Printer Friendly

eMail Article

July 20, 2009

Larry Summers: I'm Feeling Lucky
by Adrian Ash

Type "rubbish economist" into Google. Then hit "I'm Feeling Lucky"...

The INCOVENIENT TRUTH about statistics, as Al Gore would no doubt confess if you threatened to stop him flying, is they look backwards, not forwards - and not even quite to the present.

That's as true of last-quarter earnings as it is of GDP. You're left guessing what today's outcome will be, right up until it becomes historic and you can try to claim it as fact. Even "up-to-the-minute" inputs have to exclude the very minute we're in, and corduroy-patch models like Greg Mankiw at Harvard should know this. So too should his chum, the White House's own Larry Summers.

Yet Summers - formerly head of Bill Clinton's Treasury and also of Harvard University, before coming back as Obama's chief economic advisor - used a speech on Friday to highlight a statistic that suggests he's forgotten the basics of empirical research. (Previous gaffes already said he'd forgotten to use sound judgment in public.) Bundling himself into blind fortune's get-away car, he told the Peterson Institute for International Economics that it shows "the economic free-fall has ended."

What is this killer stat? "The number of people searching for the term 'economic depression' on Google is down to normal levels," he's quoted by Politico.com.

Hurray for Larry!

As you can see, searches for the term "economic depression" were apparently four times their typical level coming into 2009, as Summers noted at the start of the year.

The search-engine depression was greater still as Larry dusted off his Team America badge ahead of last November's election. But now, "The recent shift goes to show consumer confidence is higher," he claimed last week.

"If we were at the brink of catastrophe at the beginning of the year, we have walked some substantial distance back from the abyss."

Now, let's forget how absurd it might be to base an economic conclusion on the broad pattern of Google searches. Never mind that on Summers' logic, Led Zeppelin were never so popular as in late 2007...demand for food stamps is now in a secular bull market...and the campaign to "free viagra" - that famous political prisoner - hasn't been this hot since 2004.

(Larry himself shows a very erratic pattern on Google Trends, but unlike him, we guess here at BullionVault that it doesn't mean much.)

No, the real trouble with Summers' thesis is that the data series has yet to end.

Ooops! Just look what's crept into the data since Larry last checked and the start of July entered Google's query results.

Yes, Summers' own comments helped push that spike higher, of course. Google Trends confirms it on a 30-day chart. But he was only adding on Friday to a clear new uptrend in people searching for the dread phrase. And besides, Obama's advisor is only driving us back to the abyss himself, back to the brink of catastrophe, if he really believes this marker counts for something.

Better leave that forced march to the Treasury and Fed instead.

Adrian Ash
BullionVault.com

Head of research at BullionVault.com, the fastest growing gold bullion service online, Adrian Ash is also City correspondent for The Daily Reckoning in London, and a regular contributor to MoneyWeek magazine.

Useful links: FAQs, Gold price now, Public order board, and The Case for Gold

More on BullionVault

BullionVault makes buying gold simple. It buys guaranteed, market deliverable gold bars and stores them at professionally recognized bullion vaults. The actuarial risk of loss is so small that your gold is stored with insurance included at 0.12% per annum.

On BullionVault you buy whatever quantity of gold you like, starting from as little as 1 gram. Choose where to store your gold from recognized vaults in London, New York or Zurich. Your gold will be in the form of good delivery bars, so it will retain full resale value straight back to the professional market.

As a seller at any time in the future, you will benefit by having gold of professional market status. Your top-quality warranted bullion can be offered directly to new buyers on BullionVault's highly active and publicly accessible order board. You can even quote your own prices, meaning you will earn - rather than pay - the trading spread.

For your full security and peace of mind, BullionVault also publishes a complete daily bullion audit in the world, enabling you to safely check your proven holding from an internet computer anywhere, and to prove it to the physical bar list issued to BullionVault by its vault operators.

By April 2007 - just two years after launch - BullionVault was storing for its customers cash and gold amounting to more than $68m.

For further information contact enquiries@BullionVault.com

Please Note: This article is to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events and should be verified elsewhere if you choose to include it in your own analysis.

Copyright © 2006-2009 BullionVault

Image rendition and html coding Copyright © 2000-2009 SafeHaven.com

« Opinions expressed at SafeHaven are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of SafeHaven or its management. Articles are available via RSS/XML. Please visit RSSHelp for instructions. »