I’ve always been suspicious of confident forecasters. William Goldman’s truism about Hollywood applies far more broadly: nobody knows anything. 

So the Financial Times’ Tony Jackson deserves several cheers for his advocacy of humility today: 

We simply do not yet know where we are going on the big stuff: house prices, deleveraging, real incomes, the behaviour of the Anglo-Saxon consumer. 

All we have, meanwhile, is random observations… 

The general point on credibility holds. Eventually, one of those false dawns [the stuttering market rallies in the current crisis] will turn out to be real. 

Whether it is this one, nobody really knows — myself included.