RyanMcMaken.com

I found this written account by Mark Campbell McMaken. Mark McMaken was the younger brother of my great-great-great grandfather Joseph Hamilton McMaken (born 1787). This branch of the McMaken family lived primarily in Southern Ohio and Eastern Indiana. Some of them were active in the anti-slavery movement, including Mark McMaken. I found the following document on the web site of the Ohio Historical Society. The documents have since been taken down, but I preserved screen shots. In this document, written by Mark McMaken himself, recounts some episodes in which he and other members of the community worked to free slaves who had crossed the river from Kentucky. (Warning: the "n word" is used in this 1895 document. In spite of his egalitarian sentiments, McMaken was not PC by modern standards.) Note: The place names appear to all still be current except "Port Union" which is now better known as West Chester Township.  The area used to be known as Union Township, bu...

The Fed today announced that it will increase the target Federal Funds rate from 0.00-0.25 percent up to 0.25-0.5 percent. The last time the target rate exceeded 0.25 percent was in November of 2008 when the higher bound of the target rate was 1 percent. In December of 2008, the Fed lowered the target rate to 0.00-0.25 and it has stayed there ever since.  Back in September, when we thought that the Fed might raise rates, The Economist noted that " The last time the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate, there was no one to tweet about it," because Twitter did not yet exist. Moreover, Zero Hedge ran a somewhat amusing article reminding us of what the world was like the last time the target rate was above 0.25. Remember Nelly Furtado? George W. Bush was still president back then, too.  The sheer length of the Fed's flatlining has made it seem that a move to a 0.5 target rate is an immense change. Here's what the huge change looks like:  The fa...

As I noted here , and here , I'm not a big fan of speaking about demographics or trends at the national level when we're talking about a large country with large regional differences. It's nonsensical to  speak about "the United States" as if the 318 million people in the US lived under similar conditions and were affected by identical demographic trends. The same is true of Mexico, which has nearly 120 million people and displays very large regional differences, especially from north to south. The south is densely populated and tends to be poorer. The north is more sparsely populated and tends to be richer. Culturally, there are big differences. Chiapas, for example is mostly populated by people descended from Indians, while Chihuahua has a slight majority of  "whites" descended largely from migrants of German, Spanish, and French origins (among others). So, given that Mexico has a reputation for a remarkably high murder rate right now, I thought we...

Through October, the overall trend in unemployment rates for Colorado metros remain downward. For October 2015, the unemployment rate for each metro area in Colorado (according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment) was: Boulder: 2.7% Colorado Spr:3.9% Denver: 3.1% Fort Collins: 2.8% Grand Junction: Greeley: 3.2% Pueblo:4.6% This numbers are remarkable low, and I discourage comparisons with unemployment rates in the current cycle to unemployment rates of past cycles. Declines in work force participation are a significant factor in determining the unemployment rate. Nevertheless, these rates are quite helpful; in comparing geographical areas. Historically, the best job markets have been in Boulder, Ft. Collins and Denver. Greeley has recently joined that group thanks to oil jobs: Unemployment, as expected, is a bit higher in the lower part of the state. Pueblo rather consistently has the highest unemployment rate among Colorado metros, but all areas have s...

According to the Multifamily Vacancy survey from the AAMD , the vacancy rate for the third quarter in metro Denver was 5 percent. That's up from 3.9 percent during the third quarter of 2014. And it's also up from 4.5 percent during the second quarter of this year. It's unlikely that this is a seasonal softening, as the third quarter tends to be one of the tightest quarters of the year in terms of rental housing. We can expect further softening during the fourth and first quarters coming up. Five percent is what the report's original author, Gordon Von Stroh, used to call "the equilibirum rate," since it's the rate at which you wouldn't say that the market is either tight or soft. This is a change from most quarters in the last two years, though. One would certainly say that a vacancy rate of 3.5 percent is indeed a tight market, as was clearly the case last year. There does appear to be real softening in the market right now, though: Note that...

