Word: economisters
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...this is bad news for business magazines. But it doesn't necessarily mean business journalism is in trouble, says Sylvia Nasar, an economist and former Fortune writer who teaches at Columbia University's J-school. There's more demand for it than ever, and more outlets providing it - also part of Business Week's problem. "This [economic crisis] is a great story," she notes. "There is - and will be - more great journalism on it." (See the most endangered newspapers in America...
...appreciating currency and lower export volumes, which crushed trade receipts. As a result, second-quarter GDP is expected to contract 3.1% on an annualized basis, according to the Toronto-based investment dealer CIBC World Markets. "I wouldn't be surprised if June was as bad as May," says CIBC economist Krishen Rangasamy, referring to Canada's trade deficit. He expects the country's balance of trade to begin improving in the fourth quarter, with annualized GDP growth of 2.5% and 2.1% in Canada and the U.S., respectively. That sounds promising, but it's largely predicated on a successful restructuring...
What might help us better use economic forecasts, then, is to more explicitly take into account the limits that come with any forecast. You wouldn't find an economist publishing a paper in a journal without margins of error around the data - and yet we routinely drop such nuance when we talk about economic variables in public conversation. "One of the things that gets lost is the fact that there are ways of trying to assess errors in forecasts," says Robert Eisenbeis, a former researcher at the Atlanta Fed who is now chief monetary economist at the money-management firm...
...chart. What starts as a line quickly becomes a blurry fan-shaped region, underscoring that as time marches forward, the variable being forecast falls into an ever broader range of possibilities. "The more you think in terms of distribution of outcomes, the better," says Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who chaired President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. "You're always keeping in mind the inherent uncertainty." The Bank of England is a big user of the fan chart when its economists talk about inflation forecasts. Plenty of U.S. agencies, like the Social Security Administration, use them...
...admission of that sort of nuance may wind up undermining part of the appeal of forecasts: how a single number can quickly jump from an economist's spreadsheet to a politician's stump speech or a businessman's PowerPoint presentation. "Forecasts satisfy a deep psychological need that we live in a somewhat predictable and controllable world," says Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "Those are essential stories. People just find the truth" - that the future is unknowable - "too dissonant...