Sean King

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San Juan, Puerto Rico, United States

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

All eyes will quickly be turning to Friday's...

...revised estimate of 2nd quarter GDP growth. Rodney Johnson has some thoughts.

How The Commerce Clause Created Totalitarianism in America:

If you want to see how the economy (or at least a large part of it) is doing...

...in almost real time, check out the Consumer Metrics Institute's website. Fascinating, and a little scary.

I have much more faith in these numbers than in the official government statistics quoted most often in the press.

Is the US Using Climate Weapons Against Russia?

Some Russians seem to think so.

Sales of Hybrid Cars Plunge

Down more than 35%, even in San Francisco.

Debt Deflation

US credit card debt drops to lowest in 8 years. Maybe this is one reason why.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Deflation

US existing home sales down 27.2 percent in July versus analyst expectations of "only" a 12 percent decline.

Why do analysts even bother anymore? They missed it by more than a 100 percent!

UPDATE:> Forbes documents just how lame economic forecasting really is. But, it's not just forecasts. The fact is that historical economic data is often revised months or in some cases even years after the fact.

AND MORE:> Economist Greg Mankiw on the lamentable state of our economic models:

[T]he CEA took a conventional Keynesian-style macroeconomic model and used those set of equations to estimate the effect the stimulus should have had. Essentially, the model offers an estimate of the policy's effect, conditional on the model being a correct description of the world. But notice that this exercise is not really a measurement based on what actually occurred. Rather, the exercise is premised on the belief that the model is true, so no matter how bad the economy got, the inference is that it would have been even worse without the stimulus. Why? Because that is what the model says. The validity of the model itself is never questioned.