Isn't that the beauty of economy and meteorology? That everyone is an expert?
The difference in the US this time around is that the public will have no say in bailouts of banks. It will be done all hush-hush with the world dollar reserves and demand for the greenback as the final backstop:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XRQecD-Gopg
Not sure what the other federations would do though.
The fact is, there really are no good predictive models yet. There are a lot of very good and legitimate reasons why there are no good predictive models dealing with complexity, scale, and an inherent connection to human behavior.
Now, this doesn't mean we throw our hands up and anything goes: we should still provide rationale and people should continue to study these systems methodically as they can. At this point, much of professional economics vs armchair economics isn't too far separated from chemistry:alchemy or astronomy:astrology hundreds of years ago. Obviously, there was great merit in the work early chemists, astronomers, etc. took on since we can now stand on their shoulders. Economics shouldn't be belittled, yet at the same time, it should be recognized for what it is: still not very predictive.
"We find that financial cycle measures have significant forecasting power both in and out of sample, even for a three-year horizon. Moreover, they outperform the term spread in nearly all specifications. These results are robust to different recession specifications."
"These results suggest that financial cycle proxies may be another indicator that could be useful to policymakers, professional forecasters and market participants more generally."
Emphasis added is mine. That's double the coverage of uncertainty propogation.
Unfortunately, I suspect, like most working in modern research and academic settings, papers have to inflate success as much as possible or the researchers lose future funding even though this type of work is high risk of failure. This is partly to blame for the reproducibility crisis we're encountering across the board.
I don't blame the authors (I feel their pain), but I do blame the poorly structured incentive/disincentive system creeping ever-further into academic research.
Contrast this with computer related ropics and the HN expertise shines.
I've seen a biology professor, writing a biology children's picture book, with unusual care, who seemed in part motivated by not being seen by their peers as having gotten it wrong.
I've recently seen comments that since it's HN, voluminous uninformed conversation is fine, and without harm.
So absent ego threat, or clear social norms, the next line of defense for quality is... comment votes? Which seems more a mechanism for norm enforcement than creation.
The HN comment guidelines don't actually recommend "thoughtful and substantive", only that that should increase as topics get divisive. The emphasis seems respectful and curious discussion. That combination might tend towards quality, but perhaps has failure modes. Like concentrations of poorly informed discussion, perhaps less than ideally respectful and curious, either discouraging quality, or taking too long to shift towards it?
One argument for discussion fora supporting personalized filtering, is the speculation that virtual subpopulations might create and sustain norms more easily than an unfiltered population can filter comments.
One of my pet peeves is talking about debt without corresponding asset levels. Corporate America has a net worth of ~$35 trillion.
I would wager that finance is not the only topic subject this effect. E.g. Everyone in every Tesla thread is an expert in every component that goes into an automobile.