within the world
Fed’s “Deep Throat” stops delevering for now. Markets await main man next week.
Tim Cook […] reminded a Senate subcommittee that Apple is investing $100 million to make some of its Macintosh computers in the U.S. […] The operation, to be based in Texas, will be Apple’s first domestic assembly foray since 2004, and other technology manufacturers are moving jobs onshore. Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility, for example, also plans to assemble smartphones in Texas.
It’s not all public relations: These companies are taking advantage of low energy costs and a decade of wage stagnation, which has made U.S. factory jobs more competitive with those in China, where wages are rising.
Does power exist without violence?
U.S. stocks fell on Wednesday, with the Dow sliding more than 100 points.
The Dow is now riding a three-day losing skid, capped by today’s 126-point drop, marking the first time this year the blue-chip average has suffered three straight down days.
With it all said and done, the Dow went 112 trading days without a three-day losing streak, the longest such stretch in its history. The previous record was set in 1935, when the Dow went 93 trading days without three straight down days.
Perhaps most notable is that the number of companies hitting 52 week lows surged to the highest since October 2011.
Spread Gun-powder, beaten small, about the crevices of your bedstead; fire it with a match, and keep the smoak in; do this for an hour or more; and keep the room close several hours.
Having just returned alive from my first visit to Las Vegas, I feel the need to share some of my experiences, observations, and enlightening commentary. […] The place really is just that bad. Las Vegas is essentially the combined horror of Hell, the Holocaust, and the killing fields of Cambodia ground up and run through a giant neon sausage maker. […] Las Vegas was obviously designed by a retarded child and bankrolled by a shadowy cabal of Nazis, mafia gangsters, racist astronauts, pedophiles, murderers, and Celine Dion. I can’t imagine any other place in the world that would make heroes out of creepy immigrants like Zigfried and Roy, or glorify washed up actors, comedians, and musicians as Gods of the Universe.
You can never hold back spring
{ The Manhattan Bridge, June 5, 1908 | Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet. | New York City Municipal Archives Online Gallery }
‘Hell is more bearable than nothingness.’ –PJ Bailey
China, India and Pakistan have increased their nuclear weapons by about 10 warheads each in the past year, and other nuclear states appear set on maintaining their arsenals, a Swedish think tank said Monday. […]
“It is not so much about an increase in numbers, but an increase in quality,” said researcher Pillip Schell.
The first little pig built his house out of straw because it was the easiest thing to do
The airwaves are full of stories of economic recovery. One trumpeted recently has been the rapid recovery in housing, at least as measured in prices.
The problem is, a good portion of the rebound in house prices in many markets has less to do with renewed optimism, new jobs, and rising wages, and more to do with big money investors fueled by the ultra-cheap money policies of the Fed.
On my recent trip to Salt Lake City, Utah, after presenting to a bi-partisan audience in the Capitol building, a gentleman came up to me and introduced himself as a real estate agent. He explained that he’d been seeing something very strange over the past six months, where very well capitalized, out-of-state private equity funds had been buying up huge swaths of residential real estate with cash.
The effect, not surprisingly, is that regular home buyers are being outbid and eventually priced out of the market. Over time, these full cash offers at the ask get noticed and home sellers begin to raise their asking prices.
{ Chris Martenson/Zero Hedge | Continue reading }
[W]e were surprised to see an article in the very much mainstream, and pro-administration policies NYT, exposing just this facet of the new housing bubble. […]
Blackstone, which helped define a period of Wall Street hyperwealth, has bought some 26,000 homes in nine states. Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, is spending $250 million each month and already owns 10,000 properties. With little fanfare, these and other financial companies have become significant landlords on Main Street. Most of the firms are renting out the homes, with the possibility of unloading them at a profit when prices rise far enough.
Auri sacra fames
American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost during the recession, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve, hampering the country’s economic recovery.
The research from the St. Louis Fed shows that households had accumulated net worth totaling $66 trillion at the end of last year. After adjusting for inflation and population growth, the bank found that meant families on average have only made up 45 percent of the decline in their net worth since the peak of the boom in 2007.
In addition, most of the improvement was due to gains in the stock market, according to the report, primarily benefiting wealthy families. That means the recovery for most households was even weaker. […]
The Fed is spending $85 billion a month to lower long-term interest rates and stimulate the economy. It has also kept short-term interest rates to near zero. That has helped push stock markets to record highs, while home prices have jumped by the most in seven years. Consumer confidence is at its highest point since February 2008. Officials hope those factors will eventually result in more consumer spending power.
