Archive for February 10th, 2015

Nums: Why are economists so bad at forecasting?

February 10, 2015

Wash Post had an interesting analysis titled “This graph shows how bad the Fed is at predicting the future

The crux of their argument: the Fed has a clear recent tendency to mis-forecast economic growth … not by a little, by a lot …  forecasting almost twice as rapid growth as is ultimately realized.

For example,  in 2009 the Fed was predicting 4.2 percent growth in 2011.  But then in 2010 it revised that down to 3.85 percent growth. And in 2011 they revised it further to 2.8 percent growth. And when all was said and done, the economy only grew about 2.4 percent that year. The Fed projected growth almost twice as fast as what actually happened.

 

image

What’s going on?

 

(more…)