I’m making no bold predictions for 2025, since getting it right in these way-too-interesting times is like trying to guess when a ticking time bomb will explode.
When it does, the shrapnel will shred an economic bubble so pumped with folly, greed and hubris that only a Wall Street shill or a madman could believe the soft-landing story. Made-up statistics to support this fantasy are being peddled aggressively nonetheless by the likes of Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and a few other mainstream sources whose editors evidently are incapable of imagining what a hard landing might look like.
For starters, a commercial real estate market that has been imploding in slow motion for more than three years will collapse with the swiftness of a black hole, swallowing up a galaxy of underperforming assets in nanoseconds. Trillions of dollars’ worth of imagined ‘wealth’ will be wiped from the global ledger. And yet, against this likelihood, Wall Street’s newspaper of record can still report with a straight face that some Manhattan landlords are starting to make money with office rentals. A recent article would have us infer that the city's property market may have bottomed. The unfortunate truth is that the relative handful of big companies that are signing leases rather than fleeing New York's high taxes and rampant street crime have been moving into showcase buildings that represent only a minuscule fraction of rentable space.
Meth-Money
Bitcoin’s inevitable implosion could set an even bigger disaster in motion. The collapse will inflict psychological wounds on securities markets, but it will also purge an important source of meth-money from the financial shell game that sustains global GDP. The possibility that Bitcoin will fall from whatever peak it achieves above $100,000 to under $100 exists because it is mostly fools too young to know the devastation of bear markets who have pushed valuations to insane levels. Anecdotal evidence of this comes from a half-dozen Florida women I’ve dated over the years. Every one of them had a son with a day job that paid low-to-mid six figures, but who supplemented his income gambling on cryptos.
In earlier days, none of us knew a centi-millionaire, let alone someone who had made that kind of money overnight. Now, even kids are doing it often enough to turn the story viral. That’s where all the ray-rah, sis-boom-bah is coming from, and you can hardly blame avocado toast-eating, hard-seltzer-drinking, would-be titans of finance for believing that cryptocurrencies are the ticket to easy riches. The adults in the room are financiers themselves who know better. They doubtless find the spectacle entertaining but also regard Bitcoin as a limitlessly expansible source of liquidity for a banking system powered mainly by hot air. When the bubble pops, dreams of easy money will go down hard. If the severely depressed economy mutates into a state of barter, don’t count on digital money to replace hard cash for purchasing necessities. The digital wallet would become infinitely less useful if the power grid turns balky.
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Thank you,
Rick Ackerman