Super Bowl Mortgages

How Jobless Rates Forecast the Super Bowl

At last the Federal Reserve is using its economic expertise to do something worthwhile: forecast the Super Bowl.

Michael Munley, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has calculated that the city with the lower unemployment rate has won the Super Bowl 16 of the past 22 times. That favors New England this year.

Mr. Munley recalls a theory I once propounded based on the movement of the Dow Jones industrial average from the end of November through the Super Bowl. In 1996, I said it had forecast 18 of the past 21 Super Bowl winners. Alas, since then it gotten five forecasts right, and six wrong, and I have abandoned that theory. (But as Mr. Manley notes, that theory also forecasts an New England win.)

Mr. Munley points out that this is only the third Super Bowl to feature two teams from the same Federal Reserve district, but does not note that in both of the previous cases — San Francisco over San Diego in 1995 and the New York Giants over Buffalo in 1991 — the team from the National Football Conference won. That would seem to forecast a New York Giants victory.