This year has been a pretty miserable one for many people for obvious reasons, but it has been a quite humiliating one for the economists. It is not just that most of them got their 2023 forecasts badly wrong. It was always going to be difficult in a time of wider turmoil to predict how any particular element – growth, inflation, unemployment – was going to develop.

However, too often they made extreme negative predictions that caught the headlines but were really always at the outer bands of the possible.

For example, just over a year ago the Bank of England’s central forecast was for the UK economy to shrink by nearly 2 per cent this year. Yet the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in the year to October, it grew by 0.3 per cent. That’s disappointing and I expect the number will be revised up. But at least it’s a plus, not a minus.

Or take inflation. There were some really hairy forecasts for that. In summer 2022 Goldman Sachs predicted that if energy prices went on rising inflation would peak at over 22 per cent in 2023, and even if they came down it would be nearly 15 per cent last January. As it turned out, the peak in October 2022 was just over 11 per cent and last January, it was down to 10 per cent. Terrible, yes, but not as frighteningly so as predicted.

Or take house prices. Nomura surveyed the market last January and concluded that they would fall by between 10 per cent and 20 per cent from their peak by the middle of the coming year. Well, we’re not there yet and the most recent estimates from Nationwide last month show the market rising for three months on the trot and prices just 2 per cent down from........

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