The King of Irony : UBS Team Voted Forecaster Of The Year !
January 13th, 2009
This author was amazed to read that UBS of all banks were voted Forecaster of the Year by MarketWatch given the fact that UBS has been one of the biggest losers of the Credit Crunch and also caused massive losses for its investors.
MarketWatch reports on their recently released results:
U.S.-based economists at two Swiss banks took top honors in MarketWatch’s forecasting contest, MarketWatch announced Monday.A team of economists at Credit Suisse led by chief economist Neal Soss had the most accurate forecasts of economic data released in December among 44 economists surveyed, winning its third Forecaster of the Month award.And the team at UBS led by chief economist Maury Harris had the most accurate forecasts over the course of 2008, winning the team’s second Forecaster of the Year award in the past three years. Harris and O’Sullivan have won five monthly contests, including this past September’s. They also garnered the full-year title in 2006.
And the article goes on to quote the team at UBS :
At UBS, Harris and fellow economist Jim O’Sullivan have been fairly pessimistic about the economy for more than two years, correctly foreseeing that the collapse of the housing bubble would have a big impact on the rest of the economy. They are still pessimistic, but they aren’t tearing out their hair.Harris thinks the economy will hit bottom near the middle of the year, and then slowly improve for the rest of the year, he said. It’s a matter of massive monetary and fiscal stimulus — and the arrival of a new president — slowly working to restore confidence. At first, it’ll be “stabilization, not recovery,” he said.“It’s such a bad situation now,” Harris said, that “becoming less bad is very important.”Uncertainty is the main problem at present. Once Barack Obama settles in, and the big decisions about fiscal stimulus and regulatory changes are made, much of the uncertainty will fade. “The response to policy takes hold before all that much is done,” Harris said.
Is it not a fair question to ask then : How could things go so bad if they could see it coming ?
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