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Conservative Movement

Political movement in the USA that combines numerous conservative or rightwing movements into a surprisingly cohesive whole. The Conservative Movement (CM) successfully established a dominant role in the Republican Party, and nearly all GOP officials are affiliated with it.

Members of the Conservative Movement are known as "movement conservatives."

In the USA, political parties themselves are very weak and nebulous; historically, they are not bound to any particular ideology or constituency. Instead, parties take their ideological guidance from movements, which endorse candidates based on their commitment to the goals of that particular movement. Movements also marshall fundraising and organizing networks, binding candidates to elected officials and to affiliated thinktanks. The CM is distinguished because it captured an entire party, and tied it to an emphatically rightwing ideology.

The three components of the CM are the neoconservatives (neocons), religious right (theocons, "Moral Majority"), and the AEI-affiliated business conservatives (money cons).
More important, conservatives who embraced conspiratorial thinking shared a sufficient set of complaints, assumptions, and common enemies that united them with their more "respectable" cohorts in one movement. They swam in the same ideological waters as the broader conservative movement... and. above all, participated in building one mobilization out of their common grievances against American liberalism.

Lisa McGirr, *Suburban Warriors* (2002)
by Abu Yahya May 29, 2009
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confidence interval

(STATISTICS) a range of values for which you are x percent confident contains the correct answer. Answers to a statistical question which are ranged from the lowest likely value to the highest; answers outside of this range are highly unlikely.

Presupposes that you are estimating a value based on sample data, and the sample data has a genuinely random variance.

Usually the confidence interval is for a 95% confidence, meaning there is only a 5% probability that the true value is OUTSIDE the interval.
ANNA: I've been driving your car for about a month.

JAMES: And what you think is the MPG?

ANNA: It's probably about 25 MPG, with a 95% confidence interval of 19.5 to 32 MPG.

JAMES: Holy cow! Any Prussians in your family tree?
by Abu Yahya April 23, 2010
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logarithm

(MATHEMATICS) a function of numbers that are the root of a base. For example, log(base 2) means a function of numbers that are the numbered roots of 2. The log(base 2) of 2 is 1, meaning 2 raised to the power of 1 is 2 (2^1 = 2); log(2) of 4 is 2, and so on.

The idea here is that any number can be expressed as 2 raised to some power; better still, if you do math with the logs of a number rather than the numbers themselves, you can find useful patterns. For example, if you are graphing population growth, and you just plot the raw number of people over time, you aren't going to notice anything in particular. If you plot the log of population, you can see that, while population is growing, the rate of growth is falling.

Usually, if you are doing statistical research with numbers that always have to be positive (like population, death tolls from diseases, etc.), you need to use logarithms for the numerical values in order to represent a confidence interval.

Logs usually have a base of e or 10. Logs with a base of e are called natural logs.
A logarithm is the inverse of an exponential function.
by Abu Yahya April 23, 2010
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Eurostat

(EU GOVERNMENT) agency of the European Union that publishes harmonized statistics for the 27 member states of the EU. The EU does not collect the statistics, but reviews and edits statistics collected by its member states so that the data is comparable for all of the countries in it.
BILL: I'm blogging about the economy of Europe, but I don't know what the economic indicators are. You know, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, hours worked, and so on.

ANNA: Go to the Eurostat web page. It's really awesome!
by Abu Yahya July 15, 2010
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prime rate

(ECONOMICS) the lowest interest rate available to non-financial borrowers.

Banks can borrow money from the Federal Reserve System or each other at the lower federal funds rate--and they borrow money from depositors at lower rates still.
The most widely-quoted estimate of the prime rate is that published by the Wall Street Journal (from a survey of the 30 largest banks).
by Abu Yahya September 6, 2010
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financial derivative

(FINANCE) a financial instrument whose value is tied to something else; for example,

* a futures contract (future)

* an option

* a swap

In each of these examples, the value of the derivative is related in some way to the price of something else. When the market price of (say) an ounce of gold goes from $1000/oz to $1050/oz, the return to the owner of 1 oz. of actual gold is 5%. But for the owner of a call option or a future, the return is much, much greater than that.

A derivative can be used to multiply risk AND potential profits to speculators; but it can be used for the counterparty to minimize risk by locking in prices, or by hedging against risk.
The economic crisis of 2008 has really focused attention on the financial derivative market.
by Abu Yahya April 5, 2010
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balance of payments

the sum of the capital account balance and the current account balance; put another way, the net change in financial reserves of a country, whether in the form of income (current account) or foreign investments (capital account)


For example, in all years since 1980, the USA has run a large-to-huge current account deficit, but in most years it has run a capital account surplus that is almost as big as the current account deficit. As a result, the USA has run a medium-to-large balance of payments deficit over this period.

A commonly-overlooked byproduct of BoP is that it determines whether or not a currency can be used as an international reserve currency. Despite repeated efforts by the governments of the EU and Japan to get their currencies established as such, they have failed to dent the US dollar's global primacy as the money for international transactions. This is because EU member states and Japan (as well as other major economies) run very large surpluses in their BoP. Japan, in particular, imports extremely little, and retains huge reserves rather than invest all of its net export earnings overseas. As a consequence, overseas holdings of euros or yen are much to small to serve as an alternative to the US dollar.
Since the oil embargo of the 1970's, the US has run a balance of payments deficit because its trade deficit was enormous; prior to the embargo, the US BoP deficit was large because the US exported such an enormous amount of finance capital. As a consequence, the balance of payments deficit has persisted since the end of the Korean War (1953).
by Abu Yahya February 14, 2009
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