orlov always has lots of well reasoned things to say and in this 'predicition' post, he does very well at that speaking about things 'patriots' won't approve;


While many commentators see it fit to publish their predictions for the year ahead, I find a single year to be too fine-grained for any meaningful forecast. For me, plus or minus five years is about the right size of the error bars to place on any prediction with regard to timing, making it possible to time any major change to within a couple of decades. And it just so happens that another decade has gone by since I published my last set of predictions for the United States in the 2010s and it is therefore time to come up with a new set, for the 2020s.

My last set of predictions worked out moderately well. Although in some cases the process has not run its course, the trends are all unmistakable and the processes I outlined should be expected to continue and in some cases to run to completion within the new decade. But this time around I will attempt to make more specific predictions.

With regard to economics, something is bound to snap, possibly quite early in the decade, and color the rest of it. There is a growing disconnect between the financial economy, which functions based on rules that people can, and do, make up as they go along, and the physical economy of mining, manufacturing and logistics. There is no reason to particularly trust official statistics with regard to economic growth, unemployment, inflation, stock market valuations: these are all clever forgeries. A sufficiently bubbly stock market or real estate market can be maintained by suitably huge injections of fake money conjured into existence and handed out to key insiders. But if we look at how much stuff gets made and shipped, how much new public infrastructure gets built, and other such physical factors, we can already observe steady deterioration.

While finance types and economists, who deal in dimensionless quantities identified by quasi-religious mystical symbols such as $, €, ¥ and £, toil tirelessly to maintain a fake Potemkin village façade of a thriving economy, no such theatrical suspension of disbelief is possible when looking at tonnes, cubic meters or kilowatt-hours. A bunch of ruthless financial swindlers teamed up with pointy-hatted economists spend their days reasoning circularly about price determining value determining price while resolutely confusing money creation with wealth creation. Meanwhile, a shrinking physical economy obscured by runaway debt remains on a collision course with reality; once the collision takes place, the result will be similar to what happened during the financial collapse of 2007-8, except that the desperate financial manipulations that were then used to arrest it will no longer work at all and the physical economy, which is already languishing, will grind to a halt.......https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2020/01/predictions-for-2020s.html?m=1