This week I received some odd communications from mutual fund giant Vanguard Group. First, they sent a white paper titled, “Here today, gone tomorrow: The impact of economic surprises on asset returns.” As the title suggests, this paper examined the relationship between the economy and the stock [...]
Why you should care about the dullest headline of the week
This week the government issued its monthly inflation data report, and the headline could have put you to sleep: “Consumer Price Index Rises 0.2% in April.” It would have been easy to skip over this seemingly insignificant story for two reasons: First, the way the government reports inflation data, [...]
Irving Fisher
The name Irving Fisher is not widely known, but maybe it should be. In his day, Fisher was a renowned economist. He graduated first in his class from Yale, received the first PhD in Economics ever issued by Yale and then went on to join the school's faculty. Despite all that, however, [...]
Why Bill Gates does the dishes at his house – and you should too
A little bit of knowledge, as they say, can be a dangerous thing. Or, in my case, dangerous to one's marriage. First, some background: when I was in college, one of the first classes I took was Economics 101. And in that class, one of the first concepts we learned was something called “comparative [...]
