Originally posted by: Skoorb
Originally posted by: dphantom
Originally posted by: Skoorb
?Nobody expected this,? said Antoine Halff, an analyst with Newedge. ?The majority of people out there thought the market would keep rising to $200, even $250, a barrel. They were tripping over each other to pick a higher forecast.?
What a douche, plenty of people saw this. It was completely unsustainable. People who study the minutiae of economics too much seem to be blissfully unaware of psychology, which is the reason behind these bubbles and oil was a classic one if there ever was one.
That's why I rarely listen to an analyst. If they had half a brain, they would realize such things are not sustainable. The older I get, it seems the more I realize these numbnuts have no understanding of the real world. My dad and grandfather may not have completed high school, but they sure knew a lot more than these idiots. They had to, they ran a farm and lumber business and had to be able to forecast prices, demand for goods and so forth. The fact that they were successful to me means they were a lot smarter than this whizbang joker.
It sounds a bit arrogant but there truly are, and very demonstrably, plenty of experts who don't know their ass from their face. It seems to me that in a profession like medicine--also very hard--the experts really are generally pretty good at what they do, but in finance in particular you can have somebody with many credentials and years of experience who completely screws things up hugely. I think they really do spend too much time looking at a single leaf on the tree as indication of its health, unwilling or unable for some reason to see that the trunk is completely rotted through. A lot of them are rich because they sucker others in to give them money, wooing them with fancy bullsh*t.
In their defense, the economy is hugely complex and constantly changing, so it's difficult to consistently predict it, but if common sense and basic reason is saying something cannot sustain, well it cannot. It didn't take a phd in economics to realize that $200/oil was going to stymie the hell out of an already weakening economy. On a very basic and plain level the numbers just did not gel at all.