Lack of Memory

Most media outlets do disservice to their viewers when putting on "experts" and pundits. Why? They seem to almost never check the track record of predictions and forecasts given by those people in the past. This is particularly true for economists and bears. After the panic of 2008 and the Obama bust in early 2009, we heard endless screeds by pundits like Roubini and Meredith that the markets were going to get worse as another wave of disaster was coming. Hello? It didn't. A huge rally followed.

Similarly, a few years ago when copper prices hit $4, then dropped a lot, Gartman pontificated that we would never see $4 copper prices in our lifetimes. Uh ... copper prices are now about $4.30/lb.

When oil prices were approaching $150/barrel, pundits said it was demand, not hedge funds and pension fund buying. That was demonstrably wrong as US gasoline demand numbers at the time proved, but the bloviators kept on bloviating. And then oil collapsed as the beefers sold.

Facts do matter. And people need to use their memory to calibrate pundits and experts. They are not wizards or seers. There are many Nobel laureate economists. They use that credential to claim some authority, and get paid for giving speeches and writing popular opinion articles and to give interviews. Yet they disagree. That means the credential is either for work unrelated to their opinions OR is meaningless and no value in assessing the quality of their opinions OR BOTH. In both cases, you can recognize that it adds nothing to evaluating the correctness of their opinions.

You've got to do some thinking yourself and read. Get facts - hard facts. just listening to the blatherers and bloviators will lead to terminal ignorance. Don't be a cabbage watching only the Boobatron [aka TV] for your information. Do some work yourself and read. And use your memory to calibrate the pundits.

Word of the Day

"Torpor" - noun [$10]
Torpor means 1. a condition of mental or physical inactivity or insensitivity; 2. lethargy, apathy
Sentence: Don't let you mind wallow in torpor watching the Boobatron for hours - read !