My idea of "The Big Transition" - in a nutshell

The late futurist, thinker, and writer, Alvin Toffler, explaining the "Third Wave" idea that he and his wife Heidi discovered, and then explained in their 1980 book, The Third Wave.  This interview is for their 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth.

"The Big Transition" is a concept of mine, which is based on, and piggybacks on, the Third Wave idea put forth by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their 1980 book by that name.  Yes, that's a long time ago, but the Tofflers were looking far into our collective future.  We are now in the middle of "the future" that the Tofflers were thinking about, trying to figure out, and writing about.  To get to my concept, let's first get into the Toffler's "Third Wave" concept.

Originally, for somewhere around 200,000 years ago, human beings lived primarily as nomadic tribes of people, hunting wild animals, and picking fruits and vegetables that grew naturally.  We generally refer to these people as "hunter/gatherers" these days.  After thousands of years, there came some huge changes in human society and life, these are the three waves.

The First Wave
About 10,000 years ago, most likely in or near the country of Turkey, people started planting crops.  Agriculture, as we know it, was born.  It spread very slowly.  As it spread, people settled down, stayed in one location, started villages and small towns, grew crops, and fed their families.  Wealth came from owning the land the crops were grown on.  This was the Agricultural Age.

The Second Wave
About 350 years ago, new technology emerged, and machines began to get more important.  This transition happened faster, and villages and small towns grew into cities, as people left their farms, and moved into the towns and cities, because factories were being built.  It was a new economy, wealth came from owning the factories, and jobs were invented.  Before that, people worked on family farms, often on land owned by kings or barons.  The change to living in larger cities and working in factories was a complete change in the way human beings lived in society.  This was the Industrial Age.

The Third Wave
The third wave the Tofflers saw coming was another transition, from the industrial-based society to an information-based society.  They put the start of this era as 1956, the year there were more "white collar workers" (office people) than there were "blue collar workers" (factory people).  This change was fueled by an incredible series of new technologies, which began to fundamentally change society.  Radio, TV, video, computers, biological tech, medicines, all the way up to today's smartphones, A.I., and the like.  There were more and more new technologies that began to change how we communicated, how we built things, and eventually technology took many of the factory jobs humans performed during the Industrial Age.  This change to an "information-based society," the Tofflers realized, was as big and powerful as the changes between the other waves, like society moving from agriculture to factories.  But this change is happening much, much faster. This massive transition in how we live and work and communicate is basically happening in a single human lifetime.  This "information-based society" has been referred to as the "post-industrial society," or "the digital age." I use the term "The Information Age."

In their 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin and Heidi Toffler shared one idea, in particular, that got me thinking.  That idea was that different aspects of our current society are adapting to this new technology at different rates of speed.  For example, "Silicon Valley" our high tech businesses, are surging quickly ahead in using, and bringing, this new high technology into their daily lives.  The military has adapted and uses a lot of new technology, obviously.  But other areas of society, like our school system, our legal system, and our government agencies, among other institutions, have barely begun to really adapt to new technology and the many types of changes it has caused.

That idea, that we have different parts of society working with new technology at very different speeds, intrigued me, and I started thinking about this concept in a deeper way.  One main thought was the idea that we had many different parts of society, which were all in transition from the industrial-based society to the information-based society, which led me to a simple understanding.  We're actually not in the Industrial Age anymore, and we're not fully into the Information Age, we're actually still in the transition in between the two.  This long process of changing from one age into another, is "The Big Transition."  The Tofflers set the start of it in 1956, and my rough guestimate is that it will continue until at least 2040.  So instead of being in either age, industrial or information, we are all living in the in between time.  If you think of our current society that way, it's much easier to understand why things seem so chaotic in so many ways.

My next line of thought after that understanding was, "Is there any part of society that will not have to make the transition from an Industrial Age institution to an Information Age institution?"  I could not think of any part of society that would skip this change.  There may be some aspect I don't see, but I can't think of one.  So that means every single aspect of society has to change, at some point, from an Industrial Age model, to an Information Age model. So that puts us in an era, roughly 85-90 years long (maybe longer), where every single part of society has to be re-invented.  That's big.  That's scary.

"How does an industry or business or institution actually change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age?" became the next, obvious question.  I saw two ways.  1) A visionary person or group intentionally re-invents a business or institution, bringing it into alignment with not only the new technology available, but the new business and social environment created by these technologies, and new social standards, adapted to the world of new technologies.  2) A visionary person or group invents a new model for the business or industry or institution that completely disrupts the older, established Industrial Age model, and build the new, Information Age model, for that business or industry or institution.

In practice, this DISRUPTION, the second form of change, is the way most of these changes are happening.  And that's freaking all kinds of people out all across our society.  For example, in June of 1999, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker uploaded the Napster file sharing program onto the internet.  Using that program, suddenly people all over could share digital music files for free, in large numbers.  That act completely destroyed the business model for the entire music industry, immediately.  It took years ot fully shake out, but the initial change happened overnight.

That's Disruption, with a capital "D."  That really pissed off a lot of people, it put companies out of business eventually, fotunes were lost, and new fortunes were eventually built based on the larger change.  One more thing, it was INEVITABLE that a change like this would happen in the music industry, at some point, because of the new technology that had been developed.  It sucks for the Industrial Age music industry power structure, but it was going to happen at some point.  The same goes for Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify and other online stores, which have disrupted Sears, J.C. Penney's, dozens of major chain retailers, shopping malls, and have lead to what's now often called the "Retail Apocalypse."  This caused major disruption to many businesses, many power structures, and thousands and thousands of people's lives.  But in a world where technology is going to keep evolving, like it or not, these huge Disruptions will keep happening.

The Big Transition began slow, and largely unnoticed, marked at 1956 by the Tofflers.  It's going to keep happening, like it or not.  It's accelerating, and more and more industries and institutions are being disrupted, and changing from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, at the same time, now.  These changes are happening faster, and these major changes are interacting with each other, and also creating major social backlashes.  It's a chaotic world these days.  It will get more chaotic.  But it's not going to stop until all of our human institutions are working with Information Age models, or until society collapses.  Hopefully, it will be the first one.  But it's not going to stop, and it's not going to slow down, until nearly all aspects of society are part of the Information Age.

