Here are some predictions, seeded by current bubblings in the news:
We are at the bottom of the current recession – meaning growth will be stagnate in this current quarter, and we’ll be starting to grow in the next.
- The swine flu will be no more of a deadly global pandemic than SARS or Avian flu earlier this decade – or even the “original” swine flu was in 1976.
- Someone will be indicted somewhere on charges of aiding and abetting torture in the name of the United States during the Bush administration.
* Chrysler and Dodge will disappear as nameplates; Fiat will keep selling the Jeep brand, and use some Chrysler sites in the US to make its own cars here.
- I will win my age group in the Tacoma Half-Marathon tomorrow.
Let’s dissect these audacious claims one at a time.
Recessions are first and foremost about job loss. The causes may be different – rapid oil price inflation, excessive balance of payments deficit, tech-stock bubble, home value bubble – but they all start with people losing their jobs, and thus spending less money in the aggregate. And they end when more people start going to work than are leaving work. That number started to go south about Sept 2007 (when I also started grumbling about “the recession of 2008”, after spending two years grumbling about the housing bubble everyone claimed was not happening.) And, in the last few weeks, it has finally started to drop.
The little stock market rally in March was predictive of that. Stocks were rising then based on a few weak hopes – some slowing of the rate of fall of housing costs, and slight increase in new housing permits, plummeting levels of inventory, etc. We will have another little rally in July, based on the sudden revelation that, yes, economic growth is no longer dropping like a stone. Around October, the bear market will end, and stocks will slowly start to rise again, as the first indications of overall economic growth in America become more widely known.
So how does this work – which comes first, the increase in economic growth, or the rise in the stock market? I’m a believer in herd behavior in market psychology, rather than rational thinking, when it comes to changing the directional arrow on the rate of growth. I suspect that the stock market rally in March, which had no real basis in actual data, gave hope and confidence to enough business leaders that they could safely stop firing people and begin to think about returning to previous levels of production, service, whatever it is they do. So they pump up their activity a bit, and the statisticians reflect that a few months later, and the vicious circle becomes virtuous once again.
Just as things seemed to drop like a stone last Oct-Feb, so they will rise more rapidly than most analysts predict. The rapid drop in 2008 was clearly due to the increased velocity of information – everybody knows everything sooner know thanks to ubiquitous sources of information in all media, including the internet. More people know more things faster now than in 2000, or 1991, or 1987, or 1982 or 1979, or 1973, or …
If you want to feed your 401(k), you’d better have it ready for the 6-800 point one-day DJIA rise which will surely happen SOMETIME in the next nine months. But don’t ask me which day, or even in which month this will be. Odds: July: 10-1; Sept: 6-1; Oct: 4-1; Dec or Jan: 3-1; some time later: 2-1. Hey, I have just as much as chance of being right as all the economic analysts who didn’t see the drops coming!
Anyway, the swine flu is an easier prediction. As actual test results come in on the source of illness, we’re finding that a much lower percentage than assumed last week are actually this H1N1 strain. AND, young men are not dying right and left of this flu. So, sorry, this is not a Hollywood movie, and we will not be defending our homes against rabid, slavering, oinking victims of a deadly mutant strain of … influenza. Wash your hands, yes. Don’t touch your nose after shaking hands, yes. (Does anyone besides me think that the reason there are so many Asians is all that bowing instead of hand shaking?). But forget the face mask – it just looks ridiculous, and doesn’t work anyway.
Torture. I’m reading a lot about it, and while everyone admits it happened, we surely don’t have a consensus on what to do about it. Well, I’m in the camp that we have to regain our national honor, and the only way to do that is to admit our mistakes. Now, it’s possible that in our system, the way we admit our mistakes is by voting the bastards out of office, and there’s a lot to be said for that approach. It is certainly more civilized than running around the streets with machetes, or lining people up in warehouses and gassing them to death. And, no, I’m not equating a few dozen or even a few hundred cases of prisoner abuse with genocide. But, evil has to start somewhere. You tolerate some funny pictures from Abu Ghraib, turn a blind eye to a few guys poring water down some chump’s throat just because the Soviets did it, and the next thing you know, you’re stumbling over mass graves and wondering why your neighbor is hoarding ammunition.
