New cars deals are starting to appear, if you look around and pester. Got a new popular mid-size SUV about 1000 off MSRP and no destination. So approx 2200 off.
Chevy Equinox's were 2-3k off easy when I was looking.
Diversity might eventually be on the chopping block but it won't go first. The C suite is fully bought into it and likely they have spent years talking about it. So they will wait to sweep out the diversity crowd. They'll do what they always have done, which is get rid of older, experienced workers first, then the new hires.
I have read that most of those empty giant ChiCom condos are just shells.
If it's anything like the commie construction I experienced in Vietnam, even if they're "finished" they're still barely better than shells by any modern standards.
When economics really get tough diversity finally shows up. People stop giving a shit about hiring people that look like them, because they are desperate for performance per dollar.
Apartheid in South Africa was massively undermined by capitalism. Being in a bubble makes it affordable to hire whomever you palled around with in college instead of having a real recruitment process.
DIE funding will evaporate though, because those programs tend to be about using your company as a host for replicating their virus rather than any actual justice.
Vox cites the decline of abortion in Texas as evidence one can legislate morality. But if that were indeed true, there would really have been a red wave in the mid-terms.
My prediction for 2023: a new "drinking game" will emerge whereby TV viewers chug whenever a commercial appears lacking a diverse married or gay couple or mixed race family participants. It will be a sobering experience.
Interesting outside perspective, have heard this theory before.
Disclosure, i know the presenter personally, no business connection past, present or future anticipated.
His concept regarding how to deal with these changes factors into expectations of support for ours or any movement for that matter. This is a whole other topic and would require further investigation on your part if so inclined. I will not go into it here, but tangentially related to the points which will be presented later.
The word is out on the internet that the front lines in Ukraine are now staffed with Polish troops. So I make another prediction about this, assuming the parties are rational. The Russians still kick butt in Ukraine and the Poles take quite a few losses. Then the Russians cut a deal with the Poles. The Russians get the Eastern provinces they want. The Poles get Western Ukraine, which is what they want.
The fly in this ointment is that Poland is a NATO member. However, Poland may be willing to disengage from NATO to a certain extent in return for Western Ukraine. How this works out depends on how the NATO establishment feels about Polish eastward expansion. The Hungarians and Romanians want land out of Western Ukraine as well. The real wild card here is the Washington DC political establishment. Will they accept this deal making to end the war? Or will they push for it to continue for whatever unfathomable reason?
IMO, any discussion of a rising or falling value of a dollar is utterly meaningless unless one adds a "compared to what".
Unless current geopolitical trends completely reverse, I expect that the dollar's rise compared to the Euro and GBP is pretty much a slam dunk. However, unless Russia engages in games to keep the value of the ruble down, I expect the dollar to continue to fall compared to the ruble.
In many ways, China's economy is a powerhouse, and, if it continues, one might expect the dollar to fall compared to the yuan. However, signs that many elements of China's apparent wealth are questionable (some mentioned previously) would temper such a rise in the yuan's value. Even more important though, a major part of China's economic strength depends on its ability to export "stuff" to the US and Europe and a rising yuan would seriously threaten that. IMO, China will experience a lot of pressure to take measures to prevent a rise in the value of the yuan compared to the dollar, although doing so would make acquisition of raw materials and other imports from other trading partners more expensive. Thus it is difficult to predict just what the relative value of the dollar will be compared to the yuan.
And then one hs to consider the value of the dollar compared to a "basket of goods" that we, as individuals, buy. As has been previously stated in other threads, as the US economy worsens, the trend is likely to be that necessities will become more expensive, while discretionary stuff will become cheaper. Thus, as we buy less and less of discretionary items, the value of the dollar will keep falling in relation to necessities we are obliged to buy.
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". . . the Constitution has died, the economy welters in irreversible decline, we have perpetual war, all power lies in the hands of the executive, the police are supreme, and a surveillance b
Such a scenario would not likely be acceptable to Putin as he'd much prefer a buffer between NATO and the Motherland. The whole problem is that Ukraine had been that buffer until cozying up to the West. (Their treatment of their own eastern /Russian favoring cousins was largely precipitative)
Now if Poland were to separate itself from NATO adequately, perhaps...
Used in a sentence. A lot of investments and guarantees that were though to be solid turned out to be ephemeral in 2023.
Flap
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Here are my predictions for everyone to see: S&P 500 at 320, DOW at 2200, Gold $300/oz, and Corn $2/bu. No sign that housing, equities, or farmland are in a bubble- Yellen 11/14/13 Trying to leave
Russia isn't going to be "beaten"; that is, Ukraine can't win -- and their support will vanish.
The last part of the prediction (vanishing support) might not be "applicable" if the Ukraine fractions into smaller parts that are annexed by its neighbors. Then there will be military support for these parts of Ukraine by their new host countries.
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The word is out on the internet that the front lines in Ukraine are now staffed with Polish troops. So I make another prediction about this, assuming the parties are rational. The Russians still kick butt in Ukraine and the Poles take quite a few losses. Then the Russians cut a deal with the Poles. The Russians get the Eastern provinces they want. The Poles get Western Ukraine, which is what they want.
Assuming there are Polish troops, why did the Polish not negotiate first?
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Now if Poland were to separate itself from NATO adequately, perhaps...
This would nicely explain why the Polish announced in early December to build Europe's largest land army but most of the new equipment will be bought from NATO countries.
You addressed the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but two other (imho) more impactful SCOTUS cases from 2022 were the NYSRPA v. Bruen & WV v. EPA, your thoughts & predictions on those going forward?
Not to minimize the overturning of R v W, but imho, NYSRPA v. Bruen solidifies what we knew all along, that an individual has the right of armed self-defense wherever he may be and in WV v. EPA it starts to chip away at the power of the FEDGOV inserted into the states in the wrongly decided Wickard v. Filburn case.
Karl, do you see any good chance of U.S. banks failing like they almost did in 2008? I remember they clamped down on alot of the shenanigans that caused the problems in the first place.
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