I Hang Up My Skates (for now)

The snow has finally melted away here at the 44th parallel (as of yesterday), our brave little swallows are back from Nicaragua, and I just bought some triple-mix at the Co-op! Ah, spring is here, and that means I must put down my blogging pen for now. I'll be back in the fall. Good luck, everybody.

US$ v. GS Commodities Index

Not convinced that the falling US dollar is impacting commodity prices? This graph plots the US$ (inverse value) against the GoldmanSachs Commodities Index. Can you say tandem? charts from StockCharts.com.

The IMF "measures" the effects of a depreciating dollar on commodity prices, in the World Economic Outlook April 2008, (page 48).

US$ v. Cereals...

The falling US dollar (plotted as an "inverse" value) seems to be a contributing factor in the rising prices of agricultural commodities. (The dollar has dropped 15%, while this particular fund, holding sugar, soybeans, corn and wheat, has gained about 55%.)

FAO's Food Price Index

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that nearly all food commodities have been rising sharply, due to a persistent, tight supply and demand situation. In March 2008, the FAO Food Price Index was up 57% from March 2007. from FAO's Crop Prospects and Food Situation.

The Cost of Heating a Home

Consumers 65 and older using natural gas will pay $849 on average to heat their homes this winter. Average cost for all customers: $891, up $78, or 9.5%, from a year ago. from USA TODAY.

Counting the Unemployed

Floyd Norris writes in today's NYTimes: "Men in the prime of their working lives are now less likely to have jobs than they were during all but one recession of the last 60 years. Most of them do not qualify as unemployed, but they are nonetheless without jobs."

Professor Andrew Samwick (see chart) has a slightly different method of counting the unemployed.

The Middle Class on the Precipice

Middle-class families have been threatened on every front, says Professor Elizabeth Warren. Rocked by rising prices for essentials (health care and mortgage costs) as men’s wages remained flat, both Dad and Mom have entered the workforce. Even with two paychecks, family finances are stretched so tightly that a very small misstep can leave them in crisis. A modern mother with a 3-month-old infant is more likely to be working outside the home than a 1960s woman with a five-year-old child. (charts are inflation adjusted dollars) Professor Warren on youtube, in Harvard Magazine, and Warren Reports blog. HT Angry Bear, Economist's View.

On Global Financial Stability

What began as a fairly contained deterioration in portions of the U.S. subprime market has caused severe dislocations in broader credit and funding markets that now pose risks to the macroeconomic outlook in the United States and globally. from the IMF's Global Financial Stability Report 2008.

Tax Rates (mid-sized firms) EU, G8

To calculate the Total Tax Rate (TTR) for "standard modest-sized firms," the authors of this report consider various tax costs, including:
• profit or corporate income tax,
• social contributions and labour taxes paid by the employer (even if paid to a private entity such as a requited pension fund),
• property taxes,
• turnover taxes and cascading sales taxes including irrecoverable VAT, and
• other small taxes (such as municipal fees and vehicle and fuel taxes).
from Paying Taxes 2008: The Global Picture.

Analysts' Recommendations

Stock analysts are a consistently optimistic bunch. In the past 6 months, they gave 9 "buy" or "hold" recommendations to every 1 "sell," even as the S&P500 dropped 18% from the highs. The chart is from StockCharts.com, and Bloomberg TV.

1967

For our friend Steven.

Surveillance Societies

This map from PrivacyInternational.org ranks countries according to privacy and surveillance issues. I'm not a travel agent, but I think we'd do well to use the pay-phone whenever possible.

Emotion of Investing

With this "stock cycle chart," Larry Berman makes the point that investing is entwined with emotion. Rarely is a stock bought or sold without some emotional investment.

S&P500 in a Rut

In an article called Stocks Tarnished By 'Lost Decade', E.S. Browning tells us: The stock market is trading right where it was nine years ago. When dividends and inflation are factored into returns, the S&P 500 has risen an average of just 1.3% a year over the past 10 years.

Electoral Democracies Decline

This is the second consecutive year that the survey has registered a global decline in political rights and civil liberties, reports FreedomHouse.org.

