I’m only really sharing this to give me somewhere to voice my bewilderment. Economists and financial reporters strike me as among the most gullible uncritical people on the planet. Reeves had a panicky Spring statement because of a missing £10bn in the projections for 5 years time!

Now it seems the forecasts were £15bn out at a lead time of a single quarter. Yet I bet come autumn we’ll be soberly reviewing the OBR report and talking about how tax changes might impact the final year of the projections.

BTW financial forecasting is hard. Most models are wrong but some are less wrong than others and all that. I’m not arguing against using the best info we have. I’m just astounded by the level of precision we work to at these sorts of lead times, given the evidence before our very eyes of how wide the error bars are.