Tag: Fall2016

Two months before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, in the lead paragraph of our “Campaign 2016” coverage in the Spring 2015 Trends Journal, we wrote: “Billions will be spent on lies, deceptions, hollow slogans… it’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Presidential Reality Show.® In 18 months, Americans will go to the polls to cast ballots...

Over the next two years, President Trump, a political outsider not beholden to party officials, will have free reign to build his administration and implement policies with minimal resistance. And, as with most politicians, Commander-in-Chief Trump will moderate the most radical platform positions he expressed on the campaign trail. It remains to be seen if...

United we stand, divided we fall. Less than two weeks after Donald Trump was elected, a Gallup Poll reported a record-high 77 percent of Americans perceive the nation divided while just 21 percent believe it is united and in agreement. While data are still being calculated as we go to press, with both candidates’ high negativity ratings...

Just as the mainstream media and major pollsters got it wrong forecasting Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump for the White House, Wall Street’s forecast that a Trump win would sink equity markets and send gold prices sharply higher also was a losing bet. Throughout the election season, Wall Street was strongly pro-Clinton. Markets moved...

In his victory speech, Presidential Reality Show® champ Donald Trump declared, “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none,” while promising to “put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it” and spend “$1 trillion over a 10-year period.” Iron ore and copper prices spiked 5...

This past September, The Bank for International Settlements warned of excessive borrowing, mostly in dollars, by emerging-market companies. Therefore, as US interest rates rise and the dollar gets stronger, correspondingly, as clearly evidenced by current events forming future trends, emerging-market currencies will weaken. That, in turn, will dramatically increase their debt-repayment burden. In late September,...

Despite the global slowdown in trade, countries whose currencies decline against the dollar will help boost their exports because a weaker exchange rate will make their products more price-competitive than US exports. Moreover, on the home front, as interest rates rise, so too will rates for home mortgages, business and consumer credit. While mortgage rates...

You can stop blaming the mainstream media. It’s dead. Dual currents of catastrophic public-trust issues and rapidly declining advertising revenues are not cycles in the life of an industry. They are death knells. The last nail in an almost-sealed coffin was hammered in on Election Night 2016. Coverage of the campaign – dominated by the...

Information fragments – whether sound bites on broadcast news or Twitter firestorms between news sources and media – now pass as news. The masses are headline-strong and knowledge-empty. And it is a trend line cemented by the perfect storm raking over media this fall.Add it up: With trust rates well below 10 percent in media...

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the German state of Bavaria wrote a constitution stating that all economic activity should serve the common good. This was a direct response to the fascism that triggered the war, the Great Depression that gave rise to fascism and the laissez-faire economic and financial system that brought...