Map of Economic Freedom 2008

This map, released in January, is from The Heritage Foundation and rates countries according to their "economic freedom."

Map of Freedom 2008

This is the Map of Freedom 2008, from an annual survey of political rights and civil liberties worldwide, from FreedomHouse.org. “This year’s results show a profoundly disturbing deterioration of freedom worldwide,” said Arch Puddington, director of research. “A number of countries that had previously shown progress toward democracy have regressed, while none of the most influential Not Free states showed signs of improvement.” via Log base 2.

Refilling Wine Bottles

Ruben Anderson over at TheTyee.ca makes the case for refillable wine bottles: "refilling bottles is a giant success story. Canadian beer bottles have a 97 per cent return rate and each is refilled 15-20 times in its lifetime. In Germany, Coca-Cola is sold in refillable plastic bottles. Prince Edward Island has required all carbonated beverages to be sold in refillable containers since 1984... In Europe, French wine bottles average eight refills." Read the article here.

Tesla Motors Begins Production

Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric-car start-up, said Monday it has begun "regular production" of its first car, the 2008 Roadster. The car is being assembled at a Lotus factory in Hethel, England. Tesla said it has taken more than 900 deposits for the $100,000, two-seat, zero-emissions Roadster. from Mercury News, and from Tesla Motors Blog.

The Yen Hits 100

John Murphy: "The yen is over 100 for the first time in thirteen years (1995). While that's good for the yen, it's not necessarily good for global stocks which have been falling as the yen has been rising since last summer." from StockCharts.

Not Entirely Due to the US$

Gold gets the headlines, but in the world of commodities, gold has been the laggard. The US$ has dropped, by my calculation, about 15% in the past year; the rest of the rise in commodities' prices is due to supply and demand factors. The charts are from BNN.ca.

The Word 'stagflation'

The number of articles published that mention "stagflation" have surged in recent weeks to a new extreme, highlighting investor angst and the headwinds for risky assets, reports BCA Research. The second chart, from BlogScope.net, shows how often the word "stagflation" is mentioned in the blogosphere.

The Vatican's 7 New Sins

1) "Bioethical" violations such as birth control 2) "Morally dubious'' experiments such as stem cell research 3) Drug abuse 4) Polluting the environment 5) Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor 6) Excessive wealth 7) Creating poverty.

report from Bloomberg, HT to AltHouse.

Oil Production Past Peak

Diagram is from Crude Oil: The Supply Outlook, from EnergyWatchGroup.org.

Age of the Population, by Country

Hourly Comp. Production, by Country

This chart and the chart above are from A Chartbook of International Labor Comparisons: The Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe (June 2007), United States Department Of Labor.

The Unemployment Rate

Professor Andrew Samwick explains what the unemployment rate misses. For example, in this chart, he includes those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule (green). This number is currently 9% of the labor force. from VoxBaby.blogspot.com

World Inflation 1980-2005

From a report called The Age of Milton Friedman by Andrei Shleifer. (HT mjperry.blogspot)

Displaced Workers 3 Years Later

By 2006, about one-third of workers displaced from fulltime jobs in 2003-2004 had found full-time jobs that paid at least what they made on their old jobs; about one-third had not.

Unemployment Rates, by Race

Occupations, by Race

"stagflation" in the Blogosphere

The occurrence of the word "stagflation" in the blogosphere in the past 12 months. from blogScope.net.

Humility about how little I know has encouraged me to listen more carefully and more wisely. -
John Templeton

Population Pyramids

The population pyramids for Brazil and Japan for the years 2000, 2025, and 2050 show why one country is an emerging economic power and the other is in decline. from U.S. Census Bureau.

Corn Exports

The US accounts for nearly ¾ of all corn exports around the world. The largest increases in corn imports are expected to be from Mexico and China. from the USDA Economic Research Service.

