This Seattle Times report on the monorail's revision of its revenue forecast (via Shark Blog, requires registration), reminds me of something my grandfather wrote about "made to order finance." He points out that it is easy for any venture to show a profit or meet a budget if it uses unrealistic projections. In my experience, you don't even have to distort the numbers all that much, just a few percent here or there, to make a losing scenario appear to be a winning one. This is why the best money managers are careful and conservative (in the non-political sense) -- they know that wishing doesn't make something so. The monorail authority owes Seattle a projection based on those principles, and it will be much better for them to give us bad news now while they have the city's goodwill than later when they might have lost it through revenue shortfalls.
Posted by awm at December 22, 2003 10:13 AM