Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktMarkets are down small as a historic snowstorm bears down on the Northeast. Bonds and MBS are up small.
The Northeast is bracing for a historic snowstorm to start today and go through Tuesday night. NYC is expected to get up to 2 feet, while Boston could get close to 3 feet. The evening commute will probably start around noon today, as the National Weather Service has a blizzard warning for the tri state area beginning at 1:00 pm today. Expect to see a touch more volatility in the markets as desks will be understaffed for the next couple of days.
Aside from the snowstorm, we have some important data this week, with the FOMC meeting and also Q4 GDP on Friday. The January FOMC meeting should not have any economic projections and I don’t anticipate anything market moving to come out of the press release, but you never know. The Street is forecasting +3.0% on the advance estimate for Q4 GDP.
Homebuilder D.R. Horton announced better-than-expected earnings this morning. Sales, orders, and backlog are up smartly. Analysts will be most concerned about the Texas housing market. The stock is up a buck as of now. The conference call begins at 10:00 am. Note that both Lennar and KB waited until the conference call to disclose poor Q1 forecasts, so don’t feel the need to lift any Horton quite yet.
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Greece should turn out well:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/phase-one/
LikeLike
http://m.jsonline.com/watchdog/noquarter/sen-tammy-baldwin-ousts-aide-over-va-controversy-b99431970z1-289737031.html
“I get run out of my job and she gets a golden parachute for (expletive) veterans?” Honl asked incredulously.
LikeLike
Total flop of a storm. NYC and surrounding areas paralyzed not by snow, but by the panic of politicians. 5 inches of snow and trains and roads still shut down. Joke.
LikeLike
So, you didn’t have to resort to canabilism?
LikeLike
And yet if they hadn’t shut things down and a foot or more had fallen people would have been calling for heads to roll. Snow storms are a no-win situation.
You were the one that, from what I heard on the radio this morning, who was the most likely to be hit (we got a bare dusting in Baltimore). Time to put the TP and water back into storage!
LikeLike
Mich:
And yet if they hadn’t shut things down and a foot or more had fallen people would have been calling for heads to roll.
Not sure why that would be the case. If roads are impassable or trains can’t run because there is actually too much snow, it’s hard to sensibly blame politicians. But if they are impassable because the politicians are panicked that they might become impassable and people are too stupid for their own good to know better and so are prevented from using the roads/trains regardless of the actual snowfall, whose fault is it other than politicians?
LikeLike
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/01/26/mayor-thanks-sharpton-for-climate-change-work-during-blizzard-report/
LikeLike
McWing:
I saw that Bridgeport mayor clip this morning. Amazing the idiots that can get elected as mayors in this country.
LikeLike
Michael Mann blamed the storm fizzle on AGW.
Mystery solved.
LikeLike
https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/560071426309623809
LikeLike
There you go again, McWing.
I wouldn’t classify over two feet of snow on Long Island as “fizzle”. But whatevs (to quote Brent).
LikeLike
What confirms AGW more, a Snownado fizzle or Snownado F/5?
LikeLike
Why the forecasts were so bad:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/01/27/why-the-snow-forecast-for-new-york-city-was-so-bad-and-what-should-be-done/
The science of forecasting storms, while continually improving, still can be subject to error, especially if we’re on the edge of the heavy precipitation shield. Efforts, including research, are already underway to more easily communicate that forecast uncertainty.
But there is no uncertainty regarding AGW, of course. On that, at least, the science is “settled”.
LikeLike
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bowe-bergdahl-be-charged-desertion-officials-say-n294466?hootPostID=0df60729ca5699ea9876976aa820c272
Heckuva trade Mr. President!
LikeLike
The GOP-led Congress would likely act on a short-term legislative fix to the health care law that would allow federal subsidies to continue flowing through the federal exchanges up to a set date, albeit in exchange for certain concessions from Democrats in the event that the Supreme Court rules against the administration in King v. Burwell, several sources are suggesting.
On Friday, both Joe Antos, health care scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Judy Feder, a former Clinton staffer and public policy professor at Georgetown University, agreed that the government has to find some type of “workaround” if the administration loses in King v. Burwell, for which oral arguments are set to begin March 4. And on Monday, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said in an opinion piece that if the Supreme Court rules against the subsidies,
“Obama would likely push Republicans to pass a simple technical ‘fix’ that would change the language of the statute to allow for subsidies to be used toward purchasing coverage on the federal exchange.” Barrasso said he doesn’t see a permanent measure passing but suggested a temporary fix was possible if the president made some concessions.
Republicans are likely to demand that Obama agree on changes to the law that would end the individual mandate and other provisions widely disliked by the GOP in exchange for a “temporary restoration of the subsidies,” Barrasso told the Examiner.
LikeLike
@NoVA and jnc:
You really need to click on the story to see the mug shot. A picture is worth a thousand words. . .
