Advice to Buyers Competing For a Home in Multiple Offers When most people hear the word “indifferent,” they immediately think, “apathetic,” “doesn’t care,” or perhaps, “not engaged in the outcome.” But the truth is — especially in business — someone who’s indifferent between two outcomes can be intensely interested in which one occurs. It’s just...Read More
Second Home Selector, or “Hello, Palm Springs!” That’s not just a map (above) of how much February, 2015 global temperatures departed from global averages the last 30 years. If you live in Minnesota, it’s a 2nd home (or winter vacation) selector. So, if your principal residence is in a purple area experiencing temps -5º below...Read More
I Think That’s Called “Burying the Lead” (Of a Sort) It’s not for nothing that economics is known as “the dismal science.” In the same vein, The Wall Street Journal can have a decidedly “glass half-empty” perspective on things. Take, for example, its slant on this objectively happy news: “In its first revision of mortality...Read More
Shakespeare Must Not Have Known Any Economists* If you don’t know “econospeak,” let me translate what an economist recently said (headline above) about the early 2015 housing market: “Home prices went up last year, but are now leveling off.” There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? 🙂 See also, “If the Economists’ Forecast is Accurate...Read More
Putting Today’s Record Low Housing Inventory in Context Economists distinguish between “real” and “nominal” numbers. So, someone who made $40,000 in 1989 (25 years ago) and now makes $60,00 would certainly appear to be better off. But they’re not. The reason: prices have doubled since then, which means that — to have simply kept pace...Read More
Grantham Embraces “Accounting for Earth” “The full replacement of our resources is somewhere between very expensive and impossible, so our measurement system simplified the issue by ignoring it completely.” –Jeremy Grantham I couldn’t have said it better myself. But I came close, in this post three years ago: “Just consider how GDP now accounts for...Read More