{ Washington Post | Continue reading }
Uncertainty exists about how markets will reestablish normal valuations when the Fed withdraws from the market. It will likely be difficult to unwind policy accommodation, and the end of monetary easing may be painful for consumers and businesses. Given the Fed’s balance sheet increase of approximately $2.5 trillion since 2008, the Fed may now be perceived as integral to the housing finance system.
{ Federal Advisory Council via Zero Hedge | Continue reading }
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading
On April 7, 1994, Federal Express Flight 705, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 cargo jet ferrying electronics across the United States from Memphis, Tennessee to San Jose, California, experienced an attempted hijacking for the purpose of a suicide attack.
Auburn Calloway, a FedEx employee facing possible dismissal for lying about his previous flying experience, boarded the scheduled flight as a deadheading passenger with a guitar case carrying several hammers and a speargun. He intended to disable the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder before take-off and, once airborne, kill the crew using the blunt force of the hammers so their injuries would appear consistent with an accident rather than a hijacking. The speargun would be a last resort. He would then crash the aircraft while just appearing to be an employee killed in an accident. This would make his family eligible for a $2.5 million life insurance policy paid by Federal Express.
art { Caleb Brown }
‘We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.’ –Proust
Edward Glaeser: If you look back 120 years ago or so, Detroit looked like one of the most entrepreneurial places on the planet. It seemed as if there was an automotive genius on every street corner. If you look back 60 years ago, Detroit was among the most productive places on the planet, with the companies that were formed by those automotive geniuses coming to fruition and producing cars that were the technological wonder of the world. So, Detroit’s decline is of more recent heritage, of the past 50 years. […] And it tells us a great deal about the way that cities work and the way that local economies function. […] If we go back to those small-scale entrepreneurs of 120 years ago–it’s not just Henry Ford; it’s the Dodge brothers, the Fisher brothers, David Dunbar Buick, Billy Durant nearby Flint–all of these men were trying to figure out how to solve this technological problem, making the automobile cost effective, produce cheap, solid cars for ordinary people to run in the world. They managed to do that, Ford above all, by taking advantage of each other’s ideas, each other supplies, financing that was collaboratively arranged. And together they were able to achieve this remarkable technological feat. The problem was the big idea was a vast, vertically integrated factory. And that’s a great recipe for short run productivity, but a really bad recipe for long run reinvention. And a bad recipe for urban areas more generally, because once you’ve got a River Rouge plant, once you’ve got this mass vertically integrated factory, it doesn’t need the city; it doesn’t give to the city. It’s very, very productive but you could move it outside the city, as indeed Ford did when he moved his plant from the central city of Detroit to River Rouge. And then of course once you are at this stage of the technology of an industry, you can move those plants to wherever it is that cost minimization dictates you should go. And that’s of course exactly what happens. Jobs first suburbanized, then moved to lower cost areas. The work of Tom Holmes at the U. of Minnesota shows how remarkable the difference is in state policies towards unions, labor, how powerful those policies were in explaining industrial growth after 1947. And of course it globalizes. It leaves cities altogether. […] It was precisely because Detroit had these incredibly productive machines that they squeezed out all other sources of invention–rather than having lots of small entrepreneurs you had middle managers for General Motors (GM) and Ford. […]
Russ Roberts: So, one way to describe what you are saying is in the early part of the 20th century, Detroit was something like Silicon Valley, a hub of creative talent, a lot of complementarity between the ideas and the supply chain and interactions between those people that all came together. Lots of competition, which encouraged people to try harder and innovate, or do the best they could. Are you suggesting then that Silicon Valley is prone to this kind of change at some point? If the computer were to become less important somewhere down the road or produced in a different way?
Edward Glaeser: The question is to what extent do the Silicon Valley firms become dominated by very strong returns to scale, a few dominant firms capitalize on it. I think it’s built into the genes of every industry that they will eventually decline. The question is whether or not the region then reinvents itself. And there are two things that enable particular regions to reinvent themselves. One is skills, measured education, human capital. The year, the share or the fraction in the metropolitan area with a college degree as of 1940 or 1960 or 1970 has been a very good predictor of whether, particularly northeastern or northwestern metropolitan areas, have been able to turn themselves around. And a particular form of human capital, entrepreneurial human capital, also seems to be critical, despite the fact that our proxies for entrepreneurial talent are relatively weak. We typically use things like the number of establishments per worker in a given area, or the share of employment in startups from some initial time period. Those weak proxies are still very, very strong predictors of urban regeneration, places that have lots of little firms have managed to do much better than places that were dominated by a few large firms, particularly if they are in a single industry. So, let’s think for a second about Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has lots of skilled workers. That’s good. But what I don’t know is whether Silicon Valley is going to look like it’s dominated by a few large firms, Google playing the role of General Motors. Or whether or not it will continue to have lots of little startups. There’s nothing wrong with big firms in terms of productivity. But they tend to train middle managers, not entrepreneurs.
