Light Rail Discussions

Conrad deFiebre, writing in response to former Strib colleague Mike Meyers’ trashing of light rail, mentions the following:

“Buses surely are a more democratic form of mass transit than is light rail,” [Meyers] writes. “We’re still waiting to hear about plans for a light-rail line through the neighborhoods of north Minneapolis, which have more than their share of poor and minorities.”

News flash for Meyers: Months ago, Hennepin County officials selected from among four alternatives for the planned Southwest Transitway, the only route that does serve north Minneapolis. The Metropolitan Council is expected to ratify that choice later this month. Another proposed transitway high on the Met Council’s priority list, the Bottineau, would ply the heart of the North Side, West Broadway.

Since we’re talking about poor neighborhoods: One thing that Meyers and deFiebre ignore is that the planned route of the next phase of the light rail system, the Central Corridor, is along University Avenue, which goes through the economically-depressed Midway and Rondo neighborhoods — and which has been resisted tooth and nail by many anti-LRT activists. But I guess these gents are both too Minneapolis-centric to notice the existence of that funny little burg across the river from them.

DeFiebre also mentions that one of Meyers’ talking points — that light rail currently carries “only” one in eight public-transit users — is actually a point in light rail’s favor: With over 200 bus routes in the Twin Cities and only one light rail line, the Hiawatha Line, that means that the single light-rail line is carrying the equivalent of thirty (30) bus routes!

Another thing: The fact that LRT routes can’t be changed as readily and as cheaply as bus routes is a big point in their favor. Developers know that they can count on the line to still exist when they finish their office park or apartment block, and use it as a selling point. Development takes place along light rail routes, much as towns sprung up alongside train tracks in the early days of railroading.

More market madness. Or not.

As of 11PM Eastern, Asia has been following the US markets down. But, interestingly, futures on the US markets are up slightly… roughly 0.25%.

Currencies are interesting to watch, because they tell you where money may be flowing. The stronger a currency, probably the more foreign money is pouring in. The yen strengthened abruptly to 89/$, but is now easing back. Yen strength is important for domestic producers in Japan, who find it difficult to compete at these levels. The multinationals have outsourced a lot of their production, though, so this is nice for the Japanese consumer who isn’t employed in domestic industry. The Euro has bounced way up from 1.21 to 1.26/$. This looks a bit stronger than a relief rally to me, and may signal a shift in sentiment away from the US, as people figure out that no one is immune from the financial turmoil in Europe. Or maybe fears of a Euro crisis are diminishing.

An interesting point is that this correction was foreshadowed in mid-April by foreign exchanges, such as the Hong Kong and Bovespa indices. They have fallen about as much as the US–there really is tight correlation between world markets–but more gradually.

Added, 12:15 PM Eastern. Sure enough, there seems to be a rebound in Asia and US futures are creeping upward. Neither means anything for sure for tomorrow, but it’s a good bet that the Friday’s open will be a bit stronger than Thursday’s.

Added, Friday 11:30 Eastern. The markets are up now. My guess is for a fade to the close on higher volume. But unless there’s bad news over the weekend, this leg of the trip down may be more or less over.

Added, Friday 12:15 Eastern. Markets up a percent. Volume trails off. Time for the intra-day reversal probably ending down.

Another exciting day at the dogtrack?

Asia down, US market futures slightly negative as of ca. 1 AM Eastern.

The S&P closed at about 7.7% off its closing high on April 23rd, still above the low following Fat Finger Thursday, i.e., Friday May 7th. It’s not yet a correction, and the technicians will be watching closely to see if we break significantly below 111 on the S&P. From CNBC:

[Dow Theorist] Richard Russell wrote that there is a risk of a “major crash” if the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls below the May 7 closing price of 10,380.43, according to several media reports.

“If I read the stock market correctly, it’s telling me that there is a surprise ahead,” Russell wrote. “And that surprise will be a reversal to the downside for the economy, plus a collection of other troubles ahead.”

“Do your friends a favor. Tell them to “batten down the hatches” because there’s a hard rain coming,” Russell warned.

The Dow futures are now at 10395, just 15 points above Russell’s Armaggedon number.

[Added: Ritholtz suggests that S&P 1065.79 and Dow 9787.17 are the true Armaggedon numbers. Going to show how aery-faerie technical analysis is]

As Atrios would say, could be another exciting day at the dogtrack.

Or not.

[Added, 11:40AM Eastern. Strong bounce off off Dow 10,127. The index could even end positive for the day, though since tomorrow is Friday, I kind of doubt that traders are going to want to take the gamble. Odds IMO favor a fade to the close.]

And Now, A PSA From D.C. Douglas, Former GEICO Ad Voiceover Artist

Douglas is the gent who was fired from his voiceover gig after he left a message on the voicemail of FreedomWorks, Dick Armey’s right-wing lobbyist teabagger-backing group. Here’s what he has to say about that:

Remember, kids: Don’t drunk-dial FreedomWorks at 1-888-564-6273. If you must call, do it stone-cold sober and be polite and factual. They hate that most of all. If you can work in mention of Armey’s horndoggy misogynistic women-as-meat history, including the sexual harassment scandal involving Anna Weninger, please do.

Thank God for Monica Lewinsky, Part II

Sorry I didn’t do an earlier heads-up on this, as I’d promised earlier:

By 1997, Bill Clinton felt he had the upper hand with Congress and it was time for him to make historic moves. He had replaced Leon Panetta as Chief of Staff with investment banker Erskine Bowles late in his first term, and as author Steven Gillon tells the tale, Bowles brought a sense of order to the White House. Bowles planned to return to the private sector as Clinton’s second term began, but Bill and Hillary implored him to stay on for one final task: “fixing” Social Security.

