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Weekend Economists Watch the Stars Fall February 14-16, 2014
There have been so many deaths in the Entertainment world lately, but the one I felt the most was America's Sweetheart, Shirley Temple. Shirley was the best friend for little girls for the past 80 years...4 generations and counting. She never grew old, and never will.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25719377
Shirley Temple, who has died aged 85, was that rare example of a Hollywood child star who, when the cameras stopped rolling, carved out a new career.
With her ringlets, dimples and precocious talent, America's "Little Princess", charmed audiences during the 1930s Depression. For four years, she was Hollywood's biggest box-office star, representing the kind of sweet, innocent girl everyone wanted as their daughter. And, after a period of domesticity, she re-emerged as a successful businesswoman and politician.
Shirley Temple was born in Santa Monica, California on 23 April 1928. Encouraged by her mother Gertrude, she learned to dance while she was still a toddler and was enrolled in a Los Angeles dance school at the age of three. This led to her being signed up by a talent spotter for Educational Pictures, which promptly featured her in a series of one-reelers entitled Baby Burlesques. Temple later described them as "a cynical exploitation of our childish innocence that occasionally were racist or sexist".
When Educational went bust in 1933, she signed up with Fox Film Corporation, appearing in a number of bit parts. In 1934, Stand Up and Cheer became her first feature film and she stole the show with her rendition of "Baby Take a Bow".
Her box-office potential was obvious and by the age of six she was earning $1,250 (£760) a week; more than $21,000 (£12,750) at today's values. The income from her films was doubled by sales of merchandise, including Shirley Temple dolls and a host of girls' clothes and accessories.
Temple's mother always accompanied her during filming. Years later, Temple recalled how her mother had been furious when a director sent her on an errand and then made Temple cry by frightening her.
"She never again left me alone on a set," Temple said.
Her mother was also said to have done her hair for each movie, with every hairstyle having exactly 56 curls.
Across the world, audiences flocked to see her in films such as Little Miss Marker and The Little Colonel and The The Littlest Rebel. The success of her films, such as Curly Top, was credited with helping save 20th Century Fox from bankruptcy. Everyone sang along to her songs, especially On the Good Ship Lollipop, which appeared in the film Bright Eyes. In 1935 she was awarded a special juvenile Oscar and her foot and handprints were added to those of stars such as Jean Harlow and Mary Pickford outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. On her ninth birthday, Temple received more than 135,000 presents from around the world, according to The Films of Shirley Temple, a 1978 book by Robert Windeler. The gifts included a baby kangaroo from Australia and a prize Jersey calf from schoolchildren in Oregon.
The late Roddy McDowall, a fellow child star and friend of Temple, once said: "She's indelible in the history of America because she appeared at a time of great social need, and people took her to their hearts."
By the age of 10, Temple was the country's top box-office draw. President Roosevelt even credited her with helping to raise American morale during the trials of the Great Depression. Her own assessment of this period is somewhat different. "I class myself with Rin Tin Tin," she once said, referring to the canine star. "They fell in love with a dog and a little girl." Goodness always triumphed over evil in her plots, which were often based on traditional fairy stories. As she got older her character was altered slightly as the fresh-faced little six-year-old turned into a pre-adolescent.
Shirley Temple and Sybil Jason in The Little Princess The Little Princess marked the peak of her career
The studio, aware that time was not on their side, began to invest more money in her films which, certainly in the early days, had been made on a tight budget. Directors of the stature of John Ford were hired and his collaboration with her, Wee Willie Winkie, remained Temple's favourite. The peak of her film career came in 1939 when The Little Princess, her first outing in Technicolor, became a critical and box-office success. It was loosely based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, about a girl who is left in a boarding school while her father goes off to fight in the Boer War.
The obit goes on for several more decades...I also heard snippets of a BBC radio interview in which Shirley talked about potting Eleanor Roosevelt with a slingshot at a White House barbecue...
Shine on, Bright Eyes!
