Hat tip: Ritholtz.com
Apr 12th
The Time Is Now
Mar 31th
Newton’s Apple, 2011 version
Nothing to do with economics or investments (so far as I can tell), but here’s a fascinating graphic of what the earth would look like if gravity were uniform all around the world. Expanded/yellow parts are where gravity’s the greatest; compressed/blue areas are where it’s weakest. You didn’t know that gravity wasn’t equal at all points around the world? Me neither. I probably should’ve taken a few more undergraduate science classes.
Full story from BBC News explaining how the information was gathered to create the graphic, and interactive globe, is here.
Mar 29th
A Short History of Bubbles
As we continue to observe and/or speculate on current bubbles in commodity prices, Treasury bonds, and gold, BusinessPundit.com offers this short lesson on asset price bubbles.
The list includes:
- Tulip Mania – Holland, 1593
- South Sea Company – England, 1720
- Rhodium – US, 2008
- Railways – England, 1846
- Romanian real estate – Romania, 2006
- Mississippi Company- France, 1716
- Florida land – US, 1926
- Poseidon company – Australia,
- Dot-com bubble – US, 2000
- Uranium – US, 2007
Personally, I think it’s a little over-reaching to call these the “most bizarre in history” but they make for interesting reading nonetheless.
The full article is here.
Mar 25th
Totems
Mar 21th
NOT a List We Want Boise On
For several years Boise found itself pleasantly included in quite a few lists of best places to live. They ranged from best places to start a business to best cycling, and most of us (not least the city government, our convention and visitors bureau and real estate agents) were pretty pleased with the positive notoriety. Now we find ourselves on an unfortunately different list.
One of our favorite sources of graphical depictions of economic data, VisualEconomics.com, recently produced an information-rich infographic ranking the recessions affect on a number of American cities, including Boise. A snippet of the graphic is below.
The full infographic is available here.
Feb 17th
Quantitative Easing, Round 2
Idaho Business Matters, a short daily radio feature broadcast on Boise State Public Radio recorded by Boise State University’s Dr. Nancy Napier, recently focused on QE2. Professor Napier’s scripts were written by Harmonic’s Kenn Lamson.
Recordings of the commentaries can be heard by clicking on the links below.
Feb 08th
Market Structure
While we don’t use the trading software made by the folks at AlphaScanner, I found their graphic of the typical stock price performance interesting. The graphic focuses on the technical aspects of stock performance while basically ignoring things that we spend quite a bit of time on: Earnings, management acumen, product/service competitiveness and so on. That said, much of stocks’ behavior can be explained by the information on the illustration.
Here’s an interesting (dare I say, fun) way to learn about the States and foreign countries. The Economist magazine’s daily chart compares US states to foreign nations by population and GDP.
Here’s the up-close-and-personal on dear old Idaho.
Dec 31th
2010 in Pictures
While I doubt I’ll join the forecasting fray (at least not in print, where it’s incorrect the moment I write it and might be used to nefarious ends), this final day of 2010 offers the opportunity to pass along a few illustrations regarding the year’s markets and economic activity.
The Economist published an excellent review of the main economic and market events of the year, A Year In Nine Pictures. Two dark spots of the US economy, housing and employment, appear among their nine charts.
The New York Times is known as the home of the uber-Keynesian Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, but they also have a heckuva good graphics team. Here are a few illustrations from Snapshots Of the Economy, which appeared earlier this week.
Joshua Brown, who writes The Reformed Broker blog, keeps a list of annual investing fads that runs back to 1996. Reviewing it’s the investing equivalent of seeing pictures of yourself in neon parachute pants in the 80s or a huge butterfly bowtie in the 70s (sorry, you’ll find no pictures of us dressed like on this website).
If you’re a chart-watcher (I admit to leaning on that discipline from time to time), you may find StockCharts Top 10 Technical Developments in 2010 intriguing. I closely watch the performance of the each economic sector so this graph is both familiar and encouraging.
Finally, one of my favorite resources for online graphics, VisualEconomics, features their best Infographics of 2010. Here’s a snippet of one I could definitely identify with.
Apr 01th
A Graphical History of American Finance, 1861-1935
Author: Kenn Lamson
Comments: 0
The archive at the St. Louis Fed contains some work that’s fascinating to those, like me, who are captivated by the intersection of history, economics and finance. Regarding a piece that was clearly one man’s life’s work, to quote the Federal Reserve Archive for Economic Research (underline mine):
The work was created by L. Merle Hostetler in 1936, while he was at Cleveland College of Western Reserve University (now known as Case Western Reserve University). At some point after it was printed, he added the years 1936-1938. Mr. Hostetler became a Financial Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 1943. In 1953 he was made Director of Research. He resigned from the Bank in 1962 to work for Union Commerce Bank in Cleveland. He died in 1990. The volume appears to be self published and consists of a chart, approximately 85′ long, fan-folded into 40 pages with additional years attached to the last page. It also includes a “topical index” to the chart and some questions of technical interest which can be answered by the chart.
Wow. A hand-drawn and labeled chart of historical and economic data almost 30 yards long. Extraordinary.
The full interactive volume is here.
hat tip: Ritholtz.com