It was the early 1980’s, just after the debut of MTV and right before Apple launched the Macintosh personal computer. Future economics professor Campbell Harvey was considering what to study for his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Chicago. The world had just emerged from a traumatic recession, so he decided to see if there might be a way to anticipate the next slowdown. Intrigued by an academic paper written two decades earlier, he looked at whether the bond market held any helpful information, and panning through rivers of data, he found gold.

When the Michelin brothers Andre and Edouard began their travel guide in 1900 as a marketing tool for their tire company, there were fewer than 3,000 cars in France. The roads were a primitive, local network, often unmarked, and there were no gas stations – drivers had to carry a metal container into a pharmacy to purchase fuel.

After yesterday’s stock market drop, the usual alarming news articles appeared, but more interesting were the reader comments that tracked each publication’s editorial focus:

“Stocks Plunge, as Fresh Tensions With China Batter Tech Shares,” The New York Times:

• Well now. The stock market is starting to display the same kind of unpredictable behavior exhibited by Trump since before he was elected, not quite knowing how to respond to the conflicting stimuli heaped upon the economy in the many months afterward. Gee...didn't see that coming.