Prognosticating about the future: A so-so track record somewhere between the Groundhog, seer of seers, St. Malachy and Nostradamus

I studied graduate level American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario from 1993 to 1995. Before that, I studied history as an undergraduate at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, on-and-off, for pretty much forever, or at least between 1976 and 1993, which sometimes felt like forever. I also spent more than three decades working as a journalist and now I work in a university library. So how good am I at prognostication and prediction? Perhaps better than some groundhogs are every Feb. 2, but still not in the league of Nostradamus or Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, to be sure (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/). And come to think of it, almost seven years ago in March 2013, I didn’t see Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, becoming Pope Francis. Who did?

Sure, I sometimes (OK fairly frequently or at least with some regularity) write about such doomsday topics as pandemics and economic meltdowns, not because I’m always prescient, but rather because I understand they’re both cyclical phenomenon. “How quickly we could we make a trip back to a modern-day equivalent to the Dark Ages of the 5^th to 11^th centuries?” I cheerily asked in a Jan. 23 post here, headlined “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/the-fire-this-time-pandemic-prose-and-waiting-and-watching-for-the-big-one/).

When it comes to pandemics and economic meltdowns, they’re always coming and the next one may well be bigger than the last one. Something like earthquakes. In reality, of course, that all has more to do with mathematical probability than me being a seer-like scribe, although one can always wish for that.

While The Jetsons cartoon television show, which only aired for a single season in 1962-63, but became a popular culture benchmark for my generation in terms of measuring our distance from the future, works OK for gadgets (still waiting for flying cars, hyperloops, and jetpacks, but the Slovakian startup AeroMobil is hard at work on a car that can turn into an airplane and vice versa; while other startups like AquaFlyer, Martin JetPack and Jet Pack International are working towards jetpack reality) in particular (as do the many iterations of Star Trek, for that matter), we’re not as good on the non-gadget, non-cyclical side of predicting the future, myself included.

The list of what I didn’t see coming is so long, it would be easier to enumerate the few things I did see coming. But here’s a few things I missed along the way, just in the first two decades of the 21st century, which turned out to have some historical significance.

At the beginning of 2008, I did not foresee the United States was a little more than 10 months away from electing its first Black president and that president would be Barack Obama, and that he would be easily re-elected to a second term in 2012. Obama was an obscure senator from Illinois, at least to my mind, in early 2008, and early in the year I thought Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The long winter and spring primary season campaign trail changed all that in terms of who I saw winning the party nomination, and Lehman Brothers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at 1:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, following a mass exodus of most of its clients, drastic losses in its stock, and devaluation of its assets by credit rating agencies. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing remains the largest in U.S. history. The name Lehman Brothers  would soon become shorthand for one thing – and one thing only: the collapse of the investment bank triggered the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939, and ended the late John McCain’s chances to become president in the general election that followed, as even with the novelty of Sarah Palin, as his VP running mate, the prospect of a third-term Republican presidency was beyond the pale to most  American voters a dozen years ago. As Peggy Noonan put it so well in a perfect football analogy in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 14, 2008, “the idea has settled in that America just threw long.”

And speaking of American presidents, and missing or coming late to certain realizations, while now President Donald Trump formally announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, with a campaign rally and speech at Trump Tower in New York City, it wasn’t until the Republican winter and spring primary season campaign trail victories of 2016 that I started to really pay much attention to his candidacy.  Later in the fall, it was Allan Lichtman and Michael Moore who convinced me Trump was going to dispatch Hillary Clinton back home to Chappaqua in the general election and become president, polling be damned.

My political myopia, sadly, hasn’t been limited to the New World. Across the Atlantic, I didn’t see the United Kingdom general election result of 2010, leading to the first “hung parliament” since 1974, followed by the coalition government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

Nick who?

Can’t say I saw much in advance either Cameron promising in 2015 to hold a referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued European Union (EU) membership after the UK Independence Party (UKIP) strong showing the previous year. We all know how 47 years from Jan. 1, 1973 to Jan. 31, 2020 ended last week: Brexit+6=Post-Operation Yellowhammer/Operation Redfold.  Apparently the United Kingdom still has food, medicine, money, and moving freight.

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China Syndrome stock market meltdown: ‘This is like déjà vu all over again’

“This is like déjà vu all over again,” said baseball legend Yogi Berra in his famous and oft-quoted malapropism.  We haven’t had that feeling here since … 2008.

Over the past two weeks, China’s currency,  known as the yuan or renminbi, fell in value more than it did in the previous two decades.  The Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.5 percent Monday – erasing the last of its gains for the year in its biggest single-day loss since 2007.  Within minutes after the opening bell, the Dow Jones plummeted 1,089 points, the largest point loss ever during a trading day, surpassing the trillion-dollar “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010,  which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes, sending the Dow down 998.5 points, its biggest intra-day trading drop until Monday. The Dow closed down 588 points Aug. 24, the worst one-day for the Dow since August 2011.

