Predictions for 2010

I’ve had a little difficulty in mustering up a great deal of enthusiasm for making predictions for 2010. It might just be my current rather glum outlook but I think that 2010 is going to be a hard year on many fronts, possibly harder than 2009.

Nonetheless here are my predictions for 2010.

• The U. S. will not attack or invade Iran.
• Iran will not test a nuclear weapon.
• At the end of 2010 there will be at least 60,000 U. S. soldiers in Iraq. There may well be over 100,000. Don’t believe the boilerplate. The combat brigades will be converted to advice and assistance brigades.
• The Nouri al Maliki’s government will be re-elected in Iraq.
• The Chinese will report at least 8% growth for 2010. No one will believe it, least of all the Chinese people.
• Pat Quinn will be elected governor of Illinois.
• Rod Blagojevich will be convicted of at least one charge.
• At the end of 2010 the U. S. national unemployment rate will be at least 10%
• Housing prices as measured by the national Case-Shiller index will remain pretty flat, between -10% and 10% for the year.
• The U. S. will have more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined at the end of 2010 then we did at the end of 2008.
• Real GDP growth as measured by the BEA will be less than 3%.
• There will have been a substantial correction (between 1,000 and 2,000 points) in the DJIA but it will have clawed its way back to 10,000 by year’s end.
• The Congress will pass a healthcare reform bill.
• The Congress will pass another stimulus package.
• No major Chicago sports team will win a championship in 2010.
• The winter of 2010 will be a cold and hard one in the United States. Proponents of the idea of anthropogenic climate change will take this as proof of their views; opponents of the idea of anthropogenic climate change will take it as proof of theirs.
• 2010 will see a heightened level of at least nominally covert U. S. military activity in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
• Speaking of Somalia, at least 3 oil tankers will be captured and held for ransom by pirates in that area in 2010.
• The current Iranian regime will not be overthrown.
• The United Nations Security Council will not impose additional meaningful sanctions on Iran.

This year I didn’t predict that Israel wouldn’t attack Iran as I have in previous years because I just don’t know. Heretofore I’ve believed that the Israeli government was saber-rattling and would do nothing but I’m really not sure about the present government. If I were in the situation that the Israelis are in and genuinely believed that Iran truly posed an existential threat either via weapons of mass destruction or by its support for terrorists in the region, I’d be doing a lot more than the Israelis seem to be. I’d be demonstrating to the Iranians that two can play at the covert activity game and shut down its oil industry, prevent shipments of imported gasoline from arriving, or something of the sort. That the Israelis don’t seem to be doing this I consider prima facie evidence that the agitation about the Iranians—justified as it may be—is largely for domestic political consumption.

But there really is a lot more saber-rattling and there really seems to be a drumbeat for war with Iran to a greater extent than ever before so I just don’t know.

There may well also be a full-fledged trade war going on between the United States and China by the end of 2010. I think it would be imprudent but the actions on both sides point to it. I’m not confident enough about it to predict it, though.

Update

In going over my predictions I notice that I’m effectively predicting that productivity will increase while employment remains flat or decreases. Yes, that’s what I think is likely to happen.