November 05, 2010
That is what the NYT is asking readers to believe when it told them that a rally in Asian markets on Friday was due to the Fed’s decision on Wednesday to engage in another round of quantitative easing. Usually, analysts think of markets as forward looking, anticipating events. The NYT is asking us to believe that the Asian markets are still rising in response to a widely anticipated move by the Fed that was announced two days earlier.
It is worth noting that explanations for movements in financial markets is always guess work. The markets do not tell anyone why they moved in the way they did. The movements are the result of millions of individual decisions, some carrying much more weight than others. In some cases it may be evident why a particular movement took place (e.g. a high inflation number leading to a drop in bond prices), but in many cases the explanations are an analyst’s interpretation, which may well be wrong.
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