Tag: finance

JPY carry trades are not helping and stocks just keep testing lows and finding no new BTFATH-ers for now. This will come as a little surprise to those who have watched the saturated and less exuberant credit markets unable to join the party for the last 2 months.

 

Credit never bought it…

 

and all those NFP taper-is-good gains are gone…

 

as JPY carry is being unwopund (for now)…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/TtoMS6JCU7U/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The Python That Ate Your Job

We are already well into the "end of work."

The more accurate title would be "The Python (Script) That Ate Your Job." Python is a computer language whose core philosophy is summarized by "PEP 20 (The Zen of Python)", which includes aphorisms such as:

• Beautiful is better than ugly.
• Explicit is better than implicit.
• Simple is better than complex.
• Complex is better than complicated.
• Readability counts.

(source: Wikipedia)

As I understand it (from a non-programmer POV), Python enables rapid development of scripts that may not be optimized by some metrics but which work perfectly well in terms of solving a problem in a cost-effective manner.

(Programmers can be highly partisan, i.e. emotionally attached to their preferred language, so I am trying to be as non-partisan and careful as possible here to avoid arousing the ire of either Pythoneers or Python detractors. I am just an ignorant bystander; please don't shoot the piano player, etc.)

A senior manager at a small tech company recently related a story that illustrates 1) the power of Python (and other scripting languages) and 2) the changing nature of work:

The company had some time-consuming data analysis that needed to get done on a regular basis, and the manager was considering recruiting a (paid) intern to do the work. Instead, he spent four hours writing a Python script which did the work in a few minutes. He named the program "Intern."

This story is repeated thousands of times a day across millions of tasks. Virtually all of my self-employed friends use technology to enable one person to produce output that would have taken three people in the 1980s.

As management guru Peter Drucker noted, enterprises don't have profits, they only have expenses. If you are self-employed or own/manage a business, you will immediately grasp the profound truth of this insight.

If you can replace an expensive worker (and every employee is expensive nowadays, due to the high cost of labor and general overhead) with a Python script that can be crafted in a few hours, financial fact compels you to do so: your business has no profit, it only has expenses.

This dynamic is scale-invariant, meaning it is true of all organizations, from one-person businesses up to global corporations and entire nations. A non-profit group only has expenses, and so do churches, cities and nations. Once expenses exceed income, the organization goes bust.

Could I be replaced with a Python script? In some ways, yes: a script could be written that mined the thousands of entries and essays I've written for repeating words, phrases and themes, and the script would rehash the material into "new" entries.

But since the script isn't logging "experience" in the same way as a human does, the script would not be able to replicate dynamics such as changing one's mind or taking a new direction, although it could randomly generate such behaviors to mimic human development.

Would the script be "good enough" to attract readers? Perhaps; but attracting and keeping readers is not necessarily a problem-state that can be solved with data-mining and pattern matching, as readers seek not just novelty and expressive writing but insight. Any script that rehashed existing material would not be generating new insight; it would simply be repackaging previous insights.

For highly partisan blogs, this might well be "good enough," since partisan readers actually want to read the same rehashed material again and again: in effect, a script that repackaged "it's the Demopublican's fault" with new headlines and slightly different content would closely match the human content generator's output.

I have no doubt some clever programmers have already played around with generating rehashed content and posting it as a blog written by a human being, an artifice masked by an avatar ("Hi, my name is J.Q. Public and I write about politics."). It would almost amount to sport to generate a phony history and cobbled-together quirks to fill out the illusion of personhood.

(Some readers have even wondered if "Charles Hugh Smith" is such an avatar. The answer is no, because the history and quirks of "Charles Hugh Smith" are simply too implausible to be believable. Also, the cost of maintaining such a complicated avatar isn't worth the paltry income generated by the blog. What machine intelligence would be dumb enough to maintain this idiotically complicated enterprise for such a paltry return? Only a human would be compelled to do so.)

Could a robot and standardized scripts replace everything I can do with a Skil 77 wormdrive power saw? It could certainly do a great many repetitive tasks at a work bench, but it would not be able to do non-standardized, on-the-jobsite tasks such as cutting out the rotten sections of a wood window frame. The robot might be able to execute the cuts (presuming it was light enough and mobile enough to stand securely on a scaffold or slope), but it would need a human partner to program the cuts in the real world and in real time.

In other words, "work" is increasingly a partnership of humans and technology. If one's skills and experience (i.e. labor) can be replaced with a Python script, it will be replaced by a Python script. Organizations that fail to replace costly paid human labor with a script will have much higher costs than those organizations that replace paid labor with scripts.

The paid human labor that can't be replaced by a script will increasingly require the knowledge and skills needed to collaborate with technology as an essential work partner.

We are already well into the "end of work." Digital pythons have been eating jobs for some time now, and because organizations only have expenses, they will continue to do so indefinitely until the only paid jobs left are those that cannot be fully replaced by a script or a robot operating on standardized scripts.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/5lhrj3ol6yc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The Python That Ate Your Job

We are already well into the "end of work."

