It seems that I missed playing the predictions game last year. 2021 was somewhat hit-and miss with seven of my fourteen predictions coming true. My predictions for 2022 also carried a 50% success rate. I believe this is fairly good considering the specificity of the predictions and the level of global shock they delivered.
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Prediction 2022-1: No points for me. Bitcoin, instead of surging to at least $70k USD, dropped significantly in value. It stayed in the ballpark of $20k most of the year. If I had carried over this prediction into 2023, I would have missed the mark by a huge margin again! BTC to USD had a high point of about $44k in the year 2023.
Prediction 2022-2: Extra credit on this one! 2022 was a huge year for cyber attacks and breaches. Over four thousand publicly disclosed data breaches with 22 billion records being exposed. That said, my prediction was for a single breach affecting at least 300 million people. That happened with the leak of personal information of 487 million WhatsApp users.
As I stated above, I have nothing in writing for 2023. So here are my predictions for 2024:
Prediction 2024-1: The old adage that rising energy prices lead to rising costs of goods and services will be flipped upside-down. There will be a brief rise in energy prices (e.g. gasoline, natural gas, electric) that does not contribute to the CPI or PCE . Given that the Fed’s elevated interest rates has created significant inertia in driving down the inflation rate, and that consumers have spent their savings (or burned up their credit), when fuel prices bump up it will cause a crunch in consumer’s money so significant that the prices for goods will actually go down! My advice is to prepare yourselves for some amazing sale prices at some point in 2024.
Prediction 2024-2: Privacy concerns over AI will spur organizations into rapidly creating their own LLM-based chatbots. Currently, there are privacy concerns with organizational workers feeding personal or proprietary information into LLMs such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing. ChatGPT is even banned in some countries. My super-specific prediction is that 50% of Fortune 500 companies will spend exorbitant sums of money in a rush to create their own private LLM-based chatbots and that they will outright ban their employees from using the AI chatbots hosted by 3rd party companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
Hang in there and wait until the end of 2024 to call me crazy. I have been right about a lot of things that defied expert predictions in the past. I can’t wait to see how the year plays out!
Hoy Manor 