In June 2007, Jean-Philippe Cotis, the chief economist of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, declared that 2008 was going to be a great year.
The economic situation was “better than what we have experienced in years”, he wrote, and the central forecast of the OECD, representing the world’s 38 wealthiest countries, “remains indeed quite benign”. He tipped “a soft landing” in the United States and “sustained growth” in OECD economies, with “strong job creation and falling unemployment”.
That forecast – relying on the OECD’s “state of the art” economic model – proved, of course, to be spectacularly wrong. In 2008 the global financial crisis hit, the worst economic shock since the great depression.