image { Michael Wolf }
It’s go go, not cry cry
Is your child constantly causing trouble? […] If you live in South Carolina’s Chester or Richland Counties, you can send your kids to jail before they wind up there themselves. Through a program called STORM, parents can shell out a mere $25 to have their little troublemakers cuffed and booked for a sleepover in the slammer. Parents in nearby counties have to pay $5 more.
photo { Tim Head, Equilibrium, 1975 }
I’m always sad with him
“I love nick [Brooks], but he wasn’t good for me. . . he holds me back. I’m always sad with him. He’s 24 for f sake . . . he wants porn sex! He wants to b drunk or stoned all the time . . . he doesn’t have any goals and stops me from mine.”
[…]
The elder Brooks killed himself with a mail-order helium-tank suicide kit in 2011 at his Upper East Side apartment. He was under indictment for drugging and sexually assaulting 13 starlets during “auditions” for nonexistent films.
See you on the road, skag. See you like we saw your friend, The Nightrider.
A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida’s rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines.
I don’t see anything happening immediately but there could be a move in the latter part of this year or may be very early next
A Manhattan fortune teller will be jailed for a year after taking more than $650,000 in cash from an Upper East Side woman by promising to “cleanse” the money.
Swindling soothsayer Janet Miller, 39, also tricked the wealthy victim into turning over paintings and jewelry as “sacrifices” to keep the devil away, and even conned her into buying and handing over a couple of Rolexes — all to exterminate “bad energy,” Manhattan prosecutors charged.
With the poison of a junkie’s broken promise on his lip
Last night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted the 2013 Met Gala. This year’s theme was “Punk: From Chaos To Couture.” For many celebrities, this was the first time they had used the word “punk” in a sentence that wasn’t “Have my assistant get me Daft Punk tickets.”
[…]
“I skipped punk and went straight to couture. I never did punk.” —Andre Leon Talley, editor at large of Vogue/total fucking clown
“I did not [have a punk phase]. That’s why I think my version of punk for me is not probably the mohawk, typical punk that you’d sort of envision. A little bit more like ‘romantic punk.” —Kim Kardashian, notable reality TV shithead
“I don’t think I fully understood the theme.” —Kate Upton, human Viagra for Terry Richardson
I’m Mike D the one who put the satin in your panties
The four are members of a new idol group, Machikado Keiki Japan, and stocks play an important part in their performances.
“We base our costumes on the price of the Nikkei average of the day. For example, when the index falls below 10,000 points, we go on stage with really long skirts,” Mori explained.
The higher stocks rise, the shorter their dresses get. With the Nikkei index ending above 13,000, the four went without skirts altogether on the day of their interview with The Japan Times, instead wearing only lacy shorts.
They swear to God that it’s me sellin the choppas
“What people do in cities—create wealth, or murder each other—shows a relationship to the size of the city, one that isn’t tied just to one era or nation,” says Lobo. The relationship is captured by an equation in which a given parameter—employment, say—varies exponentially with population. In some cases, the exponent is 1, meaning whatever is being measured increases linearly, at the same rate as population. Household water or electrical use, for example, shows this pattern; as a city grows bigger its residents don’t use their appliances more. […]
If the population of a city doubles over time, or comparing one big city with two cities each half the size, gross domestic product more than doubles. Each individual becomes, on average, 15 percent more productive. Bettencourt describes the effect as “slightly magical,” although he and his colleagues are beginning to understand the synergies that make it possible. Physical proximity promotes collaboration and innovation, which is one reason the new CEO of Yahoo recently reversed the company’s policy of letting almost anyone work from home. […]
Remarkably, this phenomenon applies to cities all over the world, of different sizes, regardless of their particular history, culture or geography. Mumbai is different from Shanghai is different from Houston, obviously, but in relation to their own pasts, and to other cities in India, China or the U.S., they follow these laws.
art { Alex Roulette }
Reeve Gootch was right and Reeve Drughad was sinistrous
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims that this is the case.
images { 1. Dave Willardson, Rolling Stone, 1976) | 2. Bug, 1975 }
The milk falls; goodbye calf, cow, pig, brood of chickens.
The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny.
{ Christy Wampole/NY Times via | Gothamist | Continue reading }
