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marți, 1 aprilie 2014

7,041,000

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The numbers are in: more than seven million Americans -- 7,041,000 to be exact -- have signed up for private health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act. And that number will only grow as state-run health care exchanges report their numbers for the final day of open enrollment.

Share the big news: the Affordable Care Act is working and millions of Americans are getting covered.

Watch President Obama's remarks on the Affordable Care Act at 4:15 PM ET at WH.gov/live.

You'll Cry Tears of Joy When You Learn how Easy Viral Videos Can Be

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 04:09 PM PDT

Posted by jennita

Today, I'm super-excited to introduce our latest product from Moz, MozWorthy! It's a tool that takes your regular (perhaps even boring) videos, adds some "oomph" and pizzazz, and makes it go viral.

With so much talk about content marketing on the riseâ€"and guest posting on the declineâ€"we wanted to build something that helps in both instances. You make the videoâ€"heck, it doesn't even have to be that greatâ€"and we do the rest.

Check out the video we used as the test. What started out as just a regular old video, turned into a HUGE HIT around the world. In fact, it was the original version of the "internet famous" FIRST KISS video.

You can jump in and give MozWorthy! a try now, or read a bit more about why we made it, see some examples, and learn how it works.

Start using MozWorthy!

How it began

At the end of February, many of us at Moz participated in Ship It Week. This was a time when we focused on using all our internal talent, enthusiasm, and fun to collectively come together and innovate. This meant more than just coding and building things, but working to build new ideas, frameworks, and anything else we could imagine to innovate at Moz. MozWorthy! was one of the tools we created.

Our top-rated Ship It Week project is a tool that helps you learn the names of all the Mozzers, called "Name That Mozzer." It was built as an internal tool only, to help staff get to know others on the team. A big thanks to Brandon for all the work he put into making Moz a better place!

Although that one was a favorite among staff, we knew that several other projects would be used and loved by the community. For example, Peter Bray built Zoom Profiler, a tool that allows users to very quickly analyze a competitor, influencer, or customer to find their most important relationships, their top tweets, and their top content sources.

At the same time, Evan came up with the idea of making it easier for people to get their videos to go viral. As a team, we thought our customers would really love it as well, so we jumped in full force: The product, design, dev, and marketing teams got together to create something truly helpful!

Start using MozWorthy!

How it works

Ok, ok, let's get down to the real dirt. How does this baby work?! It's quite simple, and it only takes a few steps to find yourself in viral video world.

Upload your video to YouTube. (Right now, the tool only works with YouTube videos, since it's still in its infancy. However, we plan on adding Vimeo, Wistia, and other platforms soon.) If you already have a video on YouTube that you'd like to use, that's great too.
Give it a basic title; you don't need anything fancy here. We'll do the work for you!
Once your video is uploaded, head on over to mozworthy.moz.com to add the link to your video and fill out a couple of key attributes.
Hit submit! Then we do the rest for you.

Viral title generator

Once you submit your video, we take it and process both the video and title. Using super-special Moz data based on what words are the most clickable and linkable, we create a viral title for you. A combination of your title, attributes you added, and the addition of "highly viral keywords" will be used to make your title as ahhMOZing as possible.

Video enhancements

But we don't want to stop at just the title. We also take your video and make enhancements to it that will make people love it even more. Honestly, your video doesn't even have to be all that good, and we'll make it great. I mean, everyone wants to do mediocre work and press an easy button to make it awesome, right?

Increased social shares

Creating a great title and updating the video are all good and great. But what you really want is for people to see it, right? Cool. We help with that too. You'll see social shares across all the major platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube) go up practically instantaneously.

A couple examples

Ok, I know you all well, and you're not going to settle until you see exactly how it works. Which is cool, so I have a few examples to show you the kind of virality I'm talking about here!

This One Weird Trick Will Keep You Energized All Day

This one is fairly straightforward, but wow, look at that title!

You'll Never Believe What This Former Philologist Caught on Video

This is just a short, simple video as you see. But with MozWorthy! we were able to add oomph to the video, and make the title something that even your grandmother will want to share.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check out MozWorthy! right now, and see what we can do for your social shares!

