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A list of some of my predictions

At the risk of big-noting myself (fierté? moi? non! Allez manger un poisson avec une clé!), here's a list of some predictions that I got right... and a few a got wrong (The majority of my predictions have yet to be fulfilled):

• 20 September 2007: The US Dollar is very likely to continue dropping in value. Correct.
• 19 September 2007: Bernanke's continual interest rates cuts will result in a choice between growing inflation or raising rates during a recession. So far the choice seems to be inflation.
• 13 September 2007: A recession is coming and we may be in one already. A recession is still very likely but the US wasn't it one in September 2007 so I was wrong (though technically I said "may").
• 19 August 2007: My prediction that oil will reach $100. This got picked up over at Angry Bear and lots of discussion ensued. Although the prediction was open-ended, it eventually got fulfilled in the first week of 2008.
• 17 August 2007: Bernanke suddenly cuts rates and I predict that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. I also point out that cuts will precipitate a further devaluation of the dollar, which has happened.
• 25 July 2007: I predict that Share Markets are about to "plateau" out. This has been exactly what has happened. Compare the Wilshire 5000 graph in that posting to the most recent one. No bear market yet, but heading nowhere but down.
• 27 June 2007: I predict that a La Nina event is about to be announced. I was wrong, but La Nina was announced some time afterwards anyway. Besides, I think if the experts back-date it they'll agree that it had started by this time.
• 6 March 2007: Another La Nina prediction - that it will occur within the few months afterwards. Again, this was wrong on the timing but right because it eventually happened.
• 31 March 2006: A prediction that house prices in the US will fall. I have to give kudos to Kash over at Angry Bear for that one though, since his posting (linked in my article) pretty much said it all. And if people in the US had heeded this advice, they would have gotten out with their money intact, unlike now.
  
• 16 March 2006: A prediction that the Democrats would win the congressional elections. I also predicted the final amount of House of Rep seats but got it wrong by only 2 seats. My predictions for the senate seats were waaaaaay out.
• 28 January 2006: A prediction that a US recession was coming. "I actually do hope there will be an economic slowdown, a rise in unemployment and an increase in personal and corporate bankruptcies. Does this make me evil?"
• 25 October 2005. Dick Cheney will either resign or be impeached as a result of the Plame Affair, while George W. Bush may not be far behind. Well that one crashed and burned, mainly because I had too much faith in the US political system to actually DO something about the Bush administration. As it stands, neither Bush nor Cheney will be impeached, which shows just how cynical and debased US politics has become.
• 18 October 2005. My Harriet Miers prediction that came true within a month. This was picked up by Steve Gililard at the New Blog, one of the few lefty bloggers who posted my thoughts. Sadly, Steve died in June 2007.
  

Apocalypse when?

From the department of predictable social reactions:

Louisiana pastor Larry Stockstill had a disturbing dream last week. He saw military trucks and armored vehicles getting in formation for a surprise strike on an American city. Stockstill felt alarmed, but when he tried to warn a pastor in his dream, the man ignored him.

“I knew in my dream that a siege was going to happen the next day,” Stockstill says. “The enemy was being positioned. But no one would listen to me.”

Stockstill, pastor of the 10,000-member Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge, believes his dream was a prophetic warning about the spiritual condition of our nation. While America teeters near an economic and political precipice, many American church leaders are going on with their business as usual—without realizing that the church is in a state of serious moral crisis.

“I believe we are facing a window of opportunity for repentance,” Stockstill says. “Unless the pastors wake up to avert judgment, there will be judgment on America. If we don’t respond we are going to lose this nation.” Permanent link here.

A few bad employment reports and someone thinks the world's about to end. Is that it?

This article was written by Lee Grady, my favourite Charismatic Christian commentator. The guy is an interesting "prophetic" voice within the American Charismatic church because he seems to focus mainly on forthtelling God's anger towards the current American church, which is beset with bad theology and sexual and financial sin. He's done a good job of doing this.

Sometimes, though, Grady goes overboard, which serves as a reminder of the fact that, well, he IS Charismatic after all.

Let me first respond to this article from a theological perspective. Like Stockstill, I too believe that the American church is in for a big fall, but I don't claim direct divine guidance for this opinion. There are a number of problems that I see for the American church which will, eventually, result in some level of decline over the next two decades. In short, I would summarise them as follows:

• Adherence to worldly philosophies associated with modern conservative politics.
  
• A militant, abrasive and separatist attitude towards unbelievers.
• A failure to focus upon the Gospel of Christ in public worship.
• The propagation of unbiblical teachings like the "prosperity gospel".
• A failure to act consistently and in accordance with the bible's teaching on godliness - a failure which is seen at both the private and the public level (the latter especially with a litany moral failings amongst leaders dating back decades).
• An inability to discern truth from fiction, leading to numerous urban myths being propagated about modern culture, such as the Harry Potter Satanism link.
  
• An inability to read and understand the bible properly, which leads to the development of ungodly teachings, adherence to worldly philosophies and everything else mentioned above.
• An almost wholesale support of the Iraq War, not just when public support for it was high, but also now when public support has turned against the war. The embarrassing and fawning tone of The Land Letter is an example of this.
• The tacit assumption that true Christians will only vote Republican, and that the only issues worth battling about are Abortion, Homosexuality and Evolution.
  
