Corporations useless forecasts

The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- Highlight Loc. 3866-70  | Added on Wednesday, November 23, 2011, 08:11 PM

Governments make forecasts; companies produce projections; every year various forecasters project the level of mortgage rates and the stock market at the end of the following year. Corporations survive not because they have made good forecasts, but because, like the CEOs visiting Wharton I mentioned earlier, they may have been the lucky ones. And, like a restaurant owner, they may be hurting themselves, not us—perhaps helping us and subsidizing our consumption by giving us goods in the process, like cheap telephone calls to the rest of the world funded by the overinvestment during the dotcom era.