How to Forecast Economic Developments During and After Crises

Written between 2009 and 2011 the ten essays in this volume deal with problems of economic diagnosis and with forecasting, in particular forecasting of global economic developments in the first two decades of the 21st century. Based on a wide-ranging survey of the literature, Gunther Tichy’s three essays show that both academic and practising economists in large numbers pointed out the unmistakable signs of a looming crash, but their warnings were ignored for political reasons, above all in the USA, where the quest for profit was not to be damped. Therefore Tichy inquires if stricter regulation of the finance sector could make its activities more transparent and development trends easier to control. In seven essays Erich Streissler analyses the financial crisis of 2008 and deals with forecasting problems. Since the late 1990s the world economy has had to register a “savings glut”. In great parts, excess savings went to the USA where most of them were destroyed either by way of private and public consumption or by mis-investment. Streissler investigates several influential financial market models by US economists, some of Nobel prize fame, and shows that and why they were wrong and inapplicable. He discusses the question of an optimal probability distribution for analysing “rare events” like economic crises and ends the volume with an attempt at forecasting global economic developments.