Central Perk

miercuri, 21 mai 2014

The Bidens Head to Bucharest

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Yesterday, the Vice President and Dr. Biden arrived in Bucharest, Romania -- the first stop on their three-day trip to Romania and Cyprus.

Upon arriving, the Vice President toured the military exercise "Carpathian Spring" and greeted joint U.S. and Romanian participants. While there, he underscored the United States' commitment to the collective defense of NATO under Article 5, and expressed appreciation for Romania's contributions to regional and global security. He also discussed the international community's response to Russia's illegal military intervention and destabilizing actions in Ukraine.

Watch the Bidens touching down in Bucharest below:

Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 & eBay's Very Bad Day

Posted: 20 May 2014 05:10 PM PDT

Posted by Dr-Pete

After a period of relative quiet, MozCast detected a major "temperature" spike in Google's algorithm at some point on Monday, May 19th. This occurred after some historic lows, including the 3rd coldest day on record (May 11th).

Tuesday afternoon, Google confirmed two updates, Panda 4.0 and Payday Loan 2.0. Matt Cutts tweeted the Panda 4.0 announcement:

Less than an hour earlier, Search Engine Land confirmed the Payday Loan 2.0 update. This ended a weekend of wild speculation (including many predictions of a Penguin update), but didn't leave us with many details about the timeframe or the impact.

Which update was which?

For the moment, we're going to have to speculate a bit. If the latest iteration of the Payday Loan update is like the first, it hit hard but fairly narrowly. Google laser-targeted some very spammy verticals with Payday Loan 1.0 (back on June 11, 2013), but the overall impact was moderate. That update was also very query-specific. My gut reaction is that it was unlikely that the May 19th update was Payday Loan 2.0 - that update was probably smaller and rolled out over the weekend (possibly May 16th). There was heavy flux around a few potentially spammy queries on May 16th, including "mortgage rate trends" and "cheap apartments", but competitive queries tend to change frequently, so the evidence is unclear.

Google's numbering scheme suggests that Panda 4.0 is a major update, which probably means that it is both an algorithmic update and a data refresh. This typically means substantial rankings flux, and I think that's much more likely connected to what we're seeing on May 19th. While Matt's tweet implies a roll-out on May 20th, most Panda updates over the past year have been multi-day roll-outs. We should know more in the next few days.

What happened to eBay?

Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the " Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top 10). Sites shift, and nothing on the level of a keyword means much, so I took a look at the historical eBay data. This is eBay's share of top 10 rankings for the past week across the MozCast 10K (approximately 94,000 URLs, since not all page-1 SERPs have ten results):

Over the course of about three days, eBay fell from #6 in our Big 10 to #25. Change is the norm for Google's SERPs, but this particular change is clearly out of place, historically speaking. eBay has been #6 in our Big 10 since March 1st, and prior to that primarily competed with Twitter.com for either the #6 or #7 place. The drop to #25 is very large. Overall, eBay has gone from right at 1% of the URLs in our data set down to 0.28%, dropping more than two-thirds of the ranking real-estate they previously held.

It is entirely possible that this is temporary, and it's not my intention to "out" eBay – I have no idea if they've done anything that merits major ranking changes. This could be a technical issue or a mistake on Google's part. It's also worth noting that these results only track the main eBay sub-domain (www.ebay.com), not other ranking sub-domains, including popular.ebay.com.

What exactly did eBay lose?

Looking just at the day-over-day change from May 19-20, I dug into the keywords that eBay lost out on, hoping to find some clues about the broader Google updates. The vast majority of losses were where eBay had one top 10 ranking and then fell out of the top 10. In three cases, eBay lost two top 10 rankings for a single keyword phrase. Those phrases were:

"fiber optic christmas tree"
"tongue rings"
"vermont castings"

Here's what the top 10 looked like for that first phrase (sub-domain only) on May 19th:

www.kmart.com
www.walmart.com
www.americansale.com
www.sears.com
www.amazon.com
www.christmascentral.com
www.ebay.com
www.ebay.com
www.bronners.com
www.ask.com

eBay held the #7 and #8 spots. Here's the top 10 for the next morning, May 20th:

www.kmart.com
www.walmart.com
www.sears.com
www.amazon.com
www.americansale.com
www.christmascentral.com
www.bronners.com
www.hayneedle.com
www.dhgate.com
www.alibaba.com

It's interesting to note that both eBay losses here were category pages, not specific products. Here's one example (from this eBay URL):

For the other two keywords where eBay lost two positions in the top 10, the lost URLs were also category or sub-category pages (not individual auction listings). The remaining losses were either situations where eBay went from two listings to one or one to zero.

