Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktMarkets are flat this morning as labor costs rise. Bonds and MBS are down.
Janet Yellen will be speaking at noon today.
Mortgage applications fell 0.2% last week as purchases rose 7.7% and refis fell 6%. Not bad considering last week had the Thanksgiving holiday.
The ADP employment change came in at 217k, beating Street expectations of 190k. The prior month was revised upward. The forecast for Friday’s payroll number is 200k. If we get a similar payroll number on Friday, a rate hike in two weeks will be looking like a sure thing.
Productivity increased 2.2% in the third quarter and unit labor costs rose to 1.8%. Productivity growth has been slow, and employers are having to add people. We saw something similar in the ISM report yesterday. Employment was the bright spot in an otherwise disappointing report.
The ISM New York Index fell to 60.7 from 65.8.
While auto sales didn’t meet their lofty targets yesterday, they were the best in 14 years. Volkswagen’s US sales dropped 25% however in the wake of the emissions scandal. It looked like sales accelerated through the month as well.
Home prices rose 1.0% month-over-month in October and are up 6.8% year-over-year, according to CoreLogic. They are forecasting prices to rise 5.2% next year.
Filed under: Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
This one’s for KW: frist!
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sales accelerated through the month as well.
ISWYDT
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How has the American legal culture come to such a sorry state?
http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/02/americas-most-cited-jurist-hates-words-and-history/
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Completely unintentional… As a financial writer, I have to have a gazillion different terms for “go up” and “go down”
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Ever use “erect”, “engorged” or “flaccid” to represent up or down?
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For McWing:
https://www.bisnow.com/vancouver/news/retail/4-retail-deals-that-stand-out-in-a-flaccid-market-44824
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Interesting info that I never knew about the 7th amendment.
http://deanclancy.com/the-constitutions-seven-money-clauses/
At the time the Constitution was framed and ratified, there was no such thing as a United States dollar. Instead, the word referred to a coin already in existence, the Spanish milled dollar, a silver coin weighing about 27 grams or 95 percent of an ounce. To change the constitutional meaning of the word “dollar” would require a constitutional amendment. In the Coinage Act of 1792, Congress established a United States Mint to coins United States dollars, according to the following definition:
Incidentally, gold U.S.-minted coins are properly called “eagles,” not “dollars,” because only a silver coin can be a “dollar” according to the constitutional definition.
Twenty-Dollar Rule
It is common these days for legal scholars to profess not to know the meaning of the Seventh Amendment’s twenty-dollar rule (found in the seventh clause, above), because, they claim, the dollar’s value has changed since the eighteenth century, to an extent we cannot really fathom. This is incorrect. Our modern Federal Reserve Notes are denominated in “dollars,” but they are not backed by dollars as defined in the Constitution; therefore, they are not “dollars” in the strict sense. And therefore, judges seeking to apply the twenty-dollar rule today need to translate FRNs into constitutional dollars. This is not difficult. You simply take the current ounce-price of silver, shave off about five percent, and multiply by twenty. If the result is greater than the amount in controversy, the plaintiff has no guaranteed right to a jury trial; if it is smaller, he has.
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go up: rally, rise, catch a bid, increase, accelerate, climb, take off, shoot up, run, fly, pick up
go down: plummet, fall, collapse, shit the bed, get whacked, tumble, decrease, get taken to the woodshed,
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Brent:
A couple of new ones for you: crumbling and soaring.
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Now Quicken is thinking about getting out of FHA loans… The obama admin is going to have to make a choice between social engineering via the housing market or slugging the banks.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/12/02/us-quicken-mortgages-idUSKBN0TL0CA20151202#htmu1Pmr2BoFWm5s.97
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“Throbbing”, “swollen” or “heaving”?
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Have you really used “shit the bed” in one of your reports?
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“Have you really used “shit the bed” in one of your reports?”
Good question… For internal reports, absolutely…
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Hah!
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“Glistening”, “trembling” or “pulsating”?
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“This one’s for KW: frist!”
Totalitarian!
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“Totalitarian!”
Did the marxist anarchist call you that?
