Saxo Bank 2022 Outrageous Predictions: Here comes a revolution!
Saxo Markets, the online trading and investment specialist that connects people to investment opportunities in global capital markets, has released its 10 Outrageous Predictions for 2022.
The predictions focus on a series of unlikely but underappreciated events which, if they were to occur, could send shockwaves across financial markets:
- The plan to end fossil fuels gets a rain check
- Facebook faceplants on youth exodus
- The US mid-term election brings constitutional crisis
- US inflation reaches above 15% on wage-price spiral
- EU Superfund for climate, energy and defence announced, to be funded by private pensions
- Women’s Reddit Army takes on the corporate patriarchy
- India joins the Gulf Cooperation Council as a non-voting member
- Spotify disrupted due to NFT-based digital rights platform
- New hypersonic tech drives space race and new cold war
- Medical breakthrough extends average life expectancy 25 years
While these predictions do not constitute Saxo’s official market forecasts for 2022, they represent a warning against the potential misallocation of risk among investors who might typically assign just a one percent chance of these events materialising. It’s an exercise in considering the full extent of what is possible, even if not necessarily probable, and particularly relevant in the context of this year’s unexpected Covid-19 crisis. Inevitably the outcomes that prove the most disruptive (and therefore outrageous) are those that are a surprise to consensus.
Commenting on this year’s Outrageous Predictions, Chief Investment Officer at Saxo Bank, Steen Jakobsen said: “The theme for 2022 Outrageous Predictions is Revolution. There is so much energy building up in our inequality-plagued society and economy. Add to that the inability of the current system to address the issue and we need to look into the future with a fundamental view that it’s not a question of whether we get a revolution but a more a question of when and how. With every revolution, some win and some lose, but that’s not the point—if the current system can’t change but must, a revolution is the only path forward.
A culture war is raging across the globe and the divide is no longer simply between the rich and the poor. It’s also the young versus the old, the educated class versus the less educated working class, real markets with price discovery versus government intervention, stock market buy-backs versus R&D spending, inflation versus deflation, women versus men, the progressive left versus the centrist left, virtual signalling on social media versus real changes to society, the rentier class versus labour, fossil fuels versus green energy, ESG initiatives versus the need to supply the world with reliable energy—the list go on.
We collaborated globally on Covid vaccines in 2020 and 2021. Now we need a new Manhattan Project–-type endeavour to set the marginal cost of energy, adjusted for productivity, on the path to much lower levels while eliminating the impact of our energy generation on the environment. Such a move would unleash the most significant productivity cycle in history: we could desalinate water, make vertical farms feasible almost anywhere, increase computer powers to quantum states, and continue to explore new boundaries in biology and physics.
Remember that the world is forever evolving if at varying speeds, while business and political cycles are always finite.”
<The Outrageous Predictions 2022 publication is available here
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