Future Trends

[BigBagel]

Re: Future Trends

Socially -- look at the 70s in the US.

Will disco music re-emerge?

[phirang]

Re: Future Trends

Great stuff, gents!

I think we're at a major cross-roads here, folks, and we need to see how the market reacts to the major policy initatives that are coming NOW and in the near future.

It's clear that communism won - the US' era of Bertrand Russel liberalism - kaput. Anyone betting against the State will lose, and things will NEVER return to the way they were, which produces a whole new class of winners and losers. I think GRG55 has made some apt suggestions of who those may be... ;)

The real trick is to watch how FX and treasury markets globally behave in response to coming legislation and trade policy. The rest is... academic.

Just an aside, but the "gulfo" seems absurd to me: the GCC has a totally opaque economy with a capricous political economy and abritrary rule of law. Does a contract mean anything there? Does anyone take their central bankers seriously? Who here would buy a gulfo 30 yr treasury? Anyone? It's backed by oil, but what if the Saudi government falls and the new government repudiates its debt? I wouldn't buy a Gulfo treasury... unless I were covering a short associated with a sovereign default because of an oil price collapse. The only mature economy, in my understanding, is Saudi Arabia, which is rife with social and political issues. If I wanted a "gulfo", I'd buy XOM debt or a certain canroy... Is the Gulfo a sign of panic amongst the GCC rather than a sign of strength, as they fear another attack on the credit markets and desire to pool resources? Could the Gulfo be actually an ABSURDLY bullish dollar development, contrary to the media hype, indicating an acute dollar shortage as interest payments must be made now?


You want to know the likelihood of a coup in the US? It's 0%. Yes, 0%. The neo-communism we have provides rock-solid political stability, and that lets the US charge a damn high premium.

Bernanke is dancing on the head of a needle between a deflationary spiral and inflation, but don't think he's stupid: he knows what he's doing, and so far, he's winning. How many have predicted hyperinflation and hyperdeflation... and how many novice or even experienced traders have gone BK after huge gains in 2008... Ben outsmarted a LOT of clever (but not smart) people!

The Ethiopian central bank found STEEL in its gold reserves: yes, STEEL covered in gold trim. That's PATHETIC. There's your emerging market: a kleptocracy run by street-smart by otherwise idiotic sociopaths. You think Ethiopia is going to "emerge"? LOL: if they're lucky, most EM's will be a mine/oil well for the Chinese, and if they're REALLY lucky, for the West.

I expect India and China to continue to mature, but I think India will really surprise people the most: the culture in India is rapidly Westernizing, and that's the first step forward. Also, India is far more culturally open than say uber-stagnant Japan or mildly less-so Korea. I prefer India's low-order chaos to the unstable equilibrium of China in terms of risk profile.

Enough bla bla from me, fellas. :cool:

[phirang]

Re: Future Trends

I predict more "reforms" will be enacted to prop up the Treasury complex at the expense of US citizens:

"The United States has demonstrated a commitment to reforming these future liabilities and will take the lead in making the necessary transformations to entitlement programs. Indeed, Congress is currently engaged in a serious debate over health care reform. Given global demographic trends and their implications for sovereign debt markets, changes to our entitlement programs will lead investors to realize that medium term financing increases may lay the ground for longer-term fiscal stability – and a more attractive investment landscape. "

http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/tg305.htm

[touchring]

Re: Future Trends

I expect India and China to continue to mature, but I think India will really surprise people the most: the culture in India is rapidly Westernizing, and that's the first step forward. Also, India is far more culturally open than say uber-stagnant Japan or mildly less-so Korea. I prefer India's low-order chaos to the unstable equilibrium of China in terms of risk profile.

Enough bla bla from me, fellas. :cool:

How much do you know about the culture in China or Korea?

The culture is many Chinese cities today is no culture - no religion, no values, everything is possible.,

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Future Trends

The culture is many Chinese cities today is no culture - no religion, no values, everything is possible.,

That sounds implausible to me.

Perhaps it is no culture that you or I would recognize or respect, but it surely has something.

[touchring]

Re: Future Trends

That sounds implausible to me.

Perhaps it is no culture that you or I would recognize or respect, but it surely has something.

For younger generation of Chinese, perhaps you can call it the Internet and webcam culture.


