Good News for People Who Love Bad News

If you haven't lived hermetically the last year you couldn't have missed it: There is a crisis going on. Hardly anybody doubts it is worse than anything else since WWII. I was impressed though that the same experts that hadn't seen the crisis coming wanted to tell us how bad it's going to be. Starting in October, when the crisis was still a financial crisis, not yet an economical one in Germany (Germany's unemployment rate was the lowest in 16 years) following predictions have been made for the economical growth/ downturn in Germany:

15.10.2008, German government: 0.2 percent.
03.11.2008, EU commission: 0.0 percent.
06.11.2008, IWF: -0.8 percent.
25.11.2008, OECD: -0.9 percent.
05.12.2008, German federal bank: -0.8 percent.
05.12.2008, Deutsche Bank: -4 percent.
10.12.2008, RWI: -2 percent.
11.12.2008, IFO: -2.2 percent.
22.12.2008, IfW: - 2.7 percent.
19.01.2009, EU commission: -2.3 percent.
21.01.2009, German government: -2.25 percent.
28.01.2009, IWF: -2.5 percent.
23.02.2009, Deutsche Bank: -5 percent.

It is like a competition on who makes the worst prediction. I seriously wonder whom are all the bad news supposed to help. Or to say it with German comedian Dieter Nuhr:

Wenn man keine Ahnung hat, einfach mal Fresse halten.

(More polite translation: If you don't have a clue, shut up!)

But there have actually been some good news like unexpected increases in certain indexes based on people's expectations for the future. It's just that the economic institutes don't seem to trust their own surveys. And a report about Germany's export growth in 2008 reads: Export growth is lowest in 5 years! That's how a good news (growth!) is turned into a bad news. And I've always been thinking economy is so much about psychological effects. So shouldn't we interpret every ray of hope as a positive sign rather than turning it down!? I would really like to know if this is a special German mentality issue or if there is the same phenomenon in other parts of the world as well.