Liebe Leser/-innen,

bis auf weiteres werden im Markt-Daten Blog keine neuen Beiträge publiziert. Die Kommentarfunktion ist abgeschaltet.

viele Grüße

Cordula Sauerland

nicht nur in D :

David Rosenberg zu den ständigen Manipulationen der US Daten :
It’s fascinating to watch this game when it comes to the release of the Fed’s consumer credit data. The data for December, which came out on February 5, came in far better than expected — falling only $1.7bln in December versus expectations of -$10.0bln. At the same time, the November figure, to very little fanfare, was revised to -$23.9bln from -$17.5bln initially. And last then this past Friday, December consumer credit was revised lower, by $2.9bln, to now show -$4.6bln from -$1.7bln initially. Hmmm. So what we have here are the revisions in the data over the last two months painting a much different picture of the level of improvement.
Revolving consumer credit (credit cards) slid $1.7 billion in January and the level, at $864.4 billion, is now the lowest since October 2006…
… This is key and attests to the lingering consumer frugality theme
We don’t like to appear as conspiracy theorists, but if you recall, the equity market bottomed on February 5 on two pieces of news that triggered a significant intra-day reversal. The first was the initial hints of an EU rescue plan for Greece. Later in the day, December’s consumer credit data were released, showing a modest decline of $1.7 billion versus the estimate of a $10 billion contraction. When you take into account the downward revision to November, what comes out of the wash is a December level of consumer credit outstanding that is was actually $6 billion lower than expected. But obviously not the way the data are being treated by Wall Street research departments or the media for that matter.

gefunden auf Zerohedge

Five days ago a great white hope appeared for the great bankrupt Golden State (Baa1/A-), in the form of $2 billion in GO bonds, which were supposed to be promptly syndicated via underwriters JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. This would have been the first bond sale for California since November: a critical milestone as the state creeps ever closer to a full-on default. Unfortunately, the creeping just turned into a casual jog after Jane Wells (@janewells) just tweeted that California has cancelled its bond sale “after legislature fails to approve cash management flexibility bill [the] Treasurer said he needed to attract investors.”

“For a AAA government to be downgraded, Moody’s must have concluded that the deterioration in credit
metrics is (1) observable and material in absolute terms; (2) observable and material in relative terms;
and (3) unlikely to be reversed in the near future. The decision underlying a potential downgrade would
also depend on the extent of the actual and potential deterioration of a government’s balance sheet;
whether a country’s economic model can be regenerated, thereby allowing the economy to rebound; and
whether governments can repair their fiscal position by raising taxes or cutting expenditure.”

Tja, wann in 2010 werden die sich an ihre Kriterien erinnern ?

allerdings ist wie immer alles relativ  :

“Moody’s believes that there will always have to be at least one Aaa issuer — an ‘anchor’
of the rating scale. Without it, the “rating scale” becomes meaningless.”

The 2011 Obama Budget
Along with Mr Obama’s proposed fiscal 2011 budget totalling $US 3.8 TRILLION, the White House
recently released a prediction that US debt levels would reach 77 percent of US annual GDP - by 2020.
The US Treasury’s funded debt as of February 16 was $US 12.385 TRILLION. According to the US
government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, the advance estimate of real 2009 GDP showed a growth of
0.1 percent from the equivalent period in 2008. US real GDP in 2008 decreased by 1.9 percent. There is
as yet no precise figure for US GDP in 2009, but the CIA fact book estimates it at $US 14.270 Billion.
Two facts not in the CIA’s book should stand out in bold relief. First, if the CIA is right, the new
Treasury debt limit of $US 14.294 TRILLION is now HIGHER than US GDP. Second, current US
Treasury funded debt at $US 12.385 TRILLION (see above) is the equivalent of 86.8 percent of the CIA’s
estimate of US GDP in 2009.
So where did the White House get its estimate that US debt levels will reach 77 percent of US annual
GDP ten years from now? The same place it gets all its economic projections from: Wishful thinking.
For decades, that has been good enough. But it won’t be good enough for much longer, as the Treasury’s
TIC report makes perfectly clear.

