These soothsayers read the tea leaves using metrics like interest rates, capital expenditures, unemployment and stock market reactions.
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The technology is finally catching up and everything is about to change, according to the soothsayers at Internet World '96.
Then, a year on, they face the occupational hazard of humbler soothsayers everywhere: how to explain to their followers why nothing much has changed.
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Just like Vince Lombardi, who said he never lost a football game, but rather simply ran out of time, I think the strategists and soothsayers are finally right.
To be sure, I am opposed to industrial policy, which presumes that one person or a cabal of self-anointed soothsayers knows how the future will unfold.
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April 13, 2029, which should get the doomsday soothsayers excited.
Balance sheets, company statements, pending lawsuits, and executive personalities are all tools that the soothsayers use to try to predict what will happen to a stock, bond or commodity.
For weeks, private soothsayers have been suggesting the Japanese economy shrank by an annualised 4% or so in that quarter, making it the third such decline in a row.
Then again, even with reams of data (manufacturing orders, consumer spending, unemployment rates, stock prices) and complex computer models at their disposal, richly paid soothsayers prove notoriously bad at predicting the future.
For years, strategists and soothsayers have been predicting that low rates on bonds, generally benchmarked by a 10-year Treasury bond rate that has largely remained under 2%, would force investors into riskier assets.
However, often the professional number-crunchers and political soothsayers regale us with their interpretations of the wider electoral significance, we should never lose sight of the huge influence these councils have on millions of people's lives.
Now, I should say right up front as the professional forecasters in each of our offices who contribute to the forecast frequently say, we are economists and not soothsayers and all forecasts have to be understood to be subject to substantial margins of error.
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