First of all the whole goat thing and the “getting of”. They say it had to do with the practice of putting a goat in a stable with an unruly horse, and the goat would have a calming influence on the horse before a race the following day. So if the goat was stolen, the horse would become anxious, annoyed, vexatious etc. and not able to run well. Clearly it was a much simpler time.
But one thing that gets my goat is people making grand pronouncments and forecasts over things that we know we know nothing about!
China springs to mind.
Financial Times on Friday this week carried a headline
“Chinese growth hits 2-year record”
I’ve no reason to doubt them – the folks at the FT are very bright. But I recall just over two years ago a highly regarded Global economist (name available on request!) with a highly regarded Global investment bank, shouting from the roof-tops that China and the global economy were teetering on the brink of disaster. China’s economy would ground to a halt (by its own standards) and pull the world with it. It was akin to an economist version of Private Fraser from Dad’s Army: “We’re all doomed,doomed I tell ye!”. It was in August 2015 and that was a perfectly good Irish summer ruined. Currency and stock markets did what they always do, until they went back to where they were before all hulabaloo started. Happened again a few months later, and to be honest they’ve been the only major sources of market volatility in recent years.
Yet at the same time, if you’d avoided the great complex economic models and just focussed as much as you could on what was happening on ground, you would have had more of a Corporal Jones attitude “Don’t panic,don’t panic” Proprietary surveys I saw at the time showed that growth may have slowed but was still robust and reasonable for such a huge economy.
Complex analysis and building detailed models on the Chinese economy may give us spurious results. Charlie Munger once told me (and about another 15,000 in the same room) “If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well”
Personally I don’t pay much heed to the official numbers. I’m not saying they are wrong but they are certainly smoothed. I don’t pay much heed to Five Year Plans but would look at numbers of strikes or protests to get a sense of government impact on economy. I don’t pay too much heed to huge debt levels as a lot of it resides in the Party-State balance sheet. Real data, where you can see it, makes more sense than economic modelling.
I see that Chinese consumption of avocados has doubled – but Im not sure what to make of that!
Surely “that gets my goat” would have been something that the horse would have said. He/she being the one that got vexed.
Don’t get me started on talking horses!
Tradewinds 