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And the Dow's over 21.7 K. Imagine that?
Perceptions count. So too do concrete policies that make travel difficult. Bottom line is a 4% drop, for a major segment of the US economy.-RG
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WHEN Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, he wasted no time in trying to bar people from certain Muslim-majority countries entering America. He swiftly, too, promised to make good on his pledge to build a wall along the Mexican border. The nation’s travel industry shuddered. It did not feel like the actions of a man keen to woo visitors from abroad.
The predicted “Trump slump” quickly appeared to materialise. Within months, several online travel firms, including Kayak and Hopper, reported that fewer people were searching for flights to America. That seemed plausible. The country was getting terrible press abroad and the firms that sell flights online seemed the best placed to monitor demand for travel in real time. Come July, however, the U.S. Travel Association revealed that everything was rosy. Instead of a Trump slump, the country was in fact enjoying a Trump bump. The organisation’s Travel Trends Index, which tracks flight and hotel bookings, plane boardings and other data, suggested that the number of international visitors had grown for the 13th straight month in May. Previously gloomy commentators (including this one) were left to wonder how they had got it so wrong.
In fact, they had not. On September 5th, the U.S. Travel Association revised its July numbers following the inclusion of new data sources. The amended results are more in line with the naysayers. The association has gone from trumpeting the “astounding resilience” of the American travel market to lamenting the “major storm clouds” hovering over it. Rather than unbroken growth, it now says that visitor numbers dropped in four of the first seven months of 2017 compared with the year before. Its index declined most in February and March, just as the furore over Mr Trump’s attempted travel ban was at its height. There was better news in April, which registered a healthy increase in visitors, but that was mostly because the Easter holiday fell during that month. The association’s figures are now more in line with official data released last month, which cover the quarter up to March, and which show a 4.2% year-on-year drop in international arrivals, with travel from Europe particularly depressed.
The U.S. Travel Association says that there are still levers the president can pull to woo foreigners, such as backing “Brand USA”, the country’s tourism marketing organisation, and trumpeting open-skies agreements and the visa-waiver programme, which allows certain nationalities to enter the country without first obtaining a visa. That would no doubt help. But up until now the administration’s actions have tended to be more hindrance than help. The laptop ban was a good example. Leaving aside its security merits, the implementation was handled clumsily. Not only was there almost daily flip-flopping on whether it would be extended to flights from Europe and perhaps the world but, as one source recently told Gulliver, even the TSA—the body on the frontline of enforcing security—was kept in the dark about the plans until the last minute. Such things do not encourage people to travel to America. Given that foreign visitors contributed $212bn to the country’s economy in 2016, or 9.5% of total exports, that must be a worry.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/gull...ump-bump-slump
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Be interesting to see how his properties do overall.
And the Dow's over 21.7 K. Imagine that?
No doubt the ugliness of Trash and Repug brand, Aussie woman, and others, shot dead by the blood-thirsty cops, discourages tourists, but USD is also strong right now
The DOW hasn't been a good economic indicator in decades. Do you do anything but deflect btw?
We seem to be getting lots of Russian "tourists"
Great for our economy
the stagnation and impoverishment of the check-to-check, overly indebted lower 80% proves the Dow is a meaningless indicator for anybody but Capitalists.
Economic data is slow, and trends for an economy tend to take a while to manifest. Kind of like how the dow tripled under Obama from 2009 to 2016, if that is the metric of choice.
In this case, Trump is literally costing Americans their jobs, and there is some solid data to support that statement.
"It's actually a pretty bad metric," says John Shoven from the Stanford Ins ute for Economic Policy Research. "It's poorly constructed. Its only claim to fame is that it's been around for 120 years."
Before we even tackle the arcane way the Dow is calculated, let's address the milestone.
"It's just a round number," says Shoven, who has criticized the Dow and our obsession with milestones in the past. "There's nothing more significant about it crossing 20,000 than when it crossed 17,500 or any other number."
The Dow has its own divisor, a figure it uses and changes over time to try to adjust for stock splits or spinoffs. As such, it gives more influence to expensive stocks. So if two companies are worth about the same amount, if one has fewer shares that are worth more, that company has an oversized influence on the average.
"It's simple," says Shoven. "It just happens to be wrong."
Math was really hard — in 1896
And why, you may ask, does a major stock market index use such a simplistic method? Because when the index was created back in 1896, computers didn't yet exist.
"The Dow Jones is just a relic from old days, when computation was difficult," says Ronald Balvers, professor of finance at the DeGroote School of Business at Hamilton's McMaster University. He says the Dow is built the way it is because that was the easiest way to add things up 120 years ago.
That basket of 30 companies has traditionally been something of a relic, as well. Apple was only added in 2015. General Electric has held a spot since 1907. Proctor and Gamble's been listed since 1932 and Dupont since 1935.
Balvers says that means the index offers a limited scope into market activity.
"We're not including bonds, we're not including real estate, we're not including small companies, so from that perspective it's a bit of a very select measure of the performance of financial markets," Balvers says.
It's misleading, too
Worse yet, Shoven says, the Dow does not include dividends. So it doesn't come close to reflecting total returns for shareholders. If the Dow had added dividends back when it overhauled the index in 1928, it would be approaching a very different milestone today.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/dow-...rong-1.3929025
It is somewhat important to investors. It is not relevant to whether it is easy to find a job, whether your wage/salary is going to go up, or if consumers are going to come to your small business and spend.
You 5 figure Republicans are amusing though.
It is a valid indicator of the general state of the economy. That is undeniable.
I would say that's more true than not, but that doesn't mean tourism from foreigners (who spend way more than domestic tourists on average) isn't truly being negatively impacted. It's not a fatal blow to overall U.S. economy by any stretch, but it's sad that it's happening and it is happening.
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