From Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal:
And finally, here’s what Joe's interested in this morning
Yesterday Tracy Alloway and I interviewed Philip E. Tetlock, an expert on forecasting and making predictions, for an upcoming episode of our podcast. It won't be out for several weeks, but there was one comment that jumped out at me as being particularly timely and relevant. Tetlock said people make a common error of overestimating the frequency of "inflection points" in whatever they're studying. So for example, geopolitical forecasters are likely to overstate the odds of an imminent regime change or coup in any given country, despite those events being extremely rare. Part of the problem is that simply saying "the status quo will probably persist for the time being" comes off as boring and doesn't win you any glory and doesn't get you much attention in the media. Anyway, I was thinking about this with respect to the market and the economy right now. The post-crisis era has been characterized by an exceptionally long, stable period of moderate growth and cool inflation. It's a cliche, but it's basically been a "goldilocks" environment for investors. Right now we're in a period where people are starting to wonder if this is coming to an end. The fact that the Fed might ease policy is one reason they're anxious. The surge in negative-yielding sovereign debt is another. The trade war is also a huge wild card. And yet on the flipside, if you look at Friday's jobs report, with 224,000 jobs created and wage growth failing to accelerate, it certainly looks like the stable and cool economy remains with us. While there are all kinds of crosswinds and headline risk and everything else at the moment, perhaps people should be open to the idea that really not much has changed from what we've seen virtually non-stop since 2009.