Opinion | The Year in Apple Watches, A.I., Anarcho-Capitalists and Anticapitalists

We covered a lot of ground together in 2023. In this issue of the newsletter I’ll update you on some topics I wrote about this year. A lot of things didn’t turn out quite as I’d imagined. Some did.

Nobody reads this newsletter to get rich by learning what’s about to happen in the economy and markets. For that, you’d want to put your money with Hindsight Capital, the “unfortunately nonexistent hedge fund” invented by the journalist John Authers that gets every call right by investing in hindsight.

Still, I did go out on a limb now and then, prognosticating on topics ranging from the risk of recession to the possibility of a strike at UPS to the question of whether Apple would yank its smart watches off the market. Here’s a look at how a few calls turned out.

In January I wrote that the leftist president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had “no easy choices” after thousands of supporters of his rightist opponent broke into government buildings in the capital, Brasília, to protest what they falsely believed was a stolen election. It’s been a better year for Lula than I expected. Inflation has fallen and his polls are good. This month, Brazil’s Congress backed his tax reform plan. But it defied him by making it harder for Indigenous tribes to stop deforestation.

In February, in a newsletter about regulation of artificial intelligence, I wrote that OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, deserved credit for acknowledging that the software could generate harmful outputs “and what’s more, trying to do something about it.” I didn’t realize then that the nonprofit’s board was deeply divided over how quickly to roll out advances in A.I. — as the world discovered in November.

In March I wrote that the pause on student loan payments had become a political trap, and that borrowers would react badly if the Supreme Court invalidated the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out $400 billion of the debt. That turned out to be correct. The court rejected the Biden plan, and about nine million of the 22 million borrowers who were supposed to resume payments in October hadn’t paid anything by mid-November, the Education Department announced. What I hadn’t counted on was that the Biden administration would find new ways to forgive student loans or ease repayments.