Posted by David Bernstein:
Last Year's Predictions:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_12_28-2009_01_03.shtml#1230746229
Here are my 2008 predictions from last December:
(1)John McCain recovers to win the Republican nomination.
(2)Ron Paul does better than expected, and is one of the last three
candidates left in the race. He then runs a third party campaign,
drawing enough support from McCain, especially in the Mountain
States, to throw the race to the Democratic nominee.
(3) The U.S. will enter a recession in the third quarter of 2008
(4) which will also be the bottom of the housing market in nominal
(but not real) price terms.
(5) There will be a surprise Supreme Court vacancy.
I was spot on regarding number 1. Ron Paul did do better than expected
in both fundraising and enthusiasm, but his campaign faltered when he
finished a distant fifth in New Hampshire. From what I can tell, his
advisers deluded themselves into thinking he had a real chance to win
the nomination, and ran ads portraying him as a mainstream
conservative Republican, instead of the maverick libertarianish
anti-war candidate he was. It seems that the U.S. entered the
recession a bit earlier than I predicted. Not a bad prediction though,
given all the commentators who were predicting indefinite economic
growth. The housing bottom is not upon us yet, though housing does
seem to have bottomed in some Western markets. As for the Supreme
Court, that one was a throwaway--I had no reason to believe a vacancy
was imminent, but it was fun to speculate.
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