• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓
  • ←
  • →

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

In my day, never was longer.

This blog will pay for itself.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

I was promised a recession.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Everybody saw this coming.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Mobile Menu

  • Four Directions Montana
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • COVID-19 Coronavirus
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • 2024 Elections
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • Targeted Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / A tweet and a chart for 2016

A tweet and a chart for 2016

by David Anderson|  November 13, 20151:39 pm| 26 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016

FacebookTweetEmail

Economists see downside risks and recession odds receding in U.S., WSJ survey says https://t.co/HcYfBa0PIy

— Nell Henderson (@NHendersonWSJ) November 12, 2015

And from Kevin Drum:

That got me curious: have real wages risen over the past couple of years? My preferred measure is production and nonsupervisory wages, and it looks like Lacker is right. Compared to CPI, the general trend is upward. It doesn’t look to me like it’s accelerating, but it does seem to be going up.

from motherjones.com/kevin-drum
from motherjones.com/kevin-drum

A decent economy with growing wages is good, all else being equal, to incumbents without regard to party. Another good six months of good economic data will have the Clinton campaign very happy.

FacebookTweetEmail
Previous Post: « Another Horrible Day in Post-Racial America
Next Post: The Arc Of The Universe… »

Reader Interactions

26Comments

  1. 1.

    Applejinx

    November 13, 2015 at 1:46 pm

    Holy flaming shitballs guys. Where can I get a current and regularly updated version of that chart?

    It exactly tracks my gross sales as a small business guy selling audio DSP plugins on the internet, internationally. Right down to the two spikes in the beginning of 2013, and the big spike just before 2015.

    More relevantly, who do I have to blow to get that chart to spike up more like that? D:

  2. 2.

    catclub

    November 13, 2015 at 1:55 pm

    my comment in another thread:

    catclub says:
    November 13, 2015 at 11:39 am

    @gene108: I think that is a smaller part than the press barely covering good news at all. 68 straight months of job growth should be a bigger deal, in spite of the poor wage growth. Budget deficits falling far faster than anyone predicted should be a big deal.

    The only rosy side of this is that no boom in growth also means that recession is VERY unlikely in the next few years.

  3. 3.

    piratedan7

    November 13, 2015 at 1:58 pm

    @catclub: because bad news leads, good news is moved to the spot between weather and sports…..

  4. 4.

    mikefromArlington

    November 13, 2015 at 2:01 pm

    The Oracle of Omaha sees at least 4 years of growth ahead of that counts for anything

  5. 5.

    mclaren

    November 13, 2015 at 2:16 pm

    A sobering reminder that we are still a year out from the 2016 election, and a lot can happen in that time:

    There’s almost exactly one year to go until Election Day 2016. But I want to wind the clock back eight years, to Nov. 5, 2007.

    What were the headlines that day? According to the news aggregator Memeorandum, the most talked-about national stories were the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as attorney general and the increasing unrest in Pakistan. There was also the typical litany of campaign stories, particularly about the growing rivalry between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who were both serving in the U.S. Senate and running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    But there was very little about the economy, even though it was about to become the focal point of the campaign. The Dow Jones industrial average, for instance, was doing fine, having wobbled a bit from its October highs but still having risen by about 13 percent year over year.

    Just one month later, however, the economy would be in recession — indeed, in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression as part of a global financial crisis whose aftereffects are still being felt today.

    Source: “We Have (Almost) No Idea What The Economy Will Look Like On Election Day,” Nate Silver, 5 November 2015, Fivethirtyeight website.

    The next crisis is bound to involve the Too Big To Fail Banks that have highly leveraged their hold on 68% of the banking industry’s deposits. (..)
    No one understands the derivative risk positions of the Too Big To Fail Banks, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. There is presently no way to measure the risks involved in the leverage, quantity of collateral, or stability of counter-parties for these major institutions. To me personally they are big black holes capable of potential wrack and ruin. Without access to confidential internal data about these risky derivative positions the regulators cannot react in a timely and measured fashion to block the threat to financial stability, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study.
    The Dodd-Frank legislation does not reform Wall Street. Rather it preserves the system that existed prior to the 2008 crisis, according to Martin Wolf of the Financial Times of London. According to former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, “The goal of financial reform was to make the system safe for failure. It wasn’t to prevent the failure of individual firms that take on too much risk, but to make the aftershocks of failure less threatening to the system as a whole.” Most importantly, Dodd-Frank amended the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to prohibit the central bank from bailing out an insolvent financial institution on the verge of bankruptcy. It can only lend or inject capital if the bank is solvent. According to Harvard economist Larry Summers the Fed is simply not capable of understanding even when a member bank becomes insolvent.

