Opinion The Big Crunch

There is frequent alarm when it comes to the state of America's bridges — especially as we now enter holiday driving season.

Here's the thing: Despite an occasional scary video, the overall statistics don't point to a massive epidemic.

And more interestingly, a lot of the data aren't saying what you think they do.

Men didn't get any better at investing in 2015, at least compared to their female counterparts.

The median male investor lost 1.8 percent over the last 12 months, including fees and dividends, while women squandered only 1.4 percent, according to a review of 360,000 investors using robo-advisor Sigfig to track their portfolios.

Of course, we're all pretty dismal — the S&P 500 was down 1.1 percent over that same period. So if everyone invested $100,000, the median man threw away $670 more than if he had simply invested in an index fund, and the median woman wasted $270.

In a sense, that's actually better than last year, when the market was up. The median investor last year far underperformed the booming market; the average man investing a hypothetical $100,000 made $8,250 less than the S&P 500 and the average woman made $7,650 less.

You can be forgiven if statements from the Fed at times sound like a lecture from your least-favorite college subject.

A Big Crunch analysis of statements released by the Federal Open Market Committee following its meetings shows that since Janet Yellen took over as chair, the statements have become shorter but not less complex. We used the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale, a measure of word choice and sentence length, to gauge the complexity of the statements.

The post-meeting statements' length grew steadily through Ben Bernanke's tenure as chair, from under 200 words in 2006 to nearly 900 in his last few months. The FOMC under Yellen continued with the marathon statements, but reduced them after recent meetings to under 600.

Howard Stern has decided to continue working at Sirius Satellite Radio. He signed a new five-year deal that some reports suggest would pay him $90 million per year. That's up from the $80 million he earned in the previous contract.

We wanted to know: How high would Stern rank if he were a corporate CEO? It turns out — very, very high.

In fact, only two CEOs last year made over $90 million — David Zaslav of Discovery Communications and Michael Fries of Liberty Global. Only two. But overall, Stern will earn more than nearly every single executive in the country.

The Federal Reserve may be raising interest rates Wednesday, but that's only the first step in what's bound to be a long return to normalcy.

The central bank will also have to decide what to do with the massive assets it picked up during the recession. Specifically, $4.5 trillion, mostly in Treasury notes as well as mortgage-backed securities that were bought up in an attempt to absorb some of the toxic assets.

The unconventional monetary policy of adding trillions to the balance sheet will require some unconventional methods of spending down. We thought we'd help Janet Yellen out and find out what $4.5 trillion could buy you.

Now that the Federal Reserve has pulled the trigger and hiked rates, all eyes will be on the future trajectory of additional increases.

Before the hike, there was an implied odds of 9.7 percent that the Fed would hike the target rate to 0.75 percent in January. It now stands at 9.5 percent.

Not until April, do traders see a probability of more than 50 percent for the next rate hike. On Tuesday, traders placed the odds of a hike to 0.75 percent or more at 45 percent.

Read MoreWall St. expects three more rate hikes in '16: Survey

U.S. short-term interest-rate futures contracts fell on Wednesday after the Fed raised its benchmark interest rate for the first time since the financial crisis and forecast further rate hikes would be gradual.

High-yield exchange-traded funds have become a hot story in the last few days, with many market participants wondering what the effect might mean on the broader market.

To get right to the point, here's the correlation between the overall stock market and high-yield bonds. To be specific, this is a chart of the rolling three-month correlation between the S&P 500 and the Barclays U.S. Corporate High Yield Bond Index.

The last time the Fed raised interest rates was in 2006. There was no Twitter. There were no iPhones. Rudy Giuliani led the Republican presidential polls.

The world has changed a lot since then, and almost 10 years later, we might see the streak come to an end. Many experts believe the Fed will hike rates on Wednesday. And if not then, we all know it has to come soon — in the next few meetings.

But there are so many financial professionals now who have no experience with this. To be specific, that number is 13.9 percent, according to data from eVestment.

Asset management firms voluntarily provide information on their key professionals to eVestment, allowing their data to include 35,000 active professionals from 4,500 firms who graduated from 900 universities and colleges globally.

They say money can't buy happiness. Of course, they're wrong.

A substantial body of economic research says otherwise: Statistically speaking, household income is strongly related to both emotional well-being and a person's evaluation of their own quality of life.

Will getting a raise this season make you less nervous, stressed or sad? It depends on how much you're already making, according to a recent study from an economist at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western University.

Each dollar makes a big difference in reducing negative emotions for people in the 20th income percentile, but those returns fall off by the 80th income percentile and disappear at around $200,000, according to the study.

In the U.S., the price of whale meat could be time in prison. But having whale for dinner is perfectly legal in Japan, where whalers last week set out to hunt and kill the protected marine mammals despite international condemnation.

Whale meat is, of course, hard to come by these days. So how much is it worth in Japan? Not as much as it used to be.

Since the 1986 international ban on commercial whaling, Japan whalers have taken advantage of an exception for scientific research. They catch whales as part of what they call a research program and then sell the meat "byproducts" to consumers. How much that meat sells for depends on the number of whales caught, customer demand and the volume of meat stockpiles sitting in freezers around the country.

In 1985, there were more than 10,000 metric tons of wholesale whale meat for sale at the 10 major city markets in Japan at an average price of about $4 per kilogram, according to government data compiled by The Big Crunch. That was about the retail price of ground beef in the U.S. at that time.

By the early 1990s, fewer than 1,000 metric tons were for sale at those markets, costing more nearly $40 per kilo — more than the retail price of choice filet mignon today.