Saturday, March 29, 2014

Book Review: (The Secrets of) ECONOMIC INDICATORS (choose some here, please), in addition to his "Economics", by Bernard Baumol.

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This not - so - brief text on economic indicators by the great economics scribe Bernard Baumol has much to do without any triangulation whatsoever, or that might be hinted at here, with what people know to be the debate between the poets and the quants, though it avoids the bitter tone of some debating the empirical schools, those of liberal and other economists and what comprises good policy, good forecasting and so forth - obviously other issues for even more books.  In short, the argument presented here boils down to a number of charts or statistics poets and quants themselves two parties try to agree on, though same never seem to agree which can make for everything from pleasant banter to angry debate, shouting matches and so forth between advocates of these two "schools".  There is no wonder, and this given my own propensity to concentrate on narrative while numbers count (no pun intended here, they do), Baumol takes a longer approach to the shorthand and high - level semiotics and signaling of discrete economic statistics over what might seem to be a stream of words that would make even an excellent memory bend towards greater advocacy to figures, numbers, charts, graphs, and other media with, again, short and illustrative and highly semantic criteria with lots of room for discussion as to weight and importance and priority, if not the actual basis and computational arithmetic, calculus and differential math used in presenting these, too.  While the text, which illustrates dozens and dozens of indicators (you choose) carries on a very cogent and well - delivered and defined discussion of the subject matter at hand, the debate between technical and fundamental approaches to financial and other economics is authenticated by illustrative prose and the weight of the statistics themselves as portrayed and even further if you again choose one and decide to follow it through various publications:  There's no verbosity here about the prime rate and related interest rates here, nor P / E ratios, nor uptick nor downtick - type illustrations - the indicators in the narrative here are like bells that chime in the discourse of seasoned investors, students, professional economists and the like, so careful as well about what you might discover here.  It is not that it's all been "done" before, but different numbers have prominence at different times, and the world and the time that it depends upon at this point are computerized as well, at least the one many of us know at this point and the technologies that generate these figures are snappy - quick as well.

So what difference does another book by anyone make on the subject of leading and other indicators make at this point?  Well, if it is just another book about economics and finance, macro - or micro - , let it be this one.  The text here integrates, in its reading and illustrations, in the choices it presents according to economic axioms and patters, groups and hierarchies of data, information and reporting, many principles and points not only of the makings of different measures, but of the overall and actual meaning to those who have subject matter expertise and background in the materials at hand here.  Certainly, Dr. Baumol does and one reading this book ought to in fact respond to the sort of pent - up quest for indicators and their different meanings that the author addresses here by actually, and this especially if one is not familiar with the numbers and stats as presented, putting together or experimenting, and this the text might have been written for, with the correlations and reverse correlations of different figures the book introduces.  As an example, the C.P.I. might have something to do with capital flows directly, and with things like interest rates; though it actually might be found to have little related to the magnitude of national accounts and so forth, or commercial real estate numbers.  Overall an exemplary book about economics and one that every student of the subject should read through if not own outright.  

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