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Criterion-Referenced Setting of Cut-Points and Evaluation of Fitness
Most of the limitations listed above are overcome with a criterion-referenced evaluation approach, whereby a test taker's performance is compared with an absolute criterion related to whether a child meets a minimal necessary physical fitness level. In contrast with the norm-referenced approach, because the criterion is defined independently, it is not impacted by changes in a population that occur over time or in the level of fitness of a specific population. Limitations related to genetic differences or the potential for discouraging unfit participants also can be minimized with this approach.
Many methods have been developed for setting performance standards (Cizek, 2001; Livingston and Zieky, 1982), but for criterion-referenced evaluation of health-related fitness, the health outcome–centered method (Zhu et al., 2011) has predominated. Basically, this method involves linking health-related fitness performance with a particular (set of) health outcome measure(s). Specifically, this approach identifies a level of test performance that discriminates, with acceptable specificity and sensitivity, between participants who have and do not have a defined health characteristic. An example is identifying a level of performance on a measure of cardiorespiratory endurance that discriminates between groups of youth who have or do not have an at-risk score for metabolic syndrome.
Steps completed before developing cut-points for the health-outcome centered method include determining the components of health-related fitness (e.g., cardiorespiratory endurance) and selecting valid, reliable criterion measures and field tests and health outcomes or markers. Field tests are selected because even though criterion measures (criterion-referenced standards) are the most accurate measure of a construct, they often are more expensive and time-consuming and require sophisticated equipment. Field tests are more practical, less costly, and less time-consuming for mass testing. It is important, however, to determine the validity and reliability of field tests by deriving the predictive relationship and determining its consistency with the selected criterion measure.
The selection of health outcomes can be based on the expected relationship between field tests and health markers or outcomes. Health is a construct, so there are many possible health outcome measures, such as mortality, a single risk factor (e.g., blood pressure), or a group of risk factors (e.g., metabolic syndrome). Because no specific measure is considered superior, it is advisable to use multiple outcome measures to validate the test results when possible. Those selecting cut-points also need to identify health outcome measures using existing standards (e.g., a systolic blood pressure level of ≥103 mmHg for a 5-year-old child 104 cm in height) and make adjustments for specific populations if needed.


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Mikalai Dziadok sentenced to 1 more year in prison
On February 26 the criminal case of the political prisoner Mikalai Dziadok was tried in Mahilyou prison. He was charged with violation of the rules of serving the sentence under Article 411 of the Criminal Code of Belarus.
Dziadok was charged with 16 violations of prison rules, such as wearing sportswear suit instead of prison uniform, sleeping after "Wakey" signal, not sleeping after lockdown, talking to prisoners from other cells.
The prosecutor asked the court to punish Mikalai Dziadok by 1 year in a maximum security penal colony. It is a maximum term under this article. The defence noted that such cases are extremely rare and can never be started because of such minor violations. The lawyer asked the court to justify Mikalai. As a result, Judge Ihar Shvedau sentenced the political prisoner to one more year in prison. Besides, he is to serve four days out of his four-and-a-half-year term. (more…)
Рубрика: News - Один отзыв
Сообщение опубликовано: 26.02.2015

subset: commoncrawl


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The 40th entry in our DJBooth.net Freestyle Series comes courtesy of Marky, the up-and-coming emcee who brought us Sheila (I Want Her) and the reader-acclaimed Delusional. The D.C. native, who flows over an industry instrumental by Marley Marl (originally featured on LL Cool J's Mama Said Knock You Out) on his brand new, previously-unreleased Marky Said Knock You Out freestyle, is currently preparing for the mid-summer release of a project entitled Markyland, USA, as well as getting ready to embark on his College Radio Fall Road Trip promo tour and working on a yet-untitled debut album. Fans can contact Marky directly at his MySpace, which also contains a hidden link to a song the emcee recorded with hip-hop legend Erick Sermon at the age of 13.
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Thank you for helping to make the 2014 San Francisco Bay Gala our most successful fundraising event yet. Critical funds were raised during the evening to help us continue to host free environmental science-based programs for over 20,000 children annually, protect and care for thousands of animals, and be the voice for conservation and restoration of our Bay, rivers, and coastal waters.
The evening kicked off with a VIP reception to honor and thank Darius and Sarah Anderson for playing a key role in the Aquarium's transformation into a nonprofit five years ago. Following the VIP reception, guests entered the Aquarium, which had been transformed into an elegant wonderland with live music, delicious drinks, and delectable bites from some of San Francisco's finest sustainable seafood restaurants.
We would like to say a special thanks to our generous sponsors and event partners. Without their support this amazing event would not have been possible.
Whether you were able to join us at the San Francisco Bay Gala or not, you can help us continue to fulfill our mission to protect, restore, and inspire conservation of San Francisco Bay and its watershed, from the Sierra to the sea by making an online donation.
We are very proud of the work we do and we look forward to continuing this critical work for years to come. We couldn't do it without your generous support. For that, we sincerely thank you.
From all of us at The Bay Institute and Aquarium of the Bay


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Everyone who has a dream should go to Italy.
It does not matter if you think that the dream is dead and buried. In Italy, it will rise up and walk again.. Elizabeth Spencer
Invitalia, the national agency for investment promotion and enterprise development, is the one-stop partner for foreign investors who want to set up or expand their business in Italy. Through its staff, it provides information and strategic analysis to identify the best business solution, offering a deep study and up to date overview on the legal and tax system, the labor market and the national incentive system. Invitalia support services include comprehensive assistance in all stages of the investment process, to provide foreign investors with the best solutions to meet the requirements of the project. The Agency also supports companies in the search and selection of local business opportunities, national partners, in the recruitment process, through a stable and structured cooperation with the Public Administration and the institutions involved at central and local levels.


