A rule of thumb.

bongsaway said:

Oh boy. No wonder the right is so confused. Kudlow was saying right before the markets started its slide to 6500 the basics were solid and no need to fear a recession.

Oddly enough it was the same thing the bush/cheney administration was trying to push off on the public. Everything is sound, no worries.

I really think the right likes being lied to.

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And yet it was the Dems that refused to curtail the subprime market which led directly to the depression.

Torus34 said:

I've learned, over many decades, that when someone touts either stocks or horses, a good question to ask is, 'What do you do for a living?' Unless the answer's 'I haven't worked in years. I just take my own advice and apply it,' you know you're talking with someone who can't even support himself with his own tips.

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Three related topics have been extensively researched in my own field: (1) the ability to forecast stock market returns; (2) the ability to generate abnormally high returns (versus some model benchmark); (3) the added value of active management. The answers are usually: (1) You can do it a little, using the right signals and very sophisticated models; (2) Almost all attempts to use (1) or any observed deviation from a class of asset pricing model will fail miserably; (3) to a first approximation, they are almost all a pure waste of money and get demolished by simple passive strategies.


So, your intuition is actually somewhat correct: the presumption is that no one can beat the market, unless they can conclusively demonstrate the opposite. And when I say that you are almost correct, I mean to say that you're not sufficiently severe. By the sheer luck of the draw, given the huge number of people who trade, you are almost guaranteed to find someone who has a good track record. You need someone not only with some experience, but also someone who extensively researched their strategy. You need someone who went above and beyond just trading and building a track record. You'd like them to have tried in all matters of ways to throw every imaginable wrench in their own wheel -- and still concluded what they were doing is going to work.

It's not enough to have a story and a few years of exceptional performance. There is so much noise and so many people involved that this is almost meaningless.

Mycroft said:

It makes him smarter about economics than the lot of you.

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I don't personally think that this comment is entirely fair, though it is not entirely wrong either.

On the one hand, many people have pointed out in this thread that he made public predictions that turned out to be wrong. I am not surprised that he was wrong, but I am surprised that a man of experience would even venture a prediction in the first place. There is so much noise in stock market data that you can almost always come up with some kind of seemingly plausible story that sticks with the figures, even if most of what you see is entirely meaningless. On the other hand, your comment is not entirely off base: he has practical experience with the details of managing funds and dealing with intricate legal details, so he probably can say a lot of very interesting things about the nuts and bolts of many policies. Most of us here can only speak about policy issues from a very general point of view. We not know what are the relevant laws that deal with a peculiar policy, what are their key details, which government agency is responsible for oversight, how is all of this financed exactly, etc. Kudlow likely knows a lot about these things because he spent several years working on these things. To be entirely fair, Kudlow might be knowingly feeding "nonsense" to the public in the hope that it might become partly self-fulfilling. I doubt that it's going to work because I don't think stock markets are easy to fool, but that's another story.


It might not be clear from all of this, but the takeaway is that you can think Kudlow is competent without stepping up to defend that specific comment. I am aware that people who are more on the left will use it to suggest that he is thoroughly incompetent and, yes, I think that's unfair. You need more than a bad and likely political comment to determine how fit is someone for a public office. Still, you won't be as convincing in your defense if you take the most questionable things someone says and side with them.

TheEconomist said:

Three related topics have been extensively researched in my own field: (1) the ability to forecast stock market returns; (2) the ability to generate abnormally high returns (versus some model benchmark); (3) the added value of active management. The answers are usually: (1) You can do it a little, using the right signals and very sophisticated models; (2) Almost all attempts to use (1) or any observed deviation from a class of asset pricing model will fail miserably; (3) to a first approximation, they are almost all a pure waste of money and get demolished by simple passive strategies.


So, your intuition is actually somewhat correct: the presumption is that no one can beat the market, unless they can conclusively demonstrate the opposite. And when I say that you are almost correct, I mean to say that you're not sufficiently severe. By the sheer luck of the draw, given the huge number of people who trade, you are almost guaranteed to find someone who has a good track record. You need someone not only with some experience, but also someone who extensively researched their strategy. You need someone who went above and beyond just trading and building a track record. You'd like them to have tried in all matters of ways to throw every imaginable wrench in their own wheel -- and still concluded what they were doing is going to work.

It's not enough to have a story and a few years of exceptional performance. There is so much noise and so many people involved that this is almost meaningless.

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Hi! Very, very well put. Thank you for the extended comment. Regards.