patrick.net

They'll come up with a catchy new word that means Depression w/o using the D word.

In the press conference last week, the president made a remark to the effect that he'd work to get his party's nominee elected.

Could be an October surprise.

HARM gets shot in Oakland, but fortunately it's only a flesh-wound. HARM then sees the light and moves to Idaho, where he packs heat.

Peter P gets tomaine from eating raw fish, so he changes his culinary preferences to BBQ. He then moves to Kansas City.

Newly elected President Condi Rice taps Patrick for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Patrick's first official act is to prosecute WS, the banks, and others under the RICO statutes, causing them to forfeit all REO. The REO's are then distributed to worthy people who live within their means.

Surfer-X's father tells him a family secret - that Surfer-X had a 15 year coma early in life and has amnesia about that period. So Surfer-X turns out to be a Boomer.

California will see an "off the books" population decline. It will show up in increased rental vacancies putting even more downward pressure on prices. I say that with the entire state in mind. The fortress, a strong maybe.

As the economy sags further the MSM finally begins to publish stories on the bogus government inflation and labor statistics. I see bloggers talking about these cooked stats now like the real estate a couple years ago.

Commercial real estate begins to show clear signs of a bust.

The dropoff in tax revenue combined with evaporation of investment portfolios will cause some former booming municipalities to tip into bankruptcy.

Politicians will scramble to come up with bailout plans that will not be effective and will only bankrupt the government sooner.

CNBC remains bullish.

More and more people start living off the grid, and even off the monetary grid. A sort of "people's money" develops, with a real silver US coin being perhaps considered worth $10 in paper if it's a dime. A quarter is thus $25 and a copper penny is $1.

Hoovervilles multiply and a few debt-slaves finding themselves in them, get online and write about it, finding that when it comes down to it all, sitting in a Hooverville teaching one of the kids how to do cat's cradle and smelling the pot of beans cooking for lunch beats the hell out of the 60+ hour week and ulcers of being a good little debt-slave. Especially since the informal dentist (who started out training to be a vet before he started working on people) pulled that perpetually-aching molar they never had time or money to get done before.

Bartering and local currencies, already present, grow a bit more. A few decent Web sites explaining them and advocating them arise.

Interest in permaculture, already rising, increases. Rachael Ray does a show cooking with all stuff grown on her block.

Skynet finally becomes self aware and immediately decides to nuke humanity on what is known as Judgement Day.

Killer robots will stalk the remaining humans who live like rats in the wreckage of their once great civilization.

Oh, and lots re-runs since the writer's strike will neva eva end.

Predictions on what 2008 will bring?

Jeebus.

sybrib Says:
In the press conference last week, the president made a remark to the effect that he’d work to get his party’s nominee elected

Wait - who are you talking about? Putin? Or Musharaf? :-)

Okay, this was fun (not that there's anything wrong with that. But I was hoping for a few serious guesses too.

Here are my serious guesses:

Hillary wins in 08. She pursues the current policies even more aggressively, both abroad and domestically. But that is in 09.

08 will be a lot like 07 except more so. Real estate will continue to tank and realtors will continue to desert the profession in big numbers. It will become common knowledge that houses aren't really worth as much as people thought, so all the money hurled out of helicopters doesn't help anyone.

Foreclosures continue to rise, even in the fortress, and we start to see more and more infomercials about how to get very rich using pre-foreclosures.

The Internet 2.0 bubble finally deflates although some companies continue to do well. The job market starts to hurt and this, combined with the loss of jobs related to housing, really hurts the economy.

Bush seriously starts considering if he can declare emergency and stay the president for much longer.

Gas hits $4 a gallon.

What else?

Sriram those sounds like good predictions to me.

Ugh! Hillary! Yuuuuck!

ESR, I really hope that doesn't come true. But is definitely conceivable that the race next year will be between Hillary on one side and Guiliani or Huckabee on the other.

Then, no one can save this country.