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Charlotte center city
|Uptown Charlotte
|Neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina
Aerial of Uptown in May 2009
|United States of America
|North Carolina
|Time zone
|• Summer (DST)
|ZIP Code
|28202, 28204, 28206, 28208
|Area code(s)
|704, 980
Charlotte Center City (also known as Uptown) is the central area of Charlotte, North Carolina within the bounds of I-277. The area is split into four neighborhoods (Wards) by the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets.
Several Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters here, including Bank of America, Duke Energy, and the East Coast operations of Wells Fargo. The Carolina Panthers NFL team has their stadium in the Center City. Museums, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and bars are heavily concentrated in the Center City, with over 214 restaurants and 50 nightspots.[1]
Charlotte's Center City (including South End) employs more than 100,000 people and hosts more than 25 million visitors a year.[1]
Charlotte Center City is often referred to as "Uptown" by locals, although the term "Downtown" can also be used since they do not reference different areas of the city.
The history of the dual names is contested, yet prior to the mid-late 1980s, the term "Downtown" was used by residents, media and city leaders for the Center City. During the 1980s, a massive campaign was launched to revamp the image of the downtown area and the term "Uptown" was introduced to the general public. On February 14, 1987, the Charlotte Observer began using the term "Uptown" as a way to promote a more positive upbeat image of the Center City area.[2] School teachers were provided with "historical" documents justifying use of the term to teach to students. (Proclamation designating central shopping and business district as Uptown Charlotte by City of Charlotte Mayor John M. Belk on September 23, 1974)
The Wards[edit]
Center City Charlotte is divided into four neighborhoods, or "Wards", by the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets.[3]
First Ward[edit]
First Ward lies directly to the east of the intersection of Trade and Tryon. It is that quadrant bounded by North Tryon on the northwest and East Trade on the southwest.
First Ward was recently[when?] one of the most dangerous areas in Charlotte, but because of recent revitalization under a HUD HOPE VI grant, it has become one of the more desirable. Many new developments are planned and under construction. The award winning Center City Building which houses the uptown campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is in the first ward. The recently completed Center City Building is part of an urban village project being developed by Levine Properties. The current plans for the urban village include a 4-acre (16,000 m2) park, 450,000 sq ft (42,000 m2) of office space, 2,700 residential units, 250 hotel rooms, 250,000 sq ft (23,000 m2) of retail space, and 450,000 sq ft (42,000 m2) of civic space. Current attractions include: The Main Library, the Spirit Square portion of the North Carolina Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, ImaginOn Children's Learning Center, Levine Museum of the New South, the Time Warner Cable Arena, and is the home of the Charlotte Hornets. On Tryon at Sixth Street, one of Charlotte's historic gems is being preserved and connected to a new condo project called Encore.
Second Ward[edit]
Second Ward lies directly to the south of the intersection of Trade and Tryon. It is the quadrant bounded by South Tryon on the northwest and East Trade on the northeast.
Second Ward is the location of Charlotte's "Government District" and is the site of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Second Ward used to be the location of the predominantly black neighborhood Brooklyn before an urban renewal project took place. Today, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art+Culture stands in Second Ward. Here we also find EpiCentre, a mixed-use entertainment and retail complex, the Charlotte Convention Center, The Victorian Gothic style St. Peter's Catholic Church, and The Green, a downtown mini-park.
Donald Trump proposed a 72-story project called Trump Charlotte in the Second Ward which would have been the tallest building in Charlotte. The project was subsequently cancelled.
Third Ward[edit]
Third Ward lies directly to the west of the intersection of Trade and Tryon. It is the quadrant bounded by South Tryon on the southeast and West Trade on the northeast. Third Ward is the location of the Knight Theatre, the Mint Museum, and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.
Center City's Third Ward is a diverse, quaint, start of the 20th century streetcar neighborhood home to the Carolina Panthers' Bank of America Stadium and Gateway Village which is one of the state's largest mixed-use developments with 1,500,000 sq ft (140,000 m2) of office, shops, restaurants, and over 500 housing units. The most exciting new project is Wachovia's First Street Project, comprising cultural, office, residential, and open space. Johnson & Wales University is expanding its campus in the Center City while the Mecklenburg County's Parks and Recreation Department has unveiled plans for an urban park in the district. Multiple condominium high rise towers have begun or are ready to begin construction. Plans are also underway to construct a $200 million transportation hub along the Norfolk Southern Railway called the Gateway Station. The Gateway Station will house the Greyhound bus stop, the Amtrak station, the LYNX Purple Line and LYNX Silver Line, and a CATS bus hub.
BB&T Ballpark opened in 2014 as the home of the Charlotte Knights. Directly across the street is the new Romare Bearden Park, which opened in September 2013.
Fourth Ward[edit]
Fourth Ward lies directly to the north of the intersection of Trade and Tryon. It is that quadrant bounded by North Tryon on the southeast and West Trade on the southwest.
Fourth Ward is mostly residential and has many beautiful Victorian homes. It is an official historic district and is the location of Old Settlers' Cemetery as well as the three acre Fourth Ward Park.
Schools and Libraries[edit]
School System[edit]
Residents of Charlotte Center City attend the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Elementary schools include First Ward Elementary and Irwin Avenue Open Elementary School.
Private Schools[edit]
- Trinity Episcopal School
Colleges and Universities[edit]
- Johnson and Wales University
- University of North Carolina at Charlotte North Charlotte
- Johnson C. Smith University
- Central Piedmont Community College
- Queens University of Charlotte
- Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
- Reformed Theological Seminary
- Southern Evangelical Seminary
- Union PSCE (Presbyterian Seminary)
Uptown Charlotte is served by two branches of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County now known as Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. The Main library is located on North Tryon Street.[4]
The CheckIt Outlet Branch located on the Green off South Tryon Street is closed due to budget cut a few years ago.[5] This 1,000 sq ft (93 m2). facility holds popular DVDs and bestsellers and serves as a drop-off and pick-up point for library materials for workers and residents on the South Tryon side of uptown.
ImaginOn: The Joe and Joan Martin Center is located on East Seventh Street.[6] ImaginOn is a collaborative venture of Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the Children's Theater of Charlotte which strives to bring the art of narrative to life. The library provides services, books, CDs, DVDs and homework support for children and teens at this location. ImaginOn also contains the McColl Family Theatre and the Wachovia Playhouse, venues used by the Children's Theater for their performances.
In August 2013, the city opened Romare Bearden Park which is a 5.4 acre public park located at 300 S. Church Street.
List of companies based or with major corporate persistence:
The following is an incomplete list:
The following is an incomplete list:
Sites of interest[edit]
- ^ a b http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/queen_city_agenda/2014/02/retail-office-towers-hotels-top-uptown-charlottes.html?page=2
- ^ "Charlotte-Mecklenburg Story: History Timeline: 'Down' Becomes 'Up'". cmstory.org Web Site. Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Retrieved 2008-10-25.
- ^ "Charlotte Center City Map - 4 Wards".
- ^ "The Main Library of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County". Retrieved 2008-10-25.
- ^ "Library Locations". Retrieved 2014-01-09.
- ^ "ImaginOn: The Joe and Joan Martin Center". Retrieved 2008-10-25.
External links[edit]
Official websites
- Official website (Charlotte Center City)
Additional information
- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Story
- Living Uptown Charlotte
- Charlotte/Uptown travel guide from Wikivoyage


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This form is for nominations for the 2015 S'NS Junior Athlete of the Year. Please be sure to fill in ALL required boxes. Athletes must be 21 years of age or younger to qualify. The deadline for nominations is June 15, 2015. You can also send nominations to our office at:
PVA Publications
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2111 E. Highland Ave
Suite 180
Phoenix, AZ. 85016
Best of luck to all our athletes.


