The numbers don’t lie. The politicians do and the media swears to it. Go back to 2010. Look at the charts. Only a few thousand migrants were crossing the Mediterranean to seek safe passage in Italy and Malta. Four years and several wars later, over 170,000 landed last year and 4,828 drowned in transit. Who’s to blame for the migrant...

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For the past year, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and other market analysts have warned that solar-electric panels, coupled with improved electricity-storage systems such as Tesla’s home battery (Trends Journal, Winter 2015) threaten electric utilities’ business model. In 2014, an analysis by investment bank UBS stated, “…the ‘we have done it like this for a century’ value chain in developed electricity...

Adel Al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, announced March 26 from Washington, D.C., that his country and a coalition of Arab nations had launched airstrikes against neighboring Yemen, which has been wracked by civil war. Al-Jubeir said Operation Decisive Storm’s mission was “to defend and support the legitimate government of Yemen and prevent the radical Houthi movement from...

There is no real economy. For those working stiffs of Slavelandia, whose real wages have declined and whose puny bank accounts return little interest, the bottom has fallen out. In Economics 2.0, the gauge of prosperity measured by governments and the business media has become the health of the equity markets. And the only “economy” that counts is the size of...

March retail sales rose 0.9 percent, the healthiest monthly gain in a year. But the gain was below economists’ expectations and driven in large part, by auto sales, which increased 2.7 percent. Back out the spike in auto sales, and the March increase dives to .5 percent. Beyond the headlines, however, there’s a dimension to this news that gets little...

Extending the trend to turn abandoned industrial buildings from brown to “green,” the site of an abandoned steel plant in Newark, New Jersey, is slated to become a 69,000-square-foot vertical farm. The $30 million project is being organized by the private AeroFarms company, which also will maintain its headquarters on the site. The initiative is funded by private investors, the...

On March 30, Chinese authorities announced the closure of 66 out of the 400 golf courses built after a 2004 nationwide moratorium tried to impose limits on the development of new courses. Banned in 1949 because of its association with western bourgeoisie values, golf has made a huge comeback since it’s reinstatement in 1984. China now boasts 600 courses including...

Retrograde 2.0, one of the Trends Research Institute’s top trends for 2015, postulated that millennials, more than any young generation before, were positioned to reach back to the distant past to reinvent the future. In the winter Trends Journal, Gerald Celente wrote: “Listen to the millennials. What’s their vibe? Name that tune. It’s a scene-less scene. There has been nothing...

The last five years have seen the emergence of the casual fast-food phenomenon, a trend line first identified by Gerald Celente in the Trends Journal and later in his book Trends 2000. In a CNBC article earlier this month, it was reported that fast-casual restaurants are the “only niche in the restaurant sector that’s shown any growth — and that...