The staff of Fortune recently assembled its predictions for 2017. Here’s one of our forecasts.
On target: We predicted correctly that slow growth and caution about the political climate would mean the Fed would raise rates only once in the past 12 months. We called an ongoing real estate boom (some would say bubble) in China. We predicted that new endorsement deals would put Serena Williams atop the female athlete earnings list. And we read the political tea leaves to predict that Sen. Tim Kaine would become Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
In the ballpark: We warned that an email hack linked to foreign intelligence agencies would make news. (Hello, John Podesta.) And we predicted that hoverboards would be a hot item—roughly 3 million have been sold in the U.S.—but we missed that many would be so hot they’d catch fire.
Off the mark: Ask us about the “Rubio/Haley 2016” T-shirts gathering dust in our garage. Like most of the media, we didn’t see Trumpism coming. We were also overoptimistic about tech, predicting a 22% surge for Apple shares (instead they fell) and a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. (Still a Star Wars–only technology, alas.)