1.     “Bubbles generally are perceptible only after the fact.  To spot a bubble in advance requires a judgment that hundreds of thousands of informed investors have it all wrong.  While bubbles that burst are scarcely benign, the consequences need not be catastrophic for the economy” -  Alan Greenspan June 17, 1999

2.     “It was far from obvious that bubbles, even if identified early, could be preempted short of the central bank inducing a substantial contraction in economic activity – the very outcome we would be seeking to avoid. Prolonged periods of expansion promote a greater rational willingness to take risks, a pattern very difficult to avert by a modest tightening of monetary policy…we recognized that, despite our suspicions, it was very difficult to definitively identify a bubble until after the fact…the idea that a collapse of a bubble can be softened by pricking it in advance is almost surely an illusion”  — Alan Greenspan August 30, 2002

3.     “There is no housing bubble to go bust”… “Home-price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.”– Ben Bernanke, October 27, 2005

4. “the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the sub-prime markets seems likely to be contained,”
Ben Bernanke, 28 March 2007

5. “And we will never return to the old boom and bust”
Gordon Brown, 21 March 2007

6. Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said commercial real estate woes won’t set off a new banking crisis, in remarks to the Economic Club of Chicago.
“I don’t think so,” Geithner said, when asked whether commercial real estate could set off another banking meltdown. “That’s a problem the economy can manage through even though it’s going to be still exceptionally difficult.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6nMHwF6Ks8&feature=player_embedded

Office of the Special Inspector General
for the Troubled Asset Relief Program

(Leitung: Neil Barofsky)

Quarterly Report to Congress
January 30, 2010

Executive Summary (S. 6)

• To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed
to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial
subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs.

• To the extent that institutions were previously incentivized to take reckless risks
through a “heads, I win; tails, the Government will bail me out” mentality, the
market is more convinced than ever that the Government will step in as necessary
to save systemically significant institutions. This perception was reinforced
when TARP was extended until October 3, 2010, thus permitting Treasury to
maintain a war chest of potential rescue funding at the same time that banks
that have shown questionable ability to return to profitability (and in some cases
are posting multi-billion-dollar losses) are exiting TARP programs.

• To the extent that large institutions’ risky behavior resulted from the desire to
justify ever-greater bonuses — and indeed, the race appears to be on for TARP
recipients to exit the program in order to avoid its pay restrictions — the current
bonus season demonstrates that although there have been some improvements
in the form that bonus compensation takes for some executives, there has been
little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street.

• To the extent that the crisis was fueled by a “bubble” in the housing market, the
Federal Government’s concerted efforts to support home prices — as discussed
more fully in Section 3 of this report — risk re-inflating that bubble in light of
the Government’s effective takeover of the housing market through purchases
and guarantees, either direct or implicit, of nearly all of the residential mortgage
market.

Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off
a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same
winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

natürlich war das nur ein Versehen, siehe weiter unten …

The Commerce Department revised November
Durable Goods Orders sharply lower, from +0.2% to -0.7%.
The Census Bureau identified a processing error that occurred when revising historic seasonally adjusted data for the November (data month) releases. The data have been corrected…
http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/

Liebe Cordula, ich weiss es geht hier um Markt Daten, ich finde der Mut dieses Mannes verdient eine (weitere) Ausnahme

Die Charts gibts es nur auf Zero Hedge :

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/scandal-albert-edwards-alleges-central-banks-were-complicit-robbing-middle-classes

Theft! Were the US & UK central banks complicit in robbing the middle classes?

by Albert Edwards, Societe Generale

Mr Bernanke’s in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn’t responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that “there was no housing bubble to go bust”? The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to ‘steal’ their nations’ income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich?

Ben Bernanke?s recent speech at the American Economic Association made me feel sick. Like Alan Greenspan, he is still in denial. The pigmies that populate the political and monetary elites prefer to genuflect to the court of public opinion in a pathetic attempt to deflect blame from their own gross and unforgivable incompetence.

The US and UK have seen a huge rise in inequality over the last two decades, as growth in national income has been diverted almost exclusively to the top income earners (see chart below). The middle classes have seen median real incomes stagnate over that period and, as a consequence, corporate margins and profits have boomed.

