This magazine has earned credibility over the years for its ability to call trends in finance ahead of the pack. But rarely did II get it quite so wrong as we did with “The Lean Decade,” January 1990’s effort to peer into the future. “Clearly, it will be a lot tougher to make money in the 1990s,” we wrote. The cover photo featured a champagne bottle releasing its very last drop of bubbly.
To be fair, the magazine’s crystal ball issue got some of the ’90s right. “Overcapacity bred of over expansion will lead to consolidation. There will be far fewer banks, money management firms and insurance companies by the end of this decade than there are today; the survivors will be bigger and better capitalized,” we accurately predicted. And making money on Wall Street in the early ’90s was brutal. But the decade closed as one of the fattest in history — technology boomed, global trading expanded, inflation fell, corporate earnings soared and stock markets surged. By 1999 the new economy made the excesses of the ’80s look modest in comparison. Fortunately, we redeemed ourselves with a February 1999 story that predicted several tech-related market events, including Nasdaq’s IPO.
