Bill McBride
The Navigator
Judgement in the fog, money, risk and the call others cannot make.
Bill McBride reads as The Navigator because he treats economic data as terrain to be recalibrated, not merely observed. The Calculated Risk founder adjusts course before consensus shifts, as when he deliberately stripped shelter costs from inflation metrics or made his pandemic-era recession call.
“Well, this is what happened, and she commented a lot in 2005. In 2006, she disappeared. From the comments about six months later, she reappeared and she told me that she had been diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer, had left her job, and she had stopped commenting because she wasn't able to and she didn't even think she was going to…”
“Well, economics is always a hobby for me, and I specialize in that when I got my MBA, that was my focus. In the early 2000s, I had a few things that I was doing. In 2004, I remember thinking, what is a blog? And I think I stumbled across yours, the big picture, if you remember Angry Bear when it was written, the three PhD economists.”
“It was awesome. You know, it was funny because one of my commenters wrote a fiction book partially in the comments called American Apocalypse. He's a lawyer, unfortunately, has passed away now. But it became a pretty good seller on Amazon. Really?”
“Well, that's unrealistic, obviously. I mean, employment is up substantially since 2009. You know, the economy is growing slowly from a GDP perspective. That's driven, in my view, by two main things. One is for some reason productivity is down, something that I don't think anybody can really control, at least measure productivity.”
Masters in Business: “At the Money: What Data Matters and What Doesn't”
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