The Modern Corn

From the Agricultural Outlook Forum 2008 we have the following statistics: in the last decade, corn consumption is up by 32% and soybean consumption is up 52%, but total global crop area harvested has increased by only 4%. (Yields have increased by 30%.) In ten years, one third of the corn harvest is expected to go into the production of ethanol. The chart on end-use markets is from Paul Schickler's (DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred) presentation.

The US$ Vs. Price of Oil

This chart, with my annotations, shows the recent inverse correlation of the price of oil (above) to the US dollar (below). Technical analysts might say that the US$, having broken support, has further to fall. from StockCharts.

Antidepressant Meds Don't Work

British researchers have found that antidepressant medications - including Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone - did not yield clinically significant improvements over a placebo in patients who initially had moderate or even very severe depression. The study found that significant benefits occurred only in the most severely depressed patients.

About 118 million antidepressant prescriptions were issued in 2005 in the U.S., according to the National Center for Health Statistics. from MSNBC and PLoS Medicine.

Snapshot of U.S. Economy

screen grabs from BNN.ca. (Charts prepared by economist Linda Nazareth)

Ocean Impact Map

Fishing, fertilizer runoff, pollution, shipping, climate change—these are just a few of the ways that human activities influence the oceans that cover 70 percent of Earth's surface. And in all that vastness—139 million square miles (360 million square kilometers)—less than 4 percent remains unaffected, and more than a third has suffered serious human impacts, according to a new map published by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. from Scientific American, and NCEAS and a high-res map.

Roses Grown in Africa, Sold in Europe

From Green LA Girl: The flower industry that's sprung up around Lake Naivasha, the third largest lake in Africa, pushes indigenous people off their tribal lands, pollutes the lake with pesticides, and siphons off lake water needed by wildlife. That industry currently produces 25% of the roses sold in Europe.

Flower exports have become Kenya's third major foreign exchange earner after tea and tourism, bringing more than $120m into the Kenyan economy each year. from LakeNet and Economist.com

Eating Whale Meat

Whale meat resembles venison with its heavily oxygenated, dark red color that suggests lean, high-protein muscle. In Japan, it can be found in some supermarkets for about $33 a pound. Available in tony restaurants are new international style dishes: whale hot pots, as in Chinese-Mongolian cuisine where strips of meat are dipped in boiling soup; whale bacon (which can run as high as $145 a pound); Korean-style whale bi bim bap; and whale carpaccio. from TIME.

Housing Valuations and Ratios

from CrankyBernanke. (click to enlarge)

U.N. Green Summit

screen grabs of the CNBC interview of Abby Joseph Cohen from Goldman, Sachs & Co. (click to enlarge)

Trash-Based Biofuels

BlueFire Ethanol of Irvine CA believes it can produce 70 gallons of cellulosic ethanol per ton of plant waste destined for the landfill, providing as mush as one third (40 billion gallons) of all U.S. transportation fuel needs. And, if other forms of waste, such as the stalks of corn plants or the remnants of timber harvest are included, they claim, there's be enough feedstock in the U.S. "to offset 70 percent of the oil import." from Scientific American.

Reporters Sans Frontières

In 2007 at least 86 journalists were killed and over 900 were slung in jail, according to Reporters Sans Frontières. Iraq is the most dangerous place for the press. Some 47 reporters lost their lives there and kidnapping was a daily threat last year. from Freedom of the Press Worldwide 2008 and Economist.com. (The U.S. was ranked #48 in the press freedom index.)

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Figs Were First

from Harvard Magazine.

Baby Bottles Leach Toxic Chemical

Tests on baby bottles produced by Avent, Berber, and Playtex have turned up "significant" levels of bisphenol A – a chemical linked to cancer and infertility. The tests were conducted by the University of Missouri-Columbia. from The Center for Health, Environment & Justice.

A "Carbon Fast" for Lent

Two Church of England Bishops want their followers to join them in a "Carbon Fast" for Lent. They are asking Christians to remove one lightbulb from a prominent place in the home and live without it for 40 days. James Jones and Dr. Richard Chartres, bishops of Liverpool and London, respectively, said in a statement, "There’s a moral imperative on those of us who emit more than our fair share of carbon to rein in our consumption." from WIRED.