I had a Facebook discussion yesterday about statistics. At one point, my interlocutor posted “You should know better than anyone that statistics can be manipulated to actually show the opposite of what is real.” Well, just to be clear, that’s not a problem with statistics, that’s a problem of motivated reasoning, which is not a […]
Happy Every Economic Statistic in the World Day! 4. Manufacturing continued to expand strongly in September This morning’s final economic report is the ISM manufacturing index for September. This is a short leading indicator, and the new orders subindex specifically is one of the 10 components of the Index of Leading Indicators. A neutral reading […]
From the World Economic Forum: Kim Kardashian is an unlikely champion of statistics, but a tweet from the reality TV star in January 2017 contained a startling figure that has been named International Statistic of the Year. She shared a table showing a range of violent or unexpected ways people meet their deaths annually in […]
Maybe more about this at some point in the future. Consider it a RawShock Test, and feel free to describe what you see in comments.
While I applaud the cautious optimism of Spencer and Tom, I’m more inclined to quote Joseph Brusuelas: [T]he January payrolls added a dollop of Zen like logic to a recovery that is shaping up like no other. An additional 111,000 workers entered the labor force, yet the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% while private sector […]
As a rule, the Shiller Index uses the CPI as reported for All Urban Consumers (CPIAUCNS on Fred(r)). But the Index is only updated Quarterly, so monthly data is estimated. Which produces a very interesting difference over August, not to mention September expectations: The annualised inflation rate between June and August is 0.39%, which just […]
By Spencer, At month end the S&P 500 PE on trailing operating earnings was around 24. In my model that is expensive, but not massively so. Except in the irrational exuberance market of the 1990s, a PE of over 20 has never been sustained and always signaled a major bear market. Trailing earnings does include […]
GoogleLookup, for the datasheet that gets dumped into a database and updates the model regularly. Or just for fun. Consider this a PSA.
While there was a lot of blather about “values voters” swinging the 2004 Presidential election to the man who had none, the real story has always been that the HENRYs went for W’s policies. That changed in 2008: Guess who won Joe the Plumber’s vote…real people who make about $42,000 a year, the median income […]
Ms. mochi-tsuki discovers that the Washington Post has no copyeditors and cannot do math. If this were another blog, I would be typing “Why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps” here. Instead, let’s just leave it at: if you can’t extract data from the census correctly, what are you doing publishing a […]