Bloomberg Businessweek:
Trump's uncertainty principle
26 January 2017
The cloud of uncertainty Trump has kicked up may be a big deal for the economy, or not. … For one thing, uncertainty isn’t necessarily bad. It simply means the distribution of possible outcomes—both upward and downward—has widened. Investors in the stock market seem to be betting on the upside of the distribution, judging from the 6.5 percent rise in the S&P 500 since the election. It’s also possible that what looks like economic uncertainty is really just scary reports in the news media. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, an originator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, joked (I think) in an e-mail, “It may simply be the news has no connection to reality—as you know from Trump, you guys are the biggest liars.”