The others could not see – or would not see the signs suggesting that things would go from bad to worse. Now, that businesses are going down, companies are posting losses, and the state is collecting less and less money, everybody is wondering: what good are economists if they did not warn before it was too late that the economic typhoon was coming?

Although economists throughout the world had the same data at their disposal, few were able to predict the most serious economic crisis in history, and Romania has been no exception. After several years of economic growth, only a few of them have ventured at the beginning of 2008 to say that things would take a turn for the worse. Why has the economic crisis slipped through the economists’ fingers?

The first explanation given by the analysts is simple and surprising: even those who would have wanted to say that things would worsen did not take the risk of sounding crazy among all the optimism that had become common among analysts in the last few years.

”There is a very interesting, though littleresearched phenomenon that occurs - group behaviour. If an analyst makes the same growth prediction as another three hundred analysts and they all turn out to be wrong, nobody blames him. But if he is alone in being wrong, everybody points a finger. Nobody takes the risk of straying from the crowd. It’s better to be wrong when the whole group is wrong than to be the only one who is right,” says economic analyst Aurelian Dochia, 59, a member of Board of Directors of BRD-SocGen bank and a former advisor to the World Bank, the EBRD and the OECD.

Another supporter of the ”herd mentality” theory is the chief economist of the BNR (National Bank of Romania). ”It’s not easy to stand out from the crowd as the only one with negative opinions, it takes courage and flawless arguments,” Valentin Lazea says. Another reason for the economists’ failure to predict the crisis has to do with the fact that most of them work for banks and have to abide by their employer’s communication policy. ”Many have had to keep silent because their job wouldn’t let them talk,” says Lazea. As a bank analyst, you cannot say there will be no more money on the market, credits will freeze and, even worse, that the bank you are working for is making transactions with financial instruments that are too difficult to be understood by everyone involved, which will lead to significant losses.