from Amazon
Monday, April 28, 2008
Gregg Easterbrook
A new hero of mine? Gregg looks at the yappers… all of them. Everytime a yapper predicted something, he wrote it down… and then looked to see what happened. Imagine: accountability! If you yap a forecast, it is incumbent on you to look at the results. If you don’t, you’re a yapper. If you do, you are a straight arrow, a straight shooter. So, Gregg looks at literally over a hundred forecasts to see how they did. Here’s one:
Specific Wall Street Journal predictions from early January 2007, based on the consensus of a panel of 60 highly paid Wall Street economists: The year would end with oil at $60 a barrel, with the federal funds rate at 4.75, with inflation at 2 percent, with the euro at $1.30, with “gradual decline” in the value of the dollar, with a one-in-four chance of recession and with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 13,234. The year ended with oil at $96, the federal funds rate at 4.25, inflation at 3.7 percent, the euro at $1.46, the dollar having plummeted 12 percent and with the Dow Jones index at 13,264. If you make enough predictions, one will be right!
As the first of January came, I resolved to have the courage of my convictions and in 2008 once again do the reverse of whatever The Wall Street Journal predicted. This year, the paper did not run any year-beginning predictions.
If these guys can’t get it right, what’s the chance that Homer Simpson-like forecaster will have any better luck?
The biggest threat to America is not bears, but yappers.