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The Atlanta Fed's macroblog provides commentary on economic topics including monetary policy, macroeconomic developments, financial issues and Southeast regional trends.
Authors for macroblog are Dave Altig and other Atlanta Fed economists.
Useful Links
Government Resources
- BLS Handbook of Methods
- Bureau of Economic Analysis
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Congressional Budget Office
- Economic Data - FRED® II, St. Louis Fed
- Office of Management and Budget
- Statistics: Releases and Historical Data, Board of Governors
- U.S. Census Bureau Economic Programs
- White House Economic Statistics Briefing Room
July 16, 2013
Commodity Prices and Inflation: The Perspective of Firms
We've been thinking a lot about commodity prices lately. In case you haven't noticed, they've been falling. And with inflation already tracking well under the Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC) longer-term objective of 2 percent, it's reasonable to wonder whether the modest downward tilt in commodity prices is likely to put even more, presumably unwanted, disinflation into the pipeline.
We take some comfort from research by Chicago Fed President Charles Evans and coauthor Jonas Fisher, vice president and macroeconomist, also of the Chicago Fed. They conducted a statistical analysis of commodity prices and core inflation and found no meaningful relationship between the two in the post-Volcker era of the Fed. According to the authors,
[I]f commodity and energy prices were to lead to a general expectation of a broader increase in inflation, more substantial policy rate increases would be justified. But assuming there is a generally high degree of central-bank credibility, there is no reason for such expectations to develop—in fact, in the post-Volcker period, there have been no signs that they typically do.
We took this bit of good news to our boss here at the Atlanta Fed, Dennis Lockhart, who hit us with a question we wish we had thought to ask. To paraphrase: Is the response of inflation different for commodity price increases compared to commodity price decreases? The idea here is that, for a time at least, firms will pass commodity price increases on to their customers but simply enjoy higher margins when commodity prices decline.
So we reached out to our business inflation expectations (BIE) survey panel and put the question to them. Of the 209 firms who responded to the survey in July, half were asked how they would likely respond to an unexpected 10 percent increase in the costs of raw materials, and the other half were asked how they would likely respond to an unexpected 10 percent decrease. What we learned was that the boss was on to something.
For the half of the panel given the raw materials cost increase, about 52 percent indicated they would mostly push the materials costs on to their customers in the form of higher prices, compared to only 18 percent who indicated they would decrease their margins. But of the half of our sample that was given a decline in raw materials costs, 43 percent indicated they would mostly take their good fortune in the form of better margins and only 25 percent indicated that the drop in raw materials costs would induce them to drop their prices.
Of course, what a firm thinks it will do and what the marketplace will allow are not necessarily the same. But this got us thinking back to the earlier work at the Chicago Fed. Does this sort of "asymmetric" response to commodity prices appear in the data?
Following (roughly) the procedure that Evans and Fisher used, we computed the influence of a positive "shock" of one standard deviation (about 5 percent) to commodity prices on core inflation. (Our sample runs from 1954 to 2013.) As did Evans and Fisher, we confirmed that commodity price increases had a significant positive influence on core inflation, spread out over a period of several years. But we were surprised to see that when businesses were hit with a similar-sized decrease in commodities prices, the opposite didn't occur. Commodity price declines did not produce any downward pressure on core inflation.
As in Evans and Fisher, focusing in on just the post-Volcker era (from 1982 forward), we found that the influence of positive commodity price increases on core inflation was significantly diminished (although it appears to be just a little stronger than what they had reported). However, the influence of commodity price decreases on core inflation remained the same—nada.
For many of you, this result probably doesn't strike you as pathbreaking. There are many macroeconomic models where prices are "sticky" going down but pretty flexible on the way up. But if the question is whether we think the recent slide in commodity prices is likely to put added downward pressure on core inflation, we're likely to echo Evans and Fisher with a bit more emphasis: the decline in commodity prices isn't likely to have an influence on core inflation unless it leads to a general expectation of a broader disinflation. And there is no evidence in the data that suggests this is likely—post-Volcker era or not.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,
Brent Meyer, economist, and
Nicholas Parker, senior economic research analyst, all in the Atlanta Fed's research department
July 16, 2013 in Business Inflation Expectations, Inflation, Pricing | Permalink
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Good analysis.
Does this same dynamic apply to wages? Recent trends in real wages and corporate profits support the idea that when wages fall, firms use it to expand margins. So if we ever get wages to rise again in line with productivity, maybe we'll see firms pass on the costs to their customers. In a consumer-driven economy, wouldn't this create a self-reinforcing cycle of economic growth?
Posted by:
Tom in Wisconsin |
July 17, 2013 at 10:47 PM
Ha Ha! Tom! Good one!
Dude, increasing wages is the very definition of inflation!
As for Mr. Bryan's analysis: really, who did not already know this, but for him & a few others at the Atlanta Fed?
Posted by:
Edward Ericson Jr. |
July 28, 2013 at 08:40 AM
June 25, 2013
Getting Back to Normal?
Central to any discussion about monetary policy is the degree to which the economy is underperforming relative to its potential, or in more ordinary language, how much slack exists. OK, so how much slack is there, and how long will it take to be absorbed? Well, if you ask the Congressional Budget Office (and a lot of people do), they would have told you last February (their latest estimate) that the economy was underperforming just a shade more than 4 percent relative to its potential last summer, and that slack was likely to increase a little by this summer (to around 4.7 percent). Go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and they tell a very similar story in their April World Economic Outlook. The IMF estimates that the amount of slack in the U.S. economy was about 4.2 percent last year, and they expected it would rise a little to about 4.4 percent this year.
As devotees of our Business Inflation Expectations survey know (and you know who you are), the Atlanta Fed has a quarterly, subjective measure of economic slack in the economy as seen by business leaders. This month, businesses told us something pretty interesting—the amount of slack they think they have narrowed pretty sharply between March and June.
Last March, the panel told us that their unit sales were 7.7 percent below "normal"—similar to their assessments in December and September. This month, however, the group cut their estimate of slack to 4.3 percent below normal, on average (see the table).
What we find most encouraging about this assessment (well, besides the speed at which the slack was being taken up) is that the improvement was most prominent among small and medium-sized firms. These are firms that, according to our survey and other reports (like this one from the National Federation of Independent Business), have been lagging behind in the recovery. Indeed, in June, mid-sized firms indicated that unit sales were only 1.5 percent below normal, a shade better than the big firms in our panel (see the table).
A look at the industry composition of our survey reveals that the pickup of slack was relatively broadly based too. Only the firms in the mining and utilities, and the professional and business services areas reported more slack relative to March (and the amounts were pretty small at that). Elsewhere, the amount of slack appears to have narrowed quite a bit.
OK, so slack is shrinking, and according to these estimates, it shrank quite a bit between March and June. Does that mean we should be anticipating growing price pressure? Well, we can turn to our panelists again for an answer, and they say no. Projecting over the year ahead, our panelists report little change in either their inflationary sentiment or their inflation uncertainty (see the table).
Last Wednesday, at the conclusion of its June meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee said that the recovery is proceeding and the labor market is improving, but inflation expectations remain stable. Our June poll of business leaders appears to have also endorsed this view of the economy.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,
Brent Meyer, economist, and
Nicholas Parker, senior economic research analyst, all in the Atlanta Fed's research department
June 25, 2013 in Business Inflation Expectations, Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy, GDP, Inflation, Inflation Expectations | Permalink
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May 09, 2013
Weighing In on the Recent Discrepancy in the Inflation Statistics
Recently, there has been a divergence between inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the preferred inflation measure of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which is the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE). That divergence is fairly evident in the "core" measures of these two price statistics shown in the chart below.
This strikes us (and others, like Reuters' Pedro da Costa) as a pretty significant development. The core CPI is telling us that the underlying inflation trend is still holding reasonably close to the FOMC's longer-term target of 2 percent. But the behavior of the core PCE is rather reminiscent of 2010, when the inflation statistics slid to uncomfortably low levels—a contributing factor to the FOMC's adoption of QE2. Which of these inflation statistics are we to believe?
Part of the divergence between the two inflation measures is due to rents. Rents are rising at a good pace right now, and since it's pretty clear that the CPI over-weights their influence, we might be inclined to dismiss some part of the CPI's more elevated signal. But then there are all those "non-market" components that have been pulling the PCE inflation measure lower—and these aren't in the CPI. These are components of the PCE price index for which there are no clearly observable transaction prices. They include the "cost" of services provided to households by nonprofit organizations, or the benefits households receive that can only be imputed (i.e., that "free" checking account your bank provides if you maintain a high balance.) Since we can't really observe the price of these things, we'd probably be inclined to dismiss their influence on PCE the inflation measure. But we've done the math, and the impact of these two influences accounts for only about a third of the recent gap between the core PCE and the core CPI inflation measures. Most of the disagreement between the two inflation estimates is coming from elsewhere.
We could continue to parse, item by item, all the various components and weights of the two statistics to get to the bottom of this discrepancy. But in the end, such an accounting exercise would merely tell us why the gap between the two measures has emerged, not which measure is giving the best signal of emerging inflation trends.
As an alternative approach, we thought we'd let the data speak for themselves and search for a common trend that runs through the detailed price data. What we have in mind is to compute the "first principal component" of the disaggregated data used to calculate the CPI and the PCE price indexes. The first principal component is a weighting of the data that explains as much of the data variation as possible. So, in effect, the detailed price data in each price index are being reweighted in a way that reveals their most commonly shared trend, and not by their share of consumer expenditure.
The chart below shows the 12-month trend of the first principal component derived from the 45 CPI components used in the computation of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's median CPI, and the first principal component derived from the 177 components used in the computation of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's trimmed-mean PCE. (These are the most detailed component price data we could easily get our hands on.)
So what do we make of this picture? Well, three things:
First, inflation as measured by the PCE price index has tended to track about 0.25 percentage point under inflation as measured by the CPI over time. So part of the gap between the two inflation measures appears to be a long-term feature of the two inflation statistics.
Second, the first principal components of both the CPI and the PCE data have been persistently under their precrisis averages. In the case of the PCE measure, the first principal component is under the FOMC's 2 percent target (a point that has not gone unnoticed by Paul Krugman).
A third takeaway from the chart is that the "disinflation" pattern traced out by these principal components has been gradual and modest—much more so than what the core PCE has recently indicated and what the data were telling us back in 2010.
Does that mean we should ignore the recent disinflation being exhibited in the core PCE inflation measure? Well, let's put it this way: If you're a glass-half-full sort, we'd say that the recent disinflation trend exhibited by the PCE price index doesn't seem to be "woven" into the detailed price data, and it certainly doesn't look like what we saw in 2010. But to you glass-half-empty types, we'd also point out that getting the inflation trend up to 2 percent is proving to be a curiously difficult task.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,
Pat Higgins, economist,
Brent Meyer, economist, and
Nicholas Parker, senior economic research analyst, all in the Atlanta Fed's research department
May 9, 2013 in Business Inflation Expectations, Economics, Inflation, Pricing | Permalink
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No, the correct takeaway is the the focus should be on nominal gdp, which is the number that we know with significantly more certainty. There is no single explanation for why CPI, the GDP deflator, and PCE diverge (the principal components are not likely to be stable through time). Sometimes the answer is rents, sometimes its import prices, sometimes the answer is the various weights. all of the above.
Posted by:
dwb |
May 10, 2013 at 09:48 AM
April 16, 2013
Improvement in the Outlook? The BIE Panel Thinks So
Earlier this month, Dennis Lockhart, the Atlanta Fed's top guy, gave his assessment of the economy and monetary policy to the Kiwanis Club of Birmingham, Alabama. Here's the essential takeaway:
There are encouraging developments in the economy, to be sure, but the evidence of sustainable momentum that will deliver "substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market" is not yet conclusive. ... How will I, as one policymaker, determine that the balance has shifted and the time for a policy change has come? Well, one key consideration is the array of risks to the economic outlook and my degree of confidence in the outlook.
To help the boss assess the risks to the outlook, we reached out to our Business Inflation Expectations (BIE) panel to get a sense of how they view the outlook for their businesses and, notably, how they assess the risks to that outlook. Specifically, we asked:
Projecting ahead, to the best of your ability, please assign a percent likelihood to the following changes to UNIT SALES LEVELS over the next 12 months.
The table below summarizes the answers and compares them to the responses we got to this statement last November.
First, the business outlook of our panel has improved decidedly since last November. On average, our panel sees unit sales growth averaging 1.8 percent. OK, not a spectacular number, but, to our eyes at least, much improved from the 1.2 percent the group was expecting when we queried five months ago.
And how about the assessment of the risks President Lockhart indicated was also a key consideration? Here again, the sentiment in our panel appears to have shifted favorably. Last November, our panel put the likelihood that their year-ahead unit sales growth would be 1 percent or less at 50 percent. The group now puts the chances of a downshift in business activity at 37 percent. Meanwhile, the upside potential for their sales has grown. Last November, the panel put the chances of a "significant" improvement in unit sales at about 20 percent; this month, the group thinks the likelihood is 30 percent.
And this improved sentiment isn't centered in just a few industries—it's spread across a wide swath of the economy. Firms in construction and real estate, which were, on average, projecting 12-month unit sales growth of 1.1 percent last November, now put that growth number at 1.8 percent. The average sales outlook of general-services firms has risen from 1 percent to 2.2 percent; finance and insurance companies went from 0.5 percent to 1.3 percent; and retailers/wholesalers' unit sales projections rose from 1.5 percent to 2 percent. And manufacturers, who posted relatively strong expectations last November, reported about the same sales outlook this month as they did five months ago.
To be clear, President Lockhart's recent comments—and the Federal Open Market Committee statement on which they are based—indicate he is looking for a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market, not sales. But we're going to assume that it's unlikely to have one without the having the other. And is our panel's unit sales forecast "substantially" improved? Well, what constitutes "substantial" is in the eye of the beholder, but if this isn't a substantial improvement in the outlook, it's certainly a move in that direction.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist, and
Nick Parker, economic research analyst, both in the Atlanta Fed's research department
April 16, 2013 in Business Inflation Expectations, Economics, Inflation, Inflation Expectations | Permalink
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March 01, 2013
What the Dual Mandate Looks Like
Sometimes simple, direct points are the most powerful. For me, the simplest and most direct points in Chairman Bernanke's Senate testimony this week were contained in the following one minute and 49 seconds of video (courtesy of Bloomberg):
At about the 1:26 mark, the Chairman says:
So, our accommodative monetary policy has not really traded off one of [the FOMC's mandated goals] against the other, and it has supported both real growth and employment and kept inflation close to our target.
To that point, here is a straightforward picture:
I concede that past results are no guarantee of future performance. And in his testimony, the Chairman was very clear that prudence dictates vigilance with respect to potential unintended consequences:
Highly accommodative monetary policy also has several potential costs and risks, which the committee is monitoring closely. For example, if further expansion of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet were to undermine public confidence in our ability to exit smoothly from our accommodative policies at the appropriate time, inflation expectations could rise, putting the FOMC's price stability objective at risk...
Another potential cost that the committee takes very seriously is the possibility that very low interest rates, if maintained for a considerable time, could impair financial stability. For example, portfolio managers dissatisfied with low returns may reach for yield by taking on more credit risk, duration risk, or leverage.
Concerns about such developments are fair and, as Mr. Bernanke makes clear, shared by the FOMC. Furthermore, the language around the Fed's ultimate decision to end or alter the pace of its current open-ended asset-purchase program is explicitly cast in terms of an ongoing cost-benefit analysis. But anyone who wants to convince me that monetary policy actions have been contrary to our dual mandate is going to have to explain to me why that conclusion isn't contradicted by the chart above.
By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed
March 1, 2013 in Employment, Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy, Inflation, Monetary Policy | Permalink
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November 20, 2012
Rose-Colored Glasses Make the Future Look Blurry: Sales Uncertainty as Seen by the November BIE
Uncertainty is widely cited as being a significant contributor to the economy's subpar growth. Reddy and Thurm report in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that "half of the nation's 40 biggest publicly traded corporate spenders have announced plans to curtail capital expenditures this year or next," in large measure because of rising economic uncertainty. But how uncertain is the current economic outlook? A few economists have attempted to measure business uncertainty, often by using the degree of disagreement between various forecasts, the volatility of certain economic indicators, or some combination of the two. (Two such approaches can be found here and here.)
We thought we'd use our Business Inflation Expectations (BIE) survey to see if we could gauge the degree of business uncertainty directly. Last week, we asked our panel to assign probabilities to various sales outcomes for their businesses for the coming year. (This methodology is the same one we have been using to measure inflation uncertainty, except in this case our business panel was asked to reveal their expectations for unit sales growth over the year ahead.)
Specifically, we put to our panel the following statement:
Projecting ahead, to the best of your ability, please assign a percent likelihood to the following changes to unit sales over the next 12 months.
Panelists were given the following five unit sales outcomes:
- down (less than –1 percent)
- about unchanged (–1 percent to 1 percent)
- up somewhat (1.1 percent to 3 percent)
- up significantly (3.1 percent to 5 percent)
- up very significantly (greater than 5 percent)
One hundred and ninety-four businesses responded, and here's what they told us: On average, firms expect unit sales growth of about 1.2 percent in the coming year. That's more pessimistic than the real gross domestic product (GDP) forecast of the consensus of economists for the year (about 2 percent). But the range of possible outcomes seemed, to our eyes a least, to be large and unbalanced.
Consider the chart below, which shows the probabilities the panel, on average, assigned to the various sales outcomes. They assigned a 48 percent chance that their unit sales will grow 1 percent or less in the coming year, balanced against only 23 percent likelihood that unit sales will grow more than 3 percent over the next 12 months. In other words, in the minds of our BIE panel, the range of likely sales outcomes over the year ahead is pretty wide, with a fairly weighty chance that unit sales growth may not move in a positive range at all.
Perhaps we are making a bit too much of the size of the uncertainty businesses are attaching to the outlook. After all, we don't know what uncertainties firms face even in the best of times (since this is the first time we've asked this question). But when we dug into the data a little deeper, we found something else of interest. The degree of economic uncertainty varies widely by firm. Moreover, the greatest uncertainty about the future was held by the panelists who have the most optimistic sales outlook.
Check out the table below. It shows the degree of sales forecast uncertainty on the basis of whether a firm's sales projection is high or low.
Panelists with the most optimistic sales expectations (the 39 firms with the highest sales forecasts) predicted unit sales growth of a little more than 3.5 percent this year, compared with about a 0.5 percent decline in unit sales for the 39 most pessimistic panelists. But also note that those who are relatively optimistic about the coming year have much greater uncertainty about their future than those who are relatively pessimistic—in fact, they're almost twice as uncertain.
What the November BIE survey seems to be saying is that it isn't just that an uncertain business outlook is reining in our growth prospects, but that the outlook is especially uncertain for the firms that think they have the best opportunity for expansion. Apparently, those wearing rose-colored glasses are having trouble seeing through them.
Note: The regular November Business Inflation Expectations report will be released Wednesday morning.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,
Laurel Graefe, economic policy analysis specialist, and
Nicholas Parker, economic research analyst, all with the Atlanta Fed
November 20, 2012 in Business Inflation Expectations, Inflation, Inflation Expectations | Permalink
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But the coefficient of variation is far higher in the bottom quintile, right?
Posted by:
Sebastien Turban (@PtitSeb) |
November 21, 2012 at 02:21 PM
November 09, 2012
Getting the Questions Right
Among the plethora of post-election exit-poll results, the CNBC website highlights a particularly interesting response, linked from the mega-blog Instapundit with the title "Voters Worry More About Inflation Than You Think." The CNBC article itself, written by Allison Linn, describes the poll results in more detail:
It's no surprise that voters in Tuesday's presidential election identified the economy as the No. 1 issue in the campaign, far ahead of health care and the federal budget deficit.
But it was a surprise that so many voters identified rising prices as the biggest economic problem they face.
Linn notes something of a disconnect between this view and the facts on the ground:
...inflation has generally been running well under 2 percent, and Federal Reserve bankers repeatedly have said they feel comfortable that low inflation allows them to keep interest rates at rock-bottom levels.
Yet in an exit poll of more than 25,000 voters conducted by NBC News, 37 percent identified rising prices as the biggest problem facing people like them.
Unemployment was cited by 38 percent, only slightly more than the number who said inflation was their top economic concern. Taxes were named by 14 percent and the housing market was the top concern of 8 percent.
The policy stakes on understanding these responses are pretty high. In the end, the cost of inflation comes in the form of how it may distort behavior and the allocation of resources. So the expectation or perception of significant inflation is at least as pernicious as the measurement itself.
But what, exactly, does this concern about "inflation" actually reflect? Probably not what we think. Some time ago, my colleagues Mike Bryan and Guhan Venkatu (from the Cleveland Fed) made note of "The Curiously Different Inflation Perspectives of Men and Women." Their findings are pretty informative:
Over the past few years, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, with assistance from the Ohio State University, has studied household inflation perceptions and expectations using a monthly survey of approximately 500 Ohioans (the FRBC/OSU Inflation Psychology Survey). This survey, which records respondents' perceptions of price changes over the past 12 months as well as their expectations for price changes over the next 12 months, has uncovered a surprising result. The data indicate that the public's estimates and predictions of inflation are significantly and systematically related to the demographic characteristics of the respondents. People with high incomes perceive and anticipate much less inflation than people with low incomes, married people less than singles, whites less than nonwhites, and middle-aged people less than young people. This Commentary describes what is perhaps the most curious observation of all: Even after we hold constant income, age, education, race, and marital status, men and women hold very different views on the rate at which prices are changing.
...[S]tatistical tests reveal that even after we adjust for the respondents' age, race, education, and income, women in our survey tended to think inflation was 1.9 percentage points higher than men. A similar examination of respondents' predictions of future inflation yields the same basic result: After we account for other major demographic factors, on average, women expected prices to rise 2.1 percentage points more than men.
It is important to note that this result was not unique to the Cleveland Fed study:
An examination of survey data collected by the University of Michigan (which has recorded the inflation forecasts of U.S. households on a monthly basis since 1978) reveals that women consistently hold higher inflation expectations than men, even after we hold constant other important demographic characteristics of the respondent.
Most intriguing of all, the systematic overstatement of inflation by all consumers, relative to official statistics, and the difference in responses between men and women are not a result of ignorance about the facts, according to those official statistics:
In the August 2001 FRBC/OSU survey, we sought an answer to this question by asking, "Have you heard of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) before?" and "By about what percentage do you think the CPI went up (or down), on average, over the last 12 months?"
A significantly higher proportion of men had heard of the CPI compared to women (75 percent versus 61 percent, respectively). For those who had heard of the CPI, the average perception about how much it had risen over the past 12 months was surprisingly accurate—a perceived increase of 2.9 percent compared to an actual increase of 2.7 percent. It is also very interesting that men and women perceived the CPI's growth rate nearly identically (2.8 percent versus 3.1 percent, respectively.) However, of those who knew of the CPI, the average perception of price increases was 6.7 percent. And even within the subgroup of respondents who knew of the CPI, men had a significantly lower perception of price increases than did women (6.0 percent vs. 7.4 percent). In other words, the public believes that prices are rising more than the CPI reports, and women more so than men.
There are a couple of hypotheses that could be advanced to explain results like this. One is that the conspiracy crowd is correct and the official statistics are rigged and vastly understate true inflation. But that wouldn't get us anywhere near an understanding of why survey responses about inflation would be systematically different across men and women, higher- and low- income individuals, and just about any other demographic cuts we might make.
A second possibility it is that individuals' responses reflect price changes in their own personal market basket, which may differ from that of the average urban wage earner whose habits are reflected in the Consumer Price Index (CPI).That might explain why any demographic sub group could arrive at different inflation perceptions, but it doesn't explain why respondents as a whole systematically overstate inflation relative to the CPI.
I think the most likely explanation is that the survey respondents are expressing a much different concern than whether they believe food, gas, autos, banking services, or whatever are increasing or are likely to increase faster than the official statistics indicate. My guess is that they are telling us that they are concerned that their real—or inflation-adjusted—incomes are not rising fast enough to comfortably sustain their desired spending:
As I noted, the policy stakes are high. In the current environment, the policy prescription for fighting an incipient rise in inflation expectations would be much different than one deployed to address the reality of the chart above. All the more reason to make sure we understand the questions we are asking and the responses we get back.
Just to be sure, we monitor inflation trends and inflation expectations from a number of perspectives: Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS), forecasts, and the Business Inflation Expectations (BIE) survey, to name just three. And all are available on the Atlanta Fed's Inflation Project for the terminally curious to monitor with us.
By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed
November 9, 2012 in Inflation | Permalink
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The question of inflation perceptions is indeed the right question, and some recent work has been done on this. See "'Real-Feel' Inflation: Quantitative Estimation of Inflation Perceptions," Business Economics, Vol. 47, No. 1, National Association for Business Economics, pp. 14-26, which tries to quantify some of the known cognitive biases that operate on inflation perceptions (or at least, to provide the first pieces of a model to do so, were it calibrated properly).
You can find a copy of the paper, although not the BE version, here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1661941
Posted by:
Michael Ashton |
November 09, 2012 at 11:42 AM
You are looking at the personal income data that because of the massive inequality in the US significantly overstates the income of the bulk of the population.
If you look at the average hourly and weekly earnings published by the BLS you get a very different picture of real income growth.
Average hourly earnings growth is at the record low of 0.8% and with 2% that leaves real income growth much, much weaker than your chart implies. Moreover, the higher inflation stems from food and oil that is a necessity for
the 80% of the population this measure covers.
Posted by:
Spencer |
November 09, 2012 at 12:24 PM
I would think an analysis of gender perception differences should take into account the % of purchasing decisions by gender.
Women make (according to studies) 70% of the purchasing decisions and by that metric, it shouldn't be a surprise that women are more tuned into household budget.
Good points by Spencer - the 80% (and all, except the disposable income for the top 20% obviously doesn't receivce the same incemental impact as the bottom 80%)... face inflationary costs 3X the rate of headline CPI when faced with health care, higher ed and energy costs.
Posted by:
Barclay |
November 10, 2012 at 09:53 AM
November 02, 2012
Has Fed Behavior Changed?
To the titular question, Steve Williamson thinks the answer is "yes":
… the behavior of the FOMC has changed. Either it cares about some things it did not care about before (and in a particular way), or it cares about the same things in different ways—in particular it is less concerned about its price stability mandate.
Part of the Williamson case relies on an earlier post, where Williamson illustrates deviations of the actual path of the federal funds rate paths from his own estimated version of the Taylor rule:
New Keynesians like to think about monetary policy in terms of a Taylor rule, which specifies a target for the federal funds rate as a function of the "output gap" and the deviation of the actual inflation rate from its target value. According to standard Taylor rules, the fed funds target should go down when the output gap rises and up when the inflation rate rises. You can even fit Taylor rules to the data. I fit one to quarterly data for 1987-2007, and obtained the following:
where R is the fed funds rate, U is the unemployment rate, U* is the CBO natural rate of unemployment (so U-U* is my measure of the output gap) and P is the year-over-year percentage increase in the PCE deflator. You can see how it fits the historical data in the next chart.
So that's how the Fed behaved in the past. If it were behaving in the same way today, what would it be doing? Given that U = 7.8, U* = 6.0, and P = 1.5, my Taylor rule predicts R = 1.1%....
So, the Fed's behavior seems to have changed.
An obvious point: It is clear from Williamson's chart above that the predictive power of his version of the Taylor rule is far from perfect. In fact, through 2007 the standard deviation of the estimated rule's prediction error is 1.3 percentage points. From that perspective, the difference between a Williamson-Taylor rule funds-rate prediction of 1.1 percent and the actual current value of 0.14 percent doesn't seem so dramatic. I don't really see an obvious deviation from previous behavior.
More to the point, unless the metric is an absolutely slavish devotion to a particular form of the Taylor rule, I'm not exactly sure what evidence supports a conclusion that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is now "less concerned about its price stability mandate." As I argued a few weeks back, I think it is not too much of a stretch to construct a justification of post-crisis Fed actions up to the September decision entirely in terms of support for the FOMC's price stability mandate.
I don't take any great exception to Williamson's claim that, with respect to the FOMC's stated inflation objective, things look pretty much on target:
If we look at a longer horizon, as I did here, from the beginning of 2007 or the beginning of 2009, you'll get something a little higher than 2.0% (I didn't have the most recent observation in the chart in the previous post). Too low? I don't think so.
Furthermore, in my previous post I noted that while there is a plausible case that previous asset purchase programs were required to maintain this salutary record on the inflation front, the case is arguably less plausible for "QE3." But, to my mind, that just isn't enough evidence to conclude that the FOMC has downgraded its price stability goals.
Consider a homeowner with the dual mandate of keeping both the roof of the house and the driveway in good repair. If the roof isn't leaking but there are cracks in the driveway, I think you would expect to see the owner out on the weekend patching the concrete. I don't think you would conclude as a result that he or she had ceased caring as much about the condition of the roof. I do think you would conclude that attention is being focused where the problem exists.
I suppose the argument is that the Fed is raining so much liquidity down on the world that the roof is, sooner or later, bound to leak. The FOMC has expressed confidence that, if this happens, it has the tools to patch things up and will deploy those tools as aggressively as required to meet its mandate. I guess Steve Williamson feels differently. But that, then, is a difference of opinion about things to come, not about the facts on the ground.
Update: Here's Steve Williamson's response.
By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed
November 2, 2012 in Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy, Inflation, Monetary Policy | Permalink
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I think Williamson's problem is that his U*=6 is wrong. There's been plenty of discussion in the econosphere about how the CBO's estimates of output and employment potential have been downwardly biased in recent years. Part of this reflects uncertainty about the extent to which the downturn was structural, but a lot of it is also just a matter of the data being truncated--as more data comes in, the trend estimates will be revised back up due to smoothing processes.
The results on Williamson's Taylor rule are dramatic. First, update the current unemployment to 7.9 instead of the previous 7.9 and it drops from R=1.1% to just 0.98%. Then lower the natural rate of unemployment down to a more realistic long run rate of 5.5% and the predicted interest rate drops to 0.22%, which is within the window prescribed by the fed.
Now, 5.5% is much closer to the natural rate normally used in Taylor rule calculations. Williamson did not find evidence that the Fed was behaving differently, but rather advocating that it should behave differently by being more pessimistic than normal about the economy's potential.
Posted by:
Matthew |
November 04, 2012 at 07:32 AM
September 27, 2012
How Big Is the Output Gap? More Perspectives from Our Business Inflation Expectations Survey
Opinions vary widely about how much slack there is in the economy these days. Some say a lot—some say not so much.
Last month, we reached out to members of our Business Inflation Expectations (BIE) panel for their take on the issue. The panel indicated they had more pricing power in August than they did last October. OK, that doesn't exactly gauge the amount of slack businesses think they have, but it does suggest that, however much slack there is, it's been shrinking.
Another detail revealed by our August inquiry was that retailers think they have more pricing power compared with manufacturers—a pretty good sign the latter is experiencing more slack than the former.
In this month's BIE survey we went fishing in the same murky waters, but this time we took a more direct approach. We asked our panel to provide a percentage estimate of how far their sales levels are above/below "normal." Here's what we found: On a gross domestic product (GDP)–weighted basis, the panel estimates that current sales are about 7.5 percent below normal. That's more slack than the conventional estimates, like the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) measure of the GDP gap, which puts the economy about 6 percent under its potential.
But perhaps a more interesting observation from our September survey is how widely current performance varies by sector and size within our panel. Retailers, for example, say their current sales are a little less than 2 percent below normal. And firms in the leisure/hospitality and the transportation/warehousing sectors—sectors where growth has been particularly robust in recent years—say they are operating at, or just a shade above, normal levels.
Compare these estimates with those from durable goods manufacturers, which report that their current sales levels are nearly 12 percent below normal, and finance and insurance companies, which say they are almost 17 percent below normal. And construction firms? Well, best not even ask them.
And the amount of slack firms are reporting isn't just a reflection of their sector of the economy—size also matters. Firms with more than 500 employees say their current sales levels are a little less than 5 percent below normal—half as much as the amount of slack being reported by small firms.
So we're led back to the question that kicked this blog post off. How big is the output gap? Some say a lot—some say not so much. And this difference in perspective is not just among policymakers. Within the economy, experience varies at least as widely; some firms' sales are still well below normal, while others are telling us that they are very nearly back to normal, and some are already there.
But here's the rub. If the economy represents a constellation of firms operating at widely varying levels of capacity, from what viewpoint should we consider the economy relative to its potential? Are aggregate measures, like the one provided by the CBO or by our "GDP-weighted" approach, appropriate perspectives? Indeed, given widely varying measures of economic performance across firms and industries, how meaningful is an aggregate assessment of economic slack?
Ah, we'll leave these questions for the November survey.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist,
Laurel Graefe, economic policy analysis specialist, and
Nicholas Parker, economic research analyst, all with the Atlanta Fed
September 27, 2012 in Business Inflation Expectations, Inflation, Inflation Expectations | Permalink
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Normal relative to what? To levels at the height of the bubble? Is that really a measurement of the output gap?
Posted by:
Dave Schuler |
September 28, 2012 at 10:04 AM
"If the economy represents a constellation of firms operating at widely varying levels of capacity, from what viewpoint should we consider the economy relative to its potential?"
maybe a fair question, but one unlikely to be addressed by a survey. One can make the same point about inflation: At any one time, some prices are rising and some are falling, so how meaningful is an aggregate measure of the overall price level? That's the macro question for the ages. Also, you ignore the fact that the rate of growth (or rebound) and ability to add capacity is different for each industry. It could be, for example, that some industries will rebound faster or slower than the overall economy and have the ability to add capacity faster (so the measured degree of slack is essentially a function of the degree of fixed or sticky cost structure).
Overall it sounds to me that while the estimate is different than the CBO, the results are still broadly consistent subject to small sample error.
Posted by:
dwb |
October 01, 2012 at 08:35 PM
difference in perspective is not just among policymakers. Within the economy, experience varies at least as widely; some firms' sales are still well below normal, while others are telling us that they are very nearly back to normal, and some are already there.
Posted by:
escort pigerne |
October 22, 2012 at 03:26 AM
And the amount of slack firms are reporting isn't just a reflection of their sector of the economy—size also matters. Firms with more than 500 employees say their current sales levels are a little less than 5 percent below normal—half as much as the amount of slack being reported by small firms.
Posted by:
sexpiger |
February 16, 2014 at 04:27 PM
August 23, 2012
Do Firms Have Pricing Power?
Here's a question every policymaker would like to know the answer to: How much slack is there in the economy? You know the drill: If there's lots of slack, firms have little power to pass cost increases on to customers. But as the economy approaches full employment, the pricing power of firms strengthens, and cost pressures get more readily passed along. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be any practical consensus about the amount of slack in our economy. To paraphrase a well-known adage widely attributed to Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase, we've been torturing the Phillips Curve, but it isn't talking.
We wondered if businesses might be in a better position to say what kind of pricing power they have. So this month we asked our Business Inflation Panel to weigh in on how they might adjust their prices in the face of a hypothetical, unanticipated increase in costs. Not knowing what kind of cost pressure a firm might respond to, we randomly sorted our panel into two groups—one given a 2 percent cost-increase scenario, and one given a 6 percent cost-increase scenario. Here's what we learned:
On average, firms faced with the 2 percent cost increase were likely to pass about 1.3 percentage points (or 66 percent) to their customers. In the portion of our panel considering the 6 percent cost increase, the average impact on customer prices was 3.8 percentage points (or about 63 percent of the cost increase). So in the aggregate, firms think they can pass about two-thirds of any cost increase through to prices, and that belief holds roughly true whether the cost increase is relatively modest or somewhat large.
We asked a similar question of our panel last October, but the responses we got then indicated that firms held a more conservative view of their pricing power.
Of the firms facing the 2 percent cost-hike scenario last October, only 31 percent said they would pass along most of the cost on to their customers, compared with the 53 percent that said they would do so today (see the chart above).
Likewise, of the panelists asked to consider a 6 percent cost increase, only 37 percent said they would pass most of the increase on to customers last October, compared with 60 percent who said they would do so today (see chart above).
What's behind the reported increase in firms' pricing power since October? Well, we'd be speculating on that point, but one thing that's changed since October is that a smaller proportion of firms are reporting sales levels "less than normal" (54 percent compared with 64 percent in October). Said another way, firms, in the aggregate are reporting less slack today than they were ten months ago—a finding that aligns with recent results from the NFIB small business survey showing a decrease in the percentage of firms that consider poor sales to be the primary issue they face.
Comparisons across industry groups also suggest that slack may be influencing firms' reported pricing power. Retailers, for example, say they would pass through about 75 percent of a cost increase to their customers, compared with only 64 percent for manufacturers and 60 percent for other firms. At the same time, retailers are reporting that sales and price margins are closer to normal—a sign that their perception of "slack" is not as great as other firms.
Does the analysis above indicate that firms are running out of slack? Sorry, but we can't quite go that far on the basis of these two surveys. But one thing seems clear—while our panel of businesses says sales levels are still below normal, sales and pricing power are better today than they were last October.
By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist;
Laurel Graefe, economic policy analysis specialist;
Nicholas Parker, economic research analyst; and
Kate Rees, economic research analyst, all with the Atlanta Fed
August 23, 2012 in Business Inflation Expectations, Inflation | Permalink
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text:
By Tara Jones
For Civitas Media
FORT LORAMIE — The 34th annual Country Concert is projected to bring in approximately $14,800,000 in regional economic impact as estimated by the Sidney Visitors Bureau.
This estimate was prepared using the most recent average visitor spending data available from TourismOhio, the state's official travel and tourism office. In addition, assumptions were made concerning several variables such as total attendance volumes, local versus out of town attendees and the number of overnight stays in area hotel and camping venues.
Jeff Raible, president of the Sidney-Shelby Chamber of Commerce, said it is important to emphasize the economic impact can merely be an "educated guess."
"All we can really do is estimate how many people are going to come, what the accommodations are expected to be and approximately how much they're going to spend each day," he said. "There's no exact science here for us to be able to zero in to anything."
Raible also emphasized this estimate is regional in nature because Country Concert does not effect just Shelby County alone. Since the county does not have enough hotel rooms to accommodate all of the visitors, some guests also stay in Miami, Auglaize and other nearby hotels. Guests then also spend money in those other areas at stores, gas stations and restaurants, Raible said.
"We can only estimate a regional economic impact," Raible said. "The event is not confined to one particular town or county."
Last year's forecasted regional economic impact came in at $11,800,000. TourismOhio has increased their estimated expenditures for overnight travelers and Ohio has increased the forecasted amount of day spending, both which have had an impact on this year's increase in projected revenue. Raible also increased the projected attendance for the three-day event from 60,000 last year, to 70,000 for 2014.
"Because the state of Ohio is forecasting higher expenditures by travelers and because I escalated my total attendance by 10 thousand, that then translates to an additional three million in additional expenditures," Raible said. "We expect regional economic impact to be higher this year, but we find it very difficult to quantify the exact level of increase."
Country Concert also offers a 500-acre facility that hosts camp sites for concertgoers with a variety of options. There are sites ranging from those complete with water and electric to sites reserved merely for tents.
Paul Barhorst, general manager of Country Concert, also said it looks as if this year's concert will bring in more campers than last year.
"We're getting a great response to the superstar lineup we have," Barhorst said. "A lot of people that come and camp have made this a tradition year after year."
With increasing activity as the concert dates approach, the camping sites are filling up, which makes it difficult to keep an exact tally of the number of sites sold.
Barhorst said this year's concert is bringing in new people from not only across the United States, but across several other countries as well.
With an improved ticket office that now has 10 windows at the main entrance and a new saloon stage, this year's Country Concert hopes to host bigger productions and more people.
Country Concert also offers indirect economic impact, benefiting not only Hickory Hill Lakes, the site of the concert, but also local businesses and not-for-profit groups.
Martha Holscher of Fort Loramie, is the owner of the Dairy King and Motel, a local ice cream and motel business in Fort Loramie. She said Country Concert is easily one of the businesses's highest grossing weekends.
"Most of the time when people leave the concert area they're looking for food and a lot of them stop for ice cream and they send their friends and it snowballs," Holscher said.
The concert crowd typically increases the Dairy King's revenue approximately 20 percent, she said. People are not just flocking to the Dairy King for sweets, however. Holscher's 10 motel rooms are full of concert-goers that booked their rooms a year in advance. The motel also has a waiting list of about 25 people in case of a cancellation, demonstrating the demand for hotel rooms near the concert site.
Several not-for-profit groups also benefit from the event, Raible said, including the Red Cross, Newport Sportsmen Club and Fort Loramie volunteer fire department.
"Generally speaking there are a number of not-for-profit groups that play a role at Country Concert," Raible said. "Because of that involvement, there are monies raised to help support their mission."
With Country Concert attracting several out-of-town gusts, Raible hopes the concert also showcases all Shelby County has to offer.
"I'd like to think folks that take a hotel room take the opportunity to get to know the area," he said. "That opportunity plants a seed in travelers' minds to come back again another time and visit … and to get to know the community a little bit better."
Raible said along with events such as the Shelby County Fair, the Mayfest Soccer Classic, the American Youth Basketball Tour and the Rebel Run, Country Concert is one of the county's largest sources of revenue.
"I would say by far Country Concert has the most substantial economic impact of any travel and tourism related attraction for Shelby County," he said.
The three-day event comes to Shelby County this Thursday, Friday and Saturday.