Start using MozWorthy!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

MeasureCamp IV – Excel Tip Exchange

MeasureCamp IV – Excel Tip Exchange

Posted: 01 Apr 2014 01:00 AM PDT

Saturday was the fourth MeasureCamp – a free 'unconference' dedicated to web analytics. As it was my third time going I made a last-minute decision to lead a session of my own, to let people swap the Excel tips and tricks they'd accumulated over their careers. The lack of preparation was probably a mistake but hopefully it was useful anyway…

I don’t have the spreadsheet we were working on in the session: my main takeaway of the day was that you should bring a VGA to HDMI converter if you might want to use a projector with your new HDMI-and-USB-port-only laptop, rather than having to borrow someone else’s Mac.

So, instead, I’ve done my best to recreate the spreadsheet and the tips shared! Download it here.

Using awkward characters in strings in formulae

If you want to use a double quote in a string, use "".

Some functions, such as SUMIF, COUNTIF and VLOOKUP, treat the characters * and ? as wildcards – if you want to use * and ? to actually mean the characters rather than the wildcard, then use ~* and ~?. But this is only necessary in formulae that can use wildcards (and when using Find and Replace).

In the process of making the spreadsheet I've found that the tilde is more complicated: you use ~ for COUNTIF and SUMIF, but ~~ for VLOOKUP and SEARCH (and Find and Replace).

Use TEXT to get the day or month by name

The TEXT function will take in a number and give you back a piece of text in the specified format. The format “ddd” will give a shortened day of the week, “dddd” will give the full day name. Similarly “mmm” and “mmmm” will give the shortened and full name of the month.

If you have a number saved as text, then use VALUE to turn it into an actual number.

Use custom formatting to change the colour of numbers

Right click, go to Format Cells, and choose Custom. Then type in
[Color10] 0.0;[Red] -0.0;[Color15] 0
The first bit specifies how positive numbers are formatted (in this case, dark green and with one decimal point). The second is for negative numbers (in this case they appear red, with a minus sign and with one decimal point). The third is for values which are 0 (in this case they will appear grey and with no decimal points).

You can also make 0 values into something else.
[Color10] 0.0;[Red] -0.0;" - "
This will make 0 values appear ” – “. If you use them in formulae later Excel will still treat the value as zero, as you’ve changed the formatting rather than the value itself.

Shortcuts

If you’re using Windows, there are a few useful shortcuts with the formula keys:

F4 will repeat the last action.

F2 will let you edit formulae.

If you select part of a formula and press F9, the selected part will be replaced by the value of that bit. For example, if you have a formula:
=1+1=4
If you selected 1+1 and pressed F9, it would change it into 2.

Having Fewer Columns

If you only want seven columns to appear, then select the eighth column and press Ctrl, Shift and Right Arrow (or Command, Shift and Right Arrow on a Mac) to select all columns to the right. Then right click and select Hide.

Pivot Tables

To make a pivot table:

Select your data. (Make sure all columns have headers!)

Go to the ‘Insert’ tab in Windows, or the Data tab on a Mac. Click PivotTable.

If you're on Windows there’ll be a menu: just click 'OK'. You'll then have a Pivot Table in a new worksheet. You can then choose the fields you want to show. You can also drag and drop the field names to rearrange them.

If something has come out as 'Count of blah' rather than 'Sum of blah', then right click on it and go to 'Value Field Settings'. Then you can change it into a Sum.

You can add calculate fields if you want something like ROI that can't just be summed. Click on 'Fields, Items & Sets' in the Analyze tab and then on 'Calculated Field…'

You can then enter in a name for the new field, and the formula for the field.

You can also group values, for example if you have data by the day and want to see it summarised by week or month. Right click the column you want to group, then click 'Group'. In this example I've grouped areas with 1 or 2 staff, and those with over 2.

But beware that this may mess up calculated fields that use the grouped field!

Counting Unique Values

There was a question on how to count the number of unique values in a field. For example, if you have a list of user IDs and purchases, and want to know how many users there are – you can’t just count the number of cells with values in, as the user IDs will be duplicated if someone made a repeat purchase. You can’t use COUNTIF as that will count the number of times an ID appears, rather than how many unique IDs there are.

