Dick Morris was referring to the Federal Reserve Adjusted Monetary Base which did, in fact, grow by a multiple between 2.5x-3x in the five months spanning October, 2008 through March, 2009. A simple Google search will confirm this. Here's a link to one website which published a graph of the AMB from the St. Louis Fed:
Bernanke's growth in the monetary base was covered extensively in the financial press and on every major finance blog and website, earning him the nickname "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. If this is news to you then one can only assume that you don't read financial news.
Your reliance on M1 money supply statistics is simply wrong, and frankly it exposes your ignorance on this topic. M1 money supply is just one subset of the complete money supply. Here's a like to the Wikipedia page on money supply for some remedial reading, which you evidently need: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
In short, Dick Morris is right and you are wrong. I believe it is called a cruel irony when you publicly mock someone's intelligence only to find out subsequently that they are correct and you, well, you stepped in it.
Will you be publishing your retraction and apology tomorrow?
Dick Morris was referring to the Federal Reserve Adjusted Monetary Base which did, in fact, grow by a multiple between 2.5x-3x in the five months spanning October, 2008 through March, 2009. A simple Google search will confirm this. Here's a link to one website which published a graph of the AMB from the St. Louis Fed:
Bernanke's growth in the monetary base was covered extensively in the financial press and on every major finance blog and website, earning him the nickname "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. If this is news to you then one can only assume that you don't read financial news.
Your reliance on M1 money supply statistics is simply wrong, and frankly it exposes your ignorance on this topic. M1 money supply is just one subset of the complete money supply. Here's a like to the Wikipedia page on money supply for some remedial reading, which you evidently need:
In short, Dick Morris is right and you are wrong. I believe it is called a cruel irony when you publicly mock someone's intelligence only to find out subsequently that they are correct and you, well, you stepped in it.
Will you be publishing your retraction and apology tomorrow?
Anonymous:
Thanks for the info. I agree about the cruel irony part, except that this happens to me all the time! I even published a false theorem once in a statistics journal and had to retract it several years later. So, sure, I'd be happy to retract and apologize if appropriate.
As you can see from the linked blog post, I claim no expertise on macroeconomics, and I'm sure I would indeed learn a lot from the Wikipedia page on money supply. I referred to M1 only because that was what was referred to by Bill Peterson in the Chance News article that led me to Dick Morris's column in the first place.
I followed your suggestion and looked at the Money Supply page on wikipedia but could not find the term "adjusted monetary base." I did find "monetary base," which is used in the U.K. to refer to M0. Searching the web on "adjusted monetary base" led me to the St. Louis Fed webpage and the graph that you had pointed to. I pulled out the numbers:
2008-08-13 874.264
2008-08-27 876.001
2008-09-10 873.833
2008-09-24 949.847
2008-10-08 1016.694
2008-10-22 1182.387
2008-11-05 1264.992
2008-11-19 1505.035
2008-12-03 1493.915
2008-12-17 1671.248
2008-12-31 1690.915
2009-01-14 1770.323
2009-01-28 1749.868
2009-02-11 1551.341
2009-02-25 1621.121
2009-03-11 1565.933
2009-03-25 1725.736
2009-04-08 1749.164
I agree that these have grown a lot–again, I'll defer to the experts in macroeconomics as to whether we should be worried about it–but I don't see where Morris could've gotten the 271% figure from. His column was published on March 3, so the latest figure he could've been using was the 1621.121 number from Feb 25. Going back five months from there gives the Sep 24 number of 949.847. But 1621.121/949.847 = 1.706718, which is a 71% increase. A huge increase for five months, yes, but only about 1/4 as much of an increase as the claimed 271%.
Or you could look at the monthly numbers, which increased from 1142 to 1665 in the five months from October 1 to March 1: again, an increase much less than 271%.
The St. Louis Fed website also has some "continuously compounded annual rate of change" numbers based on biweeky data, which jump around all over the place: -313% on Feb 11, +114% on Feb 25, -90% on Mar 11, etc. (I think these are percentages, I can't quite tell from the graph or table.) Or the continuously compounded annual rate of change based on monthly data, which was recorded as -102% on Feb 1 and +58% on Mar 1 (again, I'm assuming these numbers are percentages, I can't quite tell).
Again, I'm happy to be proved wrong on this. If you can tell me where the 271% comes from, I'd be happy to post it on the blog.
P.S. In any case, I still think Morris's comments on Obama not caring about the economy (and his aside about Sarah Palin) are silly.
Again, I'm happy to be proved wrong on this. If you can tell me where the 271% comes from, I'd be happy to post it on the blog.
