What do you have on your political prediction bingo card that noone else does?

[noname223]

I think this is a difficult one. And probably the answers will be forgotten anyway. And noone is going to factcheck them.

I think my prediction is about Germany. The country I live in. It is easier to get a grasp of the atmosphere in a country when you actually live in it.

The German government won't hold until the end of the legislature. The Christian conservative party will break down the "Brandmauer"/"Fire wall" and aim to build a coalition with the far-right AfD. But not under Merz. Maybe under an ambitious guy called Jens Spahn. This will tear the country apart and fuel the Polarization. We will experience similar things of what is currently happening in the US. The conservatives cannibalize themselves with this strategy. The political situation might become similar to the current state of Austria and after a longer time period maybe Hungary. There won't be a fascistic government. But the country will become more and more illiberal. Courts will be the biggest Opposition to this trend. There will be many citizen Initiatives to ban the AfD of participating at elections/banning the party. The whole process of this Initiative will take a couple of years. I am not sure how it would end. I tend to think the AfD won't banned because such an act would be considered anti-democratic to ban the most popular party. There will be an agenda 2029 in Germany. The alleged goal will be reducing bureaucracy but actually the aims of the policies will be to target minorities. Remigration is a coined term that already spread to the US. This will become the New normal. The funding of public broadcast will be cut. Education about Germany's history, commemoration of the holocaust, and in general education about politics will be highly contested and polarized. The goal post will shift more and more to the right. The overton window will shift more and more right-wing. Germany's debts will skyrocket, the credibility of our credit Ratings will decrease. The poorest people and minorities will suffer the most. The government will Play divide and conquer and scapegoat migrants and unemployed people. Germany won't become militaristic in this scenario though. The government will be Russia friendly and accept Russia's Hegemony in Europe. The EU might be dissolved and the Euro will be abolished. Germany won't attack other countries though. The people in power will posture themselves as doves and primarily target "the enemy within". We will have a charismatic leader that postures as strong man. Many people will be nostalgic of a time without this German guilt.

How would All of this would end? I think it will take a lot of time for most people to realize what is actually going on. Most people will consume their news on social media and buy into the narratives of the New government. People might wake up when its already to late. It won't be the fourth Reich. But it will get a very difficult time for the most vulnerable groups in our Society. People will have to experience a lot of pain and hardship until they realize the advantages of an actual liberal democracy.

I hope this is specific enough so that noone else has it on their bingo card.

 

[NormallyNeurotic]

American here. Not sure if this counts, but I haven't found anyone else (who isn't a complete conspiracy wack) who believes that the kids "lost to the system" during ICE kidnappings and "deportations" are being sold into various types of trafficking, whether sexual or to work as unpaid workers for Trump's billionaire buddies.

I think the ICE raids will ramp up and have more suspicious "missing people" each time in 2026 (and the rest of 2025). We more-or-less can assume where the adults are going, but I think people are too convinced that Epstein's reach died with him. I theorize that people will eventually start to catch on, though.

 

[DarkRange55]

I know that history is smarter than I am.

History is extremely important to me and the main lesson of history by the way is that people do not learn the lessons of history. I consider myself to be a student of history. Many of the world's best investors are students of history.
History taught me about the world but also taught me that the world is always changing. History is exciting and interesting and wonderful for me. Philosophy teaches you to think, whether you like it or not. If you're going to adjust and be successful in life then you need to be able to think. Most people look at the TV or the newspaper or the internet and say well the sky is blue. Well maybe its not blue. Maybe you'd better think about it, you better go look out the window. Most people just say well it says here in the paper that the sky is blue, they wont even go look out the window. So it teaches you to question, to think and to come to your own conclusions.

"This time is different now." Those are the most dangerous words certainly in the investment world and in any world in fact. Because its not ever different. If you're investing and you hear someone say, "oh, this time its different," take your money and put it somewhere else.

If you want to be successful you should study history and philosophy. My parents told me the same thing Jim Rogers said, if you want to be rich you should study history, no matter what your field because it will teach everything you need to know. It's all happened before, it's all gonna happen again.

