The Lovely Charts and Graphs Thread

[Count Bobulescu]

The next chart shows housing prices to be exceeding two of their key "anchors" - the housing price to income ratio and the housing price to rent ration - in many of these countries. While housing price to income ratios are below the average levels in America, they are well above in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Australia, Canada, Spain, the U.K., Norway, Denmark and Sweden. This is even the case for crisis-prone countries like Italy and Greece

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Canada tops the list on the housing price to rent ratio. Housing prices are significantly overvalued on this score (being driven perhaps by the high global demand for housing in Vancouver and to a lesser extent Toronto). The housing price to rent ratio also significantly exceeds its historical norm in Norway, New Zealand, Belgium, Australia, France, Finland, Spain, the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and several other countries.
Lougani notes that these indicators are a "very broad brush" and that there are "myriad country-specific factors that influence house prices." Still he cautions when these two key ratios are "above their historical averages, economic theory suggests that declines in house prices may still be in the offing."
We know how painful the housing crisis has been in the U.S. With the evolving Euro crisis and continuing global economic instability, it's scary to note that a significant global housing crisis may be in our future.

[Count Bobulescu]

[Sidewinder]

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New Zealand is definitely bubbly. I'd put the current NZ market somewhere in the latter half of 2005 by the timeline of the Irish bubble. It's remarkable how identical the media coverage/propaganda is, the mentality among the herd, down to the exact same language and phrases.

Not quite as insane as Ireland got, but definitely wildly over-valued by a good 25-30% IMO.

[Slim Buddha]

New Zealand is definitely bubbly. I'd put the current NZ market somewhere in the latter half of 2005 by the timeline of the Irish bubble. It's remarkable how identical the media coverage/propaganda is, the mentality among the herd, down to the exact same language and phrases.

Not quite as insane as Ireland got, but definitely wildly over-valued by a good 25-30% IMO.

Australia is supposed to be "bubbly" too. What is it about Anglo-Saxon countries that property is such a "commodity"??

[Count Bobulescu]

In a paper presented at Chatham House, Matthew Hulbert of the European Energy Review argues that there is an inherent instability in world oil markets because the OPEC producing countries have failed to diversify their economies but are still dependent on high oil prices to keep their populations in check.


In order to illustrate this, he presents a graph showing the break-even oil price for each OPEC nation. This is the price that each country needs in order to maintain the welfare programs their people have come to expect.


The horizontal axis aligns the OPEC nations in the order that they redistribute wealth to the general population. This is generally done through subsidizing prices and maintaining welfare programs. Iran has the largest commitments (and the biggest population) while Qatar has the least. The vertical axis represents the price of oil in US dollars from zero to $140 per barrel. Saudi Arabia is highlighted in green because it represent the median.


The price of oil is currently around $85 per barrel, which means that all the countries to the right of Saudi Arabia are losing ground. This is where Hulbert sees the a pending instability. He writes:


"A key outcome of the Arab uprisings has been a significant increase in the prices needed by the producers to manage their fiscal position. This is a serious indictment of the producers' failure to diversify their economies away from a dependence on oil revenues over the past 20 years.


“If the oil price goes much lower, three scenarios could ensue sequentially: a price war forcing prices even lower, a period of internal repression as revenues fail to buy compliance among populations, and internal unrest among producers, which could lead to supply disruptions followed by prices bouncing back."


So what else is new? Prices are always going up or down. The interesting thing is the revelation of which countries are the most vulnerable to price collapses and which are not.

http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/de...012pp_opec.pdf

[Count Bobulescu]

The presidential election here at home is neck and neck. The Real Clear Politics average of the popular vote puts Gov. Mitt Romney 0.6 percent ahead of President Obama.
But if the world had its say, this election would be a blowout favoring the incumbent.
That's according to a BBC World Service poll taken in 21 countries. It found for the most part, foreign countries preferred Obama. The only exception was Pakistan where more people said they preferred Romney.
Here's the key graphic:







http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...cc=es-20121028

[5intheface]

[Count Bobulescu]

The havoc Sandy is wrecking may cost some $20 billion in economic damage, according to risk firm Eqecat Inc. It's a lot of money—so much, in fact, that the costs places Sandy in the top 10 most expensive hurricanes ever.

Comparing Sandy with numbers from the National Hurricane Center's top ten costliest hurricanes list, Sandy places sixth when numbers are adjusted to 2010 dollars. NHC combines insured loss with National Flood Insurance Program figures to calculate its list. Sandy's costs will include repairing the New York subway system and any wind and rain damage to buildings.

Many of the most expensive hurricanes all happened pretty recently, with seven of hurricanes in the chart happening after 2000, making the argument that our storms are indeed getting more intense and causing more damage. Hurricane Katrina, of course, beat out all other hurricanes with a whopping $108.4 billion in damages when adjusted to 2010 dollars. Sandy's $20 billion price tag is still just an estimate, but if she comes close to costing that much, she'll enter the pantheon of horribly expensive natural disasters.

[Count Bobulescu]

The internet may seem abstract, but it does actually need hardware—hardware that can be damaged by storms like Sandy. As this chart from internet intelligence group Renesys shows, outages happened across the Northeast but were concentrated in New York City. The data comes from BGP, or border gateway protocol, servers that are used to direct internet traffic. You can see the huge jump in outages due to Hurricane Sandy start around 5:00 PM on the 29th, peaking at around 5:00 AM the next morning.


