Graph of the Day

Earlier this week I used Pandas to grab some historical data on the S&P 500 from Yahoo!Finance and generate a simple time series plot.  Today, I am going to re-examine this data set in order to show the importance of scaling and adjusting for inflation when plotting economic data.

I again use the functions from the pandas.io.data to grab the data. Specifically, I use get_data_yahoo('^GSPC') to get the S&P 500 time series, and get_data_fred('CPIAUCSL')to grab the consumer price index (CPI). Here is a naive plot of historical S&P 500 returns from 1950 through 2012 (as usual, includes grey NBER recession bands).

Note that, because the CPI data are monthly frequency, I resample the daily S&P 500 data by taking monthly averages. This plot might make you conclude that there was a massive structural break/regime change around the year 2000 in whatever underlying process is generating the S&P 500.  However, as the level of the S&P 500 increases, the linear scale on the vertical axis makes changes from month to month seem more dramatic. To control for this, I simply make the vertical scale logarithmic (now equal distances on the vertical axis represent equal percentage changes in the S&P 500).

Now the "obvious" structural break in the year 2000 no longer seems so obvious. Indeed there was a period of roughly 10-15 years during the late 1960's through 1970's during which the S&P 500 basically moved sideways in a similar manner to what we have experienced during the last 10+ years. 

This brings us to another, more significant, problem with these graphs: neither or them adjusts for inflation! When plotting long economic time series it is always a good idea to adjust for inflation.  The 1970's was a period of fairly high inflation in the U.S., thus the fact that the nominal value of the S&P 500 didn't change all that much over this period tells us that, in real terms, the value of the S&P 500 fell considerably.  

Using the CPI data from FRED, it is straight-forward to convert the nominal value of the S&P 500 index to a real value for some base month/year.  Below is a plot of the real S&P 500 (in Nov. 2012 Dollars), with a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. As expected, the real S&P 500 declined significantly during the 1970's.

Code is available on GitHub. Enjoy!