Predictions for 2009 and/or Beyond
Posted: April 19, 2008
Cause and effect is the primary method used to make
forecasts and predictions about the future. Everything that
happens on this planet can be traced to a cause.
Using cause and effect to make future economic predictions,
while useful, is not foolproof by any means. The economy is made
up of billions of individual transactions. Billions and billions
of those transactions happen each and every month. Predicting
the outcome of the sum of those transactions can be very
difficult. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle!
Predicting the speed at which those transactions will occur,
which brings about changes in effects, gets increasingly more
difficult the further out into the future we go.
How fast will people respond to changing economic
conditions? Each transaction out of billions has to occur in
order for more transactions to come about as a result. How fast
will that happen? It is almost impossible to predict speed of
change.
How fast will Americans reduce spending?
How long will it take reduced consumer spending to cause
businesses to reduce staff?
How long before that reduced employment causes business to
reduce employment even further?
How long before the government takes action to curtail the
downward spiral?
What kind of response will the government take?
How will the Federal Reserve respond with interest rate
policy?
These and thousands of other similar questions need to be
taken into account when making economic forecasts and
predictions about the future.
It is not an easy task.
Let's use a car as an example. If you vow to never change
your car tires, and just drive it with it's current tires,
regardless of results, eventually that will cause a problem.
Eventually, those tires will wear out completely. Eventually,
the bald tires will either cause you to get in an accident, or
continue to wear through the steel and canvas and cause a flat
tire.
The key is eventually. How soon is difficult to predict with
any degree of accuracy. It will depend on how many miles you
drive per week to get an approximation of when problems might
begin to appear. Of course, the amount of miles driven per week
could change at any time, reducing the accuracy of the
prediction.
Keeping those factors in mind, I will still attempt to make
some longer term forecasts based upon the most recent causes
being injected into the US economy.
This page is recorded in the blog,
date-stamped and cached by Google, so that perfect hindsight is
not the method used to predict the "future". These predictions
were genuinely made on the date above.
1. There will be some sort of banking crisis that will
cause banks to limit the amount of both cash and electronic
withdrawals per day to a very low level.
2. The price of gasoline in the US will top $6.00 per
gallon.
3. The price of a barrel of oil will top $200 US.
4. Since the internet is such a threat to the status quo,
there will be some sort of bad even that will be blamed on
communication online, resulting in very restrictive internet
regulation being enacted. This regulation will for all intents
and purposes prevent the free flow of information online.
5. Currency restrictions will be put into place.
6. There will be a shortage of silver, with the
"official" blame being placed on hoarders, rather than where it
belongs: big business and central banks artificially holding the
price way too low for way too long creating the shortage.
7. The banking industry will continue to wage war against
honest money, and maintain their power to create money at will.
8. Foreign countries will balk at the abuse that the US
imposes on the world financial system and will harshly retaliate
with sanctions and refusals to trade, causing widespread
financial chaos and shortages throughout the US.
There you have it, my forecast for 2009 and beyond. I hope
I'm wrong and that the worst of these prediction do not happen.
Hopefully something will change for the better and put a stop
the the harmful causes that will bring about the above effects.
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