    Source: “The Ten Reasons Why There Will Be Another Systemic Financial Crisis,” Robert Lenzner, 8 December 2014, Forbes magazine.

  6. 6.

    mclaren

    November 13, 2015 at 2:25 pm

    @mikefromArlington:

    The Oracle of Omaha sees at least 4 years of growth ahead of that counts for anything.

    Over the past 15 years, Warren Buffett’s total alpha has dropped to zero.

    Yet another sign that we are now in a ponziconomy that is not operating by normal industrial productive capitalism, but mainly by scams and con jobs. And in the long run, an economy built on scams always implodes. Always.

    The two charts in this article are devastating.

    Simple alpha estimates aren’t the end-all-be-all for performance assessment, and perhaps they are influenced by an underlying pattern in risk-free rates, but the trend to zero for some of the smartest people in the marketplace is not inspiring!

    Source: “Warren Buffett and Hedge Funds Share a Trait: No Alpha,” Valuewalk website, 15 March 2015.

  7. 7.

    Matt McIrvin

    November 13, 2015 at 2:25 pm

    In 2007 the US real-estate market was already in full collapse. It just hadn’t metastasized to the rest of the global economy.

  8. 8.

    Matt McIrvin

    November 13, 2015 at 2:31 pm

    …So that suggests that if we’re going to see another crash in the next 12 months, we should already be able to see the root cause, if not the connections to everything else. China? The Eurozone? Those come to mind, but it’s hard to tell if the viability of everything is secretly built on them somehow: it wasn’t clear in ’07 that the collapsing US real-estate market was going to have the effect it did.

  9. 9.

    agorabum

    November 13, 2015 at 2:34 pm

    @mclaren: the real estate market had peaked and was already dropping in 2007. I knew architect and engineering firms that had all their business dry up then. There were a lot ore storm clouds on the horizon…

  10. 10.

    mclaren

    November 13, 2015 at 2:40 pm

    Right now America has got at least 3 different financial bubbles: the mortgage-backed rental real estate bubble (giant banks bought up houses in foreclosure, renovated ’em and are now renting them at sky-high prices, paying for it all by issuing collateralized debt instruments based on the fanciful estimated value of these rental homes), the subprime auto loan bubble, and the college loan bubble.

    That the housing market is seriously twisted is apparent by the mortgage conundrum: despite historically low mortgage rates of around 4% for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, mortgage originations averaged only $357 billion per quarter so far this year, according to the New York Fed. Unless a miracle intervenes in the fourth quarter, 2014 will be the worst year since 2000.

    But home prices have soared 74% since 2000, according to the S&P Case-Shiller index. Unit sales are higher as well. Mortgage originations soared with them during the boom, crashed with them during the bust, and re-soared with them. Now home prices have “recovered” beyond the bubble highs in many markets, pumped up by big Wall Street players with access to the Fed’s free money. They gobbled up vacant homes for their buy-to-rent scheme. And they’re now stuffing rent-backed structured securities into retirement portfolios via conservative-sounding bond funds. But even these firms are getting cold feet…

    Source: “California housing market cracks in two, top end goes insane,” Wolf Richter, Wolfstreet website, June 2015.

    So far this year, $1.34 trillion in new corporate bonds have been issued, up 6.8% from last year at this time, which had already been a record year, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). Bond issuance in 2012, 2013, and 2014 set ever crazier records; 2015 is on track to set an even crazier one: close to $1.5 trillion.

    That’s a lot of newly borrowed moolah. Much of it is being used to pay for dividends, stock buybacks, M&A, and other worthy financial engineering projects designed to inflate stock prices, though that strategy has turned into a sorry dud this year.

    Junk bonds now make up $1.8 trillion of this pile of corporate debt, nearly double the $944 billion in junk bonds outstanding at the end of 2008 before the Fed saved the economy, so to speak.

    But what happens when this flood of cheaply borrowed money begins to dry up as an ever larger percentage of that $1.8 trillion in junk bonds begins to default, while ever more high-grade bonds get downgraded to junk?

    That’s the end of the credit cycle – and the beginning of financial nightmares. It’s the phase the bond market has already entered, according to a report by John Lonski, Chief Economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Research.

    Source: “Moody’s warns about credit crunch, unnerves with parallels to 2008,” Wolf Richter, wolfstreet, 13 November 2015.

