Category: Uncategorized

A toxic mix of economic and geopolitical ingredients are signaling the outbreak of war in the Middle East that will trigger a global equity market crash. As Trends Journal subscribers are well aware, we forecast in one of our Top Trends for 2018, “Market Shock, Mass Murder,” how a U.S./Israel/Saudi alliance was crafting an anti-Iran, anti-Hezbollah strategy...

You’re invited to tune in to the Friday Trends Special show, a new Trends Research Institute video posting on TrendsResearch.com each Friday at 6 p.m. The Friday Trends Special is one of many bold, exciting improvements we’re rolling out this spring. We’ll showcase my conversations with OnTrendpreneurs who have built and grown successful businesses, and...

The developing world is undergoing a building boom. From Vietnam to India to Nigeria, businesses and governments are building roads, airports, skyscrapers and other landmarks of busy economies. Building these things requires concrete. Making concrete requires sand. Only there’s suddenly not enough sand to go around. In global markets, sand’s price has risen 40 to...

Microgrids – little islands of shared electricity generation and use, independent of the centralized grid – are poised to become a macro force in energy markets. A report from Navigant Research forecasts that microgrids will become a $100 billion sector by 2028. Growth will come largely in Asia’s Pacific region and North America, with Europe...

In January, Germany’s two main political parties confirmed a previous agreement to establish a commission that will set a timeline to phase out coal from Germany’s energy mix. This coincides with the parties’ commitment to draw 65 percent of Germany’s energy from renewable sources by 2030. Germany, once one of the world’s great coal producers...

By 2020, energy from solar panels and wind turbines will be cheaper than power made from fossil fuels, according to an International Renewal Energy Agency study. That reflects today’s rate of price decline for renewables. The report notes that the cost of generating electricity with onshore windmills has fallen 23 percent since 2010; the cost...

Antibiotics have been so overprescribed that more and more bugs are now resistant to them. In fact, tens of millions of lives are at risk from common infections that are resistant to antibiotics and can evolve into more serious medical conditions. It is a now fully evolved trend that Gerald Celente first identified in his...

After catastrophic floods in 2012, China made recovering from floods and minimizing their damage a national priority. To achieve that goal, China is creating “sponge cities” – urban areas able to absorb and hold large amounts of excess water, gradually flowing it back into nature. Only about one-fourth of the rain falling on Chinese cities...

Artificial Intelligence software created by Microsoft and Alibaba squeaked by humans to take the top spots in a complex reading-comprehension test. The Stanford Question Answering Dataset, or SQuAD, includes more than 100,000 sets of questions and answers drawn from 500 Wikipedia articles. SQuAD was created to challenge AI’s ability to understand written information. Microsoft said...