Weekend Economists "Glitter and Be Gay" February 3-5, 2012
Last edited Sat Feb 4, 2012, 01:27 PM - Edit history (2)
Yes, there's stars in the sky, and rainbows, and ponies and chocolate for all. It's the best of all possible worlds, the Panglosses of the world assure us. Unemployment down by official report, the market soaring, the euro saved, all in a good day's work.
Take a bow, you policy wankers. This is the best Potemkin PR rush job ever done. When the government lies, it does it in a big way.
So, let's get out the bubbly and dress up for the party. Don't forget your pretty baubles!
Tansy Gold will be showing off some of her stock in trade, she promises...so get ready to ooh and ahhh!
And as for the economy, well, there's hope...the Hope diamond, for example at the Smithsonian
and the canary diamond http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=29223329
and for the hoi polloi, rip-offs of other national treasures:
The Smithsonian's New Jewelry Collection for the Shopping Channel
http://www.beadinggem.com/2010/09/smithsonians-new-jewelry-collection-for.html
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_q7H5daARk5A/TIwrhrgMbgI/AAAAAAAAM-g/88WJmF6toIw/s1600/smithsonian+jewelry+5.jpg
= new reply since forum marked as read
One of the really sad aspects of the gem trade is how it contributes to the oppression of indigenous peoples. Most of us are fairly familiar with the whole "blood diamond" issue and how raw gems were used to finance bloody wars. As far as I know, there's no absolutely positive way to identify which diamonds are "clean" and which aren't.
Many other gems are hardly less free of the taint of violence and human corruption. Colombian emeralds, for example. Burma (or Myanmar) rubies.
Even the processing of raw material into jewelry is fraught with abuse. Material is shipped from all over the world to Thailand and India for cutting and polishing, because the work can be done very very cheaply. At just about any rock and gem show you'll see dealers with little plastic boxes filled with faceted stones -- amethyst, citrine, topaz, etc -- for sale dirt cheap. It's mined in Brazil and shipped to Thailand for faceting, then back to the US for sale. Beads are done in India -- amethyst, rose quartz, a zillion varieties of jasper, another zillion varieties of agate, in another zillion variety of shapes and sizes.
There are a few people, especially in Africa, who are trying to level the playing field a little, by trading fairly with the people who are actually finding the gems. http://www.greengemfoundation.com/the-green-gem-concept/
I play with stones because I am fascinated by them, and I've been lucky enough to learn enough to make enough to support my habit. And I've learned that there are ways to enjoy all the pretty rocks without fucking up the planet or screwing over the people.
My dad used to occasionally get 1- and 2-carat faceted CZs (cubic zirconia, a "synthetic" diamond substitute) through his job. My mother always thought they were so big they automatically looked fake. One of her friends, who always seemed to wear everything in her jewelry box all at once, bragged about being able to spot a fake diamond a mile away. My dad had a pair of earrings made for my mom out of a couple of 1-carat CZs and had her wear them to a party this other woman would be attending. Now, a 1-ct CZ is actually pretty good sized, and they are very flashy. Mrs. Know-it-all asked a friend where my mother got the stones, and the friend just laughed and said they were fake. The "expert" insisted they weren't, they couldn't be. Well, they could be and they were, and I have six or seven pair of them to prove it! Believe me, I sure as hell don't have six or seven matching pair of 1 ct flawless round brilliant diamonds!
CZ probably isn't good for the environment either, but those wonderful Cape May and Herkimer NY "diamonds" are pretty, too.
So are Oregon Sunstones
and Yogo Montana sapphires
and Idaho garnets
and Maine tourmalines
And now, if y'all don't mind, I'm gonna head on out to the studio and play with some gems. But I'll be back tomorrow with more!
I suggested the gemstone theme for this week's edition of WEE because on Monday morning I'm heading down with a friend to Tucson to visit some of the gazillions of rock, gem, and mineral shows going on there. Like precious metals, gems are also an investment and a "hedge" against inflation, but believe me, it's easy to get taken in this business! REEEEEAL easy! Gold is gold (ha ha, bad pun), silver is silver, and copper is copper. But gems???? Hmmm, not so easy.
The first faceted stone I bought was a "deal" offered to me by an elderly gentleman selling from his motorhome at the Quartzsite Pow-Wow ( http://www.qiaaz.org/page0002.html ) in about 1988 or 1989. His space was on the end of a row, facing Interstate 10. He told me it was 8.5 carats of rutilated amethyst and I could have it for a song, almost.
