"No Tapering, More QE, Serious Housing Slowdown" says Saxo Bank Chief Economist

With September out of the way, most economists now expect a December tapering event. Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank in Denmark is not one of them.

Via email, Steen writes ...

More QE, Less growth, Less Inflation and Less Upside

I have mentioned a few times how I see the fourth quarter having a dramatic slow-down effect, mainly due to unemployment rising, but also due to a serious drop in US housing activities. Please see the chart below. It clearly shows not only why housing will fall (correlation with a lag of mortgage rates) but also why we will see more quantitative easing (QE) rather than less.



With Months' Supply and Mortgage Rates Increasing, Sales and Prices Will Collapse in Q4 2013

Tapering will not happen in October or in 2013 for that matter. Not a single economic vector in our model is pointing up. All indicate less growth, less inflation and less upside. The problem? The market is still talking recovery, despite the US this year being barely able to muster 1.5 percent growth after 2.5 percent last year. If this is recovery, I don't want to experience recession.

Non-Tapering Changed Fixed Income's Relative Value Over Equities

Again, we are increasingly confident about our 2.25 percent 10-year US bond rate call by the end of Q4-2013 versus 2.65 percent now. The Federal Open Market Committee's fixed income put issued by the Fed's recent non-tapering act has changed the relative value of fixed income over equities. This story has only just begun.

Alpha-wise, increasingly my Gold calls still see 1525/75 before falling again, and finally I continue to play the US dollar short as the path of least resistance will be a lower US dollar to help refuel emerging market currencies.

Housing Bulls Increasingly Optimistic

Curiously, housing bulls in the US are increasingly optimistic.

For example Bloomberg reports Blackstone Said to Gather $2 Billion for Real Estate. It's important to note that Blackstone is raising money for European real estate (but it also has huge US commitment as well).

More to the point, I find the following Seeking Alpha headline rather amusing: It's Not Too Late To Capitalize On The Real Estate Recovery.

That title reminds me of my 2005 post "It's Too Late"



When you start seeing advertisements saying "It's not too late", or "Act now before it's too late", invariable the bulk of the gains have already been had, and the top is extremely close at hand, if not already gone.

One and Done Tapering?

That was a reasonably bold call by Steen. Another possibility is a "one and done" trivial amount of tapering in December. That is along the lines of what I expected in September.

For further discussion, please see ...

• The Morning After; Price Discovery is Zero; PUT on the Bond Market? Is Inflation Really Under 2%?
 
• Fed Bizarro World; One-Sided Risk Assessment; The $64 Trillion Question

Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com 

Bank Marketing Strategy Named A Top Financial Marketing Blog

For the second consecutive year, Bank Marketing Strategy was named a top 5 financial marketing blog by The Financial Brand. 

With the intent of providing a list of valuable resources for bank and credit union marketers to reference, this year's honor was bestowed on blogs that met a defined set of weighted criteria including relevancy, quality, originality, frequency, longevity and design.

The top five blogs recognized this year were:

1. Snarketing 2.0 - Ron Shevlin, Senior Analyst from Aite Group
2. Acton Financial Marketing Insights - Steve Topper, Joe Swatek
3. Bank Marketing Strategy - Jim Marous, SVP of New Control Direct and Digital
4. Visible Banking - Christoph Langlois, Social Media Planner and Speaker
5. The Gallop Blog - Various authors

A description of each of the top 20 blogs, as well as a list of blogs receiving honorable mention are provided in The Financial Brand Top 20 announcement post.

In ranking Bank Marketing Strategy number three in 2013, Jeffry Pilcher, the publisher of the Financial Brand wrote:

"Of all the banking blogs out there, Jim’s is most similar to The Financial Brand. Jim regularly discusses the design of retail banking products/services, pricing, marketing and the customer experience. Jim’s posts will also frequently gravitate towards new/emerging technologies and channel integration, with a slant towards mobile. Some financial marketers will struggle putting the insights in some of these posts to use, but they will always find the material interesting and engaging."

This is the second year in a row Bank Marketing Strategy has been recognized as a top blog for bank and credit union marketers. Last year, Bank Marketing Strategy won both the Reader's Choice (#4) and Editor's Choice distinction from The Financial Brand (last year's winners).

