As reported today by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the effective federal funds rate stood at 0.08% as of November 9th, 2011.
Currently, this overnight loan rate is at one of its lowest point in the last five decades. It may have intentionally been kept low by the government to make borrowing cheaper.
From the St.Louis Federal Reserve, reported by Disha Bheda
The Prime Bank Loan Rate, as reported today by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, stood at 3.25% as of September 1st, 2011. This rate has been steady at 3.25 % since January 2009.
Currently it is at its lowest levels in the past five decades. The rate may have been intentionally kept low to support an expansionary monetary policy due to the severe recession in 2008.
From the St. Louis Federal Reserve, reported by Disha Bheda.
The ADP employment report showed gains of 110,000 jobs during the month of October. Total nonfarm payroll has increased every month since February 2010. This number, though not enormous, shows that the economy is continually adding jobs in US even if the increases are slow. Total payroll is now above post 9/11 levels, but still significantly below the recent peak in 2008.
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be releasing their monthly employment data. Come back here or check our Employment Report to see the data.
–From the St. Louis Federal Reserve and ADP, reported by Daniel Saniski
Welcome! Over the next few days we will be finishing up our new look for Data360 which should make it easier to find the data most relevant to you. Please be patient while we set up our new organizational system to better serve you. Thank you.
Here’s some good news and it’s hard to believe, but we are consuming less gasoline. Lester Brown with a nice data trend about US gasoline consumption. I would bet that on a per person basis, the decline is even greater.
Great graph from WSJ about income and wealth in the US, following release of information by Census that median constant dollar earnings per worker have decreased to 1996 levels. I was surprised to see top 5% income has pretty much stayed same for past 20 years. I would be curious to know what the top 1% has done in that same time period.
Mega Shark savors the complex flavors of international orange in the film Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, which, despite a moving performance by Mega Shark, was snubbed at the Oscars
Steven Soderbergh, the acclaimed director of Ocean’s Eleven, Traffic and Erin Brokovich, is coming to San Francisco. Soderbergh will begin filming his new picture, Contagion, a thriller starring Matt Damon, in the city on February 9th. While San Francisco is a world class city, complete with its own film commission charged with luring Hollywood directors, relatively few films are shot here. Notable exceptions include Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Basic Instinct and The Pursuit of Happyness. In celebration of Soderbergh’s upcoming work in the city, Data360 crunched the numbers and came up with a list of actors who appear in the most scenes in San Francisco. Here are the top 10:
Rank – Name – # of Scenes – Film Name(s)
8 (Tie). Sean Connery – 22 Scenes – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Marnie, The Presidio, The Rock
8 (Tie). Goldie Hawn – 22 Scenes – Foul Play
8 (Tie). Chevy Chase – 22 Scenes – Foul Play, Memoirs of an Invisible Man
7. Jacqueline Bisset – 23 Scenes – Bullitt
5 (Tie). Mary Steenburgen 24 Scenes – Time After Time
5 (Tie). Malcolm McDowell – 24 Scenes – Time After Time
4. Michael Douglas – 27 Scenes – The Game, Basic Instinct
3. Liam Neeson – 29 Scenes – The Dead Pool
2. Steve McQueen – 30 Scenes – The Towering Inferno, Bullitt
1. Clint Eastwood – 80 Scenes – The Dead Pool, Sudden Impact, Escape from Alcatraz, The Enforcer, Magnum Force, Dirty Harry
While this post is a bit of a “just for fun” departure from Data360’s core focus on leading economic data, it also serves to shed some light on the impact of the film industry on our economy. The Milkin Institute (a non-profit economic research firm founded by post-incarceration Michael Milkin of Drexel Burnham/junk bond/insider trading/tax evasion fame) finds that the film production industry adds $57 billion to the U.S. economy, just under 0.5%. In 2009, the film industry generated a positive foreign trade balance of $13.6 billion and Dan Glickman, former president of the Motion Picture Association, told Time Magazine in 2005, “Among all the sectors of the U.S. economy, our industry is the only one that generates a positive balance of trade in every country in which it does business.” Perhaps a bit ironically, one of the profiteers of the decline of American manufacturing was Michael Moore, who’s 1989 film Roger and Me chronicles the director’s quest to meet with then General Motors CEO Roger Smith to discuss outsourcing and plant closings.
