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economy, long only Profile| Send Message| (1,443)    With the
election behind us and the fiscal cliff approaching, recession
forecasting is in full swing again, and so it's time once more
to roll out the standard caveat-not all predictions are created
equal. In fact, quite a lot of the opinions are of poor quality,
largely because one or more of the following applies: 1) the
predictions are driven by emotion; 2) the analysis relies on
cherry-picking the data; 3) the analyst is generally misreading
and abusing the economic signals and models; 4) the analysis is
overly focused on recent data that's probably infected with
short-term/seasonal distortion; 5) the analyst has another
agenda to promote that conflicts with objective macro analysis.
For example, some pundits claim that there's a clean, direct
link between the business cycle and policy debates in Washington
related to decisions that may or may not happen in the future.
For example, Steve Forbes