Of course, at that time I knew nothing about gems, and very very little even about rocks. I didn't have a loupe, and if I'd had one, I wouldn't have known what to look for or what I was seeing when I looked. So I whipped out a $20, he gave me change (yes, it was less than $20!) and I walked away with my gem.
Years later, I learned it's not amethyst at all, but fluorite. It's loaded with flaws: The white spot on the left end is a chunk of softer grey matrix, could be clay or rhyolite, and what looked like needles of rutile are just cracks in the stone that cause the red reflections. The faceting is uneven, but the top -- the table -- is nicely polished.
So I got suckered, but I've never regretted that purchase. I've learned a lot from that stone.
This is a small Brazilian amethyst crystal. Not the quality or color used for faceting normally, but faceting is after all only a way of imitating the sparkle of natural crystals. These little pieces can be bought for $5 or less, and they make absolutely one of a kind jewelry. A great investment? No, not really. But there's more to life than money.
Some of the finest quality amethyst in the world comes from almost on my doorstep -- the mine at Four Peaks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Peaks east of Phoenix. The mining compay doesn't have a great website, http://fourpeaksmining.com/ but they did have at least this photo of a rough crystal
I have one small faceted stone (maybe .75 - 1.0 ct) that may be from Four Peaks material. I picked it up at another rock show in the early 1990s. There are a lot of dealers who buy up miscellaneous stuff at estate sales and then sell what they can. This stone and a slightly larger very dark green tourmaline came into my hands for $10.
One of these days I'll get them set. One of these days. . . . . .
...Obama's State of the Union Speech at least found campaign fodder in referring to income inequality. He tried to make political use of what the Occupy movement inserted onto the mass public consciousness so powerfully last autumn. Obama even suggested a 30 percent minimum tax on those earning $1 million or more annually.The details of that suggestion remain murky with little chance that the kinds of Congresses recently elected would pass it. In any case, Obama's suggested 30 percent minimum tax would still remain far, far below the much higher individual income tax rates that the richest Americans had to pay in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Immediately after the speech, right-wing economists, journalists, and other spokespeople for the 1 percent swung into action to attack. They clearly want to keep the public's awareness and public discussion away from the income and tax issues that the Occupy movement made so important and urgent. They resent the president for even raising issues of fairness and taxation, however modestly. That usually happens when taxes and justice get discussed in the same public conversation. Stretching the truth gives way to more or less gross lying, and never more so than during election campaigns.
So, a minimal fact check on federal taxes in the US might help folks avoid being easily misled. The table below summarizes the last 75 years to show what happened to the three most important tax revenues collected by Washington (accounting for over 90 percent of total tax revenues now):
Here are some key truths revealed by these statistics gathered and published by the US government:
After the Great Depression and during World War II, the US government collected relatively much more from corporations than from individuals. Then, too, we were also closely allied with the USSR. How times change! To think that Washington placed heavier taxes on corporations than on individuals! Clearly, corporations would prefer we forget or never encounter that past reality lest it suggest something for consideration now. After the War, corporations went to work to change the federal tax system. Not only did they succeed in shifting the tax burden from corporations to individuals already by 1960, but that shifting has gone on steadily to the present.
Consider also that while the individual income tax is partly progressive (the higher your income, the higher the percentage you pay), since 1980, it has become ever less important for Washington's total tax revenues than the faster rising regressive Social Security and Medicare tax systems (the higher your income, the lower the percentage you pay).
The table above also helps to show the falseness of arguments frequently made by right-wing economists, politicians and media representatives. One such argument runs roughly as follows: "Half of Americans pay no income taxes, while the richest 5 percent of taxpayers pay over half of Washington's income taxes." First of all, the vast majority of those Americans who do not pay income taxes do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. As the Washington Post made clear (September 23, 2011), using data for 2011, of the 46 percent of US households who will not be paying federal income tax for 2011, the vast majority will be paying Social Security and Medicare taxes. The truth is that only 18 percent of US households will pay neither income tax nor Social Security and Medicare taxes. All but 1 percent of those who pay no taxes to Washington are either elderly or else have household incomes under $20,000.
Another such argument runs roughly as follows: "The richest 5 percent of income receivers in the US pay over half of all of Washington's income tax receipts." First of all, those same people pay a tiny percentage of Washington's Social Security and Medicare receipts. That is simply because the richest Americans earn the largest portion of their income from sources other than wages and salaries - such as interest, rents, dividends and capital gains. Incomes from such other sources do not have to pay Social Security or Medicare taxes. Since Washington's Social Security and Medicare tax receipts are now as large or larger than its individual income tax receipts, any honest assessment of what the richest Americans pay cannot exclude counting Social Security and Medicare taxes paid disproportionately by the bottom 99 percent - just what most of the right-wing analyses routinely do.
