Economic Predictions Quotes

I never try to predict the market.

If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.

If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you've wasted 10 minutes

An economist is someone who knows all the answers to last years' questions.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

Economics was the only profession where a person could be considered an expert without having once been right.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

The CBO is the only group that makes the weatherman's ten-day forecast look like exact science. They seem to miss their projections with extreme regularity.

I think the association of economics with forecasting is unfortunate and is down to the fact that one great way to get an investment bank's name on business television is to hire a guy called a Chief Economist who will go and prognosticate.

The track record of economists in predicting events is monstrously bad. It is beyond simplification; it is like medieval medicine.

Question: Why does anyone bother to listen to economists anymore? The profession has become an embarrassment, and the most respected economists have shown themselves to have as much predictive power as a deck of tarot cards.

If you are not around when Africa truly gets going, it would be much like the sceptics who stood on the sidelines in the 1990s convinced that China was going nowhere. How wrong they were.

Agency by agency, we frequently have lost a bit of ground, at least to inflation-but had it not been for the efforts we've made to educate people about the importance of science, technology and advanced education, those predictions very well might have come true.

It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge.

I don't think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it's going.

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

We do not have, nor have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stock market, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

Most economists, when modeling market behavior, tend to sweep major fluctuations under the rug and assume they are anomalies. What I have found is that major rises and falls in prices are actually inevitable.

I never understand why 'economist makes forecast' is ever a headline. Whether the economist in question is from the International Monetary Fund, a City forecasting group or the Treasury - a forecast is still not news.

I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can. You don't expect dentists to be able to forecast how many teeth you'll have when you're 80. You expect them to give good advice and fix problems.

All economic forecasts are subject to considerable uncertainty. There is always a wide range of plausible outcomes for important economic variables, including the federal funds rate.