However, there is a formula specifically designed to do this if you download the add-in PowerPivot.

After some post-conference Googling I've found a complicated solution using an array formula. Also, StackOverflow suggests =SUMPRODUCT((A2:A100<>"")/COUNTIF(A2:A100,A2:A100&"")) but this will only work with numeric values.

Alternatively, you could copy the user ID list, remove duplicates from that copied list, and see how many IDs you're left with.

The JOIN Function in Google Docs

A non-Excel tip! If you want to concatenate a bunch of text with a character in-between – for example, if you’ve got a list of words and want to make a regular expression like word1|word2|word3 by sticking them all together with |s in-between – then copy the list of words into a Google Doc spreadsheet and use the JOIN function.

I've made an example spreadsheet here.

Want more?

If you’d like more Excel tips I’d recommend:

Russel McAthy’s 'Why Do You Hate Excel?' MeasureFest slideshare
PPCHero, which has more Excel articles than I can usefully list
Everyone loves Chandoo.org!
And, if you don't mind the self-promotion, I've written posts on basic Excel hints, array formulae, and learning macros.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who came along and took part!

Please get in touch, either by Twitter or in the comment section, if I’ve missed out any of the tips, or if you just want to add something entirely new.

The post MeasureCamp IV – Excel Tip Exchange appeared first on White Noise.

Seth's Blog : Maximizing the value of worry: Snowden's new project

Maximizing the value of worry: Snowden's new project

At a recent conference, I was talking with Ed Snowden about the range of data that's now available, not just to the government, but by extension, to servers in the cloud. We got to thinking about just how much worry is wasted.

Combine this with Google's work on the self-driving car,

and with the increasing use of wearable computers,

and home monitors and videocams...

It turns out that we've been spending countless hours worrying about the wrong things.

It's pretty clear what the next opportunity is. Today, Ed has given me the okay to announce that he has received $15 million in funding to launch a new startup: Worry.com (not ready for sign ups yet, but he wanted to announce this at the beginning of April because the space is about to get crowded). He and his partners already have a spokesperson.

Worry is the very first technological solution that maximizes the benefit of mankind's oldest task: anxiety.

The Worry app is a front end to a sophisticated, cloud-based trouble-recognition system. Using Bayesian probability as well as advanced Fourier transforms and Markoff chains, the backend of Worry will monitor and calculate what really matters—the things you can't control that somehow are a better use of all the time you're spending trying to change things merely by thinking and worrying about them. (I didn't understand all of this at first either, but Snowden is pretty smart, and explained it to me).

Imagine taking everything the web knows about you, including the content of your web history, your emails, your reading habits and more... then integrating that with real-time video cameras and GPS tracking... then adding to that what your friends, rivals and colleagues are saying about you (not just in public, but behind your back).

Using this flow of data, the Worry app computes the things you ought to be worried about. For example, instead of needlessly wasting time worrying about a random event like being bitten by a brown recluse spider, the Worry GPS system can point out that based on where you are, you'd be better off worrying about a different, unpreventable event like being killed by a fire hydrant flying through the air or perhaps by an angry rooster wielding a knife. The Worry app will alert you to that, which dramatically increases the effectiveness of your worrying.

Even better, the new Worry watch (sorry, I should call it wearable tech) will alert you in case you stop worrying. During worrying downtime, the watch will vibrate, indicating the most likely uncontrollable scenario on your horizon, so you can begin cycling through your anxiousness.

Instead of spending time fruitlessly fretting about things that are extremely unlikely to happen, or worrying about whether your friend Sue was offended by what you said last night (he looked it up: she wasn't), now you can experience failure in advance on issues that are actually more likely to happen. Worry about the right stuff.

Your sleepless nights will now be more productive, because you can be sleepless about the right things.

In addition to Mr. Snowden, board members include pioneers Cory Doctorow, Stewart Brand and Pema Chodron. Matt Cutts has agreed to leave Google to run their SEO efforts. Stay tuned!

Look for them to launch in about a year...