That's my concept, "The Big Transition." In my mind, this is the overall contest, the macro explanation, for Western Society, and huge parts of other societies around the world.  As I write this, in August of 2019, the retail system is being disrupted.  The economic system is being disrupted.  both main political parties are being disrupted, many other industries are being disrupted.  The music industry, the publishing industry, and the video/TV industry, and the taxi/limo industry, to name a few, have already endured their main phase of disruption, and are moving forward. 

Many things have not hit their main Disruption point yet, or at least haven't hit the critical mass Disruption.  Our higher education system is just beginning to hit disruption, our K-12 education system hasn't been disrupted, our legal system hasn't been disrupted, and our government (in the way I'm speaking) hasn't been disrupted.  So there's A LOT of societal disruption still to come.

The Big Transition is a huge concept.  There could be dozens, likely hundreds, of books, written on the various aspects of it.  I see it as the background theory encompassing all kinds of smaller, but still very large, and very important, changes of all kinds.  I'm just beginning to share and spread this idea, and a book on this concept isn't in the works yet, because of my own personal issues I'm dealing with right now.  Hopefully I'll be able to put more effort into this idea, and provide a much more in depth look into this concept, before too long.

-Steve Emig, 8/26/2019

The Perpetual "IF" of Homelessness

Didn't know until just now, "Everlast" isn't the name of the band, it's this guy's stage name.  So here's Everlast taking a hit off Joe Rogan's joint, and then singing one of the best songs to come out of the 1990's, "What it's like."

"We've all seen the man at the liquor store beggin' for some change, the hair on his face is dirty, dreadlocked, and full of mange.  He asks a man, for what he can spare, with shame in his eyes.  'Get a job you fuckin' slob,' is all he replies."

-Everlast, "What's it's Like."

I know what it's like.  I slept on concrete, under an awning of an abandoned building last night.  I had a hand-me-down winter coat for a pillow, and a $9 felt furniture moving blanket from U-Haul as a cover.  I got woke up late at night, maybe 2 am, by people talking nearby.  It sounded like people talking about me, and about actions to intentionally fuck up my life more.  Nobody gave a damn about that abandoned property, until I started sleeping beside it.  That kind of thing happens, in most every city, most every night.

This is the world we live in in 2019.  It's not enough to be homeless for some people, there are people out there, quite a few of them, who go to great lengths to harass and further destroy the already difficult lives of people, like me, who are already struggling really hard, to simply survive.  I may have misunderstood the conversation happening next door.  Or maybe not.  But there's nothing nearby that's open at 2:30 am. 

I was walking to that sleeping place the night before last, in the dark, alone, thinking of the things I wanted to get done the next day.  Those thoughts were interrupted, by a thought "normal" people don't have to be concerned with.  That thought was, "I have these things I want to get done tomorrow... IF I actually live through tonight."  That's the perpetual "IF" of being homeless.  I go to sleep, alone, in a place I'm not "legally" allowed to sleep at, every single night, a place that would scare the living shit out of most people.  That's my normal.  I know that there are all kinds of things and situations that could take my life before the next morning comes.  I go to sleep every night knowing I could very easily be killed before morning.  I've done that for over 3,500 nights in the last 20 years.  I've struggled with homelessness for so long because of conversations like the one I partially overheard last night.  I've made not-so great-decisions, I've lived low budget.  But that doesn't account for the whole reason I've struggled with putting a roof over my head for so long.  There are people out there who work hard to make homeless people's hard lives harder, for reasons I have a really hard time comprehending.

Am I just amplifying my personal fears and paranoia?  No.  Not really, because knowing you could die before morning is part of the survival mentality that keeps me, and hundreds of thousands of other homeless people, alive through the nights alone.  I don't have the luxury of assuming I will wake up in the morning when I go to sleep at night.  I've made my peace with that fact.  I sleep reasonably well, in spite of the circumstances.  But to put it in perspective, here are a few of the things that I've dealt with during the nights of homelessness I've survived.

Once while sleeping under the stars, in an old slave graveyard in North Carolina, the biggest opossum I've ever seen wandered up near me.  It was as big as a good-sized raccoon, and wasn't afraid of me at all.  I leaned up on one shoulder, and hit the ground hard, to intimidate it.  That didn't work.  I yelled, stomped my foot, and it barely looked up.  It wandered within 4 or 5 feet of my feet, sniffing around, looking for food, and finally wandered off.

Another time, spending another night in that same graveyard, I woke to hear the weirdest animal sound I've ever heard.  I grew up watching Wild Kingdom and lots of other wildlife TV shows, I've heard a lot of animal noises.  It sounded like a cross between a mid-sized dog, and a weird bird call, kind of like a crow's caw.  I had no freakin' idea what was making the sound, but it was wandering around the woods 100 feet away.  All I could think of were the compy's, the little dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movie that ate the fat guy.  Not a positive thought in those circumstances.  In the very first light of day, I saw the animal trot by, it was a fox, making a weird little bark I'd never heard before.

I woke one night to the sound of a car door opening in early 2008.  I was sleeping, sitting up, in a large bus stop here in Orange County.  I saw a figure of a man, walking through the shadows, from one section of the bus stop or another.  He had a gun in his hand in front of him.  As he got closer, I realized it was a cop, a young cop, and the gun was actually his taser.  He walked up to my area, where I sat with my sleeping bag wrapped around me.  He turned towards me, 8 feet away, taser pointed at my chest, "How long have you been here?" he screamed.  I didn't know what time it was, but I told him I came in on a bus about 10 pm.  His hand with the taser trembled as it pointed at my sleeping bag wrapped chest.  I thought the voltage would probably blow my heart up if he shot, I was over 365 pounds at the time, the most out of shape I've ever been.  After maybe 20 or 30 seconds, he decided I wasn't a threat, walked off, and continued his search.

One night working as a taxi driver, somewhere around 2006 or 2007, I was sleeping in my taxi, in a shopping center parking lot.  I worked yet another 17-18 hour day, and was barely able to keep my eyes open as I dropped off my last passenger in Anaheim.  I slept in my cab six nights a week, and got a cheap motel room the 7th.  I slept 4 or 5 hours in my cab in a parking lot, a different one every night, and then headed to the Huntington Beach Hyatt, and tried to get 2 to 3 more hours of sleep in the taxi line in front of the hotel each morning.  I headed down Brookhurst boulevard, towards the ocean, literally doing head nods, and making a couple of sketchy swerves.  It wasn't safe to sleep in that area, so I pushed my luck to get back to a parking lot in Huntington Beach that I slept in some nights. Tired as hell, I made it, parked my taxi in the middle of the parking lot,  a distance away from some other cars with people sleeping in them.  That particular parking lot was kind of an informal campground for homeless people with cars and vans then.  I leaned my seat back , pulled my hoodie over my chest as a blanket, and I was out.