It is an honor to be named in a list that includes so many blogs that I enjoy reading, learn so much from and provide such great insights. I consider the authors and publishers of these great resources both my professional and personal friends.

Thanks also to Jeffry Pilcher for setting such a high standard for each of us with his Financial Brand publication. His insatiable appetite for financial marketing news and ability to publish such a massive amount of invaluable insight daily makes his digital publication the 'go to' resource first thing each morning.

Unhappy Anniversary: Illinois Overtakes California for Second Highest Unemployment Rate in Nation

The one state arguably more screwed up than California is Illinois.

Unions, union sympathizers, socialists, and tax-hike proponents are strongly in control of both states. Is it any wonder  that perpetual economic difficulties and insurmountable pension underfundings face both states?

Via email, Ted Dabrowski at the Illinois Policy Institute writes ...

Unhappy Anniversary

Six months ago, Illinois overtook California to become the state with the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation, behind only Nevada. It hasn’t budged since.

Last week’s release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics detailed yet another month of stalled unemployment numbers for Illinois. The state’s August unemployment rate remained at 9.2% — 1.9 percentage points above the national average, which fell to 7.3% in August.

Compared to its neighbors, Illinois fared even worse. The state’s unemployment rate is now a full 2 percentage points above its neighbors’ average, which fell to 7.2% from 7.3% one month earlier.

Illinois’ unemployment rate has remained above 9% since December of last year.

Illinois Unemployment Gap



The number of unemployed Illinoisans also remains high, at 602,000. This is the third month in a row the number of unemployed has remained above 600,000.

Illinois’ most recent U-6 unemployment rate is 16.1%, meaning more than 1 million Illinoisans are unemployed or underemployed.

Five years after the end of the Great Recession, Illinois still has an unemployment rate nearly 5 percentage points higher than its pre-recession average and there are 147,000 fewer Illinoisans in the labor force compared to August 2007.



The state is still missing 177,000 nonfarm payroll jobs compared to August 2007.

Six months of the second-highest unemployment rate is no anniversary to be proud of.

Ted Dabrowski

Inquiring minds should also take a look at Fiscal Crisis in Chicago: Pensions 31% Funded, Moody's Downgrades Debt 3 Notches, Pension Liability is $61,000 Per Household; Mish's Proposed Solutions

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Introducing an all-new DFA: DoubleClick Campaign Manager

The following post originally appeared on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

The phase of adolescence is a transitional one, and this year, on the 15th anniversary of DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) we find ourselves celebrating a big milestone: an entirely rebuilt campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, the coming of age of DFA. In June, we announced that DoubleClick Campaign Manager would be available to all advertisers in the coming months, and today I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched globally.

DoubleClick Campaign Manager is at the core of our DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform. It re-imagines how marketers and agencies manage the entire scope of their digital marketing efforts - from planning and executing, to measuring and optimizing their campaigns.

Intuitive workflows that give you back time. With DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we started by building new, time-saving features into a noticeably more beautiful and responsive user interface. This means the time gained from speeding things up can free up opportunities for you and your team to work on higher-value activities.

A new trafficking interface loads up to 5 times faster than before, and ads and ad changes now go live in just 2 minutes. You can also view campaign information centrally from a single page, rather than flipping across tabs. With in-line and bulk editing, we’ve greatly reduced the number of clicks to perform common trafficking tasks.

Easy tagging. Floodlight, DoubleClick’s universal conversion tag is integrated with Google Tag Manager. Now, you can push Floodlight tags directly from DoubleClick Campaign Manager to Google Tag Manager (and your site), reducing the time it takes to implement tags from weeks, to minutes.

Programmatic and reservations in one place. With one unified UI and reporting system across DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager, you get access to accurate, de-duplicated conversion data. Creatives and tags are shared, and remarketing lists are synced so you can engage your audience seamlessly across every part of your buy.

Seamless support for mobile/HTML5, video, and rich media formats. DoubleClick Campaign Manager makes it easier to produce, scale, and traffic creative formats - from mobile and video, to rich media and dynamic.

A mobile-first approach. Mobile is built into the fabric of our platform. Support for IAB-compliant HTML5 creatives means a single creative can render on any device and help you take advantage of the engaging, rich-media capabilities of HTML5. We’ve ensured that your tags work everywhere too. There is no longer a separate mobile tag, and mobile targeting and reporting dimensions are automatically available in all served tags.

