Hey, maybe I'm just a pessimist, don't pay any attention to me.
On the morning of January 26th, 2020, when Covid-19 was just "some disease in China" and conventional wisdom was that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would surge up to 35,000 soon, I made these predictions (linked below). Every single prediction seemed completely nuts at the time I wrote them. My numbers for the Dow, S&P 500, and Russell 2,000 all came true within a couple of months.
My biggest mistake in my thinking in 2020 was that I dramatically underestimated The Fed's willingness to create so much new money, to prop up the economy, that it will (and has) dramatically devalue the U.S. dollar. What we call inflation is the process of prices catching up with the devalued dollar (or other currency), due to dramatically increased money supply (up nearly 25% in 2020 alone). This process takes a couple of years to work through. Inflation will continue to rise for another year or two, it's just beginning. Full blown hyperinflation is a distinct possibility.
On January 4th, 2021, two days before the treasonous attack on the U.S. capitol by Donald Trump supporters, while trying out a new blog, I made financial predictions for this year (2021). Bitcoin was 31,431 then. In a side note, I said Bitcoin at $50,000 wouldn't surprise me in 2021. That's the only prediction that has actually happened so far, eventually followed by a huge drop. It's now below 30,000 at the moment. The prediction for silver is a typo, I expect silver to rise above $43 a troy ounce in 2021, not rise by $43 in price.
Again, The Fed has created far more money than I expected, and the inflation we are now seeing is the beginning of the effect from that. This has delayed the drops I see happening in stocks and real estate this year, but not prevented them. We'll see how close, if at all, these predictions come to reality by the end of 2021. When I wrote this blog post below, about 400,000 Americans had died of Covid-19 complications, the number is now over 624,000, and cases are surging again. I predicted 750,000 Covid deaths in the U.S. by the end of 2021. Unfortunately, we're headed that direction far to fast.
In October 6th, 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic was even on the horizon, I wrote this blog post about why I thought the next recession would be a time a massive and incredible change. The "Repo Market crisis" had just begun, and was expected to be handled by The Fed in a week or two. Conventional wisdom was that we MIGHT have a minor recession in 2021. Maybe. Obviously, I disagreed. Here's that October 6, 2019 blog post, The Phoenix Recession. I saw a full blown depression coming, but no one wanted to hear the "D" word in 2019, so I called it a recession. Obviously, we went into a serious recession, technically a depression (10% or greater drop in GDP in Q2 2020), in 2020.
I believe we are now 22 months into what I call The Phoenix Great Depression. This will be a 5 to 8 year economic crisis that will come in waves, and appear to rebound at times. But for the majority of Americans, by the time we hit 2027, it will feel like we have been through a full blown Great Depression. Those in the official capacity to decide that we are in a depression will do anything to avoid that determination these days. If the Great Depression of the 1930's happened right now, it would be called a "triple dip recession" with "great rebounds" in between the dips. We are that far detached from reality now. The second big wave of The Phoenix Great Depression is getting ready to hit us as I write this, in July 20, 2021.
Here's my most in depth post about The Phoenix Great Depression, and why I think the 2020's will be a period of change like any other in hundreds of years.
Check out my new blogs:
The Big Freakin' Transition- about the future and economics
Crazy California 43- Weird and cool locations in California
Full Circle- about writing and the writer's life
And my fiction blog...
Stench: Homeless Super hero- I'm writing fiction now about the world's first homeless super hero, Stench.
Crazy California 43- Weird, cool, and historic locations in California.
