Predicting the unpredictable

On Monday, the Government predicted the percentage of national debt will reach 57% by 2013 and that the country would be back to ‘borrowing to invest’ by the beginning of 2016.

The obvious question is how on earth can they know that? Darling has been wrong before, forecasting a wildly optimistic national growth in his last budget. And compared to these days of wildly fluctuating markets, the last budget was a put-your-house-on dead cert to predict.

Yet he still was wrong. Now, at the same time as Bank of England suddenly decided that 5% interest was acceptable in a faltering economy one day and then 3% was better the next, how can Darling hope to predict anything accurately? It simply cannot be anything other than wild speculation or blind hope.

Mervin King’s favourite book in times of need is by a man called J. K. Galbraith, a sort of Nostradamus on Lithium. In Crash of 1929, Galbraith says:

There are two kinds of economist, those who don’t know what will happen and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Now Mr. Darling is no economist. But he could at least have the courtesy to admit that he knows more about Margaret Beckett’s underwear draw than he does about the economy.