LONDON -- These are worrying times for the world economy, and perhaps even more so for the armies of highly paid analysts who failed to predict the current slump in world stock markets.
A few wiser heads have been saying for a year or more that the whole structure of stock prices was unsound -- that stock prices in relation to prospective corporate earnings (the famous P/E ratio) were far too high. But they were in a tiny minority compared with the experts from big banks who were forecasting future stock levels that now look like pure fantasy.
Yet for all the pessimism in the financial community -- the dire warnings about the value of pensions, the forecast of another 1929 crash and other blood-curdling predictions -- the general public, at least in Britain, has seemed curiously unmoved by these dramas.