to your HTML Add class="sortable" to any table you'd like to make sortable Click on the headers to sort Thanks to many, many people for contributions and suggestions. Licenced as X11: http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/licence.html This basically means: do what you want with it. */ var stIsIE = /*@cc_on!@*/false; sorttable = { init: function() { // quit if this function has already been called if (arguments.callee.done) return; // flag this function so we don't do the same thing twice arguments.callee.done = true; // kill the timer if (_timer) clearInterval(_timer); if (!document.createElement || !document.getElementsByTagName) return; sorttable.DATE_RE = /^(\d\d?)[\/\.-](\d\d?)[\/\.-]((\d\d)?\d\d)$/; forEach(document.getElementsByTagName('table'), function(table) { if (table.className.search(/\bsortable\b/) != -1) { sorttable.makeSortable(table); } }); }, makeSortable: function(table) { if (table.getElementsByTagName('thead').length == 0) { // table doesn't have a tHead. Since it should have, create one and // put the first table row in it. the = document.createElement('thead'); the.appendChild(table.rows[0]); table.insertBefore(the,table.firstChild); } // Safari doesn't support table.tHead, sigh if (table.tHead == null) table.tHead = table.getElementsByTagName('thead')[0]; if (table.tHead.rows.length != 1) return; // can't cope with two header rows // Sorttable v1 put rows with a class of "sortbottom" at the bottom (as // "total" rows, for example). This is B&R, since what you're supposed // to do is put them in a tfoot. So, if there are sortbottom rows, // for backwards compatibility, move them to tfoot (creating it if needed). sortbottomrows = []; for (var i=0; i
Roughly every month and a half, the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee meets in a dark cellar with a dark purpose - to sacrifice a goat and to read its entrails so that they might set the level of the Federal Funds Rate.
Or something like that. The truth is that there's precious little public knowledge about what exactly the Fed does when it sets the interest rate that it charges banks for overnight loans to support their operations.
Fortunately however, there's a whole platoon of Fed-watching economists and analysts who have created their own methods of reading the Fed's tea leaves to divine what the Fed will do. Today's new tool is based upon a method for estimating what level the Fed is ultimately targeting when it sets the Federal Funds Rate that was developed by Greg Mankiw, Harvard professor, former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, and experienced practioner of the dark, dismal science.
Mankiw's method for estimating the Federal Funds Rate was outlined in his May 2001 paper on U.S. Monetary Policy During the 1990s (available as a 96KB PDF document) and again in a recent blog entry.
To use the tool, you'll need two simple bits of data:
And that's all - now you too can, in the words of Mankiw, "set interest rates like a pro!"
Using the tool's default data, which is current as of May/June 2006, the method estimates that the Fed should set the Federal Funds Rate to 5.42%. At the current level of 5.25%, this suggests that the Fed may be very close to its desired target rate for the current economic circumstances, with a good probability that the Fed's Open Market Committee will increase the rate once again by .25 points to 5.5%.
At least, that is, until current economic circumstances change again - then its back off to the basement with a frightened goat....
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
ironman at politicalcalculations
Thanks in advance!
Closing values for previous trading day.
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