While housing starts increased by 15% in September, many observers doubted the actualvolume of sales in housing, pointing to the 1.7% sales decline that month.
Thorp may have been the first to discover that Madoff could not have been hedging his customers accounts because the actual reported volume of trading in stock options was a small fraction of the trades that he alone was claiming.
But Arends does delve into an important issue: no growth in revenue as the volume of actual trash disposed of has declined in the U.S. Manufacturers are using less packaging, consumers are re-using grocery bags, and little-by-little that overwhelming urge to reduce, re-use, recycle has gone from social movement to second nature for a lot of people.
Media executives say they don't yet have the data to directly measure the correlation between volume of social media mentions and actual viewership ratings.
The actual demarcation point will come when vendors receive firm orders for volume production which normally occur 12-16 weeks before a phone appears on the shelf.