So I think we need to purge this from our system, for our own safety, if not our self-respect. If it takes the Spanish to make us see that, well, more power to them. But I predict Eric Holder will set in motion a very legalistic process to achieve the same thing, without causing any undue harm to our delicate political system. Wait and see; this one will take a year or more, but will eventually erupt, possibly after the next congressional election.
Studebaker, Packard, Kaiser, Hudson, Nash, Rambler, Kaiser, Lark, Edsel, DeSoto, Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Chrysler, Dodge, and who knows what else. There is no lesson here, except that people who don’t believe in evolution need to explain how Intelligent Design works in the auto industry.
Tomorrow, I’ll be able to report on my race prediction. For tonight, I remember last year’s race. Another classic come from behind victory for me. The first four miles on this course (actually miles 2-4) are mostly uphill. At the start, I see SG__, who’s four years younger than me, just entering my age group as I am exiting. I keep an eye on him, as I expect him to contend for the lead in our 55-59 bracket. I watch him line up in the front row, while I’m 1-2 back. He takes off like a rocket, and I figure, there goes my chance for a win. He must put 40-60 seconds into me in those first four miles.
I settle into my own pace, heart rate 148-150, about 7-7:10 minutes a mile, and feel like I’m working just hard enough. Then, coming out of the park, down the hill onto Ruston Way (where we’ll follow the water for the middle 6+ miles), I see him bobbing way up ahead (he’s quite tall for a distance runner, with thick black hair, so he’s easy to spot). He doesn’t seem to be pulling away as we near the turn around, so I time his lead – down below 40 seconds now. From 7 through 10, I seem to get about 10 seconds a mile on him, and come up behind just as we near the bottom of a little bridge coming off Ruston.
I figure he’s willing to work harder on the hills than I am (that’s how he got the lead at the start), so I calculate that if I pass him just before the start of the bridge, he’ll try to pass me on the uphill, and I can then re-pass on the downhill. This is really a double reverse psychology trick I’m trying to pull off. By passing him, I’ll fire up his competitive juices, and he’ll try to raise it a notch on the uphill – a big effort for him at this late stage of the race. Re-passing someone who’s just gone by you can give you a big lift.
But getting re-RE-passed – now that’s a little disturbing, and makes you question, ever so slightly, ever so briefly, if you can actually win the race. I figured he had seen the relatively big lead he had on me at the turn around, would know that I’d erased it all to the bridge, and would get a short-lived confidence burst when he reassessed me, only to have his bubble burst as I scooted by down the back side. All this I’m thinking in the space of about 30 seconds as we hit the bridge.
I make the pass, and keep the effort level steady up the little hill. Just like I planned, he ramps it up a bit to pass me near the top of the bridge. I give him about 10 seconds up there, just enough to have him think he succeeded, and then do my own ramping up, on the downhill.
I am a VERY good downhill runner, especially late in a race. I don’t know why, but the thigh pain most people complain about as they stomp down a hill at full speed doesn’t seem to happen for me – I think my quads are just stronger than most runners, from all the skiing and biking I’ve down. Anyway, I shoot past him, but then I’ve got about 2.5 miles to stay in front, and a lot of it is uphill, some gentle, and a couple of really steep pitches. My plan means I have to go into high gear, and not let up until the end.
As usual, I start passing all sorts of people, and try to find the pace at which I feel I can not go any faster, but can hold until the end. Apparently, I have enough gas to actually bring off the race as planned, and end up winning by 26 seconds. Meaning I was going about 10 seconds a mile faster than he was for the last 9 miles of the race, after giving up about 15 seconds a mile for the first 4 miles. Perfectly done, in retrospect. He went out too hard, and I came back just right.
Problem is, tomorrow I’m in a new age group, and don’t really know if I’ll have any close competition like that again. If I’m going to hit close to the same time, I’ll have to find some other way to motivate myself coming out of the park. Usually, something presents itself – we’ll just have to see what I can come up with.