As you know I have a thing for great analytics. I ran across this post in the Daily Stag Hunt that showed an analysis that I wish I had thought of. The results are pretty interesting. They went through all the transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings from 2001 up through the end of 2006 (that’s all that’s available at this point in time) and counted up the number of times the committee laughed during the meetings and plotted the frequency of laughter. When they compared this frequency to home prices they discovered an uncanny correlation between laughter at the meetings and home prices. In other words, the more bubbly the housing market got the more the Federal Reserve was laughing in their meetings. It basically implies that they fell victim to a bit of exuberance of their own.
You should definitely check out the blog post for yourself but here are a couple of the key charts they showed:
