足球比赛上半场时间 年9月高口阅读上半场第四篇

年9月高口阅读上半场第四篇  

Question 16-20
The month of January offered those who track the ups and downs of the U.S. economy 92 significant data releases and announcements to digest. That's according to a calendar piled by the investment bank UBS. The number doesn't include corporate earnings
data from abroad or informal indicators like
say
cardboard prices (a favorite of Alan Greenspan's back in the day).
It was not always thus. "One reads with dismay of Presidents Hoover and then Roosevelt designing policies to bat the Great Depression of the 1930s on the basis of such sketchy data as stock price indices
freight car loadings
and inplete indices of industrial production
" writes the University of North Carolina's Richard Froyen in his macroeconomics textbook.
But that was then. The Depression inspired the creation of new measures like gross domestic product. (It was gross national product back in those days
but the basic idea is the same.) Wartime planning needs and advances in statistical techniques led to another big round of data improvements in the 1940s. And in recent decades
private firms and associations aiming to serve the investment munity have added lots of reports and indexes of their own.
Taken as a whole
this profusion of data surely has increased our understanding of the economy and its ebb and flow. It doesn't seem to have made us any better at predicting the future
though; perhaps that would be too much to ask. But what is troubling at a time like this
with the economy on everyone's mind
is how misleading many economic indicators can be about the present.
Consider GDP. In October
the Commerce Department announced — to rejoicing in the media
on Wall Street and in the White House — that the economy had grown at a 3.5% annual pace in the third quarter. By late December
GDP had been revised downward to a less impressive 2.2%
and revisions to e could ratchet it down even more (or revise it back up). The first fourth-quarter GDP estimate es out Jan. 29. Some are saying it could top 5%. If it does
should we really believe it?
Or take jobs. In early December
the Labor Department's monthly report surprised on the upside — and brought lots of upbeat headlines — with employers reporting only 11
000 jobs lost and the unemployment rate dropping from 10.2% to 10%. A month later
the surprise was in the other direction — unemployment had held steady
but employers reported 85
000 fewer jobs. Suddenly the headlines were downbeat
and pundits were pontificating about the political implications of a stalled labor market. Chances are
the disparity beeen the o reports was mostly statistical noise. Those who read great meaning into either were deceiving themselves. It's a classic case of information overload making it harder to see the trends and patterns that matter. In other words
we might be better off paying less (or at least less frequent) attention to data.
With that in mind
I asked a few of my favorite economic forecasters to name an indicator or o that I could afford to start ignoring. Three said they disregarded the index of leading indicators
originally devised at the Commerce Department but now piled by the Conference Board
a business group. Forecasters want new hard data
and the index "consists entirely of already released information and the Conference Board's forecasts
" says Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs. (The leading-indicators index topped a similar survey by the Chicago Tribune in 2005
it turns out.) The monthly employment estimate put out by payroll-service firm ADP got o demerits
mainly because it doesn't do a great job of predicting the Labor Department employment numbers that are released o days later. And consumer-sentiment indexes
which offer the tantalizing prospect of predicting future spending patterns but often function more like an echo chamber
got the thumbs-down from o more forecasters.
The thing is
I already ignore all these (relatively minor) indicators. I had been hoping to learn I could skip GDP or the employment report. I should have known that professional forecasters wouldn't fo real data. As Mark Zandi of Moody's put it in an e-mail
"I cherish all economic indicators."
Most of us aren't professional forecasters. What should we make of the cacophony of monthly and weekly data? The obvious advice is to focus on trends and ignore the noise. But the most important economic moments e when trends reverse — when what appears to be noise is really a sign that the world has changed. Which is why
in these uncertain times
we jump whenever a new economic number es out. Even one that will be revised in a month.