Crystal Balls, Ouija Boards or Fate: Predictions for 2009

Niall Ferguson Historian, Author and esteemed Professor at Harvard and Oxford, created a look back at 2009, as he imagines it to be. Time will be the only judge and fate our time keeper.

Ferguson begins:

It was the year when people finally gave up trying to predict the year ahead. It was the year when every forecast had to be revised – usually downwards – at least three times. It was the year when the paradox of globalisation was laid bare for all to see, if their eyes weren’t tightly shut.

And coins a new title of the current economic crisis.

That was the true significance of the Great Repression which began in August 2007 and reached its nadir in 2009. It was clearly not a Great Depression on the scale of the 1930s, when output in the US declined by as much as a third and unemployment reached 25 per cent. Nor was it merely a Big Recession.

And this about the "great merger."

There was uproar when Timothy Geithner, US Treasury secretary, requested an additional $300bn to provide further equity injections for Citigroup, Bank of America and the seven other big banks, just a week after imposing an agonising “mega-merger” on the automobile industry. In Detroit, the Big Three had become just a Big One, on the formation of CGF (Chrysler-General Motors-Ford; inevitably, the press soon re-christened it “Can’t Get Funding”).

The rest of the world begins to shrink in our rearview mirror.

By the first quarter of 2009, however, the mood in Europe had darkened. It became apparent that the problems of the European banks were just as serious as those of their American counterparts.

This asymmetric character of the global crisis – the fact that the shocks were even bigger on the periphery than at the epicentre – had its disadvantages for the US, to be sure. Any hope that America could depreciate its way out from under its external debt burden faded as 10-year yields and the dollar held firm.

Obama channels Nixon.

The same was true of Obama’s decision to fly to Tehran in June – a decision that did more than anything else to sour relations with Hillary Clinton, whose supporters never quite recovered from the sight of the former presidential candidate shrouded in a veil. Not that the so-called “opening to Iran” produced a dramatic improvement in the Middle East region. Nobody had expected that either. It was more that, like Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, it symbolised a readiness on Obama’s part to rethink the very fundamentals of American grand strategy.

And finally, faint light appears in the waining days of 2009.

By year end, it was possible for the first time to detect – rather than just to hope for – the beginning of the end of the Great Repression. The downward spiral in America’s real estate market and the banking system had finally been halted by radical steps that the administration had initially hesitated to take. At the same time, the far larger economic problems in the rest of the world had given Obama a unique opportunity to reassert American leadership, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.

Read the complete article: An imaginary retrospective of 2009

Blog friend Mark at Zenpundit has this link to a post about the future.

“Socionomic” Futurism at Futurejacked

Related to that post is this byDave Schuler at Outside the Beltway, where Dave takes on one of the more over the top predictions to surface this week, the break up of the United States in 2010.

Breakin’ Up Is Hard to Do

UPDATE: Barnett: Top 10 foreign policy wishes for 2009

Tom Barnett weighs in with his third annual list of what he wishes the United States would do in the arena of foreign policy. It is noteworthy that several of Tom's wishes coincide with several of the predictions made by Niall Ferguson in his imagined look back at 2009.

10. President Obama's speech in New Delhi to the world's Muslims.

Ferguson predicting Obama paying a Nixon-like visit to Terhan, after Ahmadinejad loses.(see #3 wish).

8. America commits to completing -- even expanding -- the Doha Round.

Ferguson sees a deepening economic crisis worldwide that leaves the U.S. dollar the desired currency and in position to lead in expanding free trade.

7. A Securities & Exchange Commission for the global economy.

Ferguson predicted a world wide banking crisis that could lead to Barnett's suggestion coming to bloom.

3. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loses Iran's 2009 presidential election.

Seems to be on everyone's wish list. Ferguson even suggests that Iran will abandon their Nuclear program after MA's departure, in order to resuscitate their flat-lined economy.

1. The U.S. economy turns the corner.

Fergusons final paragraph above, mirrors this wish.

The problem with predictions is that they can bee destroyed by seeing a "Black Swan", as Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, reveals.