The Blog Prophet of Euro Zone Doom

[groovedaddy]

BARCELONA, Spain — For years, almost nobody paid attention to the sky-is-falling alarms of Edward Hugh, a gregarious British blogger and self-taught economist who repeatedly predicted that the euro zone could not survive.

Living a largely hand-to-mouth existence here on his part-time teacher’s salary, he sent one post after another into the Internet wilderness. It was the height of policy folly, he warned, to think that aging, penny-pinching Germans could successfully coexist under one currency umbrella with the more youthful, credit-card-wielding Irish, Greeks and Spaniards who shared the euro with them.

But now that the European sovereign debt crisis is rattling world markets, driving the euro lower almost every day and raising doubts about the future of the monetary union, his voluminous musings have become a must-read for an influential and growing global audience, including policy makers in the White House.

He has even been courted by the International Monetary Fund, which recently asked him to fly to Madrid to assist in its analysis of the Spanish economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/global/09blogger.html?th&emc=th

[John Q. Citizen]

1. Uh Oh. If he's a genius, what's that make all the rest of the experts? Fools?

It's lose lose all the way.

[dmallind]

2. Predict doom constantly and you will always, temporarily, be right occasionally

Of course the same works for predicting boom constantly.

The only people worth listening to are those who have predicted both and been right.