Brexit forecasters miss everything that matters to real voters

What if the warnings from the IMF, the OECD and the Bank of England are just going straight over the heads of ordinary people?

The International Monetary Fund says Brexit would either be pretty bad or very bad. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warns that there would be dire consequences not just for Britain, but for the rest of the world. The Bank of England says output would go down and inflation would go up. As far as George Osborne and David Cameron are concerned, the evidence could not be clearer. A vote to leave in the referendum would be a self-inflicted wound. They think they have won the economic argument, which is why the Brexiters are now focusing on immigration.

The remain camp's strategy could yet pay off, but its case is not nearly as watertight as Cameron and co think. For a start, it is worth mentioning that the forecasting record of the IMF, the OECD and the Bank of England is rotten. Not one of these three august bodies was capable of predicting the 2008 crash - the biggest economic crisis in living memory - even when it was staring them in the face.