[eXpat]

I would like to post this article, it has some interesting points, i think that is very likely that Spain will be the next country in the eurozone to ask for a bailout and is gonna be the hell of a ride then.
2011 - What's Coming

Oh boy is 2011 going to be an exciting year! Some things that I think might happen:

-Volatility is going up across the board. If you have the stomach for the swings that are coming across all markets there is a ton of money to be made; balls and timing are all that are necessary. The markets will create dozens of opportunities to make and lose.

-There will be 50 days with a swing in the S&P greater than 1%. There will be 10 days where gold swings $50. There will be two days with a drop greater than 100 bucks. Most of the big moves will be down moves. Bonds will not be spared the volatility.

-Gold will be higher a year from now but off its peak. At some time in the fall, gold will be near 1,800 and the New York Times will do a front-page story that gold is on its way to 2,000. That will be the high point of the year.

-Copper will continue to rise. This metal will benefit as the poor man’s gold. Why buy an ounce of something for $1,600 when you can have a whole pound of something else for only $5? The logic is compelling only because there is no logic. Increasingly, it will become understood that money does not hold value. Copper will do a better job of storing value then a Treasury Bond.

-The US bond market is in for a heck of a year. The 30-year will trade at BOTH 3% and 5%. Higher rates will come early in the year, then the deflation trade will come back into vogue.

-Spain will be the next sovereign debtor that falls prey to the market. This will happen before the end of the 1st Q. The package to bail them out will exceed $500b. This will exhaust the EU resources. There will be very high expectations that contagion will then move to Italy. That will not happen in 2011 (2012?) The European Central Bank will step up to the table (finally) and support the market for Italy. Sometime between March and June Italian bonds will be a great buy.

-The IMF will contribute $125b to the Spanish bailout. The US portion of this will be $25b. Republican Senators and Congressman go nuts. The American people will side with them. The argument, "How can we help Spain but not California?" will be the mantra. In the end the IMF commitment will stand. But that will be the last time the US contributes to a sovereign bailout. This will prove to be very destabilizing at some point after 2011.

http://brucekrasting.blogspot.com/2010/12/2011-whats-coming.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+BruceKrasting+(Bruce+Krasting)
Feel free to add your own predictons as well

[Graeme]

From the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport, the Observer's team of experts prophesy how the world will change – for good or bad – in the next quarter of a century (I've posted here just the prediction on Energy).

20 predictions for the next 25 years

4 Energy: 'Returning to a world that relies on muscle power is not an option'

Providing sufficient food, water and energy to allow everyone to lead decent lives is an enormous challenge. Energy is a means, not an end, but a necessary means. With 6.7 billion people on the planet, more than 50% living in large conurbations, and these numbers expected to rise to more than 9 billion and 80% later in the century, returning to a world that relies on human and animal muscle power is not an option.

The challenge is to provide sufficient energy while reducing reliance on fossil fuels, which today supply 80% of our energy (in decreasing order of importance, the rest comes from burning biomass and waste, hydro, nuclear and, finally, other renewables, which together contribute less than 1%). Reducing use of fossil fuels is necessary both to avoid serious climate change and in anticipation of a time when scarcity makes them prohibitively expensive.

It will be extremely difficult. An International Energy Agency scenario that assumes the implementation of all agreed national policies and announced commitments to save energy and reduce the use of fossil fuels projects a 35% increase in energy consumption in the next 25 years, with fossil fuels up 24%. This is almost entirely due to consumption in developing countries where living standards are, happily, rising and the population is increasing rapidly.

This scenario, which assumes major increases in nuclear, hydro and wind power, evidently does not go far enough and will break down if, as many expect, oil production (which is assumed to increase 15%) peaks in much less than 25 years. We need to go much further in reducing demand, through better design and changes in lifestyles, increasing efficiency and improving and deploying all viable alternative energy sources. It won't be cheap. And in the post-fossil-fuel era it won't be sufficient without major contributions from solar energy (necessitating cost reductions and improved energy storage and transmission) and/or nuclear fission (meaning fast breeder and/or thorium reactors when uranium eventually becomes scarce) and/or fusion (which is enormously attractive in principle but won't become a reliable source of energy until at least the middle of the century).

Disappointingly, with the present rate of investment in developing and deploying new energy sources, the world will still be powered mainly by fossil fuels in 25 years and will not be prepared to do without them.

Chris Llewellyn Smith is a former director general of Cern and chair of Iter, the world fusion project, he works on energy issues at Oxford University

guardian

[eXpat]

More gazing in the crystal ball.

1. First and foremost, I'm going to repeat my prediction in Peak Oil Review - I think 2011 is the year the food crisis comes back. We're already seeing signs of it, and I think that the number of world hungry will spike again to over a billion. Energy and food prices will remain tightly intertwined, and whether we see major price spikes, demand destruction and a collapse of energy prices, or whatever else, food and energy will be increasingly hard to afford for a large portion of the world population, from the very poorest to the American and European middle class. Food will be an important site of the emergence of our energy and ecological crisis.

