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Unjustified Optimism In Theory And Practice
This one falls into the category of one picture is worth a thousand optimistic promises. Original source compliments of Out of The Frying Pan (and Innocent Bystanders).
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Yeah, but can you imagine how bad it would have been if we DIDN'T go with the Obamanation's recovery plan??
/snark
We may have lost 6 millions jobs since he took office, but think of all the jobs hes saved!
/puke
Obama vs Obama stimulus debate video
http://cfecon.blogspot.com/2009/07/obama-vs-obama-on-stimulus.html
When Obama takes all the Boomer health care benefits and gives them to his supporters it will not only be "eugenics" it will be good strategic politics. He doesn't want the Boomer vote , he wants the Boomers dead and off Social Security and health care.
There is a reason the stock market is going up.
When those corporations don't have to pay for health care because it was nationalized , all the money goes straight to the bottom line as pure {& completely unforeseen}profit .
Wrong! Most corps are self insured. On average, each employee cost $3,000/yr for medical. The gov wants to "fine" a company 8% of an employees salary if they do not provide health insurance. Do the math. This hits small business and the voters that go with it.
Tyler can you please provide a link to the data? I don't understand the source, and want to know where the #s for the projection come from. Thanks
The source was obama economic team. thats literally their graph they were touting around when they were selling the stimulus. Minus the red dots of reality of course.
Bah, i'm using my CA 3rd funemployment extension to donate to Zero Hedge in the next few weeks.
Just on principle.
muahahahaha.
Those were the goverment projected unemployment figures based on with or with out the recovery plan (IE Thowing every tax payer dollar they can find at the problem). The red dots indicate actual... would have been easier to understand if there was a red line instead.
For f-f-fuck's sake, Tyler, that's parabolic!
Looks like we got some resistance @ 10%.
That's what makes this site so good, the pure simple analysis.
Next time, for clarity, I'll tag the statements.
<sarcasm></sarcasm>
Hey- he's frontrunning!
debtor....funny, funny as shit! I roared. thank you
Remember, the projections of tax revenues going forward is based on an economy that's producing the "With Recovery Plan" employment numbers.
The Federal government can report whatever numbers suit their purpose. Just look at "headline" unemployment rate. Hell, look at U6; Shadow Government Statistics makes a compelling argument for the "most complete" unemployment rate being far from complete. Look at CPI. Feds been fudging numbers for years. What's to prevent the IRS (an piece of the executive branch) from reporting fudged tax receipts "once the stimulus kicks in. See the stimulus really is working!"
MSNBC bashing GS bonuses atm. $773,000 number reported, though the image on the screen was 733 (he said 773).
That was the data discussed with Bernanke this week and I am so amazed that the market didn't even bother about it all, just think what the stressless tests are showing now with all the mark to myth.
This market is THE biggest bubble in history at the moment but the country is being duped with green shoooooots and HFT mirages
Before you go spouting heresy, check the DOW charts for 1930. 50% retracement on a huge bear rally. This bubble ain't ripe yet.
Next time you hear the phrase "pre-Lehman", stop there.
Ask yourself.
Why?
I am certain those two red dots are bad data, right?
If you mean "bad" as in unfortunate reality, yes. If you mean bad as in junk incorrect data, no. Those red dots are telling you that things are much worse than their projections.
(To make those red dots go away, put on some rose colored eyeglasses.)
Oh, and by the way, even those nasty freckles are not 'reality' in that they are the 9.0% and 9.7% from BLS data, which is based on some sort of mixture of caterpillar eggs and eye of newt. Real unemployment in some states is over 15%, and nationally I think it's approaching that. But you'll have to take off the rosy glasses to see those numbers.
Oh wait, maybe that's what you meant by bad data. I thought you meant bad data from Out Of The Frying Pan. My bad.
nicholsong -1
1) It was a joke.
2) If you are referring to the difference between U3 and U6 unemployment data, sure. But I prefer looking at weekly h.8 fed data for bank's lending habits which are delivered promptly at 4:15 et on fridays (tend to be more timely.) That tends to be timely, and tells you a lot. In addition, go to the states comptroller pages at the first week of every month to find sales tax revenues. Tell you a lot about consumption.
If interested, you can pull data sets like a mo fo directly and excel away at BLS and the Fed.
BLS and Fed data I knew about, and I've looked at h.8 but not with any regularity so I appreciate that reminder/advise, but thanks for the State comptroller angle, that's nifty. As for pulling agency data, I was downloading from BLS and Fed and trending it for a while; gave it up in disgust. Anyway, bricking up the bunker and the animal-skinning classes take more of my time nowadays.
Haven't you heard? "Everything's Great!" Gay chorus come in stage right.
