2021: The Year Ahead

In January 2020 our Annual Outlook was one of hundreds of prognostications coming out then that – by the strict measure of forecasting what would happen in the next twelve months – turned out to have a useful shelf life of about four weeks. That was the time it took for the initial report of a strange new pneumonia that was showing up in hospitals in Wuhan, China to metastasize into a global pandemic of a scale not seen since the virulent influenza that appeared near the end of the First World War. Suffice it to say that neither the stock market decline that took place in the first three weeks of March, nor the job loss numbers that showed up in full force in April, nor the second quarter GDP decline printed in July, nor any of the other eye-popping deviations from trendlines that characterized much of the year – none of these realities showed up in the forecasts of mainstream journals of research at the beginning of the year. Including ours.