The Mystery of the Awful Economists
March 7, 2005
This week's letter comes to use from Barry Ritholtz, Chief Market Strategist of the Maxim Group and a frequent guest on CNBC. I have been reading his commentary for several years and this special report takes a look at the employment numbers.
Ten possible explanations as to why this is the jobless recovery are explored. The first two are the ones most cited by Wall Street economist, but the last eight dig deeper into the data and give us an Outside the Box look at what is going on with the numbers. Barry challenges the economist to find a way to include new factors into their models in the hopes of improving future forecasts of employment.
While economists have recently been over-guessing the employment numbers, last Friday they made a rare under-guess. The forecast was 220,000-225,000 based on several news articles and the actual number came in at 262,000.
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box
subscribers@mauldineconomics.com
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The Mystery of the Awful Economists
I've been making a fortune lately. (No, I don't own any Google IPO shares). Each month, I've been betting on the outcome of the Non-Farm Payroll report against my economist colleagues. I've been taking "the under," and, over the past year, it's been money 87% of the time. I expect this wager on a monthly jobs shortfall to remain successful for the…