Guys I just took the AOL straw poll for President. Although it is totally unscientific, the survey seems to have some controls to prevent multiple votes like using the passkey to submit. It seems like they are trying to take it seriously. It is worth noting that for the Republicans, Ron Paul leads with 27%, Giuliani is in second a full 9 points behind with 18%. Then, no statistical difference between Huckabee, Romney, and Mccain who follow at 17, 16, and 15%. This is based so far on 58,000 responders who picked from the Republican side.

Bap33 Says:

> I’ll bet you $1,000 USD, CASH, that Comrad Clinton is no
> where close to winning anything.

I would not bet that Clinton can’s win “anything”… She will win again in New York and would even beat Boxer if she moved to California (It is kind of funny that Clinton’s brother has been accused of “actually” beating Boxers daughter:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/12202007/news/nationalnews/hills_brother_a_deadbeat_514395.htm I couldn’t find the domestic violence story, but above is a recent story that is almost better).

Here in the Bay Area since almost everyone is a Democrat (people talk about family members who vote GOP like they were child molesters) people that live around here (where Gavin is a “right winger”) think Hillary can win a national election. I have yet to meet anyone who has spent a lot of time in a “red state” that thinks she (or a black guy) has any chance of becoming our next president…

Then Malcolm Says:

> Guys I just took the AOL straw poll for President. Although it is
> totally unscientific, the survey seems to have some controls to
> prevent multiple votes like using the passkey to submit. It seems
> like they are trying to take it seriously. It is worth noting that for
> the Republicans, Ron Paul leads with 27%...

Remember internet polls will always favor the candidates that tech savvy people like. Most people in red states are just now talking about “the all new aol dial up service” and will vote for whoever their Pastor or Union leader tells them to vote for (it will be the mainstream candidate supported by the party who gives money to the Pastor and Union Leader

Hillary's popularity right now is the difference between voting for someone in principle and actually voting for them in practice.

My serious predictions :

1. At least one major financial institution - here or abroad - that is too big to fail will *almost* fail.

2. The spring market in BA will shock a lot of people. Including bears - as it will not tank as much as they hoped. Many people will try to purchase thinking it's a good "deal" but will have a very hard time getting a loan. Resulting in very long closing times, and houses falling out of escrows. So end of summer will look lot worse than spring.

3. CPI will not be able to hide inflation and people will realize how trapped the Fed is. Panic will set in stock market and in general it will be a good year for short sellers.

4. CNBC will keep trying to convince people that "consumer is not dead". Of course consumers will have to spend on basic needs. But apart from that they won't spend much on anything more.

5. Since solutions to the bubble aftermath won't show any positive result, the real game will start playing in DC and in election campaigns - finger pointing. Candidates will be asked about their "solutions" to the bust in debates.

6. May happen in 2008, but more likely in 2009 - at least one local CA government will go bankrupt.

Overall, 2008 will be far more pessimistic than 2007. To the extent that it will become common, fashionable to espouse such thoughts. Such people will be viewed as pragmatic and not gloom and doomers.

FormerAptBroker Says:
December 23rd, 2007 at 10:22 pm
"Remember internet polls will always favor the candidates that tech savvy people like. Most people in red states are just now talking about “the all new aol dial up service” and will vote for whoever their Pastor or Union leader tells them to vote for (it will be the mainstream candidate supported by the party who gives money to the Pastor and Union Leader"

You are right, but we must observe that his rank is twice as high as regular national polls, and the internet is the new mainstream. It has totally disrupted the traditional mainstream networks for news, and could make the difference. Something exciting is happening, you can almost see it gaining momentum.

I don't even want to think about the Presidential general election. This super-early primary year will give the nominees about 10 months to "screw up", so I'd think all bets are off. If Congress really wants "election reform", they need to pass a law restricting primary elections to no earlier than June or July, thereby removing the perceived "need" to raise gobs of cash to blow on advertising.

IIUC due to Prop 13 Sacramento makes transfer payments to local governments to make up for shortfalls in revenues due to the property tax cap. With the budget crisis this year, I predict that Arnold will come out for a repeal of Prop 13 as a solution. Maybe a legislative constitutional amendment for the fall election with prop tax caps only for owner-occupied houses and not for rentals or commercial property. My prediction is that the CA state budget crisis will swell and become the real bad news for 2008.

