Monday, February 3, 2014

My Take on Construction Spending (Musical Tribute)

The following chart shows the natural log of the combined total of religious construction spending, sewage and waste disposal construction spending, and amusement and recreation construction spending all divided by disposable personal income. I am once again using a natural log so that exponential growth (or in this case decay) can be seen as a straight line.


Click to enlarge.

Why religious, sewage and waste disposal, and amusement and recreation construction spending you might ask?

1. We have lost faith.
2. The @#$% is hitting the fan again.
3. We are not amused.



"Bond" is certainly having a good year so far (the last few weeks in particular). Shocking.

The 20-year TIPS is back under 1%. Let's just blame the next 20 years on a few months of cold weather and call it good.

This is not investment advice.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

7 comments:

Stagflationary Mark said...

Tongue-in-cheek! Well, partly.

mab said...

Today's ~2% market drop would have been an ~ 5% drop a few years ago.

We need more blind faith!

Stagflationary Mark said...

mab,

First the Denber Super Bowl blowout, and now this?

How much more blind faith can we take? ;)

Stagflationary Mark said...

Denber? Denver? It's all good, lol. Sigh.

mab said...

How much more blind faith can we take?

I don't know! Maybe we need some more (un)intelligent design! Perhaps randomness, like free markets, always leads to the best outcomes.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing! The crash landing!



mab said...

Commenters on CRs blog used to jokingly post "down goes Frazier" on days like this. Of course, the same 35 point market drops were 5% then rather than 2% today.

Stagflationary Mark said...

mab,

The market is clearly RATtled. Risk on investors are getting MICEd and diced!

It hasn't made a roDENT in the great bond "bubble" though, much to the ongoing dismay of Jeremy Siegel!