Better economic growth likely to follow weak Q2

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The economy is expected to have grown at a dismal pace in the April-June quarter, weighed down by large tax increases and steep government spending cuts.

But the second quarter should be the low point for the year, economists say. The fiscal drag is expected to fade. At the same time, steady hiring, more business spending and a solid recovery in housing should push growth higher in the second half of the year.

Economists forecast that growth slowed in the April-June quarter to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of just 1 percent, according to a survey by FactSet. That's below the tepid rate of 1.8 percent in the January-March quarter.

The Commerce Department will release the first estimate of gross domestic product, or GDP, for the second quarter at 8:30 a.m. EDT Wednesday. GDP is the broadest measure of the output of goods and services, including everything from manicures to industrial machinery.

Most economists say growth is already starting to pick up. And many are predicting annual growth rates of between 2 percent and 3 percent in the third and fourth quarters.

There are threats to the better outlook. Unemployment is still high at 7.6 percent, limiting consumer spending. And budget fights in Washington could lead to a government shutdown this fall, potentially disrupting the economy.

Still, recent data have been encouraging.

"More and more of the economic tea leaves are pointing in the same direction: toward a growth revival ahead," Scott Anderson, chief economist at the Bank of the West, said.

Home construction, sales and prices have been growing since early last year. Americans purchased newly built homes in June at the fastest pace in five years. That's raised builder confidence to a seven-year high, which should lead to increases in construction and more jobs.

Overall hiring has accelerated this year. Employers have added an average of 202,000 jobs a month from January through June. That's up from 180,000 in the previous six months.

Better hiring has started to boost inflation-adjusted incomes after several years of stagnant wages. Joe Carson, chief U.S. economist at AllianceBernstein, a mutual fund company, calculates that average hourly pay rose at a 3.1 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the fastest pace since the fourth quarter of 2008. That was comfortably ahead of inflation, at just 1 percent.

And business spending has started to increase. Companies have ordered more industrial machinery and other equipment for four months in a row. As those orders are filled, factory production should increase.

Manufacturing is also benefiting from strong auto sales, which topped 7.8 million in the first six months of 2013, the best first-half total since 2007. Analysts expect sales will stay strong for the rest of the year.

Carson notes that housing and autos were the primary sources of growth in the second quarter. Both have benefited from the Federal Reserve's low-interest rate policies. Those sectors usually rebound early in recoveries. But after the Great Recession ended in June 2009, they were held back by tight credit and cash-strapped consumers.

"It's almost like a traditional recovery is just starting, even though we're in the fifth year," Carson said.

Federal Reserve officials have forecast better growth in the second half of the year. And Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said that the central bank could begin to scale back its bond purchases later this year if the economy strengthens. But Fed officials typically put greater weight on employment and inflation data than the GDP figures.

The Fed concludes a two-day policy meeting on Wednesday, at which point it could clarify its interest-rate policies.

Most economists blame tax increases and government spending cuts for the sluggish second quarter. Higher taxes slowed consumer spending. And government cuts subtracted nearly a full percentage point from growth at the start of the year.

Even so, the solid pace of hiring suggests the economy is doing better than the growth figures show. Tax receipts have been stronger. Faster growth in the second half of the year would help close those gaps.

The government is also expected to release comprehensive revisions on Wednesday. Roughly every five years, the department incorporates more recent data and adjusts how it calculates GDP.

The revisions will likely show growth was faster in the first quarter and last year than previously estimated, economist say. Michelle Meyer, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, estimates the revisions could add up to a half-point to last year's 2.2 percent growth rate.

