Barring a late flood of snail-mail entries, all of the predictions are in for my 2009 Economic Challenge. The headline: Readers are pessimistic about the economy, but think they can make money in the stock market.

The 44 entries are about equally divided between folks who think the economy will shrink this year and those who think it will grow slightly. The average prediction for GDP growth is -0.2%; the median prediction is +0.1%. But the median prediction for the Dow Jones industrial average is 9544, which would be a decent 9.9 percent gain for the year.

The median prediction for next December’s unemployment rate is 8.0%; the median inflation prediction for the year is 1.0%.

Does this consensus view mean anything? We’ll see. Some years, readers have been fairly prescient as a group, but as 2008 began they were looking for the bulls to keep running on Wall Street and for unemployment to stay around 5 percent. We all know how that turned out, don’t we? Even last year’s biggest pessimist thought the Dow would close at 9,999, and it ended up a full 13 percent worse.

This year our biggest pessimist is a fellow named Patrick, who sees GDP shrinking by 4 percent, unemployment soaring to 14 percent and the Dow dropping to 6,842. There weren’t any wild-eyed optimists about the economy, but a reader named David thinks the Dow can recover all the way to 11,900. Let’s hope he’s closer to being correct than Patrick is.