Carney - the man who keeps crying wolf

andrewf75

AFF8879 wrote: »

How many times have the treasury forecast doom, recession, stagnation, etc?

Then compare that to how many times they have forecast huge growth, booms, and so forth...?

Exactly.

I have no idea, they don't tend to predict either as these things are always done based on everything ticking along nicely as before.

Still can't see how the margin of error can only be in one direction.

Thrugelmir

silverwhistle wrote: »

Work harder? How about working smarter?

Technology can only do so much. Nanny state provides a comfort blanket that discourages people in certain circumstances to better themselves.

chucknorris

silverwhistle wrote: »

Work harder? How about working smarter?



But that would require more investment in machinery, training and infrastructure. The government prefer austerity to investment. Business investment is going down and our productivity is still below the OECD average..

How about working both harder and smarter? When I retired from my main occupation (chartered quantity surveyor) it was because both my part time businesses profits had each exceeded my salary. It seemed foolish to carry on working when I was earning well over double my salary from far less hours.

Thrugelmir

AFF8879 wrote: »

How many times have the treasury forecast doom, recession, stagnation, etc?

Then compare that to how many times they have forecast huge growth, booms, and so forth...?

Exactly.

Underlying situation remains little changed. Remember the guys that foresaw the credit crunch in the US. Just needed to hang in there. As one day the event had to happen. Simply a matter of when. The UK continues to walk a tight rope.

buglawton

More like in the gulley. The only way is up.

Lornapink

Why economic forecasting truly is dismal;

A good case in point would be the USA non-farm payrolls, a very important economic indicator that would move markets. Every month Bloomberg would publish 100+ economists forecasts for last month’s figures. Every month 100+ economists would get it wrong.

Why? Too many variables. But the same people are happy to publish their forecasts for how the economy will be in 15 years time. Now here are truly so many variables that it is literally guesswork.

Why do so many of these forecasts, despite the fact that they are guesses, tend to broadly agree?

What they are saying is: “assuming everything else stays the same then we can isolate a couple of variables and tweak this volume knob to arrive at our prediction.”

Assume everything else stays the same? Take a massively simplistic model of the world and tweak a volume knob? Yup.
Treasury, Bank of England, etc have said: assuming everything else in the world remains the same if trade in goods and maybe services becomes a bit more sticky then trade and growth will slow.

The modelling ignores the upside effects of an independent nimble UK being able to mitigate downside effects through policy change.

The modelling ignores the fact that in additional to our EU trade we will enjoy the fruits of full global autonomy as the worlds no.1 soft power.


So when you see phrases like “all economic forecasts agree” then what you’re really seeing is: “ all proponents of a dodgy art using the same simplistic models are covering their as£es.”

sevenhills

Lornapink wrote: »

What they are saying is: “assuming everything else stays the same then we can isolate a couple of variables and tweak this volume knob to arrive at our prediction.”

If we take the figure of 200,000 net immigration, how do you think it would change the growth forecasts if the 200,000 went from a increase to a decrease.
That is the type of info which forecasters will be dealing with.