Tag: December2014

For 35 years, I have been analyzing socioeconomic and geopolitical events and forecasting their impact on our lives. I have noted countless times how current events form future trends. The history of how we got here and the knowledge of where we are inevitably reveals the face of the future. But as history unfolds it...

The newest trend is most dangerous.  This new trend is the successful manipulation of the financial markets by the Federal Reserve and US Treasury. The Federal Reserve reduced real interest rates on US government debt obligations first to zero and then pushed interest rates into negative territory.  Today the government charges you for the privilege...

Bankism has replaced capitalism as the prevailing economic system throughout much of the world. In capitalism, businesses rise and fall on their own merits. No business is too big to fail. In bankism, too-big-to-fail banks don’t rise and fall on their own merits. They are saved by governments that in turn force the public to...

For generations, in addition to the risks of recession and unemployment, the common economic pain inflicted upon the general public throughout the free world was inflation. Rising prices routinely outpaced rising wages. It cost more to buy less. As the post-World-War-II era song goes: Now listen Mr. President, all you Congressmen too, you got me all...

The coming year will see the greatest diversification of energy sources yet as the trend away from fossil fuels accelerates ­— and energy alternatives on multiple levels dominate. Long relegated to theory, political rhetoric or wishful thinking, new energy is becoming mainstream. These new forms of energy progressively will replace fossil fuels in the same...

Small and mid-size print/digital news operations — the lifeblood of community and regional news coverage in the US and across the globe — will turn a corner in 2015, making a wobbly but complete landing in the new digital frontier. In 2014, the major chains completed a series of high profile maneuvers that saw them...

By some estimates, there’s a $3 trillion-plus market in the US alone waiting to be tapped. Who’s the target: Aging boomers and senior citizens. As we enter 2015, the mystery continues. Why hasn’t a new and more inspiring generation of products and services for older people worldwide been created, marketed and already raking in the...

Every generation has its nostalgia. And businesses find a way to profit from it while it lasts. But the need to look back intensifies when a culture is stressed, depressed, out of luck or otherwise discontent. Enter 2015 — when traditional retrograde movements make a bolder statement about what’s missing in today’s culture, and opportunities...

It’s a takeover. It’s the New World Order. And this is no conspiracy theory. Shrouded in secrecy, cloaked in misleading language and promoted as a trade pact, a conspiracy in the making will rob some two-thirds of the world’s citizens of their state’s rights and impose upon them a one-world economic and legal system. Spearheaded...

America’s appetite for war keeps growing. From the White House, to Congress, from the Pentagon to defense secretaries past and present, old wars have been re-ignited, new ones started and the prospects for a perpetual state of war are being sold as the American way. The “liberal-progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, which flexes its...