2014, Forecast - Eye of the Storm - by Warren Pollock

Totalitarian regime embeds itself in failure. 2014 will be a calm year, because we will continue to be in the eye of the storm, with the next wave approaching in late 2015. Healthcare and finance are of outsized in terms of the total economy; I sense the layoffs coming within the next year. The idea of credential creep has worked its way into an economy that has become dominated by bailouts. Wall Street is going to start to consolidate in 2014 as there is no granularity between good and bad. There will be compressions in the margins of finance that will be covered by layoffs and salary cuts. Walmart will hold up by shifting to groceries in a last ditch effort to maintain a meager continuance. In 2014 the oligarchs will push inflation into non-core items and these companies will drive themselves out of business. The government is going to pass some "very wacky regulations" aimed squarely on small and medium businesses. The government will work very hard to distort a failed economy. The lower and middle class will stew in a pressure cooker. Virtual games will dominate the lower earnings consciousness. Get your map out, the middle of the large continent will be in total play during 2014. China goes West and Russia goes East. Russia faces some major demographic and internal problems. Most of the lynchpin cities are on the ocean and we will see cities connected to the sea become local! The great landmass is local and that is why there is contention in the middle. We will see much more piracy in 2014 much of it digital. In terms of crypto-currencies; if a major company sees profit they will step in with an "inferior product" that will be widely accepted because it will sell security that is currently lacking in Bit-coin. If there is no future in crypto-currencies then large companies will ignore it. Look to the money; will there be profit? Right now the government wants to "make everything safe" which means that you can be robbed blind. Government wants large companies because they can be taxed into oblivion Elmer Fudd runs for Congress. Disease is the major trend in 2014, there has been too much detrimental reliance on the medical industrial complex.
Our society hits high points in specialized aspects of technology but it cannot find a simple overview of the total risk of complexity. There are many solutions to the medical-industrial-complex problem but there is no incentive to pursue low cost options. In an over credentialed world very good people become clerks in a "McDonald-ized" system. We will find there has not been investment in low margin drugs that are essential to life support. When you have no capital you have to find solutions on the cheap. Hopefully we will see more personal-resourcefullnes as things become more desperate. We are going to see lots of nationalism and xenophobia as the world becomes more desperate. Oil and water alliances will become more common place. International entities will shun US debt until the system breaks. There are positive things happening in the world but the citizens of the US and the world will not be beneficiaries. The quality of information will start to degrade with perceptions and "fake-news" driving perceptions and decisions.

We are transitioning to a time where people will realize that they are not participants in a working system. As things break gold and hard assets will flow silently from West to East. The pie will get smaller as the "leadership cast" consumes itself with looting. The US will lose credibility on an epic scale and eventually it will be humbled and embarrassed. Unpredictable natural events, such as a CA earthquake, might create a reckoning because it would show that the "emperor-empire-US has not clothes."