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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (143978)	6/29/2014 9:06:24 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Those are some pretty BIG 'what ifs'. (Unless you are talking about Argentina of course.... :-) With what ifs that significant you could make a case for most anything that you wanted to see... aiming for whatever conclusion you had in mind. By the way... as for myself I'd prefer to use the experimental "trimmed mean personal consumption deflator" that the Dallas Fed used to publish. (Don't know if they still do....) It was not the typical "smoothed P.C.E." we usually see in the Press (which is just the standard P.C.E. with food and energy inputs always tossed out), rather it used what I think was a statistically better smoothing technique and tossed out each month whichever two inputs were the greatest outliers that month.... Might be food and energy one month or might be some other inputs... always would be one outlier biasing upwards and the other biasing downwards that was redacted from the series. Result was a smoother, less jerky trendline. (With, I think, faster predictive validity).

To: RetiredNow who wrote (143978)	7/1/2014 11:20:06 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

MM, I consider two items as the economic bellwether: 1. Construction spending 2. Movement of goods: UPS, FedEx, railroad figures Price of chicken is not a number that I consider as significant. That is for the FED to watch since it indicates inflation. Your posts have conveniently mixed up the two: the inflation and the economy and the direction they are headed. Construction spending has dwindled to trickle. And that is what the May figures say which is a non-weather month. I would now wait for a trend before I formulate my opinion, because this figure could be an outlier. ================================ US construction spending up 0.1 percent in May By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer Updated 7:48 am, Tuesday, July 1, 2014 ....contd at sfgate.com