An Optomistic Outlook for American Youth

It would behoove the responsible institutions of this society, if there are any left, to keep the younger generations abreast of the matters that will most accutely effect their future. While their young minds are busy at scoring points or grades and their bodies busy enjoying the ample hormones God gave them, it might be prudent for them to know that their future prospects for economic security and well being are rather dismal at best. It goes without saying that the American masses, aptly referred as consumers, have been successfully vaccinated against critical thought for a generation(what the pundits refer to as doom and gloom) and have trouble dealing with the slighttist blemish on their skin or or spect of dirt on their car. While such social programming keeps the masses from interfering with the depradations of the ruling elite, all seems to work if those elites at least know what they are doing. Which bring us to the contemporary reality of America where the current crop of political, economic and cultural leaders have shown themselves to be remarkably incompetent in managing the affairs of state. It might come to pass that within a single graduating class, this crop of ivy league hacks might just do what all the terrorists in the world could only of dreamed of doing, that is destroying the power and wealth of this country. With the currency collapsing and on its way to a historical footnote, two wars with no end in sight costing us trillions and the complete and utter indebtedness of the country as a whole, our old cold-war rival, Russia, may have the last laugh on this one.

It is worth noting that in an interview with Mikal Gorbachev on the causes of the collaspe of the USSR, he stated simply that no one believed any longer in the lies from the central government, from the media and from the institutions of soviet society. The common refrain from the people was that 'we can not go on like this'. The disconnect between reality and what came out of the mouths of leaders were too great. It is not hard to envision the same thing here as ever more citizens become disillusioned with the 'free market utopia' trumpeted from every channel, deeply skeptical of the corporate spin of the mainstream media and completely alienated from the political process because of its corruption and the one-party (the money party) stranglehold on it. And the only thing that keeps it all together is the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency, a fact that may be soon to change and with devastating consequences. As a former Treasury Secretary recently noted, that if that happens, the country would have to close all 700+ of its military bases throughout the world and and beg airfare from the airlines to bring all the troops home.

As for the future of our youth, they should busy themselves studying how young people coped with the devastating changes in the former USSR. With the economy in shambles and the government bankrupt, there were not too many options for work, such as construction, office or cafe work. Schools, hospitals, universities, etc were essentially runnng on empty with little opportunity to offer. Manufacturing and services came to a standstill. Coal miners, loggers and the like found themselves waiting months for meager paychecks. Whatever savings people had, inflation destroyed. The ruble, (as the dollar seems to be headed) became worthless. The communist elites quickly turned capitalist and promptly stole as much wealth as possible until Putin put an end to it. The military and police all but collapsed with many soldiers and police going into business for themselves in the protection rackets or selling their weapons to the criminal and terror gangs (if not joing them), in order to survive. Migration was only available to small, well connected segment of the population.

As for the average young woman, there was ample work in the booming internet porn industry as well as all kinds of options for prostitution. The incredibly boring and foreign-born middle-aged businessman was your primary client. Arranged marriage services boomed as well where any schmuck in the world with some money and an internet connection could marry an incredibly beautiful Russian woman, even if the marriages were typically short lived and expensive due to the importation of the bride's family, children, boyfriend and/or husband. For women whose bodies lack the appeal of those found in glitzy magazine ads, there were not too many options available other than working for nickles, going hungry, selling everything your own, and hoping your parents have room in their house and some food. It did not matter whether you had a college degree or not although if you spoke english you had a fighting chance at some translation work helping Western carpet baggers and the like. Boyfriends and/or husbands were fairly useless as well as they were typically without work and overwhelmed with alchohol and depression. And, the few monments of sexual pleasure one might enjoy with a friend or mate in this meager landscape could have devastating consequences as orphanages filled up to the brim with abandoned babies as infertile middle-class couples from America piled in to pay $10-20K for ones (another thing Putin recently put an end to).

