I wrote a column in the May 12 issue that began:

“Suddenly last week, evidence started popping up that the housing crisis has hit bottom or soon will.”

Reading that seven months later makes me wince.

Now, I could argue that I was on solid ground in May because I was writing about how the number of home sales, not prices, in Los Angeles County had been increasing since February. Since that was, and remains, true, I wasn’t wrong, technically speaking.

Still, any argument like that is meek, considering how home prices here plunged and foreclosures zoomed after that column. I wish now I hadn’t written that column, especially that first line. The May 12 column goes down as my dumbest one of 2008.

Because this issue of the Business Journal has a year-in-review theme, it’s a good time for me to look back and see how I did. Actually, despite a few things I wrote months ago that make me squirm today, I had a pretty fair year.

For example, in early June, about a month before oil prices hit their peak of $146 a barrel, I wrote that there was no market-based reason for prices to be that high. “Oil today should cost about $40 or $50,” I opined then. “There’s little reason to think we won’t see those prices again, maybe before the end of this decade.”

That prediction seemed bold at the time, but of course, it turns out I was too timid. We only had to wait a few months to see prices that low.

An earlier prediction came true in 2008. In November 2006, I wrote that I couldn’t look at the then-new Superintendent David Brewer “without thinking ‘short termer.’

“I can’t see the guy hanging on to his new job as Los Angeles school superintendent for long,” I wrote then.

Well, he managed to hang on to his job for two years until he finally got dumped earlier this month. By bureaucratic standards, two years is not all that long. So, I consider that a fairly accurate prediction.

In the April 28 edition, I made another prediction about the-then upcoming election. I wrote that “the odds of Proposition 98 passing are about the same as Warren Buffett filing Form 1040EZ next tax season.” Indeed, Proposition 98, which would have limited local governments’ ability to use eminent domain, failed. (And I’ll go out on a limb right now and predict that Buffett still will file a really complicated tax return.)

The column that elicited the most anger in 2008 appeared in the Jan. 28 issue. I argued that the northernmost runway at Los Angeles International Airport should be moved further north toward the neighbors. The neighbors took issue with that, although their objections were reasoned. At least most were.

What did I like? Well, I kind of liked the one calling for Southern California to open up offshore oil drilling, and the one saying the Clean Trucks Program at the ports is bizarre and a mess, and the one defending Eli Broad for lending, not giving, his contemporary art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Actually, I don’t have a favorite.

What I like is the privilege of following the news in this great place and, once a week, getting a forum to comment on some of it. Even when I’m wrong.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at

[email protected].