From Friday, June 5, 2009

	Tess Vigeland: I guess maybe they're really looking at these short-term indications, you know, unemployment did not drop as much as previous months and the housing market seems to be picking up, but...

	Felix Salmon: Yeah, this is one of my favorite pieces of optimism, where people look at the second derivative of the unemployment numbers. They don't look at how enormously high it is. They don't say, "It's 9.4 percent! That's horrible!" Instead they look at the difference between the number of people who lost their jobs in May and the number of people who lost their jobs in April. And they say "Oooooh, things are turning around." This is just never convincing to me.



From Friday, January 31, 2014

	This is Felix Salmon responding to Kai Ryssdal’s pessimism about a slow in the increase of the GDP:

	"I'm going to be optimistic on the first derivative, and you can be pessimistic on the second derivative, and I'm going to be the person going up, and you're going to be going up as well, just not realizing it."