Last week the Westerwald showed itself from its best side, with blue sky and daytime temperatures around 24 Celsius. April weather in Germany is said to be unpredictable and highly volatile. But we have been really lucky. There was a bit of administration to do, and there after now we are working in Bonn on predictive modeling for the construction industry. It is a challenging task, specially as in current times, government interference into markets is intense. But it is hugely interesting to see, how markets would develop without this modification and estimate the effect of government incentives. The most recent and interesting case is the is the pre-election UK. Democracy is becoming a funny animal in Europe and you don’t have to go to Greece to see that. In the course of this project, I am also looking at real estate market reports of the major companies. Obviously, they have a lot of market transparency and enormous information on the construction pipeline. But transparency itself, is not insight. The explanatory value they provide, is often just anecdotal. The academic world, also does not produce much of practical value. Unfortunately, this does not come as a surprise to me any more. So our work here is to clean up the glass ball and have a clearer glimpse into the future than all the others. And we are quite good in that.

Evening walk at the Rhine River in Bonn.