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 Biggest Surprise of 2009: Other than the wonder of watching Stanford smoke both USC and Oregon in consecutive games in football, the biggest surprise of 2009 was how long the recovery has taken, and how difficult it's been to regain economic traction. This is not 1929. We are in the information age. In the Great Depression, Ma and Pa Kettle in northeast Arkansas could not tap into CNN.com (let alone TMZ.com) to find out what was really happening at the banks and in the underlying financial structure of the country. All they knew was that banks were collapsing and they needed to get their money out ASAP and bury it in the backyard. It was years before the news got to them that the banking system had been stabilized and they could re-inject their savings into the economy. Not so today. All of us could see on a real-time basis the reaction of the government and the banks and the financial infrastructure to the crisis, and whether you agreed politically or not, there was little doubt that heroic efforts were being made to ensure the stability of the system. This created confidence, no matter how tenuous, and has allowed money and credit to flow, albeit cautiously, on a time scale that is orders of magnitude faster than in the Great Depression. My surprise is that the underlying structural weakness has been sufficient to keep the recovery modest. The Dow is back, but unemployment lingers at very high rates. My hope is that confidence will return more robustly in 2010 and that we will roar out of this crisis into a fantastic new growth economy.
Best Predictions for 2010: Okay, here we go:
Super Bowl winner: Minnesota Vikings (Brett Favre MVP, then retires…)
NBA Championship: Who cares – I live in Seattle…
Washington finish in NCAA tournament: Lose in 2nd round in an upset
World Series champion: Boston Red Sox. Really.
World Cup champion: Brazil (U.S. out in first round again…rats)
Tiger Woods tournaments played: 4 (majors only…working on a divorce settlement otherwise)
Dow year end: 11,990
Favre year end: Un-retires, now hates Vikings for limiting his options, joins Vikings biggest NFC North rival to spite them…Packers
Apple new product: iSee, contact lens-like monitors that are not touch screens but instead are “look” screens activated by eye movements and wirelessly control CPU’s the size of iPhones that you carry…or maybe not
Seattle Genetics: Huge positive news in multiple trials, stock doubles at a minimum
Zymogenetics: Not quite as much good news…
Mayor McGinn: Re-stripes every arterial route in Seattle for bike lanes. Violence ensues between bikers and commuters not seen since WHO riots
OVP: We make some investments in really cool new ideas, we get some fantastic exits, and we continue to be one of the best partnerships in which to work.
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