Nearly 12 months ago, on January 7, 2024, Greymantle published his 2024 Forecast, which predicted that the year ahead would be both ‘a scary and a bumpy ride’.
In that prediction, we were not wrong. 2024 has been a strange and bumpy year, full of market volatility, fearful military and tribal bloodletting in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and much political change, and has also been a fearful time. More so than at any time since the early 1980s, millions of people have been subject to extreme anxiety over escalating global conflicts and the danger of imminent nuclear war between the world’s great powers: the United States, Russian and the People’s Republic of China.
Yet 2024 also proved to be a paradoxical year, in the sense that – as we predicted on January 7 – it contained relatively fewer real surprises than any year since the start of the decade. Politically strong (or autocratic) actors triumphed in national elections. The mood overall was strongly against incumbents in the Western nations, and also in non-Western countries. That was no surprise, either. Incumbents which won re-election did so narrowly (e.g. the Indian and South African leaders), and with reduced governing coalitions.
Based on the predictions that we made eleven-and-a-half months ago, we can say that 2024 turned out broadly as expected. Very few events, and perhaps only one really, shook up the geopolitical order in 2024. That event was the overthrow of the al-Assad regime in Syria in early December. This was an event that no one had predicted at the start of 2024: not Greymantle, not anyone. The fall of the Assad regime was the only real surprise of 2024 – at least for the global consensus.
But on another, and brutally honest note, Greymantle must admit that, even though his track record of predictions in the past twelve months continued to be solid, he was wrong where his most high profile and important prediction was concerned. Donald Trump did not lose the 2024 U.S. presidential election, as Greymantle had predicted. Donald Trump won the election, and Joe Biden did not even stay in the race, though admittedly we had viewed Biden’s dropping out as a possibility last January.
WE’LL SETTLE FOR AN 83% SUCCESS RATE
Of the 12 main predictions this site made in January 2024, ten have turned out to be correct, and two have been spectacularly wrong. Hence this post’s title: ‘2024 Year-in-Review: Ten Out of Twelve Ain’t Bad’. And yes, we are riffing a bit off of Meatloaf and Jim Steinman to cop that title. We freely admit it.
So, while we take satisfaction in being right 10 times out of 12 – an 83% success rate – we are nonetheless chagrined that we were wrong about the U.S. election, and about Bibi Netanyahu remaining in office at the close of 2024. The U.S. election was our biggest bet and the one that we had spent the most time trumpeting on these pages, so we feel let down, even as we can take some satisfaction from the fact that we were clear across many posts that the election would be close.
Why were we wrong about the U.S. election result? We’ve put a lot of thought into this question, and the best answer is the simplest one (thank you, William of Occam!) is: Donald Trump was re-elected to office of President of the United States because a new wind is blowing in America. The times they are a-changin’ yet again. Some great shift in public sentiments is afoot, and while we detected some signs of it in earlier posts, we were deaf to the speed and scale of the shift.
Simply put: a majority of Americans are sick of progressivism, and are throwing in their lot with populism despite the manifold defects of its principal standard-bearer. Before we delve a little bit into the causes and meaning of this shift, let’s recap our original predictions for 2024 and see how they shook out.
TEN OUT OF TWELVE AIN’T BAD
Greymantle began 2024 with two major predictions and ten minor predictions. The two major predictions for the year were:
- Donald Trump would lose the 2024 election to his Democratic opponent
- China would not move to invade or blockade Taiwan.
The ten minor predictions for the year were as follows:
- Vladimir Putin would win the March 2024 Russian presidential election, and would not launch a general military mobilization after the election (a two-part prediction).
- President Biden and Congress would NOT agree to a major border deal to control illegal immigration.
- Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would be pushed out of office by his peers
- The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank would cut short-term rates three times in 2024 to 4.75%.
- The U.S. economy would deeply and broadly outperform forecasts.
- Labour would win a sweeping UK general election victory against the Tories and SNP.
- EU far-right parties would gain ground in the June 2024 European elections.
- Turkey’s AKP would perform poorly in 2024 regional elections.
- The Israeli military would kill or capture most Hamas leaders and lose half the hostages, most likely by storming a major Hamas underground fortress in early 2024.
- Internal and external pressure on the Iranian regime would escale significantly.