I jumped awake to the sound of something really hard bashing against my driver's side window.  It was a police officer's billy club.  Someone had me seen me swerving, apparently, and called the cops.  I hadn't been asleep 20 minutes when the club on the window scared the crap out of me.  The officer questioned me, and gave me the "follow the penlight with my eyes" sobriety test.  It was all I could do to even keep my eyes open.  He finally decided I was just really tired, and not drunk.  He told me he was coming back in 15 or 20 minutes, and I better still be there asleep.  He left, and I was probably back to sleep before his car left the parking lot.  If he came back, he didn't wake me, and I slept there until early morning.

I was at the big bus stop another time, in the spring of 2008.  I was sitting on the end of the bus stop, a section not used by buses at the time.  About 30 feet in front of me, a small hill sloped down from left to right.  Just as I was about to doze off, to sleep another night, sitting up in the bus bench seats, I saw a cat wander down the hill in front of me.  A BIG cat.  Another homeless guy there said he'd seen mountain lions wandering around the bus stop at night, at times.  But he had red hair and once claimed to be a Lakota Sioux chief, he lied more than he told the truth.  So I figured it was just another of his tall tales.  I jumped up and followed the big cat, about the size of a Labrador retriever, down the hill along a small ditch next to a road.  I finally saw the cat stop in a little hole in the bushes.  It was dark out, but there was light from nearby buildings, and I could see it pretty well. I was 25 or 30 feet form it.  The tan cat probably weighed 35 to 40 pounds.  It was a young mountain lion, alright.  It was shivering, more afraid of me than I was of it.  Then I suddenly realized that if there was a young mountain lion, there was very likely a momma lion somewhere around.  Then I got scared.  I clapped my hands real loud, and the mountain lion took of running across the street, and around the corner of a building.  I saw it again, about two weeks later, while walking the other way up that same stretch of road.  It was wandering around the same area where I slept in a chair, covered only by a sleeping bag, every night.

These are just a few of the weird things I've seen, or had to deal with at night, in the years I've spent homeless.  There are many other animals, people, and weird situations I've had to deal with, just like every other homeless person wandering out country and world.  

There are a lot of things I want to do in my life from here on out... IF I live through the nights leading up to those days.  We'll see what happens.

Uh...yeah...this is complete BULLSHIT

Hey, guess what, at a big business round table, executives from 200 corporations just decided that the purpose of a corporation is not to maximize value for the people who own their stocks.  Yeah, here's the article, they just said it's all about making sure you, as a worker, make good money and have a great community to live in.  You know, that's why your wages have been stagnant for 40 years, and executive income has risen about 1,000%.

You can read the official statement in the article.  Sorry douchebags, I'm not buying it, and neither is most of America.  You can fool the Trump voters, obviously, but not the intelligent 75% of the country.  You guys are just trying to ward off the pitchforks of the 99% of the U.S. you've financially raped and pillaged the last 40 years or so.  Here's the article from CNBC:

"The CEO's of nearly 200 companies just said shareholder value is no longer their main objective"

An idea from Colombia for "real world" higher education that works

As we watch the $1.6 trillion student debt bubble grow in the U.S., and watch that debt continue to shackle a whole generation of college graduates, here comes an idea from Columbia that may spark similar ideas in the U.S. and other countries.  In this BBC article:

The Man Who Wants to Make University Degrees Obsolete

we hear of Platzi, a program created by Freddy Vega, a working class kid in Colombia.  Platzi is helping students learn skills necessary to earn more money, and helping to bridge the huge tech skills gap in Latin America. 

I think this basic idea will be one place to look for ideas when the U.S. student debt bubble collapses, mostly likely taking many U.S. colleges with it, and disrupting our higher education system the way Napster disrupted the music industry.  Colleges have their place, particularly for lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other jobs where degrees are absolutely necessary.  But in tech, marketing, media, and many of our really fast moving industries, some kind of hybrid education system needs to be created, and Platzi is one place to look for ideas. 

The accounting fraud allegations against GE... and why I care about them

Here's an interview with Harry Markopolos, whose team just published a 175 page report alleging serious accounting fraud at GE, one of the biggest and oldest companies in the U.S..  

This blog was set up mostly to share ideas that would help people either start a new business, or build small businesses.  The blog is also to share my ideas on the Big Picture of our world, our economy, and where I see things going from that perspective.  Since I was a little kid, I've been fascinated with trying to figure out what the future will be like.  I wasn't a kid dreaming about interstellar space travel or sci-fi stuff.  It was more that I just kind of naturally looked into the future, and wanted to figure out what the world would be like then, so I could kind of plan my life accordingly. OK, my life got derailed, basically, but I'm still a futurist.

When I moved to Southern California in 1986, with my first real job at a couple of BMX magazines, at age 20, the real estate market was rocketing up.  Everyone was talking about real estate, and I started watching the "get rich in real estate" infomercials every Saturday morning.  Initially that started as just wanting to make a bunch of money as a young gu,y so I could pretend to be cool and get laid a lot, like most young guys dream of. 

But it later turned into a fascination with economic trends, market trends, social trends, technological trends, and trying to figure which were most important when looking into the future.  Which of the thousands of economic and social forces out there were most important for figuring out where the world was really going?  That's what I was trying to figure out.  I began to watch the stock market day to day, and see what happened, and then try to figure out why it happened.  I read a lot of books on real estate, and then other business books, and kept reading and self-educating for the 30 years since.  My life has gone to some crazy places, and I was never to fully financially take advantage of what I've learned in these areas.

Over the last few years, after the economy had grown after The Great Recession, I began to wonder when the next recession would come along, and what it would look like.  As I looked deeper into this, I found this crazy convergence of a whole bunch of super long term trends, traditional trends, and completely new factors.  It became apparent to me that this next financial downturn would be worse than 2008. If you want to get a better idea of the weird array of trends and forces I look at, go back and read the last post.

