An updated version of this chart for June 2020 was shared with subscribers of TLR Wire, the esteemed economics newsletter managed by Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood.
The financial sector produces a lot of commentary on the things affecting markets. A lot of this year’s commentary has been focused on Covid-19, but before that there was a lot of literature being produced on the US-China trade war and Brexit.
Here I chart, for every month, the most talked about issue in financial literature. I did this by pulling out hundreds of daily FX commentary pieces from BNZ (who do a solid job on recapping the previous day’s events) and analyzing the most used words (excluding the generic ones like “the” and “markets” and “economy”).
Naturally the total number of references to Covid-19 for a given month is not just the number of times “Covid-19” is printed, but also “coronavirus” and “virus”. A similar methodology is adopted for the US-China trade war.
While Covid-19 remained in the top 5 of topics for May, we can see the focus is starting to balance out, with the the Fed getting the most number of references as we approach the June meeting (which will have the Fed’s quarterly economic projections (which they skipped in March). There was also a pick-up in references to “Trump” and “trade” this month, suggesting that we aren’t quite done with the US-China theme.
Data mining, text-analysis and chart all done on Python.
CoolStatsBlog 
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