Economic forecasting is a difficult game — get it right, and you'll get not only plaudits, but potentially a lot of money too.
But get it wrong, and you'll never be able to take it back. Your predictions will live on, and potentially sound extremely funny one day.
The past half a century is riddled with grand projections about national economies and the way the world is going. Some have aged much worse than the others.
These are some of the very worst.
"Japan As Number One" was released by Harvard social scientist Ezra Vogel back in 1979. It was not an unpopular view at the time that the United States economy would soon be surpassed by prosperous Japan, but it looks pretty ridiculous now.
Irving Fisher, one of America's greatest ever economists, said in October 1929 that he believed equities had reached a "permanently high plateau." Less than two weeks later, stocks plunged and didn't reach the highs they fell from for 25 years.
In December 2007, Goldman Sachs chief investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen made a Fisher-like prediction of her own. She suggested the S&P 500 would hit 1,675 by the end of 2008, a climb of 14% — it actually ended below 900.
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