I don’t usually do the “forecasting” thing, but Jim Cramer is such a tireless provocateur that I thought repeating his ten predictions for 2005 from NY magazine would be interesting to readers. Check predictions #5 and #7 for typically Cramer-ian examples:
1. The colossus of Wal-Mart, the greatest retailer known to man, will stumble badly.
2. North America will experience a new oil rush.
3. Fresh water will become, after oil, the next great growth commodity.
4. Despite Fed hikes that will bring the return on cash up to 4 percent, housing will stay hot.
5. Merck will be transformed into a victims’ trust.
6. After a series of suicide car bombings in this country, the attorney general will authorize a national I.D. card.
7. Oil will stay high, forcing every airline company out of business save JetBlue and Southwest.
8. The president will ram Social Security “reform” through Congress by getting brokerage houses to lobby for the change.
9. The market’s love affair with the Internet and profitable growth will take a new form.
10. The Chicago Merc will buy the New York Stock Exchange and merge it with the NASDAQ to create one giant seamless market based in Chicago.
ObDisclosure, while Jim aren’t I aren’t what you would call drinking buddies, we do e-chat now and then, and I am a fan.
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comments:
1. agree on walmart. p.s. costco sells for less yet has unionized employees…makes you wonder.
2. huh? the timespan from discovery to extraction is in decades. if new oil is to be extracted in 2005 then we would have already been discussing the source and its potential for some time. even in ANWAR the forecast for extraction is years out, and this with much research already done.
3. agreed, although this is not a secret. my feeling is that water issues will kill southwestern growth at some point. californians have had cheap ample water for so long that they don’t know how to cope otherwise.
4. agreed, markets are slower to move than people think. but people are going to get burned badly long term on many real estate transactions.
5. not too sure on merck, the biotech industry is the #1 lobbying group now, they will buy some sort of permission to continue killing people, just like tobacco.
6. two words: OPERATION NORTHWOODS. look it up! of course a national ID is coming, but also for another reason – the trump state intentions of curbing illegal immigration. the states hate illegal immigration (costs born mostly by states) but the feds love it (fresh political meat, good for their business buddies). the feds will win this war by trumping all IDs with a national ID which will be nearly freely available to illegal immigrants, who will become pseudo-citizens.
7. oil will stay high, and SUVs will be flooding the classifieds at cut rate prices. as for the airlines – to hell with them and their employees, they’ve got it coming.
8. as a “youngster” (under 35) i actually welcome some private accounts. baby boomers have raided our wealth for too long. frankly at this point maybe some boomers should starve…they’ll find out at some point you can’t eat a rolex.
9. cramer’s been saying this every year as long as i can remember.
10. no, and chicago will continue to be irrelevant as a city.
Water Wars: The Coming Conflicts over Fresh Water
Paul Kedrosky over at Infectious Greed has a post that reiterates the 2005 predictions of Jim Cramer via NY Magazine.
I searched back for this article because I saw today that Jim Cramer gave a strong recomendation to buy Merck today 7/24/06. I happened to buy Merck just when he was recommending selling it, and did pretty well. I don’t know the future, and obviously neither does he, but I think it is funny that he can issue a prediction today about a company’s performance without disclosing that his last prediction about the same company was quite wrong.