Bits Bucket for October 26, 2015
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Are oil prices on track back up to $80/bbl by December 2015?
Top News
Mon Oct 26, 2015 | 3:06 AM EDT
Oil prices weak as demand seen sagging toward year-end
A pump jack operates at a well site leased by Devon Energy Production Company near Guthrie, Oklahoma September 15, 2015.
REUTERS/Nick Oxford
By Henning Gloystein
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Crude oil prices remained weak on Monday as a slowing demand outlook implied oversupply will remain in place for months, prompting speculators to cut their bets on rising prices.
Front-month U.S. crude futures were trading at $44.62 per barrel at 2.59 a.m. ET, a mere 2 cents above their last close but more than 12 percent below their October peak.
International benchmark Brent was down 1 cent at $47.98 a barrel, and over 11 percent below this month’s high.
Goldman Sachs said that oil prices could drop “sharply lower” as refined product storage sites come close to filling, stoking a glut that has already seen crude prices fall by more than half since June 2014.
ANZ said it expected prices to remain low for the rest of this year, due to slowing demand and as speculators were cutting bets on higher prices.
On the demand side, Energy Aspects said that it “forecast a sharp slowdown in global oil demand across Q4 15 at 0.8 million barrels per day, which marks the slowest pace of growth in five quarters.”
Energy Aspects said ongoing oversupply in crude oil was starting to spill into the market for refined products, with a product stock-build of 0.6 million barrels per day seen in the third quarter.
Rising inventories as well as a mild winter expected for Europe and North America as a result of an El Nino weather event would likely lead to reduced refinery production and lower use of crude oil by refiners, it said.
Global oil markets were “still some way from rebalancing”, the research agency added.
…
I saw $1.97 gas today. Still about 20 cents higher than last year’s local low, but there are still two months to go.
2.64 in Simi Valley CA according to gas buddy.
CA is special in so many ways…
$2.07 to $2.49 in the Portland area. Bizarre how variable it is, station to station.
I’ve seen that too around LA - stations on opposite corners having 30-50 cent differences. Is it that because prices have come down so much that the owners are sitting on a store of gasoline purchased at a higher price and are waiting to run it down before dropping their price??
Doesn’t make sense because the more you wait, the more the competitors are going to drop their price more and make you look even more ridiculous.
But for some reason — it seems to be happening.
$2.06 at Kirkland Costco yesterday, and around $2.50 at the nearby retail stations.
$2.06 at Kirkland Costco yesterday, and around $2.50 at the nearby retail stations.
Interesting, In Ft. Collins, CostCo sells regular for $2.05, just 5 to 10 cents less than the retail stations.
The crazy thing is the differential between regular and supreme at a station near my house…something like 70 cents different…WTF?
Thank you Mr. President.
$2.77 (coscto) to $3.63 Chevron in town.
Marketwatch dot com
Futures Movers
Oil ends at lowest in a month, down nearly 6% on week
By Myra P. Saefong and Jenny W. Hsu
Published: Oct 23, 2015 3:25 p.m. ET
Natural-gas futures sink to lowest level since 2012
Oil futures settled with a loss on Friday, as strength in the U.S. dollar helped pull prices down by almost 6% for the week.
U.S. prices for oil ended at their lowest level in roughly a month. Natural-gas futures (NGX15, -3.98%) however, took the biggest hit Friday, settling 4.2% lower at $2.286 per million British thermal units for their worst close since 2012 on prospects for weaker demand.
December West Texas Intermediate crude (CLZ5, +0.67%) fell 78 cents, or 1.7%, to settle at $44.60 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Based on the most-active contracts, that was the lowest settlement since Sept. 28. Prices saw a weekly drop of 5.6%, the biggest since the week ended Aug. 7. Prices for the December contract, specifically, fell 6.5% for the week.
December Brent crude (LCOZ5, +0.60%) on London’s ICE Futures exchange lost 9 cents, or 0.2%, to end at $47.99 a barrel — about 4.8% lower on the week.
WTI prices were trading a bit better, at around $44.80, right before data from Baker Hughes (BHI, -2.99%) showed the number of active U.S. oil-drilling rigs fell by just 1 to 594 as of Friday. The total active U.S. rig count, which includes natural-gas rigs, was unchanged at 787.
…
CNNMoney
Business and Financial News
Saudi Arabia to run out of cash in less than 5 years
October 25
NEW YORK
Not even the mighty Middle East can survive cheap oil forever.
If oil stays around $50 a barrel, most countries in the region will run out of cash in five years or less, warned a dire report from the International Monetary Fund this week. That includes OPEC leader Saudi Arabia as well as Oman and Bahrain.
Low oil prices will wipe out an estimated $360 billion from the region this year alone, the IMF said.
Huge budget surpluses are quickly swinging to massive deficits as oil prices have crashed to around $45 currently from over $100 last year. Many of these countries are being forced to tap into rainy day funds to weather the storm.
“Oil exporters will need to adjust their spending and revenue policies to ensure fiscal sustainability,” the IMF wrote.
The depressed oil prices have come at a time when spending has gone up as many of these countries are grappling with regional violence and turbulence in financial markets.
Saudi Arabia is getting squeezed
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, needs to sell oil at around $106 to balance its budget, according to IMF estimates. The kingdom barely has enough fiscal buffers to survive five years of $50 oil, the IMF said.
That’s why Saudi Arabia is moving fast to preserve cash. The kingdom not only raised $4 billion by selling bonds earlier this year, but its central bank has yanked up to $70 billion from asset management firms like BlackRock (BLK) over the past six months.
After years of huge surpluses, Saudi Arabia’s current account deficit is projected to soar to 20% of gross domestic product this year, Capital Economics estimates. Saudi Arabia’s war chest of cash is still humungous at nearly $700 billion, but it’s shrinking fast.
…
Saudi Arabia is getting squeezed
So the Saudi’s are going to have to send the guest workers home and pick up their own trash. Oh the humanity!
Why send them home? It’s not like they have to pay them if they don’t feel like it.
They still would have to feed, clothe and shelter them.
My point was that the days of Saudi citizens having make work, oil funded, office jobs while guest workers do the real work could be coming to an end.
Sound like Texas is in big trouble. I feel real bad for those in CA who fled for Austin, bringing with them horrible traffic and road rage.
Mon Oct 26, 2015 | 1:39 AM EDT
Oil prices could go ’sharply lower’ as product inventories near maximum capacity: Goldman Sachs
A crude oil tower is seen on the seashore in Kyaukpyu township, Rakhine state, Myanmar October 5, 2015.
REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun
By Henning Gloystein
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Crude oil prices could drop sharply lower as refined product storage sites come close to maximum capacity, further adding to a glut that has already seen crude prices fall by more than half since June 2014, Goldman Sachs said.
Although “tank tops” - a term referring to storage capacities hitting their maximum - were unlikely, Goldman said that inventories were already “too close for comfort”, bearing the potential for a sharp fall in crude prices.
“Distillate storage utilization in the U.S. and Europe is nearing historically high levels, following near record refinery utilization, only modest demand growth (especially relative to gasoline), and increased imports from the East on refinery expansion and Chinese exports,” Goldman Sachs said.
