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Stocks Up, Houses Down, And What This Means for Most Americans
Put your ear to the ground and you can almost hear the bulls stampeding. The Dow closed above 12,000 Tuesday for the first time since June 2008. The Dow is up 4 percent this year after increasing 11 percent in 2010. The Standard & Poor 500 is also up 4 percent this year, and the Nasdaq index, up 3.7 percent.
“The U.S. economy is back!” says a prominent Wall Streeter.
Ummm. Not quite.
Corporate earnings remain strong (better-than-expected reports from UPS and Pfizer fueled Tuesday’s rally). The Fed’s continuing slush pump of money into the financial system is also lifting the animal spirits of Wall Street. Traders like nothing more than speculating with almost-free money. And tumult in the Middle East is pushing more foreign money into the relatively safe and reliable American equities market.
It’s simply wonderful, especially if you’re among the richest 1 percent of Americans who own more than half of all the shares of stock traded on Wall Street. Hey, you might feel chipper even if you’re among the next richest 9 percent, who own 40 percent.
But most Americans own a tiny sliver of Read more…
Employment Report: IT SUCKS
Wow…. if you remember on the ADP and Claims numbers, I said I was expecting +100k.
That was way off – we really got +36k.
The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 9.0 percent in January, while nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+36,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment rose in manufacturing and in retail trade but was down in construction and in transportation and warehousing. Employment in most other major industries changed little over the month.
Youch.
There’s no love in here. Worse, the benchmark revisions are out, and they show about 300,000 supposedly-reported jobs that didn’t really happen. No, really? How come that number seems to always be in this direction? That is, why is it that the BLS always seems to over-report reality in the establishment survey?
That inconvenient truth, incidentally, is why I always use the household numbers. They’re at least a real survey without BS “adjustments” applied and while they’re subject to Read more…
Archaeologists May Have Found Tomb of Prophet Zechariah
Archaeologists in Israel believe they may have stumbled upon the tomb of the biblical Prophet Zechariah in a newly discovered church.
The church, which is more than 1,300 years old, contains massive marble columns as well as exquisite mosaics, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a statement.
Archaeologists believe that the church, uncovered in Hirbet Madras in central Israel, is the location marked on the Madaba Map as the tomb of Zechariah, according to Haaertz.
The Madaba map is an ancient mosaic map of the region that includes modern Israel. It was found in a sixth-century church in Jordan.
“The researchers believe that in light of an analysis of the Christian sources, including the Madaba Map, the church at Hirbet Madras is a memorial church designed to mark the tomb of the prophet Zechariah,” the IAA said.
The agency stressed that this is just a theory and requires more research for confirmation.
“This issue will be examined and studied in the near future,” the IAA said.
Zechariah is believed to have lived around 500 B.C., according to the website of the Vatican Museums. The book of Zechariah speaks of the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon as well as the coming of the Messiah.
The archaeologists began excavating the site following a robbery there, Haaertz said. It was the first dig at the site, even though a piece of a doorway had been spotted poking out of the ground there in the 1980s.
Months of diggings led to the church, which is about the size of a basketball court.
To the archaeologists’ surprise, they found that the church sits on what looks like a structure from the Roman era, as well as a large complex of caves and tunnels used by Jewish rebels fighting the Romans during the Bar Kokhba revolt of A.D. 132.
Besides the ancient church, archaeologists found coins, stone vessels, lamps and ancient pottery.
“There is no doubt the discovery is extraordinary and of great importance in terms of research, religion and tourism,” the IAA said, according to Agence France-Presse.
How Cyclone Yasi compares in size to countries
Date/Time: 2011:02:02 13:29:18 Source: news.com.au
IF you’re struggling to grasp the magnitude of Tropical Cyclone Yasi, consider this: it is so large it would almost cover the United States, most of Asia and large parts of Europe.
Most of the coverage about the scale of Yasi has tried to compare it with storms of the past – it’s bigger than Larry, more powerful than Tracy.
But just as powerful is this comparison, showing this storm is continental in size. The main bloc of the cyclone is 500km wide, while its associated activity, shown above in a colour-coding to match intensity, stretches over 2000km.
The storm’s scale of destruction is as shocking as it is inevitable. In the map above, the United States from Pennsylvania in the east to Nevada in the west, from Georgia in the south to Canada in the north and well into Mexico would be battered with 300km/h winds and up to one metre of rain.
The economic impact would be felt around the world.
Scroll down to see a close-up comparison of the heart of Yasi over New Orleans and other centers. Read more…
Russia Working on Mysterious Space Plane of Its Own
It’s official: the space race is on again.
