Well, it's been nearly a year since I last posted, which is a grim reminder of just how busy things are these days. That said, I've got to bend the page a bit here and let a few cynical predictions out.
1. The Donald vs. The Sandman
Yes this is what it will come down to.
Good luck America.
2. The failure of Too Big To Fail.
There are two versions of this inevitability:
2.1 Sanders wins, the banks freak out, congress seizes up completely and we get hit with a 2008 level of recession with no way out because congress will only approve another TARP style bailout, and Sanders will veto anything that smells like corporate welfare. This happens weeks to months after the election in response to Sanders' win. Out of the fear that there will be no bailout, the banks curl up like sensitive plants in a drought and credit stops moving in every sector of the economy.
Nothing gets done.
2.2 Trump wins, his buddies in finance go looney tunes with deregulatory lobbying, the market surges like a drunken walrus masterbating in a vat of lard. For eighteen months the economy spirals upward with the frat house intensity of the very coke fueled benders driving it forward.
Then it all fails. Uproariously. The global economy vomits unceasingly in a toxic overdose of debt and investor terror.
Trump goes into a spin management cycle that keeps him within a bulletproof whirlwind of bluster and media whoring.
He becomes the president we all hoped Jesse Ventura might have been.
Nothing gets done.
3. Warheads go missing in Pakistan.
Yup. This happens.
The world shits a collective Brick.
Sideways.
ISIS claims responsibility and goes into overtime on the propaganda front while we all wait to see which middle class neighborhood goes up in a thermonuclear fireball. Will it be Mumbai, L.A., Paris? We will never know, the damn things fail to surface and everybody forgets about the threat by the end of 2018.
4: Apocalyptic Drought
By 2020 the water supply throughout the Middle East is so depleted that ISIS pretty much rules a caliphate of bleached bones and parched waste. Oil prices continue downwards as Iran opens up the tap and the US subsidizes oil production to spur job growth. Also, global warming becomes an inescapable reality forcing even the saltiest of rednecks to finally admit they have been had by the very companies their tax dollars are subsidizing while they line up to compete for horrendous, low paying jobs in the oil fields.
5. Irony Becomes Completely Passé
Hipsters vanish from the earth with the only pockets of their kind living in grey haired enclaves in Olympia and Williamsburg. Irony is considered too painful to be interesting except to a few noble game theory mathematicians who recognize that irony has an actual place in stochastics. Their research fuels a new form of ironically based investment derivative that causes the rebound of the markets in 2021.
