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U.S. Labor Market Fears and the Global Equity Swoon
- August 6, 2024
- Posted by: Christopher Thornberg, PhD
- Categories: Economics, General Economy, Social Issues
No CommentsA sudden chill has hit global equity markets. Is the panic real, or needless?
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Surge Pricing Vs. Dynamic Pricing: What’s In A Name? As It Turns Out, A Lot!
- April 30, 2024
- Posted by: Christopher Thornberg, PhD
- Categories: Economics, General Economy, Social Issues
People should respond to real experiences more than to the labels attached to those experiences – that’s the concept of the rational agent. In practice, however, labels do matter… a lot.
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Surveys and the Economy—What They Do and Don’t Tell Us
- April 17, 2024
- Posted by: Christopher Thornberg, PhD
- Categories: Economic Policy, Economics, General Economy
Surveys capture narratives that may not fully reflect reality. Today, this is on full display in Americans’ views of the current U.S. economy.
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The Changing Patterns Of Holiday Spending
- December 21, 2023
- Posted by: Christopher Thornberg, PhD
- Categories: Economic Policy, Economics, General Economy
The holidays have always been a time of higher-than-normal consumer spending. However, a drift downward in spending at this festive time of year has been occurring for years. This is likely a function of many things, the most important of which may be the decline in the number of children in the United States.
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Fed Policy in 2024: Bad News For People Who Like Bad News
- December 19, 2023
- Posted by: Christopher Thornberg, PhD
- Categories: Economic Policy, Economics, General Economy
For all the sophistication of modern asset markets, at their core, they are still just Keynesian beauty contests. Keynes’s metaphor for the markets derived from a special type of beauty contest where the judges don’t pick who they think is most attractive, but who they think will be most attractive to all the other judges. His intuition is that traders are mainly trying to anticipate what the average trader thinks the average trader thinks is about to happen. Such nested logic can generate wild volatility in the market’s response to the silliest peices of news. This has been proven yet again in the waning days of 2023 with a big jump in equity and bond prices, all because of the odd notion that there has been a sharp pivot in Federal Reserve policy. The market now anticipates that the Fed will lower interest rates multiple times next year.
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The Recession That Didn’t Happen… And Why Most Forecasters Got It Wrong
- August 8, 2023
- Posted by: Christopher Thornberg, PhD
- Categories: Economic Policy, Economics, General Economy