Even prior to Communist rule, the Chinese have an identity crisis. The last dynasty was a Manchurian dynasty, upon which Manchurian culture was forced upon the Chinese population, e.g. pigtails, cheongsam dress. And soon after the Manchurian dynasty fell, the Chinese discarded what they wore for modern western attire.

The Communist Chinese went one step further, eradicating family values, social classes, culture and religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

The effects of the Cultural Revolution directly or indirectly touched essentially all of China's population. During the Cultural Revolution, much economic activity was halted, with "revolution", regardless of interpretation, being the primary objective of the country. The start of the Cultural Revolution brought huge numbers of Red Guards to Beijing, with all expenses paid by the government, and the railway system was in turmoil. Countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards. By December 1967, 350 million copies of Mao's Quotations had been printed.[20]

Mao Zedong Thought had become the central operative guide to all things in China. The authority of the Red Guards surpassed that of the army, local police authorities, and the law in general. China's traditional arts and ideas were ignored, with praise for Mao being practiced in their place. People were encouraged to criticize cultural institutions and to question their parents and teachers, which had been strictly forbidden in Confucian culture. This was emphasized even more during the Anti-Lin Biao; Anti-Confucius Campaign. Slogans such as "Parents may love me, but not as much as Chairman Mao" were common.

China's historical reserves, artifacts and sites of interest suffered devastating damage as they were thought to be at the root of "old ways of thinking". Many artifacts were seized from private homes and often destroyed on the spot. There are no records of exactly how much was destroyed. Western observers suggest that much of China's thousands of years of history was in effect destroyed during the short ten years of the Cultural Revolution, and that such destruction of historical artifacts is unmatched at any time or place in human history. Chinese historians compare the cultural suppression during the Cultural Revolution to Qin Shihuang's great Confucian purge. The most prominent symbol of academic research in archaeology, the journal Kaogu, did not publish during the Cultural Revolution.[22] Religious persecution, in particular, intensified during this period, because religion was seen as being opposed to Marxist-Leninist and Maoist thinking.[23]

Remnants of a banner from the Cultural Revolution in Anhui.

The status of traditional Chinese culture within China is also severely damaged as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Many traditional customs, such as fortune telling; paper art; feng shui consultations;[24] wearing traditional Chinese dresses for weddings; use of traditional Chinese calendar; scholarship in classical Chinese literature; and the practice of referring to the Chinese New Year as "New Year" rather than "Spring Festival"; had been weakened in China. Yet some aspects recovered fully, and some still survived in some forms in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Malaysia and in overseas Chinese communities, notwithstanding the impacts of Western culture (and Japanese culture in the case of Taiwan and Manchuria) on those communities.

[iyamwutiam]

Re: Future Trends

For younger generation of Chinese, perhaps you can call it the Internet and webcam culture.


Even prior to Communist rule, the Chinese have an identity crisis. The last dynasty was a Manchurian dynasty, upon which Manchurian culture was forced upon the Chinese population, e.g. pigtails, cheongsam dress. And soon after the Manchurian dynasty fell, the Chinese discarded what they wore for modern western attire.

The Communist Chinese went one step further, eradicating family values, social classes, culture and religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

Perhaps we may see the counter- a resurgent nationalism that causes a rise or increased awareness or steadfastness to 'culture'. We do see some of this in South America, certain segments of Europe and assuredly it will follow in Asia -as the 'message' of America is being increasingly seen as fodder for the capitalist killing of the middle and lower class.

[GRG55]

Re: Future Trends

Great idea for a thread...perfect title...and would be nice if we use it to consolidate an ongoing discussion of same [beyond econ matters].

Would you be willing to share your prior sources, fav websites, etc with the rest of us also?

...I've seen the future, brother; it is murder.

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul...

Leonard Cohen, "The Future", 1992

These are pure speculations...

