Humans who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago often get a bad rap.

That's because they lived long before many of the great technological advances that define our world today. How could these people, who lacked the power of modern technologies like computers, or even paper, have any chance to solve difficult problems requiring lots of calculations?

Then, as now, those problems include how to settle the estates of the deceased. Dividing up an estate fairly among surviving heirs can be a tricky thing on its own, but is something that becomes much more challenging if the recently departed died while in debt to others. How did people settle estates between creditors and heirs in this situation? And how did they do it fairly if the amount of debt was larger than the value of the deceased's wealth, belongings, and property? How can such an estate be settled fairly when the deceased was bankrupt?

The answer of how at least one culture resolved this difficult task without modern technologies some 1,800 years ago is remarkable because their approach proved to be the optimal solution according to game theory, which as a field, didn't come into its own until the twentieth century. Mathologer's Burkhard Polster explains how they reached that outcome in the following 40-minute video.

Admittedly, discussions of the content of the Babylonian Talmud and concepts like hydraulic rationing can be pretty dry, but also surprisingly fascinating in how they can lead to an optimal game-theoretic solution.

The first month of 2025 was much like the last months of 2024 for the new home market in the United States. With the estimated total valuation of all new homes sold during the month slowing grinding lower after hitting a minor peak in July 2024.

Then again, we can say the same thing about the preceding four years, all of which have fallen below the market capitalization peak the U.S. new home market reached in December 2020.

The initial estimate of the time-shifted, trailing twelve month average for the market cap of new homes sold in the U.S. is $27.20 billion, which is about 10% below December 2020's finalized market cap of $30.12 billion. Which is also to say the market for new homes in the U.S. is 10% smaller than it was at the end of 2020.

The following charts present the U.S. new home market capitalization, the number of new home sales, and their sale prices as measured by their time-shifted, trailing twelve month averages from January 1976 through January 2025.

"Flat" new home sales trend:

Stalling downtrend for home prices:

Perhaps the most significant factor affecting the number of new home sales are their prices. New home prices had been falling after peaking in September 2022, but through the end of 2024 and now in January 2025, that downward trend appears to be stalling with prices at an elevated level.

We'll take a closer look at the relative affordability of new homes in January 2025 sometime in the next week.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 26 February 2025. 

U.S. Census Bureau. New Residential Sales Historical Data. Median and Average Sale Price of Houses Sold. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 26 February 2025. 

Image Credit: Aerial photography houses photo by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (Index: DJI) ranks among the world's oldest stock market indices. Created by Charles Dow in 1884, the price-weighted index originally included just 11 stocks, which was later expanded to 20 firms in 1916 and finally to 30 companies in 1928.

Over the years, the membership of the DJI has changed, with companies being periodically removed and replaced. Today, the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) has largely replaced the Dow Jones Industrials as the major index that's most representative of the most of the U.S. stock market, but the much longer history of the DJI has given it a popular staying power. For decades, it was *the* index that summarized the state of the U.S. stock market.

We're tapping a large part of that history today in a project exploring winning and losing streaks for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We pulled the index' price data through Measuring Worth's DJI database, which documents the daily closing value of the index for each trading day from 2 May 1885 onward. We tallied up the number of up days and down days for the index, then grouped them into winning and losing streaks based on how many days they lasted.

The following chart summarizes our results, presenting the number of times a winning or losing streak of the indicated number of days was recorded. The inset chart shows the frequency of winning and losing streaks as a percentage of the 38,131 trading days of the available DJI price data, which runs through 21 February 2025.

Some quick observations. Winning streaks are more common than losing streaks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The longest streaks lasted 14 trading days, for which there is one example of each.

"Single day" streaks are the most common, representing a little over 48% of the total, with nearly an equal number of up and down days. Two day long streaks account for more than 25% of the total, with two-day long winning streaks covering 13.4% of the index' total number of trading days and two-day long losing streaks covering nearly 12%. Longer streaks rapidly become less and less common.

The DJI data includes 209 days in which the level of the index did not change from its previous day's closing value, which is not covered in the chart. That makes an unchanged day for the DJI almost as likely as a seven-day long winning streak for the index!

