[ This first appeared a week ago in my Shift Age Newsletter. ] In the first eight months of 2011, I made some economic forecasts relative to the global economic landscape. As a futurist, that is part of what I do, as people always ask me about the future, particularly economics. It is only fair […]
In my last column I wrote that humanity is in transition from one Age to another and that the global financial collapse is a painful part of that transition. This occurs during any major historical transition period. In addition I wrote: “There are four words that keep coming back to me as I view the […]
In my columns of forecasts for 2008 I made clear and distinct predictions about debt, the housing market and the stock market. Debt On January 1 I wrote: “The key economic word for 2007 and even more so for 2008 will be “debt”. It is debt that is the true economic issue for the individual, […]
Debt is one of the primary underpinnings of the economic turbulence we are now experiencing. In the last 50 years debt has gone from something occasional to something universal, embraced and now endemic. Borrow against the future to pay for today. Debt, debt, debt, debt is like the drip, drip, drip, drip of a faucet […]
Happy New Year to all of you that are regular readers of this blog and to those of you who might be coming to it the first time. May 2008 be a happy year for everyone. I can promise that it will be another year of upheaval and change, probably exceeding 2007 in that regard. […]
The Bush Administration has always made me think of George Orwell and his novel “1984†from the point of view of language. While all politicians and all administrations I can remember have been somewhat loose with language and the truth, the current administration has realized the vision of Orwell in that language means nothing and […]
Thinking a lot about the future as I do, I keep coming back to the fact that there are five or six fundamental and critical issues that face America in this still new century. The degree to which we begin to face these key issues and to start to do so right now will determine […]
It feels like we are moving through a watershed moment in both the U.S. and global financial markets. When the mortgage securities market collapses as though it was the tulip bulb market centuries ago in Holland it is truly time to take pause and look at what has been allowed to occur. Mortgages, secured by […]
There are two future thinking filters through which I view the recent upheavals in the financial markets. The first is that we are moving to a new and developing global society and that this can first be seen economically. The second is that debt is something that must be looked with new perspective. Today we […]
The news out of Detroit last week was that GM had given up the title of the world’s number one auto company to Toyota. This was a development that had been expected, but when both companies reported first quarter sales last week, the numbers made it official. Toyota sold 2.35 million cars and trucks, about […]