Expert Sitings: Barry Ritholtz
Barry Ritholtz is CEO and director of equity research at Fusion IQ, an online quantitative research firm. He blogs at ritholtz.com, a top-ranked financial Web site, and is a frequent television commentator.
Run by a retired senior executive with deep expertise in housing finance (in a good way), this blog is a great source for the latest news and overlooked insights on the financial crisis and the folks in charge who keep screwing everything up.
There’s a simple mathematical beauty in a well-constructed chart. The St. Louis Fed’s monthly Monetary Trends newsletter may not be flashy, but it’s clean, clear, and always chock full of interesting data. The bank’s research division produces a prodigious volume of expert analysis, too.
For some real numbers porn, surf around on this graphics-rich site. Whether it’s a computer simulation of worldwide air-traffic patterns or a map showing global "friend" activity on Facebook, the guys at Flowing Data are brilliant at making complex visualizations look deceptively simple.
When I want to get the latest unemployment figures, survey trends in the three-month London interbank offered rate, or delve into the consumer price index, Economagic offers a much clearer starting point than the byzantine Web sites of the U.S. government or foreign central banks.
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