President Obama has likewise entrusted Erskine Bowles with the task of chairing his own Deficit Commission, which is currently meeting in secret to address Social Security and other entitlement issues. Since little is known about the deliberations of that commission, I thought it would be instructive to have Dr. Gillon on to talk about Bowles’s history of shuttle diplomacy in 1997 to negotiate a deal between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton to cut Social Security. He based his book The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation on interviews he conducted with Clinton, Gingrich, Bowles and others involved in the negotiations. And according to Bowles, the deal would have gone through save for one factor: the Monica Lewinsky episode.

The Book Salon will likely be over by the time you see this, but stop by and read the comments anyway.

As Atrios Says…

As Atrios is wont to say, there is nothing a far-right-wing celebrity can say or do that will get them forever banned from public life. (The closest that any of them have come to it in the past decade was Pat Buchanan — and that wasn’t for his anti-Semitism and general nastiness, but for the one thing he’s done in recent memory that approached an actual act of decency, vocally and publicly opposing George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Suddenly, all the people who’d kept schtum about Patrick’s nastier beliefs — or had openly cheered him on — belatedly remembered that, oh yeah, he’s said some icky stuff about Jews and blacks and women and and and. And.)

In that vein, I give you, courtesy of Steve Benen, what passes for an intellectual and elder statesman on the conservative side nowadays — the guy who harrassed his first wife Jackie, who was still groggy from the anaesthetic after her cancer surgery, until she would sign the divorce papers he shoved at her in her hospital bed, the one, the only — Newton Leroy Gingrich:

Disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), inexplicably one of the nation’s most ubiquitous Sunday-show guests, sat down with Chris Wallace yesterday on “Fox News Sunday.” The host confronted Gingrich with one of his recent quotes: “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

Wallace said, “Mr. Speaker, respectfully, isn’t that wildly over the top?” “No,” Gingrich replied, insisting that he believes President Obama intends to “decide who earns how much.”

It doesn’t matter that this is a bald-faced lie — one so blatant that even Chris Wallace couldn’t stomach it (and Wallace’s entire career is based on gleefully trashing and denigrating everything that made his father Mike a household name back when TV journalists became household names because they deserved to be such). The only way Newt Gingrich would ever get kicked off our TV screens would be if he suddenly repented all of his past career and became a progressive. And that will never happen, because there’s no money in it for him.

Further decline in US leadership

Once again, the US is left in the dust by Brazil.

Ladane Nasseri and Henry Meyer, Bloomberg:

Iran agreed to hand to Turkey about half of its enriched uranium in exchange for fuel to run a medical reactor, possibly thwarting U.S. efforts to step up international sanctions over the Iranian atomic program. …

The agreement, brokered by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, comes as the U.S. has been rallying support for a fourth round of United Nations sanctions against the Persian Gulf state.

Sanger and Slackman at the NYT get around to saying this, well below the fold:

Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, Namik Tan, described the agreement as a “confidence-building measure,” and said he was disappointed in the Obama administration’s reaction. “I would have expected a more encouraging statement,” he said.

“We don’t believe in sanctions, and I don’t believe anybody can challenge us, and certainly not the United States,” Mr. Tan said. “They don’t work.”

Rightly or wrongly, the US has been categorized as a nation that deals with conflict through extreme violence. The world wants another model. Brazil and Turkey, for their own reasons (perhaps both hope to develop nuclear industries of their own), are entering a vacuum created by a lack of American leadership.

Correction in progress?

Technical indicators always amuse me. If we believe that people buy or sell stocks because of actual events, and that future events can’t be predicted with any reliability from past events, then they’re completely meaningless. But technical indicators are complicated statistics that people don’t fully understand, so they take on a mystic aura.

Some of them, like volume, are pretty straightforward. If the market makes a big move up or down on low volume, it means that not many people concur with the direction of the movement, and that it can be easily reversed.

Some, like MACD are moderately complicated, but have a pretty simple meaning. MACD uses the average of the last 9 day’s closing prices as a norm (called a signal) for the behavior. This is called the 9-day moving average, since one takes an average, then moves to the next data point to average that. Then one subtracts the 26 day moving average from the 12 day moving average and compares that to the 9-day moving average. Through no obvious connection, one makes a determination about momentum. (Why not just use derivatives?)

Bar or candle charts show what the market did during the course of a day: where did it open and close, and where was its high and low? If the high was greater than the open, it suggests that there’s some buying interest. If the closing was the high, it suggests that the buying interest was sustained. If, however, the closing was below the high, there are obviously some sellers. The candle chart is a clever coding of that information, making it easy to spot trends.

At any rate, the chart above shows what’s happened over the last six months. Volume seems to be rising, especially on sell-offs. The relative strength average is neither in overbought or oversold territory. The MACD is negative, suggesting downward momentum. The MACD has fallen below the signal, but without any marked preceding downward cross since early April. Probably a technician would say that the signal in early April was a warning of the recent crash. I’d call it coincidence.

We haven’t yet crossed the point where it’s definitely a correction (i.e., ten percent below a recent high), but it could happen this week.

Or not.

Doing away with lies and d–ned lies (but not statistics)

Via Barry Ritholtz and Jon Gertner of the NYT, improved measurement of the state of our national economy from State of the USA.

GDP has been a terrible mirage. Increasingly our national income goes to war and prisons, to corporate pork and welfare, to enriching the very wealthy, and to corrupting other nations. Increases in these things do not improve the lives of Americans. State of the USA goes live this summer and, one may hope, will tell us exactly how much damage George the Lesser did and how much repair Obama the Better-than-McCain has accomplished.

You Go, Indeed

With a big hat tip to La Vie de Cyclisme:

I just love this video.