One of the things that most people don't realize is how easy is to trick people with numbers and what you think you are seeing with numbers are not actually what you think you see. Some times this is deliberate most of the time not. Let me give you a real world example 1/n

I'm sure by now everyone has seen this graph and marveled at it and made comments of all sorts. You want to know the dirty secret which even the journalists who made this graph probably don't know, because of the type of numbers they are using..... 2/n

A random number generator will produce effectively the same outcome. Additionally, the only reason there is any separation is basically due to the size of the country and nothing more. Let me give you a hyper simplistic example. I created a simple graph with 3 countries 3/n

Each country started out with 100 just like the FT. In the graph I am presenting I use 3 different conditions. Country A was the previous days number plus a random number between 1 and 1,000. Country B was the same except a random number between 1 and 500. Country C was 4/n

the same between 1 and 250. I set the three ranges so we could see some separation. If I make the ranges overlapping really almost at all, the lines become nearly indistinguishable. So what does the graph look like? 5/n

That looks a LOT like the FT chart doesn't it with random numbers generated within a strict range. There is one other thing to notice. Anybody notice the other key similarity about the graph? The lines flatten just like the FT. Why is that? The lines flatten for the 6/n

Simple reason that as numbers increase in absolute terms (1->100->1,000->10,000) the natural log transformation in the graph increases at an increasingly slower rate. For instance, 10->100 in natural log is 2.3->4.6 but 1,000->10,000 is 6.9->9.2 so the line flattens 7/n

Now I must emphasize, I do not think the FT is doing anything deliberate. I'm sure they mean well. The problem is that it doesn't really show what people think it shows and it is not really measuring what you think it is measuring for reasons most do not understand. Done