TL;DR - I guess my main point to Dalbrin is, media lies. It's ultimately propaganda. Politicians will also lie. Including Jean Claude "When it gets serious, you have to lie" Juncker. Data can, if accurate, reveal peculiarities in certain narratives. Any sort of evidence can really, including qualitative evidence. All I am saying is, don't put too much stock in media publications at a time when political risk has been so high- to assume a narrative (of one persuasion, or the other) is not present is quite a leap of faith.
With respect to the rest:
The average (recovery) period between recessions in the US is 8.6 years over the last century. Right now we are past that point by quite a margin. This is once of the longest 'recovery' periods in US history. Anyone that knows statistics understands variability. Anyone who has studied a basic normal distribution knows things like skew and kurtosis factor, as well as sample bias etc. Anyone who has studied harmonic motion and applied it to cyclical forecasting understands that waves will amplify or cancel one another out.
Having said that, even without any sort of forecasting, basic macroeconomic and microeconomic indicators are pointing increasingly to recessionary moves. That's with governments goosing stats, because most government statistics bureaus publishing statistics will paint a prettier view of the economic statistics-wise to help politicians.
There are macroeconomic papers out there which are qualitative that deal with sovereign debt crises, economic history and defaults. None of that requires any hard data, other than historical information on technical defaults by governments. We have enough historical information economically to track back to the 1600s reliably to look at sov. defaults in much of the Western European world.
Economists have looked at metallurgic content of coinage and monetary history. They can quantify data from those, and have. That goes back even further than previous data sets. We have the metallurgic content of silver in the Roman coinage, for instance, which would be an accurate data set on debasement of currency. Historical records from China, and other parts of the world with respect to the monetary system.
It's not all cyclical, but there is a cyclical nature to the boom/bust cycle of governments, and various ways that governments can tackle defaults.
I personally don't rely on just one piece of information- it's foolish to do so. You cannot always rely on data either. Sometimes data quality is poor, models are ineffective, etc. If you look at evidence and put it all together, you paint a picture of the world.
What I will say, is the last time Europe faced anything on par with what it is facing today, a world war occurred and (many) people were distracted by survival/violence. Whether something like this occurs again remains to be seen but I would guess that a world war is off the cards based on MAD and nuclear proliferation. That suggests (aside from cyclical analysis and forecasting) we will see a rise in civil unrest and rapid regime change. The cycles in Europe just happen to corroborate that.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2017 09:00AM by istirith.