The longest streak in which the DJI was unchanged is three trading days, which has happened three times in the index' history. The most recent occurrence of that phenomenon ran from 27 January 1912 through 30 January 1912.

References

Samuel H. Williamson, 'Daily Closing Value of the Dow Jones Average, 1885 to Present,' [Online database]. MeasuringWorth, 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and a bear running in a race."

What was the best year ever for the S&P 500 (Index: SPX)? What was the worst year ever for the index?

These are questions that are usually answered with tables of data. And that's fine if all you want to know is how much the value of the S&P 500 changed over the course of a year. But what if you also want to know when during the year that the best or worst year became the index' best or worst year?

Data tables won't cut in in that situation. In this case, what you really want is a chart that visually presents the best ever and worst ever extremes for these stocks, then shows the trajectory the index took throughout the year to reach its end.

We've built that chart, here it is using available daily trading data for the S&P 500 from 1950 through 2024:

The best year ever for the S&P 500 is 1954. That was a year in which the index was always above its mean and median trajectories. But it wasn't until some 211 trading days into the 253 trading-day long year that it set the mark as the best year ever for the S&P 500. The S&P 500 ended 1954 at a level (35.98) that was 144.2% above where it closed on the year's first day of trading (24.95).

The worst year ever for the stocks that collective make up the composite-weighted index is 2008. Stock prices stayed below the mean and median trajectories throughout the year, but also never rose above the level they were on the first trading day of 2008. Even though the year was a bad one for the S&P 500, it didn't become the index' worst year ever until 196 trading days into the year. It then stayed the worst year ever for another 57 trading days past that. The index started the year at closing out 2008 at a level (903.25) just 62.4% of the level it was at the end of the year's first day of trading (1,447.16).

For good measure, we also charted the S&P 500's trajectory during 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic struck the U.S. The index started 2020 mostly bouncing around the median and mean trajectory for stocks and had just risen above those levels when stocks started to crash about 35 trading days into the year. That crash continued and by the 49th trading day of the year, 2020 became the worst year ever for the S&P 500 at that point in time.

But 2020 only sets that bar through the 78th trading day of the year. The S&P 500 went on to recover and ultimately ended the year at a value (3,756.10) some 114.6% of the value at which it closed on the first trading day of the year (3,257.85). That's better than either the historical average or median trajectories for the index.

References

Yahoo! Finance. S&P 500 Stock Historical Prices and Data. [Online database]. Accessed 22 February 2025.

Image credit: Photo by Jen Timms on Unsplash. Quote added with Quofast Quotes Maker.

The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) had a pretty active week despite the trading week being shortened by the Presidents Day holiday. The index reached an all-time new record high of 6,144.15 on Wednesday, 23 February 2025 before retreating to close out the week at 6,013.13, about 1.7% below where it ended the week before.

Driving the market to its new record high was a continuation of the momentum in investor expectations toward more rather than fewer Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2025.

That shift could be seen in the CME Group's FedWatch Tool, which is once again forecasting two rate cuts in 2025. It projects a quarter point rate cut when Fed meets on 18 June (2025-Q2), six weeks later than it predicted a week ago. Meanwhile, the FedWatch tool is also forecasting another quarter point rate cut when the Fed meets on 10 December (2025-Q4).

But late in the week, something prompted investors to suddenly shift their forward-looking attention inward to the nearer term future of 2025-Q2. The latest update of the alternative futures chart shows that sudden shift, with the trajectory of the index moving to the bottom of the typical range for where we would expect to find it when investors focus their attention on 2025-Q2.

Since the change was less than two percent, we don't have high confidence in a prominent explanation for the sudden drop, which traces back to a report pointing to the possible emergence of a new infectious coronavirus in China. There are competing explanations for the sudden pullback in the S&P 500, which you can evaluate for yourself in the market-moving headlines of the week that was:

