For one, regularly since the early 1990s, they've been predicting a Japan style credit crisis in China. That credit crisis never comes. They have had article after article talking about huge debt levels in the banks, etc. Nothing ever happens.
Well, it doesn't end with China. Around ~2010, once you scrub off the weasel word hedging, The Economist was predicting an imminent Eurozone breakup. It didn't predict the entirely predictable austerity recessions of 2012-2015. They were fairly bullish on Abenomics in Japan. They were very bullish on the future of BRICS around ~2008, out of which Brazil, Russia and South Africa are stagnating ever since.
Then, there's a very important tool in forming editorial slant - omitting reporting on inconvenient facts. Italy and Spain, the putatively sluggish laggards strangled by overly strict labor protection laws, have somehow overtaken the allegedly dynamic UK in labor productivity. Ireland, the purported economic wonder, have a household disposable income (a fairly good metric of material standards of living), lower than Italy and much lower than France. We keep hearing about the importance of education, competitiveness, R&D and ease of doing business, yet somehow Finland, which tops the rankings, is in year 14 of it's economic stagnation. Have you heard any of this from The Economist?
Median household disposable income, at PPP, after taxes and transfers is higher in Ireland than France, Italy, UK.
It is behind all those on a per capita basis, but that's the mean, not the median. I infer that this means Ireland has less income inequality.
(Ireland's economic wonder was growth from the 90s through to the early 2000s, largely via foreign direct investment, incentivized by low corporate tax rates. This structurally inflates GDP and makes the country look artificially good on international comparisons, but this is fairly well known, I believe. Irish economic commentary often uses GNI instead, and in fact the Irish central bank replaced GDP with GNI for its own measurements of the economy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_gross_national_income.)
When you get stuff wrong regularly for 3 decades it's kind of a substantial error in my opinion. They also kept criticizing China's economic policies and banking regulations saying that they needed to change how they did things to avoid doom. Open up their financial system, etc. The Economist representing the perspective of western financial power, it just had the appearance of being self-serving, or at least arrogant. They couldn't get out of their orthodoxy and at least investigate what was going on to correct their analysis.
Not like I am a big fan of the CCP, but give the devil its due from time to time, or at least figure out how the magic tricks work.
I would say that the economist represents what remains of the British imperial perspective, not western financial power if it diverges from that, and that it is pretty clear about that perspective. It wants to imagine that it is advising British industry on how to strike out and dominate.
Why are they printing these articles? I assume to change the future, warning of a financial crisis should lessen the effects as fewer people put money into the broken system. So maybe they averted the future by predicting it
What are the time scales for their predictions? I could easily imagine (say) today's US national debt taking 25-50 years to cause {insert some particular catastrophe here}.
