Dec 19, 2022·edited Dec 19, 2022Liked by Jeffrey Carter
The War in Ukraine will heat up considerably in 2023. Ukraine will absorb a new front from the north and Putin will learn that you cannot refit an unsuccessful army with a gob of lightly trained conscripts with no NCO corps and a paucity of decent company grade officers and lousy gear and ammo (both being scraped from the bottom of the barrel) and win against men and women fighting for their homeland and freedom.
The Russians will run out of missiles with conventional warheads and artillery ammo in March 2023. Dead flat out.
This will, unfortunately, trigger Putin and he will attempt something of great danger to the world.
Putin will not be in charge of Russia by next Christmas. The Russians will depose Putin by the 4th of July. He will not celebrate another birthday. Ever. Please, God.
There is a decent chance to defang Russia. It would be one of the greatest happenstances in world history. Ever. It would put tremendous pressure on China - another wicked despotism.
Coinbase is down 90% since "go public" reverse merger. At that price, it still isn't a buy. Crypto will devolve into the blockchain - a bit of software wizardry - and Bitcoin. The rest of it will dry up and be gathered for kindling. Gov'ts will begin to roll out digital currency themselves which will only serve to provide one more thing for the NSA to track.
If left alone, Donald Trump's popularity and viability will evaporate in correlation with the price of his NFTs. He will be indicted.
Inflation chugs along at 7-9% and the Fed raises interest rates to double digits.
Biden's health and age -- he's 80! Will be 82 at the next election which implies he would serve until age 86! Not going to happen.
Thank you for this column. I'm one of the old guys (67) trying to hang on for another couple years.
Businesses might wish to get rid of old guys like me but can't. Why? Because there are not enough young workers to replace us.
How can that be? Because the pandemic and importantly, the student loan forbearance programs, have disincentivized young, entry-level workers. I see this at my university hospital, where entry positions in clinical research, data management, oversight, and hospital finance simply can't be filled. Nursing is going strong but that's about it.
The student loan forbearance programs mean, simply, that young people who previously had to get a job, any job, so as to start paying the nut now do not need to do so, and they aren't. The pandemic has changed the work calculation; why go to work when you can either work from home or hang with your parents a bit longer? The average student loan repayments typically are several hundred dollars a month; take that away and a young person's cost of living goes down a fair bit. I've heard this time and again when I've tried to hire into the open entry level positions that we have at my university. Add to this the demands for continued work-from-home (ask Twitter and Apple how that will be tolerated in 2023) and you have real issues moving young people into the work force.
I'm not smart enough to opine on the rest, but young people aren't coming into the labor market in early 2023. That's likely good for the rest of us, though that's going to be a knock-on effect for our economy that will reverberate in the next decade.
Sharp 1st quarter decline setting new LOWS across the board with sideways capitulation as stagflation sets in coupled with growing defaults in residential notes. Not a 2008 "crash" but definitely noticeable and enough to shock the "system" for the remainder of 2023 and into 2024.
There's just too much supply of currency and not enough goods. That'll take a long time to iron out, so we'll have inflation and recession for a long spell. Why don't policy makers read and get schooled on how things actually work? I lived through the 1970s: gasoline was scarce, inflation was big, so folks didn't buy much, and crime, particularly in the city I grew up in, was rampant. Today is looking more and more like that. But crime isn't isolated to just the "bad" areas.
I agree with Batman, think 2023 is going to be very rough with the worst coming in first half.
From my retail/industrial view I see people running out of money while being squeezed by inflation on one side and voracious state and local governments and their tax regimes on the other. Productivity gains look muted, incentives to work still aren’t strong as long as the feds keep absolving people of their poor financial moves.
Anecdotally I’m seeing an increase in white collars “open to work” across LinkedIn, not a great sign.
Hope you’re going to see Dr. Berger for your knee trouble. He gave me a new titanium hip in 2020 and I’m in the best shape of my life now. Safe travels.
