No Crisis Emerges in September - October

A few months ago the internet was flooded with predictions that a financial crisis of some kind was imminent including many predictions of a huge drop in the US stock market. We are now at the end of October and none of the many predicted crisis events have happened. 

I won't recap all the forecasts as there were too many to review them all. At this point the proper question to ask is, what do we learn from this?

I think what we should learn from this is that no one has a crystal ball and can predict the future with certainty. It is certainly proper to point out the conditions do exist the could lead to a crisis at any time. We have documented dozens of warnings from both the IMF and the BIS here on the blog warning about potential systemic risks.

The problem arises when people start making specific predictions that a certain period time will see a crisis unfold. Clearly, no one really knows anything like this about a specific date or time frame. We would encourage readers to be open minded and consider many points of view including listening to credible voices that issue warnings. 

But we also encourage readers to look at those who continually forecast a crisis event will happen at a certain date or "very soon" etc. and hold them accountable when they miss those predictions. People who continually make such predictions and miss them hurt their own credibility. It does not mean we won't eventually see a crisis or even that those missing the forecast do so with evil intent. But they need to understand that most people quit listening when you repeatedly issue dire warnings for specific dates that do not happen. That's to be expected.

Here, we have never issued any such type of forecast. In fact, we told readers that our most reliable sources did not see anything pointing to an imminent crisis in these two months.

What we do here is encourage readers to stay alert and informed so that if a crisis does emerge, they will not be caught by surprise and will have thought through a plan to deal with one ahead of time.