This article was originally posted on The Economic Sociology and Political Economy community blog.

Since the emergence of modern financial markets, financial analysts have played a critical role in producing visions of “the economy” and its future development. As experts, they analyze market developments and predict future scenarios that enable other financial market participants to speculate on the rise or fall of stock prices, the success or failure of particular investment products, and the growth or decline of entire national economies. The substance of the analysts’ valuation and forecasting practices is, however, heavily disputed among economists. In neoclassical economic theory, the assumption that markets are informationally efficient has challenged the legitimacy of the work of financial analysts since the establishment of the efficient market hypothesis as a central paradigm in the mid 1960s. Alternative schools of thoughts – such as new institutional or behavioral economics – have criticized this paradigm. However, they have also argued that the degree of uncertainty, which is inherent to financial markets, makes prediction impossible.Read More »