Some recent reading has got me thinking as to whether the US and UK central banks were actively complicit in an aggressive re-distributive policy benefiting the very rich. Indeed, it has been amazing how little political backlash there has been against the stagnation of ordinary people?s earnings in the US and UK. Did central banks, in creating housing bubbles, help distract middle class attention from this re-distributive policy by allowing them to keep consuming via equity extraction? The emergence of extreme inequality might never otherwise have been tolerated by the electorate (see chart below). And now the bubbles have burst, along with central banks? credibility, what now?

[1]

After reading Ben Bernanke?s speech, once again denying culpability for the bubble, I really didn?t know whether to laugh or cry (remember that Ben Bernanke, like Tim Geithner, was a key member of the Greenspan Fed). I feel like Peter Finch in the film Network, sticking my head out of the window and shouting “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Although criticism of the Fed (and the Bank of England) has now become louder and more widespread, I feel my longstanding derision for their actions during the so-called ?good years? puts me in a stronger position than some to offer further comment.

Opening my 2002-2005 file of old weeklies I did not have to go any further than the first paragraph of the top copy (end of December 2005). “As far as Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed is concerned, we have spared few words of derision. We have made plain our views that the supposed US prosperity that has accompanied his tenure has been based on a grotesque mountain of debt. We have likened the economy to a Ponzi scheme which will ultimately collapse. He has allowed the funding of strong economic activity by mortgaging the US’s future against one bubble (equity) and then another (housing), which is now beginning to implode”. These are almost consensus thoughts now, but not then.

The pigmies that populate the political and monetary elites prefer to genuflect to the court of public opinion. Blaming the banks is simply a pathetic attempt to deflect the public fury from their own gross and unforgivable incompetence. We have stated before that banks are not the primary cause of the bust. Just as in Japan, a decade earlier, bank problems are a symptom of the bust. It is the monetary and regulatory authorities that are responsible for this mess. And it is not just obvious in retrospect. It was perfectly obvious from the beginning.

I was shocked by a recent survey of Wall Street and business economists, published in the Wall Street Journal (see Bernanke View Doubted 14 Jan? link [2]). Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the proposition ‘excessively easy Fed policy in the first half of the decade helped cause a bubble in house prices’, some 42, or 74% agreed with the proposition. So unbelievably there are still 12 economists surveyed who did not agree! Even more incredible, a majority of academic economists did not agree with the proposition. Maybe they have sympathy for a fellow academic or maybe they actually believe the preposterous proposition that the western central banks were not in control of the bubbles which were primarily due to tidal waves of surplus savings washing across from Asia.

John Taylor shows this to be nonsense. There was no global savings glut (see chart below)

[3]

John Taylor is well known for his famous ?Taylor Rule? for the appropriate level of interest rates and he has been very vocal in his criticism of Fed laxity in the aftermath of the Nasdaq crash in his paper ?The Financial Crisis and Policy Responses: An Empirical Analysis of What Went Wrong’, Nov. 2008 and elsewhere - link [4]. His thesis is simple. Lax monetary policy caused the boom in housing upon which euphoric credit excesses were built. The subsequent bust was an inevitable mirror image of the boom. This simply would not have occurred had the Fed (and the Bank of England) acted earlier to tighten policy as shown in the Taylor?s counterfactual profiles (see charts below).

[5]

More recently, the San Francisco Fed published a paper this month showing that those countries which saw the steepest run-up in house prices over the last decade also saw the largest rise in household sector leverage (see charts below and link [6]). Of course the causality runs both ways. Loose monetary policy generates higher borrowing which pushes up house prices. Subsequently this prompts other households to borrow against the rising value of their houses to finance consumption via net equity extraction.

[7]

Generally most commentators have fallen for the populist line that the banks are to blame. Very rarely does a leading commentator pin the blame where it deserves to be ? on the central banks. Hence, I was very interested to read the Financial Times Insight column on Tuesday from the deep-thinking columnist, John Plender (interestingly his title in the print edition was “Blame the central bankers more than the private bankers” was changed to “Remove the punchbowl before the party gets rowdy” in the web edition - link [8]).