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The strength of the grappa gives a wonderful balance to the creaminess of the goat's cheese in this dish, and although you could substitute brandy, the 'kick' of the grappa is hard to beat. Demonstrated at the 2011 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.
Make a marinade by mixing the garlic, grappa, olive oil, parsley and a few coarse grinds of pepper. Pour a little of the marinade into a glass or ceramic dish, then gently add the goat's curd and pour over the remaining marinade.
Cover the dish with plastic film and refrigerate the cheese in the marinade for 24 hours, turning once or twice.
Remove the cheese from the marinade and serve at room temperature with rocket dressed with extra virgin olive oil and a good balsamic or aged red-wine vinegar.
Slabs of bread, brushed with olive oil and toasted in the oven, are a must.
» Metric Converter
Chardonnay, Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir are the best wines to pair with Goat's Cheese In Grappa.
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You gotta love YouTube, especially when you stumble across some really quality video…like this highlight reel of freeride champ Ross Champion. I'll keep the words to a minimum, and let Ross's riding speak volumes.
But I will say this…watching this kind of athleticism really makes me question why PWC freeride hasn't yet made it into the X Games.
Watch, and see if you don't agree.
Tags: Freeride, Freestyle, Jet Ski, Jet Ski stunts, Jet Ski Video, Kawasaki, People, personal watercraft, PWC, pwc video, Ross Champion, Sea-Doo, Video, WaveRunner, X games, Yamaha