“This raises the specter of 1998 (and) 2009 when distillate storage hit capacity, pushing runs and crude oil prices sharply lower,” it added in its note to clients.
…
Wherever you are, Albuquerque Dan, I sincerely hope you enjoy the best crow dinner, ever, this Thanksgiving.
The Motley Fool
Oil Prices May Stay Depressed Until 2017
Oil markets are still oversupplied, and unless something shocks supply soon, it’ll be the end of 2017 before they’re finally back in balance.
Travis Hoium
(TMFFlushDraw)
Oct 25, 2015 at 8:01AM
The market seems to keep thinking that a recovery in oil prices is just around the corner, sending oil prices higher or lower based on bullish or bearish comments each day. But it’ll likely be some time before oil prices move much higher.
The behemoth of an oil market was simply heading into an oversupplied situation too quickly to turn around in just over a year. So, energy stocks are in for more pain before reaching an eventual equilibrium.
There’s a lot of oil out there
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, global oil markets were oversupplied by 1.8 million barrels per day in the third quarter of 2015. That’s a result of a weaker-than-expected global economy, but really driven by the U.S. adding 2.5 million barrels per day of supply to the global market in the last two years alone.
Oil Supply And Demand
Of course, low oil prices have hurt U.S. oil producers’ production and even led to more oil consumption, but energy markets are so big and complex that oil prices won’t simply rise because oil producers slow drilling for new oil.
The long lag in oil supply
It may seem like oil prices would just balance at an equilibrium price somewhere around $70 to $80 per barrel, where some shale supply would go offline but not all companies or countries would have to go through financial hardship to stabilize supply and demand. But that’s not the way the real world works.
Even high-cost producers in the U.S. would have hedged some of their oil production for the second half of 2014 and well into 2015, meaning that when prices dropped to near $50 per barrel they didn’t suddenly shut down production. For example, Continental Resources (NYSE:CLR), one of the biggest shale producers in the U.S., had enough hedges last year to take a $433 million one-time gain on selling hedges in the third quarter. Of course, that has backfired a bit as oil has fallen since then, and the company was forced to report a loss of $131.6 million in the first half of the year.
And even though Continental Resources slashed capital spending from $4.8 billion to an expected $2.4 billion in 2015, it’s expecting to increase production by 19% to 23%. It’s taken a long time to cut back production and it will take years for today’s low oil prices to result in lower production.
Budgets in the big oil business are also set on very long time horizons, not based on short-term price swings, making it even harder to adjust to prices. In 2013, ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) set a five-year capital budget plan of $190 billion, including multibillion-dollar projects like the Kearl oil sands or an LNG plant in Papua New Guinea. Cutting the capital budgets for 2015 by 12% to $34 billion may slow down some small projects, but the behemoth projects that drive most of the company’s energy production are planned years ahead of time. That’s why it takes so long to adjust to oil prices and why big oil has found it beneficial to diversify down the supply chain to refining or marketing gasoline, which benefits from low oil prices they experience upstream. Then ExxonMobil doesn’t have to make knee-jerk reactions to the price of oil based on a few months or a year.
The long lag between when oil prices drop and when actual production drops means it could take years before supply and demand go from being 1.8 million barrels per day out of line to equilibrium.
…
Stand clear…she’s gonna blow!
Top News
Mon Oct 26, 2015 | 3:00 AM EDT
Unwanted diesel, jet ships could sink oil prices
* Backlog of vessels at port threaten loading delays
* Ships with half a million tonnes taking the long route to Europe
* Diesel storage at ARA hub above 70 percent capacity - Genscape
By Libby George and Ron Bousso
LONDON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Unwanted diesel and jet fuel cargoes are backing up outside Europe’s ports and taking longer, slower routes around the southern tip of Africa, traders say.
A symptom of the world’s excess of oil, it also paints a gloomy picture of the chance of an oil price rebound.
The abundance of crude that roiled commodity markets and turned the balance sheets of oil majors on their head also encouraged under-pressure European oil refineries to run at full clip.
Refineries from Rotterdam to India to Louisiana, drunk on cheap crude, ran regardless of whether the world wanted what they were making. Meteoric demand growth earlier this year for products such as gasoline masked the surplus.
But the armada of distillate ships en route to Europe has created delays at ports and is starting to drive up the costs of moving all oil products around the world.
The parade of vessels with no homes has cast a doubt on the chance of battered crude prices can recover in the near term.
“The ceiling may be nearing, with reports of discharge delays and the potential for forced products storage,” shipping company Gibson said.
There are now vessels carrying at least half a million tonnes of distillates sailing around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, rather than via the faster, more efficient Suez Canal. Others, such as the Captain Paris, the Ocean Tiara and the Portman Square, are parked off Gibraltar while they wait to find a home, rather than sailing directly to Europe’s increasingly crowded Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp storage hub.
Traders of other products, including gasoline, said the immense amount of diesel arriving is also amplifying the fight for on land storage tanks.
With deepening contango, a structure under which future prices for oil products are higher than current levels, some traders can make money with these types of slower voyages, while others have already taken positions with proper floating storage vessels.
But with close to record highs of 6 million tonnes of gasoil stocks in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp hub, according to industry monitor Genscape, others are simply running out of options. The combined tanks are filled to more than 76 percent of capacity, with some at more than 90 percent.
Additionally, ultra-low water levels on the Rhine river are keeping these products from sailing out of storage and into Europe’s industrial heartland.
“Unless it starts raining, I do not know where it can go but stay on the water,” a distillates trader said of any pending cargoes.
Despite this, refineries have not yet shown any signs of cutting back their output. Rather, falling Brent crude prices are encouraging them to keep the taps flowing unchecked - a development likely to put even more pressure on storage, ships and oil prices.
…
Good article, thanks for posting PB.
BloombergBusiness
U.S. Oil Contango Widens to Five-Month High as Stockpiles Weigh
Ben Sharples
Grant Smith
October 25, 2015 — 6:27 PM CDT
Updated on October 26, 2015 — 5:03 AM CDT
- Inventories highest for October since 1930 amid robust supply
- Global supplies to remain ample until mid-2016: IEA’s Birol
The discount on front-month U.S. crude futures widened to the most in five months after inventories reached the highest level for the season in 85 years.
West Texas Intermediate futures for December delivery traded for 90 cents less than January, the widest spread — also known as contango — since May 14. U.S. crude inventories have risen 5 percent in the past four weeks to 477 million barrels, the highest for the time of year in data going back to 1930, as the nation’s production pulls back only gradually in response to lower prices.
Oil is failing to sustain a rally earlier this month above $50 a barrel as surging U.S. inventories bolstered speculation that a global glut will be prolonged. World crude supplies will remain ample until at least the middle of 2016 while investment in the industry is set to shrink further, International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said in Singapore on Monday.
“Inventories are some 110 million barrels above the average,” Ole Sloth Hansen, an analyst at Saxo Bank A/S in Copenhagen, said by e-mail. “Adding to this is resilient production and another few weeks of seasonal weak refinery demand, all conspiring to lift the contango.”
