In some ways, predicting the economy is even more difficult than forecasting the weather, because an economy is not made up of molecules whose behavior is subject to the laws of physics, but rather of human beings who are themselves thinking about the future and whose behavior may be influenced by the forecasts that they or others make.
On that occasion, it occurred to me that the renowned economist and philosopher – and eventually Nobel laureate – Amartya Sen had given in these same rooms the first of our scholarly lectures entitled to the memory of our late governor Paolo Baffi. Sen’s lecture was on “Money and Value: on the Ethics and Economics of Finance”.