Topical -- December 27, 2023

Locator: 46399ECON. 

Tom Smothers: dies at age 86. 

Speaking of "age": some of the CNBC anchors are looking "a bit long in the tooth." But, then again, maybe it's just me. 

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Trans Mountain

Back in the news.

Link here.

Maybe I'm missing something but:

• 99% of a pipeline is 48" diameter;
• 1% of a pipeline is a 12"-diameter pipeline,
• doesn't that make the entire pipeline a 12"-diameter pipeline?

Again, maybe I'm missing something.

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The Economy

This is now the #1 question on CNBC and almost everywhere else: why did analysts get 2023 so wrong?

From a Bloomberg contributor, opinion piece, December 26, 2023.

A related issue, the misery index, an even worse meme for 2023, link here to The WSJ.

According to the Misery Index, Americans shouldn’t be all that miserable. But they might only recently have started to catch on.

Invented by the economist Arthur Okun, the Misery Index is the simple summing of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. It first rose to prominence in the 1976 presidential election, when Jimmy Carter highlighted its high level in his campaign to unseat President Gerald Ford. This came back to bite him: When President Carter was running for re-election against Ronald Reagan in 1980, the index was even higher.

The increase in unemployment caused by the Covid crisis sent the Misery Index to its highest levels in nearly four decades in April 2020. Unemployment fell, but then inflation picked up, so in the middle of last year it still looked lofty. Since then, with inflation cooling and unemployment low, the index has fallen sharply: In November, with Labor Department figures showing the unemployment rate at 3.7% and consumer prices up 3.1% from a year earlier, it was 6.8, versus 12.5 in June 2022.

The only thing that disappointed me about this article: the authors "beat around the bush." They seems unable to say that the "misery index meme" in 2023 was just that: a meme. And, in this case, just like in Carter vs Reagan: a political meme.

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Green Aviation

Link here.

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For The Archives To "Settle" The Argument

Tag: PhD, doctor

Link here.