Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

The shale boom was a key driver of the US economic recovery. If you mean we're not Saudi Arabia, ok, no one says we're Saudi Arabia.

There are articles like this, which say this is an explicit Saudi-led strategy to drive out high-cost non-OPEC producers, ie., US shale producers:

<i>"There is evidence the Saudi-led strategy is starting to work," the IEA said. "Oil below $50 is clearly driving out non-OPEC supply."</i>
- http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-11/iea-sees-oil-glut-lasting-until-late-2016-as-opec-keeps-pumping

Seems a bit crazy to me. I wonder if it's partly out of spite at a perceived Obama administration shift away from Saudi Arabia and towards Iran.

I have believed that pretty much since oil prices started to drop.

I mean I don't know if it's out of spite over Iran, but I think they are deliberately trying to kill the boom.

with oil down so low it looks like auto auto execs are pushing big trucks and suv's again. ugh. i'd feel worse about that if the manufacturing sector wasn't already on shaky ground

As much as I hate SUVs and the mentality behind them, their share of the climate change problem is vastly overestimated by the average liberal. Our driving culture in general (and the fact that our infrastructure is designed for it) is a bigger problem, and so are our big houses and overall consumption patterns. The difference between almost any American and people in many other countries is far bigger than the gap between an SUV owner and a Prius owner.

very difficult as an individual to positively interact with those bigger structural problems, very straightforward to make an impact on the suv/prius axis

otm. i don't think 'big houses' and 'driving culture' can change fast enough (and if they do it'll be because people moving to cities where they live in smaller houses closer to work for other reasons). prob the only hope at this point is for the energy heating houses and powering car engines to change.

also i think it's just generally misguided to look to the market price for oil to be high for environmental reasons. that's what a carbon tax is for. maybe it's a good side effect of high prices, but there are also other bad side effects, like most of the money stuffing the pockets of shitty regimes, encouraging development and exploration, etc

xp-RS. true, but there was definitely many years where a lot of political good will on climate was "wasted" on those kinds of weak impact feel-good individual solutions. if everyone had been campaigning for a carbon tax instead everyone who would have made those choices would have, and those who wouldn't have would be incentivized to do so

like i remember r'ing mde at the al gore movie ending with, "change your lightbulbs"

it felt like such a wasted opportunity. you've emotionally manipulated thousands of theatres full of well-meaning people, they're all just waiting at the end for you to tell them what to do... and you tell em to change their lightbulbs

i remember that. i almost wonder if thats just gore's DLC style mindset of "we'll never be able to get congress to act on this in any meaningful way, but we can sure as shit make people change their bulbs"

curious when the rising tide is going to life all boats. it's been about 35 years now. tide sure is taking its sweet time coming in!

otm. i don't think 'big houses' and 'driving culture' can change fast enough

it certainly won't with enough people enabling it

what do you think is a realistic window of time for say, 50% of people in america to move into smaller houses? 100 years?

i mean, if we had a tonne of uninhabited smaller houses it wouldn't be that bad. but we probably don't, and the ones that exist are probably further from where people work, so then people have to drive further. and even if they drive smaller cars, driving further kind of cuts your losses

we just need to hold on a little longer for rubio's tax cuts qualmsley

third straight month to show a decline in U.S. industrial production

http://www.federalreserve.gov/Releases/g17/current/g17.pdf

we used to make more things in this country, three months ago

*eagle tear drop*

We used to make cars, now we just connect drivers and passengers who love to share them.

third straight month to show a decline in U.S. industrial production

http://www.federalreserve.gov/Releases/g17/current/g17.pdf

― rap is dad (it's a boy!), Friday, January 15, 2016 10:40 AM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sounds far worse said that way than looking at this, you can see the little downard wiggle if you squint hard enough

http://i68.tinypic.com/j6rh90.png

the first thing I read in this thread was

Now the dollar is at an all-time low against the euro and the canadian dollar. [...]

― Aimless, Saturday, October 20, 2007 7:36 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pretty funny given that CADUSD has just hit 0.690

USD vs any other single currency is not, in itself, a very good proxy for economic health anyway, just one of those things that makes for gawky headlines.

yeah it's very annoying in canada right now

Two Tim Duy posts arguing that if a recession is coming, so far it's not in the data:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/01/fed-watch-so-you-think-a-recession-is-imminent-employment-edition.html
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2016/01/fed-watch-so-you-think-a-recession-is-imminent-yield-curve-edition.html

thanks

I don't find that analysis too meaningful. Each recession is a little or a lot different.

He's just saying these are indicators that have worked pretty reliably in the past, and as now, they're not indicating recession. No indicator is perfect.

black swans wont be in the data either

are ppl predicting a new recession bc they see a particular black swan on the horizon, though, or bc there is a lot of residual nervousness about the ongoing health of the system from the last recession?

7-8 year typical recession cycle also a factor here according to our CEO

he's predicting a 2017 US crash, following China in 2016.

I'm more concerned about residual effects from the last one that have been masked. I also think underestimating the effect of the end of low rates could lead to a kind of black swan, but those are really two sides of the same coin.

we just had a black swan 7 years ago isn't it a little too soon, aren't they supposed to have low probability? maybe a grey swan. taleb's

looking to real economy indicators or yield curves may not be perfect, but probably better than listening to heads of big banks who are (1) just freaking out cause they bet on oil (2) engaged in some form of cheap talk

agreed esp regarding (1)

"supposed to have low probability"

"supposed to" being the operative thing. the metaphor is a lot more subtle than that.

like its something you think is rare-to-nonextant, and it turns out there's _lots_ of them, you just hadn't gone to that part of the world yet

i haven't read many theories for the chinese slowdown -- is it attributable to their demographic crisis plus their aggressive expansion now self-correcting?

bc those are 2 problems the US doesn't really have. we could probably afford to spend more on our infrastructure than we already do (we don't have hundreds of empty cities) and our fertility rate is above replacement

I think a lot of it was straight up book-cooking and false growth projections tbh

apparently the US is below replacement level as well (not as extremely - US is at 1.87 and China is 1.60) but i'm guessing high levels of immigration probably help our rate. ot but can u guess which western country has the highest replacement level in the world?

i haven't read many theories for the chinese slowdown -- is it attributable to their demographic crisis plus their aggressive expansion now self-correcting?

― Mordy, Friday, January 15, 2016 4:15 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

housing bubble

but like that's a pretty unique problem to build a ton of cities and then not have ppl to move in. unless like the argument is that a chinese economic meltdown would def drag down the rest of the world into another recession but is that a reasonable expectation?

imo: no

I mean if it's bad enough I'm sure it could. Maybe a better question for the world recession poll thread than the us toilet economy thread

my black swan candidate is china too.. not only a housing bubble but an infrastructure bubble that propped up their growth rate - building a shit ton of defective crap nobody has any use for

so many swans, so little time

https://49.media.tumblr.com/34116b28018224117bfb28d379b3a41f/tumblr_n4f9wxKYqi1rdutw3o1_400.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQz6K0aWWiY

we could probably afford to spend more on our infrastructure than we already do

understatement of the decade?

people will look back at this time of sluggish demand, high unemployment, creaking public services and eight years of interest-free loans and wonder what was stopping us. an opportunity - and a generation of actual real people - squandered permanently on an altar of deficit ideology. public debt as a percentage of gdp has been average/normal for years now, even after we all bailed out the banks. for fuck's sake it's basically criminal what's happening.

Another respected economist who think the stock market needs to chill out:

http://blogs.piie.com/realtime/?p=5341

Blanchard OTM

I don't think so, that's far too simple an answer to be satisfying.