How Do We Forecast? – Mr. Peter Hall
March 29, 2023
An excerpt from “Is Economic Chaos our New Reality? Reflections on growth and hope in an unsettled world”
Mr. Peter Hall, CEO – econosphere, inc.
Transcript: How Do We Forecast?
Well how do we forecast forward when everything is so chaotic? Well it’s a difficult thing to do. But I will say–and I’ll stake my reputation on this–that one of the reasons we caught most of the changes that we had to deal with from 2007 to the present inside of my small shop at Export Development Canada, was understanding the world in this context. It enabled us to forecast with accuracy.
So we called the […] 2008-2009 financial crisis ahead of time and this is all documented. We chronicled that it was going to be a very long recovery. We chronicled what the impacts of quantitative easing were going to be. And remember, nobody had ever done this before. It was brand new. We chronicled the collapse in commodity prices, which was related to the end of quantitative easing.
Now nobody predicted COVID-19 to happen, but the recovery from COVID-19 was something that was a great mystery. Most people thought we were going to have a downturn in the economy that was like the global financial crisis. We go down and it’s a very, very long recovery.
And we said, “No, this is going to be a very sharp recovery.”
And that’s why we’re dealing with inflation and higher interest rates right now. It’s not because the economy can’t handle things. It’s because we misread how the economy was going to recover from COVID and we didn’t have policies that were appropriate to a very rapid recovery. We were all caught flat footed.
Peter Hall, CEO – econosphere inc.
Peter Hall is CEO of econosphere inc., a boutique business strategy advisory firm. In this capacity he is involved in advising leading Canadian industry associations and corporations, advising and promoting international initiatives and conducting ad hoc project work. Mr. Hall is a special advisor to both Martinrea International and Elevate Export Finance, writes a weekly column in the Financial Post and is a featured speaker at conferences across Canada.
Until recently he was chief economist at Export Development Canada, heading up a large team of economists and country risk analysts that provided comprehensive forecasting for internal and external business strategy purposes, transaction risk analysis for over 160 countries, model creation, use and maintenance and data systems support. In addition to advising EDC’s executive team and board of directors, Mr. Hall personally conducted dozens of presentations annually to a wide variety of business, government and academic audiences and was continuously sought as a conference speaker at industry events in Canada, the United States and internationally.
Mr. Hall regularly speaks at conferences and corporate events and comments on the global and Canadian economies in print media, radio and television. While at EDC, he authored the widely-circulated Weekly Commentary. Prior to his work at EDC, Mr. Hall directed the economic forecasting activities of the Conference Board of Canada. He has served as the president of the Canadian Association for Business Economics, a 600+ member organization of professional economists and also its largest local chapter, the Ottawa Economics Association. He has served on the board and as an advisor to multiple Ottawa-area charities.
Mr. Hall has degrees in Economics from the University of Toronto and Carleton University.
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