LikeLike
ah, Arlington.
LikeLike
And the great thing about Uber is that there’s a perfect computer trail available as evidence.
Edit: What I really wanted to see though was a picture of the driver. Need to determine if it was worth going to jail for.
LikeLike
FYI Nova
LikeLike
What I really wanted to see though was a picture of the driver
Uber porn! 😀
LikeLike
https://twitter.com/convert_trader/status/560141871444664320
LikeLike
This should be entertaining
“Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday appointed a man who calls himself a “libertarian Marxist” as his new finance minister.”
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/who-is-the-radical-new-greek-finance-minister-yanis-varoufakis/ar-AA8DAFr
LikeLike
“Libertarian Marxist” = a very confused human being
LikeLike
Still bet the EU capitulates and writes off a huge chunk of Greek debt to maintain the fiction, er Euro.
LikeLike
Scott, I think it’s the old left libertarian perspective being referenced. This was an interesting read:
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/
LikeLike
jnc:
This was an interesting read:
I read it. It was interesting, but ultimately, I think, nonsense. The idea that the place is “boss-less” is almost certainly an illusion. Clearly someone is doing the hiring, and someone manages the vaguely defined peer review process that determines pay. That someone is the boss. The boss may foster a very flat organization and an environment in which employees are encouraged act freely to pursue their own goals, but he’s still the boss.
LikeLike
It’s a one-off! AGW science is Rock.Fucking.Solid.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3041493/body-week/why-a-fake-article-cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs-was-accepted-by-17-medical-journals
LikeLike
“himself a “libertarian Marxist” as his new finance minister.””
hey, i think I know that guy. what could go wrong.
LikeLike
nice to see the walk back of the 529 nonsense.
LikeLike
Kevin Williamson on the NYC blizzard that wasn’t and the religion of climate change in general.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/397308/apocalypse-soonish-redux-kevin-d-williamson
In that sense, New York’s response was in miniature what the global-warming alarmists would have us do on a planetary scale: adopt invasive, burdensome, and expensive measures against expectations of catastrophe that are rooted in a good deal less certainty than they’d have you believe. Like Andrew Stuttaford, I am something of a global-warming lukewarmer; even if we take at face value the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change et al., most of the evidence points toward adaptation and mitigation as the wiser course of action — one that is more likely to be effective than extreme economic changes among the handful of advanced countries that are actually likely to carry through on any emissions promises, and one that hedges the possibility that making radical, expensive, quality-of-life-lowering changes today might in the century hence prove either ineffective or unnecessary. This course of action also relieves the world of the unpleasantness of being put under the fat and greasy thumb of self-interested politicians who are interested in accumulating vast amounts of power to impose top-down economic policy under the cover of a global emergency.
If you happen to be a power-hungry politician, a state of emergency is a very useful thing. Which is, of course, why the climate-change panic is so attractive to teapot totalitarians like Bill de Blasio, and why there is neither a warm day nor a cold day — and not a sparrow that falls — that is inconsistent with their theology.
LikeLike
@McWing: “So, you didn’t have to resort to canabilism?”
I did, and the weather was perfectly fine down here. But you can never be too prepared, that’s what I say.
LikeLike
@McWing: “It’s a one-off! AGW science is Rock.Fucking.Solid.”
Anything is rock solid when you get to massage the numbers until they say what you want them to.
The thing about AGW is . . . there is a climate. Stuff does happen. There is weather. There are temperatures. The planet gets hotter and colder and could potentially do so to extreme degrees in any given century or millennia.
AGW is a quasi-religious attempt to make humans a primary causal factor, ala “the flood that killed out crops mean the gods are displeased and require the sacrifice of a virgin . . . or burnt offerings, I’m not sure which, best do both”.
LikeLike
ScottC: ““Libertarian Marxist” = a very confused human being”
They are folks who want everybody to make the independent choice to adopt a communal lifestyle. Basically, they want a form of Communism where everybody is naturally a communist. And so everybody does their share and nobody consumes more than they need and everything just sort of works out. Alas, human nature makes such a thing impossible. Even libertarian marxists, if objectively analyzed by a 3rd party, would turn out to take more than they objectively need and do less than they objectively could. The fact that they disagree with this objective assessment not withstanding.
LikeLike
@ScottC: “But there is no uncertainty regarding AGW, of course. On that, at least, the science is “settled”.”
For almost 20 years, it’s been an established fact that comparing “weather” to “climate” demonstrates incurable ignorance, for all right-thinking people know that there is no similarity between the two, ever, and never will be.
Not withstanding the fact that the climate models don’t ever accurately predict anything, and have not. Or, more pointedly, for every modestly accurate prediction there are 100 ones that don’t pan out, and even the accurate predictions do nothing to establish causality.
LikeLike