25IQ

 The post-Depression record for consecutive months with the unemployment rate above 9% was 19 months in the early ’80s. That record will be broken this month, and it is very possible that the unemployment rate will still be above 9% in December 2011…. The economy probably needs to add around 125 thousand payroll jobs per month just to keep the unemployment rate from rising …  If the participation rate does increases – say to 65% over the next year, from the current 64.5% – then the U.S. economy will need an additional 1 million jobs just to hold the unemployment rate steady (not counting population growth). Add in 125,000 per month more jobs to offset population growth, and the economy would have to add 2.5 million jobs in 2011 to hold the unemployment rate steady (assuming a 0.5 percentage point increase in the participation rate). This suggests any decline in the unemployment rate will be slow.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/12/question-6-for-2011-unemployment-rate.html

 … If Congress had credibility, there would be no need to worry about the trade-off between helping the economy escape the recession and reducing the deficit. Congress could do what is needed to help the economy now, and promise—credibly with specific plans—to reduce the deficit once the economy has recovered. That would give us the best of both worlds.But, unfortunately, that’s not the Congress we have,  http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/12/how-fast-will-the-economy-recover.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconomistsView+%28Economist%27s+View+%28EconomistsView%29%29

 32 per cent of the $13,400bn in bank assets outstanding in the US, for example, are still loans secured on real estate. Mortgage-backed securities account for $1,252bn of the total. Many banks that are not dead today, then, could die very quickly if the housing market turns down again. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5db725e4-11e8-11e0-92d0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz19SretkCq

China has about 23% of the world’s population but only approximately 7% of the world’s fresh water supply. Moreover, China’s water resources are not distributed proportionately; the 550 million residents in the more industrialized northern area of the country are supported by only one-fifth of the fresh water and the 700 million in the southern region of China have the other 80% of the country’s fresh water supply http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/12/kass-15-surprises-2011/#more-61710

Kass: The sideways market of 2011 will prove to be a good year for opportunistic traders but a poor one for the buy-and-hold crowd as neither the bulls nor the bears will be rejoicing next Christmas.  http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/12/kass-15-surprises-2011/#more-61710

During the holiday season, clothing posted the strongest gain, up 11.2% over the same period last year when apparel sales were roughly flat. Electronics sales rose only 1.2% this year, as a glut of televisions drove prices down and shoppers shied away from innovations such as 3D TVs.  http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/

“There are fundamental constraints on the behavior of terrorist organizations that look very similar to the kinds of constraints that startup companies face — that all social groups in some ways face,” he says. “This limit is manpower.”… [A] power law relationship — called “scale invariance” — the risk of a large attack can be estimated by studying the frequency of small attacks. It’s a calculation that turns the usual thinking about terrorism on its head. “The conventional viewpoint has been there is ‘little terrorism’ and ‘big terrorism,’ and little terrorism doesn’t tell you anything about big terrorism,” Clauset explains. “The power law says that’s not true.”

Massive acts of violence, like 9/11 or the devastating 1995 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, obey the same statistical rules as a small-scale IED attack that kills no one, Clauset’s work suggests. “The power law form gives you a very simple extrapolation rule for statistically connecting the two,” he says.  http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/the-physics-of-terror-25955/