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Mon August 20, 2012
Wood Energy Not 'Green' Enough, Says Mass.
Originally published on Mon August 20, 2012 6:02 pm
Wind and solar get lots of attention, but another kind of renewable power actually creates more energy in our country --wood. The state of Massachusetts on Friday decided that these plants aren't green enough to get some special breaks.


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We'll be honest -- most Crapgadget roundups consist of a litany of patently absurd, but totally innocent USB-related input peripherals. We aren't exactly sure what the Universal Serial Bus did to deserve such treatment, but evidently it slighted someone important along the way. But this time, things are... different. Oh sure, there's the jewel car necklace flash drive that inexplicably combines a "jewel" and a "car" on a "necklace flash drive," but it's the USB banana charger and USB aroma diffuser that really has our politically correct radars on high alert. Amazingly, the aforementioned atrocities are just the beginning, so feel free to visit each and every one of this week's losers and vote for the most disgusting down below. Choose carefully!
Read - Jewel car necklace USB flash drive
Read - USB banana charger
Read - Finger flick punching bag
Read - USB digital microscope, Part II
Read - Big nose shower gel dispenser
Read - Glitter ball alarm clock
Read - USB panda speaker
Read - USB aroma diffuser
|Jewel car necklace USB flash drive
|403 (7.5%)
|USB banana charger
|1201 (22.4%)
|Finger flick punching bag
|561 (10.5%)
|USB digital microscope, Part II
|186 (3.5%)
|Big nose shower gel dispenser
|2124 (39.6%)
|Glitter ball alarm clock
|244 (4.6%)
|USB panda speaker
|241 (4.5%)
|USB aroma diffuser
|400 (7.5%)