Tuesday, 18 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil prices extend gains after Ukraine drone strike hits Kazakh supply
• OPEC+ is not considering delay to April oil supply hike, Novak says
• Trump says he will introduce 25% tariffs on autos, drugs and chips
• FACTBOX All of Donald Trump's tariffs and threatened trade actions
• Fed minions starting to realize they didn't fix Bidenflation, claim they won't become deer in the headlights because of uncertainty, but still plan to keep U.S. interest rates unchanged:
• Fed policy should stay restrictive until there's more inflation progress: Daly
• Fed's Waller: Uncertainty over trade, other policies, shouldn't paralyze rate moves
• Fed's Bowman: Greater confidence in falling inflation needed before more cuts
• Fed's Harker supports steady interest rate policy stance for now
• Bigger stimulus developing in China:
• The significance of China Xi's meet with private enterprises
• China's tech rally rests on 'hot money'
• BOJ minions expected to hike Japan's interest rates after claiming they will:
• Japan braces for BOJ to lift rates sooner and higher
• Japan's GDP beats forecasts as consumption, business spending perk up
• Other central banks cutting interest rates, becoming world's biggest gold bugs:
• Australia's central bank cuts rates, cautious on further easing
• Goldman Sachs raises gold forecast citing strong central bank demand
• ECB minions excited to keep working from home where nobody can see how much they really do:
• ECB extends work from home policy even as others reverse course
• S&P 500 ends at record high as 'overvalued' stock market dashes up in last minutes of trade
• S&P 500 ekes out all-time closing high as Fed minutes eyed
• Trump sending fewer market moving social media posts than previous term, study shows

Wednesday, 19 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil holds near one-week high on supply concerns, sanctions on Russia eyed
• S crude stockpiles likely rose last week, products seen down
• GM CFO says if US tariffs are permanent, company must consider plant locations
• Fed minions want to see more progress on their fixing Bidenflation before cutting US interest rates again:
• Fed officials seek ‘further progress’ on inflation before cutting rates
• Fed officials weighed slowing or pausing bond drawdown last month
• Potential impact of Trump policies stirring inflation concerns at Fed, minutes show
• Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
• China's new home prices stagnate in January as demand struggles
• In balancing risks and rewards, China set to leave lending rates unchanged in Feb
• Another central bank acts to cut interest rates:
• New Zealand central bank cuts rates by 50bps
• ECB minions arguing policy amongst themselves
• Top ECB policymakers outline opposing policy arguments
• ECB's Panetta says Europe should consider simpler banking rules
• Wall Street notches another record close after Fed minutes, tariff action
• S&P 500 edges to record closing high as Fed minutes parsed

Thursday, 20 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil rises for third day on US fuel stocks draw, worries about Russia disruptions
• US new vehicle sales set to rise 8.1% in February, report says
• US labor market stable; hit from federal government belt tightening awaited
• Fed minions want to see more progress on their fixing Bidenflation before cutting US interest rates again:
• Fed's Musalem flags risk of rising inflation expectations and stagflation
• Fed's Goolsbee says PCE inflation reading unlikely to be as 'sobering' as CPI
• Fed's Jefferson says Fed can take time on next interest rate decision
• Fed's Barr, stepping down from regulatory post, warns against weaker bank rules
• Bigger steel prices developing in China:
• Iron ore gains on strong China steel consumption, short covering
• BOJ minions expected to hike interest rates again as Japan's inflation risk rises:
• BOJ to raise rates once more this year to 0.75%, most likely in Q3
• BOJ may raise rates twice more this year, underpin yen, says ex-FX diplomat Watanabe
• ECB minions running a money-losing business:
• ECB reports another record annual loss, says it may suffer more losses
• Stocks finish lower, with Dow down 1% as Walmart guidance falls short
• Wall St slides as weak Walmart guidance prompts worries about consumer demand
• Higher egg prices drove up inflation, and Walmart grocery revenue
• Gold prices soar to record high fueled by safe-haven demand

