Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Industrial Production

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Everyone's a winner! Behind these curtains lies one of the nation's oldest exponential trend failures. 80 years in the making! $1,000 reward if not absolutely real! Deemed too strong for women and children!


Click to enlarge.


Click to enlarge.

Bargains galore! Pay no heed to the dog and pony sideshow! There has never been a better time to get rich quick! Learn the secrets inside!

October 17, 2012
Study shows $1.2T gap for public pensions

The 100 funds Milliman studied used a median rate of return for their investments of 8 percent. But the recession slashed into the market, dropping actual median returns to just 3.2 percent for the last five years, according to data from Callan Associates.

Gaze in wonder at the two-headed returns!

See Also:
Sarcasm Disclaimer

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Industrial Production Index

7 comments:

Stagflationary Mark said...

October 16, 2012
PDI Introduces New Scratch Ticket Scanning Feature

"The enhanced lottery scanning feature is definitely a welcomed change and is already saving our stores nearly 100 hours a week," she said.

Yes! Automated lottery ticket verification! This is exactly what our country needs in order to prosper!

(The sarcasm appears to have flowed into the comments. Go figure.)

Troy said...

I suspect the post-1995 return to trend was thanks to our trade deficit as much if not more than productivity.

We did increase our workforce by 4%:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MANEMP

but I think we got a nice tailwind from all the free stuff from China. Plus the cheap diesel too, of course.

Troy said...

As for pensions, we have a $2T gap in social security that we call the SSTF.

In 2011 we had $600B in payouts and $590B in contributions (that includes the $90B the treasury printed up in special bonds thanks to the 2% FICA cut).

1990-2009 we had over a trillion FICA over-contribution to the SSTF -- cash-on-cash (FICA in vs. expenses out).

2010 was a $16B cash shortfall and 2011 came in at -$11B. This is not a disaster as that's how we will drain the SSTF as intended, running a negative cash balance until the SSTF is back to its statutory minimum, one year of expenses.

But as the baby boom ages, SSA is going to have to hit up the UST for some real money -- by 2017 payouts are going to be $200B/yr higher than now -- that's a 30% increase in outgo.

"you know the math . . . we gotta get this thing movin'"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omZ4DMSvXVk

We're going to need to basically double the tax level to just pay our existing social programs & $800B/yr defense expense.

Who's going to pay for the underfunded state pension mess is another deal entirely.

Not me, if I can help it. Oh how I wish I had studied Norwegian in school instead of Japanese. What was I thinking . . .








Anonymous said...

The trend in your first graph looks similar to the growth graph in an earlier post. It looks like you could have one trend from 1920 to about 1975 and another trend from 1975 to about 2008 or so.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Troy,

I suspect the post-1995 return to trend was thanks to our trade deficit as much if not more than productivity.

It's been a while since I worked the trade deficit into a chart. Today may be the day!

Stagflationary Mark said...

Anonymous,

Good eye! I'll post another chart shortly.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Anonymous,

The new chart is up.