In any case, as we get closer to the critical points of this next downturn, I knew there must be some company out there that would play a role similar to the role that (the now long gone) investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers played in 2008.  The economy had been in trouble for months, and big bubbles were getting ready to pop, when Bear Stearns suddenly went belly up in March of 2008.  That really shook people up.  The sub prime mortgage crisis was a huge factor in this collapse, but not the only factor.

But the economy trudged along after that, or seemed to.  The stock market managed to go up for a couple of months afterward.  Then things really started to unravel, overleveraged positions hit sketchy and over confident investors hard, and in September 2008, the 158-year-old investment bank, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt.  That collapse hit the financial world like a 9.0 earthquake, and the U.S. economy, and much of the world's economy, went into a horrible collapse. 

Much of the U.S., primarily rural areas and small towns, have never really recovered.  The stock market began to trend upward in early 2009, but the collapse in share prices took millions of people's retirements, and large portions of their wealth.  Average investors were gun shy, for good reason, about buying stocks again.  Now we're in the verge of a similar crisis, one that looks to me like it will be much worse than 2008, in the long run.

So as I was wondering what company out there had been doing shady stuff to make its numbers, and wondering who might become the "Lehman Brothers of this crisis," this major report drops yesterday, alleging massive accounting fraud at GE.  I read the first two pages (of 175) of the report yesterday, and that gave me the impression that these allegations were very serious, and not just some random guy making stuff up.  I just listened to this interview above, and now it seems even more serious.  It looks like GE is in serious trouble.  So here are the things I find most interesting about all this.

"Seven and a half months of our own time and money, no one paid us to do this."

-Harry Markopolos in the interview above.  His team gets paid later in three ways, the SEC whistleblower program, the Dept. of Justice, and things like the arrangement with a hedge fund that's been mentioned.

-Harry Markopolos and his team self-financed this report.  The unnamed hedge fund didn't pay them to take on this project.  One way they will get paid back is by the SEC whistleblower program, years from now.  That means that at the beginning of this 7 1/2 month project, they thought there was enough wrongdoing to be found, to make it worth the while to take this project on.  That means they really thought there was a lot of wrongdoing to find.

-Markopolos was the guy who discovered the Bernie Madhoff Ponzi scheme fraud, a story that broke back in 2008, a scheme that followed a lot of sophisticated investors for many, many years.  You can get a brief version of the story here (it even mentions Markopolos).  So Markopolos and his team are no joke, they know how to find shady accounting and fraud.

-Markopolos and his team discovered issues with GE's long term care insurance while investigating another insurance company, it wasn't like they just said, "Hey, let's take out GE." There had been rumors about shadiness at GE since the 90's, and when they learned how the other insurance company cooked its books, it looked like GE may be doing something similar, which encouraged them to look into the company in a more in depth way.

-There are things this investigative team found that are not in the report, and went straight to law enforcement.  So they found evidence of illegal actions, serious enough to justify a serious look, and likely other investigations, by some level of law enforcement.

-Mr. Markopolos is smart and well informed on camera, but he's obviously not a professional on air personality.  As someone who's worked in TV years ago, I think that comes across in the interview.  He's all about the facts, he knows what he can and can't say, but he's just laying the facts out.  If this was a well planned public relations (aka P.R.) campaign, and the point was just to manipulate the stock market, or even to destroy GE, this would look completely different.  And... the guy's on Yahoo Finance, which, let's face, nobody watches most of the time. 

In a major P.R. campaign, there would be several people on multiple, major business networks, all of them would be very good looking and very good at speaking on camera, and would be repeating the same talking points over and over.  In other words, it would be the kind of mass propaganda we (well maybe you, I don't watch full scale propaganda as a rule) see every day on some news networks. 

The real P.R. campaign, the organized response by a team hired by GE, no doubt,  has kicked off today (the day after the interview above), with business news quoting Goldman Sachs "experts" and others.  If you want to know the truth about anything financial, the last "expert" you listen to is one from Goldman Sachs.  Hey, they do know finance, that's for sure, but they're the company whose people move often into government positions to work directly on behalf  Wall Street and Big Business, creating policies to help them.

So, in my humble opinion, these really are some serious accusations, and my bet would be on longtime corporate giant, GE, going bankrupt in 2-6 months or so.  I think the ultimate amount of fraud found will go far beyond the $38 billion alleged by Markopolos and his team.  He says he thinks what they've found is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm beginning to think he's right about that.

This leads to the next question, what is GE these days?  GE is a huge corporate conglomerate that started in 1892.  The company, according to Wikipedia has 283, 000 employees, so there may be a slight surge in resume's on Indeed next week. And next month.  And next year. To put that workforce in perspective, GE has more employees than the combined populations of Dayton, Ohio, Norton, Ohio, Massillon, Ohio, Coshocton, Ohio, Mansfield, Ohio, Shiloh, Ohio, Willard, Ohio, and Carlsbad, New Mexico.  Those are eight of the cities I lived in growing up, because my family moved too damn much.

GE has a whole list of subsidiaries, most of the names of which start with "GE."  Not too creative, definitely not as creative as their bookkeeping is alleged to be.  You can check out the subsidiary list here.  GE had an annual revenue of $121.6 billion in 2018, and an operating income of $ -20.72 billion.  (Well THERE'S your problem.)  They are also listed as having assets of $309.129 billion.

If these allegations prove true, which seems likely, the future trouble of GE is going to affect A LOT of people in a lot of places in a lot of industries.  After doing the basic research for this blog post, I think the issues apparently troubling GE could go well beyond a "Lehman Brother" incident.  With their huge workforce and operations all over the world, this looks more like the makings of an AIG-type crisis, because the ripple effects of big trouble at GE will be astronomical. 

In the meantime, expect GE to officially deny everything in public, and to see lots of pro-GE interviews and articles in the business media, if you watch the business media.  That's the P.R. campaign to make things look fine, while the top brass at GE tries to find out what's really going on, and how bad things might actually be there.  Most importantly, the top executives need to try to keep there asses from getting hit with criminal charges, and to get out with tens of millions in golden parachutes.  On this website, we can see that six top executives at GE get $7 to $16 million a year in compensation, as of fiscal 2019. 