In addition to these twelve predictions, Greymantle also made five major ‘non-predictions’ for 2024, i.e. he predicted several key developments would NOT occur (much like China’s non-invasion of Taiwan). These five non-predictions were:
- Russian President Putin would not be overthrown in 2024 via a coup or uprising.
- The ‘Singularity’ would not be achieved.
- Russia would not launch a nuclear attack on Ukraine.
- Ukraine would not be defeated militarily by Russia.
- Venezuelan President Maduro would not lose the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election or step down from office in the event he lost the election
Out of the 12 major predictions, we basically got 10 out of 12 correct, with a couple of minor wrinkles.
We were correct the China would not invade Taiwan, our reasoning being that Chinese leader Xi Jinping would continue with his cautious approach toward provoking the United States with regard to Taiwan, choosing to play his hand carefully and wait until the 2024 election result was clear before making up his mind.
Mr. Xi has lived up to that prediction. China has been building up its naval forces around the renegade island since late November, but it remains unclear whether this is yet another bluff on China’s part, of the beginning of its actual move to retake the island. The Chinese don’t show any clear signs of moving against Taiwan during the U.S. presidential transition, which has only three weeks remaining in any event.
It appears most likely that Mr. Xi is going to ratchet up the pressure by increments and also wait on Mr. Trump’s first moves upon being sworn back into office. It seems to Greymantle that the way the U.S. election shook out – a clear and decisive victory for Donald Trump – was the outcome that Mr. Xi both desired least and was least expecting. A ‘hung election’ with Trump losing but failing to concede the result, would have played best into Mr. Xi’s hands, possibly leading the Chinese to commence a blockade of Taiwan. Without the result that he hoped for, Mr. Xi is going to play it safe for a little while longer.
VLADIMIR THE CAUTIOUS
Having been a tad reckless with his military invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the early and severe setbacks that it encountered, Vladimir Putin took a more cautious route in 2024 after nearly stepping over the edge in 2023 with a planned tactical nuclear attack on Ukraine, an attack that was apparently seriously considered by the Russians, but abandoned at the last minute in late summer 2023 in the face of significant push-back from the Chinese and Indians against their Russian friends, and the stalling of Ukraine’s counter-offensive.
After a violent and shaky 2023 that saw Putin face the first really serious challenge to his power since the turn of the century from the Wagner Group mutiny in June 2023, Mr. Putin decided to play it safe in 2024 by focusing on winning a smooth (and surely rigged) Russian presidential election, and then leaning on enhanced recruitment of men from national minorities to feed the military’s manpower demands. At the same time, Putin demurred from a full mobilization that would have been tricky where the broader Russian public is concerned.
True to our prediction, Putin avoided the full mobilization, and more interestingly brought in aid from an unexpected quarter, soldiers of the North Korean military, to bolster the manpower of the Russian army, which is being bled white through constant ‘human wave’ attacks on Ukrainian positions.
Despite Putin’s caution, Russia gained ground against Ukraine as 2024 wore on, most particularly in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, inflicting a series of minor military setbacks against Ukraine even as it was unable to land the desired knockout blow to force Ukraine into complete submission. This was also consistent with Greymantle’s overall forecast for the war: a bloody stalemate, rather than a Russian victory.
BIBI THE SURVIVOR
Where Greymantle’s forecasting powers proved more limited was the case of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, who is closing out 2024 still very much in office, and with a strengthened position to boot. The wily Israeli has outlasted all attempts by both domestic political foes and mortal external enemies (including an attempted assassination in October via rocket and a second, murkier plot involving Azerbaijani citizens recruited by Iran to liquidate the prime minister) to remove him from power, and has confounded even our own predictions of his political eclipse.
As we wrote earlier this month, Netanyahu has recently been having something of a ‘Michael Corleone Moment’ as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has greatly outperformed even Bibi’s limited expectations for that exceptional body by killing the majority of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah and virtually demolishing all of Syria’s military assets in the aftermath of Mr. Assad’s overthrown in early December. The IDF’s successful aerial raids on Iran, which reportedly destroyed the majority of the Islamic Republic’s air defense capacity, has redounded spectacularly well for Bibi, allowing him a substantial recovery in the Israeli publics esteem.
