I have been enjoying a series of podcasts by Plant Money’s team in which they bought toxic asset which has more than 2,000 mortgages. They paid $1,000 for a piece that used to be worth around $75,000.
Their interactive graphic shows how this asset was created with mortgages across the country, how many payments they have received from it, and how it has been losing value.
In the beginning Dec 2006, “Toxie” was a little sick
The poster is one of several which explain the history, value, and composition of the FTSE 100. It is rare that I see basic financial data visualized with this much attention to the aesthetics of the design.
The book pages layer to create the center color circles which represent the sectors weightings which I though was clever.
Each circle represents a billionaire but when appropriate the company that they associated with is labeled. And of course United States leads the way with number of billionaires. I liked seeing the data presented on a map; having a geographic distribution shows off the number of non-US billionaires. It would have been nice to see their net worth included in the infographic.
In June, I posted a survey on my blog and received 145 responses. (Thanks to every one who took the time to fill it out!) In the 4.5 years I have been running this blog, I have been looking at my site stats and the email/comments I received but I thought it was time I try a survey to learn more about my visitors are looking for.
The results are displayed in the graphic below. I tried to group the opened ended responses into categories so I could summarized them.
A majority of the surveys were filled out by people who subscribe to this site (in fact that was the purpose of their visit).
18-34s year olds; with some graduate school; currently a student or working as a teacher (or both) but does not have a blog but has visited my site 2-4 times in the last month.
35% of the people have be looking at economic sites 10 or more times over the last month while 60% came to my site looking for infographics visualization (which is not surprising)
One thing that did surprise me was the number of people identifying as engineers/software engineers.
One change I will be making based on this survey, creating some original graphics focusing on financial markets which should make 70% of you happy. Also I am trying to optimize my process so I can make more graphics in less time (which I hope to include more non-US data). In addition, I have been thinking I should adding more explanations on the graphs and the process to make them, so that feedback confirms my suspicions. Look for these changes and more over the next few months.
I wanted to try out the new Tableau Public so I took the Average Tax Rates I calculated for my Comparing Rates by Income series and created this little graph. A couple disclaimers: I am assuming standard deduction and exemptions for the children and/or spouse in each example. Also I am combining all the taxes applied to your salary including: Income, Social Security, Medicare, and Payroll (paid by your employer).
Since this is a live, interactive chart you can hide/show each line using the check boxes at the bottom of the graph.
Visualizing Economics was created by Catherine Mulbrandon. Here you can view graphs and charts about the United States and world economies. I am available for freelance projects.
Visualizing Economics was created by 
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catherine[at]mrdiconsulting.com
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