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The People Are Shedding Debt: Household Debt Ratios Are Lowest Since 1993-94

Household Debt Ratios Are Lowest Since 1993-94

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The chart above shows the ongoing de-leveraging of U.S. households based on new data released yesterday by the Federal Reserve.

In the third quarter of 2011, household debt service for required payments on outstanding mortgage and consumer debt as a share of disposable personal income fell to 11.09%, the lowest ratio since the fourth quarter of 1994; and the ratio for all household financial obligations (adds automobile lease payments, rental payments on tenant-occupied property, homeowners' insurance and property tax payments to the debt service ratio) remained at 16.15% (same as Q2), the lowest ratio since the fourth quarter of 1993. 

Let that be a lesson for the U.S. Congress.....

via mjperry.blogspot.com

Rationally Optimistic - We are all kings now

The Future Still Belongs to America

So the geopolitics are favorable and the ideological climate is warming. But on a still-deeper level this is shaping up to be an even more American century than the last. The global game is moving towards America's home court.

The great trend of this century is the accelerating and deepening wave of change sweeping through every element of human life. Each year sees more scientists with better funding, better instruments and faster, smarter computers probing deeper and seeing further into the mysteries of the physical world. Each year more entrepreneurs are seeking to convert those discoveries and insights into ways to produce new things, or to make old things better and more cheaply. Each year the world's financial markets are more eager and better prepared to fund new startups, underwrite new investments, and otherwise help entrepreneurs and firms deploy new knowledge and insight more rapidly.

 

via professional.wsj.com

BERK: Read the entire thing it is nice to hear every once in awhile. "Change" is what we do in America. And as Walter Russell Mead says at the end of his essay above:

"Change is our home field. It is who we are and what we do. Brazil may be the country of the future, but America is its hometown."

Happy Fourth of July.

200 Years of Progress - The "Rest" Catching Up to the "West"

"For 200 years we have been systematically de-carbonizing our energy system."

According to Richard Sears, the world hit peak oil in 1985 in the sense that oil accounted for 50% of world energy in 1985 and the percentage has been declining since then. By that same measure, we hit peak coal in the 1920’s and peak wood in the 1820’s. Sears summarizes

For 200 years we have been systematically de-carbonizing our energy system.

We didn’t stop using wood as our primary energy source because we ran out of trees; we moved on to something better better. Sears believes we are now in the process of transitioning from oil to renewable energy sources, and not because we’re running out of oil. He concludes his presentation by saying

… the Stone Age ended, not because we ran out of stones. It’s ideas, it’s innovation, it’s technology that will end the Age of Oil before we run out of oil.

via www.johndcook.com

Israel: The New Mid-East Energy Power Broker?

From the country that grew food in the desert, we should expect energy from rocks.

In addition to holding 65% of the world’s proven oil reserves, the Middle East controls over 40% of the world’s natural gas, and the region could soon have a new power broker for this increasingly important commodity: Israel.

In December, the U.S. company Noble Energy and its partners in Israel discovered the world’s biggest natural gas field in a decade, roughly 80 miles off the coast of Haifa. The massive deposit is known as Leviathan and could hold as much as 16 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas. Israel has desperately been looking to replace its oil-based electricity, and this huge natural gas find could help do the trick. Production at Leviathan could begin in 2017, and estimates indicate there could be enough gas in the field to last 100 years. Israeli natural gas production has become much more significant in recent years.

Israel’s Natural Gas Production

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

via www.judeclemente.com

When Ideas Have Sex Innovation Accelerates

 

At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.

 

U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead—Despite All Those Chinese Mothers

There's a lot of talk lately about how Chinese and Indian students are superior to American students.  Much of it was started by this provocative Op/Ed in the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"    

From Carpe Diem, here's an excerpt from a response which basically says "your Asian kids might be academically successful, but they also will become socially awkward, creatively challenged and possess low self-esteem."  In the end, American students are still by far the most productive - not having to be retrained for duty on day one.

From Duke/Harvard/Berkeley professor Vivek Wahwa, writing in Bloomberg;

"The independence and social skills American children develop give them a huge advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation; why Chinese and Indians invest their life savings to send their children to expensive U.S. schools when they can. India and China are changing, and as the next generations of students become like American ones, they too are beginning to innovate. So far, their education systems have held them back.

My research team at Duke looked in depth at the engineering education of China and India. We documented that these countries now graduate four to seven times as many engineers as does the U.S. The quality of these engineers, however, is so poor that most are not fit to work as engineers; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as fresh American graduates.As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors and Indian industry has to spend large sums of money retraining its employees. After four or five years in the workforce, Indians do become innovative and produce, overall, at the same quality as Americans, but they lose a valuable two to three years in their retraining.

Let's keep improving our education system and focus, in particular, on disadvantaged groups. Education is the future of our nation. But let's get over our inferiority complex. America is second to none. Rather than in mastery of facts learned by rote and great numbers of accomplished martinets, its strength lies in the diversity and innovation that arise in an open, creative society."

via mjperry.blogspot.com

Wave power could contain fusion plasma - the flux capacitor?

Researchers at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion Space and Astrophysics and the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy may have found a way to channel the flux and fury of a nuclear fusion plasma into a means to help sustain the electric current needed to contain that very same fusion plasma.

via www.physorg.com

 This kind of stuff reminds me that the real world is growing at geometric rates.  Take a step back and you will notice that productivity is exploding. 

Calamitous, Danger, Apocalypse - Do what I say!

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” –H.L. Mencken