Here are the top 25 keywords where eBay lost one top 10 ranking position, ordered by their MozCast temperature:

"beats by dr dre" (231°)
"honeywell thermostat" (190°)
"hooked on phonics" (188°)
"fajate" (188°)
"batman costume" (181°)
"lenovo tablet" (181°)
"pyramid collection" (170°)
"hampton bay" (170°)
"jordan 11 concord" (168°)
"pontoon boats for sale" (168°)
"mockingjay pin" (166°)
"kobe vii" (166°)
"food trucks for sale" (166°)
"galaxy s2" (166°)
"jordan spizike" (163°)
"foamposite" (163°)
"george foreman grill" (161°)
"wholesale jerseys" (161°)
"tend skin" (161°)
"fender stratocaster" (161°)
"rims for sale" (161°)
"shed plans" (158°)
"hello kitty vans" (158°)
"cheap used cars" (158°)
"lilly pulitzer bedding" (156°)

It's very hard to interpret individual keyword changes, but, not surprisingly, many of these phrases seem to be products and product categories, and some are fairly competitive. Most of these drops seem to be from lower positions in the top 10 – I was unable to find a case where eBay lost a #1 ranking day-over-day.

In one case, it appears that both "www.ebay.com" and "popular.ebay.com" lost out. Here are the top 10 sub-domains for May 19th for the query "hooked on phonics":

www.hookedonphonics.com
itunes.apple.com
www.amazon.com
en.wikipedia.org
www.youtube.com
popular.ebay.com
popular.ebay.com
www.ebay.com
www.time4learning.com
www.walmart.com

...and here's the same SERP the morning of May 20th:

www.hookedonphonics.com
learntoread.hookedonphonics.com
itunes.apple.com
en.wikipedia.org
www.youtube.com
popular.ebay.com
www.amazon.com
www.amazon.com
thekrazycouponlady.com
hip2save.com

One page on "popular.ebay.com" kept its spot ( this category page), but two narrower category pages lost out. In this particular example, Amazon picked up a top 10 spot, although their highest position dropped. Both Amazon URLs were for specific products, although it's important not to generalize too much from one example.

What does it mean for you?

I'm sorry to say that it's probably too soon to tell. We're hearing reports of big losses and gains, which is the norm for any major update – for every winner, there's a loser. If Google is to be believed, we're looking at two sizable updates in the span of a long weekend. It's possible we'll see even more changes before the US holiday weekend (Memorial Day), so I'd strongly suggest keeping your eyes open.

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Seth's Blog : One hit wonders

One hit wonders

These are artists who gave up too soon, or lost their nerve when it came to making another leap.

A one-hit wonder is a legend who stopped early.

• Email to a friend •

marți, 20 mai 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Debate Over Fed's Exit Strategy Continues: Bernanke vs. Dudley vs. Yellen

Posted: 20 May 2014 01:54 PM PDT

Yesterday, former fed chair Ben Bernanke said "No Need for Fed to Shrink Balance Sheet".

The Federal Reserve does not need to shrink its $4 trillion-plus balance sheet by even "a dime" for it to normalize monetary policy when the time comes, former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke said on Monday.

"The Fed has worked very carefully to figure out how to raise rates at the appropriate time," Bernanke told a monetary policy conference. "That will eventually happen - we hope it happens because that means the economy is going back to normal."

When the Fed does tighten, he said, "you can have some bumpiness" as markets potentially react to the changes. But in all, he said, "it will be a fairly normal process."

Bernanke 2010 Flashback

In 2010, Bernanke told Congress Fed is Receptive to Selling Security Holdings.

The Federal Reserve is open to selling some of the securities now on its books as part of its withdrawal from its unconventional efforts to prop up the economy, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Thursday, in a change of tone on how the Fed will execute its exit strategy from crisis-era interventions.

Bernanke, testifying Thursday before the House Financial Services Committee, said that "if necessary," the Fed "has the option of redeeming or selling securities" bought during the crisis. In written testimony to the same committee on Feb. 10, he was more ambiguous, stating that he did not "anticipate that the Federal Reserve will sell any of its security holdings in the near term," at least until after the Fed had begun raising interest rates and the economy had clearly begun a sustainable recovery.

Similarly, Bernanke said Thursday that "restoring the size and composition of the balance sheet to a more normal configuration is a longer-term objective of our policies."