One way to cut through the misinformation around taxes created by the right is to see what happened to the distribution of incomes among Americans over recent years. Did the US federal tax system hurt the top 1 percent and help the remaining 99 percent; does it operate "unfairly" as they claim? An answer emerges from the best professional statistical work yet done on the US income distribution: that of Professors Piketty and Saez (widely available on the Internet). Their work covers 1993 to 2007 (before the current crisis hit). They found that the average annual growth in US real incomes over those years was 2.2 percent. In contrast, the real annual income growth of the incomes of the richest 1 percent was 5.9 percent. The real annual income growth of the other 99 percent of the US was 1.3 percent.
The US federal tax system that right wingers portray as unfair and burdensome to the richest Americans allowed them for the last two decades to gather still greater income than everyone else. The US federal tax system enabled greater inequality. And the same results apply to the US distribution of wealth. No wonder the right resents, opposes and seeks to silence those who suggest even modest changes in a tax system so convenient for the richest.
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Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the graduate programme in international affairs of the New School University, New York City. Richard also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. His most recent book is Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It (2009). A full archive of Richard's work, including videos and podcasts, can be found on his site.
We have examined the nuance of the euphoric jobs data this morning from every angle and by now there should be plenty of 'information' for investors to make their own minds up on its credibility. However, the avuncular CEO of TrimTabs, who despite channeling Lewis Black lately, likely knows this data a little better than the average Jim on the street having collected tax witholdings data for the past 14 years, is modestly apoplectic at the adjustments. In one of his more colorful episodes, and rightfully so, Charles Biderman notes that "Either there is something massively changed in the income tax collection world, or there is something very, very suspicious about today’s BLS hugely positive number," adding, "Actual jobs, not seasonally adjusted, are down 2.9 million over the past two months. It is only after seasonal adjustments – made at the sole discretion of the Bureau of Labor Statistics economists – that 2.9 million fewer jobs gets translated into 446,000 new seasonally adjusted jobs." A 3.3 million "adjustment" solely at the discretion of the BLS? And this from the agency that just admitted it was underestimating the so very critical labor participation rate over the past year? Finally, Biderman wonders whether the BLS is being pressured during an election year to paint an overly optimistic picture by President Obama’s administration in light of these 'real unadjusted job change' facts. Frankly, in light of recent discoveries about the other "impartial" organization, the CBO, we don't think there is any need to wonder at all.
TrimTabs believes the job growth picture lies somewhere in between TrimTabs estimate and the BLS’. Looking forward to February and March, we will have a much cleaner picture of job growth as we move away from the effects of tax law changes, bonus season, and enormous seasonal adjustments....A comparison of TrimTabs’ real-time withholding tax based employment results versus the BLS’ preliminary and revised results from January 2011 through January 2012 are summarized in the following table:
and from details from his blog (for the press corps to perhaps dig a little deeper):
For those of you who care, look at Table B-1, Total Nonfarm Employment in today’s BLS press release. Start with the non seasonally adjusted table that shows that in November 2011, there were 133.172 million actual jobs. Actual jobs dropped by 220,000 jobs in December and actual jobs dropped an additional 2.7 million in January. Only as a result of unknown seasonal adjustments, could the BLS report 243,000 new hires in January.
Yes, the labor market contracts during the winter and expands in the spring and summer. Could this number be manipulated? Of course it could. Is it? I don’t know. Am I the only suspicious soul out here? Hope not. Certainly feels lonely right now.
Finally, and this is a repeat of what we said prior using SIFMA data (so originating at the US banksthemsleves), for the US unemployment to be declining, Federal tax withholdings have to be rising: there is no way around it! Instead, as the chart below shows, trailing quarterly collections have just turned negative.
http://mineralsciences.si.edu/research/gems/hope_diamond/blue_diamond_research.htm
Hundreds of rare precious gemstones are on display in the Gems and Minerals Galleries at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. According to Dr. Jeff Post, curator of the United States National Gem and Mineral Collection and avid mineralogist, few of those gems garner more attention than the world famous and Smithsonian’s own, Hope Diamond. With its breathtaking beauty and mysterious past, the Hope Diamond intrigues millions of museum visitors each year; but beyond its rumored curse, the world’s largest blue diamond is proving to be a unique scientific specimen.
