Assessment of each part of the prediction (mid‑March–mid‑December 2020)

1. Claim: “Deleveraging” will be a widely-heard public term over the next nine months
   Evidence: While economists and central-bank researchers did discuss specific forms of deleveraging (e.g., a St. Louis Fed blog on credit‑card deleveraging during the COVID‑19 downturn), this was niche, technical commentary rather than broad public discourse.(stlouisfed.org) The dominant macro narrative in mainstream and policy reporting was about stimulus, rescue packages, liquidity provision, and rising debt, not about a broad deleveraging process.
   Conclusion: This part of the prediction did not materialize in the general public conversation.

2. Claim: A “violent and messy” deleveraging of a multi‑trillion‑dollar credit bubble
   Evidence on actual leverage dynamics: Multiple data sources show that global debt surged in 2020 instead of shrinking:

   • The IMF and World Economic Forum report that global debt jumped by about 28–30 percentage points of GDP in 2020, reaching roughly 255–260% of global GDP, the largest one‑year rise on record.(brookings.edu)
   • The Institute of International Finance (IIF) estimated global debt at ~$272–281 trillion in 2020, up sharply from 2019, and explicitly described the move as a "debt tsunami."(cnbc.com)
   • U.S. public debt alone rose by over $3 trillion in just a few months in 2020 as part of the fiscal response.(en.wikipedia.org)
     This is the opposite of macroeconomic “deleveraging” (which means reducing aggregate debt relative to GDP).(en.wikipedia.org)
     Conclusion: Instead of a credit bubble being forcibly unwound, the world saw massive additional leveraging enabled by aggressive monetary and fiscal support. This core mechanism in the prediction was wrong.

3. Claim: The process will leave “a lot of people unemployed”
   Evidence: This part did occur, though primarily from pandemic and policy shutdowns rather than the bursting of a credit bubble.

   • In the U.S., unemployment spiked from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020, with more than 20 million jobs lost in a single month—an historically abrupt labor‑market shock.(en.wikipedia.org)
   • Similar spikes appeared regionally; for example, the San Francisco Bay Area saw unemployment jump by over 13 percentage points in April 2020.(en.wikipedia.org)
     Conclusion: The direction of this sub‑prediction (a large rise in unemployment) was correct, but it was not caused by a deleveraging-driven credit bust as described.

4. Claim: “A lot of businesses [will be] out of business”
   Evidence:

   • Yelp’s September 2020 data showed ~164,000 U.S. businesses marked as closed on Yelp, with ~98,000—about 60%—permanently closed by late August 2020.(cnbc.com)
   • A New York Times analysis (summarized in secondary sources) estimated that up to one‑third of New York City small businesses might never reopen, implying tens of thousands of permanent closures and hundreds of thousands of lost jobs.(en.wikipedia.org)
   • A Federal Reserve–linked study later estimated roughly 200,000 excess permanent U.S. business closures in the first year of the pandemic.(foxbusiness.com)
     Conclusion: This part of the prediction—substantial business failures—did come true in scale, although again as a result of pandemic restrictions and demand collapse, not a global deleveraging.

Overall judgment

The central thesis of Chamath’s prediction was not merely that there would be a bad recession with high unemployment and many closures (which did happen), but that the mechanism would be a widely discussed, “violent and messy” deleveraging of a multi‑trillion‑dollar credit bubble.

Empirically, 2020 featured:

• Record increases in global debt and leverage, not reductions, due to unprecedented fiscal and monetary support.(brookings.edu)
• Public narratives centered on stimulus, liquidity backstops, and rising debt, rather than a prolonged, system‑wide deleveraging episode. (Specialized discussions of specific pockets of deleveraging, like credit‑card balances, were limited and short‑lived.)(stlouisfed.org)

Because the core causal story and “deleveraging” framing did not occur—and in fact the opposite (massive releveraging) happened—while only some secondary consequences (unemployment and closures) matched reality for different reasons, the prediction is best classified as:

Result: wrong