DOT Miles Driven: Overlay 2007-2011

Things that make me go hmmm... I tend to take that view that the economy is a heat engine, this looks like less heat to me... along with this:

IEA Oil Market Report US Motor Gasoline Demand

Here is the data source, go to September 2011 and click on the .xls version - you will find it on the Data tab in column I - enjoy!
US DOT Data Source

We Will Be Exploring the Limits of Storage for Natural Gas

So I've been watching storage for the natty for some time now, and it struck me that I should put up a post on it as I think we are about to explore the physical limits of the natural gas storage system in the USA...

Thanks to the good people at the EIA, I downloaded the data for natural gas storage levels from their weekly report (Thursday mornings). I constructed a 4 week moving average to smooth things out a tad and then looked at the month over month change on a percentage basis, with each year set up as an overlay.

Short version: we are coming in 'hot', and in absolute terms the last storage report was 0.2% under the previous all time high, I expect we punch through next week (I may get expelled from the economics profession for calling both direction and time). Will coal switching provide sufficient demand to set the price floor this time around?


I've added this plot to illustrate what I have been talking about - here are 12 month moving averages for natural gas production and the front month Henry Hub natural gas contract - note the divergence and even the accelerating natural gas production as prices grind lower... and lower...

U-3 Unemployment Rates from Recession Peak to Expansion Trough

Some descriptive statistics of the behavior of U-3 across all post-WWII business cycles using UNRATE and the NBER cycle dating.

The top of each red column corresponds to the peak in the U-3 unemployment rate associated with a particular recession, typically happening after that recession has ended. The lower end of each red column corresponds with the trough in the U-3 unemployment rate experienced prior to the onset of the next recession... note that for the last bar on the chart, the current trough is provisional (the low to date was 8.8% in March, 2011 while in September, 2011 that is 9.1%).

DJIA Volatility - What Next?

So is this the start of something?

First, what we are looking at - a five day intra-day range of the DJIA divided by the five day average of the close - and the absolute level of the Dow 30 index.

Now, what next? Note the observation of the shorting ban is roughly contemporaneous with the Lehman failure... no claims as to causality, but we may be getting some additional insight into that with the recent moves by several markets within the EU to ban shorting... time will tell.

UEMPMEAN - UEMPMED: Structural Unemployment

So using the mean and median weeks of unemployment time series data from the Fed FRED, here is what the spread between the mean time and median time looks like... so as mean times increase relative to median times, this would seem to indicate either a larger sub-group of long term unemployed, or that sub-group is experiencing longer durations of unemployment, or both.

What changed in the 2001 recession that resulted in a higher floor for the spread?

US Regular Gasoline Price - Perspective

Courtesy of the EIA data set on the monthly average price for regular gasoline, above is a plot of the 12 month moving average...

SLV % of Shares Outstanding Traded Daily Redux

First, we have about a 16 month view of the shares traded as a percent of outstanding...



Next, we are looking more closely at my SWAG at the region where the share volume appears to be 'different'...



Here we have the 10, 30 and 90 day daily moving averages of the share volume...



And finally, the comparison of SPY share volume to SLV share volume. Enjoy and a tip of the hat to Mike in Long Island of the CR commentariat for the shares outstanding data!