Powerful video features. An intuitive approach to video trafficking allows you to share and re-use companion ads across videos, and get a detailed performance breakdown. And support for the next wave of video formats - including interactive video and dynamic VPAID - helps you deliver more engaging videos. Additionally, you can now track your YouTube TrueView campaigns alongside all your other placements, allowing for more holistic insights.

Easier Rich Media. Integration with DoubleClick Studio allows you to easily sync creatives into DoubleClick Campaign Manager, saving you time and effort. New preview functionality allows you to test and QA creatives without relying on your creative agency. And you can create ads that are tailored to your audience with dynamic creative that optimizes the best combination of variables to serve the “perfect ad” for every impression.

New audience features help you surface key insights and optimize campaigns for better performance.

Create powerful remarketing lists based on custom Floodlight variables. Your lists are automatically shared with DoubleClick Bid Manager and updated in real-time, helping you establish second contact with your audience quickly.

New audience reporting gives you strategic insights. Audience is now a new dimension in standard reporting, so you can understand the segments with which your message best resonated. If you use DoubleClick Bid Manager, audience composition reporting shows you how your first party lists overlap with your third party lists. We will be bringing this capability to all customers soon.

Enhancements in reporting for better decisions. Reporting has always been the backbone of the DoubleClick platform, with de-duplicated reporting across channels. We built on this foundation last year with Report Builder, Multi-Channel Funnels, and DoubleClick Verification. Now, with DoubleClick Campaign Manager, we bring you even more insightful reporting tools:

Powerful attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels helps you better understand your customers’ journey from initial interaction to final conversion and more accurately credit the channels and touchpoints that contributed to your conversions. With the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can choose from several basic models of assigning credit for impressions and clicks, or you can create your own model in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

Integration of Wildfire’s social technology platform with the DoubleClick attribution suite means you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in driving social conversions. Additionally, social ad impressions and clicks can be tracked directly in DoubleClick Campaign Manager, allowing you to measure your social programs alongside the rest of your efforts.

When DoubleClick for Advertisers was founded in 1998, we invested in the promise that digital can forge connections and bring value to advertisers, publishers and users. Today, as we celebrate its 15th anniversary, we’re excited to be investing in the next wave of digital marketing where we are even more connected than ever before.

If you’re an existing DFA customer, reach out to your account manager about upgrading to DoubleClick Campaign Manager today. You can stay on top of new updates by following us on our Google+ page.

Posted by Payam Shodjai, Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick Campaign Manager

Reach, Relevance and Trust: The 'Big Three' in Display Advertising

Google Display Network offers a powerful blend of advanced targeting, innovative formats and best-in-class optimization tools that work across screens to help you reach and engage with your perfect audience. Today we’d like to take a closer look at our our reach and our partner sites that help you scale your message to precisely the right people – wherever they are.

According to comScore, 210 million unique visitors see ads served by the Google Display Network each month in the US alone. That’s as many viewers as all of the Emmy-nominated dramas put together! It's hard to visualize the full Google Display ecosystem in terms of numbers alone, so we've created an infographic to show some of our great partner sites and the metrics (like the 1 trillion monthly impressions) they generate:

Even given those big numbers, though, marketers know that sheer volume isn't where successful ads start. The real magic lies in the connection one ad makes with one consumer at a moment that counts. That's why the place where the brand meets the consumer is so important. When a publisher has a close relationship with users, it's like the ad is being introduced by a trusted friend.

Today we'd like you to meet three publishers in the Google Display Network who help make those introductions happen: Men's Health, Apartment Therapy and Serious Eats. Their stories embody what we think is special about GDN: the way it balances those big reach numbers with relevance and trust.

Reach

"One of the biggest advantages of working with Google is obviously the reach, and most importantly for us, the trusted reach, that Google brings to the table."

- Ronan Gardiner

Publisher, Men's Health

In Men's Health, a story about diet and nutrition might be matched with an ad for a healthy oat cereal or a video of a celebrity chef offering low-cal recipes. That kind of match is made millions of times a month. These days those connections happen more and more on mobile screens. Men’s Health now has more than 125,000 subscribers on tablets, enabling them to bring, as Ronan explains, “a totally cross-platform, synergistic opportunity to advertisers to speak to our guys whenever and wherever they’re engaging with our content.”  But on a personal device like a smartphone, the trusted reach that Ronan Gardiner talks about is all the more important.