Friday, 21 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US existing home sales fall more than expected in January
• US Existing-Home Sales Drop Back Again With Mortgage Rates at 7%
• Oil falls 2% but still set for slight weekly gain on supply jitters
• DOJ launches UnitedHealth billing probe, WSJ reports; insurer says it is unaware
• Fed minions blame AI for faster investor reactions to Fed minion statements, continue to worry about untamed Bidenflation:
• Fed's Jefferson says AI is speeding investors' reactions to central bankers' messages
• Fed's Kugler says inflation risks remain, cites economic policy uncertainty
• Bigger trouble, failing stimulus developing in China:
• Another pandemic scare as scientists discover new coronavirus in China
• China's key property rescue tools are too hard to use to make an impact
• BOJ minions thinking about starting spring with a rate hike as Japan's inflation rears up:
• BOJ could raise interest rates in March, says ex-policymaker Shirai
• Japan’s core inflation hits 19-month high
• BOJ isn't fretting much about rising bond yields - for now
• Japan's factory activity shrinks for 8th straight month, PMI shows
• Nasdaq ends 2% lower as gloomy economic data fuel U.S. stocks to weekly losses
• China Reports New Coronavirus 'With Pandemic Potential' Discovered
• UnitedHealth sends Medicare insurers lower after report on DoJ probe

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool's projection of what real GDP growth will be in the 2025-Q1 held steady at +2.3% for a second week.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bear who's worried about the future of the stock market."

Carpenters working to frame houses with high ceilings have a unique challenge. Setting studs to be both vertical and the right length becomes hard because the standard tape measures they use for nearly all their measurements are designed to work best when used to take measurements in a horizontal orientation. But when they're used to make vertical measurements over a span that's longer than the carpenter can reach, things go awry.

Here, if they can get the tape to stay straight, the measurement they need to read is often well above them and hard to read. But over a long enough span, the tape will start to flop under its own weight. That makes it hard to keep straight, stay in the right orientation, and cover the distance they need to get an accurate measurement. It almost ensures they have to go through a lot of trial and error to successfully cut a vertical stud to the right length for every board they need to cut. They can cut the boards long, but will often have to do extra work with multiple iterations to trim it down to the right size. And if they cut it short, they will have wasted material because once it's cut short, it cannot be used how they intended.

A Kickstarter project that will run to 10 March 2025 aims to address that challenge with some true outside the box thinking. In the following 3-minute video, Ray, a framing carpenter, describes how he developed the prototype along with a design team from Ox Tools for the Speedframe, an extendable measuring level that solves the problems of taking long vertical measurements for professional carpenters, masons, and glaziers.

In modern construction, lasers are often used to take measurements over distances that are too long for traditional measuring tapes to be used successfully, but have the problem of being slow. Professionals using the Speedframe can often take the measurements they need up to eight times faster than laser measuring tools, which is a huge advantage.

The good news is this Kickstarter project is already fully funded. The Speedframe extended measuring level will make it to the marketplace, which they're aiming to do in July 2025.

Several weeks have passed since our previous look at the expected future quarterly dividends of the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) in 2025.

Our last snapshot was taken on 21 January 2025, our new picture of the outlook for the index' dividends in 2025 was snapped on 14 February 2025. In between, investor expectations for how many dividends per share will be paid out before the end of the current quarter of 2025-Q1 rose from $19.95 to $20.15, which is quite a bump. The outlook also improved for the upcoming second quarter of 2025, although to a lesser extent as the forecast rose from $19.04 per share to $19.15 per share.

Looking further out, the future prospects for the S&P 500's quarterly dividend payouts were either slightly negative or slightly positive. Projected dividends in 2025-Q3 dipped from $19.41 per share to $19.38, while 2025-Q4's dividends rose from $19.44 per share to $19.46.

The following animated chart shows these changes for current and future quarterly dividends along with the final recorded reading of the dividend futures for each previous quarter from 2022-Q4 through 2024-Q4. If you're reading this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you may need to click through to our site to see the animation.

How changes in the outlook for dividends at specific points of time in the future affects stock prices is described by this math.

More About Dividend Futures Data

For this series, we have been taking a snapshot of the CME Group's S&P 500 quarterly dividend futures data shortly after the second or third week of each month.

Dividend futures indicate the amount of dividends per share to be paid out over the period covered by each quarter's dividend futures contracts, which start on the day after the preceding quarter's dividend futures contracts expire and end on the third Friday of the month ending the indicated quarter. So for example, as determined by dividend futures contracts, the now "current" quarter of 2025-Q1 began on Saturday, 21 December 2024 and will end on Friday, 21 March 2025.

