Better Luck Next Year

Pundits make bold predictions at their own risk. The commentators and leaders below offered confident forecasts about politics, war, the economy and even the end of humanity itself that completely missed the mark.

1. Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton's to lose, but it took a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the Iowa caucuses. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that "there will be no Clinton Restoration." This second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, "President Mike Huckabee?" The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

2. We hope Peter got a second opinion. Just days after the volatile CNBC host made this emphatic pronouncement, Bear Stearns faced the modern equivalent of an old-fashioned bank run. Amid widespread speculation on Wall Street about the bank's massive exposure to subprime mortgages, Bear's shares lost 90 percent of their value, and the investment bank was sold for $2 a share to JPMorgan Chase, with a last-minute assist from the Federal Reserve.

3. On Nov. 15, 2008, a group of Somali pirates hijacked a Saudi oil tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude in the Indian Ocean -- part of a rash of daring attacks by the bandits, primarily in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates have hijacked more than 50 ships this year in the waterway, up from only 13 in all of last year, according to the Piracy Reporting Center. But the Gulf of Aden, through which nearly 4 percent of the world's oil demand passes every day, was not on the list of strategic "chokepoints" where oil shipments might be disrupted that Blair and Lieberthal included in their essay, "Smooth Sailing: The World's Shipping Lanes Are Safe." We hope Blair will show a bit more foresight if, as expected, he becomes President-elect Barack Obama's director of national intelligence.

4. Outlook wasn't immune to the temptation of excessive confidence, either. The day after this section ran Luskin's article "Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line," Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and the rest is history. Liberal bloggers had long dubbed the Trend Macrolytics chief investment officer and informal adviser to Sen. John McCain "the Stupidest Man Alive."

5. The week before Kenya's vote, the erudite British newsweekly praised the quality of the country's democracy. If only. The ensuing election was rife with examples of voter fraud and ballot-stuffing, followed by a month of rioting and ethnic bloodshed that left more than 800 dead and 200,000 displaced. The carnage ended in a messy power-sharing agreement between President Mwai Kibaki and his challenger, Raila Odinga, leaving the country deeply divided and its government delegitimized.

6. No part of this prediction from BusinessWeek's "Ten Likely Events in 2008" panned out. After weeks of hints and press leaks, Bloomberg declared he would stay out of the race, saying that Obama and McCain offered admirably "independent leadership." After overturning New York's term-limits law, Bloomberg seems likely to run for a third term as mayor instead.

7. Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century's version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world's largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC hasn't made it through all of the experiments that Wagner was worried about, but so far, we're still here.

8. The vaunted predictive powers of Murti, dubbed the "oracle of oil" in a glowing New York Times profile, failed this time. Oil prices peaked in July at about $147 a barrel before beginning a long decline. Thanks to a decrease in demand because of the global recession, prices are now nearing the $40 mark, and some experts even see $25 as a possibility next year.

9. The Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor immediately followed this inaccurate forecast (Russia eventually agreed to a cease-fire and pulled out its troops several weeks later, leaving Mikheil Saakashvili's government in place) by predicting that Ukraine would be next on Russia's hit list and suggesting that the United States station troops there. As for Saakashvili, his approval rating was at 76 percent in September.

10. The Treasury secretary entered November with a $700 billion mandate to scoop up bad assets from troubled banks. By mid-month, he had already discharged $300 billion, albeit mostly via the kind of direct-equity stakes he had rejected earlier. Unfortunately for Paulson, shortly after his vote of confidence, Citigroup's stock price plunged below $5 for the first time in 14 years. Will more financial institutions need bailouts in 2009? We're not making any predictions.