  11. 11.

    Brachiator

    November 13, 2015 at 2:42 pm

    So, focusing in on the detail:

    Real average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees increased 0.3 percent from August to September, seasonally adjusted. This result stems from no change in average hourly earnings combined with a 0.3-percent decrease in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).

    Real average weekly earnings were unchanged over the month due to the increase in real average hourly earnings being offset by a decrease of 0.3 percent in average weekly hours.

    From September 2014 to September 2015, real average hourly earnings increased 2.6 percent, seasonally adjusted. The increase in real average hourly earnings combined with a 0.3-percent decrease in the average workweek resulted in a 2.3-percent increase in real average weekly earnings over this period.

    This is good, but I don’t know that confidence in the economy is strong, especially when you look at employment numbers.

    But the Democrats have a good case to make that they have done well.

  12. 12.

    p.a.

    November 13, 2015 at 2:43 pm

    Oh you poor people. Wages rising slightly above inflation? Is the apocalypse! Time to raise i. The Fed; making the 1% safe since… forever.

    Posted over my brand new fios signal! Goodbye DSL, rot in Hell.

  13. 13.

    catclub

    November 13, 2015 at 2:44 pm

    @agorabum: I think housing starts had already peaked, and were on the verge of plummeting. too, also.

    The charts of home equity loan and subprime loan amounts outstanding were already scary. They REQUIRED
    constantly rising housing prices to be solvent. I don not know of any similar thing that is out of whack in the same way. Households have dramatically reduced their debt ratios. Companies are rolling in cash.

  14. 14.

    jl

    November 13, 2015 at 2:54 pm

    @Applejinx:

    You make your own at

    h t t p s :// research dot stlouisfed dot org / fred2

    for regional and local data:

    h t t p :// geofred dot stlouisfed dot org

  15. 15.

    Thoughtful Today

    November 13, 2015 at 2:55 pm

    Erm…

    If there are only 6 future months of good economic news that leaves the ~6 months before the election as ? bad economic news?

    _Any_ Republican wins in that scenario. Especially against Clinton, who is running as Obama’s (no serious change) third term.

    And could someone help decipher Kevin Drum’s graph? Is it showing a ~ 3% increase of real wages over the course of ~ 4 years? ???

  16. 16.

    jl

    November 13, 2015 at 3:00 pm

    Labor market performance is still poor to mediocre by standards of most of post WWII performance. If Fed raises rates this fall, they will be effectively making their 2 percent inflation target a ceiling, not a target. (Edit:which will mean very slow increases in real compensation for vast majority of population and most benefits from growth and productivity going to top one percent).

    However, if political scientists are right that voters make their decisions based on changes in welfare during year before election, rather than based on longer term comparisons, then it might be good enough.

    The DeLong Baker Krugman Stiglitz axis of Keynesians have far better performance of forecasting based on consistent theoretical framework than any other group of macroeconomists and they say we can do better. They certainly could, and did, forecast what economy would be like a year out from 2008 election. I think if there is a downturn it will be due to unexpected unpredictable external forces (war, for example) or Fed raising rates too quickly.

  17. 17.

    Richard Mayhew

    November 13, 2015 at 3:15 pm

    @Thoughtful Today: the polisci models indicate that people anchor their economic performance perceptions in the 1st q of the year of the Presidential election. October news as long as it is not a Great Depression cliff dive does not drive voted

  18. 18.

    gene108

    November 13, 2015 at 3:16 pm

    @piratedan7:

    because bad news leads, good news is moved to the spot between weather and sports…..

    I think Republicans are right about creating your own reality. I think any movement or political group has to define the terms about which it is discussed.

    FDR managed to do this by setting up his own PR machine, within some New Deal programs, such as hiring artists and photographers to document the plight of the poor / the help of the New Deal programs.

    I’m not sure how Democrats can do this now.

    @catclub:

    I think that is a smaller part than the press barely covering good news at all. 68 straight months of job growth should be a bigger deal, in spite of the poor wage growth. Budget deficits falling far faster than anyone predicted should be a big deal.

    The only rosy side of this is that no boom in growth also means that recession is VERY unlikely in the next few years.

    I think there are a lot of good things that should be reported on that seem to represent a major generational shift in society.

    Beyond just the jobs numbers you have the lowest crime rates in the last 50 years. The lowest teen pregnancy rates ever and the highest high school graduation rates.

    I just think the reason all this good news does not sink in, even when it is reported, is just that people’s personal situations are not that rosy compared to 10 years ago.