That makes these figures different from the quarterly dividends per share figures reported by Standard and Poor. S&P reports the amount of dividends per share paid out during regular calendar quarters after the end of each quarter. This term mismatch accounts for the differences in dividends reported by both sources, with the biggest differences between the two typically seen in the first and fourth quarters of each year.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A crystal ball with the word 'SP 500' written inside it". And 'Dividends' written above it, which we added.

Every three months, we take a snapshot of the expectations for future earnings in the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) at approximately the midpoint of the current quarter, shortly after most U.S. firms have announced their previous quarter's earnings.

The latest snapshot is a little early, but still 90 days since the Fall 2024 snapshot. During this time, remarkably little changed in the outlook for the collective earnings of the companies that make up the S&P 500 index. That relative lack of change is a new development that's taken place over the past six months.

That's remarkable because it runs counter to the pattern we typically see in how the outlook for earnings changes with time. That pattern is one in which the expectations for future earnings tend to erode with each later snapshot.

To be sure, that pattern holds in the Winter 2025 snapshot but the amount of erosion is tiny. Looking at the S&P 500's anticipated earnings per share for the end of the fourth quarter of 2025, we find those expectations dipped by $1.49 per share. That's a decline of just 0.6%.

The following chart, covering how earnings expectations have changed from the end of 2021 through 11 February 2025 illustrates both the typical pattern and the relative lack of change in those expectations since 13 August 2024:

The current projection for the S&P 500's earnings per share through the end of 2025 is $249.13, which would represent 18.2% year-over-year earnings growth over December 2024's level of $210.81. Given the typical pattern for how earnings projections develop over time, that figure represents the likely ceiling for potential earnings growth during 2025.

The Winter 2025 snapshot also includes the first projection of the index' expected earnings per share through the end of 2026. The first estimate of what those earnings will be is $289.64 per share.

Reference

Silverblatt, Howard. Standard & Poor. S&P 500 Earnings and Estimates. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 13 November 2024. Accessed 17 February 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A crystal ball with the word 'SP 500' written inside it". And 'Earnings' written above it, which we added.

The market-moving headlines in the week that was were pretty bad for Wall Street bulls. A higher than expected consumer inflation report on Wednesday, 12 February 2025 would all but seem to have diminished the chances of even one rate cut during 2025. At least, that's the news the market-moving headlines proclaimed.

But by the end of the trading week, investor expectations for the outlook for interest rate cuts in 2025 changed to go in a different direction. The CME Group's FedWatch Tool closed out the week anticipating a quarter point rate cut to be announced after the Fed meets on 7 May (2025-Q2), about 12 weeks earlier than it forecast a week earlier. While that remains the only rate change expected in 2025, the FedWatch tool suggests another quarter point rate cut is likely in January 2026, which could move up into 2025-Q4 if the momentum for the change in expectations continues.

That change coincided with investors shifting their attention once again to 2025-Q4, which coincides with a 1.5% increase in the level of the S&P 500 over the previous week. The index reached 6,114.63 on Friday, 14 February 2025, just several points shy of its all-time record high of 6,118.71 from 23 January 2025. The latest update of the alternative futures chart tracks the trajectory of the S&P 500 changing with along with the changing investment horizon for investors.

Here are the week's market moving headlines, in which the business news media missed the late breaking change in investor expectations for how the Federal Reserve will be setting the Federal Funds Rate in 2025 and beyond.

Monday, 10 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Trump raises tariffs on aluminum, steel imports in latest trade war salvo
• Where does the US get its steel and aluminum from?
• US copper price premium soars to record after Trump tariff moves
• US steel makers stocks rise, foreign peers fall on Trump tariff plans
• Looming tariffs turned into a mad dash north for one US manufacturer
• Oil gains nearly 2% despite trade war concerns
• Fed minions expected to sit on hands for months before next interest rate move:
• Fed to wait for months on next rate cut as tariffs risk inflation flare up: Reuters poll
• Bigger trouble developing in China:
• China to roll back clean power subsidies after boom
• China's consumer inflation at 5-month high, producer deflation persists
• Nasdaq, S&P, and Dow ended in the green as investors await inflation data
• Gold bulls lock in on glittering milestone; $3,000/oz in sight