Plender?s point is classic Minsky. An unusually long period of economic stability, also known as The Great Moderation, engineered by Central Bank laxity inevitably created the conditions for the subsequent bust. “Central banks clearly bear much responsibility for past excessive credit expansion. The Fed’s gradualist and transparent approach to raising rates in middecade also ensured that bankers were never shocked into a recognition that unprecedented shrinkage of bank equity was phenomenally dangerous. Despite the popular perception that financial innovation caused so much of the damage in the crisis, the rise in bank leverage was a far more important factor”. His point that it takes guts to remove the punch-bowl when the party is in full swing is spot on. The Fed and the Bank of England were both gutless and spineless. Their love affair with The Great Moderation meant they simply were not prepared to tolerate a little more pain now to avoid a Minsky credit bust and massive unemployment later.

But what is the relationship, if any, between this extreme central bank laxity in the US and UK and these countries being at the forefront for the extraordinary rise in inequality over the last few decades (see cover chart)? And does it matter?

I was reading some typically thought-provoking comments from Marc Faber in his Gloom, Boom and Doom report about current extremes of inequality. It reminded me that our own excellent US economists Steven Gallagher and Aneta Markowska had also written on this. To be sure, the rise in inequality has been staggering in the US in recent years (see charts below).

[9]

It is well worth visiting the website of Emmanuel Saez of the University of California who has written extensively on this subject and now has updated his charts up until the end of 2008 (data available in Excel Format ? link [10]). The New York Times reported on the recently released Census Bureau data and showed not only that median income had declined over the last 10 years in real terms, but that this is the first full decade that real median household income has failed to rise in the US - link [11]. What is also so interesting from Professor Saez?s cross-sectional research is how inequality has clearly risen fastest in the Anglosaxon, freemarket economies of the US and the UK (also note that France, with much higher levels of equality, saw much more subdued growth in household leverage).

Our US economists make the very interesting point (similar to Marc Faber) that peaks of income skewness ? 1929 and 2007 ? tell us there is something fundamentally unsustainable about excessively uneven income distribution. With a relatively low marginal propensity to consume among the rich, when they receive the vast bulk of income growth, as they have, then the country will face an under-consumption problem (see 9 September The Economic News ?- link [12]. Marc Faber also cites John Hobson?s work on this same topic from the 1930s).

Hence, while governments preside over economic policies which make the very rich even richer, national consumption needs to be boosted in some way to avoid underconsumption ending in outright deflation. In addition, the middle classes also need to be thrown a sop to disguise the fact they are not benefiting at all from economic growth. This is where central banks have played their pernicious part.

I recalled seeing another article from John Plender on this topic back in April 2008. His explanation for why there had been so little backlash from the stagnation of ordinary people?s income at a time when the rich did so well was simple: ?”Rising asset prices, especially in the housing market, created a sense of increasing wealth regardless of income. Remortgaging homes over a long period of declining interest rates provided a convenient source of funds via equity withdrawal to finance increased consumption” – link [13].

Now you might argue central banks had no alternative in the face of under-consumption. Or you might conclude there was a deliberate, unspoken collusion among policymakers to ?rob? the middle classes of their rightful share of income growth by throwing them illusionary spending power based on asset price inflation. We will never know.

But it is clear in my mind that ordinary working people would not have tolerated these extreme redistributive policies had not the UK and US central banks played their supporting role. Going forward, in the absence of a sustained housing boom, labour will fight back to take its proper (normal) share of the national cake, squeezing profits on a secular basis. For as Bill Gross pointed out back in PIMCO?s investment outlook ?Enough is Enough’ of August 1997, “?When the fruits of society’s labor become maldistributed, when the rich get richer and the middle and lower classes struggle to keep their heads above water as is clearly the case today, then the system ultimately breaks down.”- link [14]. In Japan, low levels of inequality and inherent social cohesion prevented a social breakdown in this post-bubble debacle. With social inequality currently so very high in the US and the UK, it doesn?t take much to conclude that extreme inequality could strain the fabric of society far closer to breaking point.

