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What We Got Right and Wrong About 2021

We made good calls on crypto and Justin Bieber, bad ones on Peloton and unions.

Photo illustration: 731: Photos: Bloomberg; Getty Images; Paramount Pictures; Peloton

Bloomberg Businessweek

• The success of Cathie Wood’s ARK funds seemed to herald a boom for actively managed exchange-traded funds. But Wood’s flagship ARK innovation ETF peaked in February and other active funds have yet to generate much investor interest.

• We were correct when we said that Beijing’s plan to tilt the economy toward consumers wasn’t going to be easy to achieve: China’s consumer spending moved back into positive territory in 2021, but it still fell short of pre-pandemic growth rates, reflecting weak wage growth, consumer caution about the coronavirus, and local lockdowns.

Access to Covid vaccinations in most neighborhoods in the U.S. soared as shots were rolled out in CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, and grocery stores.

• A story about investors’ anxiety over high stock prices quoted a financial planner urging readers not to base financial plans on getting 30% returns. Always a good call—but the S&P 500 still came close, with a 29% total return.

• American workers and unions didn’t get as much of a lift from Biden’s first year in office as they might have anticipated. The plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour was shelved in the face of opposition from Republicans and a few Democrats, and a sweeping policy to reorient the federal contracting process to favor unionized bidders never materialized.

• We said former Trump administration officials had been marked with a “scarlet T” that would hamper their job prospects. Trump allies have by and large not found spots in the D.C. establishment or corporate world, with many joining either the right-wing media or new Trump-aligned think tanks and advocacy groups such as the America First Policy Institute.

looked like a big pandemic winner as people stuck at home flocked to the company’s bikes. But the reopenings of some workplaces and many gyms hit Peloton hard. Its stock fell about 65% in the past year.

• We put the over/under for the opening weekend domestic gross of Top Gun 2: Maverick$18.5 million. Its release date has been pushed back to May 27, 2022.

• After China forced Ant Group to cancel its initial public offering, we foresaw a further crackdown on the country’s homegrown tech companies. Since then, companies from DiDi GroupTencent have felt regulatory heat.

We said that as people began to return to offices, “Zoom could lose many of its newer and less natural users.” Well, the reversion to the workplace status quo ante didn’t quite happen, and continued to grow, albeit at a much slower pace. Its third-quarter profits and revenue were strong. Still, investors have punished it for adding users more slowly than they’d expected, and its share price is down about 60% from its peak in February.

• We said there was a 69% chance Justin Bieber would not begin his tour on July 2 as planned. It never happened. The Biebs is now scheduled to hit the road on Feb. 18.

• We predicted that fear of missing out would send Wall Street pros piling into crypto, which might power some higher returns for a while but would do nothing to curb the currencies’ volatility.

• Oh, and the number of times we addressed the risk of higher inflation: 0

Read next: 50 Company Stocks to Watch in 2022

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 14.01.2022

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