Economists Won’t Predict the Next Crash

You get a lot of attention if you shout out things like “The stock market is about to collapse”, or “The US dollar crash is just around the corner”, or “The housing market slump is about to unfold”. But from the viewpoint of sound economics, making these kinds of predictions is quite impossible. Putting probabilities to certain outcomes – such as “I assign a probability of 30 per cent that the stock market collapses in 2018” – might be fashionable among forecasters, but it certainly does not...