[15]

Meine Antwort an die besorgten Leser, die mich ab und zu daran erinnern, dass es hier um Daten geht …. :

If a CEO issued the kind of distorted figures put out by politicians and scientists, he’d wind up in prison, Ex-Bush Economic Advisors CEO, Michael Boskin, slams politicians for cooking the economic books to obfuscate economic conditions.
Politicians and scientists who don’t like what their data show lately have simply taken to changing the
numbers. They believe that their end—socialism, global climate regulation, health-care legislation,
repudiating debt commitments, la gloire française—justifies throwing out even minimum standards of
accuracy. It appears that no numbers are immune: not GDP, not inflation, not budget, not job or cost
estimates, and certainly not temperature. A CEO or CFO issuing such massaged numbers would land in
jail…
There is historical precedent for a “socialist GDP.” When President George H.W. Bush sent me to
help Mikhail Gorbachev with economic reform, I found out that the Soviet statistics office kept two sets of books: those they published, and those they actually believed (plus another for Stalin when he was alive)..
America has not been immune from this dangerous numbers game. Every president is guilty of
spinning unpleasant statistics. President Richard Nixon even thought there was a conspiracy against him at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But President Barack Obama has taken it to a new level. His laudable attempt at transparency in counting the number of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus bill has degenerated into farce and was just junked this week.
The administration has introduced the new notion of “jobs saved” to take credit where none was ever
taken before. It seems continually to confuse gross and net numbers…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704586504574654261655183416.html

Das B/D Model und seasonal adjustments werden m.E. auch weiterhin die Arbeitsmarktzahlen verfälschen.

John Crudele NY Post:

The charade continues this Friday.
That’s when the Labor Department will announce how many jobs it claims were lost in the US
economy during December.
The number is essentially worthless to anyone who really wants to know what’s cooking in the job
market. But it is worse than worthless — it’s harmful — to policymakers who are trying to determine
what to do about things like interest rates and the latest incarnation of the stock market bubble.
For the record, Wall Street thinks that the department will report that no jobs were lost — zero –
during December. This comes after only 11,000 jobs were reported lost in November, the first pleasant
surprise in months for those who foolishly care about these statistics…
In fact, the Labor Department has already said that when it reports its next set of statistics on Feb. 4 it
will reduce the number of jobs that it believes existed in this country from April 2007 through March
2008 by around 820,000.
2
And people inside Labor also admit that the department mistakenly believed these 820,000 jobs
existed mostly because of incorrect assumptions by its birth/death model…
Now get this! That 820,000 mistake only corrects the numbers as of last March.
The birth/death model since this past April has added an additional 900,000 jobs. And eventually those 900,000 jobs will probably also have to be extracted from the Labor Department’s count.
But it gets worse. The Labor Department tells me that despite the huge corrections, it still believes its birth/death model is working well because it is tracking closely the Census Bureau’s quarterly surveys of employment and wages.
In other words, the Labor Department doesn’t think it needs to change its belief that small companies are popping up everywhere and creating large numbers of jobs.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/why_the_government_job_figures_won_SF8z4SR9LG0at4gQjNj5eO

Der Markt-Daten Kalender für das Jahr 2010 steht als PDF-Dokument zum Download zur Verfügung.

ein  gesundes und erfolgreiches neues Jahr wünscht

Cordula Sauerland

… und weiter aufwärts!

die aktuelle Ausgabe des KID Konjunktur-Indikators Deutschland:

hier bitte weiterlesen…

tut sich was .. oder doch nicht ?

Trim Tabs versucht die Entwicklung am Arbeitsmarkt auf Grund der Lohn- und Einkommenssteuereinnahmen zu beurteilen. Hier deren Einschätzung :

TrimTabs employment analysis, which uses real-time daily income tax deposits from all U.S.
taxpayers to compute employment growth, estimated that the U.S. economy shed 255,000 jobs in
November. This past month’s results were an improvement of only 10.2% from the 284,000 jobs lost in
October…In November, the BLS revised their September and October job losses down a surprising
44.5%, or 203,000 job…

Irgendwie passt das nicht so recht mit den - 11.000 zusammen und macht auch keinen sinn, es sei denn man will den Markt auf Ende der null, null zero Zinspolitik einstimmen …