West Texas Intermediate for December delivery rose 32 cents to $44.92 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 9:57 a.m. London time. The contract slid 78 cents to $44.60 on Friday, the lowest close since Sept. 28. The volume of all futures traded was about 49 percent below the 100-day average. Prices have decreased 16 percent this year.
Brent for December settlement was 29 cents higher at $48.28 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. Prices lost 4.9 percent last week. The European benchmark crude traded at a premium of $3.35 to WTI.
“The recent spate of crude-stockpile builds in the U.S. is reinforcing that story about supply, that story about a saturated market,” Jonathan Barratt, chief investment officer at Ayers Alliance Securities in Sydney, said by phone. “Oil has very strong headwinds to get through.”
Prices were little changed on Monday near the lowest closing level in almost four weeks as investors weighed a slowing pace of U.S. drilling-rig reductions against an interest rate cut in China.
The number of active machines targeting oil dropped by 1 through Oct. 23 after declining by 45 over the prior three weeks, according to Baker Hughes Inc. China, the world’s second-biggest crude consumer, stepped up monetary easing with its sixth interest-rate cut in a year on Friday to combat deflationary pressures and a slowing economy.
The U.S. rig count fell to 594, the lowest level since July 2010, Baker Hughes, an oilfield-services provider, said on its website Friday. Drillers have cut the number of active machines by more than 60 percent since December.
“Alarmingly high” distillate fuel storage utilization in the U.S. and Europe may force refiners to cut runs and impact oil prices, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Near-record refinery runs, modest demand growth and more supplies from the Middle East and China has pushed distillate stockpiles to near-record levels, analysts including Damien Courvalin wrote in an Oct. 25 report.
…
One of life’s true pleasures is using a strategically targeted ice cold bucket of reality to shrivel denialist’s delusions to the point of shrinkage.
Paid $1.99/gal last night.
Try not to catch yourself a falling knife.
Caveat emptor.
Need to Know
Forget the tech rally, it’s time to get in early on the oil rebound
Published: Oct 26, 2015 9:05 a.m. ET
Critical intelligence before the U.S. market opens
Getty
By Shawn Langlois
Markets reporter
…
The call
Barring some unforeseen shocks, oil isn’t going to $100 and it’s not going to $30, says the Daily Reckoning’s James Rickards. Instead, it will remain in the $50-$60 range before the rise begins at the end of the next year, he said. You could wait until then to partake in the rebound, but by then, the crowd will have already hopped aboard. “The oil industry is permeated in gloom right now because of oversupply and weak demand,” he said. “Small producers are going out of business, and a wave of energy-related bond defaults is about to wash over the fixed-income markets.”
The big winners, Rickards predicts, will be the oil majors, like the crop that come under the earnings microscope this week. “Because of human biases and crowd behavior, the stock prices of the major oil companies have been beaten down along with the price of oil and the stock prices of smaller players,” he wrote. “But the oil majors are in a league of their own and are positioning themselves to benefit from the rebound of prices in late 2016 and early 2017.”
“Instead, it will remain in the $50-$60 range before the rise begins at the end of the next year, he said.”
Nice try, but already wrong!
Crude Oil - Electronic (NYMEX) Dec 2015
Historical Quotes
Market open $44.06
Change -$0.54 -1.21%
Volume 97,135
Oct 26, 2015, 9:56 a.m.
Both Lanny Breuer and Eric Holder did an excellent job holding off prosecution of the FIRE sector. They have both returned to Covington and Burling, a heavyweight defense firm representing companies (legal fictions) and more accurately people they ought to have been prosecuting.
As Matt Taibbi put it: Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.
The office thing might have been improper, but at this point, who cares? More at issue is the extraordinary run Holder just completed as one of history’s great double agents. For six years, while brilliantly disguised as the attorney general of the United States, he was actually working deep undercover, DiCaprio in The Departed-style, as the best defense lawyer Wall Street ever had.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/eric-holder-wall-street-double-agent-comes-in-from-the-cold-20150708
So the DC advisory class - the advisors to power which politicians rely upon - put in Bernanke, the oft-repeated “Depression scholar” in at chairman at the Fed, and these guys in charge of prosecutions. It’s uncanny, really. Almost like they predicted what was coming down the pike.
Well, what exactly did you think the hope ‘n change dupes were voting for? Actual reform?
Is the Government Pursuit of Wall Street Criminals Too Little Too Late?
Nearly seven years since the outbreak of the financial crisis, banks have paid out billions of dollars in settlements for financial misdeeds, but not a single Wall Street executive has been put in jail.
“It is my belief that the new DOJ stance is a defensive smokescreen to shield itself from widespread criticism,” Richard Bowen, a former senior vice president at CitiGroup and mortgage fraud whistleblower, told VICE News.
In fact, the vast majority of the top dogs at financial firms that profited off toxic mortgage-backed securities have been able to ride out the crisis, using shareholder money to pay off the fines leveled by the DOJ. In 2014, JPMorgan paid $13 billion to settle accusations of massive mortgage fraud - one of the largest such settlement in US history. No one went to jail, and the company was not required to admit criminal wrongdoing. A few months later, the board of directors awarded the CEO James Dimon a 74 percent raise.
“Up until now senior executives were basically immunized by paying shareholding funds and that does little to curtail future misconduct,” Bartlett Naylor, a former chief of investigations for the US Senate Banking Committee, told VICE News. “In fact, it reinforces bad conduct.”
https://news.vice.com/article/is-the-government-pursuit-of-wall-street-criminals-too-little-too-late
Linked from William K. Black’s Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/williamkblack
And after were done pursuing the Wall Street criminals maybe we should go after the war criminals…
Is it any surprise how poorly Jeb is doing ?? Its going to the root of how despised he brother is and his defense of his brother (understandable) has undermined his campaign
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QqQIwAGoVChMI_afQhangyAIVFP1jCh34Rgpz&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2015%2F10%2F25%2Feurope%2Ftony-blair-iraq-war%2Findex.html&usg=AFQjCNECLc5mhmZhx0PGAk1um6KZNO-CaA&sig2=4AmA47Tn20KhrYMeqH4P6g&bvm=bv.105841590,d.cGc
At first glance, he’s even dumber looking than his brother. Blank, cow-like eyes over a tepid simulation of human emotion.
He’s a twink. And he IS dumber than his brother. Without JEB!, Shrub would never have been prez.
My guess is he’s on some sort of medication. He’d have to be, in order to live with himself.
What are the Friends of Bill (and Hillary) getting in exchange for their fat cat donations?
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/10/26/clinton-white-house-sleepover-guests-still-writing-checks.html
“As one hedge-fund manager told Politico: “Nobody takes it like she’s going after them personally.”
“It’s just Hillary being Hillary. Which is to say, all things to all people.”
Hillary Clinton: The fat cats’ favorite candidate
October 25, 2015 | 9:45pm
More than 760 of Clinton’s presidential donors have listed their occupation as CEO or some variation, according to a Big Crunch analysis of federal election forms.
