As I understand matters, last December the median private-sector forecast had the unemployment rate topping out at 9% in the second half of 2009. The incoming Obama administration simply adopted that forecast. At the time I thought that was a mistake: (I thought that was a mistake: I thought they should have made a bifurcated forecast with a "good case" 80th-percentile scenario and a "bad case" 20th-percentile scenario; they should then have stressed that in the bad case we would need a large stimulus indeed to prevent high unemployment, and that in the good case we could restrain inflation via monetary policy.) By combining standard estimates of the effects of the fiscal boost package with that forecast, Jared Bernstein, Christie Romer, Steve Braun, Alan Krueger, and company came up with the "unemployment tops out at 8%" projected path for the economy that they put to bed a couple of days after New Year's and released at 6 AM EST Saturday, January 10, 2009.

By the end of January, when the Obama fiscal boost bill started working its way through congress, the situation had deteriorated significantly: things got worse in December as Christmas sales fell significantly below even recent expectations, et cetera. And here the Obama administration made its second mistake. The executive branch of the U.S. government is geared to do budget updates in two cycles six months apart: a January cycle and a July cycle. By the end of January the work on budget forecasting for the January cycle was well-advanced using the forecast as the transition had made it in mid-December. To change the forecast in early or mid-February to reflect the way the situation had changed over year-end would have required that OMB tear up a lot of estimation work and do it over at a time when the people in the NEOB are already working twelve-hour days to cope with all the extra work associated with a change of administration. I thought that they should have (a) changed the forecast and (b) simply not done the extra budget work: that they should simply have put an asterisk on every page of the budget saying that these numbers use the outdated mid-December rather than the current forecast. (In fact, I think the administration Troika should decouple its forecasts from the budget process, update them monthly, release them, and yet still feed them into the budget process only twice a year.) But, I think largely for these bureaucratic process reasons, they did not update their forecast. So by the time the stimulus bill was passed everyone's expectations were already that the 8% unemployment peak was way overoptimistic...