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2008 New Year Pundit Award Winners - Business

January 6th, 2009
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Quaich
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Click here for the list of nominees.

If politics was difficult to call in 2008, then business was a disaster for most pundits. If just one of our pundits had informed his or her readers to hide their money under the mattress, then they would have easily scooped the prize. Unfortunately, it seems that many in the financial press view their job as selling stocks so the only way to predict is up.

Leading the charge, as ever, is Jim Cramer writing for New York Magazine. Goldman to $300 he breathlessly writes (it ended the year at $89), Google to $1,000 (oops, it ended at $308) and oil will surge to $125 as we are running out (as it ends the year below $50, the Saudis must have found some more obviously). However, Cramer didn’t get it all wrong as foresaw Chrysler failing and then getting a bailout from Congress and he also predicted that the New York Times would drop below $10.

Also managing to stumble on a few forecast cow pats were Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha. The Fool thought that Yahoo would finally start to get it right (put the dunce cap back on for that one) and Seeking Alpha thought Facebook would IPO (I guess that will happen just after they figure out how to make money). Seeking Alpha regains some credibility in predicting that Ford would sell Land Rover and Jaguar to Tata.

While the Fool and Seeking Alpha may have stumbled on the cow pats, Business Week dived into the dung heap. While they predicted a crash for Web 2.0 and crude oil going through $100 they also predicted that airlines would consolidate, a back lash against the green movement, Bloomberg to run for president, Clinton to get the Democrat nomination, McCain to win and Apple to have a resounding success with Apple TV. Potentially a home run of inaccurate predictions.

However, the winner of the business category predicted at least one banking bankruptcy in 2008, that the Dow Jones would drop to 11,500 by the summer (although he failed to predict the subsequent collapse), that the credit default swap market would blow up and called bullshit on the theory that emerging markets were decoupled from the US economy. Congratulations to Jon Markman of MSN Money for an impressive performance. An inscribed quaich is on its way to you now.

UPDATE: The Seeking Alpha article was actually from Investor Trip. Seeking Alpha just aggregated it.

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