Like his Ashkenazic ancestors, Bibi is a survivor. The Jews, as a people, are the ultimate survivors, having confounded dozens of determined attempts to either wipe them out or ‘convert’ them to other faiths over the centuries, most notably by the Babylonians and Greeks in antiquity, by European powers and the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, and more recently by hostile Arab states. In his turn, Bibi has become the ultimate survivor of Israeli politics, holding onto office despite all odds and masterminding the most daring and audacious operations against Israel’s regional enemies in Israel’s history, to spectacular success.
It’s never wise to underestimate Netanyahu, and we certainly did so in our January 2024 forecast. That was out mistake, and we won’t be repeating it in 2025 – or ever again.
ISRAEL THE VICTORIOUS
At the onset of the latest Hamas-Israel War on October 7, 2023, the majority of world military and intelligence operatives were deeply skeptical that the Israeli military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip would succeed in achieving any of its objectives, which were: (1) to punish Hamas for its attack on Israel, (2) to free the Israeli and foreign hostages, (3) to militarily crush Hamas and kill its leaders, and (4) to reestablish Israel’s deterrence vis-a-vis its regional foes. The Gaza was too densely populated, Hamas fighters too deeply embedded in the Palestinian population, the Hamas tunnel network too vast, and the Israeli aversion to shedding innocent blood to deep to allow for Israeli victory.
Greymantle took the contrarian view.
In our view, the Israeli public and military establishment was so shaken by the events of Oct. 7, 2023 that the impulse they felt in the marrow of their bones was to retaliate and keep retaliating until no power in the region could say that Israel had been defeated. They would do whatever it took to smash Hamas and free the hostages, but in our view, the hostages lives were always going to be secondary to the reestablishment of Israeli military deterrence in the region.
Event have born out this viewpoint. More than 100 hostages are still being held by Hamas, and nearly half of these are believed dead. The Israelis have kept attacking. Scores of hostages have been freed, but many others (scores) have perished during the course of the war. Israel is not backing down. Far from it, they have expanded the scope and aims of the war to strike out at Hezbollah, Syria, the Houthis and Iran itself, slashing the ‘Axis of Resistance’ wherever it lives.
While we were premature in the timing we predicted (Feb. 2024) and in the existence of a central Hamas ‘redoubt’ beneath the Gaza, we were broadly correct about the course of the Israeli military campaign, its scope and ruthlessness, its targeting of the top leadership of Hamas for assassination, the levelling of both the Hamas leadership and the Gaza Strip itself, the indifference to Palestinian suffering.
By adhering to these exacting parameters, the Israelis have re-established deterrence and shaped broader events to their advantage. Israel’s weakening of Hezbollah, Syria’s Assad and the Iranian regime gave the Syrian rebels and Turkey the opening they needed to launch the November 2024 uprising that overthrew Assad and brought Syria to its knees. Israel is now primed to take advantage of the new reality.
AMERICA THE OUTPERFORMER
The predictions that we are most proud of concern the U.S. economy and the direction of interest rates. As little as one year ago, a majority of U.S. economists and the bulk of the American public were convinced that the U.S. economy was about to enter a recession, that the stock market would sink, and the inflation and short-term interest rates would remain high for the foreseeable future.
Greymantle believed none of this was true. We were convinced that the U.S. economy would continue to outperform those of all of its nearest rivals and lead the world economy. We were right. For the past two years this site has consistently forecast U.S. economic growth above trend, a moderation of inflation, healthy financial markets (if prone to some giddy gyrations), and a topping out of short-term interest rates before what we anticipated would be the commencement of Federal Reserve rate cuts in late 2024.
The economic course of 2024 proved Greymantle broadly correct yet again. In keeping with our predictions in January, the Federal Reserve Bank cut short-term interest rates three times in 2024, taking the target rate from 5.25%-5.5% down to 4.25%-4.5%. The only wrinkle in our forecast that was slightly incorrect was that the Fed cut rates by 50 bps in September 2024, rather than 25 bps as we had believed. This brought the target rate down to its current level, when we had predicted a slightly higher target of 4.5% to 4.75%.