2. 2011 will also be the year in which some mainstream segment of the US public or government starts taking peak oil seriously. This seems like it could be a good thing, but that depends heavily on *what* subset of the public or branches of government take it seriously and for what political purpose. I make no promises that peak oil activists won't go back to wishing they were being ignored.

3. Russia's wheat export restrictions and China's muscle flexing over rare earth minerals, along with the international landgrab going on for farmland are all part of an overall trend towards the recognition of limited world resources and the awareness that ensuring that there's something for your kids probably involves screwing someone else. The screwings will accellerate until morale improves - that being unlikely, I predict more and more international conflict over the limited store of goodies, and that some of that will become more acute and evident in 2011.

4. The emergence of a new "khaki market" (Khaki's the color you get when you combine green markets and black or grey markets ) economy for food, used goods and other materials will accelerate. These markets will respond to the increasing legislation of small scale production by ignoring it entirely. Small food producers will decline to be legislated out of existence and simply violate existing laws. Informal economies will develop and expand, either around or sometimes in opposition to regulation designed to discourage them. Crackdowns will ensue, but overwhelmingly be unsuccessful at either containing the growth of informal markets or approval of them in the general public. The battles will get nastier as more people depend for their basic needs on these informal khaki markets.

5. The ongoing trend towards housing consolidation among family and friends, sparked by a combination of populations aging, rising unemployment especially among the young and a destigmatization of extended family life will continue and expand. More of us will be moving in with other people in 2011. This will be good for a host of personal economies, but only make the housing market worse.

6. In the interest of having one wholly self-interested prediction, chickens, the gateway drug to goats, will open the gateway and little cute milk and dairy-fiber goats will be the new backyard trend, making chickens look old fashioned and uncool.

7. The reports of the death of climate change as an issue at the national and international level will turn out to have been at least slightly exaggerated, but the terms of the debate will change to what we are going to do about how we're going to mitigate, rather than hold off emissions. Our new awareness of resource limits will also change the terms of the debate, as the peak oil and climate change communities finally really get to know one another.

8. Someone from the peak oil community (almost certainly not me) will go mainstream in a way they have not so far. Generally speaking, movements tend to get one major public figure that catches the general imagination over everyone else - consider Michael Pollan for the food movement, for example. I'm going to take a wild risk and argue that our Michael Pollan will emerge in 2011.

9. Something will blow up big, much as the Gulf Oil rig did, revealing just how vulnerable we are in a complex society so heavily dependent on fossil fuels. The general public will be shocked and horrified to learn how contingent their lives and situations are. They won't, however, learn anything lasting from it.

10. The emerging attention to our collective crisis will give some of the movement a jolt of new energy, time and investment in 2011. This will be the positive consequence of all the tough stuff we're facing.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-01-01/2011-predictions-savage-place

[Timo]

Just for my own amusement, i'll have a go at it, with the requisite admission that i'm certainly no expert.
1) There will be some technological development enabling the viable/affordable mass production/storage of hyrdogen, thus giving the auto industry an alternative to plug-ins.
2) Oil prices will tip $100 sometime around March, and will average roughly $112 for the year.
3) The UE will face conditions threatening its existence as a collective entity. It may survive, but the possibility will bring of host of discussions about disolving.
4) The US will scale back on its financial support for NATO, thus giving rise to revived tensions reminiscent of the Cold War, but with the new addition of China.
5) There will be a new disease or bug that will cause the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands before it's brought under control.
6) Israel engages in a war with everyone nearby.
7) The after effects of the GOM will become dangerously apparent.
Food prices cause extreme discontent here in the US. Everyone will blame Obama.
9) Great Britain will face internal violence akin to a civil war.
and 10) The PTB will launch a much stronger attack on the emergence of any new reneable energy source.

[Schweinshaxe]

1. Germany will drop the Euro and return to the D-Mark after the Christian Democratic / Liberal government has been forced to resign due to social unrest and corruption scandals.

2. Sweden will win the Ice Hockey World Championships after beating the Czech Republic three times in baseball.

3. Lead, thallium and mercury will be added to dairy products in the USA to improve fertility and boost morale for the coming wars.

4. The colour turquoise will be banned in California.

5. USA will convert to the metric system and be immediately thrown back to the Stone Age because the people wont know how many foot (feet, foots, feets or whatever it’s called) a metre is and thus consistently use the wrong amount of toilet paper.

