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Outlook for 2008: The Year of Missed Opportunity

Posted January 9, 2008
“For people who don’t believe that the key to a stable future lies in coveting and confiscating your wealthier neighbor’s property, 2008 presents the last chance to put your financial house in order.” — J. Christoph Amberger

by J. Christoph Amberger (from the TFN financial video Amberger’s Smackdown).

Baltimore — (TFN): The end of the calendar year is a license to review. Even my email provider can’t help himself and is obstructing my instant access to hundreds of unread (and often quite unreadable) financial e-letters by listing the most embarrassing moments of 2007 as experienced by loopy Lindsay, bare-bottomed Britney, and a host of other celebrities I simply don’t care enough to even remember their names.

Despite the ups and downs in the financial markets and the high-risk mortgage market, I think we’ll end up remembering 2007 as part of the good old days. I don’t anticipate 2008 to turn out all that much different. Slowing an economy the size of the United States takes a while. It’s like watching an oil tanker turn… or a chubby contestant on The Biggest Loser shed a hundred pounds of blubber and fill a bucket with tears on prime time television.

No time to read? Watch the financial video…

2008 will undoubtedly rack up its own trophy wall of record highs and lows. After all, it’s the year of the Beijing Olympics — which promise to be the greatest and most decadent display of newly acquired wealth in history. On the downside, it’s also an election year in the United States — so there’ll be no lack of stupidity, cringing hypocrisy, and just plain “dumbth” at work 24/7 until November.

But maybe the year 2008 will be remembered more for the things that were left undone.

Like the Social Security, Medicare, and entitlement reform that President Bush vowed to spend political capital on back in 2004. It will remain dead in the water — the programs’ $45 trillion projected shortfall over a 75 year period the political road kill of Hurricane Katrina and the curious paralysis it caused in the White House.

Eight years from now — when the Echo Boom is entering the workforce, productivity is down, and the Baby Boomers are expecting to have their monetary and health needs taken care of by the state — some Americans may also remember 2008 as the last chance to have made some money in the stock markets… on oil and energy stocks, technology and internet shares… and companies making money of the enormous wave of global wealth creation.

By then, property prices will have soared again based on U.S. demographics and immigration. Too bad that the tax burden on investors, businesses, and middle to high incomes will have made the United States uncompetitive in the global economy — so that few younger Americans will be in the position to buy and own real estate.

The good news: The new Democrat government will have created more rich and super-rich households. Not by creating wealth. But by readjusting the progressive tax system so that households making 75,000 a year will be considered rich for tax purposes.

Since most wealthy individuals will by then have moved their property offshore, there may be some truth to that.

For people who don’t believe that the key to a stable future lies in coveting and confiscating your wealthier neighbor’s property, 2008 presents the last chance to put your financial house in order. Review your investment strategy… your cash flow… your insurance needs… and to consult on options on how to protect what you have.

This will mean getting re-acquainted with a competent tax adviser. And it will most definitely mean looking into offshore options and financial structuring strategies that minimize your appeal to those who plan to purchase their office by promising the results of your work to anyone who votes for them.

Stay tuned — we will be featuring information on all these subjects right here at TFN.

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Posted by J. Christoph Amberger · Filed Under US Stocks and Markets 

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