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Thomas Piketty: Rise of ISIS is caused by income inequality, and it is all the West’s fault
I guess when all you have is a hammer…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/30/why-inequality-is-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-the-islamic-state/?tid=pm_business_pop_b
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Why the left cannot accept the idea that Islamic terror is motivated by religion is beyond me.
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Did the marxist anarchist call you that?
No–there was some troll who dropped in on PL who called out “totalitarian leftist progressives” (or something like that), so I told him he was making me feel all warm and fuzzy.
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Why the left cannot accept the idea that Islamic terror is motivated by religion is beyond me
It’s kinda right there in the name. That being said, I don’t think that having a bunch of poor, single men with nothing better to do than shoot guns and dream of virgins helps the matter much.
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Mich:
That being said, I don’t think that having a bunch of poor, single men…
I suspect that is a unwarranted stereotype. The 9/11 hijackers were hardly poor and uneducated.
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@brentnyitray: “Did the marxist anarchist call you that?”
PlumLine RWNJ troll was telling everybody that Obama’s was the most leftist totalitarian regime anywhere ever, and it just kinda went on from there. Ale told me that Christian terrorism is WAY worse than Islamic terrorism, because all of our wars are acts of terrorism, apparently. And “anarchy” is whatever he says it is. 😉
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@Michigoose: “It’s kinda right there in the name. That being said, I don’t think that having a bunch of poor, single men with nothing better to do than shoot guns and dream of virgins helps the matter much.”
Ultimately, I kinda think it’s not “motivated” by religion, so much as it’s a red flag, because there’s a death cult as a denomination in the Islamic religion and the more liberal denominations (or sects, whatever) tend to turn a blind eye right until the part where they get blown up. Because ultimately they’re all infidels, too.
Targeting poor young men with often little more than a theological education in societies where women are second class citizens who are also great objects but desire but evil because that desire is evil . . . it don’t help. Ultimately, testicles cause terrorism!
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@Scottc1: “Thomas Piketty: Rise of ISIS is caused by income inequality, and it is all the West’s fault”
I think the conspiracy theory that the rise of ISIS was caused (largely intentionally) by the CIA and Western intelligence agencies in general is more credible. Thus, it is the West’s fault, but not how Piketty thinks. It’s not because we aren’t all more socialist.
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KW:
I think the conspiracy theory that the rise of ISIS was caused (largely intentionally) by the CIA and Western intelligence agencies in general is more credible.
Surely something “caused” the CIA to do so, so why isn’t that the root cause of the rise?
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@scottc1: “Surely something “caused” the CIA to do so, so why isn’t that the root cause of the rise?”
The plot thickens. I expect the CIA is operating on the orders of the Bilderbergs or the Illuminati.
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Opus Dei
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Has anyone here heard from Lulu?
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Mark…no. I sent her an e-mail on Thanksgiving and it got bounced back. Seemed like the address has been deleted or something.
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The latest in campus follies, this time at Hamilton College:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/01/hamilton-students-deliver-list-of-83-demands-to-college-president.html
Hilariously, although the list of demands denounces “the practice of hiring, appointing, or accepting a token number of people from underrepresented groups in order to deflect criticism or comply with affirmative action rules”, it then goes on to say “We, the Students of Hamilton College, demand Black Faculty to make up 13 percent of Faculty before 2025.”
In a sane world, I would assume this is all just a parody. But given the Twilight Zone atmosphere created by progressives on campuses across the nation, I’m not sure such an assumption is justified.
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@ Scott: Presumably Jewish faculty will decline to 2%, and Asian faculty to @1%, to accommodate this. Muslims will get 3%, and Latinos 20%. This will cut into the caucasian RC representation because all the Latinos will be RC. The caucasian protestant representation will remain at 51%, to assuage the donors.
Yes, this is the Brave New World of Student Harassing Idiotic Themes.
Addendum: On the west coast, public college entrance preferences for disadvantaged minorities did work almost exclusively against Asian and Jewish students, throughout the 90s.
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@Scottc1: “I suspect that is a unwarranted stereotype. The 9/11 hijackers were hardly poor and uneducated.”