• Email to a friend •

luni, 31 martie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

No Increase in Wealth Inequality for Top 1% Since 1960
High Frequency Trading Hits 60-Minutes Scrutiny; Trading or Skimming?
Damn the Bubbles, More Printing Ahead; Property Bubbles and the Perils of Easy Money

No Increase in Wealth Inequality for Top 1% Since 1960

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 07:17 PM PDT

For all the ranting about the top 1% by the Economic Policy Institute and others, a US Berkeley study by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman on The Distribution of US Wealth, Capital Income and Returns since 1913 shows no increase in wealth inequality for top 1% since 1960%.

All of the increase in wealth inequality is not in the top 10% or top 1%, but rather the top .1 or top .01%. Here are some charts to consider.

click on any chart for sharper image

Wealth Has Been Always Concentrated

Top 10%

Top 1% Led by Surge of Top 0.1%

Little Recovery for the Merely Rich (Top 1% Minus Top 0.1%)

The Real 1%

In regards to the above study, The Atlantic reports How You, I, and Everyone Got the Top 1 Percent All Wrong

For years, I've been making the same embarrassing mistake about U.S. economic inequality. Sorry.

I've written, over and over, that the most important divide in our wealth disparity was between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. For example, when I compared the evolution in investment income since the late 1970s, I often imagined a graph like this from the Economic Policy Institute, showing the 1 percent flying away from the rest of the country.

It turns out that wealth inequality isn't about the 1 percent v. the 99 percent at all. It's about the 0.1 percent v. the 99.9 percent (or, really, the 0.01 percent vs. the 99.99 percent, if you like). Long-story-short is that this group, comprised mostly of bankers and CEOs, is riding the stock market to pick up extraordinary investment income. And it's this investment income, rather than ordinary earned income, that's creating this extraordinary wealth gap.

The 0.1 percent isn't the same group of people every year. There's considerable churn at the tippy-top. For example, consider the "Fortunate 400," the IRS's annual list of the 400 richest tax returns in the country. Between 1992 and 2008, 3,672 different taxpayers appeared on the Fortunate 400 list. Just one percent of the Fortunate 400—four households—appeared on the list all 17 years.

Now there's your real 1 percent.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

High Frequency Trading Hits 60-Minutes Scrutiny; Trading or Skimming?

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 12:58 PM PDT

In the wake of a 60-Minutes report on High Frequency Trading, numerous people have sent dozens of links. Let's take a look at a few of them.

CBS Video

High-Speed Traders Rip Investors Off

Michael Lewis says High-Speed Traders Rip Investors Off.

The U.S. stock market is rigged when high-frequency traders with advanced computers make tens of billions of dollars by jumping in front of investors, according to author Michael Lewis, who spent the past year researching the topic for his new book "Flash Boys."

"The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged," Lewis, whose books "Liar's Poker" and "The Big Short" highlighted Wall Street excesses, said during the interview. The new book comes out today. "It's crazy that it's legal for some people to get advance news on prices and what investors are doing," he said.

The author's comments follow New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's decision to investigate privileges marketed to professional traders that allow them to place their computers within feet of exchanges and buy access to faster data streams. Officials at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission have also said market rules may need to be examined.

Dominating Volume

High-frequency traders account for about half of share volume in the U.S., a statistic that shows their pervasiveness and hints at the obstacles faced by proposals to rein them in. Exchanges rely on HFTs for profits as well as liquidity, with electronic market makers all but eliminating the old system of human floor traders who oversaw the buying and selling of equities. While critics such as Lewis see a Wall Street plot, proponents say the new system is faster and cheaper.

One of the heroes of Lewis's book is Brad Katsuyama, who left Royal Bank of Canada in 2012 to form a new market, IEX Group Inc., along with other former traders from the Toronto-based bank. David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital Inc. hedge fund invested in the platform, which started trading in October and was established to minimize the influence of predatory strategies, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has endorsed IEX and is the venue's biggest broker.
Ticket Prices

IEX was established partly to address concern that technology advances and fragmentation have made the $22 trillion U.S. equity market too fast and opaque. The platform, a dark pool with ambitions to officially become an exchange, imposes a delay of 350 microseconds, or 350 millionths of a second, on orders -- enough to curb the fastest trading firms. IEX aims for greater transparency by making its trading rules available for public review, unlike some other electronic venues.

