Republican campaign consultant Mike Murphy and Democratic pollster Mark Mehlman wrote an op-ed piece in yesterday's Los Angeles times entitled The Heisenberg Primaries, in which they argue that, despite the fact that "an awful gaffe at this stage could be deadly, and there's no question that early money is crucial," most of the early campaigning will be meaningless and early polls are worse than useless.

So what does the nuclear physicist have to do with current political polling? Read on.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw has spotted a market inefficiency in the political betting market Intrade. Mankiw theorizes that Hillary backers are pumping money into the betting markets to make her victory appear more likely than it really is:

For the 2008 elections, tradesports has approximately a 40% chance of Hillary being President and a 50% chance of her being the democratic nominee.... The 80% (40/50) that Hillary has looks awfully suspect and I assume someone is manipulating the 40% number to make Hillary look better.

This creates an opportunity for arbitrage--i.e., a no-lose bet.

Forget about yesterday's naive headlines, like  New homes sales rise 16.2 pct in April, and the claims that April new home sales were an indicator of a housing market recovery. Existing home sales accounted for 86 percent of all April home sales, and they fell to a four year low of 5.99 million.

Money Magazine reports:

The pace of existing home sales fell to a nearly four-year low, and a glut of homes on the market continued to cut into home values, according to a trade group report.

The National Association of Realtors said in its latest reading that the problems in the subprime mortgage market are now cutting into sales.

More below the fold....

Does a candidate's wealth influence your vote or do you care more about how he/she made it and invests it? Wealth is often used as a proxy for whether a politician "cares about people like you"--in other words, whether he/she has empathy for the day-to-day problems middle-class and working class Americans. This rule-of-thumb seems to work pretty well in recent cases (Bill Clinton vs. George Bush), but there are exceptions to the rule if you go back in history, notably JFK and FDR.

Today, the Washington Post and New York Times published stories on the candidates' personal financial disclosure forms, and they are revealing for the candidates who have filed.

Faye Bowers reports in today's Christian Science Monitor that fewer immigrants are attempting to cross into the United States from Mexico this year. Unfortunately, this does not mean that U.S. border enforcement has suddenly become more competent. It means that jobs for immigrants are drying up, an early warning sign of recession:

A slowing US economy, resulting in fewer jobs, is discouraging immigrants from slipping into the United States, according to economists at Arizona State University in Tempe. In fact, falling border apprehensions may be an early predictor of where the economy is headed.

If that's true, then Americans should prepare for rough economic times ahead, says Dawn McLaren, a research economist at Arizona State's business school.