BTW, fundamentals don't mean shit to this market. It has a very high p/h ratio (price to hope).
The U6 number is 16.5%. Add in contractors, people that have been looking for so long they fall out of the data range (thank you Mr. Clinton for that change in the data), etc and you can easily get over 20%.
or take the blue pill. Right, Mr. President?
Red pills.......those are red pills.
Hey Marla are we going to have a Jam session tonight?
Except REAL unemployment is in the neighborhood of 16-20%. HAHAHAHAHHAAAHAHHAA.
OK - and pardon me for digressing a little bit here - but let me get this straight - the ONLY realistic source of funding $Trillion deficits of The Obamadinejad Administration in the near (and far away) future is the printing press and yet the dollar is still supposed to blast upwards in a "deflationary"/"countertrend" move? Me thinks NOT! I think those still holding their savings/wealth (or whatever's left of it) in dollars after this fall will be the biggest losers of all. While many people are trying to scrape of a few bucks here and there shorting the market, or being "safe" sitting in cash, they are missing the forest for the trees. What people think safe - government printed cash - is the biggest risk of all - especially for Americans. It's like a time bomb sitting in your savings account while you think everything's "safe", when in fact it's just a matter of time.
I'd rather have cash than debt. I'd rather have cash than be living paycheck to paycheck. I'd rather have currency risk than market risk in a manipulated tard town market. I'd rather...
Gold.
It is a really sorry state of affairs when people do not know (or remember) how to protect themselves against the depredations of the state. Gold (and Silver) is the REAL cash, my friend; not some paper tickets printed by a corrupt government.
hard assets (including more than gold and silver but they are a fine start), alertness and an open and nimble mind. those are the protections for which I strive.
"I think those still holding their savings/wealth (or whatever's left of it) in dollars after this fall will be the biggest losers of all."
Agreed. Those nice dollars will eventually be exchanged for a world currency - at a significant haircut in purchasing power.
I think most people feel that if that happens, everyone will be in the same boat and we'll be more worried about the indigent zombies trying to rape our wives than what kind of appreciation we're getting on those dollars. I don't agree with them (in that they have to accept that fate... i.e. diversification doesn't have to do with skin color), but I think that's the consensus.
Sorry, I know misery (of owning dollars) loves company, but that's not how it'll play out. It is not an all or nothing scenario where either you have total prosperity or total mayhem, but a continuum of deterioration. You will still be living in a society where you'll need money, but those that held government cash will have been robbed of all they had. Just because the dollar will crash does not mean life will stop - it will go on as it has for millenia. Just ask somebody in Argentina, and they'll tell you how it played out. Or Weimar Germany.
GG, we are in agreement: economically, Argentina is a very likely scenario that, for individuals here in the U.S., bears scrutiny and comprehension. Life goes on. People make adjustments and keep going. No one likes it.
Many here at ZH, being an economics blog, see this as an economic event. I've always seen it as an historical / political one. The U.S. is not Japan. Mapping the outcome for U.S. foreign policy, and global realignment, and then putting it all on a calendar...that's the dicey part.
Europe, for just one example, thinks they have a bank problem. What Europe really has is an unimaginable energy problem, which means they have a Russian problem, and a Caucasus problem, and ultmately a China problem. And that means they have a political problem which is about to blow up in their faces.
http://www.euractiv.com/en/energy/geopolitics-eu-energy-supply/article-1...
Oil:
Gas:
Coal:
The value of the USD is backed by the U.S. military, and vice versa. This is the only reason Bretton Woods worked at all. And THIS is the thing that is changing, and the thing that escapes deflationists, and economists, and money-obsessed market players.
I can't get over yesterday's "The Other Plunge Protection Team: 122,017 December SPY $95 Puts" report.
Won_Over (thank you) found more scoop @ http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN2339093420090723?rpc=44
This trade may be pure hedge on one side, but there is a clear market call here... 820 < spoo < 950.
Somehow this seems to fit into the unjustified optimism theme with a nasty unwind.
That could help explain the decline in short interest in the previous thread. People are using options instead.
"Unjustified optimism" is oxy moronic (at least since the "Power of Positive Thinking" superficial brand of denial has thankfully passed us by). If you can breathe and your feet hit the floor today, you have more than enough cause to be legitimately and thoroughly optimistic. Let's not be stupid. In thirty years time, China and India will be as developed as Europe, computing power that costs a buck today will cost a fraction of a penny, biotech will have driven an even further increase in our life expectancies as well as the quality of our longer lives (party on, Wayne), and nanotechnology will have revolutionized just about everything else (at least everyhting remaining that ZH might not have). Entrepreneurialism, innvovation and our impending age of finally refraining from elevating compensated psychopaths to places of public trust and leadership will have made an entirely new world. Don't depart the Clue Train, optimism is in fact the ONLY realism.
