I find all the economic prodigies here entertaining. People who's day job is to predict this stuff can't even make good predictions. I guess I never knew that techies were better economists than the economists
That's probably a good part of why everyone has an opinion - when the "experts" are so clearly clueless, everybody's an expert.
"If we've got data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." -- Jim Barksdale
If you want to see some decent economic commentary, look here: http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/ . These guys have been screaming bloody murder for at least the past year.
Of course you could say "well, the good managers beat the market, even though on average they don't". But you could also say that the few people who correctly predict three coin flips in a row are "good at predicting coin flips" - it's easy to say this in retrospect but impossible to predict who the "good ones" are upfront.
Doing company valuations and making share market predictions are very different from having an understanding of macroeconomics or tax theory in a public policy context.
And very few people are good at prediction (myself included), and even fewer when it comes to timing. Economists have predicted 8 of the last 2 recessions :)
It's listening to someone standing on the deck of the titanic talking about the complexity of the design of the ship, how many great and esteemed members of the establishment signed off on it, and how crazy it is that anyone on the deck is pointing out that it's sinking because they can actually see it sinking, like anyone else can that actually looks at the horizon.
This is not a rebuttal. Arguments from authority about why the masters of the universe have it all figured out and those who are pointing out that they have no clothes are just clueless barbarians at the gate are fundamentally invalid.
Complexity, obfuscation and worship at the altar of authority do not actually make for solid fundamentals. This ship is going down, massively increasing the tokens for the representation of scarce resources so that the people who controlled the tokens back the last time they completely failed, does not make the people that controlled those tokens any more competent than they were at the actual game in question last time they failed.
All the central bank moves, the macroeconomic obfuscation, lies, Keynesian nonsense, negative interest rates, cash ban proposals, underhanded capital controls, worldwide currency wars, geopolitical games with oil to back fundamentally worthless scrip, bail-ins, bail-outs etc, none of it changes the underlying fact that the presently dominant system ordering the allocation and distribution of scarce resources is, as you sit here on the deck of the ship dismissing that fact, sinking below the horizon.
EDIT: Well this is embarrassing. I apologise to the guy above and below me. I guess it was actually my superior reading comprehension...
And when I say the top 1% are significantly better at making predictions than the average person, I mean better in certainty and specificity.
Look at yours and spangry's comments. Full of vagueness.
"Appropriate to scream bloody murder".
About what exactly? It's certainly appropriate to scream bloody murder about things that are happening. It would be nonsensical to scream bloody murder about something that isn't happening.
"the economic depression that will occur in the next 5 years will be started by bubbles popping in residential property markets"
What a huge range of uncertainty. So when is this economic depression occurring? Tomorrow? 2017? 2021? What kind of economic depression? Minor? Major? Capable of plunging the world into the Great Depression? Such vague predictions are fundamentally worthless to the average person.
Look at the charts, the writing is on the wall, denying at this point because the talking heads on the television are telling you that everything is going to be alright while it's very clearly not is not taking a cautious stance and saying one cannot predict the future, it is ignoring the facts on the ground as they are.
Baltic dry index, Deutsche Bank CDS spread on 60 trillion of derivative exposure, Sovereign Debt CDS', the leverage of gold on the primary exchange in the world for paper vs physical gold, the buckling price of oil, the desperate moves of the central banks in the previous 8 years coupled with begging from the too big to fail banks that even more reckless and wild moves need to be undertaken (Let the banks charge negative interest on deposits, ban cash so the consumers can't avoid it, allow the banks to make the spread, give us more quantitative easing, keep manipulating the roulette wheel so we remain on top despite our utter incompetence, pay no attention to the market moves that say we're about to be destroyed, except of course to the extent you need to understand that if we are it's the end of the world as we know it because we're too big to fail, etc).
The systemic cancer needs to be destroyed for the actual effective allocation of scarce resources to be performed, the existing central banking system, its oversight, and basically everything about it, needs to undergo creative destruction.
"Mark my words: the economic depression that will occur in the next 5 years will be started by bubbles popping in residential property markets (China's first, most likely). Consequently, we'll be looking at financial system collapse when this is transmitted to banks via insolvent residential property speculators (to whom they've loaned significant amounts of money). This ain't going to be pretty...
On the hopeful side, countries like the US, Ireland and Iceland who 'took their medicine' during the GFC (sustained heavy property price declines or significant bank collapses), will be closer to fundamental values already. So they may have less distance to fall, even though there will probably be some overshoot. Also, OPEC flooding the world market with oil (to try and kill the US shale oil industry in the crib) and the likelihood that China will run down its foreign currency reserves to pay for stimulus (depreciating the US dollar) will mean US export industries (excluding oil and natural gas) become very competitive indeed.
Countries like China, Australia, Canada and the UK on the other hand, who staved off significant property market corrections during the GFC (especially Australia), are in for a very bad time (http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-hou...). Like worse than 1920s depression bad time (closer to 1890s depression)."
So: enormous crisis, china run down fx reserves, crisis will originate from distorted chinese property market driven by speculative bubble popping.
Here are a few news articles, some from just today:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/kyle-bass-warns-chinas-fore...
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/08/latest-chinas-fx-reserves-dro...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/this-chinese-citys-property-mark...
And this is where I bow out. I'm done trying to reason with the unreasonable.
EDIT: I lied. Christ, you even misquoted me from a few posts up: "If you want to see some decent economic commentary, look here: http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/ . These guys have been screaming bloody murder for at least the past year."
Who's to say most economists are any good at their jobs? Did you see what many of them were saying during the obnoxiously obvious real-estate bubble of 2004-2007? The dotcom bubble? And so on.
Theodore Dalrymple had a column proving that Shakespeare did _not_ have a formal medical education, because he described symptoms correctly. (He contrasted this with a book by a practicing doctor from the time, who described patients purely in terms of the four humors -- creating fanciful descriptions unrecognizable to a modern practitioner.)
Come to think of it, there was also a book published a few years ago about US president James Garfield's death in the late 19th century. He didn't die of being shot in the back; he died of receiving the best medical care in the world.
When you get paid for lending academic legitimacy to politically 'useful' recommendations, accuracy isn't necessarily priority #1.