Inversión: Argentina con muchos inversores emprendedores

La Argentina, entre los países con más "ángeles inversores" dispuestos a financiar un proyecto

20/06/2013

Para transformar una buena idea en un negocio se requiere contar con un capital del cual no siempre se dispone. En el país hay cada vez más empresarios exitosos que se organizan en redes y que pueden aportar los recursos necesarios para materializar las iniciativas de muchos emprendedores . iProfesional

Una buena idea llevada a la práctica puede generar interesantes ganancias y hasta convertir al autor en un millonario.

Ese es el sueño que muchos argentinos tienen. El problema, como se dice habitualmente, esquién pone el dinero.

Pero esa dificultad podría dejar de ser tal, si se logra conseguir un "ángel inversor". Claro está, que éste no tiene por qué ser necesariamente una figura espiritual. También los hay de carne y hueso.

¿Quiénes son estas personas, capaces de convertir ese sueño en realidad? Sencillamente son cientos de individuos que cuentan con dinero ocioso y que tienen interés en sumarse a un emprendimiento que les resulte redituable.

Quieren destinar su capital a inversiones productivas, en tanto consideren que éstas tienen un buen potencial de crecimiento.

Se diferencian de otro tipo de inversores porque además aportan otros activos no financieros: su experiencia, talento, contactos con otros potenciales capitalistas, etc.

Por lo general, proveen fondos para un start-up a cambio de participación, que nonecesariamente implica la mayoría accionaria.

Así, invierten en emprendimientos vinculados con diversas industrias: de servicios, productos financieros, comunicaciones, desarrollos tecnológicos, manufacturas o real estate, entre otros rubros.

La pregunta del millón es cómo llegar a contactar a estos "ángeles del dinero".

En realidad, puede no ser tan difícil, dado que se pusieron en marcha hace años ciertas redes cuyo objetivo es el de servir como punto de encuentro entre inversores y emprendedores.

En la Argentina funcionan varias de ellas aunque las más representativas son tres: el Club de Angeles del IAE, Inversores Globales (IG) y Fundación Endeavor Argentina. 

De hecho, en el país se concentra el mayor número de empresarios de la región dispuestos aponer su dinero. 

Según el Bussines Angel del IAE, por lo general estos "ángeles" son empresarios exitosos en diferentes sectores de la economía, que no se conforman con aportar capital, tal como ocurre con una simple inversión financiera. Su entusiasmo radica en participar en la transformación de una idea en realidad.

¿Cómo invierten?
Los clubes de ángeles organizan reuniones periódicas, donde se exponen varias propuestas preseleccionadas para los miembros.

Para aquellas consideradas atractivas, los interesados en invertir avanzan en la conformación de un grupo de trabajo que continúa con un análisis más profundo de los planes de negocios, denominado Due Dilligence, que cuenta con el apoyo del club.

Silvia Torres Carbonell, directora del Centro de Entrepreneurship del IAE Business School, dió cuenta de una gran cantidad de emprendimientos vinculados con "Internet, tecnología, exportación y servicios".

Los ángeles de LatinoaméricaEn América Latina y el Caribe existen 21 redes de estos inversores, según indica un informe elaborado por la escuela de dirección de empresas IESE de la Universidad de Navarra para el Fondo Multilateral de Inversiones (FOMIN), miembro del Grupo Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID).

"Está claro que los números de América latina aún son aún muy bajos, como lo eran por otra parte hace 10 años en otros países europeos. Pero la región tiene una población creciente de empresarios y emprendedores formados en Estados Unidos y con experiencia internacional, que pueden convertirse en inversores", aseguró San José.

Y agregó que "la experiencia que estos empresarios pueden llevar a las empresas latinoamericanas en las que inviertan es enorme y ayudará a las compañías a expandirse por mercados mayores del país en el que surgen".

Los primeros pasos ya están dados, según afirmaron expertos como Susana García-Robles, del Multilateral Investment Fund. "Antes, América Latina estaba creciendo en el segmento más consolidado de la industria, el capital privado, y era difícil encontrar inversores ángeles, fondos semilla y fondos de capital riesgo", aseguró en declaraciones a BBC Mundo.

Según la especialista, "ahora, los inversores se están dando cuenta de que si no respaldan la fase inicial de la cadena de financiación, tarde o temprano se acabarán las empresas maduras con la estrategia y gestión corporativa correcta y la transparencia financiera requerida en las cuales puedan invertir".

