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Sailorman repeats for 2007 his Fearless Forecasts that proved 100% correct for 2006. With respect to prices for oil and natural gas I unequivocally and and categorically state: They will fluctuate.
BTW, this is not an entirely empty forecast, because I expect greater volatility in prices this year than last year--so much volatility that any trend is likely to be hidden in variations.
In regard to a recession, is the U.S. headed for one? Yes, again without hesitation I assert that we will have one. The three things I do not know (and neither does anybody else) are:
1. When it will start.
2. When (or if) it will end.
3. How severe it will be.
Now I can put my I-Ching sticks away.
Don Sailorman, I hereby nominate you for the Delphic Oracle award for 2006 on TOD! Those are masterful price predictions, show that you have truly intuitively devined the markets. If I wore a hat, my hat would be off to you.
Don Sailorman, I hereby nominate you for the Delphic Oracle award for 2006 on TOD!
I second the notion!
Indeed!
I read TOD religiously just for such Delphic Oracles as this!
Now I know exactly how to plan and where to invest all that money I've got laying around!
Thanks for the fun! The fun is at least as important as the "grown-up" stuff!
Of course, the Delphic Oracle does remind me that DS has often advised (if I can summarize?) to stay flexible. I agree. We live in precarious times. Precarity means things could go radically one way or another, but the species may muddle along for a suprising number of years. The variables are many and complex.
I am reading up on gardening right now. I am excited to build my gardening skills this year! I also plan to make a couple of additional rain barrels this spring.
Meanwhile, I'll continue to check at TOD for more Delphic Predictions!
Dang.
My tea leaves were saying "undulate".
How could they be so wrong?
I'm returning this jar of tea leaves to Madam Yergana for a full refund.
Dang. Just when I thought I found someone I could trust.
Step Back,
You should get double your money back. "Undulate" comes from the Latin "unda" that means "wave." To undulate is to move in waves or with a smooth, wavelike motion. By way of contrast, to fluctuate means to vary irregularly.
Anyone want my prediction as to trends in the future value of the dollar? By the way, the dollar has not really crashed since the Civil War--just eroded more or less fast since 1913 with a major deflation during the Great Depression.
Fearless Forecast: Pennies and nickels will hold their value.
Fearless counterforecast: Just as with removal of silver coins and removal of all copper pennies, I expect a changeout in metals used by the mint soon (the next 5 years). The result will be that pennies and nickels from before the change will hold their value while those after the change will lose value until the US currency declines to the point where those coins are once again worth more than the metals used to manufacture them.
My guess is that both pennies and nickels will eventually go out of circulation. The coins make no sense, because a penny will buy one twentieth of what it used to, and a nickels is worth far far less than a penny used to be worth. One-dollar bills make no sense either, because in inflation adjusted terms they are "really" only worth between a nickel and a dime, depending on your base year.
We should have five and ten dollar coins and eliminate bills of those denominations. And a hundred dollar bill buys less than ten dollars used to, so why should it be thought of as a "big" bill? It is only to make life difficult for drug dealers that we no longer have thousand dollar bills as legal tender.
Yeah, but.... the US govt mint folks have their collective heads up their collective butts if they think they can get people to accept a dollar coin. Just ain't gonna happen. People just don't like carrying around a pocketfull of worthless change, especially coins that no vending machine takes, especially since most vending machines take bills. Paper money is convenient. We seem to have grown beyond the silly notion that metal money has some kind of 'intrinsic' value.
A dollar is not worthless; it is "really" worth between five and ten cents, depending on your base year and index of price level change.
Note that in European countries large denomination coins work just fine. Coins do not have to be large. For example, the old five dollar gold piece was smaller than a penny (which created problems, because in San Francisco it was the exact same size as a bus token, and by mistake people would put them (now worth more than a hundred dollars)into the fare machine. The twenty dollar gold piece was roughly the same size as a half dollar.
Let the dime be the new lowest denomination coin, then a small fifty cent piece (about the same size as a nickel, maybe with a milled edge), and then also a small (thirteen sided?) dollar coin. The five and ten dollar coins would be larger and worth what fifty cent pieces and silver dollars used to be. I hate carrying around wads of one dollar bills.
Don,
You must be related to the guy that used to appear on Johnny Carson, The Great Criswell with his 'Criswell Predicts.' He was terrific fun.