Collected links

1. A discussion on the Fred Blog of “Price growth at the tails” (recommended); do check out the second plot. Here:

   [T]o make the inflation rate meaningful, we must condense this distribution of prices to a measure of, as statisticians would call it, “central tendency.” However, reasonable people can differ on the proper measure because the distribution of price changes has long “tails.”

   [...]

   Within this basket, the distribution of price changes is usually approximately symmetric, […]. The interesting exception is during the Great Recession period, when commodity prices fell sharply, bringing a strong negative skewness for the first time since the mid-1980s. […] In this period when the economy seemed to be in tremendous flux, the headline, average CPI moved little. However, the skewness—and the tails of the price distribution—changed quite a bit.

2. Why don’t easy to use, helpful online banking accounts like the one described here exist?

   Suppose you could design the interface for your own investing software. […] What would you put on that first landing page?

   For mine, I’d intentionally not show most of what shows up on DIY brokerage sites today:

   • The shares/price/value of each position I hold
   • Whether those positions are in a gain or a loss
   • The historical performance
   • Market news related to my holdings

   These aren’t just useless for making forward-looking decisions – they’re actively harmful.

3. New UBS Public Paper by Dominic Rohner (download pdf) on conflicts and institutions.

4. On giving up your native language by Yiyun Li in the New Yorker: “To Speak is to Blunder”:

   Over the years, my brain has banished Chinese. I dream in English. I talk to myself in English. And memories—not only those about America but also those about China; not only those carried with me but also those archived with the wish to forget—are sorted in English.

5. 29% of German economists think Italy should exit the eurozone (in German).