Eric Ryan, a spokesman for the New York Stock Exchange, and Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.'s Rob Madden declined to comment on Lewis.

"We completely disagree with allegations that the U.S. equity market is rigged," Bats President Bill O'Brien said in an e-mail. "While we should never stop trying to improve our market structure, it is unfair and irresponsible to accuse people simply because they use technology and enhance competition. This has helped make our market the most competitive and liquid in the world, greatly benefiting individual investors."

New York's Schneiderman is examining the sale of products and services that offer faster access to data and richer information on trades than is normally available to the public. Wall Street banks and rapid-fire trading firms pay for these services, providing millions of dollars in quarterly sales to exchanges and helping ensure their markets are supplied with standing orders to buy and sell stocks.

Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, provides its clients with access to some proprietary exchange feeds.

The investigation threatens to disrupt a model that market regulators have permitted for years as high-speed trading and concerns about its influence have grown. Trading firms pay to place their systems in the same data centers as the exchanges, a practice known as co-location that lets them directly plug in their companies' servers and shave millionths of a second off transactions.

SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher said on March 28 that individuals are concerned that high-frequency traders detract from fairness in the marketplace.

"The problem with high-frequency trading right now is that there's a perception that for the little guy, the markets aren't fair," Gallagher told CNBC during an interview. "That perception to me is a reality. It's something we need to address."

Video Playlist

NY Attorney General: Market Race for Speed Inherently Dangerous

Synopsis: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman discusses his investigation into high-frequency trading and why he believes the SEC needs to revisit regulation on Bloomberg Television's "Market Makers."

PennTrade CEO: High Frequency Trading Isn't Rigged

Synopsis: Steve Ehrlich, chief executive officer of PennTrade and former CEO at Lightspeed Financial, talks about high-frequency trading. Ehrlich speaks with Scarlet Fu and Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance." Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University and former non-executive chairman for Morgan Stanley in Asia, also speaks.

Co-Founder of Themis Trading: High-Frequency Trading Neither Good or Bad

Synopsis: Sal Arnuk, co-founder of Themis Trading, talks about high-frequency trading and industry regulation. Arnuk speaks with Stephanie Ruhle and Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg Television's "Market Makers."

Schneiderman, Levitt, Roach: High Frequency Trading

Synopsis: New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, former Securities and Exchange Commissioner Arthur Levitt, and Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University and former non-executive chairman for Morgan Stanley in Asia, speak about high-frequency trading. Steve Ehrlich, chief executive officer of PennTrade and former CEO at Lightspeed Financial, and Sal Arnuk, co-founder of Themis Trading, also comment.

HFT Crackdown

On May 18, Forbes reported NY AG's New Crackdown Targets High-Frequency Trading

High-frequency trading remains in the spotlight as New York's Attorney General announced a new crackdown on vendors in the business.

NY AG Eric Schneiderman announced he will take a deeper look at high-frequency trading world, particularly vendors that provide services for HFT traders.

He called for reforms that he says would eliminate "unfair advantages" that high-frequency trading firms have over other investors. Those advantages are offered by exchanges and other service providers and include: allowing traders to locate their computer servers within trading venues themselves; providing extra network bandwidth to high-frequency traders; and attaching ultra-fast connection cables and special high-speed switches to their servers, the AG's office said.

Last year, after probing from the AG's office, Thomson Reuters agreed to discontinue its practice of selling high-frequency traders a two-second sneak peek at certain market-moving consumer survey results.

"I am committed to cracking down on fundamentally unfair – and potentially illegal – arrangements that give elite groups of traders early access to market-moving information at the expense of the rest of the market," Schneiderman said in a statement.

Trading or Skimming?

Finally, please consider Speed Trading in a Rigged Market a Bloomberg column today by Barry Ritholtz.

On "60 Minutes" last night, author Michael Lewis made a bland assertion: High-frequency traders, he said, working with U.S. stock exchanges and big banks, have rigged the markets in their own favor. The only surprising thing about Lewis's assertion was that anyone could be even remotely surprised by it.

The math on trading is simple: It is a zero-sum game. One trader's gain is another trader's loss. Only in the case of HFT, the losers are the investors -- by way of their pension funds, retirement accounts and institutional funds. The HFT's take -- the "skim" -- comes out of these large institution's trade executions.