The more accurate title would be "The Python (Script) That Ate Your Job." Python is a computer language whose core philosophy is summarized by "PEP 20 (The Zen of Python)", which includes aphorisms such as:

• Beautiful is better than ugly.
• Explicit is better than implicit.
• Simple is better than complex.
• Complex is better than complicated.
• Readability counts.

(source: Wikipedia)

As I understand it (from a non-programmer POV), Python enables rapid development of scripts that may not be optimized by some metrics but which work perfectly well in terms of solving a problem in a cost-effective manner.

(Programmers can be highly partisan, i.e. emotionally attached to their preferred language, so I am trying to be as non-partisan and careful as possible here to avoid arousing the ire of either Pythoneers or Python detractors. I am just an ignorant bystander; please don't shoot the piano player, etc.)

A senior manager at a small tech company recently related a story that illustrates 1) the power of Python (and other scripting languages) and 2) the changing nature of work:

The company had some time-consuming data analysis that needed to get done on a regular basis, and the manager was considering recruiting a (paid) intern to do the work. Instead, he spent four hours writing a Python script which did the work in a few minutes. He named the program "Intern."

This story is repeated thousands of times a day across millions of tasks. Virtually all of my self-employed friends use technology to enable one person to produce output that would have taken three people in the 1980s.

As management guru Peter Drucker noted, enterprises don't have profits, they only have expenses. If you are self-employed or own/manage a business, you will immediately grasp the profound truth of this insight.

If you can replace an expensive worker (and every employee is expensive nowadays, due to the high cost of labor and general overhead) with a Python script that can be crafted in a few hours, financial fact compels you to do so: your business has no profit, it only has expenses.

This dynamic is scale-invariant, meaning it is true of all organizations, from one-person businesses up to global corporations and entire nations. A non-profit group only has expenses, and so do churches, cities and nations. Once expenses exceed income, the organization goes bust.

Could I be replaced with a Python script? In some ways, yes: a script could be written that mined the thousands of entries and essays I've written for repeating words, phrases and themes, and the script would rehash the material into "new" entries.

But since the script isn't logging "experience" in the same way as a human does, the script would not be able to replicate dynamics such as changing one's mind or taking a new direction, although it could randomly generate such behaviors to mimic human development.

Would the script be "good enough" to attract readers? Perhaps; but attracting and keeping readers is not necessarily a problem-state that can be solved with data-mining and pattern matching, as readers seek not just novelty and expressive writing but insight. Any script that rehashed existing material would not be generating new insight; it would simply be repackaging previous insights.

For highly partisan blogs, this might well be "good enough," since partisan readers actually want to read the same rehashed material again and again: in effect, a script that repackaged "it's the Demopublican's fault" with new headlines and slightly different content would closely match the human content generator's output.

I have no doubt some clever programmers have already played around with generating rehashed content and posting it as a blog written by a human being, an artifice masked by an avatar ("Hi, my name is J.Q. Public and I write about politics."). It would almost amount to sport to generate a phony history and cobbled-together quirks to fill out the illusion of personhood.

(Some readers have even wondered if "Charles Hugh Smith" is such an avatar. The answer is no, because the history and quirks of "Charles Hugh Smith" are simply too implausible to be believable. Also, the cost of maintaining such a complicated avatar isn't worth the paltry income generated by the blog. What machine intelligence would be dumb enough to maintain this idiotically complicated enterprise for such a paltry return? Only a human would be compelled to do so.)

Could a robot and standardized scripts replace everything I can do with a Skil 77 wormdrive power saw? It could certainly do a great many repetitive tasks at a work bench, but it would not be able to do non-standardized, on-the-jobsite tasks such as cutting out the rotten sections of a wood window frame. The robot might be able to execute the cuts (presuming it was light enough and mobile enough to stand securely on a scaffold or slope), but it would need a human partner to program the cuts in the real world and in real time.

In other words, "work" is increasingly a partnership of humans and technology. If one's skills and experience (i.e. labor) can be replaced with a Python script, it will be replaced by a Python script. Organizations that fail to replace costly paid human labor with a script will have much higher costs than those organizations that replace paid labor with scripts.

The paid human labor that can't be replaced by a script will increasingly require the knowledge and skills needed to collaborate with technology as an essential work partner.

We are already well into the "end of work." Digital pythons have been eating jobs for some time now, and because organizations only have expenses, they will continue to do so indefinitely until the only paid jobs left are those that cannot be fully replaced by a script or a robot operating on standardized scripts.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/5lhrj3ol6yc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Two days ago, supposedly in an attempt to demonstrate how “contained” the radiation fallout from Fukushima was, an event was held in Tokyo to demonstrate the safety of the rice grown in the vicinity of the evacuated area around the exploded nuclear power plant according to the source, NHK. And since officials from Fukushima Prefecture said “no radioactive materials were detected in any of the harvested rice” a whopping 540 kilograms of the non-radioactive rice would be served in a government office complex in Tokyo for 9 days from Monday. We further learned that Senior Vice Environment Minister Shinji Inoue and Parliamentary Vice Environment Minister Tomoko Ukishima tasted rice balls made of the crop on the first day. Inoue said the rice tasted good especially when he thought about the great effort that went into cultivating the crop. A farmer from Kawamata Town said he will continue to cultivate rice now that he knows that it’s possible to grow a tasty product if the paddy fields are properly decontaminated. He said he travelled from his temporary home to the paddy to tend the rice as it grew.

