I am constantly amazed that people write stuff that is easily falsifiable, in an era of easily accessible databases (I am tempted to go into an old fogey rant about “in my day I had to go to the library and hand copy down numbers from the hard copy volumes of International Financial Statistics”…but I will resist). Or ask me for the “raw” data when it’s freely available.
Just to remind the frequent commenters on this blog, there exist freely available data here:
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”…
Here is a graph of the front-month futures (July 2019, expires 12th) for soybeans:
Source: ino.com, accessed 6/26/2019 10AM Pacific.
Facebook last week announced plans for Libra, a new global cryptocurrency. The name seems to be a marriage of the words “livre”, the French currency throughout the Middle Ages based on a pound of silver, and “liber,” which is Latin for “free.” Facebook claims that Libra will give the freedom to easily transmit funds across borders to the 1.7 billion adults in the world without access to traditional banks.
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On this day, in 1982, at the height of the hysteria focused on competition from Japan, two unemployed auto workers chased down Vincent Chin — celebrating his bachelor’s party — and beat him senseless with a baseball bat (he subsequently died from his injuries). As we re-establish Camp Sill as an internment/detention/concentration camp (you pick the term), and the deportation campaign — real or imagined — is announced, it’s perhaps time to recall the warning signs:
In context:
Industrial production, personal income ex-transfers, and Macroeconomic Advisers’ monthly GDP are all below recent peak; manufacturing and trade industry sales and nonfarm payroll employment are still rising (although barely, in the latter case). Here’s a graph of these five indicators.
From Ben White in Politico today:
President Donald Trump is firing up his economic Wayback Machine in an effort to boost markets, the economy and his own political fortunes heading into his reelection campaign.
Economists warn that Trump’s approach, with its roots in 19th century mercantilism and 1980s Reaganism, risks back-firing on him in potentially significant ways.
Keep on saying that we’re winning, and maybe it’ll come true. For the rest of us grounded in reality, soybean prices are falling again, and soybean stocks are rising (and estimates of end FYMY2018/2019 stocks have just been revised upward).
Reader CoRev continues to voice skepticism about the predictive ability of soybean futures. He asks for
proof, with successful predictions, of the validity of…your soybean price model….BTW, we are getting closer to the model’s magic validation date.
