{"id":42628,"date":"2019-01-12T11:12:58","date_gmt":"2019-01-12T16:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42628"},"modified":"2019-01-12T11:12:58","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T16:12:58","slug":"washingtons-latest-match-made-in-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42628","title":{"rendered":"Washington\u2019s Latest Match Made In Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Washington\u2019s Latest Match Made In Hell<\/a><\/h3>\n

Almost Predictable<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the more enticing things about financial markets is not that they\u2019re predictable.\u00a0 Or that they\u2019re not predictable.\u00a0 It\u2019s that they\u2019re almost<\/em> predictable\u2026 or at least they seem they should be.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>For a long time people believed \u2013 and from what we read and hear, many still do \u2013 that economic cycles move in easily predictable, regular time periods. All you had to do was create a chart of the up and down waves of your favorite cycle model and extrapolate it into the future, and presto, your prediction was ready to be sold. But it turns out it is not that simple. The chart above was published by the \u201cInflation Survival Letter\u201d in the late 1970s and purported to show the future trend of the so-called Kondratiev Wave, a cycle invented by Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev (who was eventually deported to the GULAG and killed by the Stalin regime, after a fellow American economics professor denounced him to the communists in Moscow as a \u201ccounter-revolutionary\u201d). Interestingly, their forecast of the trend in wholesale prices turned out to be correct, but everything else they predicted in this context was incorrect. According to the K-Wave theory, the year 2000 was supposed to have been the trough of a major economic depression, with extremely high unemployment, a plunging stock market and all the other symptoms associated with a giant bust. In reality, the year 2000 was the peak of a major boom, with unemployment almost reaching a record low and stock prices soaring to unprecedented valuations. There was a time when the seeming elegance and simplicity of models like Kondratiev\u2019s had our attention as well. There are ways of rationalizing such models.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington\u2019s Latest Match Made In Hell Almost Predictable One of the more enticing things about financial markets is not that they\u2019re predictable.\u00a0 Or that they\u2019re not predictable.\u00a0 It\u2019s that they\u2019re almost predictable\u2026 or at least they seem they should be. For a long time people believed \u2013 and from what we read and hear, many […]<\/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":[5728,1675,1849,23894,11763,23895,10693,865],"class_list":["post-42628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-acting-man","tag-economic-cycles","tag-financial-markets","tag-kondratieff-wave","tag-mn-gordon","tag-nikolai-kondratiev","tag-prediction","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42628","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=42628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42629,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42628\/revisions\/42629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}