Brent crude, the benchmark for oil prices worldwide, closed Monday at $42.80 a barrel, its lowest close since March 11, 2009. Oil prices tumbled more than five per cent Aug. 24, with U.S. light crude closing at $38.24 a barrel, its lowest close February 2009. Last week marked oil prices’ longest weekly losing streak since 1986.

So perhaps it is “déjà vu all over again,” as Yogi said. Or perhaps it is déjà vu with a China wildcard difference seven years after 2008.

The Great Recession began the night before my holidays began in 2008, although no one quite knew it yet that Sunday night. I was browsing the news headlines that evening on Sept. 14, 2008. But in fact, the dominoes were starting to tumble. The failures of massive financial institutions in the United States began, due primarily to exposure of securities of packaged subprime loans and credit default swaps issued to insure these loans and their issuers, rapidly devolving into a global economic crisis resulting in a number of bank failures in the United States and Europe and sharp reductions in the value of stocks and commodities worldwide.

The failure of banks in Iceland resulted in a devaluation of the Icelandic króna and threatened the government with bankruptcy. Iceland was able to secure an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund in November. In the United States, 15 banks failed in 2008, while several others were rescued through government intervention or acquisitions by other banks. On Oct. 11, 2008, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that the world financial system was teetering on the “brink of systemic meltdown.”

Some phrases become indelibly inked in the public consciousness in association with a single idea or event.

Lehman Brothers are two such words.

Before declaring bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry and Emanuel Lehman in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama, was the fourth-largest investment bank in the Unites States, behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading, especially in U.S. Treasury securities, research, investment management, private equity and private banking.

At 1:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following a mass exodus of most of its clients, drastic losses in its stock, and devaluation of its assets by credit rating agencies. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing remains the largest in U.S. history

The name Lehman Brothers  would soon become shorthand for one thing – and one thing only: the collapse of the investment bank triggered the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939.

In a spectacular stroke of good fortune, however, about 1,250 United Steelworkers Local 6166 workers in Thompson, Manitoba inked a new three-year collective agreement with Vale, the Brazilian mining giant, on Sept. 15, 2008 – the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed. The tentative deal had been reached three days earlier on Sept. 12. Workers voted 65.5 per cent in favour of the contract, which included wage increases in each year of the agreement consistent with their previous contract, and pension improvements.  Last night, six years later, the remaining 1,100 or so United Steelworkers Local 6166 members employed by Vale’s Manitoba Operations voted 79.8 per cent in favour of a accepting a new five-year collective bargaining agreement again reached three days earlier on Sept. 12.

The United States economy, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, would later conclude, had actually been in recession since December 2007 – nine months before Lehman Brothers spectacular financial blowout, although there remained some economic outliers in North America, part of a shrinking circle that in the autumn of 2008 still included Manitoba and Saskatchewan, North Dakota and some of the high-plains Texas Panhandle. The anomaly of the good times rolling on in the fortunate outliers made the Great Recession almost everywhere else in the world seem surreal at first, although Vale did announce on Nov. 17, 2010  they planned to close the smelter and refinery in Thompson, Manitoba in 2015 – an announcement that came 17 months after the Great Recession, according to the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, ended in June 2009. Both the smelter and refinery are likely now to stay open until about 2019, having received several reprieves over the last five years. The December 2007 to June 2009 recession lasted 18 months, making it the longest recession since the Second World War.

For five very scary months, from early October 2008 through early March 2009, the world economy was in free fall. Terms such as deleveraging, subprime mortgage, London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), derivatives, credit default swap and bailout became part of our everyday vocabulary.

Bloomberg L.P., one of the world’s leading English-language financial news services, based in New York City, ran a remarkable story in January 2009, totaling up single-day job losses worldwide. “At least 21,000 jobs were targeted for elimination yesterday as employers from Hertz Global Holdings Inc. to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. grappled with recession-choked demand,” was how the story opened. “More than 20 companies said they were cutting jobs, ranging from Amonil SA, Romania’s second-biggest fertilizer maker, to Fiat SpA’s Magneti Marelli auto-parts division. Hertz, the second-largest U.S. rental-car company, said it will cut more than 4,000 jobs, as businesses and consumers slow travel because of the global recession.”

General Motors shares hit a low of $1.40 in morning trading March 6, 2009, marking their lowest point since May 23, 1933, reported the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a 12-year low of 6,547.05 on March 9, 2009 – its lowest close since April 1997, and had lost 20 per cent of its value in only six weeks.

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