That’s as many as have given to Republican hopefuls Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz combined.
And it doesn’t even include people like hedge-fund CEO Robert Mercer, who prefers to list himself as a “financial consultant” — or those who’ve given instead to pro-Hillary super-PACs. (Or all the folks who’ve bought goodwill over the years by giving to the Clinton Foundation.)
Surprising? No. We’re talking about a woman who’s made millions from hefty six-figure fees for speeches to, among others, groups headed by those same CEOs.
She’s also raked in many millions more for her campaign from corporate lawyers, lobbyists and bankers.
Still, that hasn’t stopped her from declaring, “Wall Street, you’ve had your president. Now we need a president for Main Street.”
And never mind what that seems to imply about the guy in the Oval Office now. Or that just one of her speeches costs four times the average American’s salary.
Wall Street gets it. The fat cats figure she’s just saying what she must to placate her party’s Sanders-Warren hard-left wing.
nypost.com/2015/10/25/hillary-clinton-the-fat-cats-favorite-candidate/ - 136k -
Wow Phony for once you posted an article I concur with!
I thought you were a supporter of this corrupt succubus.
This woman is so despicable that she’ll make Adelson’s purchased candidate look good by comparison.
Validation that our electorate has become as amoral as they are stupid.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-10-26/the-most-likely-next-president-is-hillary-clinton
How’s that hope ‘n change working out for ya, ‘Murica?
http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/25/1-in-2-working-americans-make-less-than-30000-a-year/
Is it possible that mr market could overpower the FED and raise rates on its own? Or is it in the worlds interest to play along?
It’s going to happen - it’s just a question of when. The Fed will never raise rates of its own volition.
Or is it in the worlds interest to play along?
Everyone is up to their eyeballs in debt and has a housing bubble in their country (and almost no one has fixed rate mortgages outside the US). I would say the world has a vested interest in kicking the can.
Rallying the base
ISIS trying to co-opt Palestinian jihad against Israel as part of its own cause:
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/10/24/isis-trying-co-opt-palestinian-jihad-israel-part-cause/
“They attacked us on 9/11 because they hate our freedoms”
LOLZ
And speaking of 9/11, apocalyptic death cult website World Net Daily rallies the base with some Sky Wizard fairy tales:
http://www.wnd.com/2015/10/ominous-jesus-quote-emerges-in-ground-zero-wreckage/
I know people who will randomly open a page in the Bible and blindly point at text when they need “advice”, so this isn’t surprising, and it most definitely will rally the base.
Hey, I do that…sometimes.
They’re certainly hating our freedom to hunt them with drones.
Meanwhile, we continue with our neurotic “Invade the world, invite the world” foreign policy.
That’s right, we bomb them back to the stone age, then we bring them in as refugees. That’s gonna work out just great.
Great business for the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes.
Common core promises to produce new millions of Stoopids from our NEA indoctrination mills to join the Obama Zombies, McCain Mutants, and Romney Retards as ‘Murica slouches deeper into IDIOCRACY.
Kayne West really can win the election in 2020. So can Lindsey Lohan. Yes, our electorate is that brain-dead.
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-55515-is-wrong-under-the-common-core-2015-10
Article for the cultural relativists and Social Justice Warriors™
Silence on rising anti-muslim sentiment is racist and un-American:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dalia-f-fahmy-phd/silence-on-rising-antimus_b_8375642.html
“If you like your 9 year old child bride, you can keep your 9 year old child bride”
LOLZ
That’s racis
Region VIII news
Individual health insurance costs rising steeply in Colorado next year:
http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2015/10/23/individual-health-insurance-costs-rising-steeply.html
Thanks, Obama
Perfect! A few more years of 10% increases and soon no one will have insurance as, even with $10,000 deductibles, it it will utterly unaffordable. Then the healthcare system will crash and we will be able to start over.
And this was already happening before ACA, which did NOTHING to solve the problem.
Open enrollment begins today. My monthly share of the bill is going up $18 a month.
I love watching the hope ‘n change True Believers get bent over along with everyone else.
What do you call it when new home prices keep heading skyward against a backdrop of collapsing sales?
I call it a bubble on the brink of bursting.
Market Pulse
New-home sales fall 11.5% in September to lowest rate in 10 months
Published: Oct 26, 2015 10:00 a.m. ET
By Jeffry Bartash
Reporter
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The pace of new-home sales in the U.S. sank 11.5% in September to an annual rate of 468,000, marking the lowest level in 10 months. Wall Street had expected sales to flatline or fall slightly after a strong surge earlier in the year, but the dropoff was much sharper than expected. Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast sales to achieve a seasonally adjusted 550,000 rate. Sales for August were also revised down to a 529,000 pace from an original 552,000, which would have been a postrecession high. Although sales fell in all regions, the Northeast experienced an unusually large 62% decline that could owe to temporary factors. Another factor in slower home sales may be rising prices. The median price of a new home in September was 13.5% higher compared to one year ago: $296,900 vs. $261,500. Despite the big drop in sales in September, new-home purchases are up 2% in comparison to September 2014.
…
Crater!
Yeah I saw this on ZH and you beat me to it. I thought the same as you as I read it. A sign that the RE bubble is about to burst.
Don’t they always go down in the winter?
The data is seasonally adjusted. So, as long as they have the seasonal adjustment right, winter shouldn’t matter.
Seems to be roughly flat year-on-year. Let’s see what the data is for next quarter before people get too excited. The builder confidence is up, and that measures things like current traffic, and how builders feel about the next 6 months of sales.
If the data stays down, it means that the builders are missing something.
Maybe you missed this sentence in the article, even though I marked it with bold text:
Yes, sales being up strongly year on year last month became flat year on year this month. A deceleration in the prior trend, no doubt.
A bearish sign, certainly. Not yet a bearish trend (let’s see a few more months before we call it a trend).
If you look at the actual Census report, the regions vary widely:
Northeast is down 57% year on year (down 62% month on month–seasonally adjusted).
Midwest is down 8% year on year (down 8% month on month–seasonally adjusted)
South is up 8% year on year (down 9% month on month–seasonally adjusted)
West is up 9% year on year (down 7% month on month–seasonally adjusted)
The Northeast data seems to be the outlier…what the hell happened there?
It is worth nothing though that taking the NE numbers out of the equation wouldn’t have turned the overall numbers positive–the region isn’t big enough.
“The Northeast data seems to be the outlier…what the hell happened there?”
Regional recession?
Economic Report
Philly Fed, Empire State both show grim conditions in manufacturing
Published: Oct 15, 2015 11:58 a.m. ET
Strong dollar weighing on factory sector
By Greg Robb
Senior economics reporter
Bloomberg
Workers at a modular home factory in Wingdale, NY
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Two regional manufacturing gauges painted an identical picture in October with both showing a sharp slowing in the industrial sector in the Northeast.
The Empire State manufacturing index, which measures conditions in the New York area, stayed in deep negative territory for the third month in a row for the first time since the depths of the Great Recession.
At the other end of the New Jersey Turnpike, the Philadelphia Fed’s manufacturing index remained in negative territory for the second straight month.
