Introduction
The article chosen was “Troubles at Silicon Valley Bank Rock the Global Market,” published in The New York Times on March 10, 2023. In this newspaper article, Sorkin et al. (2023) discuss Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) problems that have affected the global financial sector. Specifically, SVB used high-risk investments that did not pay off, leading to the bank’s forced bankruptcy, which affected thousands of technology customers.
Analysis of Statistics in the Article
The authors continue that SVB’s collapse led to unrest among global consumers, which in turn affected other banks, including international banks. One indicator of these markets is the KBW Bank Index, a benchmark stock index of the banking sector. The figure below shows a visual representation of such a fall, which the author says “fell nearly 8 percent on Thursday” (Sorkin et al., 2023, para. 8).
The decline seems obvious from the figure: it is shown as a continuous line that fell nearly eight units between March 8 and March 9. The authors are careful to use the word “nearly” in reference to percentages since the exact values before and after such a drop may give a slightly different result; in other words, this is how they secure their conclusions regarding the index’s decline.
However, according to the module tutorials, it is always necessary to label the levels of measurement in order to understand exactly what the decline is measured in, so as not to confuse the reader. The index is measured in points, so the vertical scale shows the index points: on March 8, it was 104 points, and on March 9, it dropped to 96, so the drop was 8 points. In terms of percentage drop, it was 7.69 percent, which is only rounded up to 8 percent. Leonavičius (2021) points out that even minor errors and uncertainties associated with rounding can cause serious errors, especially if the calculations require increased accuracy. Although the authors used the word “nearly” in more precise calculations, such rounding can confuse the reader.
Conclusion
Overall, it seems that the authors of the article I read did not make any severe statistical errors. They did not cite exact numbers to describe the decline, and they used the word “nearly” correctly, especially since the calculated decline percentage, rounded off, is indeed eight. Nevertheless, for a more accurate representation of the information, they could have written “7.7%” instead of “8%”, which would have only strengthened the statistical foundation of the journalistic material.
References
Leonavičius, S. (2021). Case analysis and modernization of progressive die. Web.
Sorkin, A. R., Mattu, R., Warner, B., Kessler, S., de la Merced, M. J., Hirsch, L., & Livni, E. (2023). Troubles at Silicon Valley Bank rock the global market. The New York Times. Web.