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Joe Leider

Data Narration & Visualization | Investment, Economic & Political Commentary

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Schooling Nate Silver on Data Visualization

January 11, 2015 by Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Data visualization

Monetary economics in The Hobbit

January 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment

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”. […]

Filed Under: Economics

Roundup of recent economic stories that will affect your investments

January 7, 2015 by Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Investing

Data Visualization Case Study: Labor Force Participation

January 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Data visualization

Has the stock market crash finally come?

January 5, 2015 by Leave a Comment

With oil hovering near $50 a barrel, markets at record highs and Fed tightening in sight, a lot of smart people are predicting a crash. I even did a blog post not long ago on whether American stocks were overvalued. I don’t think so. Let me explain why. During periods of slow nominal GDP growth […]

Filed Under: Investing

An ode to YNAB & automating your life

January 2, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Another year done, another year begun. Welcome to 2015. I thought I’d take this time to share some things I’ve done in 2014 that have changed my life. YNAB: This must be the most useful app I’ve ever used. Since we started using it, my wife and I are actually able to make and stick to […]

Filed Under: Personal finance

Are American stocks overvalued?

December 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Investing

Some end-of-year stock trolling

December 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment

I sold off my losers to reap the tax benefit, then realized that a lot of other investors are likely doing the same. Not only is this time of year a great time to sell, but it’s also a great time to buy stocks that have dropped, and that may be dropping more. Some of […]

Filed Under: Investing

Health care in America: privatized socialism

December 29, 2014 by Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Policy

How monetary policy will affect investors in 2015

December 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment

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

Filed Under: Investing

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