Just give me a big slice of humble pie

What goes down well with those post-Christmas turkey sandwiches and leftover mashed potatoes?

Humble pie, of course.

A friend who works on Bay Street told me recently about a year-end ritual: He sits down near the end of December and writes down everything he has learned in the previous 12 months.

I'm planning the same exercise, though the list is so long, I fear it will take me until March to complete it. Or that the laser printer will die of overheating once I do.

Oscar Wilde said: "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." Can we just call 2008 a year of rich experience, then? Here goes ...

A January column, written near the 10th anniversary of Royal Bank's ill-fated merger agreement with Bank of Montreal, argued that domestic bank mergers were no longer relevant because "U.S. banks are selling at Wal-Mart prices ... For the likes of RBC and BMO, a monster U.S. deal has never seemed more affordable."

It's lucky for the shareholders of those institutions that Gordon Nixon and Bill Downe showed more restraint. Bank stocks were more expensive than they appeared, as U.S. banks continued to look through their filing cabinets and discover billions of dollars in mortgages and securities that smelled like stinky cheese. The KBW bank index, a measure of 24 major U.S. lenders, lost 50 per cent on the year.

The BCE deal - and thank heavens for it, because it provided nearly two years' worth of drama and good stories - was also the source of prognostications gone wrong.

A February column sounded a bullish note, arguing that the deal would probably close, and that even the battered banks would agree to fund it. Post-buyout, I argued, BCE's debt would be about six times its earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation - "a lot of debt, but it's hardly obscene, given the stability of the telecom business."

Not obscene, perhaps, but it was still too much for the company to meet the technical test of solvency because of a clause in the deal that I (and most others) missed.

In journalism, haste leads to mistakes. Such was the case with a column on the political controversy around MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates' $1.3-billion deal to sell its space unit to a U.S. company.

A key point of dispute was the fate of Radarsat-2, a satellite owned by MDA but whose construction had been largely funded by taxpayers. If Ottawa wanted to make sure MDA's space business stayed Canadian, I wrote, "the time to do it was when it drew up the Radarsat-2 deal. It's not now." Except, of course, that would have been impossible: When the Radarsat agreement was struck, MDA was itself controlled by a foreign firm. Oops. (In the end, the feds rejected the sale.)

It's easy for a writer to stumble on a deal that's been made and later broken, but just as easy to trip on one that was never done. A July column examined Air Canada's finances in the context of oil prices, then still $124 (U.S.) a barrel. The airline's profits were so levered to the cost of fuel, I wrote, that if crude dropped, one of two things would happen: The shares would go up, or private equity buyers would pounce.

Wrong-o. Oil prices didn't just drop, they fell off a cliff. But so did Air Canada's share price, declining more than 60 per cent since the article appeared. Private equity firms, meanwhile, are nowhere to be found. Seems they saw a few things in Air Canada's balance sheet - the debt, the pension fund, etc. - that yours truly failed to properly consider back in July.

Quick judgments, made with imperfect information, are often the source of words I've lived to regret. Back in May, two major Canadian companies - Manulife Financial and TMX Group, which owns the Toronto Stock Exchange - were thought to be considering American candidates to fill their CEO positions. The boards should insist that these men move to Canada, I wrote, rather huffily.

On sober second thought, in the age of the BlackBerry and the private jet, that was a stupid argument: What does it really matter where someone spends his weekends? Some top executives, like Hunter Harrison of Canadian National Railway, manage to be highly effective "suitcase CEOs." (In any event, Manulife chose a Canadian, Don Guloien.)

A worse mistake is misjudging someone's character or state of mind. A recent column that called Telus CEO Darren Entwistle "Mr. Intensity" and glibly asserted that after a tough couple of years, his head might "explode in frustration" was both off the mark and crossed the line. "Frankly, it's B.S.," said a person at the company, who describes Mr. Entwistle as a much steadier hand than I implied. "In these nutty times, all I can tell you is that I'm glad he's the captain of my boat."

All I can say is: Mea culpa to the Telus boss and to readers everywhere. And on to 2009.