    Otherwise we have a society that is incapable of grasping reality and lives in a state of delusion. I am not ready to admit that.

  19. 19.

    goblue72

    November 13, 2015 at 3:23 pm

    @agorabum: Agreed. I’m in the real estate development industry (multifamily/CRE, not SFH), and by 2007, the housing market was already in trouble and accelerating to deep doo-doo. Housing prices peaked in 2006. In 2006-2007, home builders were already have inventory trouble. Foreclosures started to increase at that time as well. In 2007, the subprime mortgage industry was already in collapse. Lehman closed its subprime arm in mid-2007, a full year before it went bankrupt. Home builders were still building product in 2007 because projects were already under construction and once you start construction, its better to just finish. But the front end of the pipeline was already getting slammed shut – very little interest by 2007 in financing the acquisition of buildable lots.

    We aren’t at that point in the cycle yet. Though, I personally feel that the residential rental market has gotten too hot. Significant YoY rent growth has gone from something happening in certain core, mostly tech- and finance-sector markets (SF, Boston, NYC, Seattle, Denver, etc) and now much more spread uniformly across the country. When local RE markets stop being driven by local fundamentals and start getting synchronous nationally, I start to worry.

    While some of this has been driven by the incredibly cheap debt markets (thanks Fed!) and foreign equity capital looking to the U.S. as one of the few consistently growing/stable Western markets (thanks Chinese & Arab investors!), a lot has been driven by job growth in some key sectors – primarily tech. The energy sector gave us a liftoff as the growth industry coming out of the Great Recession, but its Web 2.0 that is now a core fuel of the current economic growth in the U.S.

    Could be I’ve spent the last decade-plus on the West Coast in the Bay Area and in Seattle, but its all starting to feel a bit like the late-1990s dot com era, though a little bit less silly in terms of business plans and the equity markets aren’t quite as giddy-stupid. Still too many unicorns for my taste. 2016 could be more of the same, or it could be the year that tech wakes up with a head cold.

  20. 20.

    goblue72

    November 13, 2015 at 3:28 pm

    @jl: Fed’s itch to raise rates is not entirely about inflation. Fed has no confidence in the Federal government at this point in terms of the Executive and Legislature not being at complete loggerheads, which means fiscal stimulus is off the table from the Fed’s perspective.

    Which leaves only monetary stimulus to fight the NEXT recession. And the Fed doesn’t have much fuel in the tank right now with rates so low. So they are stuck trying to bring rates up without tipping things too fast, so that the business cycle can gradually do its thing and the Fed can be sitting on 200 – 300 basis points of gunpowder for the next recession.

  21. 21.

    jl

    November 13, 2015 at 3:32 pm

    @gene108:

    ” I just think the reason all this good news does not sink in, even when it is reported, is just that people’s personal situations are not that rosy compared to 10 years ago. ”

    To the extent that Fox News, GOP and GOP friendly corporate hacks dominate the news media, this may be a big factor. Working class and lower middle class adult and older adult Whites wealth and incomes really got hammered in the last recession and their labor market recovery prospects much poorer than in previous recoveries, much more so compared to youth and African-Americans than in previous economic cycles.

    Now, in one respect it is hard to feel sorry for them. One, in terms of absolute levels of income and wealth they are doing far better than youth and young adults, and African-Americans. Two, at least a plurality of them have been consistently voting for politicians that have very consistently adopted policies that would, sooner or later, hit them very hard.

    But if the political reality is that people make decisions and form attitudes based on their recent changes in their welfare, rather than in absolute levels or comparison of trends over longer time horizons, then this group is feeling very depressed and grumpy and gloomy and picked-on.

    And of course, sadly, a plurality of them will gripe about kids these days being pampered lazy and whiny and ‘those people’ taking all their jobs and money (which is BS, but this group eats up BS, and problem is how to correct their delusions and bigotry).

  22. 22.

    Thoughtful Today

    November 13, 2015 at 3:42 pm

    Richard Mayhew:

    Krugman puts it at the two quarters before the election: “A nation’s leaders may do an excellent job of economic stewardship for four or five years yet get booted out because of weakness in the last two quarters before the election.”

    Though I’d love to see evidence that the bulk of the American electorate have a longer memory….

    I’m sincerely worried the Fed will hit the breaks … just in time /sarcasm … for the 2016 election.

  23. 23.

