Foreign Policy Magazine made their selections of the 10 worst predictions of 2008 and this turns out to be fun:
1. William “The Bloody” Kristol, who told the world two years ago that “Barack Obama would not beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary”.
2. Jim Cramer, who, in March 2008, was yelling at an emailer to hold on to his Bear Stearns stock. Six days later, the run was on at Bear Stearns and the rest is history. I’d bet that there is a fun study to be done in comparing Jim Cramer financial outcomes with those who don’t need to perform on camera.
3. Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal who pooh-poohed the risks to supertankers from terrorists or pirates in established shipping lanes. They went as far to say “…Third, only a naval power of the United States’ strength could seriously disrupt oil shipments.” Somewhere in the Gulf of Aden, a Somali pirate is laughing his ass off.
4. Donald Luskin (AKA The Stupidest Man Alive) for dismissing the fact that we were in a recession back in September. This man was an economic advisor to McCain.
5. The Economist magazine for praising the election process of Kenya as an example to the rest of the continent. A week later Kenya went into a month of bloodshed which left behind a poor powersharing agreement and a very weak government.
6. Business Week magazine for predicting a Presidential faceoff between Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton after Bloomberg got into the race as a self-funded Independent last February.
7. Walter Wagner, with his sky-is-falling prediction that the earth would be consumed by a black hole once the Large Hadron Collider got fired up. So the world’s largest particle accelerator gets fired up and still the only proximate black hole is right wing media.
8. Arjun Murti, a very famous Goldman Sachs oil analyst, who predicted $150 -$200 per gallon oil through 2010. This one, I think, gets a little slack — no one I know of saw the utter collapse of much of the commodities market coming.
9. Charles Krauthammer, estwhile WaPo and Fox News analyst for trying to get a rerun of the Russian communist empire building era, predicting that the Russians would be taking over Georgia and replacing its elected government back in August.
10. Henry Paulson, who, in November said:” “I believe the banking system has been stabilized. No one is asking themselves anymore, is there some major institution that might fail and that we would not be able to do anything about it.” This is, of course, not true — Citi needed to be bailed out a few weeks later.
This is the season for Top 10 Lists — nominate your own Really Bad Pundits from the national stage — or better yet — from right here in Delaware. If we get enough input, we’ll post a list of the Delaware ones…