Source: San Francisco Film Commission
What happens when you take something and place it in an art gallery? Does the value change? Do having freshly contructed-and-painted walls, just-so setting, and sublime lighting change it? What about the other pieces in the gallery? As an example, let’s use Fountain, the famous twentieth century dada sculpture by Marcel Duchamp. Technically speaking, Fountain was a urinal rotated 90 degrees, signed ‘R. Mutt,’ and placed on a pedestal. The piece caused a scandal and a great amount of subsequent discussion. Surely, a receptacle wasn’t art! But it was. Why? Context.
By situating a “readymade” toilet into a gallery amidst conventionally assumed-to-be-art pieces, a lowly receptacle becomes a sculpture. The presentation and context, along with discussion, completes the conversion. It only requires new methods of perceiving. A shift in seeing changes a common object into something much larger—possibly the centerpiece of a movement. Once you gain the special way of seeing and of processing context then a whole new world opens. The same is true of data.
Are you producing data when you get a job? Lose a job? Buy milk at the store? Balk at rising prices or thrill at lowered prices? It seems terribly abstract to consider that by living your daily life you produce endless data streams. Millions of other people, living their lives, also produce data. Then, by combining and presenting this data in a new context it becomes information just as an everyday object set on a pedestal becomes art—the everyday combined and newly presented turns into something new and wonderful. It produces new ways of seeing.
People can have world-changing, visceral reactions to a single point of data. Stock prices rise and fall from a quarterly earnings figure—a single number. People feel bolstered or disheartened by new unemployment figures. Without a well-designed context a single data point is one person gaining or losing a job, buying a car, building a home. When a whole nation engages in a behavior and it’s turned into data we can finally see the forest for the trees.
Consider the Data360 Employment Report. On page one we have unemployment figures. Looking at unemployment over time we find that things are rough, but the unemployment rate dropped four tenths of a percent this month and that’s good. Moving on to page two, though, a whole new context is produced. Since 2008 the ratio of employed and total adults has reduced considerably. The labor force participation rate, or the number of people working or trying to find work, also decreased. So the unemployment rate may have gone down because fewer people are part of the employment pool. This is a possible conclusion produced from the juxtaposition of these graphs.
Moving on to page three the total nonfarm payroll data provides a whole new context. Looking at this graph it is clear that although unemployment is extremely high, there are still more total people on payrolls. There are many factors that can be brought up for contextualization: vast population growth between the beginning of the chart and now, possible changes in reporting over time, etc. Then the whole game is changed once again by the payroll change graph on the right-hand side. The payroll alone could produce a very rosy picture, but the month-to-month change from those data points produces a whole other way of seeing. Although the absolute numbers climb ever upward, the past few years of monthly change produces a starkly different picture. Then, on page four, the context shifts once again.
Ponder the graph of people unemployed 27 weeks and over. Really look at it. It is a powerful image—the number of people unemployed more than six months has skyrocketed in the past few years. Alone it tells a story, but it also frames every other graph seen previously. The unemployment rate seems heavier. The worker-to-population ratio decline seems steeper. It all feels much more real. That’s where the danger lies.
By the time these figures were presented the entire employment situation was thoroughly contextualized by other data—which pieces of the employment puzzles increased or decreased, but also how one data set informs another. Seen context-free, figures can be misleading, but by viewing this and our other reports the data is contextualized with other relevant data. Looking at one data point out of context is not especially useful, but placing it in a chart surrounded by informing, complementary figures helps produce understanding of the whole situation—the 360 degree view, if you will.
Curated data is carefully set into each report-as-gallery and by studying each graph and each page context is produced and informed opinions can be generated. What might seem as an isolated and common event in daily life, when set together carefully and without bias may become extraordinary. When trying to understand the larger context of data come to Data360, a carefully crafted data repository designed to help show every angle of data.
-Daniel Saniski, Data360
