Friday, December 2, 2011

Longwave (3): Roy G. Biv


Heck, I dunno. I do graphs with years on the horizontal axis and debt on the vertical.

I wanted to do a graph showing the relation between debt-per-dollar and Shiller's interest rate. Sort of like the Phillips Curve graphs that put inflation on one axis and unemployment on the other. No axis has years. I had to organize the data and create the graph a few times before I got a decent result.

Only decent. I was hoping to get pop-ups that identify the year of each point on the graph. Couldn't get that to work.

I did manage to break up the dots into color-coded chunks by date, as you can see.

Graph #1

Thing of it is, I don't know what to do with that graph. I have more confidence in my years-on-the-x-axis graphs. Like this:

Graph #2

But maybe something will turn up.

6 comments:

Greg said...

Art

Just so you know. Nick Rowe has been having problems with his comment section. You may have been caught in a spam filter. He actaully did a post on it a couple days ago. You might try again.

Ill say that Nick has a pretty thick skin and doesnt take comments down very often. Yours probably got lost.

Jazzbumpa said...

I'd say that both graphs strongy suggest tht there is no relationship between debt/dollar and interest rates.

That, in itself, might be worth knowing.

Cheers!
JzB

Jerry said...

I would expect that the relationship would be between the rate of change of debt per dollar and interest rates.
i.e. something like: "when rates are low, debt is easier to make and so it accumulates faster." So maybe look at that instead?
I guess that I would do yearly percentage growth in DPD (maybe averaged over some small period of time (3 years? don't know) just to make it less noisy).

The Arthurian said...

Interest rates peak first; DPD peaks later. Twice, that I know for sure.

Jazzbumpa said...

Interest rates peak first; DPD peaks later. Twice, that I know for sure.

So if there is any cause and effect, Interest rates are the driver. But with lags >> a decade, that will be a hard case to make.

Cheers!
JzB

The Arthurian said...

It worked. Thanks, Greg!