I'm generally low-confidence when it comes to predictions, but I did predict back in January '21 that inflation would be long, difficult and sustained. I knew because of the fundamental imbalance between supply of labor and business need, which I saw with my business. Wages were skyrocketing faster than I'd ever seen, and I didn't think a few interest rate rises were going to fix it.
That turned out right for 2022.
But in 2023 I see the employment market taking a big nosedive, with many more people out of work. This will reverberate into less economic velocity and demand, which will continue to cycle growth down. I think inflation will dwindle down, slowly, and then late in the year I see deflation fears picking up.
I think government debt will skyrocket and debt service is going to be a real problem. There will be talks of another bailout at all levels. Property taxes will continue to suffocate blue states (not much of a prediction, I know).
Trump will fall out of favor. DeSantis will announce his run in the fall and will slowly overtake as the favored GOP candidate. Joe Biden will continue to make gaffes.
The Republicans will start doing some real investigating into Biden and Hunter's laptop. There will be big resistance and fiery back and forth as Democrats break the same rules they wanted to send GOP people to jail for, for not appearing in Congress and answering subpoenas. Joe Biden will not speak or comment on any of it. But the question will be, has Joe paid taxes on the monies he received from overseas? Where is the money?
The Covid vaccines will continue to be maligned and will be shown to have a causal effect on SAD (Sudden Adult Dealth) syndrome and heart issues. The federal government will ignore all the evidence and quietly stop talking about them (they already are). Fauci will not speak to Congress and will take the Fifth. So will Collins and others associated with the origin of the virus and the response.
The economy will languish and the market will continue to go down as the higher interest rates work their way through. The economy will be worse this coming year, and working people will really struggle.
Stay focused on your families and friends and have a great holiday. Thank you all for writing here and enriching my knowledge -- especially you, Mr. Carter.
Not a prediction but a hope. I hope youngsters are inspired by Musk’s stance on free speech and become free speech warriors in the future. What Musk is doing is something they have probably never seen before, so I hope it has a positive impact.
First, on your points, I do think a crash happens (although I might be using a different definition than the correct technical one). Either a crash or something worse happens in and to society in reaction to the things that the powers that be (institutions, individuals, the Feds-writ-large) do in efforts to forestall crashing. For instance, I hope you're right about the Fed and the direction of interest rates, and they don't cave and reverse, which I think is likely given US political leadership in 2023 (alas). If they do, it will amplify the bad signals and worse decisions destabilizing 2023/4 and thus the repercussions or harder landing required to correct, if there's any leadership left with the courage to take hard decisions and fortitude to make them stick.
We have a huge shortage of skilled labor and worse to come. Not only office work but especially trades, machinery, making things work, and making things. Those reluctant to leave mom's basement are unreliable workers when/if they do eventually show up (with their "whole selves"). They will not be assets in the workforce for decades. Same by the way for medical talent, skills, and brains.
Spray and pray strategies in anything/everything will be a losing play over the medium run as an escalating proportion will fail hard and completely. Crypto/tech isn't the only sector where the grift will be affected and dearth of talent/grit revealed as easy money evaporates.
Other points - construction, housing, and supplying markets for same are going to be nuts. Hot markets are frozen, building is going over a cliff, and (as you note) property taxes and other state grabs are on the rise. Both renters and landlords are screwed. I don't really have a prediction here beyond chaos.
Agriculture is already in a world of hurt, and transitioning from a sector of /relative/ predictability pre-2020 to tripled-quintupled input costs and similar plus to get to market, to whatever comes next, is going to be the ugliest thing the next 2-3 years. Low-production hippie/green ag that has been all the rage will shrivel for the same reasons as high-production, plus having a dwindling proportion of consumers willing and able to pay a 300% premium for organic this-and-that. It will be interesting to see what happens to that land in the short (20 years) term.