Readings below zero on both indexes indicate deteriorating conditions.
…
“Regional recession?”
Maybe. Pretty steep drop in a month.
“the Northeast experienced an unusually large 62% decline that could owe to temporary factors”
Like what, the excellent weather?
1 - 10 of about 4,340,000 results
related to:
Why does Obama hate Americans?
Climate philanthropist George Soros invests millions in coal
Karl Mathiesen
@karlmathiesen
Wednesday 19 August 2015 05.36 EDT
Billionaire climate philanthropist George Soros invested more than $2m (£1.3m) in struggling coal giants Peabody Energy and Arch Coal in recent months, despite having once called the fuel “lethal” to the climate.
The firm, which Soros chairs, bought the large stakes for bargain prices. Peabody and Arch are giants of the US coal sector but have suffered massive declines in recent years, losing more than 98% of their value. SFM made a similar move in 2014 by investing $234.4m in coal and gas company Consol. Those shares were sold off after a few months as gas prices continued to fall.
Soros has also been a significant donor to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s election campaigns, donating at least $1m to each through the Priorities USA Action superpac. Both have positioned themselves as supporters of strong climate action. The coal industry has admitted that Obama’s clean power plan, which Clinton has vowed to support, threatens the future of coal in the US.
On Tuesday, Citigroup bank reported that the total value of listed coal companies had shrunk by two thirds since 2012, saying “current market conditions are likely to persist”.
A spokesman for SFM declined to comment on the investments.
http://www.theguardian.com/…/climate-philanthropist-george-soros-invests-millions-in-coal - 866k -
Warmists gonna warm.
Warmism has passed the tipping point, and no amount of behavioral change by humanoids will stop the warmism now. When the last coral reefs die, they’re not coming back. Agenda 21 is a cool story bro, but all of that is too little too late to stop warmism. Infinite growth is not possible in a finite ecosystem.
Like the author of that article on the corporate owned media said… “they don’t call it programming for nothing”.
I wouldn’t jump out of a window, you NOAA where they get their money.
“When the last coral reefs die,”
“So it’s surprising to read that Mark Eakin, a NOAA Coral Reef Watch coordinator, told the Associated Press that, “We may be looking at losing somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 percent of the coral reefs this year”
NOAA says coral reefs are in a global warming death spiral
October 8, 2015 12:15 PM MST
As we first reported here, NOAA announced in early July that coral reefs are dying off at an unprecedented rate, even though a recently published paper showed that these statements are more alarmist than accurate. Coral reefs can turn white when the algae that surrounds them dies off from too warm (or too cold) water, and the satellites detect that thermal stress. But the paper published in Marine Biology showed that while even though some corals appear bleached, it doesn’t mean they are dead or even dying. Why?
Conventional tracking methods (like NOAA’s 5-km Coral Reef Watch Satellite Monitoring) can’t distinguish between white and bleached (dead) colonies. The paper, by Cruz et al, showed that “although bleaching leaves the coral skeleton visible under its transparent tissue, not all white coral colonies display this feature,” which “raises the question as to whether all ‘white’-shaded colonies are indeed bleached.” To determine whether bleached coral is actually dead, Cruz et al actually sampled coral off the east coast of Brazil, and found that white corals exhibited the same lifelike features as their multi-colored cousins.
Even as NOAA inarticulately proclaims this die-off as the third ever [sic] global coral bleaching event, they are basing that announcement on measuring instruments that have already been proven to overestimate so-called coral bleaching twofold. They are also making this statement in lieu of the fact that they have only been monitoring coral reef bleaching since 1989, when “a relatively new ocean phenomenon called ‘coral bleaching’ was increasingly observed in parts of the Caribbean Sea.”
Under the supervision of former Vice President Al Gore, the Coral Reef Watch Program took shape and was formally established in 1998 when President Clinton “issued an Executive Order that created the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force.” Using satellite data from 1985 to the present, the program created “historical” recreations of the past, allowing NOAA to declare that this “may” be the third-largest global coral bleaching event “on record.”
Put another way, coral bleaching events have been occurring for millions of years based on marine and fossil records. Unsurprisingly, the only thing new about this bleaching event is that agencies tasked with environmental initiatives are making a lot of noise just ahead of the Paris Climate Talks, where a climate change treaty is expected to emerge. A quick visit to the NOAA’s climate reef watch website shows it devoted entirely to global warming. Unfortunately for U.S. citizens, all of this propaganda comes at taxpayer’s expense.
http://www.examiner.com/article/noaa-says-coral-reefs-are-a-global-warming-death-spiral - 245k -
———————————————————————–
Good news about coral reefs – they recovered from warming
Anthony Watts / April 7, 2013
Back in 1998, when we had the super El Niño, some of the warm water pooled east and west of Australia (seen in the 1998 image below) and damaged coral reefs there, setting off a cottage industry for noisy alarmy/worry types like Ove Hoegh-Guldberg that have turned the “save the coral reefs” issue into a career.
1998_super_el_nino
1998 Super El ñino – Image: NOAA/NESDIS – click to enlarge
Now it seems that mother nature has simply ignored his concerns and does what she does best – adapt and fill the void, and saved the reefs on her own. This must be devastating news for him.
The above posting brought to you by the Koch Brothers and Exxon Mobil.
My weekend was brought to me by Exxon Mobil.
I had the non-hiker flatlanders in town, so I took them on a 300+ sightseeing roadtrip over Loveland Pass, to Leadville, Independence Pass, and Buena Vista.
We got alot of likes on Instagram.
My weekend was brought to me by Exxon Mobil.
I never buy their gas, nor Chevron. They always have the highest prices in my nabe.
“I never buy their gas, nor Chevron. They always have the highest prices in my nabe.”
Duly noted my friend.
I had the non-hiker flatlanders in town, so I took them on a 300+ sightseeing roadtrip
So their mobility scooters don’t work on hiking trails? Did they pass out in the Eisenhower tunnel or in Leadville?
Warmists gonna warm:
http://imgur.com/5vSeJm8
Somebody should send this picture of snow to the Drudge Report to rally the base. Reading about “science” gives people a headache, but looking at pictures of snow summarily proves that warmism isn’t happening.
Hey Goon,
I’m heading up soon to see a friend of mine in Ouray. Got any recommendations on a good “scenic tour” route? Leaving out of Colorado Springs.
RKH
It is pretty ironic that these guys could actually go and look at some coral reefs up close and under a microscope to see if the little critters are alive or not. Instead they examine them from satellites miles in the sky. Brilliant. I guess when you have a satellite, everything looks like a nail, or something.
It is my understanding that coral reefs can be quite large, as in hundreds of miles. A satellite could measure their size and detect if they are shrinking.
they are dead, just go to Hawaii and ask the locals or put on your gear and go look. I just did in June.
An estimated 20 percent of the world’s coral reefs are damaged beyond recovery and about half of the remaining coral reefs are under risk of collapse. Did you know that approximately 500 million people worldwide depend upon reefs? In fact, 30 million are virtually totally dependent upon reefs.
