Cue lots of quotes from City Economists about how this was entirely predicatable and easily explained - even though they neither predicted it, nor apparently were away of the reasons why this would happen at 09.29 this morning. Here's a typical example I've lifted from the Telegraph.
I must get round to writing a longer post at some point about the madness by which the bankers and economists are clearly not in control of events - yet are being put in charge of countries (Italy, Greece) and the Euro Zone as a whole (ECB) - as they are 'the best people to sort this out.
But in the meantime, I'm just going to bang my head on the desk for a while...
"They predicted 0.5%, it actually grew at 0.6%. So they were out by 20%"
ReplyDeleteSo, by the same reckoning, if they predicted 0.01% growth and we had growth of 0.11% they would have been out by 1000%
Isn't the issue more that a 0.1% error isn't really a huge deal, especially in a woolly science like economics?
Well, of course I take your point. but I get irritated by the continuous stream of information telling me what 'will' happen, watching the markets yo yo on the basis of these 'facts' - which are then hopelessly wrong.
ReplyDeleteFor what its worth, an error of 0.1% in a quarter is a little over £5billion; in a year it's £22 billion. That's a lot of schools, hospitals, nurses...