36 replies
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“Foreclosure Rebound Pattern”: Foreclosure Starts SUDDENLY Jump 57% in California (And Soar In Much Of The Country)
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-02-13/%E2%80%9Cforeclosure-rebound-pattern%E2%80%9D-foreclosure-starts-suddenly-jump-57-california-
From Federal-Reserve-fueled bubble to debilitating return to reality – reality being a financial calamity – to Federal-Reserve-hyper-fueled bubble: that’s the US housing market over the last ten years. There are many places around the country, including some cities in Silicon Valley, where home values are now higher than they were at the peak of the last bubble. Of course, no one at the Fed or in government calls it “bubble.” They’re talking about the housing “recovery.” But the excesses and speculators are back, and private equity funds and highly leveraged REITs are all over it, buying up every single-family home in sight, and now Wall-Street-engineering firms have come up with a new and improved contraption, a synthetic structured security that on its polished surface looks like that triple-A rated mortgage-backed toxic waste that helped blow up the banks. But this time, it’s different. The securities are backed by sliced and diced rental payments from single-family homes that are, hopefully, rented out.
So wither this “recovery?”
Foreclosure filings – default notices, scheduled auctions, and bank repossessions – suddenly jumped 8% to 124,419 in January across the nation, according to RealtyTrac. Which left some people scratching their heads. A mild uptick was expected after the holidays, but 8%? And what about the polar vortices – weren’t they supposed to have slowed things down to a crawl? OK, foreclosure filings were still down 18% from a year earlier, the 40th month in a row that they declined on an annual basis. But it was the smallest annual decline since September 2012. And the 8% jump from December was the largest such increase since May 2012. Crummy as they were, these national averages covered up some, let's say, interesting phenomena in a number of states.
Ah, my beloved state of California. Housing has been booming, and prices in coastal areas have been soaring – along with rents, to the point that mini-rebellions are breaking out. In this hyped and glorified housing market where the Big Money rules and where first-time buyers have been shoved aside unceremoniously, where foreclosure starts in 2013 had plunged 60% from 2012, and had declined year-over-year for 17 months in a row, or with the exception of five months, had declined four years in a row, well, in this wondrously recovered housing market, foreclosures starts in January suddenly jumped 57%.
?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1392329066937
It’s not just in California. Foreclosure starts rose 10% from December to hit 57,259 properties across the country. That they on average were still down 12% from a year earlier obscured major annual increases in certain individual states, and not just in one or two, like us crazies out here in California, but in 22 states! And California with its 57% jump in foreclosure starts now suddenly seems tame: In New Jersey, they soared 79%, in Connecticut 82%, and in Maryland 126%! The cynic in me says the sudden and dizzying jump in foreclosure starts, not only in California but in much of the country, must be some kind of data problem. Maybe RealtyTrac’s computers got hacked by some evildoer who was short the housing market or something. But when I contacted RealtyTrac to request permission to republish the chart, there was no word of a retraction, though this would have been a good opportunity, and so the numbers hold...Maybe foreclosure starts in February and March will somehow, miraculously, plunge and return to trend. Maybe January was just a fluke. But that may be wishful thinking. Instead, it could be the indication of a turning point of sorts, like some of the other indications we’ve already observed, and maybe the strange sound that we’re hearing out there is the hot air hissing out of this whole construct, so carefully inflated by the Fed, and so assiduously taken advantage of by private equity funds and other Wall Street outfits with access to the Fed’s nearly free money...