Humanity’s actions are threatening coral’s survival
An estimated 20 percent of the world’s reefs are damaged beyond recovery and about half of the remaining coral reefs are under risk of collapse. The top threats to coral reefs—climate change, unsustainable fishing, and land-based pollution—are all due to human activities. These threats—combined with other threats like coral disease; tropical storms; tourism and recreation; vessel damage; marine debris, and aquatic invasive species—compound upon each other, sometimes making conservation efforts more difficult.
What is the explanation for overfishing killing coral?
lack of biodiversity, and Food Chain
The food chain goes as follows: producers, which are photosynthetic organisms and have a key role in the reef system because they are not only the base of the food chain but all of the energy for the system comes from them (The Coral Reef Food Chain). Also, these producers are key to reef-building corals (The Coral Reef Food Chain). The reef-building corals have a relationship with the zooxanthellae, plant-like organisms that photosynthesis for reefs (The Coral Reef Food Chain). Then these producers are eaten by the consumers, which are either herbivores or carnivores (The Coral Reef Food Chain). It is important to notice that for coral reefs specifically some carnivores eat and keep in check the coral reefs themselves. “Fishing for a particular species obviously affects that species directly, but it also affects the animals and/or plants in both directions along the food chain - the predators and the prey of the fish will both be affected, and changes to them will also affect their predators and prey, and so on” (The Coral Reef Food Chain). A specific example includes the grouper fish, a very popular fish to eat, can be found in the Great Barrier Reef (Coral Reefs). The overfishing of grouper in some cases has led to an increase of damselfish, which is a major food supply for the Grouper fish. Damselfish, help create pockets in corals that are important for coral reef life (Coral Reefs). That’s where the algae the damselfish feed upon grow (Coral Reefs). If the damselfish population isn’t controlled by natural predation, these algae can take over a reef, eventually killing it (Coral Reefs). Overfishing of other herbivorous fishes can also lead to high levels of algal growth in different cases.
(The Coral Reef Food Chain)
You can say that again.
I couldn’t find any reference that any reef around Hawaii is actually dead as you claim. Some articles about fungal attack, which might be due to pollution and might actually be killing gropers. Sewage treatment is important for so many reasons. So is controlling runoff from construction. We lost the Seneca Lake trout breeding grounds in the 70s because of such.
I dove on a coral reef once and it was a very wonderful experience. I alone was not drinking the Bahama Mommas.
You guys ever fished with M-80’s? It’s quite effective. So is lighting up the entire fishing ground with a car battery and capacitor.
“Infinite growth is not possible in a finite ecosystem.”
This dude and his machine were on the local news back in 2007. The second time he was on they said he was being flown to Washington. That’s the last I heard about him.
Fla. Man Invents Machine To Turn Water Into Fire
UPDATED 2:53 AM EDT May 24, 2007
SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. —A Florida man may have accidentally invented a machine that could solve the gasoline and energy crisis plaguing the U.S., WPBF News 25 reported.
Sanibel Island resident John Kanzius is a former broadcast executive from Pennsylvania who wondered if his background in physics and radio could come in handy in treating the disease from which he suffers: cancer.
Kanzius, 63, invented a machine that emits radio waves in an attempt to kill cancerous cells while leaving normal cells intact. While testing his machine, he noticed that his invention had other unexpected abilities.
Filling a test tube with salt water from a canal in his back yard, Kanzius placed the tube and a paper towel in the machine and turned it on. Suddenly, the paper towel ignited, lighting up the tube like it was a wax candle.
“Pretty neat, huh?” Kanzius asked WPBF’s Jon Shainman.
Kanzius performed the experiment without the paper towel and got the same result — the saltwater was actually burning.
The former broadcasting executive said he showed the experiment to a handful of scientists across the country who claim they are baffled at watching salt water ignite.
Kanzius said the flame created from his machine reaches a temperature of around 3,000 degrees Farenheit. He said a chemist told him that the immense heat created from the machine breaks down the hydrogen-oxygen bond in the water, igniting the hydrogen.
“You could take plain salt water out of the sea, put it in containers and produce a violent flame that could heat generators that make electricity, or provide other forms of energy,” Kanzius said.
He said engineers are currently experimenting with him in Erie, Pa. in an attempt to harness the energy. They’ve built an engine that, when placed on top of the flame, chugged along for two minutes, Kanzius told WPBF.
Kanzius admits all the excitement surrounding a new possible energy source was a stroke of luck. Someone who witnessed his work on the cancer front asked him if perhaps the machine could be used for desalinization.
“This was an experiment to see if I could heat salt water, and instead of heat, I got fire,” Kanzius said.
Kanzius said he hoped that his invention could one day solve a lot of the world’s energy problems.
“If I were to be bold enough, I think one day you could power an automobile with this, eventually,” Kanzius told WPBF.
————————————————————
Could salt water fuel cars?
by Josh Clark
You may have heard about an invention created by a 63-year-old named John Kanzius that claims to create an alternative fuel out of salt water. Through sheer serendipity, Kanzius, a former broadcast engineer, found out something incredible — under the right conditions, salt water can burn at high temperatures.
News of the experiment was generally met with allegations of it being a hoax, but after Penn State University chemists got their hands on the RFG and tried their own experiments, they found it was indeed true. The RFG could ignite and burn salt water. The flame could reach temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and burn as long as the RFG was on and aimed at it.
But how could salt water possibly ignite? Why don’t careless litterbugs who flick lit cigarette butts into the sea set the whole planet aflame? It all has to do with hydrogen. In its normal state, salt water has a stable composition of sodium chloride (the salt) and hydrogen and oxygen (the water). But the radio waves from Kanzius’ RFG disrupt that stability, degrading the bonds that hold the chemicals in salt water together. This releases the volatile hydrogen molecules, and the heat output from the RFG ignites them and burns them indefinitely.
auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/salt-water-fuel.htm - 87k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kanzius#Water-as-a-fuel
“He said engineers are currently experimenting with him in Erie, Pa. in an attempt to harness the energy. They’ve built an engine that, when placed on top of the flame, chugged along for two minutes, Kanzius told WPBF.”
“Kanzius acknowledged that this process could not be considered an energy source, as more energy is used to produce the RF signal than can be obtained from the burning gas”
This Kanzius acknowledgement was brought to by Exxon Mobil.
I don’t think he should have gone to Washington.
From Wikipedia
John S. Kanzius (March 1, 1944 – February 18, 2009) was an American inventor
Some kids in my eighth grade science could have probably figured that out.
Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.
The attack was a spontaneous response to a you tube video.
More energy is used to produce the RF signal than can be obtained from the burning gas.
Salt Water into Fuel - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGg0ATfoBgo - 261k -
“Some kids in my eighth grade science could have probably figured that out.”
MightySaul
I doubt that but maybe some kid in your eighth grade science class could have taken a 70’s Radio Shack clock radio apart, claim he built it, put it in a briefcase with lots of wires hanging out and bring it to school to show his English teacher like Ahmed.
#IStandWithRadioShack
More energy is used to produce the RF signal than can be obtained from the burning gas.
That has always been the case with electrolysis.