    Hoodie

    November 13, 2015 at 3:54 pm

    Looks like the GOP plan to stall recovery and politically capitalize on it was not quite right on the timing. Their best chance was in 2012, but Obama was too skilled and/or they were too inept. Seems like they’re currently trying to create an alternative reality that things are going to hell in a handbasket, but economic data like this going into next year is going to make that tough sledding. I imagine their pivot early next year will be that their obstructionism kept that big spendin’ fool Obama in check and that’s why the economy is now improving and we now need a tax cut for rich folks to keep things rolling. I guess there’s nothing dems can do about that, the GOP will always make up fairy tales.

  24. 24.

    Richard Mayhew

    November 13, 2015 at 6:48 pm

    @Thoughtful Today: interest rate trickle through on the housing channel is slow with a nine to twelve month lag. 2 quarters is March/April before the election so the end of Q1 and start of Q2. We are paraphrasing the same policy sci research from different angles

  25. 25.

    Bill Murray

    November 13, 2015 at 9:49 pm

    I would take half the value of the problem off if any student in one of my classes interpreted that data as showing an increase with time.

  26. 26.

    mclaren

    November 13, 2015 at 10:15 pm

    @Bill Murray:

    Welcome to the magical world of Mayhew, where random noise fluctuations get reinterpreted as a rising trend.

    Mayhew gibbers “A decent economy with growing wages is good, all else being equal, to incumbents without regard to party,” suggesting that the 2015 economy is actually pretty decent. Happy, happy, joy, joy! Things are looking up! Prosperity is just around the corner!

    Meanwhile, back in the real world, Larry Summer writes:

    Blanchard Cerutti and I look at a sample of over 100 recessions from industrial countries over the last 50 years and examine their impact on long run output levels in an effort to understand what Blanchard and I had earlier called hysteresis effects. We find that in the vast majority of cases output never returns to previous trends. Indeed there appear to be more cases where recessions reduce the subsequent growth of output than where output returns to trend. In other words “super hysteresis” to use Larry Ball’s term is more frequent than “no hysteresis.” (..)

    Standard new Keynesian macroeconomics essentially abstracts away from most of what is important in macroeconomics. To an even greater extent this is true of the DSGE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models that are the workhorse of central bank staffs and much practically oriented academic work.

    Why? New Keynesian models imply that stabilization policies cannot affect the average level of output over time and that the only effect policy can have is on the amplitude of economic fluctuations not on the level of output. This assumption is problematic at a number of levels.

    First, if stabilization policies cannot effect average levels of employment and output over time they are not nearly as important as if they can. Beginning the study of stabilization with this assumption takes away much of the motivation for doing macroeconomics.

    Second, the assumption is close to absurd. It is surely reasonable to assume that better policy could have avoided the Depression or the huge output losses associated with the financial crisis without having shaved off some previous or subsequent peak.

    Third, contrary to the now common view that macroeconomics is best understood by studying the stochastic properties of stationary time series, the most important macroeconomic events are in some sense one off. Think of the Depression or the Great Recession or the high inflation of the 1970s.

    Source: “Advanced economies are so sick we need a new way to think about them,” Larry Summers’ blog, 3 November 2015.

Comments are closed.

Primary Sidebar

Recent Comments

  • Eunicecycle on Distribution of Medical Spending in the US Population (Apr 17, 2024 @ 1:48pm)
  • rikyrah on Arizona In The Crosshairs (Apr 17, 2024 @ 1:48pm)
  • kitfoxer on Arizona In The Crosshairs (Apr 17, 2024 @ 1:48pm)
  • Geminid on Arizona In The Crosshairs (Apr 17, 2024 @ 1:45pm)
  • Soprano2 on Arizona In The Crosshairs (Apr 17, 2024 @ 1:44pm)

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Balloon Juice Meetups!

All Meetups
Talk of Meetups – Meetup Planning
Proposed BJ meetups list from frosty

Fundraising 2023-24

Wis*Dems Supreme Court + SD-8
Virginia House Races
Four Directions – Montana
Worker Power AZ
Four Directions – Arizona
Four Directions – Nevada

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
Positive Climate News
War in Ukraine
Cole’s “Stories from the Road”
Classified Documents Primer

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Mailing List Signup
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)

Fix Nyms with Apostrophes

Balloon Juice for Ukraine

Donate

Twitter / Spoutible

Balloon Juice (Spoutible)
WaterGirl (Spoutible)
TaMara (Spoutible)
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
ActualCitizensUnited

Political Action 2024

Postcard Writing Information

Balloon Juice for Four Directions AZ

Donate

Balloon Juice for Four Directions NV

Donate

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2024 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc

Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!

Email sent!