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Software Map
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Now limiting view to projects in the following categories:
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3 projects in result set.
|0. PaStiX - PaStiX is a high performance parallel solver for very large sparse linear systems based on direct methods. It provides also an adaptive blockwise iLU(k) factorization that can be used as a parallel preconditioner.
|Activity Percentile: 98.45
Registered: 2005-12-01 17:31
|1. SYNTAX - Ensemble d'outils permettant la construction automatique d'analyseurs syntaxiques à partir de leur description grammaticale. Les formalismes reconnus vont des CFG (déterministes ou ambiguës) aux TAG, LFG, RCG, ...
|Activity Percentile: 12.62
Registered: 2006-07-07 12:05
|2. MURGE - MURGE is a common interface to several sparse linear solvers. This projet aims at providing a interface that can be use in numerical simulation to call different solvers without rewriting some code.
"MURGE is close to MERGE".
|Activity Percentile: 0.00
Registered: 2009-02-04 15:35


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Comments from this week's BVI Charter
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Re: Comments from this week's BVI Charter
Originally Posted by
Thank you TF! Sounds dicey trying to get moorings. What is the latest time of day that you have a decent chance of getting one?
I don't think that there is any single answer to that question. It varies so much at different times of the year, and different days of the week, and different weather conditions. While I mentioned a couple of times that mooring balls were in short supply, they were always when weather conditions would cause more boats to seek protection (some of which might leave as soon as the weather cleared). Boats seemed to come and go during all times of the day. Remember that most of the balls are free for day use, and I don't think that they come around to collect until late afternoon. So there's always a good chance that someone would depart late in the day before they have to pay. Bottom line, it does not matter how many balls there are, as long as it's greater than zero.
We were glad that we weren't there between Christmas and New Years, as I suspect there is so much traffic then that mooring balls may often be filled to capacity. But outside that, it's probably a crap shoot with pretty good odds. Maybe someone who lives there can fill you in better.
We were determined not to let fears over mooring ball availability affect our fun. We weren't going to go racing out of the mooring field early in the morning just to get to our next destination. We were going to sleep in, eat, snorkel, and do whatever we wanted to, and leave when we were ready to. We figured the worst that would happen is that we would have to anchor (which we preferred not to do because we're not familiar with the quality of hold in this area) or we would have to pay a little more for a slip in a marina.
Don't forget that overnight mooring ball rental is a business, and if there's sustained demand for them, then there's an economic incentive to put more in. This might make the anchoring folks unhappy as they see their free anchoring areas encroached, but it's good for the environment since it protects the coral better than people dropping anchor all over the place.
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The excise tax remains employers' No. 1 concern with the health care reform law, with 45% of employers surveyed recently by Mercer citing it as a significant concern.
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The granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr. fled the controversial and shock-value-driven "church" revealing they were told to "pray for people to die," and RadarOnline.com has her eye-opening story.
Libby Phelps Alvarez, 29, left the church in 2009 and spoke to the Kansas City Star, telling them she struggled without the lifestyle she'd known her entire life.
PHOTOS: Libby Phelps Leaves Controversial Westboro Baptist Church
"That first year, there would be days it would hit me really hard," she said.
The church — known for crashing funerals of slain military heroes, protesting with multi-colored signs bearing hateful messages against homosexuals and inserting themselves in high-profile celebrity stories — is comprised of about 40 members who are almost all Phelps family.
PHOTOS: Celebrity Racist Rants
After Libby fled the organization she was asked by 96.5 The Buzz in Kansas what the craziest thing was that the church made her do.
"To pray for people to die," she responded.
PHOTOS: Celebrity Death Threats
And while there are days that Libby still wonders if she's going to heaven or hell, or wants to speak with her mother, she's glad to have left the organization and is now happily married.
Logan Alvarez was a member of the Westboro Baptist Church when he met Libby while shopping at an Urban Outfitters store, and after just four months of dating Libby gave him a way out of the church and he proposed to her.
To find out more about the Westboro Baptist Church click here.
What Is The Westboro Baptist Church? Seven Things You Didn't Know About 'Hate Group' Threatening To Picket Sandy Hook Funerals
Anonymous Vows To 'Destroy' Westboro Baptist Church Over Plan To Picket Sandy Hook Funerals, 'We Know Where You're Sleeping'
Westboro Baptist Bigot Slams Steve Jobs: From Her iPhone!
EXCLUSIVE: Westboro Baptist Church 'Using Elizabeth Taylor's Death To Further Their Own Agenda' — Says Friend