Drivel. The future is hell on earth for 99%.
Speak in "I statements" please. "The future is hell on earth for me" (that is unless you count yourself as one of the 1% for which the future will be whatever you'd forecast it to be other than "hell"). Good luck with that.
The future is everyone you know sitting on a composting toilet, eating healthy organic food off a conveyor belt while talking heads float in high definition 3D in front of them, telling them who is fucking whom and who just bought the moon, and all of this in private rooms that allow them to sit naked and drool on themselves as they masturbate to any filth-on-demand they have the government credit to pay for. (Think 'Wall-E' but sticky and with a lot more stink.) For some that's optimism. For other's that's a definition of hell.
For the other 80% who have been deemed genetically unsuited for higher education, working in the pit mines of the global plantation won't leave any doubt as to what life is about.
Wow, it got dark around here quickly for a friday.
optimism is in fact the ONLY realism
Well, optimism is certainly a lot like realism, except of course for the untested, unsupported fantasy about the future where everything is A-OK it requires.
Other than that, optimism is just like realism.
HHahah, thanks I spat my drink.
Give me realism, with a dash of hope, any day of the week. Everybody should remember, the folks that were heading into the gas chambers in the concentration camps a long time ago were optimistic that they were, in fact, going to take a shower. The rest of the world was optimistic that the rumors they were hearing about Nazi Germany were unfounded, that no civilized society could perpetrate such atrocities. Hope is good, don't get me wrong. But when it is blind hope, history bears out the fallacy of hope not balanced by realism.
Reductionist version: NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE PERVERSITY OF HUMAN NATURE,
Not at all the message by one of the actual Holocuast survivors. Read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl. Cliff notes dirct quote summary:
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Only humans (apparently we can include numerous ZH posters here) could be so ignorant to believe that their very gift of life, and the "renewed Atlantis" inevitable destiny of it were they just to stay out of their own mistaken pessimistic ways (study Mayan history, much less Solon of Athens, Plato's Critias, or Bacon's work on the matter circa 1627), is anything other than balls out uncharted spiritual wilderness for which to be thankul, in my case (thankfully) American dream style.
If you can't be properly optimistic for yourself (for reasons and ways in which Frankl describes above), then do it for future generations (our ancestors did it for us, it's the least we could do in return). They're counting on us to be more than weak-kneed and wavering Hamlet's. I'm choosing to deliver for them, difficult and against all odds as it may be, how about you?
Well that's a different message than the first time you spoke of optimism where it seemed to imply that a beatific stare with glazed eyes were part of the package.
Now you get to put yourself on the pedestal and look down at us for not being constructively optimistic, but that's what I found completely lacking in your first statement.
The well chosen words would have been better placed the first time around. You might have saved "some ZH posters" time wasted responding to you to begin with.
http://www.postersultan.com/posters/buckwheat_otay_littlerascals.jpg
Seriously, I did not write a treatise in my first post, sorry if it was incomplete. And my bad if I gave any impression of pedastal-seeking from which to look down at anyone (Dude, I'm married with adopted kids, I get stellar lessons in the mistake of that every day). The need for us to all stick together here is obvious, and I'll take your reply to heart. But come, do you think the Dude who replied "Drivel, the future is hell on earth for 99%" was really altered by amplification of the second post? (Or was that you?)
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
I believe each of us has achieved our own Zen. Here is mine. Despite what I see around me every day, I remain optimistic. Most importantly, I remain optimistic that I will choose my friends wisely and that my wise choices in this regard will enrich my life each day. I convey to these friends that together we will get through this TOGETHER (or die trying; if that is my fate, so be it). I remain optimistic that there are good people of conscience out there who just need to find their voice. This is the attitude I choose in the given set of circumstances in which I find myself.
However, I do not extend my attitude and optimism to the given set of circumstances. To me that is acknowledging reality. Call my approach guarded optimism, if you wish.
Where's the patent (#'s/quality, etc.) ETF?
Supertramp. Reminds me of my days in college. Whatever happened to them....
You're being very un-Dude...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless
Though I do agree, Supertramp the band got it done (and I'd suggest in ways that would only likely only bring on disdain from many here, still are). Oh hell, here it is anyway as it relates directly to optimism said above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECDxGf1awfU
source for 'actual' unemployment was google - http://tinyurl.com/co6c9s
I didn't feel like researching beyond that as you'll find different numbers everywhere, but the effect remains the same
the jobs we lose will never return.
