Banker, Lawyer Had Winning Predictions for 2006
Believe your banker. Listen to the junior associate at your law firm. And read your newspaper with a skeptical eye.</br></br>These seem to be some lessons of the 2006 Local Economy Challenge. Meet the person who most accurately predicted how the Washington region would fare last year: Kathleen Walsh Carr, the president of Cardinal Bank Washington. And the least accurate? We'll get to that in a minute.</br></br>Carr correctly guessed that the value of goods and services produced in the Washington area would rise by 4 percent. She reckoned that the region would add 70,000 jobs; the number was 67,600. She figured that local stocks would rise 10 percent; they rose 9.3 percent.</br></br>Those were among the nine economic indicators that she predicted, on average, better than any other participant. "I am just stunned that I won," said Carr. "I wasn't throwing darts at a board, but almost."</br></br>Actually, she was being modest. Carr has spent 33 years as a banker, all in her native Washington. She said she based her predictions mostly on conversations with friends and clients, from whom she detected a general feeling of confidence. "It wasn't scientific so much as it was information gleaned from other people," she said. It didn't hurt that, as a member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, she routinely reviews its extensive economic research.