>1. Doug, is it worth it for someone to buy the paperback if he or she
>already owns the hardback edition of your book? Oh -- I know Doug's answer
>to that one. So let's make it specific: have all the data in the paperback
>edition been updated to encorporate the most recent info?
All the market-based (interest rates, stock prices, etc.), national income accounts, & flow of funds data was updated, or if I were the Fed, I'd say "were updated." I didn't update stuff that was mainly for illustrative purposes - consumer expenditure survey, NIPA savings & investment accounting, figures on the number of banks. The charts & tables in the back - stock & bond returns, interest rates, who owns what, were all updated (markets stuff to first quarter of 98, FoF & NIPA to end-97). About 100 pages were changed of 382.
>
>2. Someone on lbo-talk asked something like "how will the markets like the
>election of Schroeder?" (probably without the anthopomorphization of the
>"markets").
That was me, and I might have even anthropomorphized. If this keyboard had irony markers, I would have used them.
>Please -- don't ask that kind of question. There's no answer.
>The daily and hourly fluctuations of speculative markets is totally and
>utterly unpredictable -- unless of course you have some sort of inside
>information. And if you have inside info, it hurts your bottom line to
>share it with us.
It would improve one's bottom line most to position oneself first, and then spread the rumor.
I didn't think the markets would react much to Schroeder winning, so it was mainly a joke question. But how markets react to political and economic news is important if there's a significant revaluation or trend shift involved. Markets told Jimmy Carter that G. William Miller just wouldn't do. As Greenspan is fond of celebrating, markets are harsh disciplinarians. Sure there's lots of noise involved, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Doug