A group of Britain's finest economists have this week been explaining to Her Majesty why they failed to predict the credit crunch. They are responding to a question raised by the Queen during a visit last November to the LSE, where she asked why the top academics failed to see the credit crunch coming.

Professors from London School of Economics and Queen Mary signed the letter and in it they admit that they failed to foresee the 'timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off."

What happened was as follows: Economists, as Winston Churchill pointed out, are two handed creatures and unfortunately they use both hands: They are very comfortable saying, 'on the one hand, this might happen and on the other hand that might happen'. But they rarely are inclined to say that something definitely will happen - unless they are trying to sell an article to a newspaper or a thesis to a bunch of academics.

In the case of the credit bubble they were even less inclined to make negative (even if accurate) judgements as everyone was having such a hell of a party and they were loathe to be 'Cassandras.' In the letter to the Queen this is clearly what they must mean when they refer to a "failure of the collective imagination of many bright people."

It is important to remember that economists are people who extrapolate conclusions from hard data, and if the data is so damned hard that it does not yield any obvious predictions then what can these economists do? Make it up? Heaven forbid.

And whilst we might view any economist that is incapable of imagining one of the worst crashes in history to be as useful as a perforated condom, we should remember that they were not the only ones. They are joined by most of the developed world's governments, the world's top bankers, financiers, CEOs of leading multinationals, broadsheet columnists, academics and other assorted professionals and corporate bosses.

And we would not want Her Majesty the Queen to think that any of that lot were about as useful as perforated condoms...

Would we?