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ORIGINAL: Real_Trouble

I would suggest real experts are people who:

1 - Accurately predicted things beforehand, and more so, had sound reasons and methods for making those predictions (as in, it wasn't just luck)

2 - Have solutions based on the same sort of fundamental knowledge that led them to make the predictions in the first place (some predictors don't know how to solve the problems they identify)

The trick is to find people who were right about what was going on before it was popular to be right about what was going on; I would suggest Robert Shiller, Nouriel Roubini, and Paul Volcker as three who clearly saw what was coming before it came.

There's no shortcut to being a real expert, though.  It takes a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, and more so, they are probably impossible for someone not reasonably well schooled in the topic to identify, unfortunately.

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With regards to CL`s question, many experts are only seen as such, all the time things run in their favour. Monetary policy makers were seen as being brilliant, until the bubble burst. Maybe the real experts were the one predicting the current situtation long beofre it happened. Alan Greenspan was critized for keeping interest rates too low as far back as 2004.

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ORIGINAL: Politesub53

Lorr thanks for the interesting post above. This brings me to something I have always wondered. Do the moneymen running every Country just act with a view on how long they will be in power ? Do any of them ever take a long term view of how this will affect future generations, or is that impossible to do ?