Tuesday, Feb 12, 2008
No more comments - shut up everyone!
David Smith's Economicsuck.com: CPI 2.2%, RPI 4.1%
With the growing barrage of criticism at his shortsightedness and lack of analytical rigour, David Smith has had a hissyfit and closed the comments facility on his site. On the one hand I think its good, although he still has his job at The Sunday Times to spout claptrap regarding his ill-conceived skip index. On the other hand it's a shame really. I enjoyed having a look every once in a while, not so much for his inane posts but to relish the hammering he always used to get in the comments section from his readers.
Posted by paul @ 01:44 PM (539 views) Add Comment
9 Comments
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1. Orwell said...
I quite liked his site.
I think he must have been told to close it down because too many people who were better economists than he and in the know were making the public unesay... Rupert did you have anything to do with this?
2. Landedgentry said...
I think a confused76 MWAHAHAHHA HAH HAH AHHAH AHA HAAHHAHA is in order, make that a double!
3. hpwatcher said...
What this ''expert'' thinks is of no consequence.
4. sold 2 rent 1 said...
I stopped posting there 9 months ago.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard blog is going well
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/business/ambrosevanspritchard/
Not everyone agrees with what Pritchard says athough most do. Unlike cry-baby Smith he can back up his arguments when the going gets tough.
5. richc said...
David Smith doesn't know what he's talking about -- literally. A few months back, he was going on about how house prices in the US haven't fallen that much, citing as evidence the OFHEO house price index which he thinks is the best index available. When I challenged him in the comments on this, citing almost every other index out there, it turned out that he didn't know that the OFHEO index excludes most house sales in California and other more expensive areas in the country because it only includes lower-priced homes where the mortgage has been purchased by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the US government-backed mortgage packagers. The upper price limit of houses included in the index is well below the median price of houses in California, the most populous state in the US. As OFHEO excludes many of the areas that drove the housing bubble, of course, it's going to show smaller falls in the bubble collapse. That's pretty basic and you shouldn't be citing such figures if you don't understand what they are.
6. Peter Kiddle said...
Smith reminds me of a medieval fool locked up in the stocks while passers-by threw rotten vegetables at him.
Shame we can't do that anymore...............
7. confused76 said...
Yep, he is a village i@iot. He said that house prices are "sticky downwards"... what that means he only knows, that s not even English
Every time a comment was referring to US and Spain, he was saying "impossible, just a couple of percent drop"
Japan, not on the map
IR's can only go down
It is different this time and here
House prices only go up
Strong fundamentals
Repossessions? What?
MWAU UAHHAH AHAHAHAH HAHAHHAH AHAHAHAHHAH
8. little professor said...
He's right about prices being "sticky downwards" - see the NYTimes article above for an example of this.
Basically it means stubborn sellers cling on to their notion of their assessment of their houses value, and refuse to drop the price by any significant amount. Buyers stand their ground and refuse to buy at those prices, and hence you get the current situation where sales volumes have dropped through the floor, even though actual sale prices haven't decline that much (yet).
Once sellers catch on that the market isn't about to miraculously pick up speed again, they will eventually be forced into price cuts, which will be even bigger as they chase the market down.
9. new user 2007 said...
Given his site has been around for so long, and that lots of us "doomsayers" have been on it, it is odd to decide suddenly to shut it down?
Is it just another symptom of the "this time it is different crowd's" ego being hurt that it is becoming increasingly obvious that it was not different?