A long-standing theme of this blog has been the notion that forecasting the stock market and economy is fraught with folly. The Econoblog over at the Wall Street Journal has an interesting discussion with James Hamilton and Kash Mansori on the “perils of forecasting.”

Hamilton has the best line of the piece:

So here’s my zen: Don’t ask for too much of your forecast or your policy, and it won’t disappoint you.

The same James Hamilton writing at Econbrowser takes on the topic of soaring commodity prices. It has been proposed that commodity prices are positively correlated with monetary policy. That is when monetary policy is easy, commodity prices are higher. Presumably with the Fed increasing interest rates, commodity prices should ease. However Hamilton asks whether something has changed in the commodity market with the introduction of resource-hungry players like China and India.