Monday, March 8, 2010

And I Have Oceanfront Property In Kansas Up On Ebay

Steven D caught this BBC article this morning and he doesn't buy it either.
Greece's financial crisis is unlikely to spread to other eurozone countries with high debt levels, the head of the International Monetary Fund has said.

IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said "there's no reason" to expect that Spain and Portugal would also need to call for external support. 
Yep, no reason at all to think the Greek Fire will spread.  Everything's fine in Europe.  Just give us a second to lock it down, we're fine here.  How are you?  Steven D:
But Steven, you say. Aren't you cherry picking here? Well, maybe. The again, maybe not. Look at this article in Huffington Post about the prescience of the IMF from last summer:

The International Monetary Fund has made the cautiously optimistic prediction that the global recession is coming to an end. Given the organization's history of poor predictions, that just might mean the world should prepare for even worse times ahead. [...] 
In 2003, the General Accounting Office put out a report declaring that IMF's primary forecasting tool, its "World Economic Outlook," had a poor track record of forecasting global financial crises. The IMF, the congressional auditors said, had only been able to predict 15 of the 134 recessions that had occurred in 87 developing countries from 1991 through 2001 successfully. That makes for an 11 percent success rate.
Eleven freaking percent? That's the IMF's success rate at predicting future economic outcomes around the world? You and I can do better picking American football games against the point spread by just flipping a coin. Maybe the IMF economists and financial experts should give that method a shot. I will tell you this. If I were a betting man I'd bet against European stocks today. Especially financial ones.
The man has a salient point there.  I'm betting the Greek Fire spread far and wide, and it's going to cause a hell of a lot of damage before it's through.

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