Are Bankers Successful in Forecasting the Direction of Credit Volume and Interest rates?

The aim of this study is to compare directional expectations of credit volume and interest rate of the banking sector with realized observations and to test whether bankers are successful in forecasting the direction of credit volume and interest rates. Using data from the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency’s Survey on expectations of bank managers, it is observed that the quantified expectations capture the movement of the direction of the credit volume and interest rates. Directional accuracy tests reveal that for some survey questions, the hypothesis on the independency of the direction of predicted change and the actual change cannot be rejected whereas for others the independency hypothesis is rejected. On the other hand, the analyses indicate that the success of forecasts does not differ when c redit volumes/interest rates rise or fall.