Relevance

"Our audience is 60% women, 40% men, between the ages of 25 and 45. If advertisers know who they want to reach, we’re perfect for them.”

- Maxwell Ryan

CEO & Founder, Apartment Therapy

Apartment Therapy is "saving the world, one room at a time." Here you might see ads for handcrafted wood furniture matched to a photo essay titled "Organic Modern Dining Rooms." Maxwell Ryan, the founder and CEO of this über-cool home design collective, attributes his site's success to its ability to make an emotional connection with his readers: "We're addressing a very personal space for people in a very focused way."  A personal connection with a very focused group: that's the kind of relevance that marketers really aim for.

Trust

"Our audience is very passionate about food and they've come to trust us. So advertisers who advertise on SeriousEats develop that same credibility with our audience and their product."

- Ed Levine

Founder, SeriousEats.com

Founder Ed Levine says that "every post is the start of a conversation," and we believe you should be able to say the same for every ad. The Google Display Network portfolio includes 65% of comScore’s top 100 sites, so you can feel sure that your brand conversation will be happening on a site that has earned viewers' trust.

That's our goal, after all: to make sure that your great ads get matched to the right audience on great sites like these. The Google Display Network makes those introductions, one match at a time, millions of times each day. We'll keep working hard to make sure the GDN continues to grow with full measures of reach, relevance and trust. To become part of the Google Display Network with your site, sign up today!

Posted by Brad Bender, Director Product Management

Create beautiful, engaging display ads in seconds with Ready Creatives

Building on VP of Product Management Neal Mohan’s presentation to the Mobile Marketing Association about building cross-screen creative in HTML5, and Product Management Director Brad Bender’s keynote speech about advances in creative formats at IAB MIXX yesterday, we’re excited to announce the launch of Ready Creatives – our groundbreaking new solution to make display ad creation easier than ever. Ready Creatives consists of two powerful tools: Ready Image Ads and Ready Ad Gallery.

Display ads today need to captivate consumers with rich creative and dynamic messaging. But creating an engaging, beautiful ad takes time and effort. High quality ad creation – until now – has been a big challenge, putting it out of reach for small to medium businesses. Ready Creatives puts the power back in your hands – and makes it easier than ever before to create beautiful ads that can be consistently displayed across screens.

Instantly build IAB Standard, HTML5 compatible ads with Ready Image Ads

With one single click, take advantage of Ready Image Ads flexibility by simply adding your website URL to automatically construct display ads based on images from your website.  You can customize further by adjusting the text, font, color, images, headlines, URL and more – in a way that best tells your story. Our friendly user-interface and streamlined process enables you to build display ads in minutes, automatically creating IAB standard ads in HTML5 formats using your existing elements from your website or your own uploaded images. And these HTML5 ads can be viewed across mobile devices as well as desktops!

Provide your website URL and Ready Image Ads automatically builds a variety of beautiful ads for you to use in your campaigns

Beautiful ads at your fingertips in Ready Ad Gallery

Ready Creatives doesn’t just quickly cobble together the elements you want included in your ad – it helps you build campaigns that engage customers with stories they love, remember and share. Our Ready Ad Gallery features pre-built templates you can easily customize based on your campaigns goals.

Choose from the following formats and watch your display ad come to life:

• Dynamic Ads – Dynamic Ads deliver tailored creative across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website.
• Engagement Ads – Engagement Ads captivate consumers with rich creative messages. They fit in standard display units, allowing to scale across the web, and then expand to a larger format after an innovative two-second hover delay. 
• Video Ads – Videos are as effective as TV in building awareness of your business.  Create a quick video ad in seconds that showcases your brand.
• General Purpose Ads – if you need a simple display ad, browse through our hundreds of template options and customize in our easy-to-use editing tool.

Building display ads has never been simpler, and we’re making this capability accessible to all advertisers at no additional cost, and as part of the AdWords campaign workflow. No matter what type of ad you choose, you can be sure you will not only have saved time and money but also have created an ad your customers and prospects are sure to love.

To get started using Ready Creatives today, log into your Adwords account and click on the Ads tab. For more information, visit www.google.com/think/products/ready-creatives.html.

