Why can’t we all do this sort of analysis?
Professor James Hamilton at UC San Diego comments on Econbrowser about Ben Bernanke and the current economic situation. Quote:
We’ve seen some quite remarkable movements in commodity markets the last two months. The graph below plots the price of 14 that I could get my hands on quickly through Webstract, with each price normalized at 100 for January 1. Every single one of these prices has risen dramatically since then. The most tame among the group has been zinc, which is up a mere 6.5% over the last two months, or 39% at an annual rate. Topping the group is wheat, up 46% over two months; I won’t try to translate that one into an annual inflation rate because I don’t want to scare you.
Prof. Hamilton clearly has access to data and tools that allow him to quickly (a) find recent historical prices on 14 commodities, (b) baseline all the figures to a common starting point, and (c) present them all together on a single chart.
For the rest of us, this could easily take a few hours. It shouldn’t. Much of the source data is publicly available, and the mathematical manipulations and charting capabilities have been available in spreadsheets for years.
Tags: economics, tools, Visualization
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