Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | Percent | ||
| SPU2 Comdty | S&P Futures | 1332.5 | -5.0 | -0.37% |
| SX5E Index | Eurostoxx Index | 2166.7 | -14.5 | -0.66% |
| CL1 Comdty | Oil (WTI) | 82.89 | -1.1 | -1.36% |
| US0003M Index | LIBOR | 0.468 | 0.000 | 0.00% |
| DXY Index | US Dollar Index (DXY) | 81.79 | 0.164 | 0.20% |
| USGG10YR Index | 10 Year Govt Bond Yield | 1.57% | -0.01% | |
| RPX.CP28 Index | RPX Composite Real Estate Index | 180 | 0.3 |
Markets are slightly higher as we await the FOMC meeting on Wed. Overseas, Spain sold 3.04 billion euros worth of bills, higher than its 3 billion target. Euro sovereign yields are lower across the board, while US Treasury yields are flattish. MBS are flat. As we head into the end of the quarter, we will start to hear from companies who are going to miss earnings estimates.
Housing starts came in at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 708k. This was below April, but was 29% over May 2011’s rate. Building Permits, which is a leading indicator for starts came in at 780k. Overall, it shows the housing market is on the mend, although new construction activity is focusing more on multi-family as opposed to single units. Housing’s contribution to GDP growth is back to slightly positive, and it is still well, well below historical averages.
Interestingly, the average housing start number for the past 10 years has been a 1.3 million annual rate. The average annual rate from 1959 – mid 2002 was around 1.5 million / year. Pre-crisis, housing formation numbers had been running at around 1.2 million / year. This certainly helps explain the nascent demand in multi-fam construction as those people have to live somewhere, but it also suggests that a lot of the overbuilding from the bubble has been worked off.
Chart: Housing starts 1959-Present
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Housing market in NoVA is doing really well (anecdotally at least). Houses in my neighborhood have been selling quickly and there have been quite a few on the market. I heard that avg house prices were up either 7 or 9% from last year earlier today on the radio. But we don’t have unemployment either so…. location location location…
lmsinca, missed the Father’s day post on Father’s day but it was nice. I spent my FD weekend at a cub scout family camp nearby. The kids launched rockets, flew R/C airplanes and searched the skies at night with an astronomer. The campsite was ‘easy’ with platform tents and pavillions on each site. My three kids had a great time as did my wife and I. My wife is not really into camping so it was a true present for her to remark it was a good camping experience. On Sunday, I watched my oldest son win the flag football championship of his league. My middle son was excited all week that he had found and ordered me a gift off Amazon. It was a multipurpose tool that when closed looks like a key (he says since it looks like a key I can take it in airports!). It was a really thoughtful gift. My daughter wanted to spend time with me working with her and her clay pottery wheel. I write all this mundane stuff because to me this is the best part of being a dad – hanging with and enjoying time spent with the family.
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jnc:
Presumably the Dems posture towards Dimon today in the House hearings has been more to Taibbi’s liking, although he shouldn’t be any more impressed with their actual knowledge of what they are talking about.
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Taibbi doesn’t know anything more than they do. He just hates the banks and wants to see them get beat up in public.
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I’d bet that Taibbi knows more about the subject than the House Democrats do, although admittedly that’s a low bar to clear. As Scott noted once while reading through one of his articles on the Jefferson county interest rate hedging fiasco, if you look closely enough he does include the technical information needed to figure out what really happened on the subjects he’s writing about which is better than most of the mainstream media. However, he makes no bones about being biased in his views.
I like his muckraking style and view it as appropriate for his publication, Rolling Stone. He goes after everyone including the various liberal targets like Obamacare and can’t be dismissed as easily by some on the left as Fox News. As one voice of many, I think he has value.
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“Germany set to allow eurozone bailout fund to buy troubled countries’ debt
Angela Merkel poised to remove opposition to direct lending by rescue fund in move seen as step towards sharing debt burden
Patrick Wintour in Los Cabos
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 June 2012 13.02 EDT”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/19/germany-eurozone-bailout-countries-debt?CMP=twt_gu”
Banned/John, I believe you will have won the bet.
