{"id":11867,"date":"2015-09-05T10:25:01","date_gmt":"2015-09-05T15:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11867"},"modified":"2015-09-05T10:25:01","modified_gmt":"2015-09-05T15:25:01","slug":"institutional-aggression-superfluous-planners-and-predictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11867","title":{"rendered":"Institutional Aggression, Superfluous Planners and Predictions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Institutional Aggression, Superfluous Planners and Predictions<\/a><\/h3>\n

Pretense of Knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wall Street breathlessly awaits the newest payrolls report, which is widely held to contain the information needed for the FOMC to decide whether or not it should raise the overnight interbank lending rate from zilch to zilch plus a few basis points later this month.<\/p>\n

\"aggression\"photo via plantsbrookschool.co.uk<\/p>\n

The payrolls report is going to be revised umpteen times after its initial release, is in many ways driven by statistical artifacts (such as the \u201cbirth-death\u201d model) and concerns a lagging economic indicator \u2013 in other words, its \u201csignal to noise\u201d ratio makes it utterly useless,\u00a0even<\/em>\u00a0if one erroneously ascribes a lot of meaning to economic statistics describing the past.<\/p>\n

\"Monthly<\/a>Change in monthly non-farm payrolls in 1000ds, via Saint Louis Federal Reserve Research, click to enlarge.<\/p>\n

And yet, this utterly devoid of informational content data point is what the central planning bureaucrats are held to need to decide on their next steps in terms of interest rate manipulation! We are continually surprised by the fact that people can discuss this obvious nonsense with a straight face.<\/p>\n

In this context we have recently come across an interesting article at Forbes, by sound money and free market advocate Ralph Benko. It is entitled\u00a0\u201c<\/em>If The Fed Is Always Wrong How Can Its Policies Ever Be Right?<\/a>\u201d\u00a0<\/em>and is well worth the read. As Mr. Benko points out, the Fed\u2019s economic forecasts leave a lot to be desired, primarily because they tend to be dead wrong with unwavering regularity.<\/p>\n

He proceeds to ask how a bureaucracy that couldn\u2019t forecast its way out of a paper bag can possibly know what policies it should implement. It seems totally absurd to expect it to be able to ever get it right, except perhaps by sheer accident.<\/p>\n

\"2014-Interactions-Main_0\"<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Institutional Aggression, Superfluous Planners and Predictions Pretense of Knowledge Wall Street breathlessly awaits the newest payrolls report, which is widely held to contain the information needed for the FOMC to decide whether or not it should raise the overnight interbank lending rate from zilch to zilch plus a few basis points later this month. photo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5728,303,305,4512,8719,8718,6170,8720,8721,860],"class_list":["post-11867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-acting-man","tag-fed","tag-federal-reserve","tag-fomc","tag-interbank-lending-rate","tag-knowledge","tag-pater-tenebrarum","tag-payrolls-report","tag-ralph-benko","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11867"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11868,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11867\/revisions\/11868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}