In a nice post, Tim Harford explains why it would be desirable for economic pundits or forecasters to place bets based on their punditry and forecasting, citing a recent £1000 wager between Jonathan Portes and Andrew Lilico. It would put a premium on precision, and it would incentivise the forecaster to make the best forecast possible, not simply one that is sexy or dramatic, and grabs the headlines. As forecast consumers, the rest of us, worried about whether to get a fixed or floating rate mortgage, buy a car or not, would have forecasts that were more useful. In fact, my last post covered a recent example. We can view Mark Carney as a 'pundit'. And his recent remarks speculating about the timing of the next interest rate rise as a forecast. Wouldn't it be better if the BoE took bets that the forecasts these words were presumably based on were right?