The revisions will also alter GDP data all the way back to 1929. In one major change, the government plans to count spending on research and development as investment, rather than as a regular cost of doing business. That, along with other changes, will boost the level of GDP in 2007 by about 3 percent, or $450 billion. It isn't likely to significantly change the pace of growth in recent years.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-07-30-US-Economy-GDP/id-b700a410be294091b7e71bceef768da4

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E-Commerce Platform StackSocial Redesigns Site, Expands To Gaming And Design Products

StackSocial, an e-commerce platform that?provides its users with discounts and special offers on software and hardware, has launched its redesigned site to display increased inventory and?help users discover products more easily.?CEO Josh Payne tells me in the coming weeks the company will implement more community features, such as the ability to "want" or "heart" a product, as well as?add gaming and design products to its catalogue. While there are several other services that offer deals through bundling, such as NimbleCommerce and AppSumo, StackSocial is focused specifically on technology. This specific niche is especially handy for reaching a larger consumer base through related publisher partners. Payne says he expects to see sales from partners reach 80 percent in the near future. Several publisher partners are also focused on gaming and design, which explains the expansion into selling those products.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7Qg2wvEKytc/

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Intergalactic magnifying glasses could help astronomers map galaxy centers

June 30, 2013 ? An international team of astronomers may have found a new way to map quasars, the energetic and luminous central regions often found in distant galaxies. Team leader Prof. Andy Lawrence of the University of Edinburgh presents the new results on Monday 1 July at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.

If a star passes too close to a giant black hole found in the centre of a galaxy, it will be shredded by the strong gravitational field. This produces a flare-up in the brightness of an otherwise normal looking galaxy that then fades over a few months. In a large scale survey using the PanSTARRS telescope on Hawaii, Prof. Lawrence and his team studied millions of galaxies to search for this rare effect. They did find flare-ups but with very different behaviour to the 'star shredding' predictions.

Instead of seeing a fade over months, the objects they found look like 'normal' quasars, regions in the centre of galaxies where material is swirling around a giant black hole in a disk. But the quasars in the survey were not seen a decade ago, so must now be at least ten times brighter than before. Monitoring with the Liverpool Telescope on La Palma showed that they are also changing slowly, fading over a timescale of years rather than months.

The biggest surprise however was that the quasars seemed to be at the wrong distance. Measuring the characteristic shift in lines found in the spectrum of the quasars allows astronomers to measure the speed at which they are moving away from Earth. Knowing the way in which the universe is expanding enables scientists to deduce the distance to each object.

In the new survey, the quasars are typically around 10 billion light years away, whereas the galaxies that host them seem on average to be about 3 billion light years distant. The distances are rough estimates, so it could be that the estimated galaxy distances are completely wrong and that they are actually much further away. The black holes in their centres have then have flared up very dramatically, explaining why they seem so bright. But past studies of thousands of well-known quasars have never shown events on this scale.

If however the estimated galaxy distances are right, then Prof. Lawrence and his team believe they are looking at a distant quasar through a foreground galaxy. Normally this has little effect on the light of the quasar, but if a single star in the foreground galaxy passes exactly in front of the quasar, it can produce a gravitational focusing of the light which makes the background quasar seem temporarily much brighter.

This "microlensing" phenomenon is well known inside our own Galaxy, producing a brightening when one star passes in front of another. (It is for example also now being used to detect exoplanets). Microlensing may also be the cause of low-level "flickering" seen in some quasars. But this is the first time it has been suggested to cause such giant brightening events.

Prof. Lawrence sees real potential in this newly-discovered effect. "This could give us a way to map out the internal structure of quasars in a way that is otherwise impossible, because quasars are so small. As the star moves across the face of the distant quasar, it is like scanning a magnifying glass across it, revealing details that would otherwise simply be impossible to detect."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/astronomy/~3/dx2MD1m0pB4/130630225229.htm

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Nick Jonas Collides With Baseball Player

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Source: http://oceanup.com/2013/june/30/nick-jonas-collides-baseball-player

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Despite cuts, Fort Knox's iconic status endures

FORT KNOX, Ky. (AP) -- Few military posts have a place in pop culture as rock solid as Kentucky's Fort Knox, thanks to its mysterious gold vault.

The name of the historic base is practically synonymous with impenetrability. In addition to housing the Treasury Department's U.S. Bullion Depository and its stacks of gold, the Army's tank training school was started at Fort Knox. And the sprawling central Kentucky Army post has been the setting for blockbuster Hollywood films.

