Economic forecasting, no matter how complex the underlying model may be, is essentially about extrapolating historical trends. We showed last week how economic models completely fail to pick up on structural shifts using Japan as an example. On the other hand, if an economy doesn’t really change much, as in the case of Australia over the last thirty years, model “forecast” are generally quite accurate. However, spending millions of dollars to do the job of a ruler doesn’t seem like wise resource allocation to us. That said there’s obviously a very limited market for model based GDP forecast and most of them are not exchanged among pure market based players, but rather between governmental funded agencies. True, Wall Street spews out their sell-side GDP propaganda on a regular basis, but claiming international banking is anything akin to a free market is absurd. GDP forecasting is something only wasteful organizations do and that should tell you all you need to know about these exercises in futility. 
Take the latest IMF forecast for China as a half decent example. According to the IMF, the credit junkie known as China, which needed one trillion dollar in fresh credit in the first quarter alone to create GDP “growth” of somewhere between 6.3 and 6.7 per cent (265 billion dollars for the quarter) will continue to race ahead with six per cent growth for the foreseeable future. The Chinese economy is 100 per cent dependent on ever more money and credit expansion to maintain its completely unsustainable momentum and will very soon come crashing down. And by the way, China’s reported GDP numbers are obviously grossly overstated anyway. 
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