54 years after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite, sparking the original space race — and 20 years after the USSR’s collapse left America as the sole space superpower — the Russians are back on track. The Kremlin’s military space chief Oleg Ostapenko just announced that Russia is developing a small, maneuverable, reusable space plane to match the U.S. Air Force’s mysterious X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle.
Russian industry has already outlined the craft’s design, Ostapenko said. “As to whether we will use it, only time will tell,” he added coyly.
But it seems unlikely Russia would forgo the opportunity to Read more…
Egypt VP Targeted in Assassination Attempt That Killed Two Bodyguards, Sources Tell Fox News
An assassination attempt on the Egyptian vice president left two of his bodyguards dead, sources told Fox News Channel on Friday.
The unsuccessful attempt to kill Omar Suleiman reportedly came in the past couple of days as violent unrest rocked the capital Cairo.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs would not comment on the matter when asked Friday.
Fox News Channel said it had not been able to independently confirm the story on the ground in Cairo.
Meantime, an AFP correspondent reported that gunshots erupted Friday for a few minutes at Cairo’s central Tahrir Square at the epicenter of protests against President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year grip on power.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to address the assassination reports when asked by Fox News.
“I’m not going to … get into that question,” Gibbs said.
Map shows most of Northern Hemisphere is covered in snow and ice
At first glance it looks like a graphic from a Discovery Channel program about a distant ice age. But this astonishing picture shows the world as it is today – with half the Northern Hemisphere covered with snow and ice.
The image was released by the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Association (NOAA) on the day half of North America was in the grip of a severe winter storm.
The map was created using multiple satellites from government agencies and the US Air Force.
That Antarctica, the Arctic, Greenland and the frozen wastes of Siberia are covered in white comes as no surprise. But it is the extent to which the line dips down over the Northern Hemisphere that is so remarkable about the image.
The shroud of white stretches down from Alaska and sweeps through the Midwest and along to the Eastern seaboard. The bitter cold has reached as far as Texas and northern Mexico where in Ciudad Juarez temperatures today were expected to dip to minus 15C.
In the U.S. tens of millions of people chose to stay at home rather than venture out. In Chicago, 20in of snow fell leading to authorities closing schools for the first time in 12 years. The newspaper for Tulsa, Okalahoma, was unable to publish its print edition for the first time in Read more…
Red alert in Britain’s forests as Black death sweeps in
Millions of larches have had to be felled to prevent the spread of a lethal virus from Asia. Christopher Middleton reports from the bleak and bare hillsides of South Wales.
Just before Christmas, you could stand at the top of Crynant Forest in South Wales and not have a clue that there was a village in the valley below. Today, the view down to the little white houses is uninterrupted. Where in mid-December there were thousands of larch trees, now there is a mass of stumps and branches.
It looks like a photograph from a First World War battlefield. A featureless no-man’s-land, interrupted by the occasional blasted tree trunk, pointing at an unnatural angle.
And that’s just the start of it. Turn your gaze in any direction, and there is a scene of devastation. Bare hillsides as far as the eye can see; slopes that look as if they’re covered in bracken are in fact coated with fallen trees.
Meanwhile, piles of logs as tall as barns are stacked up neatly by the roadside, like casualties awaiting collection from clearing stations.
The force that swept through here was not a hurricane, but an army of tree-felling engines sent in by the Forestry Commission. Already they’ve cleared 380 acres, but there’s more to be done. Much more.
And they’re in a race against time. Across the country, some 1.4 million larches have been cut down in the Read more…
Take a look at how many ounces of silver have been needed to buy a median-priced home in the US:
For most people, there are some surefire luxuries that signify wealth, a few pearls of conspicuous consumption that say “you’ve made it!” For me, it’s always been a second home. My grandparents owned a vacation home in Arizona and then Florida when I was a kid, and it was an annual highlight to travel there every year.
But something happened on the way to my generation’s iteration of the American dream. Of all the people I know that have second homes, only one acquired it through his own hard work and success. The rest inherited them.
With high unemployment, shaky business conditions, desperate governments, weak real estate demand, and a suspect stock market, owning a vacation home is not even on the radar these days for most Americans. Paying their existing mortgage is the primary concern, something millions of homeowners still aren’t able to do. So, how is it that I can suggest a way to buy a vacation home in this market?
Because there are two trends in motion that I believe will continue working in our favor. And it likely won’t take long for them to reach a culmination point, allowing those of us with such a goal to see it realized.
First, Read more…
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