{"id":14380,"date":"2018-01-29T10:37:30","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T15:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=14380"},"modified":"2020-04-27T16:39:19","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T20:39:19","slug":"lobsternomics-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/lobsternomics-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Lobsternomics"},"content":{"rendered":"

By David Svenson<\/em><\/p>\n

May 2012 | view story as a .pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Roaring Twenties, when Wharton\u00a0Business School\u2019s George Taylor proposed\u00a0his \u201cHemline Effect\u201d\u2013that as\u00a0hemlines rise, so does the economy\u2014he\u00a0could also have taken a trip to the docks for\u00a0similar insight. Because sales figures for\u00a0fresh lobsters share an uncanny ability to\u00a0predict market changes in the Dow Jones\u00a0Industrial Average.<\/p>\n

Why wouldn\u2019t lobsters perform well in\u00a0this murky business? As our graph illustrates,\u00a0our CPAs of the sea (in red and green)\u00a0called the bust of the dot-com bubble ahead\u00a0of the stock market. Specifically, lobster\u00a0prices steeply declined before the Dow Jones\u00a0Industrial Average settled to 9,796 in March\u00a0of 2000 from 11,722 as the year opened.<\/p>\n

And who could detect subprime slime\u00a0better than Homarus americanus? In 2007,\u00a0while the Dow enjoyed a relative calm\u00a0between 13,000 and 14,000 from mid-2007 to\u00a0the end of 2007, the price of lobsters began\u00a0its deep dive from just under $4.50 a pound\u00a0to where it settled in mid-2009, at just under\u00a0$3. This journey\u2013fine for our pockets and\u00a0celebratory dinners\u2013began before the market\u00a0dropped. After the silt settled, the Dow\u00a0reached its trench of 6,547 (in March 2009,\u00a0down from 13,058 in May 2008 and 9,015 in\u00a0January 2009). Since then, the two concurrently\u00a0started a climb.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese correlations, I believe, are just a\u00a0coincidence,\u201d University of Maine economics\u00a0professor Hsiang-Tai Cheng says. \u201cThe\u00a0only thing I can think of is consumer confidence\u00a0and sentiment before the economy\u00a0goes south.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other claw, \u201cIt\u2019s very interesting,\u00a0because others have found that a recession follows\u00a0rising oil and food prices,\u201d Cheng says.\u00a0Perhaps, after all, there\u2019s a little sage in\u00a0the water.<\/p>\n

\"201204MAY<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fresh lobster sales figures share an uncanny ability to predict market changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[960,904],"class_list":["post-14380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classic-maine-stories","tag-dow-jones","tag-lobster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14380"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18197,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14380\/revisions\/18197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}