Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts

Monday, March 2, 2009

How bad is the economy going to get?

Interesting article on the Freakonomics blog:
For example, using last Friday’s options prices, we can calculate that it would cost 10 cents to buy a portfolio of options that pays $1 if the S&P 500 falls below 250 on December 18, 2010. If markets were risk-neutral (I’ll come back to this), we could infer that the market thought there was a 10 percent probability that the value of U.S. stocks could fall to one-third their current value by the end of next year. Such a drop would leave the index down to one-sixth of its peak level in late 2007. By way of comparison, in the Great Depression the value of stocks fell to between one-sixth and one-seventh of their earlier values.
Well, at least it's only a 10% chance...