I know it's old but I just had to bring this up. The words in the title are ones spoken by Glen Stevens, the Reserve Bank Governor of Australia in a speech on December 9, 2008.

I do not know anyone who predicted this course of events. This should give us cause to reflect on how hard a job it is to make genuinely useful forecasts. What we have seen is truly a ‘tail’ outcome – the kind of outcome that the routine forecasting process never predicts. But it has occurred, it has implications, and so we must reflect on it.

I find it odd that the Reserve Bank Governor doesn't know anyone who predicted the recent world events. Off the top of my head I can think of a few - hell the entire Austrian School of economics has been calling this thing since 2006(ish). Perhaps it's because the Reserve Bank relies on their Computerised General Equilibrium (CGE) models of the economy, based on the flawed neoclassical fundamentals in which their staff are trained to provide them with these 'forecasts'.

Unfortunately, CGE models have all but conquered the world of policy analysis today; use of the general equilibrium framework appears to be taken as the mark of good science. I personally favour an Austrian approach of qualitative case-by-case analysis. To quote Henry Hazlitt (I forget the exact date -- sometime around the 1930s/40s):

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the long effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Perhaps the Governor aught to broaden his horizons a bit and start reading literature from all trains of thought rather than just neoclassical/keynesian rhetoric that they've been blindly following their entire lives.