Economy 2010 - General predictions

Folks, it has been a long time since I posted something. The last several months have been great and at least from a professional stanpoint was fun. I know I made some predictions in the middle of last year about the economy and some of you are going to taking me to stock for some of the predictions. I predicted a 9K for DOW, but as you may know we have crossed 10K and the apparent crisis that we encountered in the fall of 2008 is no more a crisis. Banks are making more money (in some cases more than 2007) using cheap funding provided by the Fed and the support given to them by the taxpayers. Fed has been actively involved in buying up mortgages, almost a trillion worth, that the rates have reached such low levels, it has spurred a considerable interest in the housing market. The other prediction that I made regarding unemployment, seems to hold true and the recovery in the broader US economy has been happening without any addition to the job market. Still, the US economy is not out of the woods yet by any stretch of imagination - as I had said earlier, it is going to take some sort of innovation revolution, just like the technology spending that we had in the late 90s to at least see a ray of light that the recovery is adding jobs.

One area where revolution is very ripe is in the area of mobile technology. More and more people have access to cell phones and more and more they are turning to them to make decisions on buying, selling and all the fun stuff. The technology that is currently available, even in the latest edition of smartphones is not enough to push the envelope into the space where PCs are currently dominant, which means more work needs to be done. We are in the periphery of the revolution and eventually, in the next 5 years, we will be using cellphones to operate ATMs, vending machines and all. I know it is happening in some countries like Finland and Japan - but it has not reached a mass scale, that can lift us out of using outmoded technologies like PCs yet.

Another area, that is expected to lead us out of the slump is the green revolution. All major companies, seem to be doing something related to this, but there is no coherence in where all of them are headed. There are several initiatives planned for - but the wild card in this is going to be China and India. These are the two countries that are expected to have a tremendous growth in consumption and production of several products at least in relative terms when compared to the developed world - that whatever action they do with respect to energy consumption and production will set the trends for the 22nd century.

I predict a combination of mobile technology and green revolution will lift us out of "slump" and radically change the way we do things in the next 4-5 years. Hope you are all here to challenge me on this prediction.