T he Financial Times team of crack pundits is back, once again, to risk its professional reputation on bold predictions of some known unknowns. Last year, Roula Khalaf correctly saw that Iran would not get the bomb and Gideon Rachman noted that Pervez Musharraf had a "better than even" chance of not lasting the year as Pakistani president. Ed Crooks deserves a barrel or two for predicting that the oil price would break $100 a barrel and end the year below that mark.

Gillian Tett will receive a bonus - probably paid in toxic assets - for correctly seeing that the financial crisis could spread, creating a "second chapter" in the credit crunch. The depth of the sector's problems, however, knocked others off course. Krishna Guha's prediction that the US would not fall into recession if it could avoid any large shocks might well have been right. But who knows?