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Associated Press
IVA, S.C. - The police chief of an Anderson County town has been arrested on criminal domestic violence charges and suspended from duty.
The Anderson County Sheriff's Office says Iva Police Chief Tommy Miller was charged Saturday with criminal domestic violence and third-degree assault.
Arrest warrants accuse the 39-year-old police chief of repeatedly striking his 14-year-old son with a piece of wood and attempting to harm his wife by grabbing and throwing her. The incident report says deputies reviewed video footage and spoke with Miller's wife and son before arresting Miller.
Miller was taken to the Anderson County jail and released on personal recognizance bonds.
Town officials have suspended Miller while they look into the charges.
Iva has about 1,200 residents.
Voicemail messages left on Miller's home phone were not immediately returned.
- Keywords
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Benefits of Thunderbolt™ TechnologyThunderbolt technology is a transformational high-speed, dual protocol I/O that provides unmatched performance with 10Gbps bi-directional transfer speeds. It provides flexibility and simplicity by supporting both data (PCIe*) and video (DisplayPort*) on a single cable connection that can daisy-chain up to six devices. Thunderbolt technology enables flexible and innovative system designs and is ideal for thin profile systems and devices such as Ultrabooks™.Thunderbolt UsagesThunderbolt enables new and flexible system designs and thinner form factors by providing the ability to expand the system capabilities on a single cable. The user can have extreme mobility on the road with a laptop or Ultrabook, and then connect to a multi-function monitor or dock at home to get no-compromise access to every device on the desk, turning the laptop into a desktop computer.Thunderbolt technology is ideal for media creation and connectivity applications. By combining high bandwidth, low latency and highly accurate time synchronization users can now connect audio/video devices to the PC via Thunderbolt for creation of broadcast quality media.As the fastest available connection to your computer at 10Gbps, with Thunderbolt users can transfer an entire HD movie in less than 30 seconds making it ideal for fast synchronization of content between devices. When users require high performance backup and restore functionality Thunderbolt is obvious choice enabling the transfer of 1TB of data in less than 5 minutes.Thunderbolt technology brings a new balance of performance, simplicity and flexibility to end users. As a revolutionary PC I/O technology, combining data and video (PCI Express and DisplayPort) on one shared high-performance cable, Thunderbolt technology opens doors to making new things possible.
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Giving a boost to domestic production and reducing dependence on imports, finance minister Arun Jaitley introduced various measures to provide parity between domestically produced goods and their imported counterparts. Jaitley used a combination of imposing and exempting customs and excise duty to promote local manufacturing of consumer products like mobile phones, CRT televisions, LED and LCD televisions that measure less than 19 inches, oils, soaps and footwear while also making these products more affordable for consumers, especially the weaker section of society.
Jaitley proposed to reduce the basic customs duty on fatty acids, crude palm stearin, RBD and other palm stearin, specified industrial grade crude oils from 7.5% to nil for manufacture of soaps and oleo-chemicals. Similarly, duty on crude glycerin has been brought down from 12.5% to 7.5% and crude glycerin used in the manufacture of soaps from 12.5% to Nil.
Moreover, a basic customs duty at 10% has been imposed on specified telecommunication products in order to give a fillip to domestic manufacturing.
While personal computers will get cheaper as all inputs/components used in their production have been exempt from 4% special additional duty (SAD), the finance minister has imposed education cess on imported electronic products to help locally manufactured products equal the ground for competition.
Exempting colour picture tubes from basic customs duty will make cathode ray TVs cheaper.
Anirudh Dhoot, president, Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturer Association (CEAMA) and director, Videocon, said that the budget aims to encourage the manufacturing sector as well as TV manufacturing in the country by reducing import duties.
According to Gaurav Gupta, senior director, Deloitte India, said these changes would hopefully lead to better demand along with the incentives to invest in manufacturing.
Attempting to boost SMEs especially in the footwear industry, excise duty has been halved to 6% on footwear of retail price exceeding Rs 500 per pair but not exceeding Rs 1,000 per pair. Footwear of retail price up to Rs 500 per pair will continue to remain exempted.
On the flip side, in a move that is likely to burn a hole in the pocket of cigarette smokers, FM announced a steep increase in the excise duty on cigarettes in the range of 11% to 72%. What this primarily means for a cigarette smoker is that a small filter cigarette measuring 60-64mm in length will now cost him/her almost double the amount as the cost per thousand sticks in this product category now increases by 72% to Rs 1,151 from Rs 669 in FY14. Price hike in the case of regular filter cigarettes measuring 65-70mm is to the tune of 17% to Rs 1,649 for thousand sticks.
Cost per thousand sticks of cigarettes with long- (70-75mm) and king-filters (75-85mm) will see an increase of 11% and 20.7% (on year) respectively. Prices of cigarettes with extra large filters (85-100mm) remains the same at Rs 3,290.
While both the industry and the analyst community have been expecting some increase in the excise duty, the steep hike has come as a big shock. According to The Tobacco Institute of India (TII), the extremely steep excise duty increase on cigarettes coming on the back of sharp increases in the two preceding years, will provide a further fillip to the growing illegal trade in India which is already a significant 19% of overall cigarette industry.
The most impacted due to this excise duty hike, according to analysts, will be India's biggest cigarette maker ITC. Calling it one of the steepest hikes ever, industry experts said the weighted average excise duty hike works out to around 25% for ITC. In fact, according to analysts at PhillipCapital India, the sharp increase in under 64mm products by 72% is a long-term negative for the company.
"The hike will have a bearing on ITC's cigarette volume growth. We expect ITC to take price hikes of 12-13%," said Abneesh Roy, associate director - institutional equities – research, Edelweiss Securities.
Not sparing smokers in the lifestyle segment, Jaitley said that increases are also proposed on cigars, cheroots and cigarillos. Likewise, excise duty has also been increased on other 'injurious to health' products. Accordingly, excise duty on pan masala is being increased from 12% to 16% while on unmanufactured tobacco it has been increased by 5% from the earlier 50%. On products like gutkha and chewing tobacco the excise duty is being hike from 60% to 70%.
Attempting to curb the growing consumption of aerated waters containing added sugar, Jaitley proposed to levy an additional duty of excise at 5%.


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Resolution: standard / high
Figure 8.
Comparison of rhTF and hTF for supporting hybridoma cell proliferation, cumulative cell density, and antibody production. Sp2/0 hybridoma cells were cultured in serum-free medium supplemented with hTF or rhTF at 0.03, 0.1, 0.3, 1, 5, or 30 mg/L. The hTF and rhTF were compared at different degrees of iron saturation: Apo, iron-free; Partial, partially iron saturated; Holo, iron saturated. A. Comparison of hTF to rhTF for cell proliferation during log phase growth (day0 through day3). B. Comparison of hTF to rhTF for cumulative cell density. Cumulative cell density is the estimated area under the growth curve and is indicative of the total cell mass generated by a culture system. Units are given in cell-days/ml. C. Comparison of hTF to rhTF for antibody production. Error bars denote the standard deviation of triplicate cultures.
Zhang et al. BMC Biotechnology 2012 12:92 doi:10.1186/1472-6750-12-92


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Comment: cheese with that whine? (Score 1) 218
by Nexboy (#12352236) Attached to: Phishing for Credit
Jeez, did you see the whiny little responses by the nimrods who were hooked by the simulated phishing attack? I say that every admin ought to do these attacks on their users daily, and anybody who replies should get their access cut until they write on the blackboard 100 times "I'm a stupid dumbass for responding to a phishing email."


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ISBN 10: 0691144842. See all ISBN's
Publisher: Princeton University Press
This is an eTextbook Learn More
Spain's development from a premodern society into a modern unified nation-state with an integrated economy was painfully slow and varied widely by region. Economic historians have long argued that high internal transportation costs limited domestic market integration, while at the same time the Castilian capital city of Madrid drew resources from surrounding Spanish regions as it pursued its quest for centralization. According to this view, powerful Madrid thwarted trade over large geographic distances by destroying an integrated network of manufacturing towns in the Spanish interior.
Challenging this long-held view, Regina Grafe argues that decentralization, not a strong and powerful Madrid, is to blame for Spain's slow march to modernity. Through a groundbreaking analysis of the market for bacalao--dried and salted codfish that was a transatlantic commodity and staple food during this period--Grafe shows how peripheral historic territories and powerful interior towns obstructed Spain's economic development through jurisdictional obstacles to trade, which exacerbated already high transport costs. She reveals how the early phases of globalization made these regions much more externally focused, and how coastal elites that were engaged in trade outside Spain sought to sustain their positions of power in relation to Madrid.
Distant Tyranny offers a needed reassessment of the haphazard and regionally diverse process of state formation and market integration in early modern Spain, showing how local and regional agency paradoxically led to legitimate governance but economic backwardness.
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ISBN 10: 0691144842, ISBN 13: 9780691144849, eISBN 10: 1400840538, eISBN 13: 9781400840533
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