En este sentido, agregó que "parece haber un esfuerzo renovado para centrarse en el espíritu empresarial y la etapa temprana, de muchas maneras impulsado por las actividades y los Gobiernos del Fondo Multilateral de Inversiones (FOMIN) que entienden que las economías propulsadas por la innovación tienden a ser las más competitivas".

El pronóstico, entonces, parece ser que más ángeles volarán por los cielos latinoamericanos.

Estados Unidos, el pionero
Se estima que ésta es la principal fuente de financiación para las empresas tecnológicas norteamericanas en fases tempranas.

Efectivamente, en ese país "hasta un 60% de las empresas tecnológicas con potencial de crecimiento han tenido un inversor ángel", afirmó a BBC Mundo Amparo de San José Riestra, quien redactó el informe "Las redes de inversionistas ángeles en América Latina y el Caribe".

Para tener una idea de las cifras que se manejan, aunque la magnitud de las inversiones ángel son, por su naturaleza, difíciles de calcular, los investigadores estiman que la financiación "en cada una de las empresas varía entre u$s10.000 y u$s500.000, situándose la inversión media en el entorno de u$s200.000".

Tendencias históricas del PBI: Apostando a China

Share of the world’s GDP since 1820

​

This remarkable chart—from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers “Internet Trends” presentation in late May—shows the shifting shares of global GDP over an unusually long timeframe. Europe’s dive over the past century is made clear, along with China’s sharp rise, and India’s middling progress. Perhaps surprising: China’s and India’s huge shares in 1820. And the American Century looks a lot less impressive in this context. —Kevin J. Delaney

FED recula en su política de compra de bonos

The Fed statement looks taperific to markets

By Matt Phillips @MatthewPhillips

The just-issued Fed statement looks like a sign that the US central bank is still leaning toward tapering off its bond buying program—at least judging by the market reaction.

Stocks slumped, which is consistent with ongoing diffidence over whether the economy can keep powering forward on its own steam with slightly less help from the central bank.

And prices of bonds—which the Fed buys as part of its effort to push money into the system through quantitative easing—fell, pushing yields on bonds sharply higher.

These initial reactions could change depending on what Fed chairman Ben Bernanke says in his press conference, which is now underway.

QZ

Hong Kong quiere sacarle dinero a Singapur

Hong Kong is rolling in more millionaire money than Singapore

By Lily Kuo @lilkuo

A rebound for Hong Kong

In the epic battle between Singapore and Hong Kong to attract money flowing into Asia, Hong Kong is coming back.

One telling sign: Hong Kong now has more millionaire money than Singapore. According to a global wealth survey by RBC Wealth Management and Capgemini released today, the total wealth of individuals with more than $1 million in investable money in Hong Kong was $560 billion (paywall) last year, up 36% from the year before, which trumped Singapore’s $489 billion. Both stock markets were up in 2012—Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 20% and Singapore’s Straits Times Index jumped almost 18%. But Hong Kong’s wealthy tend to be bigger risk takers and stock buyers than Singaporeans, according to (paywall) Barend Janssens of RBC.

In last year’s report, Singapore had more millionaire wealth than Hong Kong by about $30 billion. An index of global financial centers by Z/Yen Group released in March, based on surveys of finance professionals, put Hong Kong and Singapore in third and fourth place, respectively.

For most corporate executives looking for a reliable base camp near China, the two city-states are in some ways interchangeable. Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Standard Chartered operate branches from both cities. The IMD world competitiveness list—which measures things like infrastructure and efficiency—ranked Hong Kong third and Singapore fifth. Even pollution, traditionally a big drawback to living in Hong Kong, has recently hit Singapore, too.

But when it comes to political freedom and openness, Hong Kong has its drawbacks. Lately, the self-governed Chinese territory known for its free press and partial democracy has been getting squeezed by Beijing. Singapore, meanwhile, has been busy wooing Westerners. Aside from letting up on censorship, the country has erected two high-profile casinos, and softened its ban on homosexuality.

QZ

El Banco de China hace política contractiva

China’s central government is dueling its banks over the country’s cash crunch

By Gwynn Guilford @sinoceros

The People's Bank of China is standing firm. Photo By Zheng Ze/Color China Photo/AP Images

China’s banks and regulators are in a game of chicken over how to address the country’s cash crunch.

