Friends Don’t Let Friends Think Only Bivariately
On thinking about today’s CPI numbers:
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Why Friends Don’t Let Friends Calculate 18 Month Not-Seasonally Adjusted Growth Rates
Bruce Hall seems to think calculating 18 month inflation rates (either annualized or not) is just fine. It is just fine. As long as you don’t do it using not-seasonally-adjusted data. If you do that, you really should be clear. Illustrative example for CPI below.
Why Friends Don’t Let Friends Apply Deterministic Time Trends to Nonfarm Payroll Employment
Suppose you wanted to detect anomalies in nonfarm payroll employment (NFP). Would you want to apply a filter that relied on trend stationarity of NFP (like reader CoRev does in his “anomaly analysis”)? My short answer is “no”…
When People Who Don’t Understand Basic Time Series Analysis Try to Talk Time Series Analysis
From 2019, pay special attention to CoRev’s statistical analysis (at the end):
Using Chained Quantities when Relative Prices Change a Lot
Usually, summing up chained quantities yields relatively small errors. However, when relative prices change a lot, then the differences can be large. That’s the case with relative prices of consumption since the pandemic. Hence, the sum of the components does not equal the total for consumption.
Lumber Futures As Predictors
In assessing market views on future lumber prices, reader JohnH writes: Futures markets aren’t foreseeing a decline in lumber prices any time soon. https://www.barchart.com/futures/quotes/LS*0/futures-prices
Assessing Trends in Real Shares
Justin Fox has a excellent discussion on the problems in conveying trends in real activity in relative terms when the real magnitudes are expressed in chain weighted terms.
China Policy Moves in Context
PBoC and financial regulators act, but even with fiscal measures underway, are unlikely to drastically change the path of the economy.
“Is the Boom-and-Bust Business Cycle Dead?”
That’ s leading question in the NYT a little while back (just getting to this now that I’ve finished grading).
What Is CoRev Smoking this Holiday Season?
Innumerate CoRev writes: “[I am] Just smiling at the idiocy and cognitive dissonance of the renewables zealots. …EV purchases dropping…coal use rising” Like innumerable things CoRev writes, this seemed wrong, so I looked up US DoE EIA data, and downloaded this: Figure 1: US coal consumption (light blue), seasonally adjusted by author (dark blue), all […]