It is going to be a fantastic year in 2009, if you happen to love oatmeal.
“We’ll be up to our butts in oatmeal in 2009 with Starbucks and Jamba Juice both rolling out the porridge nationally,” predicts John Imbergamo, a restaurant-industry consultant based in Denver.
Clearly, we’ll be up to our butts in something.
“Anxiety and depression will threaten Americans’ mental health in 2009 as the recession progresses,” begins a list of predictions recently compiled by University of Alabama faculty members.
A recent survey by the Association for Financial Professionals reported that five of every six financial professionals do not expect business conditions to improve in 2009, and 55 percent expect them to get worse. Financial professionals — as we painfully learned in 2008 — do not make accurate predictions. That’s why I also relied on psychics in developing my outlook for 2009.
Sharon Lewis is a graphic designer in New York City who also works with tarot cards and anagrams in personal and corporate readings.
She recently e-mailed me a list of partial anagrams she made from the name of former Nasdaq chairman and alleged Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff.
Like many psychic insights, they are cryptic:
“O I affect dire sums;
“Use as item for FDIC;
“Suicide of FR mates;
“O mad cities suffer.”
She also derived these messages from the name Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC:
“BM invested secret funds, L. Amer. oil, final CRT;
“Secret bulletin in dead man, Mr. RTV’s offices;
“Staff deliver monies in secret, BM call nut dr.”
“I don’t think he was the only one,” Lewis told me. “I think they are going to find a lot more.”
More Ponzi schemes?
“Yes,” said Lewis. “This is just a harbinger of what’s going on on Earth.”
I told Lewis that I’d been trying to come up with my own predictions for 2009 but that they were really dark. She replied, “You may be more psychic than you think.”
For 2009, I predict that housing foreclosures will continue to rise, causing almost everything else to keep declining.
Problem loan portfolios at our biggest banks will become bigger than the federal government’s ability to bail them out. Automakers will not magically turn viable, and at least one of them will have to undergo either a forced consolidation or a bankruptcy.
The recession will continue through most, if not all, of the year, and when it’s over, we will still be in a global economic malaise. Unemployment will come close to double digits by year-end. The Dow will slip below 6,000. Gold will exceed $1,000 an ounce.
Oil prices will remain well below $100 a barrel for long enough to silence most serious talk about alternative energy and electric cars.
Watch for suckers’ rallies. Stocks will spike. Low-interest rates will even encourage home sales. But most optimism will prove short-lived.
To make my predictions, I consulted a Magic 8-Ball that I keep on my desk beside a transparent box of glass shards from a high-rise window that was smashed out by a rogue banker, just before jumping to his death. Check back this time next year to see how I did.
Chicago-area futurist Sidney Friedman, author of “Your Mind Knows More Than You Do,” writes down his dreams. He also gazes into liquids, including wine and champagne.
But lately, when he gazes into liquids, two words keep popping into his head: “plastic” and “algae.” These two words will have something to do with the economy in 2009, he told me, but he is not sure what.
I think I know what. But I would rather eat oatmeal.
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