Question: did he patent the process? And if he did, who owns the patents?
And if it really does work, why aren’t other countries using this process?
“Question: did he patent the process? And if he did, who owns the patents?”
Look at the dates on these articles and the you tube video.
May 24, 2007 it hits the news and he is going to Washington while saying “If I were to be bold enough, I think one day you could power an automobile with this, eventually,”
February 18, 2009 he is dead with a quote saying… “this process could not be considered an energy source, as more energy is used to produce the RF signal than can be obtained from the burning gas”
“That has always been the case with electrolysis.”
Always being since 2007?
burn salt water, use energy for de sal.
Maybe Soros is thinking of investing in coal liquefaction projects, which might become economical if he can buy the coal in the ground at a cheap enough price.
Why bother when there is no shortage of oil and gas?
Because it’s possible with some coal liquefaction projects to combine carbon storage with fuel production so the plant is carbon neutral. In the future if carbon taxes or carbon credits become more important, fuel from a carbon neutral plant would be more valuable on the market.
“carbon neutral”
….a humorous new buzzword. Under this newspeak, wood burning stoves are once again benevolent.
I suspect that a “carbon neutral” coal processing scheme might be similar to perpetual motion notion.
We learned last week that the Europeans have given up on injecting CO2 into the ground to sequester it. Turns out one eventually gets tap water resembling coca cola.
Nobody is going to pay double for junk energy.
Yes, it is easy to throw rocks at any new technology before it’s had a chance to prove itself. When the early Mercury-Redstone rockets failed, and when Apollo 1 caught fire, I’m sure there were curmudgeons and cynics who said we’ll never make it to the moon.
I have no idea if a carbon sequestration/coal liquification plant is workable. For West Virginia’s sake, let’s hope we can get it working.
Actually we were quite confident that we’d make it to the moon. Getting back, we weren’t so sure.
You pay for it my friend.
And you pay for the Bush Wars. Deal!
Lola,
You’ll have to explain what one has to do with the other.
money
You failed lola.
New York Times (real journalists) promotes warmism with this “science”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/science/intolerable-heat-may-hit-the-middle-east-by-the-end-of-the-century.html
The Times is behind the times. Already happened last August in southern Iran on the Gulf coast, where the heat index hit 165 F: https://goo.gl/L4SmvY
When the temperature exceeds roughly 110F at 90% humidity, it can become quickly fatal — even for healthy, fit individuals. At such high humidities evaporation stops and sweat no longer cools the skin. Once your core temp gets in the high 100’s, you are toast.
“End of the century” is a cautious estimate. There will be areas of the world rendered uninhabitable sooner than we think.
You’re going to have to come up with better material. Iran is a desert and has been for a long time. There are areas where nothing can survive, as in deserted. It gets a lot hotter than 110F.
New York Magazine (they must be real journalists if they’re from New York) promotes the warmism, disses on Senator James Inhofe who proved that warmism is impossible when he brought a snowball on the Senate floor:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/snowball-chucking-senator-may-crash-paris-talks.html
Wow, some stocks are really overpriced in my view:
McDonalds
Home Depot
Coca Cola
Visa
Microsoft
GE
All have a PE ratio of 24 or higher. A high PE ratio is normal and fine for a small to medium sized company that is growing quickly. But these stocks are large, mature companies with not much room for growth. Is McDonalds really worth 10 times book value? They’ve already saturated the world with their product, I don’t see how they can grow fast enough to justify a growth stock price. Oh, they just got upgraded to $130 per share.
Is McDonalds really worth 10 times book value? They’ve already saturated the world with their product, I don’t see how they can grow fast enough to justify a growth stock price.
Haven’t you heard? You can get Egg McMuffins all day now! That’s innovation!
buh-buh-buh-buh-BAH, I’m lovin’ it.
Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -
602.69
P/E (ttm): 863.57
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AMZN
Amazon is amazing: not only are they dominating internet sales, bringing Walmart to their knees, they are also battling head-to-head with Microsoft and Google for cloud computer services. A two-sector monster. Even if they are not worth the $600/share price, Amazon is something else. I like my Prime membership.
https://acarisnotarefrigerator.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/meerkat-standing.jpg
‘Amazon is something else’
Boy-howdy! Now they’ve got the post office losing even more money by working on Sundays.
Heh, Walmart of the Internet, that’s for sure. I suppose millions of people can’t be wrong, but I’ve only shopped there once and promptly returned the item. The selling pages make my eyes cross. Too much information. Way too much information.
It just seems like to me that Bezos competes just for the sake of competing sometimes. In other words, it doesn’t matter if the enterprise makes money or not, as long as someone loses out to Amazon. Weird. He’s started a division called Amazon Handmade, to siphon off customers from a little website called Etsy, many of whose sellers are mostly crafters. Seriously. He wants the handmade quilt business? My guess is someone who is either in management or an investor in Etsy ticked him off and so he went after the customers of the website, just because he could.
And don’t get me started on his ownership of WaPo. Every day a bashing article on Trump. Trump lives rent-free in Bezos’ head.
USPS somehow survives despite Congress’ best efforts to kill it…
Heh, Walmart of the Internet
At least with my Amazon Prime membership I can shop online where I am spared the indignity of having to look at a tattooed 300 pounder in soiled sweats driving a mobility scooter, holding up the checkout line while the cashier figures out which junk food items can or cannot be purchased with a SNAP card.
You may have missed this from last week.
McDonald’s Shares Soar as Easterbrook Turnaround Takes Hold
McDonald’s Corp. shares soared the most in almost seven years after third-quarter profit topped analysts’ estimates, showing Chief Executive Officer Steve Easterbrook’s plan to turn around the world’s largest restaurant chain is gaining traction.
Net income in the quarter rose 23 percent to $1.31 billion, or $1.40 a share, the Oak Brook, Illinois-based company said in a statement Thursday. Analysts estimated $1.27, on average. And while revenue fell 5.3 percent to $6.62 billion, that beat analysts’ $6.41 billion average projection.
McDonald’s back to basics since ascending to the CEO position in March. He’s tweaked the menu, paring back weaker-selling items while adding a few new offerings, such as a buttermilk chicken sandwich, that have been hits with customers. The world’s largest restaurant chain also has renewed a focus on providing value for customers with a popular $2.50 meal deal. The changes helped propel global same-store sales to their best performance in more than three years, with gains coming from all of its geographic divisions.
“The return to positive same-store sales across all of the operating segments is huge progress for their turnaround plan,” said Jennifer Bartashus, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Sales at locations open at least 13 months rose 4 percent globally, topping analysts’ average estimate for a 1.9 percent increase. U.S. same-store sales rose 0.9 percent in the quarter, marking the best performance in more than two years and beating analysts’ average projection for a 0.2 percent decline.
The shares rose 8.1 percent to a record close of $110.87 in New York for the biggest increase since October 2008. McDonald’s has gained 18 percent this year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-22/mcdonald-s-profit-tops-estimates-as-new-menu-items-help-results
Thanks MM. The last two paragraphs tell the real story: the sales increase numbers are small percentages, while the stock has gained 18% this year. To catch up to the 18% bump they’re going to have to sell a lot of Egg McMuffins and Quarter Pounders…
‘WaPo…Every day a bashing article on Trump’
Yeah, Trump has shown that a candidate can criticize globalism. Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen the other candidates fire back, saying “nu-uh, NAFTA is great, trade with China is making us rich!”