The 45.52-carat blue diamond puzzles scientists because of the fiery red glow it gives off for several minutes after being exposed to ultra-violet light. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as phosphorescence. “It looks like a glowing orange coal in your barbeque grill,” explains Post. “It has been described as one of the unique properties of this unique diamond, something special to the Hope Diamond.” No comprehensive studies on the nature of the phosphorescence exist, which has made Dr. Jeff Post question the impressive glow for years. “There didn’t seem to be a lot of consistency, or certainly no quantification of the nature of the phosphorescence,” Post says. Thus, he and a team of researchers took on the challenge to dispel the deep dark secrets of the Hope Diamond.
In a curious effort, Post and colleagues from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Ocean Optics Instrument Company, and Penn State University eagerly snagged the Hope Diamond from its glass enclosure, along with the world’s second largest deep-blue diamond, the Blue Heart Diamond, and blue diamonds from the Aurora Butterfly of Peace, a temporary collection of 240 colored gemstones. They hand carried the gems to the Smithsonian’s highly secure blue room vault, where hundreds of the museum’s most expensive and rare gems are located. Using a portable instrument that measures wavelengths of light, known as a spectrometer, the researchers exposed each diamond to ultra-violet light in order to measure the intensity of light given off, and the rate at which it faded. As reported in the January 2008 issue of the journal Geology, the researchers developed a better understanding of phosphorescence behavior, and to their pleasant surprise, discovered a way to essentially “fingerprint” blue diamonds.
Post and his team of researchers concluded that red phosphorescence is not just specific to the Hope Diamond, but indeed a property of all natural blue diamonds. Trace impurities of the element boron give rise to a diamond’s deep blue color. Presumably, the boron interacts with trace amounts of nitrogen to give each diamond its unique phosphorescence behavior. Hoping to see a trend among the diamonds tested, researchers found just the opposite. “The plot just scattered, indicating that each of these diamonds had its own set of these characteristics,” said Post. “That gave us a way of fingerprinting a particular blue diamond.” In addition, the researchers tested synthetic diamonds doped with boron and natural heat-treated blue diamonds. The artificially treated blue diamonds had a completely different phosphorescence spectrum than the natural blue diamonds, which could be useful to gemologists when identifying the real from the fake.
Dr. Post’s passion and natural affinity for crystals inspires him to probe for new questions regarding the Hope Diamond. “There is always more to learn, and as new ideas, new techniques, new questions come up, we will continue to learn from it,” says Post, “Usually, one study raises as many questions as it answers, and so it always opens up new lines of potential research that will hopefully lead to a more in-depth understanding of the diamond itself.” This study has also been a nice change for Dr. Post who is used to studying materials that most people have never even heard of. “Much of my day to day research is on mud and muck and clays that are critically interesting to our environment, but yet there is no aesthetic pleasure whatsoever,” he says. “Then on the other side of the research coin is working on things like the Hope Diamond, so it’s an interesting stretch, but also a fun balance to have.”
The intense orange phosphorescence of the Hope Diamond is only visible in a dark room after exposure to ultraviolet light. One of the diamonds surrounding the Hope is phosphorescing blue. Photograph by John Nels Hatleberg.
must be my mind messin with me. It sounds good on cold snowy day. I guess I'll suffer with green chile. Scratch your dogs for me. I'm without any dogs at this time and I miss me some doggie lovin. Have a good day.
They're called Herkimer diamonds, because they come from the area around Herkimer County, New York. http://www.herkimerdiamond.com/ but they're actually quartz crystals (silicon dioxide) and not diamonds at all. Of course, they're a lot more affordable!
I have a few in my collection, purchased at rock shows or acquired from friends. The one above is just about the size of a penny but most of it is absolutely clear. "Herkies" can get to be pretty good sized and sometimes form bizarre clusters, like this one with one crystal forming on another on another on another.
The stones that become Cape May diamonds are similar in origin to the Herkimers, but the source is apparently underwater and the pieces break off to be drawn down through the currents of Delaware Bay for years and years, maybe even centuries, until they end up at Sunset Beach on Cape May.
Some of the "diamonds" I picked up at Cape May, NJ, the summer of 2006. These are quite small -- the larger ones are slightly smaller than a dime -- but some are perfectly clear and faceting quality. The two that appear white in the photo are unpolished. This is the way they come from the beach, but of course when they're wet, they look clear and that's how you find them.
My daughter lives in northern New Jersey, about a 2 hour drive from Cape May, but when I visit, I make sure we take a trip to Sunset Beach to go diamond hunting.
when a friend showed it to me and asked if I knew what it was.