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jnc
Thanks for the observations re Taibbi. He and Greenwald, I think, are two of the best as far as taking on both sides bs, on certain issues anyway. I don’t think only economists should be allowed to write about the economy anyway, imagine how boring that would be for the rest of us…………lol
I write all this mundane stuff because to me this is the best part of being a dad – hanging with and enjoying time spent with the family.
Dave, glad you had such a great Father’s Day. And I couldn’t agree more. I think my point is that those times with the kids now will pay off later as both fantastic memories and good will. Sometimes as parents, we need a little good will.
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lms:
He and Greenwald, I think, are two of the best as far as taking on both sides bs, on certain issues anyway.
Unfortunately, Taibbi seems to be as likely to be dishing out BS as taking it on.
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That’s part of his charm Scott. I like his style even if the substance is sometimes overblown. As a matter of fact, I’d love to write like that, but then I probably wouldn’t be welcome or tolerated here anymore. 🙂
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Looks like a NOGO with the Germans. Never trust anything reported about a German agreement to anything like combined debt unless it’s a direct Merkel quote.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/grauniad-rejected-germany-denies-all-rumors
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“jnc4p, on June 19, 2012 at 12:01 pm said:
Banned/John, I believe you will have won the bet.”
Scratch that.
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Worth a read:
“Barack Obama the Underdog Against ‘Change’ Slogan
By Stuart Rothenberg
Roll Call Contributing Writer
June 19, 2012, Midnight”
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_153/Barack-Obama-the-Underdog-Against-Change-Slogan-215453-1.html
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-israel-developed-computer-virus-to-slow-iranian-nuclear-efforts-officials-say/2012/06/19/gJQA6xBPoV_story.html
Why would a responsible former intelligence operative [or current one] reveal this? Why would an American newspaper publish it?
Just because they can?
I hope the whole disclosure is disinformation and not the kind of revelation that truly is against the national interest.
Does anyone here suspect that former officials are trying to tarnish the Administration here? Or that the Administration is so leaky that it is discrediting itself?
I am really bothered by this. Is anyone else here concerned? Does anyone here have a plausible explanation?
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marK:
Why would an American newspaper publish it? Just because they can?
In a word, yes.
I suspect that, as Mike Wallace once explained (start at about minute 36:40), the reporter and his editors probably believe that their highest duty is to the story, and not to their country. Fairly or unfairly, much of my disdain for journalists probably can be traced back to having seen this show back some 20-odd years ago. (BTW, the whole 10 part series, which was fantastic, can be found here.)
Does this bother me? I suppose, although probably not as much as it ought to since I don’t find it unique or surprising.
BTW…continue to watch the Wallace clip for a while and around minute 44 you will see a young Newt Gingrich making some rather prescient comments.
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Crossposting my responses from PL:
It’s one in a series of stories that purports to show that:
1. President Obama is taking strong decisive action against Iran with regards to it’s nuclear weapons programs
2. There are effective options to prevent the Iranians from developing nuclear weapons short of direct military action.
Both arguments benefit the administration going into the election by feeding a particular narrative:
“Obama is the strong leader who keeps us safe, but not crazy like Romney”.
The silence and inaction of the Administration in proactively launching it’s own investigation of these leaks when contrasted with Thomas Drake or Bradley Manning is telling. The article is really just a follow up to the main one from the NYT and could just be the Washington Post playing catch up.
“Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 1, 2012
WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room. ”
The attribution that is damning is “according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.”
You have to read them all to get the full picture of the leaks.
Having said that, I’m not sure they realized the full significance of what they were disclosing until the actual articles ran as some of the info on Stuxnet was already out there, but not publicized in the same way as it wasn’t directly attributed to members of the administration. A good reporter can take bits and pieces and weave it into a narrative that is more than the sum of it’s individual leaks. Much like a good intelligence analyst.
Glenn Greenwald makes the point better than I do:
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/01/tough_guy_leaking/singleton/
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jnc, the more I read of your links, the more I think you are on top of this. Thanks.
