"That forecast just doesn't seem realistic," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, "and I don't think it helps the Fed's credibility to make these sorts of forecasts right now".
The numbers are based on data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Remember, these sorts of forecasts are almost always wrong.
The ultimate aim being to help people avoid having to fall back on their overdraft as "an expensive form of credit", says co-founder Jason Wilk, describing it as a sort of "weather forecast" for money management.
This sort of amazing forecasting is why we still read Nostradamus today, despite the wide availability of authentic, federally registered psychics.
I think we have sort of a similar forecast for tomorrow.
"There are all sorts of potential forecasts for M2M growth over the next 10 years or so, and the only thing they have in common is that they all see huge growth," he said.
His archive at BU now contains some 90,000 papers; his family sued to remove them, but failed.This sort of risky long-distance forecasting had not been part of Mr Gotlieb's brief when he was plucked, from teaching history at Yale, to run BU's special collections in 1963.
This is the sort of question that the FiveThirtyEight forecast is designed to address.
