2010 Forecast - The Year of Uncertainty

In this issue:
2010: A Year of Uncertainty
"Rocking Even Me"
Prisoners of Our Preconceptions
The Statistical Recovery
The Great Experiment
Whither the Fed?
London, Monte Carlo, Zurich, and Stocks

"Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We'll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating."

-- from Transition, by Iain M. Banks

Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

-- The Boxer, by Paul Simon

"They Are Rocking Even Me"

This will be my tenth annual forecast issue. Time has flown by, and I enter a new decade of writing Thoughts from the Frontline. And even as I write about the high level of uncertainty of the current times, I am optimistic that at the opening of the next decade we will look back and realize that there has been an enormous amount of progress made. None of us will want to revisit the pleasures of the past ten years in some nostalgic dream. I am so ready for a new decade. And speaking of Paul Simon (above), reading the lyrics of The Boxer, one of my favorite songs from my youth, another few words seemed to hit home: