Thursday, December 25, 2014

A "Soft Landing" Christmas Miracle (Musical Tribute)

The following chart shows the annual change in the 13-week moving average of initial claims.


Click to enlarge.

The 13-week average of initial claims hasn't been this low since the year 2000 (not seen in the chart). That alone might make one believe in miracles, but wait, there's more.

Should we continue on the current parabolic trend in red, initial claims will actually go negative within 2 years!

Don't you see what this means? Not only will all layoffs be a distant memory, but people will actually be plucked right of the street and placed in cubicle farms! Perhaps even against their will! Oh, the humanity!

May 10, 2014
Warren Buffett on the Fed: Bernanke Was a Hero

Zero rates have had a huge effect on rejuvenating the economy and asset prices. We are not in a bubble situation at all right now, but it is an unusual situation.

Bernanke, what a hero! He kept rates at zero! Who said anything about bubbles?

December 24, 2014
Don’t Be a Hero, Leave Rates at Zero

Talking about raising rates makes sense to contain excess speculations. Actually raising rates makes no sense until inflation arrives in earnest.

Yellen, don't be a hero! Keep rates at zero! Who said anything about excess speculations?

Swamped in Unusual Situations


Once we've bought the sure things
Once we've bought the sure things
Once we've bought the sure things
Once we've bought the sure things
Oh, no

Risk assets
They are fueled by doves
We know not all gains can be realized

Risk assets who cares?
When they turn around
And we know that they descend down for free

The trend is underway
The risk is gone
Don't be alarmed
That a few have sold
Few have sold
Few have sold

Risk assets
Can't replace the lie
Scary shadows of the past are implied

Risk assets who cares?
When they turn around
And we know trends can descend by a mile

The trend is underway
The risk is gone
Don't be alarmed
That a few might sell today

It's just a parody
That risk is free
Don't be alarmed
That a few have sold

Once we've bought the sure things
Once we've bought the sure things
Once we've bought the sure things
Once we've bought the sure things
Oh, no

The trend is underway
The risk is gone
Don't be alarmed
That a few might sell today

It's just a parody
That risk is free
Don't be alarmed
That a few have sold
Few have sold
Few have sold

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

19 comments:

Stagflationary Mark said...

As a side note, Lacuna Coil's Swamped was in Rock Band 2.

I have heard it SO many times and I still love it. It didn't hurt that it was fun to play.

Rock Band Expert Guitar - Swamped - Lacuna Coil - 100%

I could play it well on expert (on a good day), but that's not me playing it in the video.

Troy said...

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=VLE

5M FTE jobs to just get back to the baseline

Happy New Year to You!

Troy said...

That video was pretty cool! Beat Mania and GH/RB were such great game design efforts.

I'm a big fan of women's hard rock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRsYm_yqp60

^ Princess Princess, the top act in Japan in 1989-1990.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqV9xkJ33fo&spfreload=10

^ SCANDAL and the lead singer of SHOW YA, the former is a current girl's band, the latter was a contemporary pioneer of girl's rock in Japan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsnmRyA62cU&spfreload=10

^ SCANDAL with another JPOP hard rock hit, Nanase Aikawa's Yume Miru Shojo Iranai (Don't Need a Dreaming Girl)

Stagflationary Mark said...

Troy,

L's Theme A

Stagflationary Mark said...

And Happy New Year! :)

Stagflationary Mark said...

I posted these comments from my iPhone.

OMG!

I finally made it to the 21st century! ;)

Troy said...

I'd been soldiering on with my 2010 iPad 1, but the iPad Air 2 was a compelling upgrade for me (2GB, triple-core, half the thickness).

I was waiting for the Nexus 9 tablet from HTC, since it was a similar package, but the Air 2 blows it away more or less.

Target's $140 Black Friday Doorbuster sealed the deal for me; I showed up at a somewhat out-of-the-way Target an hour before their 6PM opening on Thanksgiving Day and just managed to get their last 16GB model (didn't want to pay $100 for the 64GB if I didn't have to since as an app developer 16GB is sufficient for my needs).

The thing's really magical. Made for DSR!

With the new iPad I won't need an iPhone; still happy with my ~$6/mo Virgin plan, tho T Mobile apparently has a $3/mo plan I should check out.

Stagflationary Mark said...

I've already managed to fill more than 6GB just with Spotify (like a kid in a candy store).

The leased phone is a Christmas gift from my girlfriend's parents. It is definitely spoiling me. It's not a permanent lease but I may have a permanent addiction, lol.

There are 4 different free games I'm playing on it so far (Sim City BuildIt, Chess, Zombie Highway 2, Pacific Fleet (Lite).

I also love that it can take my pulse using the camera. Even shows the wave form! Amazing!

Troy said...

wow that PF game is SO close to the design I've been "iterating" on since ca 1989.

The Solomons battles of 1942-43 were such great knife fights. Discovering the NROTC shelf at the university library was striking the mother lode for me; I'd carry so many books home it'd hurt (no car back then, just a trusty 10 speed)

http://www.cruiserscout.com/contents.html for one man's experience.

Stagflationary Mark said...

My dad served on the battleship North Carolina in WW2, so I'm a sucker for games related to that. Still have the board games Midway and Flat Top from high school and college. Wish someone would create an iPhone app for those games!

