Birthday boasts: 18 predictions that beat the world’s economists (Beat the Press)

The economists aren’t always right. In a bit of admitted self-indulgence, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points out a few of the times when he was right while a bulk of economists were wrong. Baker first warned of a housing bubble in August 2002, but Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time, said there was no bubble. Baker, alongside his colleague Mark Weisbrot, first raised the possibility that Greece and other debt-burdened countries should leave the euro back in March 2010. Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it was said that the U.S. narrowly averted a second Great Depression. Baker argues that we now know how to recover from a financial collapse and that such a downturn would have lasted, at most, three years—what he says would hardly qualify as a second Great Depression in most people’s views.