Doug Kerr for Flickr
Our stock market is ping-ponging up and down in shock waves, and most of us are more than a little anxious about our own money. I thought you might like to see some of my predictions for the not-too-distant future, so that you can use the budgeting forecasting for your own finances.
I am pretty good at predicting how events will affect our country and your budget. For example, I predicted that the Iraqi’s would not pay our military expenses with the money harvested from their oil fields as former vice-president Dick Cheney promised. Instead, I forecast the price of our optional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would total in the trillions ($2 trillion and counting). My budgeting forecasting led me to predict the cuts in our Veterans Administration and how that would short-change our wounded warriors.
So what is this thing called budgeting forecasting and why should I care about it? People think of it as a business tool, but I don’t see why we can’t use it for our own budgets. There are three stages to it: budgeting, planning and forecasting (BP&F). BP&F lay out your long- and short-term personal money goals.
Okay, now let’s take a look at some of my predictions:
SUCCESSFUL PREDICTIONS
1. Great Recession
Our government representatives and most of the press seemed oblivious to the depth of the recession. I called the situation what it was, the Great Recession, for nearly a year before the term became accepted.
2. Disloyal Corporations
Back in the ‘80’s, I predicted that companies would show no loyalty to their workers. Unfortunately, people didn’t realize this until their jobs went onto the layoff list. Even then, many continued to find it hard to accept that a formerly paternalistic organization will disown its employees. Change is difficult. Denial is fatal.
3. Too Big To Fail
When Henry Paulson handed President George W. Bush a single sheet of paper asking for too-big-to-fail funding in the billions, I had no doubt that our country was headed for big trouble. That lone televised act smacked of the administration’s other hasty, careless decisions. One page is more like a note from your mother to get you out of school. I predicted what Paulson and Bush planned and that the plan was already in action. It was.
4. Middle Class Evaporating
It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out: no jobs – no purchases.
THREE NEW PREDICTIONS
Okay, now for the good stuff. Here are some of my predictions:
5. Banks Failing Again
The too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever. When they begin to fail, and they will, the mega-banks expect to be bailed out again. That bank fix didn’t work for very long, did it? We must not bail them out, or our economy will find itself in a Great Depression II. Banks must be broken up into smaller banks, and no bank should be able to be both a traditional bank and a reckless investment company.
6. TPP Is NAFTA On Steroids
NAFTA kills thousands and thousands of our manufacturing plants and the jobs that went with them. Why would anyone expect the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) to work out any better? It won’t.
7. Middle Class Eulogy
I wondered for a long time what advantage mega-corporations saw in killing off our middle class. Then I realized they were pulling a Walmart – using up one market, casting it aside, and then moving on to another market. The only problem is that China’s growing economy took a major dive. It seems there is a fatal flaw in the big corporation’s budgeting forecasting.
If our politicians would grow a spine and insist that these corporations support U.S. jobs, and they could, our middle class might put itself in reverse and start to grow. But the politicians won’t do that. The only hope that I can see is that the mega-corporations realize the advantage of investing in us. That is a possible outcome.
What can you do to prepare for these three predictions?
- Buy local.
- Hand write a letter to your congressmen and women to tell them you don’t want the TPP.
- Invest in gold.
You might ask how I learned to do budgeting forecasting. I blame my career where I anticipated the timing of different organizational systems colliding into one another, so I could begin problem-solving prior to the crash. That experience, plus a strange affection for statistics, seems to work rather well when I do my predictions.
It seems like now is a good time to share the information.