Men had more adventurous income producing opportunities. Those good with knives and guns and little compuction at killing things, primarily humans, had plenty of work in bootlegging, blackmarketing, highway banditry, extortion, kidnapping, drug running and murder. Police don't work if there is not any money to pay them so crime was a boom industry. Those with college degrees, family connections and the same work ethic as the criminals found work with foreign companies seeking to loot the former empire. For those guys who lack that degree of moral fiber there was petty crime, the occasional drudge work as well as plenty of cheap heroin and alcohol. Many just went to work at their old jobs with little prospect of pay but nothing better to do, living off the wages from sex work of their wives and girlfriends. If you had advanced degrees and training in the computing sciences, work overseas was a distant possibility. For American, though, many of these options will not be available as most of the world can do whatever it is we do, and probably better.

Our attempts at bankruptng Russia through the years will have served to bankrupt us as well. Although all the pain and suffering the Russian people have gone through for the last twenty years has finally began to wane as Putin put an end to the society's distingration and the country is emerging in far better shape than its cold war rival. Putin paid off the national debt and with the one of largest oil reserves and the largest natural gas reserves in the world (an ironic twist of fate), Russia's 21st century prospects are looking pretty good. A highly skilled workforce educated in the sciences and technologies stands to breathe new life into the Russian state. A nice stockpile of nuclear arms will keep America at bay as well as it recovers it strenght and reasserts itself in the world. Russia has even intimated interest in its currency being the new reserve. An event that would transform, expotentially, Russia power and relegate the US to that of bankrupt, second-rate has been.

The future prospects for this country are not terribly bright thanks to its ruling class. This class is an utter catastrophe of an unimaginable degree. A human Katrina. Our credibility as a great nation has been permantly damaged by the current regime and it will take more than a public relations firm to sraighten the mess out. The economic tsusami enveloping the globe as a results of Wall Street's criminal schnanigans stands to make '29 look mild. While the average American slouches, half-asleep, in their lazy boy waiting for the next round of commericals promising to deliver them to consumer paradise, the country spins out of control at an ever accerating pace. It seems that no one has any clue how all keep running and there in lies the danger. Like the subprime derivitives, the system has become so murky and convoluted that no one know how it works or even why. Input and outputs do not correlate. In '29, the average American was one generation from the farm and that is where many went to wait out the depression. Even though no one had two nickles to rub together, food could be grown, game hunted and a lot of cards be played. Not so today. As a modern, urban industrial/technological society with its highly dependent and atomized citizens, the experience will be more aligned with the collasped soviet state.

Those who pooh-pooh such a senario here in the United States simply are ignorant of the geopolitical forces driving world change and the political, economic and social crisis that lies just beneath the surface of this 'culture of values and lifestyles'. Our minds have been infected with too many Hollywood happy endings to be able to contemplate the consequences of 27 years of the Reagan Revolution. A nation 10's of trillions of dollars in debt, an economy based largely on speculation and fraud, a bloated and over-extended military, and a corrupt ruling elite holding itself beyond reproach and accountability, openly and rapaciously looting the wealth of Americans and foreigners alike, coupled with an increasingly autocratic and authoritarian social order and police state as well as a population with an increasingly self-absorbed, narrow-minded and apathetic but happy-nonetheless-outlook (thanks to pharmacuetical industry) – such trends do not indicate a dynamic and forward thinking society and are obvious harbingers of a procipitous decline. What passes for discourse today in the mainstream makes old Leave It to Beaver reruns look like the Advant Guard.

The demise of the dollar will shatter the illusion of America as a beacon of freedom and democracy, of opportunity and possibility and will reveal our society to the world to be a farce of tragic proportions. Our pantheon of superheros busted on doping, embezzlement or fraud charges of one sort or another offers a fitting analogy to the decay within. The public's apathy are the nails in the coffin accompanied by an Irish wake sponsered by some money grubbing businessman anxious to extract the last little profit from a collasping social order. The blame lies clearly with those that rule but it is to be expected that power corrupts but I'd like to reserve the hottest place in hell to those that control the mainstream media and the institutions of higher education. It is because of them that America's youth will be the last to know. A tragedy of epic proportions since it is they who will be forced to foot the bill.