It was nice to see a sub 500,000 jobless claims number to end the year after an ugly November and December. However, should note that the fine print is not as good because this number was completely dominated by seasonal adjustments. The actual unadjusted number of 718,468 was actually higher than last week’s actual unadjusted 716,576.

Trolling the web today as is my wont, I happened across an interesting article about the Austrian finance company Immofinanz. It seems that Immofinanz got caught up in the Eastern European property market. Unfortunately, its investments have not worked out and it was forced to report a half-year loss of 1.85 billion euros. Is Immofinanz a canary in the coalmine for Eurozone financial services exposure to Eastern Europe? I certainly believe so as I indicated in my ten predictions for 2009.

It may sound counter-intuitive to loosen credit standards when we are on the cusp of major job losses and bankruptcies. But, this is exactly what the newly minted bank GMAC is going to do with its free money from the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program).

I caught a good article in today’s Guardian about the British Pound. The question is: how weak will Sterling get? My answer is below 1-to-1 with the Euro. But before I tell you why, let me interject a blurb from the article.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Index for U.S. housing came out today. It was a pretty nasty little report. It showed a clear acceleration in home price declines for the month of October, the latest month for which data is available. In the Composite-10, prices are a full 18.6% lower than they were last October. While I have believed the pace of house price declines was slowing, this report pours cold water on that thesis. The report also suggests that house prices will be a major concern for the incoming Obama Administration.

In my most recent post, I gave a fairly comprehensive retrospective of the year that was. Near the end of that post, I listed a number of posts I wrote in Octobr and November which point to how I see 2009 shaping up. Let me give you a more direct assessment here. I will finish it off with my top ten predictions for 2009.

This is the time of year when everyone tends to look back and sum up the year in one way or another. I have been doing much of the same.

In keeping with that theme, I have taken a good look through my nearly 1400 posts to get a better sense of what I got right and what I got wrong and how knowing that can help me going forward. Call it an exercise in intellectual honesty. This exercise has given me a good understanding of where things went wrong in the past year and why.

It may also give me some thoughts as to where we need to go in 2009. Let me share a little of what I learned with you. This is a long but thoughtful post, so take a few minutes. It should be worth it.

On the whole my predictive powers were working pretty well this year. But, I made a few lousy calls and some controversial ones along the way. Below is my view of how the year went, on some of those calls and links to the relevant posts. At the end, I’ll wrap it up with a few thoughts about where that leaves my thinking for 2009.

I want to make a brief statement about analysis, prognostications and this global recession. When I began this site nine months ago, my focus was clearly on the downside scenario. Now, while I did believe policy makers were underestimating the threat of economic calamity, I must admit that I was optimistic about the potential outcomes. And I am still optimistic today that we can overcome the major hurdles we face. However, we must always prepare for the worst, even while we hope for the best. This is why I am still focused on the downside scenario — because I believe that complacency is still much too high regarding how quickly things could unravel.

On Wednesday morning the U.S. Department of Labor released the latest report on claims for unemployment insurance. The week to December 20th saw 586,000 new claims for unemployment insurance on a seasonally-adjusted basis, which is a 26-year high. The actual number was even higher at 715,496. While these are extremely high numbers, we have to wait until the holiday season is over before drawing any definitive conclusion because this time of year is notorious for distortions from the effects of seasonality.

Hello again. I hope you all had a good few days away. I will keep posting fairly light today as we have one day left until the weekend. This is a brief housekeeping post. I wanted to alert you to a number of changes we have made to the website.