What's Next for the Economy is a book about economic cycles and how they can be used to project current economic conditions forward to understand what to expect in the future. If you can learn from history, you can take advantage of that knowledge for your own personal planning and decision making to minimize losses and maximize profits. The key question in projecting the past to determine the future (or at least getting an idea of where it's headed) is to know where the economy is in each particular cycle. You need to know at what point of the curve it's on, so you can tell what the next point will be, to answer the question, "What's next?" The value of this approach to understanding the economy is that it is not time-specific: If you know where you are in each cycle, you can project to where you will be in that cycle for future dates at any time. This makes investment planning a much easier task for everyone interested in his or her own financial future.
This book is designed to describe four different cycles (inflation, the stock market, real estate, and business) in the same format and context by:
1. describing the "up" portion of the cycle,
2. describing the "down" portion of the cycle,
3. describing the overall cycle length and providing historical evidence to verify the period of the cycle, and
4. based on the preceding information, providing specific data explaining what will occur next in the cycle (incorporating where we currently are on each cycle).
All these cycles are interrelated: inflation and real estate, real estate and the stock market, and the business cycle and everything else. What's next could be different, depending on the confluence of the different cycles overlapping. Depending on where you are in each of these curves, you can predict what the general overall future will be in any of these cycles. This is a good thing to know. And based on that location, you can guide your decisions toward a path of profitability and success. It's just like navigation: If you don't know where you are, it's hard to figure out where you should go or where you will end up.
This book provides personal finance information and recommendations, not unlike books by Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, or Robert Kiyosaki. However, where those books delve into the What and How of personal finance, this book discusses the When and Why. The argument here is that it is just as important When you make your investment decisions, as What you are actually investing in. In addition, there are times when it is better to be in Real Estate than the Stock Market, and vice versa. This is not to take anything away from those other authors, or their recommendations and methodologies, it is only to suggest that there is another piece to the puzzle of investing and personal finance that should also be considered when making investment decisions.