• Plutocracy reigns in most of the developed economies. Society trifurcates into "haves, have-nots, and have-yachts"
• The chronically unemployed "disappear", invisible even though they are in plain sight.
• "Security" as a business [in its many and varied forms] jumps to a higher sigmoid growth curve in the developed economies.
• China and the other mercantile economies struggle to reform and restructure but eventually restart growth on the back of internal and regional trade block models, as "globalization" continues to slowly shrink. APEC dissolves as the North American members are encouraged to exit, as they consider expanding their own regional trade block using NAFTA as the foundation.
• India with its already well developed internal markets and geographic location advantages, outmaneuvers China and forms bilateral and multilateral ties with key OPEC producers who have largely been shut out of a seat at the table of the Asian trade block organizations such as ASEAN.
• Turkey, having courted and been rejected by the EU, joins with the Levant and Central Asian nations to restore the trade patterns that were first evident in the days of the old silk road.
• Russia never really changes.
• With few exceptions most of sub-Saharan Africa is overrun by the Chinese, who fund and execute development while continuing to happily fill the Swiss bank accounts of the kleptocrats in power.
• Having squandered its reputation, waning US international influence removes the counterweight from totalitarian regimes the world over, and they flourish as they continue to receive tacit support from China.
• The "War on Terrorism" continues.
• The "War on Drugs" continues.
• The "War on the Developed Economies Middle Class" continues...

Time to resurrect an old thread

And add a couple of not quite as old articles:

The 86 million invisible unemployed

By Annalyn Censky @CNNMoney May 4, 2012: 10:39 AM ET



Last year, 86 million Americans were not counted in the labor force because they didn't keep up a regular job search. Most of them were either under age 25 or over age 65...



Somehow, the Unemployed Became Invisible
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: July 9, 2011

GRIM number of the week: 14,087,000. Fourteen million, in round numbers — that is how many Americans are now officially out of work...

[Shakespear]

Re: Future Trends

Nice find GRG55.

Not a happy picture. That same "picture" is to be found in many European Union countries.

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Future Trends

Last year, 86 million Americans were not counted in the labor force because they didn't keep up a regular job search. Most of them were either under age 25 or over age 65...



Somehow, the Unemployed Became Invisible
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: July 9, 2011

GRIM number of the week: 14,087,000. Fourteen million, in round numbers — that is how many Americans are now officially out of work...

What are they doing for food and rent? Strong are robbery? Cat sitting?

[jpetr48]

Re: Future Trends

What about the underemployed?

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave


My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.


DON'T TAKE ANYTHING that happens to you there personally," the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. She winks at me. I stare at her for a second.
"What?" I ask. "Why, is somebody going to be mean to me or something?"
She smiles. "Oh, yeah." This town somewhere west of the Mississippi is not big; everyone knows someone or is someone who's worked for Amalgamated. "But look at it from their perspective. They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. So they're gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they're gonna increase the goals. But they'll be yelling at you all the time. It's like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they're going to tell you, 'You're not good enough, you're not good enough, you're not good enough,' to make you work harder. Don't say, 'This is the best I can do.' Say, 'I'll try,' even if you know you can't do it. Because if you say, 'This is the best I can do,' they'll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You'll see people dropping all around you. But don't take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you."

