In August, China finally surpassed Japan to become the world's second-largest economy.
But wait ... didn't that already happen? We often hear in debates and in the news that China is the world's second-largest economy, behind only the US and catching up fast. The expectation was treated as history; the forecast a certain fact.
It does seem odd now in retrospect that what we have been assuming for the past two years only happened last month. What is even odder is that we have been making decisions based on this assertion.
Why should any of this matter?
It may seem harmless now that we know the forecast is true. However, at the time it wasn't - it was merely an expectation. And the future is always uncertain.
China might have seemed to be surpassing Japan last year, but the financial crises might just as well have brought exports down so badly that our country would undergo a recession. That 'might' is significant enough for us to draw the line between fact and forecast.