New third-quarter average rent data came out for metro Denver last month. The average rent hit a new all-time high during the third quarter of 2015. During the third quarter, the average rent in metro Denver, according to the Apartment Association of Metro Denver's vacancy survey , was $1,291. That's up from the third-quarter 2014 average rent of $1,145: Year-over-year, the third quarter saw one of the largest growth rates ever recorded. During the third Q of 2015, the YOY change was 12.7 percent. That's down slightly from the second quarter's all-time highest growth rate of 13.2 percent: Although this graph only goes back to 1988, we'd still find that recent YOY growth is the highest ever, even if we go back to the earliest data recorded by this survey (which was in 1982). We can safely say that we're now experiencing the highest levels of rent growth seen in thirty years.  But what if we adjust for inflation? Is the rent really at an all tim...

According to the LA Times , the US crude slumped to $35 per barrel this week, "the lowest price since early 2009." Up through last week, the West Texas Intermediate Crude price had fallen to 40 dollars per barrel, putting it close to the sorts of prices we saw during the dark days of the last recession. If this week's trends keep up, we'll be headed back to ten-year lows in oil prices: Source: US Energy Information Administration A year ago, the oil price was more than 30 dollars per barrel higher, and came in around 70 dollars, although by that point, the price had already tumbled from a price of 105 dollars that had been reached during mid-2014. The 2014 prices were not as high as they seemed, given the effects of price inflation. If we make a  mild adjustment based on the official CPI data, we find that 2014's peak levels had really only been matching the prices we saw during the early 80s. Those prices are indeed near historical highs, but the decli...

The World Bank recently  announced  that the world had reached a new milestone. Extreme poverty, the Bank explained, is likely to dip below 10 percent worldwide for the first time in 2015. Extreme poverty, according to the WB, is a situation in which a person lives on an income of less than $1.90 per day. In other words, we're talking about real, grinding poverty, and not a lifestyle at the poverty line in America where the poor have cell phones and air conditioning. In other words, this measure of poverty isn't a relative measure , as is often used by the UN for measures such as its child poverty report. According to the Bank: The World Bank projects that global poverty will have fallen from 902 million people or 12.8 per cent of the global population in 2012 to 702 million people, or 9.6 per cent of the global population, this year. We must note that richest countries of the world have already eradicated extreme poverty. There are not people who live on $1.90 in the ...

The Pew Charitable trusts recently released new data up through 2013 on federal spending in the states. If we look at federal spending as a proportion of each state's overall GDP, we find that the recipients are not exactly evenly distributed: Source: Pew Charitable Trusts   (based on data from 2004–2013) This is all federal spending, so these totals are a combination of military spending, social welfare programs such as Medicare, and ordinary civilian federal spending, including civilian research facilities and other programs funded by federal grants. These are proportional numbers, so they are a function of both the amount of federal spending as well as the overall size of GDP. So, in California, for example, which receives immense amounts of government spending, is nevertheless a state where federal spending is offset by a very large private sector. In a more rural state with few major private industries, such as New Mexico, the state shows up as being highly reliant...

Republican Congressional leaders and President Obama recently agreed on a two-year budget deal . And in case you were worried, rest assured there were not any significant cuts to any government program. Oh sure, there will be spending increases for some programs, and cuts for others, but the total amount spent is only going up with minimal changes to the big picture. Some of it will be covered by tax revenues, but about half of it will be covered, yet again, by an increase in debt. The Brookings Institution notes : The second problem is that the lubricant Congress used to enact the deal was money it doesn't have. Thus, according to CRFB, all the spending in the deal cost $154 billion but the offsets in the bill amounted to only $78 billion. Thus,  the true net cost of the bill , excluding budget gimmicks, was $76 billion. As always, the money will be obtained by additional borrowing, thereby increasing the nation's debt. So, more than $150 billion will be spent, with 76 bi...

