Paul Krugman: Economic Storm Signals

--The New York Times, December 1, 2006

“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “especially about the future.” Actually, his remark makes perfect sense to economists, who sometimes have trouble making predictions about the present. And this is one of those times.

We’re now two-thirds of the way through the fourth quarter of 2006, so you might think we’d already know how the quarter is going. Yet, economists’ assessments of the current state of the U.S. economy, never mind the future, are all over the place.