I took all that data, fed it into a statistical model, turned the crank and out pops a prediction.

This year, the model is predicting pretty much what a lot of other people are predicting.

Each of the categories has become more predictable over time, particularly Best Actress, which was very hard to predict up until the early 1970s.

The Fed has been on 'autopilot' with its monetary tightening so that even bouts of weaker data, such as we saw after hurricane Katrina, failed to divert the Fed off course. But now, following the minutes of the December meeting, it is clear that policy will become more data dependent.

But clearly any view on the Fed now is dependent on how the data comes through and hence we can expect the dollar to be a bit more volatile on data releases, starting with Friday's payrolls.

As I thought
about that, I had
to wonder: What will we
know better about tomorrow?
Who cares? Hindsight is useless.