Over on Facebook, a lot of people have their knickers in a knot over this picture of Super Bowl parking rates from WTHR:
The irony is that most of the people who are shocked, shocked at expensive pricing for Super Bowl parking are the same people who were caterwauling a few months ago about how it was unfair that the 1% had so much money. Well, guess what folks? The vast majority of people who can afford to attend the Super Bowl in the first place are among the 1%, or within spitting distance of it, So on the one day when local businesses can make a killing rooking Mr. Big Shot 1% because he wants to park his Ferrari or Escalade within walking distance, you get all outraged over “price gouging.” I guess because someone’s actually making a profit off Mr. 1% rather than the government stealing it from him to pay off the debt from your Masters in Women’s Studies.
A parking space has no “intrinsic value.” It’s worth whatever people will pay for it. (And while we’re on the subject Marx’s Labor Theory of Value is bunk. Just in case you hadn’t figured that out yet.) Why should you care that a guy who’s already paid $1,200 for tickets has to cough up another $200 for parking? No one’s forcing Mr. 1% to park there. The market pays what the market will bear.
Things are moving very fast indeed on the Euro front:
U.S. banks stop lending to European governments. While this is good news, the possibility that the Fed may rescue Europe is very, very bad news. Our own life raft is barely treading water, and now liberals want us to invite a dying elephant to climb aboard.
And not the Fed, then the IMF, which America also funds to a large extent.
This article from Der Spiegel is a good roundup on consensus wisdom, which boils down to the rest of Europe wondering why Angela Merkel won’t just give in and pay their bills.
There’s word she might even do it, but only if she can get France, Finland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Austria to join Germany in issuing “elite” Eurobonds. I mean, what’s another trillion in taxpayer equity flushed down the toilet in comparison to the beautiful dream of European integration?
From the beginning, the Brussels elites made it clear that, to adapt Abraham Lincoln, their paramount object was to save the Union. Never mind if that meant imposing epochal poverty and emigration on the southern members, and unprecedented tax rises on the northern. Never mind if it meant toppling the elected prime ministers of Italy and Greece and replacing them with Eurocrats (respectively a former European Commissioner and a former vice president of the European Central Bank — two perfect specimens of the people who caused the crisis in the first place). They were prepared to pay any price to keep the euro together — or, more precisely, to expect their peoples to pay, since EU employees are generally exempt from national taxation.
How expensive will a Euro bank bailout be? Keep in mind that at one point during the 2008 meltdown, Morgan Stanley owed Uncle Sam $107 billion. With a B. For one bank.
In the mid-1990s, Bulgaria got a good look at a currency meltdown first-hand. They only recovered by adopting a currency board for the Lev (which is exactly what Steve H. Hanke and Kurt Schuler had suggested in 1991.)
The only beneficiaries of the State’s assumption of [Anglo Irish Bank]’s liabilities are taxpayers in the countries whose banks were the reckless lenders to Anglo. Anglo, for all the guff at the time of the bank guarantee, had no systemic importance to the Irish economy. Irish taxpayers had no moral or other liability for its debts.
The sole reason for saving it was the ECB’s insistence that no euro zone bank should fail. Had Anglo failed, the costs would have been borne primarily by European banks and consequently by European taxpayers.
So the undertaking by the Irish State to stump up €47 billion to pay those private debts is an act of extreme (if extremely demented) euro-altruism. We are Europe’s ragged-trousered philanthropists, bailing out the euro with money we don’t have and that our European partners are kindly lending us at penal interest rates.
And this single act of insane generosity wipes out every red cent we’ve got from Europe since 1973.
[snip]
And for what? For less than nothing. For a moment of panic, a daft notion, a stupid indulgence in bluster and bravado. Some bleary-eyed fools decided, in the middle of the night, that they could bluff the markets by throwing all the chips we might ever have on to the table. It didn’t take long for the markets to realise that their hand contained nothing better than a pair of deuces.
But the gamble failed for Europe too. There might be some kind of (very expensive) pride in being able to say that little Ireland took the hit to save the euro zone, like the starry-eyed gal who takes a bullet for the outlaw in a corny western. But we saved nothing. All we managed to do was to buy the euro zone leaders more time in which to delude themselves that there was no real crisis.
As you can see, Texas isn’t just the fastest growing… it’s growing over twice as fast as the second fastest state and three times as fast as the third. Given that Texas is (to borrow a technical term) f***ing huge, this growth is incredible.
People are flocking to Texas in massive numbers. This is speculative, but it *seems* that people are moving to Texas looking for jobs rather than moving to Texas for a job they already have lined up. This would explain why Texas is adding jobs faster than any other state but still has a relatively high unemployment rate.
They’re also high paying jobs: “Since the recession started hourly wages in Texas have increased at a 6th fastest pace in the nation.” And, if you subtract people who moved to the state, Texas has the lowest unemployment rate in the country.
While hardly a disinterested observer, Karl Rove is far from an untutored one, and he offers up some compelling reasons why Obama will lose in 2012. Four, to be precise:
The economy is very weak and unlikely to experience a robust recovery by Election Day.
Key voter groups have soured on him.
He’s defending unpopular policies.
And he’s made bad strategic decisions.
The second point is the one he offers the most meat in terms of polling analysis. And the fourth is Obama’s decision to abandon Presidential distance and starting campaiging for reelection early.
