U.S. Domestic Politics

A significant border-security or immigration bill is signed into law. (90%)

Immigration is a core GOP platform issue. With control of Senate & House, Republicans are very likely to pass something Trump can sign. I think we are all waiting to see just how agressive it's going to be.

The "department of DOGE" lays off less than 280,000 persons (80%)

I'm drawing that line at about 10% of the federal workforce sort of arbitrarily Current federal workforce 2.2MM + 0.6MM USPS, but it looks like I'm pretty close to the Betting Market Based on Elon's patterns when he took over Twitter, we can guess that he's going to try to put most of the cuts in pretty fast. The flip side of that is that there wasn't very much stopping Elon from laying off folks at Twitter. The Federal Bureaucracy is quite a bit tougher. That may result in layoffs smearing out over a few years. I have complicated feelings about the DOGE described more eloquently by others. There are versions of this I could really imagine going well and Fighting Ossification. I also default to imagining it going poorly

U.S. Economy & Financial Markets

S&P 500 ends 2025 higher than $6000. (70%)

The S&P usually goes about 80% of years. I'm downgrading from my base reference of 80% to 70% because of the compressed yield curve, high interest rates, and generally gloomy macroeconomics. As I have said in previous similar posts... it takes the escalator up and the elevator down. I think right now is a terrible time to have market exposure. I think the expected value right now is very very bad.

Bitcoin Peak Over $150k (90%)

Historically the local all-time highs happen around 18 months after the halving. The last halving was in April 2024, so we would expect local ATH to be around October this year.

In the last cycle the move from price at the halving to the price at the all time high 18 months later was around 5x. Each halving that multiple gets markedly smaller. The price at this most recent halving was ~$60k. So a pretty conservative 2.5x would still get us to $150k.

On top of that, the previous administration was aggressively There was a program often referred to as Chokepoint 2.0 to attempt to destroy crypto via de-banking anti-crypto, and the incoming administration seems to be aggressively pro crypto.

I do notice that I'm feeling some cognitive dissonance between this prediction and the S&P500 one, but the correlation between BTC and the S&P is realistically only like 0.6, so I feel like when I bring that across from 70% that gives some real space for things to be OK.

Bitcoin Peak Over $200k (70%)

BTC hits a peak price over $200,000. All of the above logic remains the same, but now making a slightly less conservative estimation of a 3.33x multiple.

This is where we start getting into interesting questions about total market size, and about the entire market struggling with high interest rates, and dealing with risk-on assets.

Bitcoin Ends Year Down From Peak, But Over $100k (90%)

There is a very good chance we also see the typical crash that comes after the peak this year. That's going to be painful, but historically that takes like an entire extra year to get down to 2x price@halving.

Pretty much all of the factors that are compressing the multiple up (larger float, exposure to larger capital pools, synthetic instruments and futures), are also compressing the multiple down.

ETH price peak over $6000 (80%)

This is almost entirely an expectation that ETH will move along with BTC in the same way that the rest of crypto does. ETH has been underperforming very aggressively so far, and has yet to achieve an all time high this cycle, but I will be shocked if it can't at least eek out $6k by the time BTC peaks

International Affairs & Wars

No Taiwan Invasion By China (90%)

This includes large-scale blockades of Taiwan.

Taiwan still has a very effective silicon shield plan in place... though this is currently actively being dissolved by the USA. At the very least if I were China and wanted to invade Taiwan, I would wait to see if USA on-shores better chip making capacity so that it won't defend Taiwan so fiercely.

The U.S. does not exit NATO(90%)

Trump is criticizing NATO constantly, but an actual formal withdrawal in 2025 seems improbable to me. Even if it's not just bluster, I think that it would be preceded by a bunch of negotiations, and get dragged out until at least 2026.

The U.S. announces withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement (90%)

but does not finish by year's end. Last time Trump was in office, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement, and has announced he intends to again. It's worth noting specifically that it takes a full year after starting withdrawal to be formally out. I do think that this 1-year process will be honored, and that the US will actually be out in early 2026.

The U.S. announces withdrawal from the WHO(90%)

but does not finish by year's end. Again, this is something Trump did last time, Again the process itself takes more than a full year.

No peace in Syria (90%)

No peace treaty, agreement or constitution is signed by all major Syrian factions (including the Assad regime and recognized opposition groups). Syria is made up of a huge number of factions, all of whom are I'm taking Zeihan at his word here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ADOGajDN5Q not really in a position to gain the upper hand, or willing to give up. There really isn't anything valuable enough in the country to inspire an external power to come in and try to sort it out. This is going to keep being a stateless mess for years to come.

No peace in Palestine (90%)

Israel really doesn't have a comprehensible end-game here. No one outside the region has any real leverage except for the US, and for strategic regions the US won't lean hard enough on Israel to stop things. Even if the US did lean hard no one has an actual solution, except for granting statehood to Palestine, which I think we can safely say Israel is less willing to do than ever.

War in the middle east is endless, and horrifying, and for most of my life no one has been able to figure out how to stop it. To clarify I am not counting a "ceasefire" that lasts less than 3 months, or is not still in place at the end of the year.

Commercial Self-Driving Trucks Finally Happen (80%)

I think that this will be the year we see a self-driving truck corridor is running commercial service within Texas. Several companies are pilot-testing long-haul autonomous trucking.

Aurora has specifically planned a launch https://apnews.com/article/aurora-driverless-trucks-launch-delayed-14a5b990ef808e90c1ea28cd94a9aa4a.

I feel like there is a good chance that the entire "Texas triangle" will see self-driving trucks. But this prediction is for any single route.

NO Interstate Self-Driving Commercial Trucks (90%)

There will NOT be any commercial self-driving trucks operating across state lines. This is a case where the regulatory complexities of getting between states are, well, huge. As far as I can tell we don't even have any trials running currently

Social & Environmental

California Wildfires Burn Less than 1MM acres (70%)

California wildfires burn ≥1 million acres in total. Why: Large-scale wildfires have become the new norm. Acreage burned is tracked annually by CalFire/USDA, but for ease of use we can use the numbers reported on Wikipedia.

After a few past misses on the CA wildfire guesses, I have updated my guessing pattern... I now think that the particularly bad years for wildfires are the ones where we had unusually high rainfall the previous year. (so high 2024 rainfall implies high 2025 wildfire acreage)

It's not a perfect correlation, but it's not a terrible one. This year it looks like we had middling rainfall.

At least one Category 4 Atlantic hurricane forms (90%)

We have had a Cat 4 every year for a decade, it's just part of the fact of global warming. We also are getting LOTS of Cat 5's now.

So, I guess the question is "why so timid?" I used to guess a lot of Cat 5s because it was surprising, and people were still getting used to that being the new reality. Now I think we have internalized that... and also I think that because of La Niña giving us a slightly cooler ocean 2025 is going to be tame by recent standards.

I'm still about 50/50 on us having a Cat 5, but that's a sort of useless prediction. I guess I can go on record as saying we are very unlikely to have TWO cat 5s?

A note about AI

You may have noticed that none of these predictions are about AI. This isn't because I'm ignoring it, or because I think that it's not literally the most important and relevant thing happening right now.

It's because I can't figure out how to make any meaningful predictions in the space. I think we are literally dipping into the singularity. Progress is rapid, but almost every way we have to measure progress either deeply flawed and doesn't boil out to a simple yes/no answer. I could make predictions about companies fund-raising, or specific individuals actions, but honestly that's inside baseball stuff that there isn't much reason to care about. At the end of the day, I'm stumped on what to predict. So I guess i'll just keep reading Zvi's AI reporting and trying to figure out whats useful and what's scary.