Several months prior, I'd reported on an Ohio warehouse where workers shipped products for online retailers under conditions that were surprisingly demoralizing and dehumanizing, even to someone who's spent a lot of time working in warehouses, which I have. And then my editors sat me down. "We want you to go work for Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.," they said. I'd have to give my real name and job history when I applied, and I couldn't lie if asked for any specifics. (I wasn't.) But I'd smudge identifying details of people and the company itself. Anyway, to do otherwise might give people the impression that these conditions apply only to one warehouse or one company. Which they don't.
So I fretted about whether I'd have to abort the application process, like if someone asked me why I wanted the job. But no one did. And though I was kind of excited to trot out my warehouse experience, mainly all I needed to get hired was to confirm 20 or 30 times that I had not been to prison.
The application process took place at a staffing office in a run-down city, the kind where there are boarded-up businesses and broken windows downtown and billboards advertising things like "Foreclosure Fridays!" at a local law firm. Six or seven other people apply for jobs along with me. We answer questions at computers grouped in several stations. Have I ever been to prison? the system asks. No? Well, but have I ever been to prison for assault? Burglary? A felony? A misdemeanor? Raping someone? Murdering anybody? Am I sure? There's no point in lying, the computer warns me, because criminal-background checks are run on employees. Additionally, I have to confirm at the next computer station that I can read, by taking a multiple-choice test in which I'm given pictures of several album covers, including Michael Jackson's Thriller, and asked what the name of the Michael Jackson album is. At yet another set of computers I'm asked about my work history and character. How do I feel about dangerous activities? Would I say I'm not really into them? Or really into them?
Macduff Everton/CorbisIn the center of the room, a video plays loudly and continuously on a big screen. Even more than you are hurting the company, a voice-over intones as animated people do things like accidentally oversleep, you are hurting yourself when you are late because you will be penalized on a point system, and when you get too many points, you're fired—unless you're late at any point during your first week, in which case you are instantly fired. Also because when you're late or sick you miss the opportunity to maximize your overtime pay. And working more than eight hours is mandatory. Stretching is also mandatory, since you will either be standing still at a conveyor line for most of your minimum 10-hour shift or walking on concrete or metal stairs. And be careful, because you could seriously hurt yourself. And watch out, because some of your coworkers will be the kind of monsters who will file false workers' comp claims. If you know of someone doing this and you tell on him and he gets convicted, you will be rewarded with $500.
The computers screening us for suitability to pack boxes or paste labels belong to a temporary-staffing agency. The stuff we order from big online retailers lives in large warehouses, owned and operated either by the retailers themselves or by third-party logistics contractors, a.k.a. 3PLs. These companies often fulfill orders for more than one retailer out of a single warehouse. America's largest 3PL, Exel, has 86 million square feet of warehouse in North America; it's a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL, which is cute because Deutsche Post is the German post office, which was privatized in the 1990s and bought DHL in 2002, becoming one of the world's biggest corporate employers. The $31 billion "value-added warehousing and distribution" sector of 3PLs is just a fraction of what large 3PLs' parent companies pull in. UPS's logistics division, for example, pulls in more than a half a billion, but it feeds billions of dollars of business to UPS Inc.
"Leave your pride and your personal life at the door," the lady at the chamber of commerce says, if I want to last as an online warehouse worker.
Anyhow, regardless of whether the retailer itself or a 3PL contractor houses and processes the stuff you buy, the actual stuff is often handled by people working for yet another company—a temporary-staffing agency. The agency to which I apply is hiring 4,000 drones for this single Amalgamated warehouse between October and December. Four thousand. Before leaving the staffing office, I'm one of them.
I'm assigned a schedule of Sunday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. When additional overtime is necessary, which it will be soon (Christmas!), I should expect to leave at 7 or 7:30 p.m. instead. Eight days after applying, i.e., after my drug test has cleared, I walk through a small, desolate town nearly an hour outside the city where I was hired. This is where the warehouse is, way out here, a long commute for many of my coworkers. I wander off the main road and into the chamber of commerce to kill some afternoon time—though not too much since my first day starts at 5 a.m.—but I end up getting useful job advice.
"Well, what if I do start crying?" I ask the woman who warns me to keep it together no matter how awfully I'm treated. "Are they really going to fire me for that?"
"Yes," she says. "There's 16 other people who want your job. Why would they keep a person who gets emotional, especially in this economy?"
Still, she advises, regardless of how much they push me, don't work so hard that I injure myself. I'm young. I have a long life ahead of me. It's not worth it to do permanent physical damage, she says, which, considering that I got hired at elevensomething dollars an hour, is a bit of an understatement.
As the sun gets lower in the curt November sky, I thank the woman for her help. When I start toward the door, she repeats her "No. 1 rule of survival" one more time.
"Leave your pride and your personal life at the door." If there's any way I'm going to last, she says, tomorrow I have to start pretending like I don't have either.
THOUGH IT'S inconvenient for most employees, the rural location of the Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. warehouse isn't an accident. The town is bisected by a primary interstate, close to a busy airport, serviced by several major highways. There's a lot of rail out here. The town became a station stop on the way to more important places a hundred years ago, and it now feeds part of the massive transit networks used to get consumers anywhere goods from everywhere. Every now and then, a long line of railcars rolls past my hotel and gives my room a good shake. I don't ever get a good look at them, because it's dark outside when I go to work, and dark again when I get back.
We are surrounded by signs that state our productivity goals. Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience. There is no room for inefficiencies.
Inside Amalgamated, an employee's first day is training day. Though we're not paid to be here until 6, we have been informed that we need to arrive at 5. If we don't show up in time to stand around while they sort out who we are and where they've put our ID badges, we could miss the beginning of training, which would mean termination. "I was up half the night because I was so afraid I was going to be late," a woman in her 60s tells me. I was, too. A minute's tardiness after the first week earns us 0.5 penalty points, an hour's tardiness is worth 1 point, and an absence 1.5; 6 is the number that equals "release." But during the first week even a minute's tardiness gets us fired. When we get lined up so we can be counted a third or fourth time, the woman conducting the roll call recognizes the last name of a young trainee. "Does your dad work here? Or uncle?" she asks. "Grandpa," he says, as another supervisor snaps at the same time, sounding not mean but very stressed out, "We gotta get goin' here."
The culture is intense, an Amalgamated higher-up acknowledges at the beginning of our training. He's speaking to us from a video, one of several videos—about company policies, sexual harassment, etc.—that we watch while we try to keep our eyes open. We don't want to be so intense, the higher-up says. But our customers demand it. We are surrounded by signs that state our productivity goals. Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience. There is no room for inefficiencies. The gal conducting our training reminds us again that we cannot miss any days our first week. There are NO exceptions to this policy. She says to take Brian, for example, who's here with us in training today. Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired. Having to start the application process over could cost a brand-new dad like Brian a couple of weeks' worth of work and pay. Okay? Everybody turn around and look at Brian. Welcome back, Brian. Don't end up like Brian.
Soon, we move on to practical training. Like all workplaces with automated and heavy machinery, this one contains plenty of ways to get hurt, and they are enumerated. There are transition points in the warehouse floor where the footing is uneven, and people trip and sprain ankles. Give forklifts that are raised up several stories to access products a wide berth: "If a pallet falls on you, you won't be working with us anymore." Watch your fingers around the conveyor belts that run waist-high throughout the entire facility. People lose fingers. Or parts of fingers. And about once a year, they tell us, someone in an Amalgamated warehouse gets caught by the hair, and when a conveyor belt catches you by the hair, it doesn't just take your hair with it. It rips out a piece of scalp as well.
If the primary message of one-half of our practical training is Be Careful, the takeaway of the other half is Move As Fast As Humanly Possible. Or superhumanly possible. I have been hired as a picker, which means my job is to find, scan, place in a plastic tote, and send away via conveyor whatever item within the multiple stories of this several-hundred-thousand-square-foot warehouse my scanner tells me to. We are broken into groups and taught how to read the scanner to find the object among some practice shelves. Then we immediately move on to practicing doing it faster, racing each other to fill the orders our scanners dictate, then racing each other to put all the items back.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...s-labor?page=1

