Robert Schiller: – Recovery is just luck

Professor Robert Schiller at Yale University makes some clear statements about the resent signs of economic recovery in an article published in Gulf Times sunday. According to Mr. Schiller the authorities and governments around the world can not claim to have “saved” the world with their policies and measures. They just got lucky, Schiller concludes.

“Where our still-ailing world economy goes from here is as uncertain as the speculative markets that played such an important role in both the financial crisis and the recovery. We can only wish that formulating economic policy were as clear-cut as, say, mechanical engineering. It is not: a host of poorly understood natural cyclical factors play a role, and so do the vagaries of human psychology.”

Robert Schiller

(Article in Norwegian, link to original post in English)

– Hvordan vår skantende økonomi vil utvikle seg videre er like usikkert som det spekulative markedet, skriver professor Robert Shiller i en kommentar. Myndighetene har bare hatt flaks, mener han.

I en kommentarartikkel i Gulf Times søndag skriver Yale-professor Robert Shiller at myndighetene har vært kjapt ute med å ta æren for det økonomiske oppsvinget vi har sett i tredje kvartal i år.

“The IMF, along with many national leaders, seems ready to give full credit to these policies for engineering what might be the end of the global economic recession.”

“Any solid understanding of the causes of this turnaround is likely to prove elusive. People are still puzzling over the reasons for other major market upturns (1933, 1982, etc.).”

“A market boom, once started, can continue for a while as a sort of social epidemic, and can foster inspiring “new era” stories that are spread by news media and word of mouth. The stories themselves help magnify the boom, becoming part of the feedback that sustains it.”

“But any such speculative boom is inherently unstable, as the stories evolve in time and with new shocks, whose effect on markets is most uncertain.”

“To be sure, governments and multilateral institutions made some reasonable attempts to restore confidence. But they did not “engineer” a recovery. They got lucky.”

Robert Schiller rangeres blant de 100 mest innflytelsesrike økonomer i vår tid.

Les hele professor Robert Shillers markedskommentar her: (Article in English).