Written in 2006......

Oil was about $60 a barrel. This guy is on to something. Probably means shortages. Remember rice and beans missing on the shelves earlier this year?

Could be interesting as trucking companies struggle through the first quarter. Walmart's fleet is strong and stands to do great.

However, all bets are off on our competitors. Expect some to disappear as union contracts squeeze bottom lines.

Fertilizer shortages in march should pop up and scare the beJesus out of us. Getting food on the shelves is tied to a long line of trucks. I know. I drove food from California to Boston.

This could come to a screeching stop. Prepare now.

Remember, independent drivers went bust when diesel prices boomed. Some of these guys are not coming back. I would be surprised if my former employer is still in business with his two truck operation.

Neither will food imports come back. Foreigners will have their own  problems. Food riots sounds about right.
 

Oh yes. Get to Walmart and pick up any junk you didn't get last week. Everything is on sale by next weekend.

 Everything.

Kunstler's Forecast 2007

I will be so bold to say that I called the housing crash correctly last year, though the worst symptoms are slow to present for technical reasons. There's no question that the action on the real estate scene changed drastically in mid-year. The implosion of this mighty structure of fraud, folly, and misinvestment so far has taken place in such breathtaking slow-motion that its victims have not really felt the pain from the falling bricks yet. By late summer, buyers started evaporating. Real estate signs planted in lawns last June are still sitting there on New Years. Prices have come down a bit in many markets, including most of the hotties such as Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Boston. But the buyers are still not bidding. Meanwhile, the sellers have dug in, determined to get something at least close to their wished-for inflated prices, egged on by their representatives, the realtors. This mutually reinforcing psychology cannot hold indefinitely. Many of these sellers don't have the luxury to wait around forever. Some have had to move to other houses in other places because of job changes, and are stuck paying two mortgages. Many are stuck with "creative" mortgages that all the evil ingenuity of the human mind conjured in recent years to enable the feckless to live above their means -- adjustable rate, payment optional, no money down contracts that suckered buyers into booby-trapped obligations whose initial low-interest terms lured them in and are now set to blow up in their faces as terms automatically re-set upwards to higher rates and "optional" deferred payments get backloaded onto the principal, putting the mortgage holders so far underwater on their contracts that a tour of the Titanic would feel like a day at the beach. Read the whole article