Article Source My previous post regarding government statistics elicited a lot of commentary, with a tremendous amount of vitriolic commentary directed at the current approach to calculating the CPI. Rather than provide more of my own thoughts on what constitutes an appropriate mix of theory and pragmatism, I will quote from the author whose work I had to read in graduate school, W. Erwin Diewert. From his entry in the 1998 Journal of Economic Perspectives which had a symposium on the Boskin commission report: Defining a true cost of living index must begin on the household level, and then move to the social level. The Konuis (1939) true cost of living index for a single household is defined as the ratio of the minimum costs of achieving a certain reference utility level in a base period, given the prices prevailing at that time, and at a later "current" period, ...

For mental health reasons, we hardly ever watch CNBC anymore. But glancing at it this afternoon, at one point we saw three separate live graphics displaying the price of crude oil. So much screen space was taken up by live oil trackers, there wasn’t enough space left to show the chart of whatever alternative energy company they were pumping.

Was oil making a new high today? Did the U.S. unilaterally attack another country?  Did someone accidentally double-park in the Strait of Hormuz?  No.

If you feel like it’s been impossible to get away from oil and oil-related stories for too many years to count, that’s because you’re right. The CXO blog has a nice report up on a momentum-based sector investing strategy, and as they explain, the primary reason the strategy massively outperforms the S&P over the

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