Tuesday, 11 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil prices climb to 2-week high on supply worries, US tariffs check gains
• EIA raises US oil production forecast for 2025
• Fed minions say US economy is okie dokie and so are their monetary policies, so there's no need to rush to cut interest rates faster:
• Fed's Powell, quizzed about trade, Musk, and bank safety, says economy is fine
• Powell says there's no rush to ease more given strong economy
• Fed's Williams says monetary policy is in right place to achieve Fed goals
• Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
• Shares of Chinese steelmakers slide as Trump's fresh tariffs add uncertainty on exports
• China's car sales post biggest drop in almost a year in January
• Eurozone minions thinking about responding to US steel, aluminum tariffs:
• EU readies response as Trump hikes steel and aluminium tariffs
• Germany's trade surplus with US reaches new record
• German exports rise, industrial production falls
• Wall Street ends mixed on tariff drama, Fed comments; focus shifts to consumer inflation
• Wall Street ends mixed as Coca-Cola gains and Tesla drops

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US consumer inflation increases at fastest pace in nearly 1-1/2 years in January
• Inflation heats up more than expected in January CPI
• Hotter January inflation jolts markets, dimming rate cut hopes
• Few mourn the US penny as Trump moves to kill it
• Oil prices retreat after report of U.S. crude stockpile rise
• US fourth-quarter 2024 earnings growth set to be highest in three years
• Fed minions surprised by inflation, thinking about stalling more rate cuts:
• Fed's Powell sees a ways to go on shrinking Fed holdings
• US inflation jump puts Fed officials on notice as Powell testifies
• Fed's Bostic: Not comfortable cutting rates again until there is more clarity on inflation, other policies
• Hot Jan US CPI surprise argues for Fed staying in neutral
• BOJ minions say they're going to aim at 2% inflation for Japan's economy:
• BOJ to conduct monetary policy to achieve 2% inflation target, Governor Ueda says
• BOJ governor says higher food prices in Japan may alter inflation expectations
• ECB minions say they're excited to keep cutting Eurozone interest rates, have dark outlook for Eurozone economy:
• ECB can keep cutting rates even if Fed takes it slow, Vujcic says
• Reuters interview with ECB policymaker Vujcic
• ECB's Nagel wary of blurry 'neutral' rate target, U.S. tariff damage
• ECB's Villeroy reaffirms that Trump policies will likely be negative for economy
• S&P 500 ends down as hot US inflation data hints at fewer rate cuts
• Dividend attention grows as Wall Street digests higher inflation report

Thursday, 13 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• US producer inflation trends higher; labor market remains stable
• Trump outlines reciprocal tariff plan in latest bid to reshape trade on his terms
• Trump's memo outlining reciprocal tariffs plans
• US power companies increase data center demand spending as DeepSeek fears wane
• Higher inflation pushing back timing of Fed minions' expected 2025 rate cut:
• Fed seen likely policy hold until September; Traders add bets on July cut
• BOJ minions expected to keep delivering interest rate hikes because of inflation in Japan:
• Japan's wholesale inflation jumps, reinforcing BOJ rate-hike bets
• Most economists expect BOJ to hike rates in latter half of 2025, survey shows
• Nasdaq, S&P close up 1% as Trump tariff directive staves off new immediate levies
• Wall Street ends higher after Trump unveils tariff plan
• Can the S&P 500 pull off a three-peat 20%+ year? Wells Fargo says, 'In short, no'

Friday, 14 February 2025

• Signs and portents for the U.S. economy:
• Oil edges lower as potential Ukraine peace deal eases supply worries
• US retail sales post biggest drop in nearly two years amid winter freeze
• US manufacturing output falls in January on weak motor vehicle production
• Fed minions to address criticism of how they measure inflation by becoming less clear about it; also say they want to go slower on rate cuts:
• Fed may only nuance much-maligned ‘averaging’ strategy
• Fed's Logan calls for caution on rate cuts, even if inflation cools
• Bigger trouble, stimulus developing in China:
• Chinese exporters brace for 'rat race' in shift away from US
• China January bank lending hits record high on policy stimulus
• China's property loan contraction eases after government support
• Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq closed mixed as markets snapped a two-week losing streak

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool's projection of what real GDP growth will be in the 2025-Q1 dropped from last week's +2.9% to +2.3% on 14 February 2025.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull excited by good earnings news". This is pretty generic cartoon for which we dropped in a headline to capture what the market-moving headlines missed!

