Juan Convers

Last sunday it was really warm here in Berlin. I was able to get on my bike and do a nice ride to the north part of the city. Nevertheless I remembered some data I read back in January about how the world is really warming up:

This winter has been really mild in Berlin.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics published the unemployment figures for the month of January and the rate is low: 4.9%. It's one of the lowest unemployment rate since the whole financial crisis of 2008. The rate is half of what it was in the peak of October 2009:

Even if those are very good news for the American people, on the other hand the increase on the wages is still sluggish. In the last quarter of 2015 the rate was 1.9%. It was around 3% before the crisis hit hard.

If I were American I would ask those questions to the presidential candidates.

The Economist published a couple of days ago in their daily chart section an interesting graph with the most violent cities in the world (in terms of homicide rate). They have an analysis on how the Venezuelan economy is in turmoil and how according to a Mexican report "Venezuela's capital Caracas had the highest murder rate in the world last year"

Wikipedia also offers a page compiling a List of cities by murder rate. Unfortunately most of the Top 50 cities from this list are located in South America (and many of those in Brazil!). Take a look at the following chart and map:

Last night I was reading in Business Insider the headline about how Bernie Sanders just melted away a 30-point Hillary Clinton lead in a new poll, related to the US presidential elections. Wikipedia has a useful article where they track the different polls for both parties. The results of those polls are reported here on that page: Democratic Primaries.

It's true that the last poll conducted by the Quinnipiac University shows a preference of: Clinton: 44% and Sanders 42%, and with a 4.5% margin of error, they are virtually tied. There is even a newer one performed by "Reuter/Ipsos" showing a similar trend: Clinton: 48% and Sanders 45% (with a 5% margin of error).

It's fascinating to see how this candidate without any of the infamous [superpacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#Super_PACs) behind him has been able to attrack so much attention and how it has become a real contender in the US 2016 presidential elections.

This morning I was reading on the news how the "Average 30-year mortgage rate falls for a 5th straight week" (3.72%)>. I was checking if the data was available to double check this headline. Fortunately the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis offers this data set on their website. It's called MORTGAGE30US and the data goes back all the way to 1971.

Looking at the data it's true that the 30-year mortgage rate has been falling during the last couple of weeks. Nevertheless it's not the lowest point in the graph. Actually last year, around the same time it was even lower (3.59%):

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