A collection of some guesses

True to custom 2011 has started with all sorts of predictions of what could lie ahead during the course of the year and further. We have made a collection of some of the more prominent and/or interesting ones. We do not, however, offer to take poison on any of them – as the New York Times wrote at the turn of the millennium: “… the quick pace of change might be making the future less predictable, but it has also made the world's state of constant transformation more familiar, less forbidding, to everyone."

Moneywatch made some investment predictions for the decade:

• There will be a new investment bubble. Count on it! Despite the beat-down our economy has suffered over the last year or so, irrational exuberance is alive and well. You can be sure there will be at least one new bubble, and probably more, coming this decade. It’s possible that we are already starting this decade with a growing gold bubble, but it may be too early to tell. That’s the problem with bubbles - they are not so obvious until after they have popped.
• There will be new investment paradigms.
• While predicting markets is hard, predicting investor behaviour is relatively easy. Investors will buy after the investment has gone up in value and sell after the investment has collapsed. That’s because of two human instincts - greed and fear. Sound familiar? It should, because this is the cycle that is historically repeated again and again. Don’t despair though, this could be the decade that you learn from history so as not to repeat it.
• Wall Street will flourish. Wall Street was definitely dragged through the briar patch at the end of this past decade. I admit that I never thought I would see the day that Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns would go the way of the dinosaurs, or that AIG and other insurance titans would need a bail-out. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to count Wall Street out. They will continue to invent new securities and products that seemingly give us return with minimum risk, and we will continue to buy them.

On the website mindflowers Ryan McGivern took a look at wider issues:

• Most important in this decade of cultural paradigm shifts will be the slow but marked demise of the American Car Culture. The American Car Culture is characterised by a personally owned/leased vehicle, roads, highways, parking lots, fast food culture, and the support industries of repair/maintenence, tyres, and fuel. While the switch to solar-charged electric vehicles and ‘city runner’ golf-cart type cars such as the Segway Puma will be successful, this decade will show even greater changes.
• As car culture dies, city planners will have two new reasons to innovate more livable cities: the road/block structure will be unnecessary, and residential/work districts will become more synthesised.
• America’s culture of excessive consumption will begin to be overcome in part through trends in religion and the ending of the American colonial empire.
• Slow food movements and eating locally produced foods will increase and watch for hipsters to soon take over the Block Party model to begin hosting weekly potlucks on your newly car-vacated streets.
• Houses will continue to be unattractive to most Americans as many will move to urban clusters, dissolving suburbia. Apartments as well as large houses now taken over by multiple/extended families will become popular as well as organised community lots (think ‘compound’ without the creepy sect feel).
• TV will become really just the internet streamed over high quality screens. TV  networks and cable will become obsolete as all viewed content will be hosted on highly niche websites.
• Ease of quality movie-making, interest in user-loaded content, and ‘reality TV’ genre will create ‘non-professional’ channels on the internet. This will result in a cultural revolution as heretofore under-represented communities will be afforded wide dissemination and control of content.

In The Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard offered his predictions on the global economy:

• Policy levers in the US, Europe, and Japan remain set on uber-stimulus with the fiscal pedal pressed to the floor and rates near zero everywhere, yet OECD industrial output has not regained the peaks of 2007-2008 by a wide margin. Leading indicators are tipping over again. We are one shock away from a liquidity trap.
• The East-West trade and capital imbalances that lay behind the Great Recession are as toxic as ever. Surplus states are still exporting excess capacity with rigged currencies -- the yuan-dollar peg for China and, more subtly, the D-mark-Latin peg within EMU for Germany.
• Dangerously high budget deficits of 6%, 8%, or 10% of GDP in countries with dangerously high public debts near 100% may have prevented an acute depression, but they have not prevented the weakest rebound since World War Two, and they cannot continue, whatever the assurances of New Keynesians and pied pipers of debt.
• Ben Bernanke made a fatal error by launching QE2 too early, with an incoherent justification, by dribs and drabs for fine-tuning purposes. The QE card cannot easily be played a third time. If he now tries to print money on a nuclear scale to crush all resistance and hold down Treasury yields, he risks exhausting Chinese patience and invites the wrath of  the Tea Party Congress.
• Japan will slip back into technical recession. It cannot keep raiding its foreign reserve fund to pay bills. Public debt will spiral up to 235pc of GDP. Interest payments will approach 30pc of tax revenues. Fresh debt issuance will outstrip fresh private savings this year. Dagong, Fitch, and S&P will have to act. Downgrades will come thick and fast. This time they will hurt.
• China and India are over-heating, faced with a 1970s choice between choking credit or the onset of stagflation. If they choose the latter to buy time, the politics of food will turn on them with a vengeance.
• Vietnam will have to rescue its banking system, kicking off the Asian hard-landing of 2011-2012. The Aussie dollar will come back to earth.
• I doubt the West will recover soon enough to pick up the growth baton before the East hits tyres. We may then have a "sub-optimal equilbrium", that modern euphemism for a trade depression.
• Europe is hobbled by its Delors Error. The region makes things that the world wants to buy. Its external accounts are in balance. Fiscal policy is more responsible than in Japan, America, or Britain, yet the whole is less than the parts. A dysfunctional currency union engenders chronic crisis at a lower threshold of aggregate debt.
• It will become clear that Europe’s scorched-earth rescues cannot work because they offer no means by which victims can clear debt and claw their way back to health.
• Ireland's Fine Gael-Labour coalition will take its revenge on Europe for imposing such ruinous terms under Berlin's Diktat. It will restructure senior bank debt, setting an irresistible precedent for the PASOK backbenchers in Greece, the Left wing of the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol, and America’s insolvent cities. From bank debt to parastatal debt is a hop, and from there to quasi-sovereign debt is a skip.
• Gold may slip at first as casino funds cut leverage to meet margin calls, before punching higher to €1300 an ounce as investors seek gold bars in a precautionary move. Talk of capital controls will grow louder.
• Certainly, this is the year when Europe's unions will remember their own warnings 20 years ago that EMU was a "bankers’ ramp", a scheme for the convenience of elites. They will ask louder why crucifixion on a Deutschmark cross is in their interests.
• The EU will do just enough to prop up the edifice, but too little to restore lasting confidence. The German bloc will not confront the elemental point that either they agree to pay subsidies – not loans – on a scale equal to Versailles reparations, for year after year, or the South will stay trapped in slump until electorates blow a fuse.