• The rapid secularisation of American society and the rise of popular atheism.
  

If you put all these together, we see a church that is in trouble, and a church that is in for a fall.

Of course, as an Australian Christian, I would say that many Churches in my own country here suffer from the same problems. However, Christianity in Australia is relatively small and does not have as much influence in modern society or politics as our American brothers and sisters.

Unlike Stockstill, however, I am loathe to link the current malaise in the church with the current economic situation. I suppose some links could be made, namely that the church has supported Republicans who have, in turn, created policies that have led to the current economic problems - but that is about as far as I can stretch it.

From a sociological perspective, though, Stockstill's concerns are quite predictable and normal. Think back to the last time America was in an economic malaise - the mid to late 1970s - and ask how many people appeared as "prophets" who worked to call the church back to its fundamental principles. One "prophet", of course, was Keith Green, whose music and lyrics at the time reflected a restlessness with the state of the church. I'm certain that other Christian leaders - especially those linked in with The Jesus Movement - had similar concerns at the time.

Economic and social conditions in the US are currently declining. Unemployment is on the up, as is inflation and mortgage foreclosures. There is a general trend of unhappiness spreading across America that is leading people like Stockstill to call the church back to action, and people like those on the Calculated Risk comments thread to seriously consider purchasing firearms... "just in case".

Yet while I have been predicting big economic problems for America for quite a while, I have never become apocalyptic in tone. America will eventually recover from this unofficial recession but it will take time. It is not the end of the world, it is just the end of an era.

Deaths

Australian Cricketer Norm O'Neill (71).

Blind Guitarist Jeff Healy (41).

Global Warming Deniers are innumerate

ie they suck at Mathematics:

Every now and then, I venture over to other fields to see what the debates look like. The most recent laugher was amongst the global warming denialist crowd.

Why? In 2007, the average global temperatures dropped by 0.595 degrees centigrade. This is a fact. The response from this group was to say (verbatim) "Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming."

Um, no. As the charts... reveal, it does nothing of the sort.

Audioslave

I have had a revelation about Audioslave and their first album. My considered opinion has always been that the album was okay but didn't really stand out.

At the moment, though, via Amarok, I am listening to individual music tracks from all my CDs, which means I could be listening to a Bob Dylan song, then an Audioslave song, then Pink Floyd, then U2, then The Dead Kennedys, and so on.

So what did I discover?

Audioslave songs sound very good when you listen to them once, and then not listen to another Audioslave song for a while.

The Birthday Girl and Dad

My Daughter turns 3 on Tuesday

And her party is tomorrow. It's a "Dorothy the Dinosaur" party.

This photoshopped image has been shamelessly stolen from Something Awful.

Virtual Monetary Policy

This is absolutely fascinating:

The game Eve Online has a major virtual economy, and many of the players form corporations to handle space exploration, mining, and manufacturing. So, in August, they hired a economics professor to be their "Alan Greenspan". He measures CPI and markets in the game, so that the game designers can institute virtual monetary policy. The PDF above is the latest quarterly report where he tries to address the debate about whether or not inflation exists in Eve Online.

How do you handle monetary policy in a game? In Eve, there is no loan system (though they are thinking about inserting one), so monetary policy consists of making minerals scare or more plentiful, or changing the powers of in-game objects, thus changing how players value them. For example, this PDF has a graph showing how changing the range of cruise missiles in the game affected their prices.

I remember a few years ago when I heard about people willing to spend real cash to buy good characters in World of Warcraft that there would be some interesting times ahead for online gaming and economics.

I love the fact that EVE Online has its own "Alan Greenspan" who controls inflation by adjusting the amount of resources present in the game - far more effective than the real world, though if God chose to he could adjust all the resources accordingly.

Of course people would say that such an economy would be limited to the online gamers themselves and have no real world application. I disagree. There is a commodity that our modern economy has complete control over, which can be produced or restricted at will. We can produce an infinite amount if we choose to, or completely rid ourselves of it. What is this commodity? Money.

Let's reverse the analogy here. Instead of the economics professor being a virtual "Alan Greenspan", let's assume that a central bank is like that economics professor. Of course, central banks do not have control over any form of goods or services except money, so while inflation in the game is controlled by this professor adjusting the amount of goods present, the amount of inflation in the real world is controlled by central banks adjusting the amount of money present.

Central Banks can induce inflationary monetary conditions quite easily - this is through its open market operations like reducing interest rates, reducing reserve requirements on bank accounts, or even simply creating the stuff out of thin air and distributing it to whomever you want to. On the other hand, central banks can induce deflationary monetary conditions just as easily - by increasing interest rates, increasing the reserve requirements, or getting rid of any income it receives (from overseas reserves for example). Both forms of monetary policy - inflationary and deflationary - rely upon the effect of the money multiplier as money passes through the economy.

What does this mean for us? Well, put simply, it means that central banks (including the Federal Reserve) DO have the power to completely control inflation if they want to. Inflation that is "out of control" is essentially the result of a central bank that is not using its powers properly (either through legal restrictions or incompetence).

For me, it means that it is more than possible that an economy could sustain Absolute Price Stability (zero inflation over the course of the business cycle). It also means that my idea for a taxless economy is also possible.