6. Vice President Biden will come out of the closet as a cross-dresser.

7. Tiger Woods and Julian Assange will join the Rolling Stones and later become moderators at peakoil.com.

8. 01010011 01100011 01101000 01110111 01100101 01101001
01101110 01110011 01101000 01100001 01111000 01100101
00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000
01100010 01100101 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110
01110100 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 01100100
00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 00110110 00100000
01101101 01101111 01101110 01110100 01101000 01110011
00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01100001
01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100110
01101111 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101111 01110010
01110001 01110101 01100101 00100000 01110111 01110010
01100101 01101110 01100011 01101000 00100000 01100110
01110010 01100001 01110101 01100100 00101110

[eXpat]

GEAB N°50 is available! Global systemic crisis: Second half of 2011 - European context and US catalyst - Explosion of the Western public debt bubble

The second half of 2011 will mark the point in time when all the world’s financial operators will finally understand that the West will not repay in full a significant portion of the loans advanced over the last two decades. For LEAP/E2020 it is, in effect, around October 2011, due to the plunge of a large number of US cities and states into an inextricable financial situation following the end of the federal funding of their deficits, whilst Europe will face a very significant debt refinancing requirement (1), that this explosive situation will be fully revealed. Media escalation of the European crisis regarding sovereign debt of Euroland’s peripheral countries will have created the favourable context for such an explosion, of which the US “Muni” (2) market incidentally has just given a foretaste in November 2010 (as our team anticipated last June in GEAB No. 46 ) with a mini-crash that saw all the year’s gains go up in smoke in a few days. This time this crash (including the failure of the monoline reinsurer Ambac (3)) took place discreetly (4) since the Anglo-Saxon media machine (5) succeeded in focusing world attention on a further episode of the fantasy sitcom "The end of the Euro, or the financial remake of Swine fever" (6). Yet the contemporaneous shocks in the United States and Europe make for a very disturbing set-up comparable, according to our team, to the "Bear Stearn " crash which preceded Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and the collapse of Wall Street in September 2008 by eight months. But the GEAB readers know very well that major crashes rarely make headlines in the media several months in advance, so false alarms are customary (7)!
In this GEAB issue, we therefore anticipate the progression of the terminal crash of Western public debt (in particular US and European debt) as well as ways to protect oneself. Furthermore, we analyze the very important structural consequences of the Wikileaks revelations on the United States’ international influence as well as their interaction with the global consequences of the US Federal Reserve’s QE II programme. This GEAB December issue is, of course, the opportunity to assess the validity of our anticipations for 2010, with a of 78% success rate for the year. We also develop strategic advice for Euroland (8) and the United States. And we publish the GEAB-$ index that will now allow us to synthetically follow the progress of US Dollar against major world currencies every month (9).

In this issue, we have chosen to present an excerpt of the forecast on the explosion of the Western public debt bubble.

Thus, the Western public debt crisis is growing very rapidly under the pressure of four increasingly strong limitations:

. the absence of economic recovery in the United States which strangles all public bodies (including the federal state (10)) accustomed to an easy flow of debt and significant tax revenues in recent decades (11)

. the accelerated structural weakening of the United States in monetary, financial as well as diplomatic (12) affairs which reduces their ability to attract world savings (13)

. the global drying up of sources of cheap finance, which precipitates the crisis of excessive debt in Europe’s peripheral countries (in Euroland like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, ... and the United Kingdom as well (14)) and is starting to touch key countries (USA, Germany, Japan) (15) in a context of very large European debt refinancing in 2011

http://www.leap2020.eu/GEAB-N-50-is-available-Global-systemic-crisis-Second-half-of-2011-European-context-and-US-catalyst-Explosion-of-the_a5625.html

[Ludi]

Schweinshaxe earns extra points for posting a picture of the great Criswell.

[eXpat]

Schweinshaxe earns extra points for posting a picture of the great Criswell.

What about the Sweden women's ice hockey team? that would earn him
extra points.

[Ludi]

What about the Sweden women's ice hockey team? that would earn him
extra points.

Whatever floats your life raft.

[Schweinshaxe]

This is a picture of the Swedish women's hockey team. There are two men standing behind the hockey ladies. One man showing four fingers and one man with his mouth slightly open. These two men are very dangerous! Where do they come from? How did they get there so quickly? The other two men are probably harmless. There's also what looks like a couple sitting at the back of the picture. Are they trying to conceal a rifle? Why are they sitting there?



I've also included a picture of Pat Boone for Ludi's viewing pleasure. Pat is known for his strong belief in family values and is very pro-gun, pro-creationism, anti-gay marriage, anti-evolution, anti-Dixie Chicks and anti-matter. The fact that he doesn't even believe in matter makes him a bit different from the average Republican. He also strongly disagrees with Gödel's incompleteness theorem and therefore thinks that Wittgenstein's criticism was justified.



I also have a new prediction: There will be an incident with a damaged drywall in 2011. It could be an overloaded shelf mounted with the wrong kind of screws that falls down and rips a piece of the wall with it or it could be water damage. This will happen in the summer of 2011 but I can't see it clearly enough yet to tell exactly when or where. When the drywall is repaired, something unexpected will be found.

Thank you.