Forecast 2004: The Silver Lining Economy

For the last 10 days, I have been reviewing over 500 pages of forecasts, predictions, and data from a wide variety of sources. Some have been extremely bullish and others make you want to just slit your wrists and get it over with. But even ignoring the extremes, which are almost always universally wrong, never in all my years have I seen such a wide range of opinion and disagreement accompanied by an increased hardening of those opinions. With a few notable exceptions, there are a lot of analysts who seem more sure of their view of the future than they have been in the last few years.

I am one of the exceptions, but nevertheless I will plunge into the treacherous waters of writing my annual forecast issue. If I go into as much detail as I usually do on each topic, there is the potential for this e-letter to be much too long. Therefore I will try and take the larger picture, make specific and shorter predictions and save the details and the arguments for later issues. Let's begin by…