Hacker News Reader

Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

They are economists, not seers. Nobody could have predicted the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent effect on gas price this time last year.

View on HN

It doesn't work like that. There was public intelligence mid summer last year and we were running transports full of weapons to Ukraine back in December. This was all over paid up commercial intelligence feeds that investment companies have access to. You'd have thought they would have the same info at hand. It was damn obvious where we were heading.

Same as the rise of Covid 19 was reported as far back as November 2019 on the same feeds.

The problem is no one competent is at the wheel and the default policy is keep the spice flowing and hope the fuck the problem goes away and when everything goes to crap, blame it on "external factors" or something.

Edit: I think really it's "politically inconvenient" to have issues at some times so they hide them.

Imagine if the govts of the world had mandate to transparently and efficiently find and squash issues before a complaint, like we wouldn't freak out when we only see strong intervention without the precursing issue.

To be fair they tend to do that quite a lot. It's only the really large things we get to see and the shooting of ones own toes off.

What kind of feeds are you talking about? Surely the problem is that there are many things implied by the feeds and only a fraction of them come to pass?

We get intelligence feeds from various companies. I can't name them as we are under NDA but it's an aggregation of news, real data, analytics to build credible views of things that are going on and where they are likely to go. We have an internal analytics team who apply this to organisational risk and syndicate it out to whoever needs it. They are surprisingly accurate.

Inflation was already at 7% when Russia invaded and had been well above 4% for most of 2021. What part of that looks transitory?

> Nobody could have predicted the invasion of Ukraine

Many people have actually predicted it. Not economists, though.

Just about everything is predicted by someone at some point. Once an event takes place it's very easy to look back and pick out the people who were right.

I think no one listened to predictions what entering to economic warfare would entail. And actually thinking that even if Russia would end losing would they still keep delivering the cheap energy...

It is not invasion itself, but Europe's response to stand up for Ukraine. Former had certain level of uncertainty, but latter was fully conscious decision and amount and depth of it is entirely under control.

It has little to do with Ukraine, though that exacerbated it. Energy and commodity prices were heading up long long before Ukraine invasion. Russia is still selling its oil to India and China, and oil is somewhat fungible of a commodity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com