Quote of the week: Ben Stein

“Almost all economic pundits and soothsayers—whether on television, in newspapers, or at brokerage firms—are asked to tell the future. Some of them are stunningly well paid for their efforts, even though they are wrong decade after decade. The fact is that we as humans cannot tell the future. Life is far too complex and baffling for the minds of mortals to understand as it happens, let alone to predict it accurately. Just two years ago, who would have imagined that Citigroup would trade for a time under $1 or that General Electric would trade for a time under $6 or that Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers would virtually vanish? And who would have guessed that we would have a fall of more than 50 percent in the broad stock indexes or that oil would triple in price and then fall by more than $100 a barrel? Yet, we cry out for someone to tell us the future, like children who want to hear the end of the story.”

Ben Stein in The New York Times