Saturday, May 23, 2015

BUSTED: Paul Krugman removed 20 years of data from a chart to show a correlation that wasn't really there

Someone sent me an email Wednesday evening with some details on the Paul Krugman response to James Montier, which I discussed here. I had previously stated that the Krugman response was lacking meat. But it's actually worse than that. It's actually highly misleading and appears intentionally so.
In the post, Dr. Krugman tries to show how much interest rates matter by comparing the Fed Funds Rate with Housing Starts. He shows a chart and declares that there appears to be a strong correlation. Except, as this emailer notes, he appears to have shifted the chart to make it appear as though there is a correlation where there isn't one.
Here's the Krugman chart:
Mountain View
And here's the version that would have originally shown up when the data is pulled from FRED:
Mountain View
Read more: http://www.pragcap.com/fun-with-charts-paul-krugman-edition#ixzz3asSBMO2V

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