[don]

Re: Future Trends

They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. So they're gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they're gonna increase the goals. But they'll be yelling at you all the time. It's like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they're going to tell you, 'You're not good enough, you're not good enough, you're not good enough,' to make you work harder. Don't say, 'This is the best I can do.' Say, 'I'll try,' even if you know you can't do it. Because if you say, 'This is the best I can do,' they'll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You'll see people dropping all around you. But don't take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you.

Great rebuttal for the fantasy of "individual achievement in a production environment".

(Variant on the above from the Big Boss - Good Cop/Bad Cop)

[Shakespear]

Re: Future Trends

You'll see people dropping all around you.

We won't see them as they will not be reported on or will be moved away. They will fade away in their apartments spending their last dollars buying food and medicine if they are lucky.

The Dutch have some great ideas along these lines
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-villages.html

[GRG55]

Re: Future Trends

We won't see them as they will not be reported on or will be moved away. They will fade away in their apartments spending their last dollars buying food and medicine if they are lucky.

The Dutch have some great ideas along these lines
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-villages.html

In the "old days" one depended on one's family through good times and hard times. Over the past 60 odd years we have replaced that with a dependence on government support programs (The Great Society, welfare, unemployment insurance, government pensions schemes, and so forth). And when those run out...then what?

Anybody remember the television series (set in the 1930s Depression) "The Waltons", which ran through the last multi-year slow-growth, high-unemployment, gas line up era in the 1970s? In our societies the family was not only an economic support mechanism (safety net) but it (and the community) also set the standards for expected and appropriate behaviour. Apparently the Dutch now plan to have the government take on that latter responsibility too...

Some of the first Europeans to arrive (in the early & mid-1800s) in the area of the Rocky Mountain foothills where I live were "remittance men". These were the black sheep sons of the English upper-class, who behaved in drunken or disreputable ways, and were "sent to the colony" and paid a remittance to stay there in order to avoid further dishonouring the family.

[GRG55]

Re: Future Trends

Couldn't help but notice this article on the Telegraph link. Would seem the Dutch really have their hands full...

Dutch linesman Richard Nieuwenhuizen killed by youth players had been officiating his son's match

Richard Nieuwenhuizen, the football linesman who died after being beaten and kicked by youth players in Holland, had been officiating a match in which his son was playing, it has emerged after police confirmed they had arrested three teenagers...