Mathematician John Conway loved playing games. He also loved using math to invent games, the best known of which is his Game of Life. Not the Hasbro board game, but rather a game based on simple mathematical rules that simulates the life and death of simple organisms.

Since its Valentine's Day, we thought we'd take inspiration from Conway's Game of Life by playing the game in a way that he might have done. We drew the outline of a heart on the Game of Life grid, much like the one on the left hand side of our featured image, and let the game play out to see what patterns might emerge from that starting design. We next drew another heart, the same size as the first one, but this time, filling in the inside of the heart.

But before we clicked the button to "start reproducing", we wondered how that simple difference might change the outcome of the game. Would the filled-in heart produce similar patterns to the simple outline of a heart? Would it "live" longer, or rather, would it go through more generations than the outlined heart before it might either stagnate (reach a pattern that doesn't significantly change) or die out (disappear altogether)?

We're not going to tell you the outcome, because it's easier to find out for yourself. Draw your own heart in the grid below by clicking the squares to make it, then click the "start reproducing" button to bring it to life. Then try again with a variation of your first heart design. If you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click through to our site to access a working version.

Click on table cells to toggle the cells as alive or dead.

We will say we were surprised by the symmetry in the patterns that emerged from our initial hearts. If you play the game again, you might try making your heart design a little different. Would the outcomes change if you made it bigger or smaller? What would happen if you only filled in half of the heart? Would that live longer or shorter than your previous longest-lasting initial heart design? What would change if you made that design asymmetric? Is it possible to tweak your heart design to make its descendant patterns stay alive forever?

We don't know the answers to any of those questions. Yet. The best way to find out is to play. Have fun and a happy Valentine's Day!

Previously on Political Calculations

• John Conway's Game of Life
• Omniperiodic Oscillators in the Game of Life
• A Game About Love and Graphing
• A Formula for Love
• The 37 Percent Solution
• The Maths of Love
• Math Formula Explains Geek's Dating Drought

The pace at which carbon dioxide is being emitted into the Earth's atmosphere is continuing to set new record highs.

China, by far and away, the world's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions, helped cinch the new record. A new analysis by Carbon Brief indicates "the tail end of China’s rebound from zero-Covid in January and February, combined with abnormally high growth in energy demand, stopped CO2 emissions falling in 2024 overall," despite China's surge in green energy production during the year.

Carbon Brief estimates China's overall CO₂ emissions "grew by an estimated 0.8% year-on-year". That growth may may sound small, but since China's emissions are so large, even a small percentage increase in its CO₂ output carries substantial impact. Carbon Brief also recently confirmed that China's emissions have caused more global warming than the 27 countries that make up the European Union. Not that that's any kind of surprise.

In the last two decades, much of the increases in the rate at which carbon dioxide accumulates in the Earth's atmosphere can be traced to Chinese government's various efforts to stimulate China's economy. The following chart highlights that contribution from January 2000 through January 2025:

China's ending of its repressive zero-Covid lockdown policy at the end of 2022 constitutes the beginning of its latest stimulus. Combined with China's government's ongoing efforts to continue its stimulus effort to offset recessionary forces acting within the Chinese economy, the result is the record high rate of CO₂ accumulation in the modern era, which now extends back over sixty-five years. The next chart illustrates that history:

What defines the modern era is the collection of data on the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's air. Those measurements began at the remote Mauna Loa Observatory in March 1958. Since our long-term chart tracks the year-over-year change in atmospheric CO₂ we could have set its initial month at March 1959, but we opted for January 1960 instead to align it with the beginning of a calendar year.

In any case, the following references provide links to the Mauna Loa Observatory's full dataset of its atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements.

References

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Online Data]. Updated 5 February 2025.

Image credit: Jungliangcheng Power Plant in Tianjin, China by Shubert Ciencia on Flickr. Creative Commons CC by-SA 2.0 Attribution 2.0 Generic Deed.