Here's the DIX index updated for the December 2008 forecasts.
For an explanation of how this is calculated see here.
Things have improved a bit, but there's still some wild variances in forecasts for the cash rate, the biggest being a range of 2.75% to 4.75% for the Dec '09 rate.
I just stumbled upon the HousingPANIC blog. Now that the dire predictions that the blog focused on have come true the author has closed it down, but there's a ton of interesting stuff in there to look back on. Here's a couple of posts as a sampler:
A couple of months ago I speculated on the role played by the Queensland connection in the unexpected government guarantee handed out to banks, building societies and credit unions.
Today the AFR has a major story on "how Suncorp was pulled from the fire." References to Queensland Inc and the desire of the Queensland political milieu to keep Suncorp as a "proud regional brand" abound. It's well worth a read.
...or maybe not. The September update of the tipsters league table showed ANZ leading the pack, with the narrowest of leads over my team. The size of the rate cuts since that time (1% in October, 0.75% in November and another 1% in December) have sent the "root mean square error" mechanism into overdrive. As the formula is particularly hard on forecasts that are very wide of the mark (courtesy of the squaring process) the overall error ratings of all the tipsters has blown out. In September ANZ led with an error rating of 0.339%. The new leader is Westpac on 0.624%, although its worth noting that both the Average and No Change tipsters have snuck into the outright lead.
It's not hard to see why we've all gone backwards so fast, and ANZ in particular. It was only a few months ago, in June 08, that a majority of the tipsters we track were calling for the cash rate - then at 7.25% - to be hiked. ANZ were particularly aggressive, calling for two hikes to 7.75% by December '08. The current rate of 4.25% leaves them a mere 3.50% adrift, with some pretty clear implications for the RMSE error calculator.
