Sense on Cents

Are you scratching your head wondering about the title of this commentary? Are you wondering if I inadvertently mistyped and should have written CPI for Consumer Price Index? Is it possible that I meant to write PPI for Producer Price Index? Am I somehow opining on a new found capability of the fabulous GPS navigation devices? A resounding no to all of the above.

I have been a big proponent of the work produced by Rick Davis of Consumer Metrics Institute. Recall that Rick captures real-time internet related discretionary consumer purchases to measure the overall health and pulse of our economy.  As much as some may question the correlation of Rick’s work and the economic reports released by the crowd in Washington, I am a big fan of his work. I strongly encourage people to follow him. Why do I broach this topic?

Do you trust our Washington establishment to provide real truth and display unquestioned integrity in our economic releases? You don’t? Neither do I. Aside from monitoring Rick’s work, are there other broad based,  independent vehicles with which we can measure economic data? 

Well, how uncanny that the right hand column of today’s Financial Times highlights, Google To Map Inflation Using Web Data,

Google is using its vast database of web shopping data to construct the ‘Google Price Index’ – a daily measure of inflation that could one day provide an alternative to official statistics.

The work by Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, highlights how economic data can be gathered far more rapidly using online sources. The official Consumer Price Index data are collected by hand from shops, and only published monthly with a time lag of several weeks.

At the National Association of Business Economists conference in Denver, Colorado, Mr Varian said that the GPI was a work in progress and Google had not yet decided whether to publish it.While the Federal Reserve is unlikely to panic just yet, Mr Varian said that the GPI shows a “very clear deflationary trend” for web-traded goods in the US since Christmas. Although the data are not seasonally adjusted, Mr Varian said that prices rose during the same period a year ago. The ‘core’ CPI in the US, which excludes food and energy, rose 0.9 per cent on a year ago in August.

 “It’s a quite different picture if you go to the UK where you see a slight inflationary trend,” Mr Varian said. He attributed the rise in the UK GPI to the weakness of sterling.

Mr Varian emphasised that the GPI is not a direct replacement for the CPI because the mix of goods that are sold on the web is different to the mix in the wider economy. Housing accounts for about 40 per cent of the US CPI, for example, but only 18 per cent of the GPI.

 The GPI shows a “pretty good correlation” with the CPI for goods such as cameras and watches that are often sold on the web, but less so for others, such as car parts, that are infrequently traded online.

 Mr Varian said that the GPI had been inspired by a personal shopping experience: “A tragedy struck our house a few months ago because my favourite pepper grinder broke.”

 On typing ‘pepper grinder’ into Google Shopping, Mr Varian was struck by the list of prices. “What’s the first thing you want to do if you’re an economist? You want to construct a price index,” Mr Varian said.

Mr Varian also discussed some of his other work on using Google’s search data for economic forecasting. He said that he is working on “predicting the present” by using real-time search data to forecast official data that are only released with time lags.

For example, searches for “unemployment insurance” may be a good tool to predict actual claims for unemployment insurance, or the unemployment rate.

Mr Varian said that Wall Street analysts are still more accurate, because they can take account of changes such as lay-offs of census workers, but Google search data may help to improve the accuracy of their forecasts.

Think our friends in Washington are not aware of these trends? Why have Ben and Turbo-Tim effectively forsaken the dollar?  

The GPI is the newest financial tool for ‘sense on cents’. I will be looking for Hal Varian regularly. I encourage you to do the same. In fact I will look to link Rick Davis and Hal Varian. What might we call that?

Sense on cents squared!!

Larry Doyle

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I have no affiliation or business interest with any entity referenced in this commentary. As President of Greenwich Investment Management, an SEC regulated privately held registered investment adviser, I am merely a proponent of real transparency within our markets so that investor confidence and investor protection can be achieved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 12th, 2010 at 3:04 PM and is filed under deflation, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.