On Election Day, states from sea to shining sea legalized marijuana for recreational and medical use, getting high or getting better. Now, despite pot still being federally illegal, it has become legal in 28 states. While the fast-moving track for legalized marijuana is, at least for the next few years, teeming with profit opportunities for ontrendpreneurs and multinationals… and with...

China, the country with the world’s largest population of 1.35 billion people and the world’s second-largest economy, accounts for 1.2 percentage points of world Gross Domestic Product. America, the world’s largest economy, with just 320 million people, added only 0.3 percentage points to overall world GDP growth. Japan, the third-largest world economy, added less than 0.1 percent. As for Europe,...

Soon, you won’t be able to see or touch cash in the coming global cashless society. The pace at which currency across the globe was challenged or devalued accelerated in 2016. The stage is now set for even greater momentum: In 2017, there’ll be a global sprint toward digital currency. Sweden – where barely 2 percent of all payments are...

Start with the central banks’ rigged-markets-fueled merger-and-acquisition craze that’s created monumental wealth for the world’s very wealthy elite. Couple that with the explosion of cheap technology that’s transforming industries and economic sectors worldwide. The result: Creation of a new, dynamic playing field for innovators – the era of The OnTrendpreneur™. As we forecast for 2016: “The cheap-money, zero-interest-rate policies of...

Virtual reality is no longer just for video gaming. The technology’s explosive use and effectiveness in educational and training settings will become so pervasive in 2017 that a foundation will be laid to use VR learning models not only in higher education and advanced training settings, but in primary education. The fast-evolving VR-ED trend is bolstered by a growing record...

The future is coming! What will it look like? How will it affect your business, your family… your life? There is only one place in the world to read History Before it Happens®: The Trends Journal®, the world leader in trend forecasting. From economics to geopolitics, from real estate to retail, covering trends in over 300 categories since 1980, The Trends Journal and...

The technological wave sweeping the globe in 2017 will trigger a historic, rapid transformation of how societies live, work and play. With astonishing effect, our machines increasingly will do the thinking for us. “Big data,” computers’ ability to gather vast amounts of information in complex databases, will be stored in the limitless spheres of “The Cloud.” And the “deep learning”...

The daily newspaper dies in 2017. Don’t read one anyway? Why should you care? For nearly a century, fat-staffed newsrooms, populated with reporter-class curmudgeons who questioned authority at every turn and made it their life’s mission to expose the bad guys, set the agenda for public discourse. Back then, broadcast outlets didn’t have the staffing, investigative chops or clout the...

It’s grander than Presidential Reality Show champion Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again.” It’s bigger than France’s presidential primary victor, François Fillon, who promises to restore “respect,” “pride” and “French values.” It’s bigger than the Austrian, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, German, British, etc., political movements whose foundations are built on bringing back times long gone by, when their countries and...

The economic year that was will never be again. The new economic year ahead will be like none we have ever seen before. Indeed, this time last year, we forecast that panic would hit Wall Street in 2016. And, immediately after the new year was rung in, the Dow Jones suffered one of its worst openings in its history. By mid-January, some...