The predictive power of economists.... I'm not going to make too much of this, but all week I've been reading reports of the new jobless recovery, and today we find that the unemployment rate has dropped. It is only one point on the bigger trendline, but talk about amusing timing (they thought it would rise to 5.9%, but it dropped to 5.6%). A funny quote:

"This [report] makes no sense, but it gets the Fed off the hook; [there will be] no intermeeting ease," Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics Ltd., said in a note.

If the facts don't fit the theory, maybe something is wrong with the theory....