Dudley Proposes Exit Change Strategy

Today, the Financial Times reports NY Fed President Floats Change to Exit Strategy

One of the US Federal Reserve's most influential officials has called for a change to its exit strategy from easy monetary policy.

William Dudley, president of the New York Fed, said the central bank should keep reinvesting in its mortgage portfolio until after it raises interest rates. The current exit strategy calls for stopping reinvestment before rates go up.

The call for the Fed to keep its mortgage portfolio larger for longer signals how exit strategy is now the most active policy debate at the central bank as the US economy gets closer to full employment. The possibility of more sustained Fed demand may boost markets for mortgage-backed securities.

Mr Dudley said that raising interest rates would give the Fed the flexibility to cut them again if the economy gets into trouble, so it is more important than reducing the MBS portfolio.

"Delaying the end of reinvestment puts the emphasis where it needs to be – getting off the zero lower bound for interest rates," said Mr Dudley in a speech to the New York Association for Business Economics on Tuesday.

"In my opinion, this is far more important than the consequences of the balance sheet being a little larger for a little longer."

In the near-term, Janet Yellen is the chair and she will get her way.

Dudley's idea of hiking now so there is room to lower rates later is not going to happen. Bernanke is out of the picture.

If housing continues to crumble with employment reasonable, perhaps the Fed tapers at the existing pace, with all or most of the tapering in treasuries, with little or no tapering in mortgage-backed-securities. To appease Dudley, a change of that nature is a reasonable bet.

Mid-term, if employment growth stalls, tapering will slow or halt.

Long-term, hikes are longer off than most realize. Also, the Fed will never sell anything. Assets will be held to term.

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

Jobs Recovery at the Periphery, Not the Core: April 2012 vs. April 2014

Posted: 20 May 2014 11:11 AM PDT

Here is a second set of charts from reader Tim Wallace on labor force, population, and employment. The first set was a look at Labor Force, Employment, and Population April 2008 vs. April 2014.

This set compares the last two years, April 2012 vs. April 2104. Click on any chart to see a sharper image.

Age 16-24 Stats

Since April 2012 the number of people in age group 16-24 dropped insignificantly as did the number of people in the labor force. The latter is down by 101,000. However, there has been a 3.6% upswing in employment of 634,000.

Age 25-54 Stats

Age group 25-54 population is up slightly since 2012 but the labor force is down 0.5%. Employment is up 1.2% by 1,114,000. However, this is essentially a rise from the abyss. The first set of charts shows employment in this age group is down 4,614,000 from April 2008. Accounting for the decline in population in this group since 2008, employment is down 3,561,000 from where it should be, even with the 1,114,000 increase in the last two years.

Age 55-64 Stats

Population in age group 55-64 is up by 1,422,000 and employment is up by 1,211,000. Percentage-wise population is up by 3.7%, while employment is up 5.2%. This is a huge difference compared to stats for the core age group 25-54. We would need a finer breakdown to see if retirement is pushed back in the 62-64 age group but other evidence, notably the 65+ age group strongly suggests just that.

Age 65+ Stats

The age 65+ chart shows the increased tendency for people to work past retirement age, especially in percentage terms. The overall effect on employment has not been that great, at least in absolute number terms. The age 65+ population is up by 3,157,000 but employment is only up 813,000.

Synopsis

The first set of charts shows a rather dim view of the recovery since the start of the recession.

This set of charts shows the uneven nature of the recovery in the last two years. Percentage-wise, the worst performance is in the core 25-54 age group.

Let's take a closer look at the curious set of numbers for the last two years.

Age Group	Population Increase	Labor Force Increase	Employment Increase
16-24	19,000	101,000	634,000
25-54	96,000	-546,000	1,114,000
55-64	1,422,000	844,000	1,211,000
65+	3,157,000	743,000	813,000

Age Group	Population Increase%	Labor Force Increase%	Employment Increase%
16-24	0.0	0.5	3.6
25-54	0.1	-0.5	1.2
55-64	3.7	3.4	5.2
65+	7.6	9.7	11.2

In percentage terms, there has been a decent recovery at the periphery, but not the core.

The decline in the labor force in age group 25-54 stands alone. Even in the last two years, things have not been normal.

Nonetheless, strong percentage hiring at the periphery coupled with the fact that employment is rising faster than the labor force in every demographic, explains the drop in the unemployment rate.

I will take one more look at this data in regards to retirement and the unemployment rate in a third post.

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