China’s central bank removed 2 billion yuan ($326 million) from the money market today, mostly to punish the country’s banks for their shady lending. As a result, banks held onto more of their cash, which sent the two-week and overnight interbank lending rates up 212 and 206 basis points, respectively. Meanwhile, the one-month rate surpassed 7.6%, territory it hasn’t seen since January 2012. To sum that up: Chinese banks think lending to each other for 24 hours is riskier than Portugal’s chance of default on a 10-year bond.

The State Council, which controls regulation, also announced today that authorities would “firmly guard against regional and systemic risks” in the financial system.

The move comes after many attempts by the central bank to rein in banks and local governments. First, the banking regulator cracked down on wealth management products (WMPs), the securitized off-balance-sheet loans sold retail investors, and interbank bond trading. Then the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, and arm of the People’s Bank of China, vowed to cut off capital inflows via faked trade invoicing, some of which ended up in high-yield schemes like WMPs. Earlier this year, the ministry of finance lent 350 billion yuan to local governments to make up for their budget shortfalls.

What’s really going on Zhongnanhai, where China’s government elite convenes, is anyone’s guess. But it appears that China’s central government is reclaiming control over local government finances. Meanwhile, other sources of liquidity may be drying up. Foreign direct investment rose just 0.3% in May versus the same month in 2012, after rising 20% in the first five months of the year.

It all adds up to major pain for even the country’s biggest banks. State-owned Agricultural Bank of China, one of the “big four” state-owned banks, just announced that it is raising funds to shore up its capital adequacy ratio (link in Chinese).

Premier Li Keqiang suggested in March that market reforms should involve some “wrist-cutting.” The bleeding has begun.

QZ

Sobreexplotación de recursos comunes: Evidencia fotográfica de sobrepesca en el Atlántico Sur

Argentina caught a Chinese ship trying to steal 180 tonnes of its squid

By Roberto A. Ferdman @robferdman

Is China supplying its demand for squid by stealing from Argentina? Reuters/Andy Gao

An unlicensed Chinese jigger hoarding some 180 tonnes (200 tons) of fresh squid was caught fishing off of Argentina’s coast late on Tuesday (June 17). The country’s coast guard has since boarded and seized the ship, which is being escorted to the Patagonia port on Argentina’s southeastern coast. But the incident was hardly the first.

Argentina is having a hard time keeping foreign fishermen from illegally plundering its waters for cephalopods. Squid are an essential part of the South Atlantic food chain—they provide food for whales, predator fish, penguins, and other carnivores—and help sustain the country’s growing fishing industry. But squid are also coveted as a luxury in China. Bad news considering that China is one of the planet’s most flagrant overfishers.

Which is why Chinese boats make the trek across thousands of miles of ocean to fish in Argentine waters. The problem has gotten so big that satellite images taken of the earth at night by NASA last year (and shown above) show darkness in seas worldwide save for a cluster of lights off Argentina’s southeastern coast. Late last year, the Argentinian coast guard commandeered two Chinese vessels for illegally poaching 10 tons of squid from off its South Atlantic coast, and some 300,000 tons of illegally fished squid are believed to be pulled out of its waters each year.

Much of the sought-after-squid roam across the maritime boundary between Argentina and the Falkland Islands, but a lack of cooperation between the two has made it all the more difficult to deal with illegal fleets both outside of and within their maritime boundaries. Hundreds of boats lurk near Argentina’s economic exclusion zone, but, unlike the Falkland Islands, Argentina doesn’t have British warships and submarines to keep unlicensed fishers honest. Instead, it has to rely on its depleted coast guard, which consists of a mere eight ships meant to oversee more than a million square miles of ocean.

The results have been ugly.

In the wake of yesterday’s seizure, the head of the Argentine coast guard, Jorge Alberto Castello, told South Atlantic news agency MercoPress that they ” have contacted the Chinese consulate” to figure out what comes next. China will likely patch things up by issuing a fine commensurate with the volume of confiscated squid, but that’s unlikely to keep away the scores of boats still out stealing Argentina’s seafood.

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¿Cómo podemos predecir la próxima crisis financiera?

Humor: La crisis económica afecta a todos

¿Calificar al profesor atañe a los alumnos?

