Microsoft Smelling Like Bear Meat Going Into 2013
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Big thanks to MSNBC's Hardball for drawing attention to our chart analysis from Thursday, when a Facebook posting from Scott Brown set the floor for the Dow that day.
Unfortunately, the market crashed through that low yesterday, so from a purely technical point of view.... watch out.
(Thanks to @ivanthek for the image).

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Among the many cliffs America faces on Jan. 1 is the "dairy cliff."
That's the scenario where Congress fails to pass a farm bill to extend agricultural subsidies, which in turn would cause milk prices to soar.
But USDA data shows 2011 milk sales reached their lowest levels since 1984, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Rick Barrett.
In September, Barrett wrote that total U.S. beverage milk sales last year were 53 billion pounds - about 6 billion gallons, he reports.
Plus, more than half of all adults no longer drink milk at all, data site Informa recently reported.
Here's a graph showing the decline:

What's behind the drop-off?
Barrett talked to Vivien Godfrey, CEO of the Milk Processor Education Program known for the "Got Milk?" and milk mustache advertising campaigns.
"Shifting consumer habits and a flood of new beverages in the marketplace, including sports drinks and bottled teas, have taken a toll on beverage milk sales," Godfrey tells him.
"While Americans consume about the same number of gallons of beverages as they did in the past, they're drinking a lot less milk.
"Milk has lost out to other beverages, primarily bottled water," Godfrey says.
SEE MORE: Citi's Epic Commodities Outlook for 2013 >
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/6hXixoMKKHw/milk-sales-dairy-cliff-2012-12
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Some brands are instantly recognizable by a single color. For example, the Tiffany blue box is universal (test your knowledge of trademarked colors by taking this pop quiz).
The color a company uses to brand itself conveys how trustworthy they are to consumers, the quality of their products, and much more.
We've put together a fun color guide based on findings by Karen Haller, a UK-based business color and branding expert who has consulted with a number of well-known brands including Dulux, Orange Mobile, and Logitech.
What it means: Red is the color of power and passion. Haller says it can also be linked to excitement, energy, and physical courage.
Which brands use it: The Virgin Group is one of the biggest, most powerful brands in the world. Even when they were just starting out, Richard Branson was smart to use red to convey confidence and energy. Coca-Cola is another big brand that uses red in its lettering. Recently, French shoemaker Christian Louboutin SA won the right to trademark the brand’s distinctive red soles after suing Yves Saint Laurent.
Source: Karen Haller Colour And Design Consultancy
What it means: Green is the color of money and envy, but it also signifies the environment, Mother Earth, and universal love, Haller says. Green is attractive to youth and to those who enjoy life.
Which brands use it: The green mermaid on the center of every Starbucks cup is intended to brand the coffee company as one that is young and Earth-friendly. Starbucks is proud of its responsibility to the environment and its fair trade coffee products. Garnier Fructis is another green-colored brand, whose shampoos and other hair and body products jump off the shelves.
Source: Karen Haller Colour And Design Consultancy
What it means: Blue represents “trust, integrity, and communication,” Haller says. However, the use of the wrong tone of blue “can make a brand appear cold, aloof and unapproachable.” Blue relates to the mind, so consumers associate it with logic and communication. It’s also serene, like the ocean, and calming to look at.
Which brands use it: The major social media companies—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—use blue as their primary brand colors. Haller points out that the lighter blue of Twitter also “expresses the fun side of social media, given the high amount of yellow undertone.” Tiffany & Co. is also immediately recognized by its trademark teal blue.
Source: Karen Haller Colour And Design Consultancy
See the rest of the story at Business InsiderPlease follow War Room on Twitter and Facebook.
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A year ago at the WSJ's D Conference, I was at a private dinner with a dozen VCs and founders of note. One famous attendee lamented to me that their daughter was on Snapchat all the time.
"What's that?" I asked, always on the lookout for the next Rapportive (bought by LinkedIn), Uber (crushing it), Gowalla (Facebook), Wanderfly (TripAdvisor) or GDGT (crushing it) to invest in. "You don't want to know," they lamented.Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
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People who insist that the US has a gigantic "spending problem" are ignorant of what really drives the deficit and the national debt, as Henry Blodget easily demonstrated in a series of charts.
Closing the deficit is not just about lowering spending, relative to GDP, but also about increasing revenue from our very low levels.
So how is that accomplished?
When people talk about the deficit, they almost always use the "pain" metaphor.
In almost any op-ed extolling the wisdom of the Simpson-Bowles plan, it's pointed out that we're going to need to take some pain. Obama has said that the Federal Government needs to tighten its belt, which is something that is painful. Conservatives say the government needs to go on a diet. Diets are painful. A recent USA Today headline was very standard: "Nation's soaring deficit calls for painful choices."
It's understandable why the pain metaphor is so popular. One, it's logical to think that the answer to big deficits is cuts, and cuts are painful. More importantly, it appeals to an innate sense that pain is frequently a long-run redeeming thing to experience. You go to do Crossfit, and you feel pain. But then pretty soon you're a beast that's never felt better. Some religious groups use to mutilate their own flesh to show proper respect to The Lord.
So this is just a popular idea: Take the pain now, be redeemed.
The good news is that in economics and when talking about the deficit it doesn't need to work that way! Fixing the debt is painless!
That's because the primary driver of deficits is a lack of growth.
A chart that everyone needs to have seared into their brains is this one, which shows the deficit as a percentage of GDP (red line) vs. the unemployment rate (blue line).