While we will avoid commenting on the “intelligence” behind this action, designed to demonstrate just how under control the Fukushima situation is (when even Tepco admitted it no longer is), especially since it takes years if not decades for radiation-induced illnesses to appear (although we do remind readers that the leader of the Fukushima explosion response team did die from Cancer in July, or just over two years after the disaster), we will note something curious.

A quick search for the original article on NHK, which we read when it came out, reveals a surprising finding: a 404 error.

This is ironic because a cached version of the same URL still exists, all the more so since the original story was picked up and syndicated by others include RT and Voice of Russia.

Which makes one wonder: is this the first instance of the government’s brand new “secrecy” bill being implemented, and if so, why, of all places, in a story which is nothing but propaganda to telegraph that all is well in Fukushima and whose downside is at most the well-being (and life) of two lowly government apparatchiks.

In the meantime, if the US is importing any rice from Japan, it may want to give it the good old Geiger Counter test or two.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/q7d2F_Gp02A/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The ratio of bulls to bears has never (that is ever) been higher according to (the perhaps ironically names) Investor’s Intelligence. There are now more than 4x more bulls than bears and even more concerning, the only time “bears” have been lower than the current 14.3% was in the spring of 1987…

 

 

h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/hYOhrfvWFAY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The ratio of bulls to bears has never (that is ever) been higher according to (the perhaps ironically names) Investor’s Intelligence. There are now more than 4x more bulls than bears and even more concerning, the only time “bears” have been lower than the current 14.3% was in the spring of 1987…

 

 

h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/hYOhrfvWFAY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform blog,

The MSM  is trying to spin the 110,000 sign ups in November as a fantastic result. When a “free” new entitlement is announced and rolled out in this country, they would normally be knocking down the doors to sign up. Anyone who really wants Obamacare has already signed up. The first two months should generate the biggest numbers. When you have only achieved 5% of your goal after two months, you’ve failed miserably. Obamacare is a disaster before it even gets off the ground and bankrupts the country. Young healthy people will never sign up for Obamacare. They know it’s a scam. They also know that Obama and his IRS minions are so incompetent, they’ll never figure out how to collect the fines from people who don’t sign up. Have you ever met an IRS employee?

But, the MSM will do their darndest to mislead the public about Obamacare success.

 

Behind Obamacare figures

The latest figures on Obamacare enrollment are out, and they have better but not great news for the White House. The stats show that Obamacare enrollees who have selected insurance plans through the federal HealthCare.gov website quadrupled from October to November, but other figures don’t show growth that rosy.

HHS figures show that HealthCare.gov enrolled 110,410 new consumers in health plans last month, more than four times that of the 26,794 signed up during October, as the troubled website started to work out the troubles it experienced from its inception Oct. 1.

Growth in the number of people processed through the system wasn’t as sharp. HHS figures indicate that 822,789 consumers were deemed eligible for health plans last month, up 17% from the 702,619 reported for October. The pace of those who completed applications for health coverage was slightly better, with November postings of 1.23 million, up 19% from the 993,635 reported for October.

Further, activity slowed significantly on both the federal and state marketplaces, though some of that wane can be attributed to initial heavy interest. After nearly 27 million unique users clamored to HealthCare.gov and the state websites in October, that slowed down to roughly 12.2 million in November, a drop of 54%. Calls to the various service centers dropped to 2.1 million from 3.2 million, falling by a third.

HHS officials said nearly 365,000 people have selected health plans from state and federal marketplaces since Oct. 1, with nearly two-thirds of that coming from the states. The number of federal marketplace enrollees deemed eligible for coverage is twice that of the state-run exchanges — at 1.5 million vs. the states’ 780,000.

In addition to the 365,000 nationwide sign-ups, more than 800,000 were deemed eligible for Medicaid or the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program. HealthCare.gov serves 36 states, while the 14 other states and the District of Columbia run their own exchanges.

HHS hopes to enroll 7 million people in health plans by March 31. It has been hampered severely by troubles with HealthCare.gov, which it says is operating smoothly for the bulk of consumers visiting the site.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/8v_h99lqECs/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The following Third Point letter may or may not have been actually sent, although if indeed shareholder activists – more aggressive now than ever thanks to the brilliant idea of forcing management teams to lever themselves up to the gills with what for now appears to be cheap credit – do get some original ideas thanks to this particular Vanity Fair lampoon, then children around the world will have a fabricated Dan Loeb to thank for having their Christmas presents delivered by an army of highly efficient and profit-maximizing Amazon drones.

Source: a rather humorous Vanity Fair

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/xhu4iEozHuI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

But…we have a deal in DC?! As the safety bid for bonds and bullion continues, stocks are greatly rotating lower, retracing all the post-payrolls (taper is a good thing) gains. Perhaps more notably, attempts to juice stocks with EURJPY are failing (for now)…

Retraced…

 

EURJPY not working…. But AUDJPY is…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/szz7OL9auCQ/story01.htm Tyler Durden