October 2016 – Barter is Evil

24 October 2016

A Bank Ratio Comparison (For my students)

We talked a significant amount lately about bank performance ratios and the various sources for this data. I grabbed bank efficiency ratio data from the FDIC Statistics on Depository Institutions for 2016 Q2 and plotted it against the return on equity (ROE). I did remove any banks with efficiency ratios above one hundred because there were some significant outliers. Students will recall this is not my favorite ratio because it is a bit too arbitrary and I think the graph bears this out.

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21 October 2016

Cubs Ticket Prices Go Up After Game Starts?

Bloomberg has a nice little piece about Cubs ticket prices going up after the game starts. This obviously goes a little bit against conventional wisdom as they demonstrate in the article. Well worth a read and of course, if conventional wisdom was going to break down, we know it would be the Cubs that make it so.

20 October 2016

Student blogging about the election

A student of mine, Richard Carpenter, has some interesting graphs and discussion of voting participation in the US compared to population on his blog. At various times in this election both candidates discussed the notion that they are brining new people to the voting booths, though I think we need to wait and see before declaring this some type of transformational election.

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20 October 2016

Baseball talk from radio today

I was on the radio with Jarrod Thomas again today and the early topic was baseball. One of the aspects we discussed was when Manager Dave Roberts should pitch Clayton Kershaw. There was speculation Kershaw could be moved up to pitch tonight in game 5, and the betting lines fluctuated based on what people thought would happen.

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20 October 2016

Continuing claims, North Dakota

Along with the initial claims we can look at the continuing claims for unemployment insurance from the same source, and I think it better displays the unemployment situation in North Dakota than the initial claims.

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