For 60 years (!) the pattern has held. When unemployment drops, the deficit as a percentage of GDP drops. When unemployment rises, the deficit rises.
So now let's break this down further, to address the idea that we need to increase revenue as a % of GDP, which is undeniably true if we want to prevent the national debt from growing. The answer there is, once again, improve the employment picture (i.e., increase growth)
This chart shows revenue as a % of GDP (red line) vs the unemployment rate (inversed). The chart isn't quite as pretty, but as you can see, the primary driver of how much revenue we get as a % of GDP is unemployment. Went to get the red line up closer to 0.18? That will take getting the blue line closer to 6%.

It's the same deal with the spending side.
This chart shows spending as a % of GDP (red line) vs. the unemployment rate (blue line). Want to get the red line down to its historical range closer to 22% of GDP? Improve the unemployment rate! This makes total logical sense, of course, since lower unemployment implies reduced spending on all kinds or programs.

These charts showing the connection between the unemployment rate and the deficit (and the drivers of the deficit) are especially powerful when you consider that they've held firm through a variety of different tax regimes.
Look how dramatically the effective tax rate has come down over the years on the top earners (which is where the fight is currently located).

It started going down in the late 40s, jumped in the 60s, went down in the 80s, jumped again in the early 90s, and then has been going down since then. And yet that hasn't been the deficit pattern.
The deficit has been driven by unemployment, which means... Closing the deficit is painless. It's not about belt tightening, it's about putting more people to work, which is something that everyone loves.
Consider: With zero actual "belt tightening" over the last few years, the deficit as a % of GDP has been falling at its fastest pace since WWII, all thanks to people re-entering the workforce, and the pain of the economy being reduced.

Now there's a few related points that need to be addressed here.
-- Sadly achieving growth is not trivial. So although it's the only meaningful solution to the deficit, there isn't agreement on the magic answer to get there. In terms of what it takes to deal with the debt, there's a widespread belief that the Fed could do more to juice nominal growth (real growth + inflation) and nominal growth is all you need to reduce our debt burdens. Furthermore, as this chart showing nominal potential GDP (red line) vs. actual nominal GDP (blue line) shows, we're actually growing again on the same trajectory as we were pre-crisis. The problem is that we took an unprecedented dip during the crisis, and we haven't overcompensated.

-- In the debate over fiscal policy, you frequently hear liberals argue: "It's not time to deal with the deficit, we need to fix the economy first and then fix the deficit when the economy is stronger." While this has merit as a political concept, it's actually giving into a false frame that dealing with the deficit and dealing with unemployment are two separate things that you do at different times. Steps you take to improve unemployment are deficit reduction measures, as the above chart from IBD shows. While the government has done, technically, nothing to address the deficit in the last few years, the deficit is shrinking (relative to GDP) merely because the economy has improved, and more people are going back to work. If unemployment drops to 7%, or 6.5%, or 6%, we'll get quite a bit of deficit reduction then.
-- Even people who agree with all of the above analysis showing that the growth and employment are the critical drivers of the deficit will still point to charts like this one showing that the cost of Medicare is going to swamp the government, and set the deficit soaring unless there's a change.
Here's a famous chart from Paul Ryan showing the explosive growth of Medicare, and of course there are many others like it.

It's natural to look at a chart like that and say: Yeah, that's great about deficits being driven by growth, but clearly there's this big structural problem that is coming up on us fast.
So a few things need to be said about this chart:

So in the near term, deficit reduction is painless, and in the long-term, there's a few good reason to be skeptical of the scare charts.
-- So what about taxes then? If closing the deficit and getting more revenue as a % of GDP is all about growth, then why do we have to raise taxes on anyone?
Here it's probably best to think of Fiscal Policy not as a tool to create revenue and close deficits, but as a tool to shape society, but incentivizing some kind of activity (e.g. tax credits for R&D), disincentivizing other kinds of activity (sin taxes) and redistributing wealth (progressive taxation). All of this is controversial stuff, but there's almost nobody on either side of the political spectrum at this point who doesn't favor some kind of redistribution of wealth, so as to ameliorate extreme inequality. It's true that raising taxes on the rich to Clinton-era levels doesn't raise much revenue (just $40 billion a year, perhaps) but with income inequality at historical extremes (its worse now than it was pre-crisis) it may still be a beneficial policy tool to smooth things out somewhat via taxes.
As the GOP has argues, tax rates don't have much to do with government revenue collections.

But while that red line has gone down, another red line has gone up, and that's the US Gini Coefficient, which is a statistical attempt to measure income inequality.

If this inequality is something that's of concern, and some worth addressing, than taxes should be one part of the discussion in addressing them.
-- The bottom line is that pain and belt tightening are associated with higher deficits. The great financial crisis saw an explosion of the deficit, and a historic belt tightening, as the savings rate more than tripled from under 2.5% to over 7.5%.

History has also shown that when the government makes a real effort at "belt-tightening" the same results happen. One of the most important charts in the world is Richard Koo's look at what happened when Japan tried tightening fiscal policy prematurely during its slump and deficits widened.

Pain is entirely the wrong way to think about closing the deficit. If it's important to make it go away, we need to find a way of doing the exact opposite, putting people to work and making the economy grow.
SEE ALSO: Forget the deficit, here's the REAL reason to raise taxes on the rich >
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Part of the delight of Christmas morning is opening up fresh, shiny, untouched gifts. Our new stuff gets wrapped in colorful paper outside of the boxes and layers of protective plastic by the Asian teenagers who made them for us. Jan’s great-grandson is still a baby, so he probably didn’t care one way or the other about the condition of … [More]
Source: http://consumerist.com/2012/12/28/walmart-sold-us-a-high-chair-covered-with-food-and-mold-as-new/
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