Happy New Year commodity peoples of the world!
I tend to have a cynical view of life and the world most of the time. But I am also a firm believer in the glass is half full theory so I thought I would try and be optimistic about the forthcoming twelve months and get my “Astral Al” crystal ball and head scarf out and try to make some very loose predictions for 2022.
- All focus groups so beloved by governments around the world will only consist of futures traders to ensure diversity of opinion
- A Standard vanilla financing structure will be given a new title; “counter- intuitive reverse algorithmic performance structures,” portrayed as the new holy grail discovery in the finance cosmos only to be discovered as a fraud next year
- Insurance premiums will go up
- Old King Coal will celebrate a jubilee anniversary while “Coal Juice” will be found to have beneficial effects on humanity
- The availability of finance will be more important than ever for the small/medium sized traders and certain Banks will be thinking… “Commodities, maybe we should get heavily involved in that market again?”
- Green clause LCs will return with a vengeance
- Serbia will play Australia in the Davis Cup
Also seems appropriate to have a look back on some things I’ve learnt over the past year
- The “Crisis Junkies” of the world had a good year but every crisis has to end
- Traffic jams are not exclusive to roads
- We need to learn to live with fraud, it’s not going away, i.e., “a fish always rots from the head down”
- Data is not enough on its own without intelligent analysis and new technology isn’t always better than the old technology
- Kate Moss is better at modelling than a lot of scientists
- Good friends die too soon
I’ll leave you with the vitriolic thoughts of The Jam’s, Going Underground from 1980, “And the public wants what the public gets.”
That’s one classy song to be discussed down the pub whilst it plays on the jukebox, (I wish).
