Wall Street follows the money. Financial pundits follow the crowd.
Right now Instagram is the hottest social media platform. Because of its emphasis on pictures the platform is usually more associated with food and fashion than finance.
So its notable that Mohamed El-Erian, one of the big names in finance, just started posting. El-Erian, the chief economic adviser for Allianz and a commentator for Bloomberg and the Financial Times, started using the service yesterday.
He said he plans to post charts illustrating trends in markets and the economy, but started out with a bit of humor. He posted a picture of his dog, explaining that indeed it is possible to “teach an old dog new tricks.”
This being social media, one of the first questions he got was about the name of the dog. (It’s Bosa, for the curious.)
Within a day El-Erian had posted ten times, mostly charts on topics ranging from U.S. interest rates to Chinese manufacturing to Venezuelan inflation.
The global scope is vintage El-Erian. I saw first hand his ability to string together disparate data into a narrative during a 2006 meeting in Boston when he was running Harvard’s endowment.
El-Erian’s charts are a pretty effective way to communicate some big ideas. Within a day he had accumulated more than 1,800 followers and elicited lots of comments.
It’s a small number compared with the 197,000 people who follow him on Twitter, but it’s a fast start and an indication you can expect other Wall Street pundits to follow.
Ted Merz 