Clearly, New York state, represented by the purple, suffered the most internet loss. Just media wise, Gawker, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and National Review have all had server problems during Sandy. Renesys also notes that while outages affect some 60 million people locally, the network troubles can go beyond the five boroughs: "New York City also happens to be a major hub of international telecommunications. As a result of outages there, we've observed Internet traffic shift away from the city as carriers scramble for alternative paths."

[Count Bobulescu]

The growth in world oil consumption has leveled off to only about 1 percent per annum while both energy growth in general and GDP continue to rise at a faster pace. That's the essence of a graph included in Gail Tverberg's essay, "An Economic Theory of Limited Oil Supply," posted on The Energy Collective this week.


The graph tracks the rate of those three factors - oil consumption, energy consumption in general, and GDP - from 1968 to the present. Oil is represented by the red line, energy consumption by the green line and GDP by the blue. The horizontal axis is the horizontal scale, the vertical axis represents the percentage of growth over the previous year for each year. Notice that growth can also be negative and has been for oil growth on several occasions. Only once, in 1982, did energy growth dip into negative territory and GDP growth has never dipped below 1 percent, although 2009 did mark a low point.


Until 1974, oil growth regularly exceeded energy and GDP, rising at a phenomenal rate of 8 percent and above in 1968-1970. After the Arab Oil Embargo it plummeted, falling into negative territory until hitting an astonishing - 3.8 percent in 1982. Since 1984 it has been back in positive territory but never more than slightly above 2 percent.


Oil and energy tracked each other pretty will until 2004, when a gap of about 1 percent opened between the two. Oil growth is now a full percentage point below GDP growth and even more below energy. In an unusual turn, overall energy growth has exceeded GDP growth over the last two years. Since 1974, this had happened in only one year - 2004.


The lesson seems to be that oil is playing a smaller role in economic output, meaning it is being replaced by other forms of energy. The close association between energy and economic growth, however, seems, if anything, to be getting stronger.

[Count Bobulescu]

Gail Tverberg had a big week with major essays on both OilPrice and The Energy Collective. Her OilPrice essay, “Why Natural Gas Won’t Save the World,” argues that shale gas wells may turn out to have a short life and that the problems of employing natural gas in transport nay limit its growth. Meanwhile, other fuels will continue to play a big role in our energy budget. In other words, natural gas isn’t going to solve everything.


As an illustration, she presents the above graph tracking the increase in the major forms of energy from 2006 to 2011. The change is measured not in terms of percentage but absolute numbers. The vertical axis represents the five-year change in millions of metric tons of oil equivalent while the horizontal axis breaks world energy consumption by the various source.


Despite all the efforts to limit coal burning in the US, coal consumption has increased the most on a world level, up nearly 600 million tons. Natural gas is second at 350 million tons. Oil and biofuels (lumped together), hydroelectricity and other renewables (mostly wind and solar) are all at about 100 million tons. The big surprise is nuclear energy, which has actually declined by about 20 million tons oil equivalent. This is probably due to the Fukushima accident and the resulting decisions by several countries to take nuclear reactors off line.


The bar graph could suggest that coal will remain the fuel of the future. But this may be changing. The US is making a deliberate effort to shut down older coal plants and even China seems to be scaling back the pace of development.


Offsetting this, however, may be the cutbacks in nuclear, which are causing Germany and others to increase coal consumption. In the next five years, natural gas could surpass coal in growth. Oil will probably remain fairly stable, nuclear may recover and renewable energy sources will continue to grow. For now, though, Tverberg is probably correct – natural gas isn’t going to replace everything.

[Count Bobulescu]

An Animated Map of Frantic Campaign Traveling

Romney and Obama have really hopped, skipped, and turned all across the country to campaign, as you can see in this fun animated map video of their campaign travels by statistician Jerzy Wieczorek. Using data from a Washington Post interactive on campaign stops from May 29 to October 25, Wieczorek plotted travel between different campaign events for Romney and Obama. The blue line represents Obama, and the red line represents Romney, with exact locations popping up below and above the map. Note: The video does not include trips home to D.C. or Boston. With those, the frantic hopping required to the campaign for president would be even more hectic.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/polit...aveling/58647/

[Count Bobulescu]

[Count Bobulescu]

The Most Popular Excuses Americans Give For Not Voting
There are many reasons not to vote, even though you totally should. Here are the most common








Some interesting details from the Census Report that came up with the data:
27 percent of Asians said they didn't vote because they were busy, considerably higher than the national average of 17.5 percent.
15 percent of whites said they didn't vote because they didn't like the candidates, twice as high as any other group.
Young people (ages 18-24), Asians, and bachelor's-degree holders were most likely to report registration problems.

[Count Bobulescu]

One thing we’ve learned this election is that averaging polling data gets you pretty close to an accurate prediction. But particular polls are often badly off. According to Fordham’s Costas Panagopoulos, some of the least accurate polls came from surprising sources. Gallup, Rasmussen and NPR were among the worst, whereas YouGov, PPP and Ipsos/Reuters all nailed it:

RAND also had a good night. Their poll, which used an innovative methodology that tracked 3,500 people through Web surveys, predicted that Obama would get 51.7 percent of the two-party vote. He got 51.1 percent. Getting it right to within 0.6 percentage points is pretty good.