There’s a difference between predicting the degree of inflation (an output metric of the entire complex system) and predicting that the country imposing a tariff pays most of the tariff (almost the definition of the word tariff). And if you can’t see that obvious distinction, who’s the one engaged in a fundamentally political argument?

We usually critique the movie after the end titles roll.

I'm not unconvinced by the idea that businesses in the US dulled inflation by pulling forward stock purchases and stockpiling goods. But 9 months worth of goods? SMBs can't afford to do that. Large enterprises don't have the warehousing capacity to do that.

Could you imagine Amazon increasing their stock on hand by 30%? Maybe. Could you imagine them quadrupling their stock on hand? Seems unlikely.

Impacts should've shown up by now, most of the stockpiled goods would've been sold down.

I don't know, it seems like there has been a fair amount of reporting about closing or struggling SMBs and farms, and there's also the economy changing to make more and more of the spending come from upper income, which will be less price sensitive and the question of whether various things could have gone down in price otherwise.

The popular zeitgeist seems to reject the inflation numbers because of perceiving it to be higher, too.

I do agree it's probably not inventory, but the frequent changes to the policies may also be part of it too.

And then there is the bit where the reporting agencies can no longer be trusted.

The titles have rolled. The prediction in Q1 last year was specifically that by this time, the US would be in a deep recession due to tariffs.

I can understand that most people do not actually stay with these forecasts. The story hits NBC, you are completely outraged about this forecast made by these economists, the thing never happens, NBC has moved onto next disaster coming round the corner, next outrage.

If you work in markets, you are confronted with the relentless inability of talking head economists to just say mildly rational things. It is constant, almost every year now we have this latest economic disaster by economists in the periphery of political parties...no-one pays attention to these people, they have tenure, they make money from cashing in their political contacts not through actual correct forecasts (and yes, they always say that the thing they predicted will definitely happen next year now).

Stopped clock is eventually right. But there was literally zero information in the insane claims made in Q1. If you did not see this immediately, don't pay attention to these forecasts.

That's a really nice comment but does not bear in any way on what I wrote. The Trump administration has now completed its first year. There are three to go.

Yes, i am saying very directly that the prediction made was made by many (which is the comment you replied to) that tariffs WOULD HAVE ALREADY caused the economy to fall into a deep recession. These predictions were wrong, they were obviously wrong at the time they were made but that didn't stop the breathless coverage about a coming Great Depression.

Whatever happens next is irrelevant, it won't make that prediction correct.

There are some selection bias here, these are the economists whose voices got heard.

Weather prediction is the more apt analogy here. Astrology is total bullshit, while economics and weather is an attempt to predict the chaos.

Astrology is probably far more apt than you might think, because most don't know the history of astrology. For centuries it was taught as a scholarly proper and real 'science.' Think of something like e.g. modern psychology. Various fields like social psychology have something like a 20% replication rate among top journals which means the entire field is pretty dodgy, but plenty of people keep on repeating the latest headlines, which even end up shared on here fairly frequently, and treating it like any other science.

Astrology only really fell out of fashion due to a perfect storm of a bunch of different factors. The Church defacto banned aspects of it that implied external forces driving human behavior as that would contradict free will, and that happened just about the Renaissance was kicking off and all sorts of new astronomical discoveries led to no greater precision in astrological predictions, along with a more broadly skeptical shift in society, which gradually left it relegated to where it remains to this day.

"My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth." - Carl Jung to Sigmund Freud, 1911

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It's a great example of how what is deemed proper and scientific at one point in time is still heavily influenced by things that, in the future, will be considered 'obviously' nonsense. Even in far more modern times, it wasn't long ago that lobotomization was considered an appropriate psychological treatment. No less than JFK's sister [1] was lobotomized as a 'cure' for her irritability.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy

Right, but what people miss is that some people (usually not academic economists) are able to predict the economy with good levels of accuracy. It is not hard, there is a ton of data, the problem is that you have to drop your own personal interest in politics...for 99.99% of people feeling politically validated is more important than being right on the economy.

Isn't there reams of data on weather patterns too? I thought that like the weather, economic systems are fundamentally chaotic and thus demonstrably unpredictable. There's a whole field of math where we can create these mathematical models that simulate chaos and are fundamentally unpredictable. I was under the impression that Economics falls under the purview of this mathematical theory in terms of unpredictability.

If I may ask, who are the people that do these predictions? What is there methodology and how do you know it's not luck?