Thursday, September 17, 2020

17/9/20: Exploding errors: COVID19 and VUCA world of economic growth forecasts

 

Just as I covered the latest changes in Eurozone growth indicators (https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2020/09/17920-eurocoin-leading-growth-indicator.html), it is worth noting the absolutely massive explosion in forecast errors triggered by the VUCA environment around COVID19 pandemic.

My past and current students know that I am a big fan of looking at risk analysis frameworks from the point of view of their incompleteness, as they exclude environments of deeper uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in which we live in the real world. Well, here is a good illustration:


You can see an absolute explosion in the error term for growth forecasts vs actual outrun in the three quarters of 2020 so far. The errors are off-the-scale compared to what we witnessed in prior recessions/crises. 

This highlights the fact that during periods of elevated deeper uncertainty, any and all forecasting models run into the technical problem of risk (probabilities and impact assessments) not being representative of the true underlying environment with which we are forced to work.  


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