Doctor’s prescriptions

“THERE ARE two kinds of forecasters,” said the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. “Those who don’t know and those who don’t know they don’t know.” Asset management is a business built on the notion that the future is somewhat knowable, even if in large part it is not. So we must look for omens. Today’s “dishevelled” or “inchoate” borrower should not be expected to pay back its debts tomorrow, as The Economist warned in its editorial of March 28th 1868.