Not all of them were that well educated, and I can’t find any indication of their lack of poverty outside of money from Al Qaeda. Which gives an educated, wealthy psychotic like Bin Ladin a tremendous ability to incentivize. Which is not to say the problem is income inequality, because it most decidedly is not. It’s the incentives of the culture, and until such time as radical Islamists are held in the same regard in the general Muslim culture the way we regard whack jobs on SSRIs that show up and shoot up Planned Parenthood offices or the KKK, very little is going to change.
“We, the Students of Hamilton College, demand Black Faculty to make up 13 percent of Faculty before 2025.”
While this sort of quota should be extremely easy to meet and more difficult to argue against without being considered an admission of racism and extreme white privilege by the administration, it’s bizarre that they would include the first bit of “not hiring a token number of people from underrepresented groups in order to deflect criticism”.
That being said, if I were the president I’d try to comply by hiring highly educated blacks from everywhere in the world except America. Well, and bring in a few Walter Williams and Thomas Sowells, I suppose. The apoplexy would be delightful.
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KW:
I can’t find any indication of their lack of poverty outside of money from Al Qaeda.
Of the 19 hijackers, wikipedia has entries on 12 of them. Below are 8 of the 12, all of which at least imply the absence of any poverty. For the other four, there was either no indication either way or a reference to having grown up in a “poorer” area.
Mohammed Atta: “Atta was born on September 1, 1968 in Kafr el-Sheikh, located in Egypt’s Nile Delta region.[8] His father, Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, was a lawyer, educated in both sharia and civil law. His mother, Bouthayna Mohamed Mustapha Sheraqi, came from a wealthy farming and trading family and was also educated.”
Nawaf Hamzi: “Nawaf was born in Mecca in Saudi Arabia to Muhammad Salim al-Hazmi, a grocer. He traveled to Afghanistan as a teenager in 1993.”
Satam_al-Suqami: “A native of the Saudi Arabian city of Riyadh, Suqami was a law student at the King Saud University.”
Mohand el Shiri: “Born 1979, Shehri was one of five hijackers to come from the ‘Asir province of Saudi Arabia…Mohand was a student at Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University in Abha”
Majed Moqed: “Moqed was a law student from the small town of Al-Nakhil, Saudi Arabia (west of Medina), studying at King Fahd University’s Faculty of Administration and Economics. Before he dropped out, he was apparently recruited into al-Qaeda in 1999 along with friend Satam al-Suqami, with whom he had earlier shared a college room.”
Salem al Hazmi: “Hazmi was born on February 2, 1981 to Muhammad Salim al-Hazmi, a grocer, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.”
Ahmed al Haznawi: “Ahmed al-Haznawi was the son of a Saudi imam from the Al-Bahah province, a province in the south west of Saudi Arabia. It is the capital of Al Bahah Province nestled between the resorts of Mecca and Abha, Al Bahah is one of the Kingdom’s prime tourist attractions.”
Saeed al Ghamdi: “Ghamdi spent time in al Qasim province, Saudi Arabia where he transferred to college but soon dropped out and ceased contact with his family. While there he probably associated with the radical Saudi cleric named Sulayman al-Alwan as several other future hijackers had.”
It’s the incentives of the culture, and until such time as radical Islamists are held in the same regard in the general Muslim culture the way we regard whack jobs on SSRIs that show up and shoot up Planned Parenthood offices or the KKK, very little is going to change.
I very much agree. This is not a problem that “we” created, and it is not a problem that “we” can solve, the trite and often times absurd explanations of the Pikettys and Bill Nyes of the world notwithstanding. We can only strive to manage it.
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has anyone seen/heard from JNC?
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I’ve been slammed with work which involved lots of travel as it’s M&A related, so I haven’t had as much time to post.
That and I don’t see much point in posting on PL anymore.
The good news is that it looks like I’ll hit SPG gold status from only one month’s worth of travel.
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I had been wondering the same thing, NoVA. Thanks for popping up, jnc!
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Which is not to say the problem is income inequality
I didn’t say it was.
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Mich:
I didn’t say it was.
Thomas Piketty did.
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oh good. you’ve missed nothing at the PL. i might make a news years break.
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Thomas Piketty did
I’m well aware of that. I haven’t bothered to read that article, because I don’t think that income inequality is the be all and end all of the world’s (or the US’s, for that matter) problems.
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