Clive Granger Quotes

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.

People are always saying that prices are too high. When they turn out to be right, we anoint them. When they turn out to be wrong, we ignore them. They are typically right and wrong about half the time.

If I would need to make a prediction I still believe Kaplan's scenario is very plausible.

Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex.

Why did God create economists? To make weather forecasters look good.

I think bubbles are things people see with 20/20 hindsight. If you look at any particular period where prices go up and then they go down, you will always find people who predicted that they would go down. Those are the people you pay attention to.

We're not very good at forecasting, and we don't know how to measure the impact of economic policy.

I was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I had some of the most brilliant mathematical statistical minds in the country, who would put together the modern technology, if you like, of understanding the economy and tracking it and trying to influence it.

The data are what matter in economics, and the more ruthlessness that an economist can summon to make sense of the data, the more useful his findings will be.

When it comes to assessing the chances of some complicated combination of events, gut feelings are pretty much useless.

I come from a financial news background, originally, so that is a big area of focus for me.

If I've learned anything as an economic analyst, it is that the stock market and economic winds can shift by the hour.

If you get rid of emotion for a minute and think about the threat of terrorism statistically, it's not even there. The probability that you will slip on a wet floor in your bathroom and die is a thousand times higher than the probability of you dying as a result of terrorism.

Predicting and responding to the global economy will be the biggest challenge.

Entire populations of market strategists, fund managers, and economists are employed to try and intuit for clients which securities to bet on for the best possible return each year - or quarter.

Economists often get the market wrong.

I've said many times that I'm not one of those people who check statistics, follows history, and says, 'If I do this, what will happen.'

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.

Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.

There is very little difference between speculation and investment. The only difference is basically that investments are successful speculations because if you successfully anticipate the future you make a speculative profit.

I think the works of W.D. Gann and Robert Prechter have inspired me more than anyone else. It was from their writings that I discovered cycles, patterns, and psychology dominate the market, and that the news breaks with the cycles, not the other way around.

Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy or elections.

If you knew what was going to happen in the economy, you still wouldn't necessarily know what was going to happen in the stock market.

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?