It is against this background that forecasters face the seemingly impossible task of predicting the future. Of course, public policymakers face an equally profound challenge: While another crisis is coming, probably sooner rather than later, aligning forward-looking policy with the pitfalls of a highly uncertain future is the functional equivalent of balancing a heavy weight on the head of a pin.
But that hardly justifies self-serving excuses for policy mistakes, or portraying asset-market mispricing and economic dislocations as unavoidable accidents arising from so-called unprecedented circumstances. I have run out of patience with policymakers, corporate decision-makers, and investors who collectively throw up their hands and say, “Don’t blame me.”
This is largely a cop-out. Shocks are here to stay, and our task is not to predict the next one – although someone always does – but to sharpen our focus on resilience. Staying the course of politically mandated policies while minimizing the inevitable dislocations is easier said than done. But that is no excuse to fall for the myth of being victimized by the unprecedented.
Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of "Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China" (Yale University Press, 2014) and "Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives" (Yale University Press, 2022).