The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday, Feb. 12, edition that economists from top banks predicted the latest jobs report would show 68,000 new jobs added, while on-line gamblers on Kalshi expected 54,000. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe reports that the actual report revealed the U.S. economy added 130,000 jobs, with both groups missing the mark by a wide margin. Over the five years that Kalshi has existed, its thousands of gamblers have proved as accurate on average at predicting certain economic indicators as the highly trained forecasters, a working paper published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found. The crowd is also pretty good at predicting interest-rate decisions from the Federal Reserve, and even better than the professionals at predicting the rate of inflation. "Gathering information from a large group can be an effective forecasting method," said Jonathan Wright, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University. Another working paper, by economists at the London Business School and Yale University, found that Polymarket bettors as a whole forecast corporate earnings more accurately than the analysts who are paid to advise investors on whether to buy or sell.