As an aside, the other day I saw a banner outside a liquor store promoting its EBT service.
The “other candidates” are mega-donor-driven, and I’m pretty sure all those donors are globalists. That’s how we got here.
EBT - But, cheaper than jail. Or do you have a better idea as what to do with these unskilled zombies? No one will ever hire them, too much of a liability. Anti- abortion? then you get to take care of them later.
Everyone on SNAP is an unskilled zombie? Where’d you get that idea? Even if that notion had any validity, there are plenty of jobs that don’t require much skill.
Have you ever driven through the South? I would not hire those people to sweep my driveway. They might fake an injury and sue me. They cant even keep their pants up.
ps. what jobs dont require skills?
I wrote that there are jobs that don’t require much skill. If you look at the jobs report every month, jobs in bars and restaurants are usually near the top of the list in terms of the number of jobs created. It doesn’t require a lot of skill to be a waiter or a dishwasher.
That’s a wild statement that no one in the entire South is employable. Companies like Airbus and Hyundai and so forth appear to disagree.
“McDonald’s is seeing a surge in sales of its Egg McMuffin breakfasts – and it’s all because of one minor ingredient change. The fast food giant has stopped using margarine – spreading old fashioned butter over the muffin slices instead. And the simple trick is working a treat for the global chain and customers alike, with a 0.9 per cent growth in sales across the US.”
0.9% growth. That’ll send the stock to the moon…
Egg McMuffins
I wonder if the creator of the Egg Mcm still get his royalties? He has a mansion in Santa Barbara.
22 for the S&P
print baby print
WSJ article:
Sam Zell Edges Out of Apartments
Equity Residential agrees to sell some apartments for $5.4 billion to Starwood Capital
I find what’s interesting is the two conflicting opinions from Zell and Sternlicht (both not stupid).
The Zell quote:
“There’s an awful lot of apartments under construction,” Mr. Zell said, “and the majority of them are garden apartments in suburban areas.”
And so they are selling similar apartments.
The Sternlicht quote:
“This is the healthiest U.S. apartment market in my lifetime,” Mr. Sternlicht said in an interview Friday. “We don’t see that trend reversing.”
I’ll be interested to see who ends up on the “right” side of this trade. My money is on Zell.
RE markets nearly always turn with high supply being added, and the one place where there is lots of supply being added, is apartments.
“This is the healthiest U.S. apartment market in my lifetime,”
Given the fact that tens of millions of houses are held up in foreclosure moratoriums, this makes sense.
If foreclosure moratoriums exist, then fewer people would be renting, since they would just stay in their house…since no one is kicking them out.
Logic fail.
They exist in every single state my friend.
Misrepresentation fail.
“they would just stay in their house…”
As of 2014, there are just as many owner occupied units as there were in 2005.
‘Benghazi: What Neither Hillary Nor the Republicans Want To Talk About’
‘The hearing could have been a watershed in American foreign policy if someone on either side of the aisle had wished to pillory Hillary on an issue that screams out for public answers…That issue is what was really going on in Benghazi.’
‘In short, to an extent still undisclosed to the American people, US agencies (and specifically the CIA) were at least aware of – and almost certainly complicit in – a pipeline to ship weapons from Gaddafi’s captured stocks to jihad terrorists in Syria seeking to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The key actors were jihadists, including elements of al-Qaeda, that NATO had assisted in overthrowing Gaddafi.’
‘Shockingly, such savages don’t always remain on the leash and sometimes bite the hand that fed them. In a word, the Benghazi debacle was blowback from a “regime change” operation in which our allies and clients were the very terrorists we’ve been told for 14 years by both parties are the greatest threat to Americans’ lives and freedoms.’
‘The same pattern continues today, in Syria. Just this week, in light of Russia’s airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh), the al-Nusra Front (the official al-Qaeda affiliate), Ahrar al-Sham, and other jihadists, the Obama administration boldly responded – with arms drops to “trusted” terrorists. Having been up to their elbows in supporting jihad in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Gulf States are now doubling down on their aid to terror groups in Syria, while publicly members of the US-led “anti-ISIL coalition.” Some allies.’
‘And where is the GOP? Aside from a few noble exceptions, Republicans are faulting Obama for not providing more help to the jihadists, even joining with none other than Hillary Clinton in calling for a no-fly zone. How little we’ve learned.’
http://original.antiwar.com/James_George_Jatras/2015/10/25/benghazi-what-neither-hillary-nor-the-republicans-want-to-talk-about/
They’ve really pulled off a miracle with this ISIS/Syria thing. Actively doing the exact opposite of what they tell us they’re doing.
Filed under Big Lies.
Why we would believe anything these criminals in DC tell us is beyond me. Some posters here think all is well because Hillary “looked good”.
Some posters here think all is well because Hillary “looked good”.
Hmmm … I don’t recall anyone saying that. Yes, some did say that Hillary looked good under pressure, but I don’t recall anyone say “and thus all is well”. All it means is that she is a tough bird. Nothing more.
Perhaps I should have said “indicated their approval of Hillary”.
It’s indicative of the times and uninteresting at the same time. Hillary fans think that she performed well at the hearing. Hillary haters think the opposite.
I don’t know firsthand how she performed. My point was that the underlying corruption cancels any significance of how she presents on TV (her or any of the other actors). Refer to the article Ben posted.
Then Colorado is correct. You probably can’t find anything posted here lately in which someone states that the kind of thing mentioned in that article should be ignored because Hillary performed well.
You have apparently missed a thing or two.
What, no casino buying this for the publicity?
https://www.yahoo.com/food/cracker-from-the-titanic-sells-for-23000-155719441.html
Proof that some people have too much money to burn.
Gotta love how Trump tripled down on Bush and 9/11. About time that we talked about it. Blair now too. I wonder if there is anyone still alive who think invading Iraq was a good idea? (besides Cheney)
The Iraq war has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion so far and with interest could swell to more than $6 trillion, according to a study released Thursday.
The study, part of the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, drew from actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments.
That $2 trillion figure comes from $1.7 trillion in war expenses and an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans.
What happens to the European immigrants when it turns out a lot of them carry diseases/
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/614793/German-hospital-refugees-asylum-seekers-migrants-demand-breaking-point
How’s that hope ‘n change working out for ya, ‘Murica?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-26/what-recovery-record-number-americans-become-blood-plasma-sellers-make-ends-meet
I wonder what we do next, now that “trickle down” failed.
I think it is actually healthier to ignore it all and just go fishing. All our concerns mean nothing and are just a waste of time.
Demand management is just another failed socialism scheme my friend.
Amazon.com: Nobody Died At Sandy Hook: It wasn’t a School …
http://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Died-Sandy-Hook-Massacre/dp/1518650848 - 439k - Cached - Similar pages