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What are some organizations that are good at predicting economic turns?

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rousseau

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I'd like to keep a good look at the global economy as the years pass to have a better idea of what to do with my finances at different points.

I've done a fair amount of searching on economics but there seems to be a lot of noise, and very little signal. So I wonder: which organizations out there are fairly reliable with their economic predictions?

Are economic depressions something that's possible to forecast?
 
Are you asking if there is an organization that is able to reliably predict the market?
 
Is economics really a social science?

Anyway, I'm interested to know if there are any bodies out there that are reliable at predicting economic recessions. I did a bit of searching and it seems like almost no one forecasted the past recession, though, so...
 
rousseau said:
Is economics really a social science?

Anyway, I'm interested to know if there are any bodies out there that are reliable at predicting economic recessions. I did a bit of searching and it seems like almost no one forecasted the past recession, though, so...
Click to expand...

It's probably impossible.

Why don't you just take advantage of highs and lows? It's simple: buy low, and sell high. That's what Warren Buffett does. But most people, for reasons that are not rational, see high values as values that should go higher and the opposite for low values.

My brother followed Buffett's philosophy in the last recession. He bought stocks in banks, real estate and companies that were definitely considered "low" like G.E. Sure enough, just like Buffett said, it all turned around.

Actually, I think when Buffett said all of this, the mainstream analysts disagreed with him.

Right now, stocks are generally considered high, so you can just short what you think is high instead of waiting for the next recession.

It's really that simple.
 
rousseau said:
Is economics really a social science?

Anyway, I'm interested to know if there are any bodies out there that are reliable at predicting economic recessions. I did a bit of searching and it seems like almost no one forecasted the past recession, though, so...
Click to expand...

To the extent that it is any science at all, yes. It certainly isn't a natural science.

Although arguably, the topic would fit just as well in pseudoscience.
 
No such thing as social science versus physical science. If it's good science it's just science.

Don't keep echoing post-Kantian philosophy (Naturwissenschaften und Geisteswissenschaften).


(One day we'll have to do the same with "alternative medicine". It's a term that only encourages the hoodoo crowd. If it works it should be prescribed, and if so, it's "complimentary treatment", if you're going to call it something. Nobody calls psychotherapy "alternative medicine" -but why not? Simple: because it is well researched and incorporated in standard treatment of a specifically diagnosed segment of patients. So the same should go for herbal, Siddha and ayurvedic treatments. Prove or move.)
 
You can look at good fund managers. The UK Dustman's Union pension fund (Garbage man in the US) regularly outperformed the market in the last few decades.
 
rousseau said:
Is economics really a social science?

Anyway, I'm interested to know if there are any bodies out there that are reliable at predicting economic recessions. I did a bit of searching and it seems like almost no one forecasted the past recession, though, so...
Click to expand...
Quite a few people forecast the collapse of the real estate bubble that triggered the recession. You might want to read The Big Short, which profiles several of them. (Come to think of it, weren't you just asking for good books on modern history? There you go.)

Unfortunately for the rest of us, doomsayers have a proven track record of successfully predicting, as the saying goes, ten of the last five recessions. When some experts are saying it's all going to crash and other experts are saying it's business as usual, it's hard for us non-experts to know who to believe. And each recession is unique in some respects; so it's one thing to figure out something is going wrong and see a breakdown coming and it's quite another to be able to do it reliably when it's a different thing going wrong each time.

Moreover, there's a theory that says if there really were a body out there that could reliably predict such a thing, you wouldn't hear about it from us. We're the public. Such a body would necessarily be keeping its existence a secret. If the public found out about it and knew it was reliable, we'd start taking its predictions into account in our economic decisions, which would mean behaving differently from their theoretical model of how the public behaves, which would throw off their calculations and cause them to start making unreliable predictions. :(
 
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