Scott, thanks for the Wallace link. I guess the worst [legally worst] recent media leak was from that reporter [Rivera?] who diagrammed a troop position in Iraq for all to see. I don’t think this NYT/now WaPo story or the WSJ-NYT-LAT story about the Terrorist Financing Tracking Program in the GWB Admin were illegal.
EDIT: I don’t know how the Pakistanis learned that MD helped us find Bn Ladn. If that was because of something we said, that was an inexcusable leak.
OT: Apparently from a video clip I saw last night on The Daily Show when BHO said he could not change immigration law by executive order he then said, same interview, next sentence, that DHS had discretion to prioritize and go after conventional criminals first. Conveniently, Fox did not show that part of the interview.
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Mark:
…he then said, same interview, next sentence, that DHS had discretion to prioritize and go after conventional criminals first.
In other words, Obama is trying to have it both ways, pretending amid great fanfare to announce a new policy on illegal immigrants in order to curry favor with Latinos going into an election season while actually doing nothing more than exercising the same discretion he’s had and been using for years.
I’m guessing Jon Stewart “conveniently” did not point that out.
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I agree with that take, Scott, and wrote that here. In fact, there is no change in DHS policy at all, AFAIK.
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This seems like the world’s worst kept secret. Who else would be behind computer viruses specifically directed against Iranian nuclear facilities. If anything it’s a warning to other countries that we have that capability.
Far more damaging would be a smoking gun linking us to the assassination of top Iranian scientists. Although the difference between murder by drone and murder by car bomb is a pretty slippery one.
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“markinaustin, on June 20, 2012 at 6:30 am said:
…
Scott, thanks for the Wallace link. I guess the worst [legally worst] recent media leak was from that reporter [Rivera?] who diagrammed a troop position in Iraq for all to see. I don’t think this NYT/now WaPo story or the WSJ-NYT-LAT story about the Terrorist Financing Tracking Program in the GWB Admin were illegal.”
The worst leaks during the Bush administration were the revelations of the warrant-less wiretapping program by the New York Times and the black CIA sites being hosted in eastern European countries that was done by Dana Priest of the Washington Post.
In both cases, the Bush administration tried to get the relevant news organizations to not publish, delay or make changes to the stories. In the case of the NYT piece, they delayed publication for a year. In the case of the Washington Post story they agreed not to name the specific countries hosting the CIA sites.
To the best of my knowledge, no similar requests were made of the NYT by the Obama administration prior to publication, which is also telling. Those sorts of requests are routinely listed with the stories upon publication as an editorial note.
“yellojkt, on June 20, 2012 at 5:10 am said:
This seems like the world’s worst kept secret. Who else would be behind computer viruses specifically directed against Iranian nuclear facilities.”
There are two issues with the “worst kept secret” argument.
1. There’s a difference between having reasonable knowledge of who was behind it (U.S. and Israel) and gaining confirmation on sources and methods from individuals directly involved.
2. The Obama administration still maintains that these programs are in fact secret when arguing in court that they can’t allow any court challenge of say the assassination of American citizens by drone due to the secret nature of the program.
“Yet the drone attacks in Pakistan are part of a C.I.A. covert action program designed to be “deniable” by American leaders; by law they are in the most carefully protected category of secrets that the government keeps. In court, the administration has taken the position that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of such operations.
“There’s something wrong with aggressive leaking and winking and nodding about the drone program, but saying in response to Freedom of Information requests that they can’t comment because the program is covert,” [Bush DOJ official Jack] Goldsmith said.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/07/probing_obamas_secrecy_games/singleton/
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“ScottC, on June 20, 2012 at 7:56 am said:
Mark:
…he then said, same interview, next sentence, that DHS had discretion to prioritize and go after conventional criminals first.
In other words, Obama is trying to have it both ways, pretending amid great fanfare to announce a new policy on illegal immigrants in order to curry favor with Latinos going into an election season while actually doing nothing more than exercising the same discretion he’s had and been using for years.
I’m guessing Jon Stewart “conveniently” did not point that out.”
The work permit provisions struck me as something new. People in the country illegally aren’t eligible for them under current law, correct?
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