Chart of the week: the perils of forecasting

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," as baseballer Yogi Berra once said. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has found it particularly hard in recent years, notes Myles Udland on BusinessInsider.de.

As the hangover from the global crash has lingered, the IMF has consistently had to temper its optimism about five-year growth prospects. It is especially sobering to see that in 2011 it thought the global economy would be expanding at an annual rate of almost 5% by now.In 2011 and 2012, meanwhile, it briefly erred in the other direction, before again becoming too cheerful.

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