Troy said...

Something really compelling about 1942, yes.

While it was real life & death of course, the game balance was already there. Lightweight fighters only good for defense (VF) , heavy-hitter torpedo attack bombers (VB), and the middleweight VB dive bombers.

Then you got the PT, SS, DD, CL, CA, CV, BB mix, each with their own roles and weaknesses.

Plus the oddball CB http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/USS_Missouri_(BB-63)_and_USS_Alaska_(CB-1)_at_Norfolk,_Virginia,_1944.jpg and the over-powered Japanese superbattleships.

Which reminds me, a naval strategy game incorporating some https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN-nth63S24 alternate history technology would be interesting too.

Ah, I see the PF game is a Unity3D game. Funny how in the AppStore age IP isn't protected all that well any more. Unity offers some protection, but the PF people didn't take advantage of it

Hmm, these assets could serve me very well as placehoiders.

Troy said...

Ah, playing PF, yech

alls I want is Task Force 1942

Problem with navy sims is water/wake effects, and convincing pyrotechnics and ship destruction.

Those ships got beat up!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/NewOrleansTulagiBowMissing.jpg

Which reminds me, even an app faithfully re-creating e.g. the battle of Midway would be more than enough. The History Channel has made some attempts, but they always screw it up somehow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39PUT1a3L1s

Stagflationary Mark said...

I'd love to see a fleet game in the style of Combat Mission.

Plot out the next 60 seconds and then watch the 60 second movie. repeat.

That was an awesome game full of strategy/tactics. I really liked how your orders were not always followed to the letter. For example, a light tank spotting a previously hidden Tiger tank tended to ignore further orders and justifiably seek out survival!

Troy said...

one crazy idea I've had is that the player commands their forces from the keyboard not mouse, issuing natural-language orders

which iPhone did you receive?

Stagflationary Mark said...

Voice command: Siri, torpedo... los!

Was given a choice on the phone. I opted for the iPhone 6. Girlfriend got the larger plus version. It all comes down to pocket space vs. purse space mostly.

Heck, I don't even like keys in my pocket in the summer. Might explain why I was willing to wait so long to get a mobile phone. No going back now though. Add one more expense to my long-term budget. It's amazing how far tech has advanced since the TRS-80.

Troy said...

phone's got the oomph to drive a KVM setup, but Apple has yet to go that way.

the untapped potential of my iPad Air 2 (I'm looking at it laying on my PC, sleeping) is so sad.

back in the 90s in Japan my company was launch partner for NEC's first PowerVR graphics card (it rendered the frame locally and pumped it back to the video card over PCI) Development system was a 133Mz Pentium (3M transistors).

The iPad Air 2 has 3B transistors, that includes the octo-core PowerVR part of the die.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8716/apple-a8xs-gpu-gxa6850-even-better-than-i-thought

The APIs Apple's shipping with iOS8 are pretty sweet (SceneKit, GameKit, CloudKit, SpriteKit, OpenAL)

Add a keyboard, monitor, and mouse and a bit of desktop OS polish and you'd have an excellent home computer, in the Amiga 500 mold.

Microsoft's releasing of its C# infrastructure to the community interests me greatly with this, I'd love to insert their CLR right between Apple's API stack and the desktop OS and theapp/game code running on this desktop OS.

The second OS would only need to be a glorified game launcher basically, what SteamOS is trying to do I guess.

http://i.imgur.com/6X4D2Fb.png

is a PNG comparing the iPad, iPhone 6, and 6+ screen sizes, scaled to the 100 DPI of my current monitor -- you're not missing much going with the 6 I guess.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Troy,

...you're not missing much going with the 6 I guess.

I'm 50. My eyesight does a bit better on the iPhone 6 Plus. So far, it's only been an issue on the Pacific Fleet game. I can just barely read its super tiny fonts with my bifocals, lol.

As a side note, I'm trying to figure out if the game is worth upgrading. I'm torn. It's not the ideal game I was looking to play but as we've discussed, the topic interests me.

It's Atlantic version is right out. As much as I might enjoy playing it, there are apparently a lot of in-app purchases to acquire new ships. Not going to happen.

mab said...

Zero rates have had a huge effect on rejuvenating the economy and asset prices.

Totally agree that zero rates have had a "huge" effect on asset prices. As for the economy, I don't buy the "huge" part at all. Buffett is a shill imo.

Let's look at the "huge" effect that zero rates and QE "money printing" have had on prices:

http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/

Annual inflation has been about 1%/yr over the past 6.5 years. Likely negative inflation if one accounts for actual home prices during said period. Do we have a trillion Shadow Stats to prove otherwise?

And going forward I'm sure lower gas prices will lead to hyper-inflation:

http://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx?time=24

Wow, that's some serious demand driven inflation!

And just to pile on, I'll mention that German 5 years bond rates just went negative!!!!!

Economic rejuvenation baby, that's what I'm talkin about!

Stagflationary Mark said...

mab,

Long-term interest rates are like a deflated basketball on a court with made up entirely of dead spots. All they can do is bounce higher and higher off the floor from here! ;)

in all seriousness, I played on a visitor's court with a massive dead spot in high school. It provided much amusement when you'd dribble the ball over it and the ball would bounce half as high expected.

The Great American Ball Bubble!