I have worked for decades in third world political economies evaluating policies and programmatic corrections when leaders are making very poor choices in tough environments, and our contemporary powers-that-be are not even as smart and just as venal. Casual and thoughtless destruction can be instant while building anything meaningful, productive, and functional requires so many different decisions and investments including time - it takes all that when building from scratch and (as you note re:Twitter) so much more when 'remaking' fatally flawed foundations.
The gradual and subtle move away from investing in market share without profits will continue to disintegrate and survival of the fittest will take place with stocks and crypto.
The insanity of the lack of sensibility in progressive policy, some of which admittedly is okay, but most, maybe 80 or 90%, is utterly absurd, will eventually get voted out, as main Street America begins to feel the pain of the trickle-down effect of these policies on a day-to-day basis and street gang crime, which has been evolving into organized crime for quite some time in big cities, moves further outward from major metropolitan cities' surrounding suburbs to the outlying areas and that will finally wake up enough people to change their votes.
Historically as a nation we have tilted left and tilted right and as soon as we go a little too far in one direction we get pulled back toward Center and the unfortunate backlash against a previous President's personality rather than policy was a a group mindset fubar that has backfired spectacularly, but he is probably not reelectable. What will need to occur is someone taking office who can coalesce and patch together a group of people who can focus on the greater good or the United States of America will rapidly descend into what happened to the British Empire and as ridiculous as it sounds, it could happen in less than a decade if we don't get our crap together.
I agree with your assessment of Twitter and also think that ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, what will pull us out of our economic malaise will be advances in technology, particularly energy and healthcare.
I wouldn't call Paul G a left-wing liberal...he's been very strong for free speech (see especially his posts at his website) and I haven't detected statist thinking in any of his posts or tweets. Voted for Biden rather than Trump, I believe, which I find hard to understand, but overall a very good political & social thinker.
“You will see a lot of boutique consulting, engineering, M+A, and financial firms crop up in the next year.”
And add to that, everyone without a skill set to hawk will suddenly become a “turnaround” or “restructuring” expert. Managed a $B p/l but doesn’t understand how that even gets to the balance sheet let alone managing said balance sheet. I digress.
The War in Ukraine will heat up considerably in 2023. Ukraine will absorb a new front from the north and Putin will learn that you cannot refit an unsuccessful army with a gob of lightly trained conscripts with no NCO corps and a paucity of decent company grade officers and lousy gear and ammo (both being scraped from the bottom of the barrel) and win against men and women fighting for their homeland and freedom.
The Russians will run out of missiles with conventional warheads and artillery ammo in March 2023. Dead flat out.
This will, unfortunately, trigger Putin and he will attempt something of great danger to the world.
Putin will not be in charge of Russia by next Christmas. The Russians will depose Putin by the 4th of July. He will not celebrate another birthday. Ever. Please, God.
There is a decent chance to defang Russia. It would be one of the greatest happenstances in world history. Ever. It would put tremendous pressure on China - another wicked despotism.
Coinbase is down 90% since "go public" reverse merger. At that price, it still isn't a buy. Crypto will devolve into the blockchain - a bit of software wizardry - and Bitcoin. The rest of it will dry up and be gathered for kindling. Gov'ts will begin to roll out digital currency themselves which will only serve to provide one more thing for the NSA to track.
If left alone, Donald Trump's popularity and viability will evaporate in correlation with the price of his NFTs. He will be indicted.
Inflation chugs along at 7-9% and the Fed raises interest rates to double digits.
Biden's health and age -- he's 80! Will be 82 at the next election which implies he would serve until age 86! Not going to happen.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Thank you for this column. I'm one of the old guys (67) trying to hang on for another couple years.
Businesses might wish to get rid of old guys like me but can't. Why? Because there are not enough young workers to replace us.
How can that be? Because the pandemic and importantly, the student loan forbearance programs, have disincentivized young, entry-level workers. I see this at my university hospital, where entry positions in clinical research, data management, oversight, and hospital finance simply can't be filled. Nursing is going strong but that's about it.