The guys in Washington haven't read history and the ones who have read history think that they're smarter than history, they actually think they're smarter than history and they can control it.

If you want to be rich you need to understand the world. Well first philosophy will teach you think which is very, very hard. And to question. And you need to understand history because everything that has happened has happened before and it will happen again. And if you can understand history you will see that the world is always changing and you need to understand that if you want to be successful at investing or anything. You need to understand that anything we think in any year is not going to be accurate 15 years later. And you can pick any year in history and you'll see that 15 years later everything had changed. 2000 well the world was very, very different in 2015. So history will teach you very, very important things about yourself, about the world and thats what you need if you're going to be successful in the future. And history will certainly teach us all that nothing lasts forever. No currency has been on top for more than 100-150 years, the world has had many international currencies in the past. The world's had many things, technologies, ect they have all moved on and changed to something else. Well if you want to be successful you need to know that. And then you need to figure out what the new change will be and then you'll be very successful.
Part of philosophy to me is, I studied guys like Marx, he's an interesting character, and Lenin and Hitler and Mao. But I also studied the other great capitalists like Ford and those guys, and they thought differently. So it's a matter of the way you think. Start with history because macroeconomics is history. You have to look back in time.

The world always is changing and it always has been. You pick any year in history, everything that people thought was wrong 50 years later, doesn't matter where, what year. 1900, 15 years later everything they thought in 1900 was wrong. 1930 everything people knew was right in 1930 was wrong in 1945. The most important thing you need to learn is its changing and its not going to stop and if you want to adjust and succeed, you'd better figure out the change and adapt to the change. Whatever's happening now in your life and whatever you know in the year 2021 is not going to be accurate in 2036, its going to be totally different.

The book Things Fall Apart, one if the key themes in that book is there's a resistance to change with traditional cultures so in that book its specifically talks about the change that happened in Africa with the Igbo tribe and how there were somewhat outworn practices that were kind of bad like killing twins and stuff like that. And these Christian kind of like colonizers took over and they changed things and there was a bit of resistance but overall it led to perhaps a better tribe. Is that kind of ethos happening in the United States with a resistance to the eventual change thats occurring?

There's nearly always a resistance to change. Thats why people are called iconoclast because they come along and say let's do something different. Deng Xiaoping in China came along in 1978 and say we gotta try something new, this isn't working. And of course a lot of people were against it. In fact Mao Zedong put him in jail for a while because they thought he was strange with these new ideas.

One of my favorite electives was Modern France Since 1750 it was a history course all about France from the French Revolution moving forward. I love history.

And study geography, too. Very interesting. One of the best classes I took was geographic economics class.






…I think we'll look back in a few hundred years and know it was the rhythm of history swinging as it always has. I mean it's a little early for us to give definitive answers. There's a great story, I don't know if its true or not. In 1969 there were great riots in France and the whole country was falling apart. And somebody said to Mao Zedong, the dictator in China, they were talking about the world or history and they Mao Zedong, "well what do you think of the French Revolution," (the real French Revolution) which had happened in 1789. And Mao's answer was, "it's too soon to know." And the Chinese have a long view of history and life and events in the world. It is said that the Chinese don't think in terms of decades but rather in terms of centuries. One of the things that was said during the Vietnam War was the Chinese are not in this for the decade. They're in this for the century. And you know the result of the Vietnamese War.


When I was 10 and read about great explorers like Columbus, Cortez, Cook, DaGama, I started sailing lessons and eventually as a student was sailing onboard ships carrying cargo along the same trade routes established by Ferdinand Magellan and Captain James Cook. I read every book I could about their lives and adventures. But my dad taught me don't just study the explorer and his ships. Study the power of the corporations behind the explorer and his ships. The more so read about the corporations behind these great explorers and how they shaped world history, the more interested I became in global businesses and doing business through a corporation. Some of these corporations such as the Dutch East India company and the British east India trading company had their own navy and army to control access to the nations overseas wealth.