Opinion

I tended to be a lot more optimistic than most commentators last year and were reasonably happy that we were pretty close to the mark. In a nutshell, we thought the Australian economy would hold up pretty well against the rest of the world, that our unemployment rate would stay low (although underemployment would rise substantially), that residential property prices would stall rather than plunge and the China commodity boom would drive the sharemarket.

But, in the end, no-one really has any idea what’s going happen in the next 12 months. We can all have a “best guess” stab at it but that’s all it is… a best guess.