"This year’s list is both fascinating and shocking while encouraging investors to think outside the consensus box," Chief Economist at Saxo Bank, Steen Jakobsen, said.
EU announces a debt jubilee
Italian contagion sickens Europe’s banks as the EU lurches into recession. After this contagion spreads to France, policymakers understand that the EU faces the abyss. Germany and the rest of core Europe, which refuses to let the Eurozone fall apart, have no other choice than to back monetization.
GBP/USD parity
Labor sweeps to a resounding victory and names Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister. New tax revenue streams are tapped into as Corbyn brings the UK’s first steeply progressive property tax into being to soak the wealthy and demands the Bank of England help finance a new “People’s quantitative easing”, or universal basic income. Inflation rises steeply, business investment languishes, and non-domiciled foreign residents run for cover, taking their vast wealth with them. As a result, sterling is crushed, and for the first time in history the pound sterling rate reaches $1.
New Fed head
At the December 2018 Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell signs on with a slim majority of voters in favor of a rate hike - one too many and the US economy and US equities promptly drop off a cliff in Q1 2019. By the summer, with equities in a deep funk and the US yield curve having moved to outright inversion, an incensed President Trump fires Powell and appoints Minnesota Fed President Neel Kashkari in his stead who continues the policy of reducing government debt and accelerates inflation to 6 percent. Against this background, the dollar remains at risk of weakening.
Apple takes over Tesla
Having decided to enter the automobile market, Apple acquires Tesla by securing funding for the deal at a 40% premium of $520 dollars a share. The deal allows Tesla to build several new Gigafactories and production facilities in Europe and China to stay ahead of the competition and dominate the future of the car industry.
X-class solar flare
A solar storm strikes the Western hemisphere, taking down most satellites on the wrong side of the earth at the time and unleashing untold chaos on GPS-reliant air and surface travel/logistics and electric power infrastructure. Saxo Bank noted that the damage will be estimated at around $2 trillion. Thus, in the coming year, even the Sun can turn against investors.
For a long time, medicine treated the human body as a machine with many useless parts. "Appendix is an atavism, wisdom teeth are an evolutionary mistake." Such views were common until recently. It turned out that nature, which built our bodies, is a brilliant architect. The so‑called "errors" of evolution are in fact secret tools for human survival and longevity.
Today, bold AI architects compete in the same information space with wise business patriarchs well into their eighties. The energy of their influence reflects specific mental models: obsession with speed, systemic simplification, and fanatical fidelity to principles. These builders of global brands prove daily that true leadership is the ability to stay relevant in any era.
In the modern world, the line between civilization and wild nature often blurs in the most unexpected places. Sometimes, cities and entire countries must adapt to legitimate "indigenous residents" — animals whose migration routes or habitats have ended up ringed by asphalt. While some people close intersections so a duckling can safely make its first important walk from nest to water after its mother, others shut diplomatic channels between states, like a quarreling married couple demanding the return of gifts.