Several years ago, the founder of Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency firms, had said that the firm had "not had a losing day of trading in four years." The firm's average holding period for stocks is 11 seconds.

Any professional trader can tell you that his job is to manage risks. It is a statistical certainty that a percentage of trades will be losers. You are establishing a position with an unknown outcome. Sometimes they go your way, other times they go against you.

How is it possible that one of the largest high-frequency trading firms executes millions and millions of orders for four years without ever having a down day? The short answer is what they do is not trading -- it is skimming. I call it legalized theft. High-frequency trading is a tax on investors, encouraged by the exchanges, allowed by the SEC. It is prima facie proof that something is amiss.

It is interesting to note that the rigging theme is consistent with everyone who looks closely at this subject. My colleague Josh Brown notes that markets haven't become rigged, they have always been rigged. What is different is the ability of high-frequency traders to see other people's orders, jump ahead of them, and then sell that exact same stock to them, at a higher price. It is the ultimate market-skimming operation.

I am looking forward to reading "Flash Boys." I hope our members of Congress and the folks at the SEC do so too.

Flash Boys

Lewis is a good writer, I too will pick up a copy of "Flash Boys", sure to be a best-seller.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Damn the Bubbles, More Printing Ahead; Property Bubbles and the Perils of Easy Money

Posted: 31 Mar 2014 11:27 AM PDT

Damn the Bubbles, More Printing Ahead

Fed Chair Janet Yellen was tooting her own horn today. Yahoo! Finance reports Yellen strongly defends easy Fed policies, cites U.S. labor slack

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen gave a strong defense of the central bank's easy-money policies on Monday, saying its "extraordinary" commitment to boosting the economy, especially the still struggling labor market, will be needed for some time to come.

In her first public speech since becoming Fed chair two months ago, Yellen cited the struggles of three American workers in backing the policies of low interest rates and continued bond-buying. She said there remains "considerable" slack in the economy and job market, a sign that further monetary stimulus can still be effective.

"I think this extraordinary commitment is still needed and will be for some time, and I believe that view is widely shared by my fellow policy-makers at the Fed," Yellen said at a community reinvestment conference.

Property Bubbles and the Perils of Easy Money

Meanwhile, China Defaults Sow Property Cash Crunch Concern.

The specter of default in China's trust loans market is deepening the distress of property developers that also borrowed in dollars.

Part of China's $7.5 trillion shadow-banking system, trust financing has been key to fueling the nation's 10 percent annual growth rate in the past decade by providing easy credit to companies considered too risky by banks. After trust loans to the property, solar, coal and other industries tripled in the past three years to 10.9 trillion yuan ($1.8 trillion), bondholders are becoming increasingly alarmed as the government reins in lending, housing demand cools and the economy slows.

Defaults Unavoidable

Cracks are already starting to appear. Closely held Zhejiang Xingrun Real Estate Co. collapsed earlier this month, less than two weeks after Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science & Technology Co. defaulted on its debt.

While China Credit Trust Co. was bailed out in January, Premier Li Keqiang has said some defaults may be unavoidable as the government shifts policy to tighten credit.

Home prices have soared 60 percent since the government provided 4 trillion yuan of fiscal stimulus in 2008 to bolster the economy after the financial crisis, prompting companies to borrow heavily to speed construction. Now, as China abstains from providing further stimulus for the economy, thousands of apartment buildings across the country sit empty.

Home Prices Up 60% Since 2008

Home prices in China rose 60% since 2008.

How much did that contribute to official inflation statistics? The answer is 0%.

Asset bubbles are ignored when calculating inflation. Instead central banks only factor in rent prices. Yet, asset bubbles spurred all sorts of financially untenable projects all dependent on Ponzi financing of debt to pay off existing debt. The party comes to a brick-wall halt the moment Ponzi financing stops or the moment the pool of greater fools runs out. Either or both happen at any moment.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

marți, 1 aprilie 2014

7,041,000

You'll Cry Tears of Joy When You Learn how Easy Viral Videos Can Be

You'll Cry Tears of Joy When You Learn how Easy Viral Videos Can Be

How it began