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-02-13/%E2%80%9Cforeclosure-rebound-pattern%E2%80%9D-foreclosure-starts-suddenly-jump-57-california-
From Federal-Reserve-fueled bubble to debilitating return to reality – reality being a financial calamity – to Federal-Reserve-hyper-fueled bubble: that’s the US housing market over the last ten years. There are many places around the country, including some cities in Silicon Valley, where home values are now higher than they were at the peak of the last bubble. Of course, no one at the Fed or in government calls it “bubble.” They’re talking about the housing “recovery.” But the excesses and speculators are back, and private equity funds and highly leveraged REITs are all over it, buying up every single-family home in sight, and now Wall-Street-engineering firms have come up with a new and improved contraption, a synthetic structured security that on its polished surface looks like that triple-A rated mortgage-backed toxic waste that helped blow up the banks. But this time, it’s different. The securities are backed by sliced and diced rental payments from single-family homes that are, hopefully, rented out.
So wither this “recovery?”
Foreclosure filings – default notices, scheduled auctions, and bank repossessions – suddenly jumped 8% to 124,419 in January across the nation, according to RealtyTrac. Which left some people scratching their heads. A mild uptick was expected after the holidays, but 8%? And what about the polar vortices – weren’t they supposed to have slowed things down to a crawl? OK, foreclosure filings were still down 18% from a year earlier, the 40th month in a row that they declined on an annual basis. But it was the smallest annual decline since September 2012. And the 8% jump from December was the largest such increase since May 2012. Crummy as they were, these national averages covered up some, let's say, interesting phenomena in a number of states.
“The sharp annual increases in some states shows that many states are not completely out of the woods when it comes to cleaning up the wreckage of the housing bust,” said RealtyTrac VP Daren Blomquist. “The foreclosure rebound pattern is not only showing up in judicial states like New Jersey, where foreclosure activity reached a 40-month high in January, but also some non-judicial states like California....
Ah, my beloved state of California. Housing has been booming, and prices in coastal areas have been soaring – along with rents, to the point that mini-rebellions are breaking out. In this hyped and glorified housing market where the Big Money rules and where first-time buyers have been shoved aside unceremoniously, where foreclosure starts in 2013 had plunged 60% from 2012, and had declined year-over-year for 17 months in a row, or with the exception of five months, had declined four years in a row, well, in this wondrously recovered housing market, foreclosures starts in January suddenly jumped 57%.
?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1392329066937
It’s not just in California. Foreclosure starts rose 10% from December to hit 57,259 properties across the country. That they on average were still down 12% from a year earlier obscured major annual increases in certain individual states, and not just in one or two, like us crazies out here in California, but in 22 states! And California with its 57% jump in foreclosure starts now suddenly seems tame: In New Jersey, they soared 79%, in Connecticut 82%, and in Maryland 126%! The cynic in me says the sudden and dizzying jump in foreclosure starts, not only in California but in much of the country, must be some kind of data problem. Maybe RealtyTrac’s computers got hacked by some evildoer who was short the housing market or something. But when I contacted RealtyTrac to request permission to republish the chart, there was no word of a retraction, though this would have been a good opportunity, and so the numbers hold...Maybe foreclosure starts in February and March will somehow, miraculously, plunge and return to trend. Maybe January was just a fluke. But that may be wishful thinking. Instead, it could be the indication of a turning point of sorts, like some of the other indications we’ve already observed, and maybe the strange sound that we’re hearing out there is the hot air hissing out of this whole construct, so carefully inflated by the Fed, and so assiduously taken advantage of by private equity funds and other Wall Street outfits with access to the Fed’s nearly free money...
Here's hoping he's at his best!
I would love to see him -- better take flask to toast him.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-rise-and-rise-and-rise-of-the-001-percent-in-america/283793/
Take one look at this graph, and you'll think you recognize the story: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the 1 percent blasts into the stratosphere while the 99 percent languishes in stagnation, moving on...
Simple, right? Except this graph doesn't tell that story, at all. Because you see that languishing green line at the bottom? That's the 1 percent.
Now let's add labels (the income data lives here if you wanna play at home) and voila, you can see this isn't a picture of the rich and the rest. It's the 40-year history of the rich, the truly rich, and the truly filthy stinking rich—the 1 percent, the 0.1 percent, and the 0.01 percent.
Who even are these people—the 1 percent of the 1 percent?
