It’s fun reading everyone else’s predictions.
You would think, coming into what the Mayan’s may have predicted to be the final year for this planet, that people would want to make sure they get things right but no – most people just predict for next year a variation of what they thought would happen this year – no matter how wrong they were in 2011.
Last January, the Dow was under 12,000 and we had Russell leadership as they tested the 800 line, now the Dow is the leader at 12,287 and the Russell is struggling at 745 but both in such a tight range that we could have pretty much skipped the whole year and we wouldn’t have missed anything.
Although constantly asked, I do not like to make arbitrary predictions just because the year is winding down on the calendar. The dirty little secret to my accurate prognostications is I WAIT until I actually see something that’s very likely to happen before I mention it. This annoys many people who interview me, who are used to getting a prediction on pretty much anything they ask a guest, no matter how clueless that person is.
That being said, last year, on December 19th, I wrote “It’s Never too Early to Predict the Future” and among other brilliant observations I noted: “I’d be gung-ho bullish now if I wasn’t worried the Euro will collapse as that is the fly in the ointment.” Here we are a year later and we survived that, as well as a nuclear catastrophe in Japan and revolutions in the Middle East and none of that caused the World to end, nor did it push oil over $100 for more than a short while, nor did it ever get gold to that magic $2,000 level.
So what’s it going to take? What would it finally take to topple the now $60Tn global economy where EVERY Nation on Earth has proved that they are ready, willing and able to create Trillions of new Dollars/Euros/Francs/Yen/Yuan and drop them into the mix – until they find the recipe to make the Global Economy start to rise again. Will too many cooks spoil the broth or is it just that a watched pot never boils and we are all a bit too impatient as we have to wait for the economic yeast to rise?…
