FORECASTS
Statisticians Who Failed Today
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
February 25, 2011
In the statistical forecasting of trends, all predictions of trends, excepting those written post-facto, have failed. Therefore, watch carefully the choice of the date identified in the heading of a report, before you attempt to interpret somebody's forecast. Note, that none of my general forecasts were ever dated less than six months before the forecast development was first likely to occur.
Also note: that the definition of a competent economist is that of one who not merely rejects, but who actually understands, and thoroughly abhors the inherent incompetence of the use of statistical predicting of economic trends. The secret of competent forecasting lies in reading the failures made in forecasts, as much as the customary failures of the minds of those in positions of responsibility to influence, who are either shaping, or failing to shape today's current policies competently, but within and among nations.
Every would-be forecaster of late, who has attempted to explain a severe social-economic crisis in any nation, but who also attempted to explain the crisis as the special product of the political-economic situation in terms specific to that nation itself, is worse than a failure, not only as a forecaster, but as a human being. There is, presently, in fact, an accelerating and spreading of waves of crises with the characteristic quality of a threatened, or even actually in-progress, breakdown-crisis of a nation, a wave presently sweeping throughout the trans-Atlantic world, and, also, threatening to explode, or perhaps even in process of exploding among nations of the Asian regions. These crises are not the product of the internal situation within each specific nation; each is a crisis with the characteristic of a virtually global economic-breakdown pandemic, a pandemic already exploding within the nations throughout the trans-Atlantic regions, while threatening to overwhelm the Asia rim.
That present world-wide, financial-monetary economic system entering a break-up phase, is presently gripped by an onrushing, general, physical-economic, as much as a financial-monetary breakdown-crisis. The same crisis which is hitting the southern and eastern sections of the Mediterranean region, is also bringing down the respective national economies of the Americas. We are virtually "inches away" from the present potential of a general breakdown-crisis throughout the trans-Atlantic and "Near East" regions, a wave of a single crisis which even the great nations of Asia could not withstand.
Take note of a fact of special importance. The current President of the United States, Barack Obama, is already gripped by his own personal breakdown-crisis. Since the developments of this just past January, it has become plainly visible to an observant portion of the public, that Obama has lost control over both the nation and himself. Much the same is to be said of both the Federal executive and of both the House of Representatives and the Senate respecting any crucial legislative or related effort to prevent the presently onrushing general breakdown-crisis of the U.S. economy generally. In brief, the U.S.A. itself is presently gripped by the most deadly economic crisis which the world had known in recent centuries, while Europe, including the British empire, is in a condition as bad, or worse than that of the U.S.A.
In the case of the government of the U.S.A., we find that the national institutions of the government are curiously inept, unable to take any actually rational action to deal with the onrushing physical and social effects of a presently accelerating, general financial-monetary-economic breakdown-crisis. Those institutions are "letting the worst breakdown-crisis in U.S. history simply happen, pretending that the situation is out of their hands." At the present moment, the only evident source of political vitality is found on the level of the general citizenry of our republic, not the officials of rank in the Federal Government or the governorships of the states.
So, in manifest effects, Scott Walker's Wisconsin and Gaddafi's currently disintegrating Libya are pretty much the same politically, from the top position occupied by the state's already notorious Governor and virtual prospective cannibal-in-chief, down. Gaddafi and that Governor are, personally, expressions of the same, global, trans-Atlantic breakdown-crisis currently in accelerating progress.
It is time to remember that the French Revolution launched in July 1789 was a relatively mild affair when compared with the global disaster now accelerating throughout the planet, under a reign of the spread of political tornadoes, throughout the presently ruling political and financial institutions of the trans-Atlantic region as a whole. A certain madness grips the minds of the reigning political and economic institutions, a madness among the institutional leaders of public and private authority, alike. A certain special kind and degree of madness among those institutions. A madness to which no leading governmental institution of the trans-Atlantic region has brought any significant sign of sanity thus far.
In light of that general state of affairs in that region of the world, my uniquely superior qualifications on record as a competent forecaster, may be brought into play through a fresh approach to remedies. I have announced this approach now, and will be presenting relatively detailed pieces of warning and advice during the days and weeks immediately ahead.
