Inside The Crystal Ball: How To Make And Use Forecasts

Everybody forecasts and listens to forecasters, whether they are investors or not. Forecasting is an essential and unavoidable part our lives. Decisions about future outcomes are critical for success or failure in everything from marriage, career choices, business, and investments. No one always makes the right choices. Yet being right the majority of the time, especially for investors and businesses, is everyone’s goal.

This book is about improving almost anyone’s ability to make more correct decisions. The book:

• Provides sobering evidence on just how hard it is to successfully forecast the economy
• Showcases how and why economists succeed and sometimes fail to correctly forecast the future
• Examines what has made economic forecasters relatively successful and others not so successful in order to learn from past mistakes

Chief UBS US Economist Maury Harris is uniquely equipped to reveal how much can be learned from economists’ successes and mistakes.

MAURY HARRIS is a Managing Director and Chief Economist for the Americas for the UBS investment bank. Dr. Harris has led forecasting teams ranked as the most accurate in the country in four separate years over the past decade. In addition, he has been named numerous times to the Institutional Investor (II) All-America Research Team over the past two decades. Dr. Harris is a past President of the Forecaster's Club of New York. Prior to the UBS AG acquisition of PaineWebber Incorporated, he was the Chief Economist for PaineWebber. Before that, Dr. Harris worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and The Bank for International Settlements. Dr. Harris holds a PhD in economics from Columbia University, an MA in economics from Columbia University, and a BA in economics from the University of Texas, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He is married with two children.