As Tim Noah explained, they're mostly executives and bankers. A 2010 study of the top 0.1 percent found that 61 percent of this group is either a banker or an executive/manager another big corporation. The rest are mostly lawyers (7 percent), doctors (6 percent), and real estate people (4 percent).
Take one look at this graph, and you'll think you recognize the story: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the 1 percent blasts into the stratosphere while the 99 percent languishes in stagnation, moving on...
Simple, right? Except this graph doesn't tell that story, at all. Because you see that languishing green line at the bottom? That's the 1 percent.
Now let's add labels (the income data lives here if you wanna play at home) and voila, you can see this isn't a picture of the rich and the rest. It's the 40-year history of the rich, the truly rich, and the truly filthy stinking rich—the 1 percent, the 0.1 percent, and the 0.01 percent.
Who even are these people—the 1 percent of the 1 percent?
As Tim Noah explained, they're mostly executives and bankers. A 2010 study of the top 0.1 percent found that 61 percent of this group is either a banker or an executive/manager another big corporation. The rest are mostly lawyers (7 percent), doctors (6 percent), and real estate people (4 percent).
http://www.epi.org/publication/years-american-recovery-reinvestment-act/
Next Monday marks five years since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was enacted, yet the U.S. labor market remains extraordinarily weak, with too little demand, few job opportunities, and crushing levels of long-term unemployment. This demonstrates the continued importance of expansionary fiscal policy, including large-scale ongoing public investment—purchases the government makes now that are useful for years to come, such as building roads and investing in research and education. However, though increasing funding for public investment is a win-win—creating jobs today and making critical improvements to the nation’s infrastructure—policymakers have instead pursued austerity.
In 2012, the last year with data, public investment for nondefense purposes was falling precipitously relative to potential gross domestic product (GDP)—the maximum sustainable output of the economy. Within the next decade, nondefense public investment will be lower than its previous historic low point. The figure below shows that by 2023 nondefense investment will be less than two-thirds of its average share of GDP from 1962 to 2012. (Because only the small amount of defense investment that goes to basic and applied research typically contributes to private-sector output, the graph below depicts only nondefense investment, though the downward trend applies to defense investment as well.)
In addition to improving the country’s infrastructure, increasing investment in a struggling economy has recently shown positive effects: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created jobs for up to 3.3 million people in 2010, when ARRA spending peaked. Of all of ARRA’s components, the Congressional Budget Office found that the two with the biggest bang-to-buck ratio were federal purchases of goods and services and transfer payments to the states for infrastructure spending—when the states actually spent the money as intended.
Next Monday marks five years since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was enacted, yet the U.S. labor market remains extraordinarily weak, with too little demand, few job opportunities, and crushing levels of long-term unemployment. This demonstrates the continued importance of expansionary fiscal policy, including large-scale ongoing public investment—purchases the government makes now that are useful for years to come, such as building roads and investing in research and education. However, though increasing funding for public investment is a win-win—creating jobs today and making critical improvements to the nation’s infrastructure—policymakers have instead pursued austerity.
In 2012, the last year with data, public investment for nondefense purposes was falling precipitously relative to potential gross domestic product (GDP)—the maximum sustainable output of the economy. Within the next decade, nondefense public investment will be lower than its previous historic low point. The figure below shows that by 2023 nondefense investment will be less than two-thirds of its average share of GDP from 1962 to 2012. (Because only the small amount of defense investment that goes to basic and applied research typically contributes to private-sector output, the graph below depicts only nondefense investment, though the downward trend applies to defense investment as well.)
In addition to improving the country’s infrastructure, increasing investment in a struggling economy has recently shown positive effects: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created jobs for up to 3.3 million people in 2010, when ARRA spending peaked. Of all of ARRA’s components, the Congressional Budget Office found that the two with the biggest bang-to-buck ratio were federal purchases of goods and services and transfer payments to the states for infrastructure spending—when the states actually spent the money as intended.
