S0 what a horrible year that was. A full-blown credit crunch, of the kind I have never witnessed before, alongside a nasty commodity-price shock. One was the worst since the 1930s, the other the biggest since the 1970s.

The commodity shock is over but the credit crunch is still very much with us. Economists, unsurprisingly, found it a tough year to predict. That was partly because of the nature of the crunch itself.

At the start of this year we had seen two phases of the crisis, the initial August-September 2007 turbulence in the markets that did for Northern Rock and a secondary shock in December, as banks scrambled for liquidity.

But it was reasonable to think that markets would gradually thaw during 2008. That was the view of central banks and finance ministers when they gathered for the IMF’s autumn 2007 annual meetings.

Instead, things turned out gloomier than even the pessimists expected. A third phase of dislocation in the money markets came in March, claiming the scalp of Bear Stearns, and worse was to come six months later with the failure of Lehman Brothers. It was in March that the real squeeze on lending started to hit Britain’s economy.

It did not necessarily have to be like this. There were a number of ways the crisis could have played out. The route it ended up taking was close to the worst.

Forecasters always find it difficult to predict turning points in economic activity but there were other reasons why 2008 was an unusually hard year to pin down. Imagine, a year ago, somebody had told you the oil price would have collapsed from $100 to $40 a barrel, the economy would be in recession, Bank rate would be just 2% and then invited you to guess at Britain’s inflation rate in those circumstances. I would have said 1%, not the 4% (though falling) we have at present.

So any economist getting it right during 2008 would have required mystical powers of prediction. Small wonder, as I look at my annual forecasting league table, most got it wrong.

A word about the rules of engagement. Economic data get revised all the time and just before Christmas we had new figures for gross domestic product and the balance of payments; the latter suggesting that the current-account deficit is coming down sharply.

But there has to be a cut-off point and mine, as in previous years, is the December forecasting consensus for growth (0.8% for the calendar year) and the current account (a deficit of just below £40 billion). I have used the actual end-year Bank rate, and November’s inflation and unemployment figures. One or two forecasters have been slightly harmed by the use of this cut-off but nobody has been seriously wronged.

Banks have had a torrid time and have justifiably seen their reputations slide. So it is odd, then, that after a year most forecasters would prefer to forget, banks top my annual forecasting league table. Standard Chartered, whose chief economist is Gerard Lyons, was gloomier than most a year ago, predicting just 1.2% growth at a time when forecasters were clustered around 2%.

His forecast was too low on inflation — most people expected an end-year figure of 2% — but right to pick up on the downward risks to growth. Standard Chartered is downbeat on growth for 2009 — it expects the economy to contract by 2.3% before edging up by 0.6% in 2010. The fact that policy has responded quickly and commodity prices have plunged leads it to suggest a recession on the scale of the early 1990s but not as bad as the deep downturn of the early 1980s. Even so, Sarah Hewin, Standard’s UK economist, thinks the Labour Force Survey measure of unemployment will eventually hit 3.5m.

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