Posted by Ashley Jiang, Product Manager, Google Display Network

Will Republicans Please Put Up Or Shut Up? (I Expect Neither)

For the third time in a couple years, the administration, mainstream media writers, and various Republican members of Congress all pretend there is some sort of budget story in the works.

Government Shutdown Hype

Lisa Rein at the Washington Post kicks off the government shutdown hype with After past shutdowns, Congress gave federal workers back pay. This time? Don’t count on it.

A government shutdown next week would jeopardize the paychecks of more than 800,000 federal workers who could be told to stay home. More than 2 million other employees who are deemed essential by the government — including the active military — would be entitled to their salaries but might not get paid on time.

While there is no law requiring that nonessential employees be compensated if they are ordered off the job, Congress has in the past voted to reimburse their losses once shutdowns ended.

But this go-round could be different. The bitterly divided Congress includes many lawmakers who are unsympathetic to the plight of federal workers and could be loath to help them recoup their money.

“It’s a very different time and a very different Congress,” said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers. “I’m concerned when employees who were here remember that last time employees were paid and think it will happen again, because it’s not a given at all.”

More Hype

Erza Klein adds to the Washington Post hype with There’s much less time to avoid a government shutdown than you think

In theory, the deadline for avoiding a government shutdown is 11:59 p.m. Sept. 30. That gives Congress seven days to figure something out. But those seven days are, at this point, pretty much spoken for.

Still More Hype

Paul Kane, also writing for the Washington Post says Sen. Ted Cruz happy to be outlier in shutdown showdown

Ted Cruz began a frantic effort Monday to bend the Senate to his will by employing tactics that have earned him mostly enemies in his less than nine months in the chamber.

A master of fiery conservative oratory, the freshman senator is trying to block funding for President Obama’s health-care law with a strategy that, if successful, will almost certainly lead to a partial government shutdown next week. The Texan has become the face of an effort variously described as the “dumbest idea,” leading Republicans to a “box canyon” and ending with their political “suicide note.”

And those descriptions were from Cruz’s fellow Senate Republicans. On Monday, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Minority Whip John Cornyn (Tex.) joined the list of longtime GOP senators objecting to Cruz’s strategy, which is intended to shut down the government until and unless Democrats agree to abolish funding for Obama’s health-care law.

This has left Cruz in a relatively familiar place, almost alone in advocating a tough strategy that is winning him the adoration of conservative activists but isolation and quiet disdain among his colleagues on Capitol Hill.

The Key Sentence

Did you catch the key sentence in the above article?

Here it is: "Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Minority Whip John Cornyn (Tex.) joined the list of longtime GOP senators objecting to Cruz’s strategy, which is intended to shut down the government until and unless Democrats agree to abolish funding for Obama’s health-care law."

Another Wolf Call?

In simple terms, Republican leaders have no intent on doing anything but making noise (and complete fools out of themselves).

How many times can Republicans cry "wolf" on a government shutdown and have the call be believed?

Of course mainstream media, especially the Washington Post is ready to go along with the hype, effectively creating a story where there is none.

I Hope I Am Wrong!

I actually hope I am wrong. I hope government shuts down and stays shut down until there are significant, verifiable cuts in the budget (not game-playing cuts in future budgets that won't be honored).

My comment may sound harsh, but it isn't.

• The quicker we stop funding insane military actions the better.
• The quicker the US stops being the world's policeman the better.
• The quicker the US balances its budget the better.
• The quicker we get rid of government employees, the better. 

My comment holds nothing against Federal employees trying to do their job. It's not their fault.

But do we really need a BLS? Do we really need a Department of Energy? HUD? FHA? etc., etc. I suggest we don't. There are countless government agencies that deserve no funding at all.

And to further reduce government expenditures, it's high time we scrap Davis-Bacon and all prevailing wage laws.

There is so much government waste, it's hard to know where to start.

Where to Start, When to Start

Where to start is debatable; When to start isn't.

The time to start is now (years ago actually), but given that Republican leaders have already thrown in the towel on forcing the issue, the odds of a government shutdown are very small. The odds that a short government shutdown would really accomplish anything are precisely zero.

History suggests that somewhere along the line, Republicans will totally and completely wimp out (because they always do). But as I said, I hope I am wrong.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com