charts

  • 15 Jul 2011 at 1:02 PM

Today in Statistics: People Have Stuff (Had, Anyway)

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The Atlantic points out a chart in Bernanke’s report to Congress showing the mean ratio of Americans’ net worth to annual income. After bouncing around 5x for much of the early ’90s, it went well above 6x during the tech boom, dipped briefly, and then soared to 6.3x-ish in 2007 before plummeting to around 5x again today. The Fed report, and Daniel Indiviglio at the Atlantic, point to this as a key restraint on consumer spending, as consumer confidence won’t rebound until people have repaired their balance sheets.

Here at Dealbreaker we were more surprised that the ratio was so high, since we assumed that the average American didn’t have much in the way of net worth beyond a 47 inch flat screen, a Wendy’s Baconator Deluxe and an underwater mortgage. So we looked around for median data, assuming that the mean was dominated by the top and fluctuations are driven mostly by Tiger Woods’s property tax bills. And we put together a somewhat different chart, based on the Fed’s Chartbook, which is triennial and only goes through 2007 (and measures slightly different things from the report to Congress):
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  • 13 Jul 2011 at 12:06 PM

Today in Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Nerdy)

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Zero Hedge points out this awesome chart in an otherwise kind of back-test-eriffic Stanford paper on credit-equity correlation trading:

The chart graphs 2003-2010 investment grade credit spreads (left axis) versus the S&P (bottom axis), with the size of the circles corresponding to the level of the VIX volatility index and the colors distinguishing the year of the observations.
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  • 21 Feb 2008 at 3:39 PM

Jerome Kerviel: Charting His Trades

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Jerome Kerviel's Performance (small).pngOur eyes were already glazed over when we finally turned our attention to the the report released by Société Générale on the Jerome Kerviel scandal. The ocular varnish hardened to opaque as we skimmed through blather about how almost everything had gone right, everyone had done things well, and it was just a few bad eggs. It confirms much of what we had already concluded—that the back office lacked the knowledge and spine to really control the risk of the traders. “In some cases, according to the report, controllers who asked Mr. Kerviel about irregularities in his trades didn’t understand his explanations, but they dropped their inquiries,” the Wall Street Journal writes.
We woke up a bit when we read the Journal’s summary of the report: “The findings are likely to prompt widespread soul-searching within the banking sector.” Cue laughter.
But what really got our attention and tore the scales from our eyes was the chart attached to the report. Kerviel, according to SocGen, hid his real profit and loss by displaying an “official” P&L that was very small by comparison. After the jump, we bring you the chart.

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