Well, if it isn't 2008 already. My how time flies and my spare tire gets larger - too much holiday cheer - food that is. I couldn't resist an extra chocolate chip cookie, or the fudge brownie, even that extra bowl of ice cream on top of rich homemade pecan pie!. Oh yes I did say a slice of pecan pie? Well maybe a quarter of pecan pie - another 1000 calories. There are several sayings around the holidays. One of my favorite is; "A moment on the lips, forever on the hips". Well thats the female version. I've modified it for us guys - "Over the lips, under the gums, lookout waistline, here it comes!"

Here it comes! Well that leads me to predictions for 2008. For years I've followed Jim Kunstler, liked his style of irreverent humor, and generally believe he had a firm grasp on reality. Jim has endeared me with his wit and humor, especially describing suburbia, for which I have equally as much disdain. I've take the liberty to copy Jim's predictions and distill them down to bullet points. While I like Jim's writing, the software engineer in me wants things in a neat and orderly fashion.

I've become pretty much a "doomer" type of person. I don't hold out much hope for the USA's status quo to continue functioning in any sane and rational manner. While the ultimate end of these events hold promise, return to a hunter / gather type society, the transition period will be nothing less than pure hell to endure. We in the USA have had a party at the worlds economic and our planets remaining crude oil expense. It's been one hell of a ride. I've become addicted to this lifestyle like anyone else. However as the drunk must sober up, we must rid ourselves of our addiction to the American way of life - a suburban drive in utopia, complete with fast food and open heart surgery. Our planet wont support it anymore. So without further adieu here it is....

Current Status at the beginning of 2008

1. Very few people really “get it” regarding peak oil and the economy.
2. We have never seen a society “rigged” for implosion, such as the USA.
3. The inertia holding the financial sector (economy) together finally melted away last summer with the subprime unraveling! In other words the financial sector stood revealed for the mostly worthless bales of paper they truly are, and the investment community was left suspended in mid-air, grinning unconvincingly, like Wile E. Coyote 13 yards before the edge of the mesa, with a sputtering grenade in each hand and an anvil tied to his ankles.
4. The 2nd half of 2007 was nothing more than “desperate rear-guard action” to stave off the inevitable subprime fiasco.

Examples are:

1. Bear Stearns. Not only the “onshore” fund failed, but the offshore fund in the Cayman Islands were beyond the reach of “official US legal machinery”, so if you invested in these funds, well – Too bad, so said!
2. Truckloads, boatloads, and helicopter loads of “rescue liquidity” delivered through autumn by the Fed and other central banks – even European central banks! Helicopter Ben lives up to his reputation!
3. Foreign Sovereign Wealth funds jumped in with five billion here, 10 billion there, coming away with big chunks of ownership, but of what?
4. SWF ended up with a part ownership in companies with liabilities in excess of assets – technically bankrupt!
5. Mostly, these desperation moves worked to paper over virtual bankruptcy through the crucial Christmas holiday, when yearly bonuses are doled out, which spared the boards of directors from having to explain why executives were lined up at the loading docks filling their Lincoln Navigators with stupid dope piles and knots of the shareholders' loot.
6. In Suburbia, from California to Florida, gut retching groans went up as mortgage rates adjusted upward, resulting loans stop performing, for sale signs failed to turn up buyers, and sheriff's deputies showed up with rolls of yellow foreclosure tape.
7. Some of the actual owners of this re-poed property, such as the Florida State Teachers Pension Fund and south of the Norwegian Municipal Councils investment fund are finding themselves in legal twilight zone.
8. The Boyz at the Wall Street genius desks left us with a mighty goddam mess!
9. In the background, the US dollar sank to record lows against the Euro, pound sterling, and the Canadian dollar.
10. The price of oil jumped 56 percent, just grazing the $100 a barrel mark.
11. Drought punished the American Southeast and Australia's grain belt.
12. Floods ravaged Texas and England.
13. The polar ice shrank dramatically.
14. The US escaped any major hurricane action for a second year in a row.
15. Mrs. Bhutto was murdered, otherwise the international scene was quite.
16. Iran got a clean bill of health regarding nuclear weapons manufacturing.