The American economy has beaten the ‘mental recession’ in the minds of 150 millions Americans (at least) because of strong fundamentals. Business investment is high, home balance sheets are strong, the labor market is tight, and consumers feel able and motivated to spend money despite their misgivings over the country’s political and economic future. We believed all along this would be the case, and said so.
THE ANTI-INCUMBENT MOOD IS HERE TO STAY
We were correct about national and regional elections in the EU, Turkey and the United Kingdom, with power changing hands peacefully via the ballot box in these regions exactly as we had predicted.
Even after winning the Turkish presidential election in early 2023, Prime Minister Erdogan was sure to face continued problems and an electoral backlash in local elections, where his AKP partly performed poorly. The reasons are varied, but a weak economy, high inflation, parlous public finances, the social fallout from Turkey’s 2023 earthquakes and high numbers of Syrian refugees (3 million) packing Turkish cities were sure to create a climate of discontent. The return of most of these refugees to Syria is surely among the key motivations of Erdogan in backing the rebel attacks in late 2024 that toppled the Syrian dictator.
All around the world, from the UK, to India, to South Africa and even to the United States itself, the mood of deep popular discontent that leaves political incumbents at risk looks to be here to stay for many more years. It was Greymantle’s belief that the U.S. would escape this trend in 2024, with Biden or another Democrat winning the White House, mainly because of the strength of the American economy, Biden’s early success with his industrial policy (e.g. the CHIPS Act), a rising stock market, and strong consumer spending.
Even this native economic dynamism could not save the Democrats, however. Whether it was because Biden was too old, broke his promise of being a one-term president, or because Kamala Harris was a weak candidate, the Dems just could not beat a resurgent Donald Trump.
In Greymantle’s view, the result is actually somewhat incredible, given that Trump is a convicted felon, stoked the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021, and refused to concede his 2020 election loss, crossing a dangerous red line without precedent in American political history.
In the end, Americans did not care as much about these facts – to the extent they believed them to be facts — as they did about their own feelings of unease, distrust, discontent, and disrespect for their own political leaders and system. Arguably, Americans have fewer reasons to complain than virtually any other national population in the world, with Singapore and Japan being possible exceptions.
BACKLASH TO PROGRESSIVISM AND EPISTEMIC CRISIS DRIVE POLITICAL REALIGNMENT
But change is apparently blowing in the wind in America. Perhaps the excesses of progressivism and the ‘Great Awokening’ finally pushed enough Americans over the edge to shift them into the populist camp. In our view, the critical cause of the Trump victory is the shattering of shared reality in America, the so-called ‘Epistemic Crisis‘, which Greymantle believes to be very real.
As we have written before on these pages, the people of the U.S. now largely consume a diet of fantasy through their smartphones and streaming services. They live in a ‘choose your own adventure’ style of fake reality, entirely insulated from facts and opinions differing from their own.
Financial wealth and security are held by the top 40% of Americans. The remaining 60% own no stocks or bonds, may not own a home or apartment, and maintain a low savings rate. They are frequently in debt, and where college loans are concerned, they may be in deep debt. The dislocations brought about by the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020-21 weakened social trust even further (it was already on its last legs) and put tremendous pressure to bear on these households. In such a social environment, people will take big risks if they believe an odd choice can improve their personal situation, especially if they are misinformed.
Whatever the reason, the next several years in American politics will be completely unpredictable.
For this reason, we are going to focus much less on U.S. domestic politics in 2025 and beyond, and more on social and cultural trends. These are more interesting, and possibly more subject to analysis.
A RESOUNDING ‘THANK YOU’ TO OUR READERS
As we come to the end of another year – our fourth full year in publication – we want to thank all of the readers who have been sticking it out with us and continue to subscribe to either this blog directly or to our business Facebook page, which can be found here.
Publishing this blog continues to be something of a wild ride, and a lot of fun. We’ve been right in our forecasts more than we have been wrong, and that seems to be the main reason why our subscribers are growing and feedback to our posts continues to be overwhelmingly positive. Our post-election analysis in November and our post of Bibi Netanyahu on December 11 all received a ton of positive response.
We’re still learning a lot. Please stay on board for what should be a very eventful 2025.
With the new year in mind, we’ll present our 2025 Forecast late next week. Look for it around January 2 or 3.
Until then, have a great New Year’s Eve.
All the best,
Ivor Greymantle
