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Notes -
2023 Predictions
Where percentages mean the expected share of predictions at that percentage that are correct by the end of the year. Essentially, I expect 4 of my 5 80% predictions to occur, one of my four 25% predictions, etc.
Asset Markets will:
50% at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 12%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
25% at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 20%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
The Federal Reserve will:
80% raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
80% not cut interest rates before July 1st, 2023.
50% raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
The Bank of Canada will:
80% raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
50% raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
Canada will:
50% have a “moderate” recession which begins in 2023 defined as either of: (1) a cumulative decline in GDP of 2% across any number of quarters, (2) the unemployment rises to 7% at any point.
80% see detached house prices decline by 15%+ as measured by the December over December CREA national benchmark.
25% Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the Liberals will win a minority government.
50% Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the CPC will increase seats and win the most votes.
25% Have a constitutional or jurisdictional crisis over provincial / federal issues, probably related to guns, but possibly related to the Alberta Pension Plan, health care funding, or equalization. This is hard to define, but I would take any kind of Meech-Lake style conference, or Supreme Court decision on constitutional questions, the creation of the Alberta Pension Plan, or refusal by local police to enforce federal gun bans as positive evidence.
At the risk of narcissism, I will:
50% Buy a house.
80% Save over half of our family's after-tax income.
25% Switch jobs.
Not going to estimate certainty, and I don't even have a specific prediction, just want to be on record saying: something's up with the trans front of the culture war, the vibes are shifting. Whereas I don't really see BLM / CRT / MeToo / other aspects of wokeness going anywhere (other than the volume being turned up or down), I have a strong feeling there's something unstable about the trans stuff. Will it lead to a collapse, and if so will it be this year? Don't know, just saying keep an eye on this space.
Oh, a house! At first I thought you were planning on buying a horse. Well, good luck either way!
My sense is that we're in a lull right now. A culture war recession. It's hard to even rank them. I would almost say MeToo is the highest right now but only because of the recent Roe decision, but that turned out to be more of a pop than a bang, didn't it? Maybe the affirmative action case decisions in June will stoke the BLM/CRT set.
One theory is that Blue Tribe turns the burner up or down for purposes of tactical or strategic advantage. Given that they're more or less back in control, what advantage is there on turning the burner back to high?
Thousands of extra black people are being killed per year, compared to five years ago, and this rise correlates neatly with the largest social intervention in law enforcement in living memory. But this is an inconvenient correlation to examine, so it simply goes unexamined, and people mention how it seems like things have chilled out lately. Well, sure. The chillness or lack thereof of our collective environment is entirely determined by Blue Tribe social consensus, and is entirely detached from any actual facts of our physical existence.
BLM was a crisis of the cops hunting black people in the street, not because the cops were actually hunting black people in the street, but because the media and other organs of blue-tribe social consensus generated a collective delusion that it was so. Now black people are actually being killed at rates approximating those delusive rates, but no one cares. This is how it works, and in fact how it has always worked. We've collectively outsourced our cognition to a small cadre of radical utopians, and we dance to their whim.
It will remain so until the existing system ruptures badly enough that the problems become undeniably immediate.
You're missing something important here. Floyd for example was viral on Black Twitter and communities BEFORE media or Blue Tribe got involved. The ideas about police brutality exist in urban black communities and then that filters to their nominal political allies in the Blue Tribe. Which then will get signal boosted by the media etc. The sentiment does not vanish (whether or not it is accurate) because it is not based on data. It's based on stories and previous experiences and then the emotion is usually triggered by a specific incident (often one with a video that can stir up emotions).
You could have zero deaths of black people to cops for 5/10 years or more and no media stories about it and this belief would still persist. The evidence is that stories of white doctors killing black babies in utero as part of maternal care is something that still persists through the stories told by say my ex-wife's mother who is certain white doctors in the 60's killed her first two babies. She successfully had 5 kids after skipping all maternal visits thereafter until thinking her fears were overblown she went back to a doctor for her 6th and youngest. Then when he was born, they discovered he had a needle broken off in his skull and suffered brain damage and partial blindness. So the belief was reinforced, spread to her community and crucially to her children. Did white doctors try to murder her kids in utero? I don't know, but she believes they did.
My ex-wife, an educated IT worker, decided this was no longer a worry, but when she miscarried our first child after a visit to her (white) Ob/Gyn where did her thoughts go? For our second, she repeated her mother's ideas and refused to visit any doctors for the first 6 months. I am pretty confident the miscarriage was a coincidence, but I really want people to understand just how these cycles of issues and thoughts can re-occur even with "normal" events because they are not driven or created by data, they are created by fears and passed on stories from family and friends. Her sister then refused to go to any doctor for her 2 kids. Vaccination rates in Black communities still lag due to "taking the government needle" STILL being an active concern.
Blue Tribe media does not GENERATE these beliefs. It SPREADS them to Blue communities. This is an important difference for understanding what is going on.
I don't understand your point. There's plenty of batty ideas out there (I happen to hold some myself!), that either side's media would refuse to spread, and if they spread organically, they'd only address them in a negative way.
I'll buy "those ideas were already out there" as an excuse for Blue Tribe media when I see them give the Great Replacement the same treatment they gave BLM.
Ahh, i think you misunderstand. I am not talking about blame, just correcting an erroneous understanding (in my view) of the situation.
If FC is correct once the media stopped the narrative the issue would vanish entirely, because they generate it from whole cloth. If I am correct even if the media didn't mention the issue at all you would still get periodic race based protests/rioting within black communities regardless, when a trrigering event occurs.
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