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b_b  ·  2998 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sell everything ahead of stock market crash, say RBS economists

I'm agnostic on whether $10/barrel oil is good or bad for the world economy as a whole. i'm not smart enough to know what the broad implications are. I am smart enough to know that forecasters typically look at what has happened in the last month or year and do a linear extrapolation. I remember AAA's top economists released a report in summer 2014 telling the US with the full confidence of their best minds that $3/gallon gas was history. We will never see anything close to it again. I remember summer 2008 reading all sorts of brilliant people telling me that oil was going to be $400/barrel by this time next year. I remember also in 2008 Goldman telling us that oil was going to be $200/barrel for the foreseeable future, then 6 months in 2009 later telling us to expect a protracted price slump. With these predictions in mind, from the people who know the most about oil of anyone in the world,and all miserable inaccurate, it's hard to take any prognostication seriously. The thing that each of these incorrect predictions has in common is that each is based on a data set that was limited to a several month period preceding the prediction. Gloom and doom means whatever the prognosticators want it to mean at the time it is uttered, but of course if any of us actually knew what the future held it wouldn't be gloom and doom at all, because we could exploit that knowledge to make a shitload of money.