Greek debt, discouraged workers and Japan's tsunami made last year treacherous for economic forecasters, but Robert Larson navigated around the difficulties better than most.

The 72-year-old Bridgeton resident is our Economic Challenge champion for 2011. A retired information-technology worker who says he's largely self-educated in matters of finance, Larson came within 28 points - or two-tenths of a percent - of predicting the exact closing value for the Dow Jones industrial average.

Our contest drew 82 entries, each of which ended up being flawed in some way.

Most were too optimistic about growth in gross domestic product, which came in at an anemic 1.6 percent, and not optimistic enough about unemployment, which fell nearly a percentage point to 8.5 percent. Many were tripped up by a surge in inflation, which at 3.0 percent was the highest since 2007.

Larson was a little off on all of those numbers, but the stock-market bullseye made his overall forecast the most accurate - or perhaps the least inaccurate - that we received.

He says he was most surprised by the unemployment number, although maybe he shouldn't have been. He had predicted a year-end jobless rate of 9.2 percent.

"I thought it was going to stay pretty high," Larson told me. "I thought about the discouraged worker phenomenon, but I didn't factor it in."

A discouraged worker is someone who has stopped looking for work, and therefore is not counted as unemployed. Larson was in that situation himself after being laid off from Wells Fargo Advisors in 2009. He had intended to work longer, but he retired because he didn't think he could find another job.

Now, Larson has plenty of time to watch financial-news shows on TV, and that's where he got most of the information that he used to make his forecast. He says he's a hands-on investor who has been "pretty much riding my portfolio for the past few years. When stocks go down, I hang on and just hope they will come back."

His fellow investors should be heartened by Larson's 2012 forecast: He thinks the Dow will soar to 14,205 by the end of this year, which would put it in record territory. He thinks companies are ready to invest some of the cash they've been accumulating in recent years, which could lead to an increase in merger activity.

Larson also predicts a little bit more GDP growth (2.5 percent) in 2012, a little less unemployment (8.2 percent) and a little more inflation (3.5 percent).

Our contestants' forecasts weren't the only ones derailed by the events of 2011. Most professional forecasters had to mark down their growth predictions several times, first because of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last March, then because of the ongoing European debt crisis. The civil war in Libya caused a spike in oil prices, which helped push inflation up.

This year surely will bring its own surprises, which will force CNBC's talking heads to revise their forecasts yet again. Larson can watch them while wearing his Post-Dispatch fleece, which is part of the prize package we're sending. And, if he's so inclined, he can remind all of his friends that, for one year at least, he was smarter than the experts.