Good Baa’d Data
The legendary investor Charlie Munger likes to tell a story:“A teacher asks a class a question: There are 10 sheep in a pen. One jumps out, how many are left?”. Everyone but one boy says 9 are left. That one boy says “none are left”. The teacher says “you don’t understand arithmetic” and he says: “You don’t understand sheep.” This morning’s better-than-anticipated retail sales report helped boost the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow nowcast estimate, with the updated model forecasting a 5.4-percent annualised expansion in real gross domestic product for the third quarter* – joining September’s blowout payrolls report and stubbornly-sticky...