Turns out it's not peridot at all, but cuprian smithsonite. Smithsonite is quite common, but cuprian smithsonite is a fairly rare mineral. Most comes from Tsumeb, Namibia; a few locations in Mexico and New Mexico; and the 79 Mine in Gila County, Arizona, which is where this piece came from. It ranges from a yellow-green like peridot to a bright emerald green, and it can be faceted.
One of the things that's been niggling away at the back of mind lately is the (seemingly) increasing sameness of the blogs I read. More and more, as I plow through them in the morning, they're all filled with posts on the exact same four or five topics. I used to call them the "outrages of the day," though of course they're not all outrages. Some of them are just the ordinary news of the day.
This popped into my mind in a slightly different context today as I made my way through my RSS feeds and found post after post after post about the January jobs report. Some feeds had two or three or even four or five separate posts on the subject. It's gotten crazy.
Back in the day, blogs posted a bit here and there about monthly economic news, and of course specialty pubs like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal would dive a little deeper into them and provide a bit of commentary and reaction. No longer. Now, the various reports are greeted every month by an enormous hail of blog posts diving ever deeper and deeper into the details behind the headline numbers. I wonder if it's time to ease up on this.
I appreciate detail as much as the next guy — more than the next guy, actually — but you know what? It's a jobs report for one month. There's only so much it can tell you. Diving deeply into it is sort of like trying to squeeze more significant digits out of a result than went into the inputs. You're just kidding yourself if you think this level of detail on a single month's data is really telling us anything.
I'm not much of a gardener. House plants, vegetables, trees, doesn't matter -- I'm not very good. Living in the desert certainly doesn't help.
But hope springs eternal, so shortly after moving into this house, I bought two small cactus plants, each not much bigger than the palm of my hand, and settled them in a spot at the front corner by the gate, under a velvet mesquite tree. I didn't expect much from them, but at least they didn't die.
That particular corner then became what I called the Sparkle Garden. Odd bits of rocks that weren't good for jewelry made their way to the Sparkle Garden. There's a lovely piece of bright blue chrysocolla out there, but the blue is only a crust less than a millimeter thick, so it looks good but that's all. Lots of druzy chalcedonies and jaspers -- they have that layer of ultrafine crystals that sparkle like fresh snow on a moonlit night at 10-below. And so on. Every few weeks I add a rock or two as I sort through "the inventory."
Yesterday on my way out to run errands, as I opened the front gate I noticed a flash of pink -- exactly the color of Marilyn's dress -- by the velvet mesquite.
ET TU, DEAN BAKER? IF SO MANY PEOPLE ARE GETTING JOBS, WHERE ARE THE TAX REVENUES?
http://www.truth-out.org/strong-job-growth-leads-drop-blackhispanic-unemployment/1328283836
Unemployment for African American men fell by 3.0 percentage points in January.
The Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent in January, bringing its drop over the last year to 0.8 percentage points. African Americans in particular saw an especially sharp decline in unemployment, with their overall rate falling by 2.2 percentage points to 13.6 percent, the lowest level since March of 2009. The unemployment rate for African American men over age 20 fell by 3.0 percentage points to 12.7 percent, the lowest level since November of 2008. The drop for women over age 20 was 1.3 percentage points to 12.6 percent. The unemployment rate for Hispanics dropped by 0.5 percentage points to 10.5 percent, the lowest since January of 2009. These numbers are erratic and may be partially reversed in future months.
The gains for whites were more modest, with the overall unemployment rate edging down by 0.1 percentage points to 7.4 percent. The unemployment rate for white men over age 20 fell by 0.2 percentage points to 6.9 percent, while it was unchanged for women over age 20 at 6.8 percent. The unemployment rate for all men and women over age 20 is now the same at 7.7 percent, the first time they have been equal since the recession began in December, 2007.
Other data in the household survey were more mixed. There was a small rise in the number of workers unemployed involuntarily; although, this followed sharp declines the prior two months. The percentage of unemployment due to quits edged up slightly, but remains very low and even below the levels of October and November.
The establishment survey showed a gain of 243,000 jobs with the private sector adding 257,000. With upward revisions to job growth for the prior two months, job growth has now averaged 201,000 over the last three months. Ignoring Census hiring, this is the strongest three-month stretch since February to April of last year when job growth averaged 239,000 a month.
PARDON ME WHILE I SCOFF
RTS was released just a couple of weeks before I sold my first romance novel. There are so many bloopers in it, it isn't funny, but there are also some inside jokes that had me laughing hysterically through four or five viewings when it came to our little theatre in Indiana. I still love it.