This week a number of wire services picked up a story in which states are ranked according to which states are the "most expensive states to raise a family." The list, which was created by a private company to drive web traffic to its site, attempts to quantify the cost of raising a family by factoring in government mandated family leave, the cost of child care, and other factors. The use of mandatory family leave is rather novel, given that mandated leave raises the effective minimum wage for many workers, and thus negatively impacts the least-skilled workers the most.  Nevertheless, the list appealed to the common-sense notion that there's more to one's standard of living than a relatively high income. The cost of living is an important factor. The US Poverty Rate Does Not Account for Local Cost of Living  Given the importance of the cost of living, it is very problematic that the official poverty rate totals for US states do not take costs into account. W...

In this article , I noted that median incomes — even when adjusted for cost of living, taxes, and social benfits — are higher in the United States than in Europe. What's more, Americans at poverty level (i.e., 60% of national median income) have more purchasing power than median-level households in many European countries. But what are some outward indications of this? The UNICEF report on childhood poverty , for example, attempts to quantify the effects of poverty by asking extremely subjective questions like "Did you feel stress this week?" and using the answer to compile a type of index. The problems with indicators such as these should be obvious, since "stress" can mean any number of things. But let's try for a somewhat more concrete manifestation of a low standard of living: adults living with parents. In the US, at least, it's been long accepted that new household formation is an indicator of the state of the economy. Specifically, it is ass...

Third quarter multifamily vacancy and rent data will be coming out in a about a month, but let's have a closer look at the second quarter's numbers. If current trends are any indication, the third quarter — which tends to be the strongest quarter of the year for multifamily — will be another period of low vacancies and high rent growth. The first graph shows the overall apartment vacancy rate in metro Denver through the second quarter of this year. The rate was 4.5 percent for the second quarter. that's down from the first quarter rate of 4.9 percent, and down from 4.7 percent during the second quarter of 2014. So, vacancies are low, given that 4 percent is pretty much as low as the vacancy rate ever goes in the metro area. From a tenant perspective, it's about as easy to find an apartment now as it was during the final days of the dot-com boom: And when vacancy rates get low, we generally expect rent growth. But this time around, we're seeing some of the lar...

This map from the Tax Foundation shows that Colorado has some of the lowest property taxes in the nation: This should not be interpreted as a proxy map for which states have the lowest overall tax burden, for example. Note that Texas has relatively high property tax. But, Texas has no income tax so there's little we can discern about taxes in general from this map. But when thinking about property taxes, it is useful to note that property taxes are especially damaging to people on fixed incomes like retirees and disabled people. Old people with low incomes, for example, would do fairly well in a state with high income tax and low property tax. But if property taxes are high, those seniors would get pummeled by repeated increases  in the property tax.

Case-Shiller released new home price index data for July this week . As has been the case since 2012, the data shows continued increases in home prices. The first graph shows the index value for both the nationwide 20-city composite index, and the metro Denver index:   While the trend has clearly been upward in recent years, we are now seeing that a plateau has been hit in both the Denver metro area and in the composite index. Of course, the metro Denver plateau around ten percent points to continued strong gains in prices, and is a reason for current homowners and landlords to be happy. first time homebuyers, on the other hand, have less reason to be happy.  At the national level, though, the composite index suggests more of a cooling in the market. Growth rates are clearly down from where they were back in 2013, and outside of Denver and San Francisco, price growth has moderated throughout many of the cities covered in the index.  Index growth is now flat arou...

We often see the United States compared to a variety of other countries in terms of life expectancy, murder rates, and more. But, it's a bit dishonest to compare a country the size of Portugal, for example, with the United States.Portugal has ten million people and is not geographically diverse. The United States has more than 300 million people, and is extremely diverse in its geography. So, it makes much more sense to compare the particular states within the US with foreign countries, and most people tend to underestimate the diversity in factors such as life expectancy and murder rates among states. For example, the murder rate in Oregon (2.0 per 100,000) places it about 160th among 218 countries measured. That's quite low, and well below the US overall rate of  4.7 (per 100,000), which places it at 91st in the world . In other words, there are many places in the US that are well below the national murder rate, including Iowa, Wisconsin, and Colorado. If we were use th...