First of all, every election season I devour Nate Silver’s blog FiveThirtyEight.com, and I loved his book The Signal and the Noise. So it’s with great pleasure, and maybe a little regret, that I get to show the folks at fivethirtyeight a thing or two about data visualization. I just read the article Dear Mona, I Masturbate […]
Monetary economics in The Hobbit
It’s always interesting to watch a science fiction or fantasy movie and see how the characters deal with money. For example, in Star Trek IV when the crew travels back in time, there’s a scene where a woman (who obviously likes Kirk) mentions sarcastically that they probably don’t have money in the future. Kirk replies “we don’t”. […]
Roundup of recent economic stories that will affect your investments
What is going on? Volatility is back. The oil market is collapsing. Europe may fall apart. And stocks seem set to move sideways. Pundits are claiming the bubble is about to burst. And stocks are trading at a multiple of GDP not seen since the early 1960’s. Below are some recent stories that caught my […]
Data Visualization Case Study: Labor Force Participation
I ran across an interesting data visualization using Tableau on labor force participation. The source of this data is the Federal Reserve of Atlanta’s macroblog. Both articles start with a distribution graph – why aren’t people in the labor force by age. There are problems with each: Macroblog AggregatedData Problem: Bar graphs are […]
Has the stock market crash finally come?
An ode to YNAB & automating your life
Are American stocks overvalued?
I recently read a fascinating post (Fixing the Shiller CAPE) about how changes in financial reporting are affecting everyone’s favorite measure of stock market valuation. P/E ratios are popular for a good reason, but I was wondering how the S&P index has done against something broader like nominal GDP. Below is a graph that indexes […]
Some end-of-year stock trolling
Health care in America: privatized socialism
Liberals point out that American health care is expensive. And they’re right. But the reason, they say, is that’s it’s private. It follows that European-style single payer systems are cheaper because of government control. We shouldn’t let greed run our health care system, the argument goes. But is that really the case? Below is a scatter plot created from 2012 World Bank data showing the relationship between private spending as a % of health care costs vs. the cost of health care overall as a % of GDP. Read more
How monetary policy will affect investors in 2015
As an avid reader of TheMoneyIllusion, I’ve been surprised to learn that monetary policy since 2008 has been very tight, and this is a major factor in America’s slow recovery from the Great Recession. The ECB, though its interest rates hover around 0%, is currently pursuing an ultra-tight monetary policy. Read more