We'll see what happens, but it appears that revelations of trouble at GE are just getting started.  If these troubles do turn out to be true, there will massive ripple effects throughout the business world, and U.S. economy.  Another question is, are there other companies out there that have been doing shady stuff, or have been using far too much leverage to try to optimize profits?  Undoubtedly, there are.  Are we going to see other large companies getting into major troubles as we head into the next recession, whenever it starts?  It's likely we are.  One really big company going bankrupt could spark a collapse, something like 2008, and now 125-year-old GE, the former General Electric, is a company to keep an eye on in the next few months. 

A beginner's Guide to The Next Great Recession: The Trends

What's in store for the world's economy in the next year or two?  Here's a pretty good series of visual metaphors for what I see coming...

This is copied from my personal blog, Steve Emig: The White Bear
I'm going to put the financial oriented stuff on this blog from now on...

People watch weather reports.  Why?  So you can be prepared for the rain, snow, wind, lightning, possible tornadoes, and on a really bad day, a hurricane, in some regions.  We watch the reports, and adjust our plans to work around the lame stuff that's going to inevitably happen.

Yet in the financial world, it's just the opposite.  Home prices go up and down.  Stock prices go up and down.  Bull markets happen.  Recessions happen.  But almost everyone ignores you when you say, "Hey, there's a recession coming pretty soon, I think it's going to get really gnarly."  For some reason, the people who would want to prepare for a hurricane, or close all the windows before a bad thunderstorm, don't want to even hear about an economic storm.  In my opinion, there's a Category 9 hurricane 100 miles offshore right now.

I say this because I've been writing about the serious recession I've seen coming, for a couple of years now.  Hardly anyone takes me seriously.  OK, I'm homeless and broke, so those are legit reasons to be skeptical.  But Robert Kiyosaki is rich, and he's been saying the same thing.  Gary Vaynerchuk is rich, and he's ready to pounce on good deals during the next collapse.  Jim Rogers is rich, and he's been saying the same thing.  Warren Buffet doesn't talk about it, but he's sitting on $120 billion, waiting for the next downturn to find good deals to invest in.

Most people don't even listen to those guys, guys who have been through this before and have made fortunes from the downturns.  Most people just jog along with the other lemmings, completely ignoring all the red flags and warnings, from people who look ahead and watch the economic world.  Remember, lemmings are basically hamsters that follow the crowd and go BASE jumping... without a parachute.  Then they die.  For obvious reasons, I never wanted to be a lemming.


Here are the basic trends I've been watching, many for years, or decades in some cases, that lead me to believe we're in for the financial equivalent to a Category 9 hurricane, and we're just heading into it now.  It will be apparent to everyone within six months, I think.

-Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Third Wave idea- This idea says that we, as a society, began to leave the Industrial Age society in 1956, and are transitioning into an Information-based society. This transition will affect every level of society, and is as big as the change from hunter/gatherer societies to agricultural societies (about 10,000 years ago), or the change from an agricultural society to an industrial society (beginning about 350 years ago).  Except this time, this massive change is happening in the span of a human lifetime, not over hundreds or thousands of years.  No humans, in known human history, have had to deal with a societal change this big.

-P.R. Sarkar's idea of the transition from a society led by the "Acquisitor" (business person's) mentality to a "Warrior" (those who prize courage and physical ability most) mentality.  Only economist Ravi Batra speaks of this, and his 1989 book is where I first heard of this.  It takes a while to explain, but Batra's take on this theory from India is why I was predicting a future populist uprising, back in the mid to late 1990's.

-The Populist Uprising in the U.S. (and western society) actually happening-  It's kicking into high gear now, and it's far from its peak. While the Trump following racists, xenophobes, and business people got the head start, this Populist movement greatly favors the political Left and the Progressive/Socialist side of the equation, over the long term.  Hey, I'm a capitalist, I'm not stoked on this, but that's where the momentum is, and will be for some time, like it or not.

-Demographic shifts- Rich Dad, Poor Dad author, Robert Kiyosaki, predicted a 2017 recession back in about 2003.  Why?  Because 2016-2017 is when the huge Baby Boom generation was mandated to start taking their money out of the stock market, as the first of that group hit age 70 1/2 years old.  This trend of pulling money out of stocks by the Baby Boom will continue for about 20-25 years.

-The Big Transition- This is my personal term for the transition that the Toffler's spoke of in The Third Wave, the change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.  I don't think we're in either age right now, but the chaotic and messy transition between the two.

During this period, The Big Transition, with the continuing and accelerating rise of new technology, comes Disruption.  Think of the music industry a month before, and a month after, Napster went online.  The whole industry was suddenly toast, thanks to a click of a mouse by a kid we'd never heard of.  A new technology can literally cause a disruption that makes an entire business model obsolete, practically overnight.  Major disruption has happened in music, TV, movies, publishing, and marketing. But Disruption hasn't really hit many other areas.  I believe that every business, industry, organization, or institution, will either intentionally re-invent itself from an Industrial Age model to an Information Age model, or more likely, it will collapse and an Information Age model will be created by someone else.  There's A LOT of Disruption still to happen.

Both main U.S. political parties right now, for example, are in the middle of their disruption.  Trump and Bernie Sanders came out of nowhere in 2016, buoyed by the simmering populist sentiment on both sides, and garnered huge support, because the traditional power structures in the parties had completely lost touch with average Americans.  That will continue, in political parties, and EVERYWHERE ELSE.  I see this period of transition lasting from 1956 (the Toffler's starting date) to about 2040 (my guestimate of when it's all shaken out, and begins to settle, providing humans are still here then).

-The Student Debt bubble- Student debt is now over $1.6 TRILLION in the U.S..  Why is it so high?  That's $300 billion more than the sub prime mortgage bubble that helped spark the 2008 crisis.  Student debt is so high because Wall Street took the sub prime model, and simply applied it to student debt.  The student loans are bought, repackaged as Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS), and resold in pieces to other investors.  To keep making the wonderfully high fees on all of this, Wall Street needed more and more student loans.  So the student loan bubble is the new sub prime.  Here's a fun fact, according to this recent Nerd Wallet article, about 40% of current student loans, over 10 million loans, are not being actively paid back.  Right now, 5.2 million federal student loans are in default, about 5 million other loans are deferred in one way or another.  Tick, tick, tick...

