"Experts" blow their Black Friday predictions

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

The dismal retail sales figures are in for Black Friday and the news is . . . good?

Wait a minute, the news was supposed to be bad, awful, ghastly, dreadful, etc. Analysts, almost to the person, were predicting that retail sales would decline from last year's level, if not plummet. Some forecast economic calamity, because so much depends on consumer spending.

Not to pick on anyone in particular, but here are a few examples of pre-Black Friday conjectures:

• Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst with NPD Group, said "this could be the worst holiday [shopping season] ever."

• ABI Research analyst Michael Wolf said Black Friday could end with consumers spending less than usual.

• A Wall Street Journal headline predicted a "Bleak Friday for retailers."

But as I write this, the weekend sales figures are starting to trickle in and the sages look like they're turning out to be all wet. Chicago-based ShopperTrak RCT Corp. said sales not only didn't fall, but actually increased 3 percent over a year ago, to $10.6 billion. PayPal saw almost 34 percent more transactions and a 26 percent increase in sales online over last year's Black Friday. The National Retail Federation's 2008 Black Friday Weekend survey found shoppers spent an average of $372.57 over the weekend, a 7.2 percent increase over last year's $347.55. Fourteen percent more shoppers spent $41 billion, it said. In short, the analysts and many of my media colleagues who delight in amplifying any negative prediction—the worse, the louder—blew it. Too bad; maybe if they had been right, there would have been no crowd of idiots at a Wal-Mart store to trample an employee to death.

This wouldn't be worth writing about if the sages weren't so universally wrong, if we didn't give them so much weight and if so much of the economy didn't turn sour every time they opened their mouths. The fact is, despite their golden credentials, the initials after their names and affiliations with the high-end financial institutions, they don't know any more about the future than you or I. Yet, they and their grim prognostications appear as an endless parade on the business television network CNBC and on the financial pages. "The market hasn't bottomed out yet." "The recession will be deeper than anything we've seen since the Great Depression." "We're in for another three years of economic reversals."

"Baloney. Bushwa. How do you know?" I shout at the TV screen. They don't. Michael Lewis told us that from personal experience in his book, "Liar's Poker." He explains it again in Conde Nast's December Portfolio.com: "To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall."

He went on: "I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable."

I dare that his predictions then were just as good as the predictions we hear today. Lewis said this nonsense was unsustainable, yet here it is, more than 20 years later, and we continue to see the same kind of specious advice flowing out of Wall Street and the media. Upon this, Americans continue to make decisions on how much to spend and invest, and the more we listen, the worse the economy becomes.

When oil was hovering around $150 a barrel, the same folks guaranteed us that the price would go even higher and that high energy costs were a permanent condition that would fundamentally change our society. I'm not saying that that day won't come. But now that oil is about $50 a barrel, can't we be equally glad? Gasoline and home prices have dropped precipitously; that's bad for some, but great for others.

As the start of the Christmas shopping season tells us, there are bargains everywhere and, since when are low-priced homes, cars, electronics and other goods really horrible things? Can't we at least pretend that there's some good news to be heard?