Foreign Policy is running a top ten list of the most wrong predictions for 2008. The list of people who made bad predictions is, um, predictable. Here ’tis.
- William Kristol. Really, Bill should be his own list of bad predictors. Everything he says is wrong. In this case, he predicted Hillary Clinton would easily win the Democratic nomination, which is actually one of the least stupid predictions he has made.
- Jim Cramer of CNBC’s “Mad Money” — yeah, the guy who yells perpetually — who advised someone not to take money out of Bear Stearns. “Bear Stearns is fine!”
- Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal, for pooh-poohing the risks of piracy to oil shipments.
- Donald Luskin, the pathetic little creep who has made a career of bashing Paul Krugman. In the Washington Post, Luskin wrote, “[A]nyone who says we’re in a recession, or heading into one—especially the worst one since the Great Depression—is making up his own private definition of ‘recession.’†The day after this appeared in print, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the financial crisis became official.
- The Economist, for praising elections in Kenya as a model of democracy that would set an example for Africa. The election was followed by a month of rioting and bloodshed that killed more than 800 people.
- BusinessWeek, for predicting Mayor Mike Bloomberg would become a third-party presidential candidate.
- Walter Wagner, who predicted that activating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would destroy humanity. It didn’t.
- Arjun Murti of Goldman Sachs, who predicted the price of oil would reach $150 – $200 a barrel. It didn’t, quite, but seems to me it came close.
- Charles “The Turtle” Krauthammer, for his Russia v. Georgia commentary.
- Henry Paulson. Need to ask why?
Any more bad predictions anyone can think of? Can you think of predictions somebody got right?
To be fair to #7, I think we can only say that the LHC hasn’t destroyed humanity yet. It had a wiring and coolant failure before it could actually start accelerating particles. It may yet destroy the world sometime in Spring 2009.
One of my favorite websites provides frequent updates on this question:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
How can someone make a list like this and leave out Dick Morris?…LOL….
biggerbox — is this the link you meant? 🙂
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
I was sort of hoping the Large Hadron Collider would cause time to reverse itself, so we’d get do-overs on the last eight years. Well, do-overs on the entire span of human civilization, really. I suppose a ludicrous hope isn’t the same as a bad prediction.
Looking back on 2008, it seems quite a bit of it took everyone by surprise. Hands down, Nov. 4 was my favorite day.
Yes, I predicted correctly that the housing bubble would pop big time especially after reading that two years ago 30 percent of mortgagees were not able to make their first payment.
I also predicted that the subsequent big ‘pop’ would create rack and ruin in the world of finance which, because its profits are one-half as big as the total profits of all of America’s non-financial firms, therefore too big to ‘fail,’ big-time government bail-out was foreordained.
(Because I’m no rocket scientist, it’s impossible to believe that the players on the Street were, according to them, taken completely by surprise by this disaster.)
Conservatives are notoriously bad predictors – I recall Rep. Pete Domenici (R-Asshole) predicting in 1993 that Bill Clinton’s tax increases for the wealthy would cause a substantial economic downturn. Conservatism is mental illness.
This guy’s been mostly right so far as investing goes. He was featured on one of the finance sites a couple weeks ago.
I think Krauthammer is a pompous fool, but do we need to get personal with the turtle pic?
Bruce, the “Turtle” nickname is old news. A bit insulting to the turtle, admittedly, since it’s a creature that understands its world.
I think it’s fair to comment on to the astonishing superciliousness of Krauthammer’s expression, which so accurately reflects his mind. I can’t take credit for it, but another comparison would be to one of those 18th Century foppish French aristocrats, the kind with a lacy hanky tucked up one brocade sleeve, and silver buckles on his satin shoes. Those guys didn’t understand their world, either.
I love scientists. We’ll know if the LHC will destroy all life on earth when they switch it on and all life does or does not end. Brilliant. That’s responsible science.
There were a bunch of guys at Los Alamos who’d calculated that the A-bomb would burn off the atmosphere. They lit it up anyway, I guess just to find out? Wow.
What about us stooges who predicted that Bush’s presidency would be a big flop? Boy, were we ever mistaken!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28408424/
Well, maybe I was wrong about Bush, but at least I can safely predict that we’re gonna have a huge success in Afghanistan in the coming years.