30 January 2018

Thought for the Day - 30 January 2018

So, there's a braying replacement for New Gold called bitcoin. You may have heard of it and there have been numerous reports that actually spending it can be a clusterfuck. Now, it turns out, the attempts to augment transactions have led to pilfering. Isn't Bitcoin, et al supposed to be super-duper secure?? Right.
The whole point of Bitcoin was to get rid of the middlemen that dominate the financial system. But in the past few years, most bitcoin buying and selling has been conducted using middlemen--the exchanges that let people turn traditional currencies into digital coins. Users have flocked to exchanges in part because the original Bitcoin network can't process enough transactions to allow for seamless trading.

Not to mention the damn gummint. Off to the Yukon!!!

28 January 2018

Poor Little Rich Boys

Every now and again, some reporting generates such a level of outrage that one ought to let some little time pass before putting pen to paper, or in this day and age, fingers to keyboard. Well, here's the latest such. To be frank, I can't tell whether the Editors of the NYT are attempting to show the Trumpistas that even the Failing New York Times understands and has mucho sympathy for the plight of the highly paid yet uneducated and unskilled (and increasingly unemployed) in the Empty Counties.

Or, one might hope, the intent is to provide transparency into their arrogance and self-entitlement. Who knows?
At age 28, Mr. Zmija, like most of the coal mineworkers here, has not lost faith in the industry. He is considering applying for a coal job in Alabama, or he may return to his old mine job in Maryland, although it pays far less than the $106,000 he made last year at 4 West. A sign in his living room says, "I'm a proud coal miner."

Still, he grumbles about the turn of fortune at 4 West, saying, "It feels like a slap in the face."

Right. And how much does a school teacher, a person whom you've likely never paid any attention to, make? $35,000 minimum and $40,275 average. Now, that's fair, right?

So, for those who still think that micro-quants are the bee's knees and the macro-folk are just politics, consider such a distortion. Or not.
William Laviolette, a 26-year-old maintenance worker at the mine who made roughly $55,000 last year, said that if he didn't find another mine job, he would go back to school to get his high school degree.

Some how, I don't think his heart is in it. After all, he'd be taking a giant step down if he goes on to get a BA in education and gets a position teaching other members of the uneducated elite.

24 January 2018

I Told You So - 24 January 2018

Remember all those missives about New Gold and the effects, always ignored by Orange Julius Caesar and his minions? Well, mainstream pundits are beginning to notice:
... the world believes your national currency -- and the world's reserve currency -- is suddenly not worth what it used to be. Moreover, the dollar's decline could eventually have some very serious knock-on effects on the president's precious stock market performance.

Moreover, all that looming inflation, by Democratic Socialists of course, has been here for years. But, of course, it's driven by the 1% dumping all that idle moolah into stocks and bonds. Being the New Gold means you have to pay attention.
... if the greenback's rout deepens and pushes crude oil past the $70-a-barrel threshold. This isn't the kind of round number Mr. Trump will want to brag about on Twitter.

I told you so.

20 January 2018

Chinese Checkers

More than once in these endeavors the notion that Orange Julius Caesar will seek to squelch or even pervert macro data to support his agenda. We see this already at EPA (the top of the linked page is a screenshot from EPA, not the site; just so you don't get confused). We can expect the same, and I already sense that a thumb is on the scales with recent reporting from the agencies (call me suspicious), as time goes on. Remember, fascists turn to lying when the tale gets too outlandish.

Those who look at the "Chinese miracle" have long suspected that Beijing has a 3 kilo foot on the scales. Here's a recent report. Expect similar from this administration.
"It's just simplistic to say they lie or they don't lie," said Pauline Loong, the founder and managing director of Asia-analytica, a Hong Kong consulting firm specializing in mainland China. "They define their data differently, and they keep changing their definitions."

What Kellyanne calls alternative facts.

All macro-quants should be concerned.

15 January 2018

The Devil is in The Details

So let me get this straight. Anonymous sources tell the WaPo that Orange Julius Caesar referred to some countries as "shithole". Later, Durbin confirms; likely the original source (but hasn't admitted, to the best of my knowledge as of now). Right Wingnut brown nosers deny he said those words. Now, it happens, that the argument is whether it was shithole or shithouse countries. So, I guess, Durbin lied. May be.

09 January 2018

Another R Book

It should come as no surprise that I, being a codger, prefer my books with pages sewn into a spine and hard covered. For the last few decades those have been mostly about relational databases and things quant. R being the latest obsession. The pile never seems to diminish.

One kind of interesting aspect of the R world is that there is a bomb thrower amongst them, not wholly unlike what's going on in the political world. That would be Hadley Wickham. Some years ago there were reports of naughty words towards him. You can let your fingers do the walking through the Inntertubes (you'll even find a bit of prose from Your Humble Servant in one such thread).

Which brings me to his latest (with co-author), "R For Data Science". I don't think it's best as a learning text for R per se; Crawley is still (but, yes, a little long in the tooth) my preferred intro with ggplot2 to get up to date graphics. But as a reference on Wickham's tidyverse, it's canonical.

Here's a recent view:
The tidyverse is an 'opinionated' collection of R packages that duplicate and seek to improve upon numerous base R functions for data manipulation (e.g. dplyr) and graphing (e.g. ggplot2). As the tidyverse has grown increasing more comprehensive, it has been suggested that it be taught first to new R users. The debate between which R dialect is better has generated a lot of heat, but much light.

Here's one point from the book that, at one time, likely would have gotten major flames:
R is an old language, and some things that were useful 10 or 20 years ago now get in your way. It's difficult to change base R without breaking existing code, so most innovation occurs in packages. Here we will describe the tibble package, which provides opinionated data frames that make working in the tidyverse a little easier.

Anyway, recommended. O'Reilly spent some extra moolah on color graphics and text to make a pretty book. On the whole, I'd rather they'd spent the money to put it in a Rep-Kover binding.

05 January 2018

Wages of Sin

There continues to be noise from both sides, both sides, about why it is that we have more than traditional Full Employment, ~4.1%, yet wages/incomes have barely moved up since the Great Recession. Orange Julius Caesar brayed during the election that the issue was that Obama/BLS were lying, and the "real" employment rate was much, much higher; 42% was his favorite. No one who has a brain believed that. But doubting the truth of U3 is valid.

But the fact is, BLS has always published various versions (with various definitions, naturally) of the unemployment rate. The one labeled U3 is the "official" rate over the years. But that rate doesn't include folks who would be looking for new/better full time employment if they thought it mattered. Including those folks, and other marginally attached workers, makes for U6. You can play with the display.
The current U6 unemployment rate as of December 2017 is 8.10.

So, for the first time in history, Orange Julius Caesar is sort of right. The slack manifest in such a much larger U6 is why "full employment" U3 doesn't drive wage/income increase. The Right Wingnut Leona Helmsley Memorial Tax Cut for the 1% won't trickle down to drive up wages. There is zero historical evidence that such will happen.