“Rising Treasury Yields Quiet Investors’ Concerns” –WSJ Headline (11/14/19). Stock swooned last Summer, sort of, when the dive in interest rates — combined with uncertainty over trade wars, Brexit, and whatever else was in the air — convinced people that something nasty might be just over the horizon. Fast forward a couple months. Interest rates...Read More
Hint: What’s In Between a Buyer’s and Seller’s Market? Along with most large metro housing markets, the Twin Cities has favored Sellers for so long — about 5 years now — that Buyers and Seller (if not their agents) can be forgiven for forgetting that there are two other kinds of markets. The first is...Read More
Golden Retrievers & Economists Every time I start to think our family Golden Retriever, Raffy, is an actual person, he reliably does something to remind us that he’s . . . very much not. Like catch (and eat) a frog he found in our backyard, or — more horrifyingly the other week — killing a baby bunny...Read More
Exhibit A: Late 2015 Gas Prices Still believe in economic forecasting? Find me one analyst, less than 3 years ago, who got both or just one of the following right — and correctly forecast the economic effect of same: One. Wholesale gas prices will collapse. Retail prices (what consumers pay at the pump) will plummet more...Read More
Economist: “Assume You Have a Can Opener”* Everything I learned about economics at Stanford turned out to be useless. In fact, worse than useless, because it was wrong, and therefore had to be flushed (unlearned). (Sorry, Mom; sorry, Dad. Thankfully, not everything I learned in college was for naught.) Economics’ Dark Age In Stanford’s defense,...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