Professor Rating: Is It Students’ Business?

written by Christopher Nash

INOMICS Blog

In recent months the INOMICS blog has featured a series of posts about rankings of departments and universities. Traditionally, ranking has practically been an academic discipline in itself, with big names like QS, the Times Newspaper and in Economics the citation listings compiled by REPEC, dominating the field. However a trend towards a kind of “crowd-sourcing” of ranking has started to appear. TheShanghai ARWU was one of the earliest major ranking bodies to introduce this, but others are following.

Perhaps in some ways ahead of the game in this regard are the so-called “professor-rating” websites. These rely almost completely on input from (former) students and, much like hotel or holiday comparison sites, in many cases combine written comments and feedback with a fixed numerical rating system.

These platforms are not without their fair share of controversy, however, with criticism focusing on the anonymous nature of the feedback and the difficulty for lecturers to respond on some platforms. Some professors have also suggested that critical comments, especially when factually incorrect, may leave the person commenting and/or the hosting platform open to legal action.For a well balanced review of rating platforms including the opinions of several “rated” professors, this short 2009 article in the National Teaching and Learning Forum is also worth a read.

Below are some links to leading professor ratings websites. If you use these or other services, or have an opinion about the merit of online rating platforms in general, unlike some professors, we welcome your comments at the end of the article!

Rate My Professor

Ratemyprofessor.com is probably the highest profile professor-rating site currently online. Focused on the USA, it also covers colleges and universities in Canada, the UK and some major universities in other countries too.

Ratemyprofessor.com allows users to post an anonymous rating according to a range of factors including easiness, friendliness and clarity, as well as write a comment. There is also an option to flag “hot” professors.

An interesting feature of Ratemyprofessor.com is the ability for professors to respond to the ratings and comments about them. In addition, there is a “Professors Strike Back” video section, where professors are filmed responding to a selection of the critical comments posted about them.

For many students in North America, Ratemyprofessor.com is the authoritative source for information about what to expect from the lecturer in a forthcoming course, and may increasingly become so for students in other countries.

Other organisations have also used the data on Ratemyprofessor.com to compile lists of the top universities according to professor ratings, implying perhaps that these platforms are starting to be taken more seriously by the wider academic community.

Mein Prof

Meinprof.de is a German language professor-rating website covering universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. To view the feedback and ratings, users are required to register for a user-account.

The listings are comprehensive, covering most if not all German higher-education institutions, and the site seems to be well used, with over 400,000 ratings for around 100,000 courses and just under 50,000 professors.

My Edu

Myedu.com is more of a network and education planning website than a pure professor-rating site. The website requires signup, and is also heavily USA focused, although some information is available for Canadian institutions as well.

Students are able to give feedback on a professor or a course, and additionally can “recommend” the professor. It is not, however, a comprehensive rating system like those offered by other rating websites.

Rate Your Lecturer

Rateyourlecturer.co.uk is a new British focused website, very much inspired by the American Ratemyprofessors.com. It is still growing, with many professor profiles still empty.

Interesting features include “league tables” for professors, courses, universities and cities, based on the ratings the professors receive. Recent press coverage makes this site one to watch.

Predicción en economía: ¿Predecir la crisis?

What does it mean to have "predicted the crisis"?

Since 2008, quite a lot of people have boldly claimed that they "predicted the crisis". Usually, the claimants use this "fact" to argue for the superiority of their economic school of thought, modeling approach, investing approach, or personal intuition. But what does it mean to have "predicted the crisis"?

First of all, there are different things that get labeled "the crisis". These include:

1. The big drop in U.S. housing prices that started in 2006-7.

2. The systemic collapse of the U.S. financial industry that began in 2008.

3. The deep recession and the long stagnation that began in late 2008.

Predicting one of these is not the same as predicting the others. It is possible, for example, to have missed the housing bubble and the finance industry collapse, but to have successfully predicted, after seeing these events happen, that a deep recession and long stagnation would be the result; this is what Marco Del Negro et al. claim to have done, and a number of pundits and commentators made informal recession predictions after housing peaked in 2006. Alternatively, it is possible to have predicted the bursting of the housing bubble without foreseeing the systemic damage that this would cause to the financial system; some economists, such as Dean Baker and Nouriel Roubini (and of course, Robert Shiller), seem to have called the bubble far in advance, as well as some writers like Bill McBride. It is also possible to have predicted the collapse of the big banks and their mortgage-backed bonds - and made money off of this - while staying agnostic about the macroeconomic consequences; this seems to have made a lot of money for investors like Steve Eisman and John Paulson. Of course, in theory it might have been possible to predict all three events.