Dick Morris was referring to the Federal Reserve Adjusted Monetary Base which did, in fact, grow by a multiple between 2.5x-3x in the five months spanning October, 2008 through March, 2009. A simple Google search will confirm this. Here's a link to one website which published a graph of the AMB from the St. Louis Fed:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2009/03/hol…
Bernanke's growth in the monetary base was covered extensively in the financial press and on every major finance blog and website, earning him the nickname "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. If this is news to you then one can only assume that you don't read financial news.
Your reliance on M1 money supply statistics is simply wrong, and frankly it exposes your ignorance on this topic. M1 money supply is just one subset of the complete money supply. Here's a like to the Wikipedia page on money supply for some remedial reading, which you evidently need:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
In short, Dick Morris is right and you are wrong. I believe it is called a cruel irony when you publicly mock someone's intelligence only to find out subsequently that they are correct and you, well, you stepped in it.
Will you be publishing your retraction and apology tomorrow?
Dick Morris was referring to the Federal Reserve Adjusted Monetary Base which did, in fact, grow by a multiple between 2.5x-3x in the five months spanning October, 2008 through March, 2009. A simple Google search will confirm this. Here's a link to one website which published a graph of the AMB from the St. Louis Fed:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2009/03/hol…
Bernanke's growth in the monetary base was covered extensively in the financial press and on every major finance blog and website, earning him the nickname "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. If this is news to you then one can only assume that you don't read financial news.
Your reliance on M1 money supply statistics is simply wrong, and frankly it exposes your ignorance on this topic. M1 money supply is just one subset of the complete money supply. Here's a like to the Wikipedia page on money supply for some remedial reading, which you evidently need:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
In short, Dick Morris is right and you are wrong. I believe it is called a cruel irony when you publicly mock someone's intelligence only to find out subsequently that they are correct and you, well, you stepped in it.
Will you be publishing your retraction and apology tomorrow?
Anonymous:
Thanks for the info. I agree about the cruel irony part, except that this happens to me all the time! I even published a false theorem once in a statistics journal and had to retract it several years later. So, sure, I'd be happy to retract and apologize if appropriate.
As you can see from the linked blog post, I claim no expertise on macroeconomics, and I'm sure I would indeed learn a lot from the Wikipedia page on money supply. I referred to M1 only because that was what was referred to by Bill Peterson in the Chance News article that led me to Dick Morris's column in the first place.
I followed your suggestion and looked at the Money Supply page on wikipedia but could not find the term "adjusted monetary base." I did find "monetary base," which is used in the U.K. to refer to M0. Searching the web on "adjusted monetary base" led me to the St. Louis Fed webpage and the graph that you had pointed to. I pulled out the numbers:
2008-08-13 874.264
2008-08-27 876.001
2008-09-10 873.833
2008-09-24 949.847
2008-10-08 1016.694
2008-10-22 1182.387
2008-11-05 1264.992
2008-11-19 1505.035
2008-12-03 1493.915
2008-12-17 1671.248
2008-12-31 1690.915
2009-01-14 1770.323
2009-01-28 1749.868
2009-02-11 1551.341
2009-02-25 1621.121
2009-03-11 1565.933
2009-03-25 1725.736
2009-04-08 1749.164
I agree that these have grown a lot–again, I'll defer to the experts in macroeconomics as to whether we should be worried about it–but I don't see where Morris could've gotten the 271% figure from. His column was published on March 3, so the latest figure he could've been using was the 1621.121 number from Feb 25. Going back five months from there gives the Sep 24 number of 949.847. But 1621.121/949.847 = 1.706718, which is a 71% increase. A huge increase for five months, yes, but only about 1/4 as much of an increase as the claimed 271%.
Or you could look at the monthly numbers, which increased from 1142 to 1665 in the five months from October 1 to March 1: again, an increase much less than 271%.
The St. Louis Fed website also has some "continuously compounded annual rate of change" numbers based on biweeky data, which jump around all over the place: -313% on Feb 11, +114% on Feb 25, -90% on Mar 11, etc. (I think these are percentages, I can't quite tell from the graph or table.) Or the continuously compounded annual rate of change based on monthly data, which was recorded as -102% on Feb 1 and +58% on Mar 1 (again, I'm assuming these numbers are percentages, I can't quite tell).
Again, I'm happy to be proved wrong on this. If you can tell me where the 271% comes from, I'd be happy to post it on the blog.
P.S. In any case, I still think Morris's comments on Obama not caring about the economy (and his aside about Sarah Palin) are silly.
Again, I'm happy to be proved wrong on this. If you can tell me where the 271% comes from, I'd be happy to post it on the blog.
==========
… and Anonymous was never heard from again.