The student loan forbearance programs mean, simply, that young people who previously had to get a job, any job, so as to start paying the nut now do not need to do so, and they aren't. The pandemic has changed the work calculation; why go to work when you can either work from home or hang with your parents a bit longer? The average student loan repayments typically are several hundred dollars a month; take that away and a young person's cost of living goes down a fair bit. I've heard this time and again when I've tried to hire into the open entry level positions that we have at my university. Add to this the demands for continued work-from-home (ask Twitter and Apple how that will be tolerated in 2023) and you have real issues moving young people into the work force.
I'm not smart enough to opine on the rest, but young people aren't coming into the labor market in early 2023. That's likely good for the rest of us, though that's going to be a knock-on effect for our economy that will reverberate in the next decade.
Sharp 1st quarter decline setting new LOWS across the board with sideways capitulation as stagflation sets in coupled with growing defaults in residential notes. Not a 2008 "crash" but definitely noticeable and enough to shock the "system" for the remainder of 2023 and into 2024.
There's just too much supply of currency and not enough goods. That'll take a long time to iron out, so we'll have inflation and recession for a long spell. Why don't policy makers read and get schooled on how things actually work? I lived through the 1970s: gasoline was scarce, inflation was big, so folks didn't buy much, and crime, particularly in the city I grew up in, was rampant. Today is looking more and more like that. But crime isn't isolated to just the "bad" areas.
I agree with Batman, think 2023 is going to be very rough with the worst coming in first half.
From my retail/industrial view I see people running out of money while being squeezed by inflation on one side and voracious state and local governments and their tax regimes on the other. Productivity gains look muted, incentives to work still aren’t strong as long as the feds keep absolving people of their poor financial moves.
Anecdotally I’m seeing an increase in white collars “open to work” across LinkedIn, not a great sign.
Hope you’re going to see Dr. Berger for your knee trouble. He gave me a new titanium hip in 2020 and I’m in the best shape of my life now. Safe travels.
I'm generally low-confidence when it comes to predictions, but I did predict back in January '21 that inflation would be long, difficult and sustained. I knew because of the fundamental imbalance between supply of labor and business need, which I saw with my business. Wages were skyrocketing faster than I'd ever seen, and I didn't think a few interest rate rises were going to fix it.
That turned out right for 2022.
But in 2023 I see the employment market taking a big nosedive, with many more people out of work. This will reverberate into less economic velocity and demand, which will continue to cycle growth down. I think inflation will dwindle down, slowly, and then late in the year I see deflation fears picking up.
I think government debt will skyrocket and debt service is going to be a real problem. There will be talks of another bailout at all levels. Property taxes will continue to suffocate blue states (not much of a prediction, I know).
Trump will fall out of favor. DeSantis will announce his run in the fall and will slowly overtake as the favored GOP candidate. Joe Biden will continue to make gaffes.
The Republicans will start doing some real investigating into Biden and Hunter's laptop. There will be big resistance and fiery back and forth as Democrats break the same rules they wanted to send GOP people to jail for, for not appearing in Congress and answering subpoenas. Joe Biden will not speak or comment on any of it. But the question will be, has Joe paid taxes on the monies he received from overseas? Where is the money?
The Covid vaccines will continue to be maligned and will be shown to have a causal effect on SAD (Sudden Adult Dealth) syndrome and heart issues. The federal government will ignore all the evidence and quietly stop talking about them (they already are). Fauci will not speak to Congress and will take the Fifth. So will Collins and others associated with the origin of the virus and the response.
The economy will languish and the market will continue to go down as the higher interest rates work their way through. The economy will be worse this coming year, and working people will really struggle.
Stay focused on your families and friends and have a great holiday. Thank you all for writing here and enriching my knowledge -- especially you, Mr. Carter.
Not a prediction but a hope. I hope youngsters are inspired by Musk’s stance on free speech and become free speech warriors in the future. What Musk is doing is something they have probably never seen before, so I hope it has a positive impact.
Merry Christmas and Happy Channukah to you also! A lot of good writing and calls this year. Keep up the good work.