I am not an american by birth, but by naturalization. But I must say, although I am profoundly patriotic to this country, quite seriously to all natural borns, how the fuck did you let this great country slide to this level of shitness. It is absolutely bizzare to the nth degree that you were coned BIG TIME.
I'll second that, I am also quite stunned. Had a nice run in America, but man, whew, way to squander it people.
Making preparations to move again, perhaps Singapore.
Those of us who've been ranting about the unsustainability of the path we were on for decades (Austrian School) were roundly ignored by the masses and pooh-poohed by the MSM. We tried, no shit. No one wanted to hear it because everything seemed to them to be working.
I attended the Ludwig von Mises Institute Conference on "Secession, State and Economy" in Charleston SC in April 1995. Where the fuck were you?
I love you, Man! Thank God for the Mises Institute. Whenever I despair in our current Keynesian darkness (lose optimisim, indeed), there I head:
www.mises.org
Neither touches ten.
That a prediction? --that the official count will never break 10%?
So 24 trillion in potential obligations is worth 1% lower unemployment according to this projection. Sounds like we overpaid a bit.
You know, if the folks atZero Hedge weren't so busy rolling out awesome new features, that chart would have had real data pointsfor the whole period and a pretty interpolated line.
Why can't I have everything? I'm an American damn it... somebody told me I was supposed to get everything free... at reasonable interest.
Seriously though, that chart would be a lot more compelling with a line. Miss Manners says the little things matter. It would be awesome to see some of your articles that make such clear statements placed in an area where they would be updated as the trend you've pointed out continues.
Of course, maybe I'm just going to have to accept that even Americans have to do things for themselves : )
Tyler President Obama would like to invite you to the White House for a beer and a discussion about getting of his ASS!
THAT IS NOT where that graph came from.
It came from HERE http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/unemployment-june-proje...
Credit where credit is fuckin' due, goddamnit!!!
Source was misrepresented and has been corrected. Thanks for the catch.
And THAT's what makes this media superior to the old golems; effective feedback loops.
You da man.
...I know you knew that, I just had to say it.
wasn't misrepresented at all, the graphs are different and mine originally appeared on my site. I'm not really after the credit here (though this post makes it seem otherwise), but let's keep everything correct.
(original post http://tinyurl.com/mn9y86)
Obama will blame those who cling to their driver's licenses for all the unemployment. Or he could blame the current state of race relations which is still a problem. Guess which race the poor race relations are coming from now? Funny it always seems to be from the race that holds the presidency.
The future holds a president that cannot shut his stinking mouth. Castro could take lessons in long winded blathering. Is the president capable of anything other than apologizing?
So, what do we do to get folks employed? The same thing that is propelling the stock market: Dollar TP. We need to race the dollar down and drop our standard of living. Gets kind of simple. I suppose that we could tax away all our assets. Simpler to tax away all our savings. Tax away the assets and gun clingers get edgy. Tax away the savings and the clingers can hang on to their ammo and not need to use it.
Welcome to the brave new world where only those that subscribe to the NY Times get it in the chops because they are such pansies.
Game Over ?
They have until October.
Politics always trumps Free Markets and it's all calculated!
If this fiasco hasn't turned-around by then, the O-Team will send in "The Cleaner" and the Election Cycle will rein.
Result:
- misallocated Capital encouraged overcapacity and the Social Contract with Labor is null & void
- End of '09, Bargaining & Hope is lost and Anger causes heads to roll (i.e., B.B., L.S. and T.G. are out as the nation moves closer to socialism)
- 2010 will bring Depression and will end with Acceptance
- 2011 re-election campaign kicks in with promises to Labor of a "Road to Recovery"
- 2012 Capital gets the backseat, Labor is in the driver's seat. O-Team is re-elected with a majority in the House
The fate of capitalism as we know it, will forever have changed!
Election Cycles:
...note election year Novembers, the February following election year Novembers has been an excellent indicator as to whether the election year November would mark[s] an important top. In every case since at least 1968, when February following election year November moves to a higher high than the January following election year November, the market has proceeded to do very well.
Conversely, when the post-election year February is unable to move higher than the post-election year January, a significant market decline has always followed. This may be coincidence but it has proved prescient for at least the past 40 years.
Capitalism is overrated.
Capitalism, like socialism and communism, fails to account for the perversity of human nature. All that said, "it's the worst economic system out there, except for all the others."
I am OUTRAGED!!
You put those red dots back where they're supposed to be RIGHT NOW!
CW
The President has saved many jobs....Lloyd Blankfein and his crew, Jamie Dimon and his crew, Ken Lewis and his crew
And destroyed millions other in the process...
Nice graph of the concept of something for nothing. All those trillions spent apparently have no downside in the future and no cost in the present. That's way cool.