-What a student loan bubble pop would do to real world ("Main Street") America- Let's say the student loan bubble doesn't crash like sub prime in 2008, but just has a major correction period, and this causes student loan income to colleges and universities to be cut back by 20%.  Where are colleges?  They're in 150 or so cities and towns around the U.S., all over the place.  After the loss of manufacturing plants and jobs, a huge number of those towns and cities are now referred to as "Eds and Meds" cities.  The colleges and the hospitals (often associated with the colleges) are the primary employers in town.  So if student loan income drops by just 20%, what happens to those 150 or so towns and cities?  MASSIVE economic slow down, everywhere.  Now, what happens to those towns and cities, most of America by area, if the student loan bubble actually does burst, and student loan and tuition income drops 40%-50%-80%?  The financial crisis becomes catastrophic, REAL QUICK.  So there's that...

-The Geographic Recession- Most of the United States, by area, is rural area, small towns, and small to mid size cities.  Most of of those regions simply have not recovered from The Great Recession.  Real estate hasn't surged.  Large numbers of people work two or three low paying service jobs to survive.  High tech companies avoid these areas, and entire regions, like the plague.  There are a handful of people who describe the U.S. as actually having been in a Great Depression for the last 10 years.  We've had growth well below the long term trendline that whole time.  Sure, there's money in the big tech companies in the big cities, but the vast majority of the U.S. is ALREADY struggling.  In the next economic downturn, that will intensify.

-Richard Florida's Creative Class and the rise of Tech Hub cities- This is a very complex set of ideas, but here it is in a nutshell.  In a high tech enabled, information-based society, creativity is a main (probably THE main) driver of innovation and building wealth.  Creative people like to be around, actually physically near, other creative people.  Creative people cluster.  So the emerging tech world is now largely clustered in Silicon Valley/The San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, Southern California, New York City, Washington D.C., the Raleigh Reserach Triangle, and Austin, Texas, by and large.  In effect, and for a whole range or reasons Richard Florida has laid out in his books and articles, much of the U.S. is a kind of wasteland with little or no large scale high tech businesses.  We have the tech hubs with lots of wealth and one set of urban issues to deal with.  Then we have the vast majority of the country's small cities, towns, and rural areas, trying desperately, and largely unsuccessfully, to attract high tech companies and viable start ups.  The map of these different areas is also the map of our political divide.  We have tech hubs and tech wastelands.  Since his first book on these ideas, The Rise of the Creative Class, in 2002, Florida has been looking for ways to level this playing field out, but the clustering has actually increased in the 17 years since.  This geographic sorting is a major root, but not the only one, in my opinion, to our current political polarization.

-The Retail Apocalypse- In 2017, 2018, and so far in 2019,a total of 20,000 retail stores have closed, or are scheduled to.  Another 20,000 or so closed from 2009 to 2016.  Toy-R-Us is gone.  Radio Shack is gone.  Sears and J.C. Penney's, once the 800 pound retail gorillas of retail, are now circling the drain.  This is the technology rooted Disruption of the Industrial Age retail industry.  Amazon didn't cause this.  The leaders of all those dead and dying companies, who didn't see the future potential of the internet that Jeff Bezos of Amazon saw, caused this.  The Industrial Age goods distribution system of mass marketing, mass manufacturing, U.S. based factories, and hundreds of department stores, malls, and shopping centers, is collapsing, because most of it is not viable in the Information Age.  A new system, including Amazon, but also platforms like eBay, and millions of small, online, niche stores, is growing to replace it.  By watching how the Retail Apocalypse has taken shape, I (and you, hopefully) can get an idea of what's going to happen to colleges, and to every other major industry where it hasn't happened already.  Technology has changed the game.  If you're still playing the mass market Industrial Age game, you're toast.  Or soon will be.

-And now... we get to the actual current economy.  Historically, we have a recession every 4 to 10 years in the U.S..  We're in year 11, so we're due, simply looking at the timing.

-The everyday person, traditional American economy, has decoupled from Wall Street and the Tech world.  Most of America never left, or barely left, the last recession, even as stocks have soared.  A bull market in stocks, in today's world, barely effects most of the everyday economy.  This is the Geographic Recession I mentioned above.  The Wall Street euphoria died a couple months after the Trump tax cuts, and stocks headed down, but that hype has risen again the last couple of months.  The recent cut in the Fed Funds rate shows that The Fed is getting desperate, and doesn't have much left to keep Wall Street growing.

-The ultra low interest rate and quantitative easing economy-  The Fed lowered interest rates just over a week ago, in what was already a historically low interest rate economy.  The interest rates were lowered dramatically, and quantitative easing (buying our own debt and pulling money out of America's ass, basically) was instituted to help bring the economy back after The Great Recession.  It didn't work.  The Fed was never able to raise interest rates back up to traditional, historic levels.  Yes, we've had a 10 year bull market in the stock markets, but it's been absolutely feeble economic growth the whole time.  There's been very little major infrastructure or capital investments.  But there's been a ton of stock buybacks.  We're in this weird financial Never Never Land, a place the economic world has never been, best described by former Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers quant, Nomi Prins, in this talk, and her book Collusion.  No one knows a good way out of this mess.

-The Orange County/Southern California real estate market- When I lived here in Orange County from 1986 to 2008, it was pretty easy to see economic downturns coming, because the real estate market here soars up, tops out, and then heads down fast.  When you see housing inventories rising, and then prices begin to decline, things are getting ready to drop, and that's happening now.  In this blog post, we see the housing inventory growing here, which happens right before prices begin dropping.  Also Chinese buyers are pulling out of the U.S. market, which has helped it soar to the current point.

These factors (and many others) are all coming together in a huge convergence.  Some of these factors only happen once in hundreds of years, or once ever.  In addition, all forms of debt; government, business, and consumer, are at or near all time high levels.  All this situation needs to turn into a big financial downturn is a spark.  It looks like Trump's trade war with China is turning into that spark.

So that's why I'm predicting an economic collapse in excess of what we saw in 2008, and a 5-6-7 or more year hangover of little, if any growth, and stagnation all over the place.  We're in new territory in many ways, we've never been here before, and there is no roadmap (or GPS directions for you youngin's) to lead us out of it.  If it's not a textbook Great Depression in the next decade, it will definitely feel like one to most Americans.

But with this dismal economic outlook comes opportunities at a never before seen level, as well. Warren Buffet, Robert Kiyosaki, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jim Rogers, and other business people, are ready to pounce on all the good deals that will happen soon.  You can do that as well, if you're not crushed by your own debt right now.  A new world will be built in this next economic downturn, if we survive it, that is.

