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Here's what I wrote last month. You can see the seasonally adjusted charts if you are so inclined.
September 14, 2010
Seasonally Adjusted LA Area Port Traffic
This month's data is out. I should update the charts but it takes a lot of work to seasonally adjust the data. I have to copy each data point individually out of the output files. There may be a better way but I don't know it. However, I can provide something nearly as good.
September's loaded inbound traffic:
Los Angeles Port: 373,249.35
Long Beach Port: 288,905.00
Total: 662,154.35
The seasonal adjustment program offered a forecast into the future and I still have that data available to look at. It predicted 674,887.32 loaded inbound containers for September. 662,154.35 is nearly 2% too few. The prediction range (with 95% confidence) was 604,607.01 to 753,337.12.
Imports may therefore not be quite as strong as they might otherwise appear. The seasonal trends here are huge. As Calculated Risk accurately points out, there is normally a slight dropoff in September, but this appears to go a bit beyond that normal drop.
Update:
September's loaded outbound traffic:
Los Angeles Port: 139,800.25
Long Beach Port: 124,021.00
Total: 263,821.25
The seasonal adjustment program predicted 268,364.94 loaded outbound containers for September. 263,821.25 is also nearly 2% too few. The prediction range (with 95% confidence) was 252,072.55 to 284,657.33.
The slowdown appears to be affecting inbound and outbound traffic fairly equally.
See Also:
Calculated Risk: LA Port Traffic in September: Imports Strong, Exports Stalled
Real Estate Newsletter Articles this Week: Existing-Home Sales Increased to
4.15 million SAAR in November
-
At the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter this week:
[image: Existing Home Sales]*Click on graph for larger image.*
• NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increase...
11 hours ago
9 comments:
Stag,
There may be a better way but I don't know it.
I'm reminded of my high school chemistry class. I never actually successfully completed a titration. I just didn't have the patience to find that magical last drop. It really didn't matter. I knew what the result should be without the lab experiment. No harm no foul.
Of course Wall St. does it a little differently. They know the actual end results won't generate bonuses so they fudge the data in a way that allows them to tell the sheeple what they want to hear:
This will make you wealthy! High yield AND AAA baby!
It works every time. And with the Fed & CONgress there to fix things, what's the harm?
mab,
You should see all the data that gets spit out of that seasonal adjustment program. It is a sight to behold.
Take the inbound traffic.
I supplied 2,257 characters of text input data.
It spits out an amazing 95,222 characters of text output data.
I've included a small subset of it below.
Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy way to convert a table of text data (each column is two months, each set of two rows is a year) into a single column of Excel data.
D 11 Final seasonally adjusted data
From 1995.Jan to 2010.Aug
Observations 188
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec TOTAL
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1995 233791. 216620. 229642. 222905. 219409. 208574.
216932. 218544. 202271. 219333. 209198. 210654. 2607874.
1996 220665. 231163. 209429. 223588. 224079. 230376.
239599. 239210. 249129. 254206. 251871. 261766. 2835080.
And so on. Not exactly Excel friendly, at least for my limited Excel skills.
So I end up copying all 188 data points (and growing) each time I want to update my charts. Sigh.
I should add that I should probably just break down and write a program to extract the data from the text file in a format I'd prefer, but I feel no great desire to update my rusty programming skills.
"Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West.
But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy."
"The decline has been painful for the Japanese, with companies and individuals like Masato having lost the equivalent of trillions of dollars in the stock market, which is now just a quarter of its value in 1989, and in real estate, where the average price of a home is the same as it was in 1983. And the future looks even bleaker, as Japan faces the world’s largest government debt — around 200 percent of gross domestic product — a shrinking population and rising rates of poverty and suicide."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/asia/17japan.html?_r=1
Iif the above link does not work, copy and paste the following into Google to get the article.
"Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened"
Anonymous,
Thanks for offering the link.
“We’re not Japan,” said Robert E. Hall, a professor of economics at Stanford. “In America, the bet is still that we will somehow find ways to get people spending and investing again.”
Bet? Still? Somehow? That's the "proof" we aren't Japan?
Here's my "bet". Economics degrees will have a declining value to cost ratio. If not now, someday. As "proof", I would point to the rising cost of tuition combined with questionable modern economic "somehow" theories.
Hi Mark -
I highly urge you to keep those basic programming skills sharp! Not because you'll need them at work again, but because it's a great way to maintain your brain, and they do come in useful as an investor. You can learn a lot of interesting things with a homegrown stock database (or a purchased one, of course) and custom screening scripts. For instance, you'd never have guessed it from all the market-babble about "corporates have record levels of cash", but if you take the Value Line database (about 1500 stocks) and try to find the ones with both strong financial strength ratings and low debt-to-sales ratios, you only get a handful of companies. Everyone else may have some cash to get through a crunch, but they are deeply vulnerable to cash-flow issues due to the high debt burdens.
However, that wasn't what I came here to comment on. On CR's blog, someone pointed out that the LA port traffic data has an ongoing upward bias because they've been growing market share (fraction of total West Coast port traffic) following some infrastructure upgrades. I'd be interested in knowing if you've done any research in that direction. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to compile the total U.S. port data, with a west/east breakdown... the numbers are out there. Wish I didn't still have my day job and kids, or I'd be having fun with this!
Wisdom Seeker,
After 20+ years of programming (many of them 60+ hour weeks), I'm pretty much done. It's just work to me now and if I was forced to work again I'd sooner stock shelves or cook fries. That's how burned out I am.
There's an infinite number of ways to stimulate the brain. I love strategy games (such as Civilization and Disgaea). I probably overstimulate, lol.
As for the port traffic, it would not surprise me that the LA ports are gaining market share. I don't know what it is like now, but when I first started tracking it I chose LA and Long Beach because they were big and had timely and easily accessible data. Most ports did not.
As for corporations flush with cash, I've pointed out a few times here that corporations are also flush with debt (as seen in the Fed's Flow of Funds Accounts). Would I too be "flush with cash" if I had $100k cash with $300k in debt? I think not.
Your senator learns that a much- maligned weapons system now has enough votes for funding. Before the news gets to a reporter, he buys shares in the arms manufacturer for a quick, handsome profit.
What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, according to the law. Nor would it be illegal for him to tip someone else, say, his largest campaign contributor.
Laws that criminalize insider trading cover corporate insiders and those they tip, but not specifically Congress. And while scholars differ on whether existing law could be applied on Capitol Hill, it hasn’t been.
It’s a gap in the law that two members of Congress have been trying for years to plug, to no avail. Congress is famous for telling others what they can and can’t do. When it comes to proscribing its own conduct, it’s a different story.
This week the Wall Street Journal reported that during the past two calendar years, 72 congressional aides from both parties made trades in companies that their bosses’ help oversee. Among them are top advisers to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Their timely investments proved profitable, but the staffers deny the trades sprung from inside knowledge, the Journal reported.
Either way, suspiciously timed trading on Capitol Hill isn’t new.
Companies stuck in asbestos litigation suddenly saw inexplicably heavy trading and a rise in share price on Nov. 15, 2005. The next day, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced a breakthrough on a bill to create a government-backed fund to settle asbestos cases. It turned out that political intelligence firms benefitted from a leak in Frist’s office, Business Week reported the following month.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-14/it-isn-t-insider-trading-when-congressmen-do-it-commentary-by-ann-woolner.html
Anonymous,
Still waiting for an ETHICAL explanation of Bernanke's CANADIAN treasury bond holdings as he sets AMERICAN monetary policy.
Canadian Dollar
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