But Knox's days as a war-fighting post may be over with the Pentagon's decision last week to strip its only combat brigade, which follows the loss of its famed armor school and thousands of tank personnel just a few years ago. The base will remain the site of the gold vault, but otherwise it could be destined to function less as a tip-of-the-spear military facility and more as a home to office and support workers.

Many of those workers file into a nearly million-square-foot structure on post that was completed a few years ago, but the massive building doesn't seem destined to unseat the vault as the symbol of Fort Knox.

"It is kind of an icon. Most people when they see the outline of the depository, they know what it is," said Harry Berry, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who is now judge-executive in Hardin County. "When you think about Fort Knox, if you don't have a military background, you instantly think about gold or 'Goldfinger,'" the 1960s James Bond film.

The Pentagon announced last week that it was eliminating Knox's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division as part of a major restructuring that will reduce the Army's active duty combat brigades to 33 from 45. The cuts will reduce the size of the Army from about 570,000 in the midst of the Iraq war down to 490,000, which includes personnel in units that support the brigades.

For some posts, that means the loss of a few hundred soldiers, but in Knox's case it's a cut of more than 40 percent to its active duty force and nearly a total elimination of its fighting personnel. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear puts the figure at about 10,000 lost troops and their families leaving Knox and the surrounding area.

Gen. Ray Odierno, Army chief of staff, said the military was not moving toward closing Knox: He pointed out that the Army's recruiting and human resource commands have relocated there since a major Army realignment almost a decade ago.

Baldy Carder, who owns a tattoo parlor in nearby Radcliff, said he's not worried about the post closing ? "because of the gold reserve." But he said his business could take a hit since about half his customers come from the post.

"When you're talking about 10,000 people leaving, that's quite a chunk of change that we're going to be losing," he said.

Fort Knox's own estimates project that its annual economic impact will shrink from about $2.8 billion a year to $2.62 billion upon the brigade's departure, said Ryan Brus with the post's public affairs office. That's a decrease of more than 6 percent.

Much of Knox's future is invested in the home for the Army's Human Resources Command, which opened in 2010. The gleaming structure is the largest office building in Kentucky and one of the biggest in the military.

The work going on inside is a far cry from the military post's heyday when tanks and infantrymen roamed the grassy hills. Knox was known as the home of the Army's tank and armored vehicle training for more than seven decades, before the Pentagon completed the move of the school to Fort Benning, Ga., in 2011.

Lonnie Davis hated to see the tanks go. Aside from the lost business for his Radcliff barber shop, the Kut Zone, he had a 20-year career in the Armored Division at Knox.

"That's why I went into Armor, to stay close to home," Davis said.

Today, the Gen. George S. Patton Museum and a scattering of aging tanks and armored vehicles sprinkled around the post are only remnants of that past.

Inside the museum, which just finished a $5 million renovation, visitors learn about the post's history, and tucked away in a small corner is a tribute to its Hollywood past. That started with "The Tanks Are Coming," a 1951 film about a tank crew fighting its way into German territory. Bill Murray's comedy "Stripes" was released in 1981, with Knox doubling as the fictional Fort Arnold where Murray goes through basic training.

But the most iconic film shot at the post was 1964's "Goldfinger," with Sean Connery in the role as 007, tasked to stop a madman from destroying the country's gold reserves.

The movie helped spur curiosity about Knox's gold vault, which opened in 1937. Its seemingly impregnable walls ushered Fort Knox into the American lexicon as a way to describe a safe and secure location.

During World War II, the gray stone fortress housed documents including the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Treasury Department says on its website that there are now 147 million ounces of gold inside, with an estimated worth of more than $160 billion at today's prices.

But the gold stays inside, and the bullion depository is not a tourist attraction: No visitors are allowed in.

Berry and Davis said Knox's future success could depend on adding staff to Human Resources Command along with other administrative-oriented missions. The post's total workforce now is about 20,000, including active duty and civilians.

"We'll gain from that as opposed to the green-suit side, if you will," Berry said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/despite-cuts-fort-knoxs-iconic-204646658.html

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