The Retail Apocalypse continues- 8/13/2019

A Retail Archeology video, "The Deader Side of Sears."

 The "Retail Apocalypse," for any not familiar with the term, is the name given to the closing down of THOUSANDS of retail stores over the last several years.  This has been happening at scale since The Great Recession of 2007-2009.  It really took off about 2016, and the name was dubbed around then.  In an article this past spring, a count of 20,000 retail stores was listed as either closed in 2017, 2018, and closed or scheduled to close in 2019.  There were probably another 20,000 stores that closed from 2008 to 2016.  These counts are major chain stores, and generally don't include all the mom and pop stores, and smaller regional chains, that may have also closed.

This article today on CNBC, "We are in the Middle of the Great Department Store Shakeout-and There's No Stopping It," focuses on the larger department stores.  Among other things, it says that 1,000 actual department stores have closed, many the anchor stores in malls, which used to draw in foot traffic for all the smaller stores that have been closing.  In the department store world, Bon Ton and Gordman's (and Toy-R-Us, though technically not a department store), are gone, Sears is bankrupt, J.C. Penney's is working to restructure its debt, trying to avoid bankruptcy, and sales at Nordstrom's and Macy's are down 35% or more in 2017- 2018.  The market is rough, and getting rougher, for department stores, it's definitely not getting better yet.  Keep in mind this collapse in traditional retail stores happened during the long uptrend in the economy and stock markets.  Now that talk of a coming recession is common, things are likely to get worse faster.

Why is all this happening?  From my own reading, research, and thinking, it seems pretty obvious.  The big shopping mall and shopping center world was the Industrial Age distribution of goods network.  That's how we did it, mass market brands, advertised on the three TV channels, distributed through big warehouses to big stores in big malls.  Hey, it worked well for 60 years or so.  And then the internet came along, and then became a commercial tool, and made shopping online and getting goods shipped direct much more efficient.  Buying products and getting them shipped direct did happen in the 20th century, but it was through mail order catalogs, which is slower and less efficient.

As I've written in my idea, The Big Transition, I see this as the inevitable collapse of the Industrial Age way of distributing goods, while a new, Information Age way of distributing goods, is being built.  The new way is led by Amazon, Walmart, Target, retail brand direct websites, but also includes tens of thousands of smaller Amazon resellers, eBay stores, thousands of Shopify and other small online stores, discount sites like Wish.com, and millions of other retail websites around the world.

  Hell, I'm a homeless guy at the moment, and I've sold my artwork in 9 states and 3 countries, starting on half a shoestring.  It's not that Jeff Bezos and Amazon killed traditional retail, it's just that there was a technology enabled paradigm shift, and most old companies simply didn't keep up.  They were big and entrenched and used to kicking butt in sales, and didn't see the possibilities coming in the online world.  So now they're dying.  Hey, that's capitalism.  Retail natural selection.  If you lose your competitive edge, you go out of business.  Bezos and several others saw the potential of online sales early on, and took advantage of the opportunities.  Sears itself did the same thing itself in the late 1800's, ushering in catalog sales and shipping of goods.

So several major retailers, most of whom should have died off already, are hanging on to the old days, and trying to keep alive a bit longer.  There's still a place for bricks-and-mortar retail, but it will be a different model, and there will far fewer stores across the country.  TJ Maxx is a good example of a retail business that will likely keep going for a long time to come, focusing on really good deals on major brands.  So that's where this is at the moment.  In my opinion, as we head into the next recession, the Retail Apocalypse will accelerate even more.  

Inflection Points: When many different things come together and synch up in a big move

Bethany Hamilton surfing a ginormous wave at Jaws, on the north shore of Maui, in 2016.

Inflection point- (2) (In business): A time of significant change in a situation; a turning point.
- Google dictionary

This video is an inflection point, it captures a very short span of time where many conditions came together to form an absolutely huge wave that had the right characteristics to allow Bethany Hamilton to surf it successfully, changing or enhancing many people's view of Bethany, the surf break of Jaws, women's surfing, and the idea of wave riding itself.  Most people would see this video and think, "Wow, that guy's crazy!"  Then a surfer would respond, "That's a woman!  A woman with one arm."  Then the inevitable response.  "Wait... really?  She's NUTS!" Yeah, and just plain amazing.

All kinds of things had to happen to make the 18 seconds of the ride in this clip above get captured on this video.  The tectonic plate of the crust of the Earth, under the Pacific Ocean, slowly moved over a hot spot of magma, volcanoes formed, and eruptions over millions of years built up those volcanoes from the bottom of the sea, eventually rising above the water level, and formed Maui and the other Hawaiian islands.  A ridge offshore off the north of Maui, the area known as Pe 'ahi to the locals, formed from volcanic activity, and then was worn into a certain shape by ocean currents and wave action over hundreds of thousands of years.

Meanwhile, in 2016, a huge storm, perhaps a thousand or more miles away, sent out pressure waves that travel through the water at 500 miles per hour, in a very specific direction, towards the small island of Maui.  That pressure wave combined with ocean currents, the tides created by the Moon's gravitational relation to the Earth, the local shape of the shore, and the underwater ridge.  Those and many other factors forced the water upwards, into the wave we see in the video, at that particular moment in time.

At that same time, surfer Bethany Hamilton was there, holding a tow rope attached to a jet ski, waiting for the right wave.  Bethany, born and raised in Hawaii, was already a legend in the surfing world.  Bethany was just 13-years-old in 2003, already a hot up-and-coming amateur surfer, when she was attacked by a huge, 14 foot Tiger shark, of Kauai.  The shark bit off her left arm near the shoulder.  With the help of her best friend Alana Blanchard, and Alana's dad and brothers, Bethany got to shore, was rushed to the hospital, survived losing 60% of her blood, and came through the ordeal.

A surfer to the core, Bethany not only got back in the water, she learned to surf again, with one arm, and went on to become a top women's surfing pro.  Her shark attack ordeal was written in the 2004 book, Soul Surfer, and made into a movie in 2011.  The attack made Bethany famous.  What Bethany did after the attack, not only learning to surf again, without one arm, but going on to become a top pro and a big waver rider, made Bethany a legend to surfers and non-surfers alike.

