{"id":506,"date":"2012-04-12T13:03:53","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T01:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=506"},"modified":"2012-04-12T13:03:53","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T01:03:53","slug":"misleading-explanations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=506","title":{"rendered":"Misleading explanations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>If \u2013 a few days ago \u2013 you opened your newspaper at the business section, you may have read that Asian markets had fallen on the back of investors\u2019 concerns over uncertainty in Europe.\u00a0 And if you opened the same newspaper a few days later, you probably read that Asian markets had risen<\/em> on the back of investors\u2019 concerns over uncertainty in Europe.<\/p>\n

So, pulling the markets down?\u00a0 Or pushing the markets up?\u00a0 Which is it?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m rather looking forward to the morning that I wake up to hear (or read) that \u2018such-and-such happened last night; but we don\u2019t know why\u2019.\u00a0 Because I\u2019m pretty sure that, most of the time, most of the people writing about the financial markets have no real idea of why something has happened.<\/p>\n

With the benefit of hindsight, some of the better commentators can usually put together a reasonably plausible account of why something might<\/em> have happened.\u00a0 But they are seldom emphatic in their conclusions.\u00a0 On the other hand, the people reporting on what has happened in the past hour, or the past day, always seem so sure of themselves.<\/p>\n

Bertrand Russell once observed that \u2018fools and fanatics are always so certain \u2026 but wiser people are so full of doubts\u2019.<\/p>\n

I am not suggesting that financial markets reporters are all fools.\u00a0 Far from it.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think that they would do their credibility any harm if they were a little less ready to offer instant one-line explanations for everything.\u00a0 Especially when, a few days later, they trot out the same instant one-line explanation to support a totally different outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If \u2013 a few days ago \u2013 you opened your newspaper at the business section, you may have read that Asian markets had fallen on the back of investors\u2019 concerns over uncertainty in Europe.\u00a0 And if you opened the same … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=506"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":508,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions\/508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}