GEAB 140

As we do every December, we have completed an evaluation of the trend anticipations we published last January. This time, we have ended up with a final score of 27.5 over 39 key trends, or a 70.5% success rate, 2.5 points higher than last year (68%).

We organised the “up & down” trends for 2019 under three main topics: Governance, Eco-Fi-Mon and Geopolitics). For each, we identified a dominant trend and several “up & down” trends. The scores obtained for each category are as follows:

Governance: 6/8 (dominant trend validated) or a 75% success rate

Eco-Fi-Mon: 13.5/18 (dominant trend validated) or a 75% success rate

Geopolitics: 8/13 (dominant trend validated) or a 61.5% success rate

The fact that all 3 dominant trends are validated is an important aspect, in our opinion, of the validity of the perspective we proposed 11 months ago. They are the foundational trends on which we based our vision for the coming year. These 3 trends guided, in part, many of our analyses in the months that followed. We considered giving these 3 trends an increased weighting, but instead we simply draw our readers’ attention to their qualitative importance.

The scores obtained in the areas of governance and the economy are encouraging.

On economic, financial and monetary issues, we were right about the reform of the monetary system, gold, energy, inflation, interest rates, pensions… Unfortunately, we lost a point that we thought we had won concerning the institutionalisation of cryptos: all of our anticipations for the year on this subject were correct but, last January, we were pessimistic about the system’s ability to start moving resolutely in that direction. For once, things seem to be going faster than we expected.

In terms of governance, our point of weakness was Brexit. We thought a year would have been enough for Europe and the UK to emerge from the quagmire, but this prospect is still ahead of us. For the rest, they were quite good intuitions.