As Claudio Borio of the BIS said, “The main reason why crises occur is not lack of statistics, but failure to interpret them correctly and to take remedial action.” Have we learnt from past crises? Since the global financial crisis is so much a part of our consciousness, a relevant question is, have statisticians learnt from past crises?
As one of President Obama’s advisers said, “This crisis is too good to be wasted”. That is a dictum that economic statisticians have always been mindful of. The Great Depression of the 1930s, led to the development of a new statistical framework for economic analysis.