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.
I think you are right on the money, Mr. White. I'm 47 (Gen X) and have seen the labor issues since January 2021. It was like aliens came to earth and abducted the entire labor pool between 21 and 35. I raised wages between 40% and 70% and still had trouble getting people to even respond. The people in prime working age (due to sheer energy, health and time on their hands) are mostly doing something else. Even the ones that work have their heads somewhere else.
I think the pandemic gave them the courage to "walk away" because everyone was doing it at the same time. Then, when the schools and culture embeds in your mind that everything we do is just a cog in "consumerism" and "capitalism" and that those are horrible things, they are demotivated and searching for meaning.
Our economy is going to go to those who understand hard work and who have the experience to make things happen. To me that is the Boomers and X'ers and those working class millennials who get it. There are less and less of us.
More and more I've come to really appreciate the Boomers and I sing the praises of your generation's work ethic and fortitude. Press on.
Part of the issue with 20-something employment stems from Obamacare. It raised the age in which you had to leave your parents health policy and have to get your own to 26 years of age. There is less pressure to begin a career or get a full time job now because you can still get health care through your parents. I have 40+ years in recruitment at all levels and this started to become apparent about 5 years ago, I think it also sends a subliminal message about delayed adulthood as well, which is very wrong.
There is a lot of delayed "adulthood" now isn't there? Student loans, health insurance, "gap years", marriage and children, family -- I think that due to the sheer size of the Boomer generation, we didn't see the effects as much in our economy, early on with these trends. Now that Boomers are retiring, we are seeing the deficits of work ethic and experience begin to take hold. Alas, when we have a huge amount of work to be done and less people to do it, we will see inflation. I think eventually inflation will give way to enduring stagflation, simply because government is constantly going to be goosing people away from working and self-responsibility.
@philly guy great point. was chatting with another parent my age about the fact we made it too easy for our kids. no one dates anymore (fear of rejection), no one commits to anything anymore (fear of a lot of things)
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 was a little kid in the 70's and it is starting to feel more and more like it. You can tell by the little things, like cars. In the late 90's and post 2000, it felt like all the cars on the road were new and nice. Cheap money does that.
In the 70's the cars were rusted, dinged and beat up. No one could afford to finance a car and everyone kept the "old car" alive and running, somehow. I remember my mom had a VW beetle, where you could see the street under the driver's side floorboard. I used to watch the street go by...under the car!
There's almost something nostalgic about an era of scarcity, where you made full use of the things you had, and you didn't need a million cheap things to stay entertained. It forced you to be closer to family and find things to do with your mind.
Right there with you on family members' cars with holes in the floorboards! And I find the concept of financing a car purchase nuts, financially bonkers, in the best of times.
My concern is the social fabric and basic competencies in the '70s versus now. In the '70s we were raised by parents who'd grown up with extended families and in societies with living memories of WW One, the Depression, subsistence lifestyles, and WWII. Things people regard now as "prepping" or "off the grid" were normal everyday life; a certain amount of hard times and self-reliance were accepted parts of the requirements/rhythm of life. In what areas does our society still have the resilience of the '70s? Over-extended and fragile in every way is how I see it. Hope I'm wrong!
Yeah! We have gone soft and unappreciative of what we have and how good we have it.
I notice that there are a lot of unhappy, directionless people today. There are a number of reasons for this, I speculate, but one big one is the Pleasure/Pain relationship.
It's a simple axiom: "Without pain you can't have pleasure," mainly because you don't know the difference. Back then people saved up for things and there was a lot of joy in it. Delayed gratification has benefits, at least to me. It makes you really appreciate things when you finally get them.
Do we experience that as much as a society now? Or does everyone expect any and all hardships to be addressed by someone else -- be it the government or others?
It's just a theory, but something I ponder from time to time.
I get it. My perspective on it is more about appreciating earned things, including learning and really understanding difficult topics, versus 'easy come, easy go'. The satisfaction of solving a puzzle of any type, building or fixing useful things. There's a lot of satisfaction and solid confidence grown through coping with the basics that grounds a person for life's bigger challenges. Maturity, professionalism, responsibility - all out of fashion these days, it seems to me. Maybe hard times will wake some people up; we'll see.
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 traded next to a guy, back in the 90’s. He had to show up morning of the operation with a $10,000 bag of cash back when Berger took no insurance. Crazy! All those docs at Midwest are the best. Good luck!
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.
He's a lefty. He can't bring himself to vote for a conservative, or a Republican. He wouldn't vote for me to be dog catcher, and would vote for a commie over me. I don't know him personally, but know the type.
“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.
I think you are right on the money, Mr. White. I'm 47 (Gen X) and have seen the labor issues since January 2021. It was like aliens came to earth and abducted the entire labor pool between 21 and 35. I raised wages between 40% and 70% and still had trouble getting people to even respond. The people in prime working age (due to sheer energy, health and time on their hands) are mostly doing something else. Even the ones that work have their heads somewhere else.
