John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
He is absolutely right, but unfortunately made this statement several years after he served as the Fed Chairman. He never made a statement like this when he and his colleagues made their policies based on their economic forecasting. Central bankers have generally felt that one of their jobs was to give the people confidence in the nation’s banking system and economy and the admission that much policy making was based on “coin toss” forecasting.
John Kenneth Galbraith OC, also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official and intellectual. A leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism, his books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.
