Economy In Perspective - unemployment, jobs, GDP growth, inflation, the deficit, and tax receipts

If you can read this small but informative website - it's just a few pages and reads sequentially - and still want to vote for a Republican I will be amazed.  Please explain.

td

Economy In Perspective - Home:


INTRODUCTION

"During an economic downturn politicians often have very heated arguments about the best way to approach the problem.  This made us curious about how effectively the economic policies of previous presidents might have dealt with these situations.  In 2009 we began researching the issue and compiled some statistics.  Our goal was to create a long-term view of the economy, using the metrics that everyone brings up to show how good (or bad) things are going. These are: unemployment and job creation, gross domestic product (GDP) growth, inflation, the deficit, and tax receipts.  This would let people put numbers to common questions such as, “What was happening” and “How did we get that way”."
...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Department of Commerce have been compiling economic data for decades, and whenever possible we have taken the data directly from their website.  For data on national debt and federal receipts, our source is the St. Louis Federal Reserve. 
...

so the authors took lots of data and made many graphs and charts like this one here

...
CONCLUSION
We disregarded all the arguments and took the simple step of finding the economic measures that seemed most important: jobs, growth, spending and inflation, and asked when they looked good and when they looked bad.  We found the answer very surprising.  With few exceptions, the economy looked good when democrats were in the oval office, and less good when republicans had taken over.  It seems somehow that it can’t be that simple, but we’re content to let the analysts fight over that.  For us, the numbers speak for themselves more clearly than any economic analyst ever has.

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Chart of the day, HFT edition | Felix Salmon

This astonishing GIF comes from Nanex, and shows the amount of high-frequency trading in the stock market from January 2007 to January 2012. (Which means that the Knightmare craziness of last week is not included.) The various colors, as identified in the legend on the right, are all the different US stock exchanges. You might think there are only two stock exchanges in the US, but you’d be wrong: there are only two exchanges where stocks are listed. There are many, many more exchanges where stocks are traded. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/08/06/chart-of-the-day-hft-edition/

High Frequency Trading (HFT) has warped the stock market.  Literally millions and billions of trades are made lasting only micro-seconds, sometimes pulled just before completion, affecting the stock price up or down, then entering again to buy or sell at that newly affected price - scraping profits off of manipulating transactions within the market system - not based on buy and hold.  It's what the day-traders of the 80's and 90's used to do - only done over micro-second intervals, not hours or days.

One of the points here is that there is a chance to generate some revenue and hold down the manipulation of the market by adding small transaction fees - particularly for these rapidly traded transactions - not for your purchase of XYZ Inc. for dividend or long-term investment.

If not "significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT world" - and just like in the 2008 market collapse, the guys with the computers and suits will profit, while the rest of us take it in the shorts.

td
Update from a SlashDot comment on the post - where I first saw the HFT article.

by cpm99352 (939350) on Tuesday August 07, @07:51PM (#40911727)

To repeat my comments from just a few days ago [slashdot.org] , the fine article [caseyresearch.com] states on page 4:

Many HFTs will make near-simultaneous trades on different exchanges and profit because of the delay in one of the exchanges. An example will help me explain: let’s use the NASDAQ and EDGE exchanges, and say that ABC stock is trading at $1.00. The HFT will send a bunch of quotes (offers) to NASDAQ and EDGE, trying to sell ABC stock at $1.01. Once the NASDAQ order is accepted, the HFT can simultaneously cancel the $1.01 sell order on the EDGE exchange and replace it with a buy order at the original price of $1.00. EDGE immediately accepts that $1.00 order, because its system has not caught up to the new price of $1.01, and the HFT’s net position becomes zero. This is possible because of latency, which is jargon for delay in the system. The net result is, the HFT captures a $0.01 arbitrage. By scalping this tiny amount from many trades, the profits add up quickly

Let's repeat: the HFTs are putting orders on the system for which they have no intention of fulfilling. This is a violation of SEC rules, yet the SEC does nothing. There was an AC responder to my post who made a blanket denial cancellations were happening. Care to respond?

Chart of the day, HFT edition | Felix Salmon:

"The stock market today is a war zone, where algobots fight each other over pennies, millions of times a second. Sometimes, the casualties are merely companies like Knight, and few people have much sympathy for them. But inevitably, at some point in the future, significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT world, which is so complex that its potential systemic repercussions are literally unknowable. The potential cost is huge; the short-term benefits are minuscule. Let’s give HFT the funeral it deserves."

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