Gold Magazine September - October 2013, Issue 30 | 页面 46

opinion

No Success
Like Failure

Economic forecasters seem to feel
no pain when they get it wrong

W

atching the way he beats
himself up when losing
a point, you know
Andy Murray is in the
true sense of the word
a winner. The same
weekend he came through with his historic win at
Wimbledon, I watched the Australians in defeat.
As the Lions quite rightly celebrated their rugby
victory, I could see these words being seared in
the minds of each of the Wallabies: I don’t like
losing, it hurts.
Without entering into motivational psychobabble, you have to recognise that errors and
defeat mean failure. In two fields, however, there
seems to be a total lack of hurt when losing. On
the one hand we have England’s international
footballers and on the other financial and economic forecasters.
HSBC research analysts have been unable to
contain themselves about how impressive the
future is for the UK’s residential market and how
attractive its listed homebuilders are. Why do I
make particular reference to HSBC? Because this
is the firm which, until quite recently, was telling
us that UK homebuilders were long-term rubbish.
I do not want to simply pick on investment
bank research where analysts are never “wrong”
but “surprised”. Such euphemisms are everywhere, in research consultancies, accountancy
firms and essentially all self-selected soothsayers.
Consider the all-too-familiar, “I am adjusting my
forecasts” where in reality the wording should
read “I am correcting my forecasts”.
For their part, the IMF, OECD and CBI have
recently raised their GDP forecast for the UK.
What makes these revisions (read “corrections”)
particularly interesting is that they come from
organisations which, only recently, were lambasting the Chancellor for driving the UK into
the ground. Let me return to the UK residential
sector, and consider another self-congratulatory
team of forecaster ˈ