Economy:

- Commodities will begin a new boom, aided by the war in Ukraine and the drought in South America

- Apple will collapse in the same way Tesla and Meta collapsed this year

- Europe will enter a deep recession. Lagarde will be too late to stop inflation by raising rates so the hard landing will be extra hard. The US is in a better position for a not-so-hard landing, but...

- China will start using their financial leverage to increase prices in the West and force further hikes/delay pivots

- Green energy sources fail to deliver in Europe and the US but they keep course with de-nuclearization. The non-Western-alligned take the opposite approach and begin investing in nuclear in bulk (Japan, India, South America)

- This is more longer term but the US market becomes a trading market for the next 10 years or so. Like after 2000 or after 1970.

Politics:

- Labor movements will begin gaining steam due to the cost-of-living crisis in the West.

- Neoliberalism and globalism breathe their breaths as the world goes back to blocks. This exacerbates the aformentioned cost-of-living crisis with not just price increases but shortages

- Left-wing parties in Europe manage to either win their scheduled elections (Spain, Finland, Greece) or win snap elections (UK, Ireland), turning Europe totally red. The new EU pressures Ukraine to capitulate and give up on the separatist provinces (both because they sympathyse with Russia since always and because this helps ease cost of energy)

- China doesn't invade Taiwan. They never even planned to do that.

- CBDC are introduced in Canada and Europe. The first right-wing individuals get locked out due to them.

- Trump is condemned for January 6th.

- A very serious and morally outrageous scandal is revealed about the United States and its politicians by someone who sells it to an American enemy to publish

Tech:

- Layoffs continue and get worse. Google layoffs a lot

- There is one "big" IPO from one of the remaining unicorns that ends up as bad as WeWork

- The AI-mounted-over-an-LLM startup becomes the new Web3 startup, nothing useful comes out of it

- The FOMO with AI becomes the the new FOMO for crypto/metaverse

- Politics will delay further research into AI in the West due to misunderstanding of what things like GPTChat and Stable Diffusion do

- Private equity tech companies will see their valuations cut at at least 60%. Many new startups will close even when they are "well-funded".

- Salaries will collapse. Not at the "teacher in rural Guatemala"-level but the days of the $500k senior salary are gone.

- As a consequence of that: "geoarbitrage" becomes the new thing. Developers moving to LCOL countries with low taxes to work remotely for companies in the US, Europe or wherever, keeping costs low but their savings rates high. Tech people with great resumes will flock to Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Cyprus, Thailand, Malaysia and work as contractors.

- This in turn will bring an even bigger push for unionization of tech workers in the US. And protests (sometimes violent) in third-world countries against these economic nomads (my first guess will be either Portugal or Mexico, where people are already being priced out of their family neighborhoods)

- Linux notebooks begins to eat Macbook's share

- At least one of those "frontend" companies that spend too much time promoting conferences and meetups goes belly up ugly, like Polly did this year

user:	lechacker
created:	November 6, 2022
karma:	72