First, on your points, I do think a crash happens (although I might be using a different definition than the correct technical one). Either a crash or something worse happens in and to society in reaction to the things that the powers that be (institutions, individuals, the Feds-writ-large) do in efforts to forestall crashing. For instance, I hope you're right about the Fed and the direction of interest rates, and they don't cave and reverse, which I think is likely given US political leadership in 2023 (alas). If they do, it will amplify the bad signals and worse decisions destabilizing 2023/4 and thus the repercussions or harder landing required to correct, if there's any leadership left with the courage to take hard decisions and fortitude to make them stick.
We have a huge shortage of skilled labor and worse to come. Not only office work but especially trades, machinery, making things work, and making things. Those reluctant to leave mom's basement are unreliable workers when/if they do eventually show up (with their "whole selves"). They will not be assets in the workforce for decades. Same by the way for medical talent, skills, and brains.
Spray and pray strategies in anything/everything will be a losing play over the medium run as an escalating proportion will fail hard and completely. Crypto/tech isn't the only sector where the grift will be affected and dearth of talent/grit revealed as easy money evaporates.
Other points - construction, housing, and supplying markets for same are going to be nuts. Hot markets are frozen, building is going over a cliff, and (as you note) property taxes and other state grabs are on the rise. Both renters and landlords are screwed. I don't really have a prediction here beyond chaos.
Agriculture is already in a world of hurt, and transitioning from a sector of /relative/ predictability pre-2020 to tripled-quintupled input costs and similar plus to get to market, to whatever comes next, is going to be the ugliest thing the next 2-3 years. Low-production hippie/green ag that has been all the rage will shrivel for the same reasons as high-production, plus having a dwindling proportion of consumers willing and able to pay a 300% premium for organic this-and-that. It will be interesting to see what happens to that land in the short (20 years) term.
I have worked for decades in third world political economies evaluating policies and programmatic corrections when leaders are making very poor choices in tough environments, and our contemporary powers-that-be are not even as smart and just as venal. Casual and thoughtless destruction can be instant while building anything meaningful, productive, and functional requires so many different decisions and investments including time - it takes all that when building from scratch and (as you note re:Twitter) so much more when 'remaking' fatally flawed foundations.
Thank you for your keen insights, Jeff.
The gradual and subtle move away from investing in market share without profits will continue to disintegrate and survival of the fittest will take place with stocks and crypto.
The insanity of the lack of sensibility in progressive policy, some of which admittedly is okay, but most, maybe 80 or 90%, is utterly absurd, will eventually get voted out, as main Street America begins to feel the pain of the trickle-down effect of these policies on a day-to-day basis and street gang crime, which has been evolving into organized crime for quite some time in big cities, moves further outward from major metropolitan cities' surrounding suburbs to the outlying areas and that will finally wake up enough people to change their votes.
Historically as a nation we have tilted left and tilted right and as soon as we go a little too far in one direction we get pulled back toward Center and the unfortunate backlash against a previous President's personality rather than policy was a a group mindset fubar that has backfired spectacularly, but he is probably not reelectable. What will need to occur is someone taking office who can coalesce and patch together a group of people who can focus on the greater good or the United States of America will rapidly descend into what happened to the British Empire and as ridiculous as it sounds, it could happen in less than a decade if we don't get our crap together.
I agree with your assessment of Twitter and also think that ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, what will pull us out of our economic malaise will be advances in technology, particularly energy and healthcare.
I wouldn't call Paul G a left-wing liberal...he's been very strong for free speech (see especially his posts at his website) and I haven't detected statist thinking in any of his posts or tweets. Voted for Biden rather than Trump, I believe, which I find hard to understand, but overall a very good political & social thinker.
“You will see a lot of boutique consulting, engineering, M+A, and financial firms crop up in the next year.”
And add to that, everyone without a skill set to hawk will suddenly become a “turnaround” or “restructuring” expert. Managed a $B p/l but doesn’t understand how that even gets to the balance sheet let alone managing said balance sheet. I digress.