Call me a contrarian, but here's my gut for the New Year

1. Housing recovery has already started, and will become big story in 2009. Home building will remain sluggish while inventories slowly drop.
   
2. Stock market rally in first quarter to 12,000 Dow ... with big stories dominated by mergers and acquisitions
   
3. Even though Federal Government gave out cash to GM and Chrysler, both will file bankruptcy in 2nd quarter, with GM being purchased by Ford and Chrysler by Toyota. This will break the union contracts and allow steel, textiles, and other union dominated industries to begin re-organizing labor contracts.
   
4. Mortgage rates will hang at 5% till end of March, with refinance boom helping dodge Alt-A reset crisis, but then start going up as "economic recovery" news causes inflation to become more certain
5. Oil will go back up to $80 by June 2009, the dollar will strengthen though. The US will lead the global recovery thus the dollar strength. Oil demand issues will recover traction thus the oil strength.
   
6. Conservative groups will continue rapid growth - #TCOT, #dontgo, #rebuild, and collaborative projects will push to hyperlocal since local races in 2009 and 2010 are more important than national ... ie. local state house control of re-districting in Indiana
7. Obama will be tied in knots, one the one side his radical left support, on the other the great middle of America that only heard "change" ... he will accomplish very little in 2009 and 2010 ... which frankly will be good for America
8. Governments all over the country will actually have to cut budgets, and cut deeply. This will be the first time in decades that budgets actually get cut. Some politicians will lose in 2010 merely because they couldn't deliver pork for the first time.
   
9. Hyper local blogger collaboration will hurt traffic to individual bloggers, with a rush to get added to collaborative projects. Monetization will only work in collaborative aggregates, with traffic and advertising connections. See circa 2006 model Northwest Indiana bloggers, old news. I better move or I'm dead in the water too.
10. Massive unemployment will actually be good for the economy, with consulting and home based contractors niche growing substantially. Companies will hire the work they actually need and leave the extras to the side as unecessary overhead. The fast and connected will not only survive but grow, the lazy and entitled will be left far far behind.
    

What are your predictions for 2009? Disagree with me, cool comment or email me, the engagement is more important than the prophesy.