January solar cycle 24 numbers, a new high for one, continued slumps for others

@Policycritic – Gail claims the Fed did something, you claim the banks did something… HOWEVER, you seem to miss the whole idea that the Federal Reserve Bank is the Bank that controls all of the other banks, so I don’t think you really invalidated Gail’s argument.

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 6:49 am
“The smoothed values [over a year] are in the right-most column and they show a maximum of 66.9 and will probably reach 70 in the months to come.”
The value of 66.9 is a smoothed value and is only one point of solar maximum, are you saying that your prediction of 70 was for this one value?
Looking at the smoothed numbers, there are 0 values in the 70’s, there are 6 values in the 60’s and 12 smoothed values in the 50’s.
If we are using smoothed number values to judge how weak or strong this cycle is, so far, the 50’s have it. Which is a remarkable 150-200 below Hathaway’s original predictions, 40 below this “consensus” value of 90 and 20 below your value of 70.

@Leif
> Solar flares contribute to F10.7.
> 20140107 180000 2456665.239 2145.723 0592.4 0572.8 0515.5
Ok, I guess you could say that their data is “fluxed up” 😐
Don’t understand why they can’t validate and filter the data with simple thresholds. How hard could that be?

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 9:30 am
The prediction is pointless!

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 9:54 am
…
The maximum monthly value of the yearly smoothed sunspot number is way lower than Hathaway’s prediction and is lower than your prediction of 70. The average of the maximum monthly value of the yearly smoothed sunspot number so far is in the 50’s.
You haven’t predicted when this single number would occur, only that your prediction of 70 would be reached somewhere during this cycle, which it has not, well, not yet.
Is the maximum monthly value of the yearly smoothed sunspot numbers likely to reach a random peak of 70 or above? It’s possible but not likely, in my own opinion, the average of the Rmax values will remain at 50 with few 60’s and with no peaks of 70+.

lsvalgaard says:
February 4, 2014 at 10:39 am
“You are still not paying attention”
I usually just ignore your insults and the silly bate n’ switch tactics.

PeterB in Indianapolis says:
February 4, 2014 at 8:10 am
@Policycritic – Gail claims the Fed did something, you claim the banks did something… HOWEVER, you seem to miss the whole idea that the Federal Reserve Bank is the Bank that controls all of the other banks, so I don’t think you really invalidated Gail’s argument.

First of all, I wasn’t attempting to invalidate Gail’s argument; I consider her one of the more astute commenters on this site and value her arguments. I was attempting to expand upon it in one important way…or two. 😉
I am aware that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks regulate the private member banks in their districts. Or they are supposed to by their federal charter, and by law. They are public-private entities; so are banks. (And the NY Fed, aka Timothy Geithner then, was supposed to regulate mortgage banks—not part of the Federal Reserve system—and didn’t, even though the FBI warned in Sept 2004 that mortgage fraud was at 90%; ergo, the 2008 Great Recession.)
However, the Federal Reserve is a schizophrenic, and misunderstood, beast. It must, by law, do what Congress tells it to do. It answers to Congress, by law, and must return net profits to the US Treasury annually. It handles the US Treasury’s account and its high-powered money as its banker…and…it backs up the banking and payment systems as banks create credit money, the majority of money created, in the system. Since October 22, 1999, however, the Fed Chairman under Clinton allowed these banks to become casinos when they ripped up Glass-Steagall. I say Fed Chairman even though it was Citi’s CEO Sandy Weill and Phil Gramm that twisted Congress’s arm to destroy the stability of the banking system in place for ~65 years; Greenspan could have sounded the alarm, but didn’t.
My quibble was with Gail’s statement that “The Fed already did via inflation (currency devaluation),” and I apologize for not being clearer about that. On a macro level, US currency has not been devalued. If anything, the Fed’s massive QE programs for the last five years purchasing Treasury Securities on the open market has removed interest income that would otherwise go to the seller over time from the economy, thereby making US dollars scarcer in the macro, which increases the value of the currency. Inflation since the 1970s has gone down from double digits to its current 1.5%, fifty basis points below the Fed’s current target of 2%. Inflation is not the problem.
The entities that have had free reign to alter asset prices (by gaming the system in my opinion) are the banks untrammeled by sufficient regulation by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Instead of loaning on credit worthiness—their original charter—banks now loan on the underlying value of the financial asset which they have a direct interest in seeing increase. Why? More money to the banker as their fees are a percentage of the value of the loan.
I hope this is clearer.