2010 Financial Forecasts: A 50% Chance of Being Right
by ilene - December 25th, 2009 5:41 pm
2010 Financial Forecasts: A 50% Chance of Being Right
By Barbara Kiviat, courtesy of TIME
It’s that time of year again: the prognosticators are out in full force. What will the year 2010 bring? To find out, all you have to do is turn on a computer or TV. You’ll quickly learn that next year we’re going to eat fried chicken and whoopie pies, view televised sports in 3-D, witness six to eight hurricanes in the Atlantic, watch as Ruth Bader Ginsburg retires from the Supreme Court and tune in to Sarah Palin’s new talk show.
Then there are the financial forecasts. No one loves a look at the year ahead more than the folks who manage money for a living (or who sell advice about how to manage it). That makes perfect sense. Unlike the people predicting, say, the rise of homemade beer, the professionals who get paid to grow portfolios really ought to have a handle on the future. What’s the best way to make money? Figure out what’s about to go up in value and buy a lot of it before anyone else catches on.
So what are the sages saying now that 2010 is just around the corner? Plenty. Next year we’ll see oil hit $90 a barrel (per Goldman Sachs), unemployment peak at 10.5% (Fitch Ratings), the value of the dollar with respect to the euro and yen hit bottom (Deutsche Bank), 10-year Treasuries yield more than 4% (Bank of America Merrill Lynch) and small-cap value stocks outperform all other categories (Richard Bernstein Capital Management). As for the stock market more broadly? Strategists at UBS expect gains well into the double-digits. The CEO of PIMCO sees a 10% drop.
Wait a second. Will the stock market go up or down? That major discrepancy raises an important point. Making predictions a year out is a tricky — and unreliable — business.
A good illustration of that: right now there are two main schools of thought on the direction the economy will take in 2010, and they couldn’t be more dissimilar. J.P Morgan Chase’s chief U.S. equity strategist Thomas Lee is an advocate of the more optimistic outlook. He sees the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates low, credit rushing back in to households and small businesses, consumer demand taking off, employment rebounding and the S&P 500 rising 18%.