Then there's the question of what it means to "predict" something. Here are some alternative definitions:

1. You could predict the timing of an event, e.g. when the housing bubble would burst.

2. You could predict the size or severity of an event, e.g. how much house prices would decline or how much the economy would contract in 2009.

3. You could predict the duration of an event, e.g. how long our economy would stagnate after the recession, or how long it would be before housing prices reached their pre-crash peak.

4. You could describe the particular characteristics of an event, e.g. what would cause banks to fail, or whether they would be bailed out, or whether inflation would remain subdued after the recession.

Next, there is the question of with what degree of confidence you make a prediction. Saying "this event is a conceivable possibility" is different than saying "the risk of this event is high," which is different from saying "the risk of this event has increased," which is different from saying "this event will happen."

Also, there is the question of how far in advance a prediction was made. That could be important.

Finally, there is the question of whether the prediction was made by a model or by a human. If it's a model, then there's the hope that humanity has a tool with which to predict future crisis events.

Anyway, how should we evaluate these claims? There are so many different combination of "predictions" and "crises" here that it's very difficult to lay out an explicit taxonomy of who got it "more right," and who got it "less right." As a more humble goal, we can examine a specific individual or model, and identify which events he/she/it predicted, with what degree of confidence, and when.

As an example, let's take Steve Keen.



Steve Keen, formerly a professor at the University of Western Sydney, is known for claiming moreloudly and confidently than just about anyone else on the planet that he "predicted the global financial crisis". According to Keen, this should be a reason to believe his extensive critiques of neoclassical (i.e. mainstream) economics, and his suggested alternative paradigm, known as "Post-Keynesianism".

So in what way did Keen "predict the crisis"?

Searching the internet, I can find no record of an ex-ante prediction by Keen of a large-scale U.S. housing bubble. He did, however, predict an Australian housing bubble, in 2007 after the U.S. housing bubble had already begun to pop. That prediction has so far yet to materialize; Australian housing prices have not collapsed yet. As a result of this incorrect prediction, Keen lost a high-profile bet.

Did Keen predict the collapse of the U.S. finance industry (the Lehman shock and subsequent bailouts)? Not that I can find. Nor did he warn of the risk of such an industry collapse, as far as I can find.

How about the recession and stagnation? Here, Keen makes his strongest claim to have made an ex ante prediction. His argument is laid out in this paper. (Warning: as others have noted, Keen's papers are nearly unreadable.)

Much of the paper covers the history of macroeconomics as Keen sees it. Later, on page 10, we get to the part where he explains how he "predicted the crisis". Keen presents a macroeconomic model; actually, a class of macroeconomic models. Each of the models is a system of deterministic Ordinary Differential Equations describing the behavior of macroeconomic aggregates. He claims that this sort of model would allow one to realize that a crisis of the type we observed could potentially occur.

Notice, therefore, that this is not a prediction of timing. It is a prediction of the particular characteristics of a recession. And as to whether or not it is intended to be a prediction of the severity or duration of the recession...that's not clear. Keen isn't saying when a recession would happen, he's saying that his model shows what it would look like.

And what would it look like? Well, one of the models Keen presents (a "Goodwin" model, apparently from the 1960s) produces cycles of employment and output that look like this:

As you can see, these cycles are periodic, and of constant amplitude. But we know that this is not what business cycles really look like. (More complicated versions of this type of model might veer from periodicity into extreme nonlinearity and chaos, but chaotic models by definition have little to no predictive power.)

The next model he references is one of his own, produced in 1995. That model contains the possibility of something like a complete economic collapse:

My own simulations in Keen (1995) illustrated this possibility of a debt-induced collapse if the rate of interest was too high. For a low rate, a convergence to equilibrium occurred (Figure 4): 

At a higher rate, the system approached the infinite debt to output ratio equilibrium...

However, we have not observed an approach toward the infinite-debt-to-output ratio and near-total unemployment equilibrium that . Also, interest rates were still historically low when the financial crisis began. So this 1995 Keen model does not appear to describe the crisis we really had. Keen also adds:

[T]he 1995 model lacked price dynamics.

