Tag: Winter2016

Happy 2016! World equity and commodity markets welcomed in the new year with a record-breaking crash. By now, most will have forgotten how bad it was; many more never heard it when it happened.  In the first week of trading, the Dow Jones made history, falling a whopping 6.2 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500...

Throughout last year, I predicted the Federal Reserve wouldn’t raise rates by September and that it was unlikely to do anything to seriously rock the rate boat at all. That turned out to be accurate. On December 16, the Fed did raise rates — sort of. I say that because the Fed utilized the smallest...

With each passing day, drums of war beat louder and the list of countries joining the march to war grows longer. If trend lines drawn since the War on Terror launched by US President George W. Bush following 9/11 are not reversed, World War III will not only be a Top Trend of 2016, it may...

Throughout 2016 and for years to come, millions of refugees will flee war-torn nations looking for safety. Millions of migrants will leave economically depressed countries looking for work. Trends are born, they grow, mature, reach old age and die. The Great Migration trend, born some five years ago, was ignored by the media and ridiculed...

Happy Economic New Year! Wild equity market, currency and commodity price swings have become the new abnormal. Since money makes the world go around, follow the money. During the first six weeks of 2016, the global banking system got pounded. Bank shares in Europe fell 24 percent. Japan’s Topix Banks Index lost 21 percent. In the...

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. It’s a Barnum and Bailey World. It’s the Greatest Show on Earth: The 2016 race for the White House.  It’s a red, white and blue living-color freak show. It’s produced and directed exclusively by the masters of propaganda: just six corporations that own and operate 90 percent of the “media” — and...

The first wave of baby boomers, about 2.4 million of them born in 1946, will turn 70 in 2016. The generation that turned popular culture and societal norms upside down will confront the rigors of growing old, face life-and-death decisions, and grapple with difficult lifestyle choices. This initial wave of boomers led the charge in a...

Take a trip around the world. If you live outside one of those cities of wealth, take a walk around the block. What do you see? On the global scene, from Canada to Chile, Venezuela to Russia, Nigeria to Norway, and South Africa to China, countries large and small and rich and poor — all...

The cheap-money, zero-interest-rate policies of the Federal Reserve, mimicked with increasing skill across global economies, have further fueled the takeover, mergers and acquisitions landscape engulfing civilized nations. As the Trends Research Institute predicted in its Top Trends of 2015, “Takeover” has indeed taken over. The absence of meaningful regulation governing monopolistic activity, coupled with ease...

Look at any meaningful metric to determine America’s and much of the Western World’s economic, physical, cultural and moral health. In fact, all those indicators are in sharp decline. Tensions are high and the trajectory is not positive. As we wrote two years ago in “Empire America is fading fast” (Trends Journal, Fall 2013), “When...