Speaking of NAR economists, their forecast for 2007 home sales will probably go down in history as the poster child of spin and bad faith.
At the start of 2007, like every year, they forecast the number of sales for that year (as do many other economists). Their number was way higher than everyone else’s, including Fannie, Freddie, Citi, Goldman, Merrill, Economy.com, CR, etc. That, in itself, is not a crime. To err is human.
What they did later, though, made them the laughingstock they are now. Every month, for 12 months, they published cheerful press releases in which they proclaimed that the year started out on a temporary weak note, that the turnaround is just around the corner, and that the estimate would be revised slightly down. They did that all the way through November 2007. They chipped away at that estimate for 12 months, until they finally got it right, by the end of December.
That, my friends, is called bad faith. Their credibility in economic circles is absolutely zero today. As I said, I’m amazed that reporters still talk to them.