It's also noteworthy that Keen's 1995 model, like the "Goodwin model", contains plenty of periodicity, which as I mentioned is not observed in real life.

Keen then goes on to present a model that does include price dynamics. The figures he presents from that model is labeled "Schandl (2011)", indicating that it was made after the crisis and cannot therefore cannot be regarded as a prediction. Note that in that model, as presented by Keen, the economic collapse takes 40+ years to happen, and involves unemployment going to 100%:

In any case, it is clearly apparent that nowhere in this paper - or in any other paper that I can find - does Keen present a model whose output bears even a passing resemblance to the crisis we experienced in the late 2000s. (As an aside, note that many models, including a simple neoclassical Ramsey model, have equilibria in which the economy collapses completely. Building such a model is very very easy. But complete economic collapses - total and permanent cessations of economic activity - haven't yet been seen in the real world...ever.)

Therefore, we can conclude that there is no Steve Keen model that predicted the recession and long stagnation that we've experienced. And in fact, there does not seem to be any "Post-Keynesian model" whose features closely resemble the financial crises and recessions that we see in the real world.

So did Steve Keen himself warn in the early or mid 2000s of the impending possibility of an economic collapse? He claims that he did warn of an "impending global recession" in 2005 (see also here). I cannot find any actual writings by Keen from 2005, but I will take him at his word, since if he had made this up, I'm sure that his fellow Aussies would quickly tar and feather him for it. (If you have links to the 2005 prediction, please post them in the comments section.)

So Steve Keen presumably did warn in 2005 that a global recession was coming. This means that, counting his prediction of an imminent Australian crash, he has a 50% success rate. Remember that, according to Bayes' Theorem, the predictions of someone with an unconditional 50% success rate (i.e., coin flips) convey no information.

But is that his true success rate? After all, how many earlier predictions of imminent global recession has Keen made, that did not materialize? According to this website, Keen was predicting an imminent global recession as early as 1995. It was 12 or 13 years before his prediction came true; this long time lag makes the prediction a bit less impressive, since someone who in 1933 predicted a global recession - which did come, 80 years later - would nevertheless now be seen as having been "wrong". Now, 12 years is better than 80 years, of course.

Anyway, so we see that Steve Keen's prediction of the global financial crisis was considerably less impressive than his bold claims would have us believe. He does not have a model that can predict bubbles, financial collapses, or recessions. His personal warnings of doom often don't seem to materialize for over a decade...if they materialize at all. If you trust Steve Keen as an economist or as a personal prognosticator based on his 2005 warnings of imminent global recession, you may be falling victim to the common behavioral phenomenon of overconfidence. (Not that I expect this fact to give pause to many of his...um...ardent followers. Remember that pundits get more fans by displaying self-confidence than by being right!)

Of course, all this is not to say that Keen should receive zero plaudits, respect, or commendation for his 2005 warning - or, for that matter, for his 1995 and 2007 warnings. There are plenty of people out there who said that finance has nothing to do with recessions. There are plenty of people out there - including some very prominent mainstream economists - who said that big recessions couldn't happen anymore. However right Keen did or didn't get it - and even if he made his predictions just by reading old Minsky books and nodding his head in vague agreement - those mainstream people got things farless right.

Anyway, a similar exercise can be applied to any other economist, model, or pundit whom you think may have "predicted the crisis". You will obtain varying results, though my bet is that few will be as spectacular as you might hope.

In conclusion: Predictions are hard, especially about the future. Sometimes people get things right because they understand how the world works, and sometimes they get things right by luck. The idea of a brilliant Cassandra-like sage, shouting in the wilderness while everyone ignores his or her trenchant warnings, is occasionally true, but not as much as we would like to think.


(Update: Naturally, a bunch of people have been asking me: "So, Noah, blah blah blah, but who do you think predicted the crisis the best?" Well, I don't know. Back in 2002 and 2003 I was reading Dean Baker talking about a housing bubble and bank failures. And I remember believing that, and as a result not being too surprised when the crisis came. I'm fairly sure Baker also predicted that the macroeconomic knock-on effects would be severe. Nor do I recall him predicting a bunch of other crises that never happened. So from my very limited set of knowledge, I'd guess that Baker did very well as a prognosticator. But to really know, I'd have to go back and check systematically. Note also that Dean is a quite humble guy and doesn't go around thumping his chest about having "called the crisis"...)

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