In addition to the legendary surf break Jaws, and legendary surfer Bethany, this short video took the lifetimes of work of the surfers/watermen (and women?) on the jet skis, the photographers on the boats, and the video cameraperson from Shannon Reporting, Shannon Marie Quirk, who captured this moment on video.  All of these things I've mentioned, and many other things as well, came together to create this 18 seconds of action on video, which will raise anyone's opinion of what is possible by a human being.  In other words, this short video is an inflection point, something that enhanced Bethany's surfing reputation greatly, Shannon's video reputation, and even the reputation of the mighty surf break Jaws.

So why am I going into so much detail about a cool clip of amazing surfing?  Because it's a good metaphor for inflection points in the economic and business world.  All my life I've been an amateur futurist, always wondering what would happen in the future, and trying to figure out how to understand the present, in order to accurately predict the parts of the future that were predictable to some degree.  This seems to be where my fascination with predicting the future evolved from.

In late December of 1989, I visited my parents in North Carolina, going there for a week over Christmas.  I bought a book to read that week, because staying there was pretty boring most of the time.  After the initial, "How have you been?" conversation for a couple hours, everyone mostly did their own thing, and reading was a good option to fill my time.  I picked up the book, The Great Depression of 1990 by economist Ravi Batra.  Yes, I know, not the subject matter most people would choose.  I'm an economics geek, making me a geek even among the geeks.  I found the book fascinating, as Batra explained a very obscure social theory from India, added in his understanding of economics, and then predicted am economic Great Depression, like in the 1930's, starting in 1990. I found that fascinating, because I'm weird like that.  After reading the book, I headed back to Huntington Beach, and I began to read the business section of the newspaper every day.

We didn't have a Great Depression in 1990.  But we did go into a recession, then popped out a bit, then back into it.  They called it a "double dip recession."  To me it seemed that most of the reason it was given that name was so they wouldn't have to actually call it a "depression," which has a much darker, and scary, connotation.

The traditional definition of an economic recession, at that time, is an economic "contraction" for two consecutive quarters.  So instead of the total economy growing, it shrinks for six months.  A "depression" is when that happens for three years, and a "great depression" is when that happens for five years.    The "double dip" thing "officially" only lasted 8 months.  But the economy sucked for average people, and the California (and most other places) real estate market didn't rebound until late 1996 and early 1997.  So things largely sucked financially for 6 years, and we happened to have this little thing called the internet being invented (in a widespread way, as opposed to the original military uses) to help bring us out of it.  That was a huge, unexpected, one time economic boom, that almost everyone by surprise.

So from my point of view, most of what Ravi Batra predicted in 1989 actually happened.  It just didn't happen to as deep of a level as he predicted.  I became really interested in the social theory from India, "The Law of Social Cycle," by P.R. Sarkar, as well as many of his thoughts on long term economic trends.

One of those trends was that we have a depression (or great depression) every 30 or 60 years in the U.S., going back to colonial days.  The only exception was the reconstruction era, for about 30 years, after the Civil War.  That period through everything out of whack.  But looking at the historical records, Batra found that if the depression skipped the 30 year mark, it tended to be more intense at the 60 year mark.  So we had the stock crash of 1929, leading into The Great Depression of the 1930's.  There was no depression in 1960, 30 years later.  So he saw a deeper depression looming in 1990.  Guess what 2020 is?  Yep, it's the 30 year mark after 1990.  So that's one long term trend suggesting an economic downturn, a sizeable one, could happen in, or around, 2020.  That's one historical trend in a possible major inflection point for our economy.

By actually watching the economic news, actually reading the newspaper in the early 1990's, and later watching CNBC business news, as it came along and grew, I noticed that many different things would happen, which could be seen in real time, and often in different charts of different economic factors.  The stock market would be doing one thing.  The bond market and interest rates doing another.  The price of gold, the price of oil, the price of agricultural commodities would each be doing their own thing.  But when you looked at several different charts over the same span of time, you'd see spikes at the exact moment, in many different things.  Some spiked up while others spiked down.  Some things would trend up before the spike, while other things trended in a rough parallel, and others trended down.  But many different charts would show the exact inflection points, suggesting there were deeper things, factors, happenings, that affected all of them.  Interest rates being moved up or down by the Federal Reserve was the most obvious.  The effects of The Federal Reserve moving interest rates up or down ripples throughout the economy.  But that's not the only cause of these inflection points.

In the late 90's, I took a home study course on trading commodities, which relied heavily on looking at the different price charts for the 40 or so traded commodities.  That's when I really began to notice these inflection points, in multiple markets, all happening at the same time.  So I started looking up and searching for what the business news was on those particular days, the times when several different markets made big moves, at the same time.  Like I just mentioned, several were when interest rates were adjusted.  But others had different causes, and some I never did figure out.  But I learned that when several markets are heading in the general direction of a big inflection point, its an indicator a big inflection point if coming.

That's where we are in today's economic world.  There are all kinds of trends pointing at a HUGE inflection point, something that will be a massive negative hit to millions of people's lives.  Yet no one wants to know it's about to happen.  That's why I predicted we're in the "prelude" to a Great Depression on my personal blog a couple of days ago.  Many different factors are coming together in a big confluence pointing to that happening.  I've been saying this since 2017, knowing we were heading that that direction.

Here's the ting about inflection points.  If you were in a sea kayak or small boat, not knowing the swell was coming to Jaws, the wave above could easily kill you.  But Bethany spent her life pushing limits as a surfer and as a human, to be able to have a chance to successfully ride this huge wave.  HUNDREDS of millions of people will be crushed by the economic wave I see building.  But some will surf it.  That's why I write things like this.  For those who don't want to be crushed to know to get out of the way, and for those who can "surf" economic waves to surf this one that's building.

There is one more aspect to the video above that I haven't mentioned that played a crucial role.  Someone predicted that there was a huge swell coming, and that it might make Jaws go off in an epic way.  That's how Bethany Hamilton, the guys on the jet skis, the photographers, and Shannon with the video camera all knew to be there.  That was most likely Surfline.com, based in Huntington Beach, California, where I've spent most of my adult life.  Surfline predicts swells around the world, and top big wave surfers regularly fly halfway around the world, on a couple of days notice, to surf a spot Surfline.com predicts will go off in a big way.

When it comes to the big economic waves, I am Surfline.com.  There's a huge crash coming, a "negative" wave that will also create more opportunity for smart businesses, new businesses, and new ideas of all kinds, than any period of time in our lives.  It's about to happen.  Get your board waxed up.