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Comment by droffel | Hacker News Reader

> scarily accurate

As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions. They have a consistently bearish bias (which rarely seems to play out), and ties to the Russian state, which brings into question the motivations behind their criticisms of the US (not that I'm the biggest fan myself).

All of that said, ZH introduced me to a lot of economic literature and concepts I likely wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. They touch on niche subjects constantly, and I have to give them credit for broadening my understanding of economics in general.

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ZH proudly flaunts their bearish bias. The name Zero Hedge really says it all. Their motto, 'On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everybody drops to zero', makes this explicit.

That's a quote from Fight Club and more of a joke than anything, IIRC.

They obviously chose it because it fits their worldview. Their lack of originality is beyond the point.

Most of the articles are written by 'Tyler Durden', part of the 'fight club' philosophy joke.

Right, so I think looking for a deeper philosophy in the choice of name and tagline is a bit futile. "Tyler Durden" used to be the cool pseudonym to use online circa 2005.

Nobody said it was deep. Just that it reflects their attitude.

Fight Club, though, was just fancying up and decontextualizing the first sentence of Milton (EDIT: John Maynard, nor Milton) Keynes famous quote: "In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if, in tempestuous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."

I would be very surprised if a financial news outlet choosing the Fight Club quote did so at random and not specifically because of its predecessor.

Well, if we're going to play the X is really just modified Y game, we might as well go back to the original.

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

- Ecclesiastes, 300 B.C.E.

King James Version truly is the worst translation you can find of the bible.

Milton Keynes? :)

Yeah, that was a great brain-o

Exactly. They are glass half empty paranoids, as are many traders in financial markets, their primary audience.

Most of the corporate media are (sometimes ludicrously) optimistic, the other polarity. I read both.

> Most of the corporate media are (sometimes ludicrously) optimistic, the other polarity. I read both.

Unfortunately being wrong on the internet is now becoming long-term grounds to be censored and excluded from mainstream society's systems.

Its quite sad really and I don't know what the solution is.

One thing that I DO know is that the solution isn't coming from the government. They are terrible at things. Their job should largely be relegated to protecting freedoms and security.

This 230 stuff is mostly probably going to backfire and create a less free internet. We don't need more lawyers and more government intervention to internet communication.

I do know we have many thousands of people working on solutions to things like Reddit (and Cloudflares) hyper-sensitive long-ago-crosed-the-line censorship, even if censorship is probably a poor world for it given the historical baggage.

Although this is the internet and even sights like T_D were almost entirely replaced on a site without Reddit's regulation and controls (a far worse situation in many's eyes) welll before it was banned on Reddit. It's thriving on a domain name I won't mention here.

Same with infowars and 8chan, they both quickly found new homes on new places.

But there censoring on any major platform and being related to fringe online communities being fringe DDOS protection services and aononimizers (who yes do still get heavily advertised and recruited on Reddit and redirected to these new unmoderated sites, so their censorship policies were always destined to fail).

I'm more concern about operating in the real world (VISA/Mastercard, Patreon, acess to advertising monopoly networks like adwords/adsense, etc), less so the online communities where discourse it happening. Reddit's censorship problem will eventually be solved on a wider/easier scale once the engineering work has been put into it.

It's probably one of the biggest problem of our current era for those of us who understand the importance of "outlaw thinking", free expression, and those who know the history of how these tools of control are almost always abused and riddled with false positives. The history of those who went against the grain (even if that grain is terribly wrong, wrong things have plenty of other ways to kill off than censorship).

You've really got to be careful with this sort of thing. This is how Rush Limbaugh got into otherwise sane people's hearts and minds: he explained how the legislative process worked in accessible language.

That's a very interesting point. (I stopped listening to Limbaugh ~ 1994.) I collect books on policy making. I'll look for Limbaugh's explainers. But should you have links handy, I'll be your best friend (duration unspecified).

> As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions.

No question ZeroHedge is excessively pessimistic, but that saying is silly. The US has been having recessions almost like clockwork once every 10 years since 1950 [0].

Saying "a recession is incoming!" is pretty much trivially true. It is always very likely there will be a recession in the next 10 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

> The US has been having recessions almost like clockwork once every 10 years since 1950

Your standards for "clockwork" regularity seem to be quite low. Your own source offered to support that claim shows almost double that frequency from 1950-1990, and a maximum interval of 10 years, 8 months over the whole period. So it is neither "like clockwork" over that period (the frequency has on average dropped over the period, but the intervals are highly variable from one to the next), and not averaging anything like 10 years.

Gee, well that leaves me debunked. I guess recessions are quite common and ZeroHedge is ... much more reliable than I thought? A scary discovery.

If you are planning your investments around not having a recession about once a decade, I'm unconvinced it will end well for you.

Anyway, the point stands - regularly predicting recessions is a sensible approach, and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong. The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent. Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.

> regularly predicting recessions is a sensible approach,

No, its not, because recessions do not occur on a regular pattern. And even if they did, its still possible to predict them much more frequently than they do occur.

> and saying ZeroHedge overpredicts is wrong.

Just doing a quick search, ZeroHedge seems to have predicted a recession, counting only predictions with a one year or shorter forward window, literally every year since the end of the of the Great Recession. In many of those years, they made at least one prediction where the window was effectively negative, as they claimed that the US was already in a recession that just wasn't yet recognized.

So, yes, ZeroHedge significantly overpredicts recessions, as they have predicted not less than 11 of the last 1 recessions.

> The normal financial press are reckless in assuming that recessions are not imminent.

That's a non-sequitur, in any case.

> Looking 5+ years into the future to assess the present state is prudent.

Sure, but if ZeroHedge was consistently predicting a recession within 5 years, they'd still be overpredicting by quite a lot (not if this was 1950-1990, but it isn't), but they are much, much worse than that.

No, I don't think you will come out ahead in your investments by trying to predict recessions. Timing the market almost always ends badly in the long term. The best way to come out ahead is to plan based on very long term market trends which include the recessions and stick to your plan with the understanding that there will be recessions, you just don't know when they will start and when they will end.

I'm quite certain if someone simulated trading based on predicted recessions on ZH, you would end up well below market returns.

> As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions.

I wonder if that's actually true.

> > As the saying goes, Zerohedge has predicted 28 of the last 4 recessions.

> I wonder if that's actually true.

Its not, as ZH was founded during the Great Recession, and there's only been one since.

That's at least 10 less than they've predicted, though, so the quote, while not literally true, understates the degree to which ZH overpredicts recessions.

They are, but when the FED keeps re-inflating bubbles and manipulating the markets, all conventional economic processes that they were using as sentinels were also getting disrupted.

> They are, but...

But nothing. In short, the claim of 'scarily accurate' is not true. There may be underlying reasons that their accuracy has issues, but their track record up to this point has been highly inaccurate.

Yada yada yada

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