Three of the four candidates came across as prepared, articulate, polished and effective speakers, and all four tried to portray themselves as tea party conservatives:
Ted Cruz was the most polished of the four, as you would expect of the former Texas Solicitor General. He was very good not only at making his points, but also expertly tying highlights of his career and life-story (like his work on 10th Amendment issues for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and his father fleeing Castro’s Cuba [see here for correction]) into answers without it seeming forced. His only drawbacks were that every now and then he would seem just a little bit too polished, his pitch modulations a little too calculated, and he needs to add a few touches of humor liven things up. (His one recycled Reagan anecdote isn’t going to cut it.) With Michael Williams out, I think Cruz cemented his status as both tea party favorite and frontrunner.
I have not made any secret of my doubts as to Tom Leppert‘s new-found conservative convictions, but he comes across as a very polished and prepared speaker. He says that he cut a lot of unnecessary programs as Dallas Mayor; when I get a chance, I’m going to ask his campaign for a list. If you didn’t know about his previous record, you would think him just as conservative as his compatriots. He did have a couple of weaknesses as a public speaker: shrugging and spreading his hands was his go-to move for almost every question. He also displayed a sort of nervous eye-twitch between questions, maybe because of the bright stage lights. But guess what? There are going to be a lot of bright stage lights between now and March…
Roger Williams had the most varied performance: He has an engaging, natural personality (with just the right touch of rough-hewn “old coot” country charm) and can clearly hold his own against his more polished opponents, but he went back to his “I’m a small businessman” routine two or three times too many, and too transparently. On the other hand, Williams also got the best laugh lines of the night. Referring back to an earlier question about how he’d eliminate the budget deficit in one year (he didn’t think the Ryan plan went far enough), in a question on the the EPA’s attempt to take over Texas air quality, he said “You know that 1.6 trillion I’d cut out of the deficit? The EPA would be among them.” Williams probably improved his standing the most of any candidate attending.
Elizabeth Ames Jones…look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this. Jones should get out of the race. It wasn’t her message (she made effective conservative points), it’s the fact that she was a cringingly bad public speaker tonight. I can’t tell if it’s nervousness or an actual speech impediment, but her voice sounded like it was trapped at the back of her soft palate, almost as if she had all her wisdom teeth yanked a week ago and was still getting use to her own mouth, and late in the debate she seemed to have a slight lisp. She spoke like someone who was so eager to talk that the words all tried to come out in a rush at once, causing her to stumble over herself, stop and start, and generally sound nervous; way too nervous for someone that already holds a major statewide office. She calmed down a little bit after the first couple of questions, and occasionally made good points (“I have to fight the EPA every day”), but she was far and away the weakest candidate on stage by a good measure. And her “I was down in the trenches” refrain (mostly dealing with her time in the legislature) got even tireder than Williams’ small businessman shtick. Between this and her abysmal fundraising numbers, I see no hope for Jones in this race and no reason she should continue in it. She’s doing a good job on the Railroad Commission, and she should probably stay there for the immediate future.
Not a lot of policy differences on display. All agreed not to raise taxes under any circumstances (I wondered why moderator Evan Smith didn’t ask any of them “Not even in the event of a World War with China?”), all were on-board with the Ryan plan or an even more immediate cutback in federal spending, all for greater border control measures and against amnesty, all pro-life (one of Jones’ most effective moments), all more national energy exploration, all against earmarks, all slamming Obama.
Enough for tonight. I’ll post more tomorrow if I have the time.
According to this Forbes piece, yes. This seems to be partially a reaction to the government pouring more money into the public sector.
What does that mean? Hell if I know. But it makes sense. After all, if you could get out of China, wouldn’t you?
But between this and China’s housing bubble, it goes a long way to show that China’s “economic miracle” is a lot more fragile than the likes of Thomas Friedman would have you believe…
It’s impossible to say definitively that a market has strayed into bubble territory until after the collapse. But prices rising out of the reach of average buyers is one indicator. Housing prices in the U.S. peaked at 6.4 times average annual earnings this decade. In Beijing, the figure is 22 times.
The figures get even worse when you consider that the “shadow market” (i.e., banks making “off book” loans) means the bubble is even worse than it seems:
Local governments and banks have set up off-balance sheet vehicles to conceal loans and keep the spending boom going. Fitch Ratings estimates that not only did banks exceed the central bank’s 7.5 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) cap on lending for this year, they made an additional three trillion yuan of these shadow loans.
Something that can’t go on forever won’t. That’s especially true of a housing boom in a country aging as rapidly as China (which Mark Steyn famously said “will get old before it gets rich”); and don’t forget that a rapidly aging populace was also a factor in Japan’s own “lost decade.”
The big question is whether China’s housing bubble or Europe’s Sovereign Debt Crisis pops first. The aftershocks of both will certainly be felt in our own economy…
When the Internet economy allows an increasing number of people to live anywhere, low costs win. Texans spend 8.4% of income on state and local taxes compared with 11.7% for New Yorkers. Dollars that would rent a fifth-floor walk-up in New York City instead can buy a small ranch and maybe even acreage in Texas’ suburbs, where prairie begs to be paved for another Applebee’s.
Texas creates jobs like a fiend, in part because businesses large and small have no worry of obstacles such as plaintiff-friendly courts, consumer-friendly regulators or oversight-friendly lawmakers. Pro-business isn’t just a mantra; they put it in the water.
Oil and gas still play a huge role here, but are increasingly overshadowed by technology, medical and defense jobs. Texas has more Fortune 500 company headquarters than New York.
