Margin Debt is picking up

This is bullish.

Also put-call ratio for NDX at all time low: very bullish.

Spending on services is faltering

Wolf Street points this out. This is bearish (but may not alter the direction of travel). “Services” is such a mis-mash category: I always used to think of it as things like transport/distribution, but actually much bigger items in the category are rent, healthcare and education.

Rent is such an odd part of national accounting. So much of it is an imputed amount which owner occupiers pay to themselves in exchange for the use of properties they have bought (or are buying).

NY Fed Macroeconomic model available on Github

This article describes how the model comes to be on github. This is the actual repository. As someone who (many, many) years ago implemented a macro model to run on a PC, I am very tempted to try to install this, but my head tells me I’ll spend frustrating hours just getting it to run, and get very little in the way of insight into what will happen out of it. It’s nice to know that the NY Fed is willing to share this with the world.

Julia sounds a cool language, and even though the NY Fed could undoubtedly afford a MATLAB licence, it recognizes the huge advantage of writing in an open source language.

Viruses

This amazing essay on viruses in the Economist is well worth reading. Microbiology is so much more interesting that footage of megafauna. If we want biodiversity, then bacteria, archaea and viruses certainly deliver it.

Wonderful podcast

Grant and Bill interview Lacy Hunt. The guest is that rarest of successful investors, a serious academic economist. This is another discussion about inflation, He talks a lot about the production function, (and, a bit, about velocity), about Robert Gordon’s book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” and Japan. Interestingly, he says that changes over the short term (a year or two) are simply unpredictable using macroeconomics, but that changes over the longer term are reliably predictable. Dr Hunt makes the case that inflation is going to be lower than most people expect. Like a lot of people, I have been expecting inflation for a long time, a lot of people say that we’re never going to get it. Unlike most people, Dr Hunt has an explanation other than that we haven’t seen it yet so why should we see it now.