Foreign Policy magazine has an article showing the forecast chart below, which is from the US Energy Information Administration's (EIA) International Energy Outlook 2007. Obviously the EIA badly missed their oil price forecast - at least in the short term.
It would be easy to say that the EIA are lousy forecasters, but this is not the case. The Department of Energy and the EIA have world class energy and forecasting talent working for them. They also work with the best energy academics, analysts and forecasting firms. Despite all this talent (or maybe because of it), they missed their forecast badly.
More proof that forecasting is hard and no one can predict the future.
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