5. Non humans on this planet didn't fare so well:
1. Honeybees.
2. Yangtze river dolphins.
3. House sparrows.
6. Al Gore went up another suit size, as he received part of the Nobel prize for his slide show.
7. Predictions for 2008:
1. Can't imagine any scenario where the US economy doesn't end up in histories emergency room.
2. No need to rehash Greenspan's housing bubble-blowing disaster, its the outcome that concerns us.
3. No one knows for sure the economic outcome, however there's little disagreement about the housing market fundamentals.
4. Housing market is in a death spiral. Eventually the median price will have to fall back to the median income – a long way to go! Perhaps 50 percent!
5. Until housing price equalization occurs, homes will generally remain unsellable.
6. To add insult to injury, the mortgage companies will tighten up lending requirements.
7. As foreclosures accelerate, most defunct owners would be better off mailing the keys to the mortgage company.
8. Painful psychological impact on defunct homeowners!
9. All sorts of election year schemes will arise to “fix” the problem, however most if not all will fail.
10. As housing prices fall, remaining homeowners will demand their property taxes be “readjusted”, causing local and state governments untold problems.
11. We could even see IRS forgiveness on reporting foreclosure losses. That would accelerate the problem even more!
12. The suburban building workforce will need to start looking for something else to do.
13. Suburbia ran into the implacable force of Peak Oil.
14. Our lives will start becoming simpler.
15. We will start traveling less distances.
16. Peak Oil implies a pervasive trend for contraction in everything, from our daily distances we travel to our notion of economic growth (as we currently understand it in the age of industrial capital).
17. 2008 will be the year that the issue of Peak Oil not only takes stage in the forefront of American politics, but pushes global warming aside as the most immediate threat to the "modern" way-of-life.
18. Housing collapse is only one phase of a more generalized real estate collapse. Also included are strip malls, power centers, and office parks.
19. Commercial real estate has been securitized and sprinkled all over the world. Thus more banks will collapse in the first half of 2008.
20. The death of more than a few hedge funds could easily unwind the entire global finance system -- meaning a period of destructive chaos followed by a set of severely different institutional arrangements, with untold loss of imagined capital wealth along the way and big changes in everyday life.
21. Demand destruction may not keep oil out of the $100 a barrel range.
22. The growing oil export problem, soon to be a crisis. It now appears that exports, in nations with surplus oil to sell, are going down at an even steeper rate than production declines. Why? They are using more of their own oil. The population is growing robustly. The Saudi Arabians are building the world’s largest aluminum smelter and many chemical factories. This takes a lot of oil. Russia, another big exporter, saw its car sales jump by 50 percent in 2007. Mexico is depleting so rapidly, and using so much more of its own oil, that it might be out of the export game altogether in three years.
23. New factor on the Peak oil scene is "oil nationalism." It is prompting countries like Norway and Russia to husband more of their own resources as the awareness hits that they are past peak and might want to keep their own motors humming further into the future. Oil surplus nations are also trending more toward selling their oil on the basis of long-term contracts with favored customers rather than just auctioning the stuff off on the futures market. This makes oil a much more important element in geopolitical power politics. Note that the US may not enjoy "favored customer" standing among many of these nations.
24. Oil between $80 and $160 a barrel. Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, predicted at a major conference in October that the US is much closer to encountering a problem with chronic spot shortages of oil (and gasoline, of course) than the public realizes, and Simmons says that this supply problem will be extremely disruptive in every imaginable way -- economically, politically, and socially. Most of the commentators I take seriously see the price of oil oscillating in 2008 between $80 and $160-a-barrel. Simmons says Americans will keep sucking up the price increases, but they will probably freak out over spot shortages.
25. Odds are that the US will have more rather than less trouble from the rest of the world in 2008-- especially if our own financial recklessness trips up the global economy.
26. The mere thought of a president Huckabee gives me the chilblains, and the rest of the Republican pack I would not want to have as my county supervisor.
27. In any case, whoever ends up in the oval office will preside over one king-hell of a clusterfuck. In the immortal words of TV's erstwhile "Mr. T," I pity da fool who gets elected into this mess.
28. There will be a whole continent full of bankrupt, re-poed, and idle former WalMart shoppers, many of them with half of their skin tattooed and many of that bunch all revved up to "roll heavy and gun up" against the folks who screwed them. And screw them they did!
29. 2008 will be the year that celebrity wealth goes into hiding. A land full of people crying into their foreclosure notices will take a dim view of the Donald Trumps and P. Diddys luxuriating out there and may come looking for scalps.
30. Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton may have to double-up living in a minuteman missile silo to keep the angry mobs of fans-turned-vengeful-berserker's away.
31. After mis-calling the DOW in 2006 (4000) I have learned my lesson about making numerical predictions for the stock markets. So let's just say there is no fucking way that the DOW, the NASDAQ, and the S & P will not end the year 2008 absolutely on their asses. The charade of permanent prosperity based on getting something for nothing is over. That sound you hear out there is reality knocking on the door. It has been standing out in the cold for a long time and it is not happy with us.

Well now you have it! How much will come true - who knows, only father time will tell us. Either way, reality has been out in the cold for a very long time, and it is very unhappy with us. We are in for one hell of a time to say the least!

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