I think the pandemic gave them the courage to "walk away" because everyone was doing it at the same time. Then, when the schools and culture embeds in your mind that everything we do is just a cog in "consumerism" and "capitalism" and that those are horrible things, they are demotivated and searching for meaning.
Our economy is going to go to those who understand hard work and who have the experience to make things happen. To me that is the Boomers and X'ers and those working class millennials who get it. There are less and less of us.
More and more I've come to really appreciate the Boomers and I sing the praises of your generation's work ethic and fortitude. Press on.
Part of the issue with 20-something employment stems from Obamacare. It raised the age in which you had to leave your parents health policy and have to get your own to 26 years of age. There is less pressure to begin a career or get a full time job now because you can still get health care through your parents. I have 40+ years in recruitment at all levels and this started to become apparent about 5 years ago, I think it also sends a subliminal message about delayed adulthood as well, which is very wrong.
There is a lot of delayed "adulthood" now isn't there? Student loans, health insurance, "gap years", marriage and children, family -- I think that due to the sheer size of the Boomer generation, we didn't see the effects as much in our economy, early on with these trends. Now that Boomers are retiring, we are seeing the deficits of work ethic and experience begin to take hold. Alas, when we have a huge amount of work to be done and less people to do it, we will see inflation. I think eventually inflation will give way to enduring stagflation, simply because government is constantly going to be goosing people away from working and self-responsibility.
@philly guy great point. was chatting with another parent my age about the fact we made it too easy for our kids. no one dates anymore (fear of rejection), no one commits to anything anymore (fear of a lot of things)
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 was a little kid in the 70's and it is starting to feel more and more like it. You can tell by the little things, like cars. In the late 90's and post 2000, it felt like all the cars on the road were new and nice. Cheap money does that.
In the 70's the cars were rusted, dinged and beat up. No one could afford to finance a car and everyone kept the "old car" alive and running, somehow. I remember my mom had a VW beetle, where you could see the street under the driver's side floorboard. I used to watch the street go by...under the car!
There's almost something nostalgic about an era of scarcity, where you made full use of the things you had, and you didn't need a million cheap things to stay entertained. It forced you to be closer to family and find things to do with your mind.
Right there with you on family members' cars with holes in the floorboards! And I find the concept of financing a car purchase nuts, financially bonkers, in the best of times.
My concern is the social fabric and basic competencies in the '70s versus now. In the '70s we were raised by parents who'd grown up with extended families and in societies with living memories of WW One, the Depression, subsistence lifestyles, and WWII. Things people regard now as "prepping" or "off the grid" were normal everyday life; a certain amount of hard times and self-reliance were accepted parts of the requirements/rhythm of life. In what areas does our society still have the resilience of the '70s? Over-extended and fragile in every way is how I see it. Hope I'm wrong!
Yeah! We have gone soft and unappreciative of what we have and how good we have it.
I notice that there are a lot of unhappy, directionless people today. There are a number of reasons for this, I speculate, but one big one is the Pleasure/Pain relationship.
It's a simple axiom: "Without pain you can't have pleasure," mainly because you don't know the difference. Back then people saved up for things and there was a lot of joy in it. Delayed gratification has benefits, at least to me. It makes you really appreciate things when you finally get them.
Do we experience that as much as a society now? Or does everyone expect any and all hardships to be addressed by someone else -- be it the government or others?
It's just a theory, but something I ponder from time to time.
I get it. My perspective on it is more about appreciating earned things, including learning and really understanding difficult topics, versus 'easy come, easy go'. The satisfaction of solving a puzzle of any type, building or fixing useful things. There's a lot of satisfaction and solid confidence grown through coping with the basics that grounds a person for life's bigger challenges. Maturity, professionalism, responsibility - all out of fashion these days, it seems to me. Maybe hard times will wake some people up; we'll see.
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.
A colleague of his. Same practice. Berger doesn't take my insurance.....not a problem
I traded next to a guy, back in the 90’s. He had to show up morning of the operation with a $10,000 bag of cash back when Berger took no insurance. Crazy! All those docs at Midwest are the best. Good luck!
It is now $22k out of pocket..... : )
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.
From your mouth to the Millennials and Gen Z's ears, sir.
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.
you were an early proponent of crypto. What happens there? (Not to call you out publicly but given your experience it would be interesting to hear)
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.
He's a lefty. He can't bring himself to vote for a conservative, or a Republican. He wouldn't vote for me to be dog catcher, and would vote for a commie over me. I don't know him personally, but know the type.
Very smart comment about the disincentive for young folks to get a bloody job because of the absence of loan repayment pressure.
Well played. Bravo!
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
“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.