from Zero Hedge
Submitted by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk via Bawerk.net,
Economic forecasting, no matter how complex the underlying model may be, is essentially about extrapolating historical trends. We showed last week how economic models completely fail to pick up on structural shifts using Japan as an example. On the other hand, if an economy doesn’t really change much, as in the case of Australia over the last thirty years, model “forecast” are generally quite accurate. However, spending millions of dollars to do the job of a ruler doesn’t seem like wise resource allocation to us. That said there’s obviously a very limited market for model based GDP forecast and most of them are not exchanged among pure market based players, but rather between governmental funded agencies. True, Wall Street spews out their sell-side GDP propaganda on a regular basis, but claiming international banking is anything akin to a free market is absurd. GDP forecasting is something only wasteful organizations do and that should tell you all you need to know about these exercises in futility.