TDB – International Predictions 2025 – A year of Black Swan flocks

2025 is the Year when shit really hits the fan.

A cascade of perfect storms will bring a flock of Black Swans that will lack the global leadership to de-escalate.

The planet is burning, failed states are collapsing, the global economy will be anaemic and we will face existential threats from AI, solar flares and pandemics.

It’s like all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse plus their mates, whanau members and Instagram Followers all combining to make every month worse than the previous.

There are so many destabilising factors that could plunge large parts of the planet into a series of Polycrisis that it is difficult to be optimistic.

Trump will be the trigger for much of it.

Here are TDBs International Predictions for 2025.

Trump’s United States of Wounded Masculinity: 

Core inflation in America rose .2 beating predictions of .3 while job data was stronger than expected.

Since Covid ruptured supply chains and geopolitical tensions changed just-in-time supply chains to just-in-case supply chains, the West has been importing inflation.

This has caused price gouging by Price Makers and crushed the working classes with a cost of living crisis.

Trump’s election risks the beginning of an escalation that risks flocks of Black Swans.

To date we have been told by Trump’s defenders that his wild and mad proclamations are all the spin of a deal maker negotiating the best deal with the worst threats, and certainly the Art of the Deal is just a how to guide for Alpha Jock Dickheads doing Alpha Male Jock Dickhead stunts.

Taking offence at some unrelated issue and causing a Tantrum for emotional leverage to get the best deal you can isn’t Art or a Deal, it’s Alpha Male Jock Dickhead bully behaviour that has all the empathy of an average Andrew Tate bro culture tutorial.

This time around however Trump believes God saved him from an assassination attempt.

The difference between war crime and genocide tends to be believing God is on your side.

If Trump believes he’s the vessel for Christ’s retribution, he’s going to do shit for realzies.

I fear he absolutely intends to ram Tariffs on the world from Canada to China.

The impact of such a sweeping move will see the American currency spike and create an over valued global currency that hurts everyone else.

It hurts China and destabilises their already weak economy.

It hurts Canada and gives fuel to the MAGA movement in Canada and sets a narrative they should become a de facto 51st State.

Trump will have operatives spend a small fortune on setting up a referendum in Greenland to join America and gain 51% of the 56 000 Greenlanders by promising them the world. That result will stun the world and lead to Trump simply seizing the Panama Canal the way George Bush invaded Panama.

Because he believes God has saved him to do special God stuff to be the bestest American President ever!

This God delusion for a narcissist allows Trump to do things no other sane President would attempt so he will blunder into a Global economic  meltdown because his decision making has become manifest fucking destiny.

If he implements eye watering Tariffs, they could cause enormous and immediate economic dislocation.

This seems fine according to JD Vance…

In the end, Trump may not care too much if the dollar becomes a source of global instability. Vice President-elect JD Vance argued last year that the dollar’s role as a global reserve currency has subsidized Americans’ ‘mass consumption of mostly useless imports.’ 

…the last time the American Dollar became this dangerously over priced was in 1985 when a negotiated series of interventions was agreed to bring the dollar down in a controlled manner…

This problem last occurred in early 1985, when the dollar was universally reckoned to be dangerously dear. At that time the US was able to call on trading partners who depended on the US security umbrella – the UK, Germany, France and Japan – to negotiate the ‘Plaza Accord’, which coordinated a series of interventions in the foreign exchange market that allowed the dollar to decline in a measured way. 

…there is no way China would agree today to helping America devalue their dollar generated by Trump’s Tariffs.

That leaves a dangerously overvalued currency risking massive financial dislocation all because Trump thinks God loves him.

His plans on a migrant crack down will enable a new secret police that will quickly start hunting other internal enemies based on little more than Trump’s paranoia.

Trump’s hope is that has culture war will distract the working classes he’s attracted.

Ukraine/Russia:

Zelensky is fucked.

Trump will force the Ukraine into a surrender that will see Putin’s aggression rewarded and that in turn will launch an open shadow war between Russia and Europe where Russia sows chaos and disorder at every turn. The Ukrainian surrender will trigger a level of disruption to the fabric of Europe that will ignite conflict throughout Russia’s new coldwar.

Russia’s economy is hurting after this torturous and illegal war.

The West underestimated how much pain Putin was prepared to take for dominance.

700 000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, that is a number no Democratic Leader could sustain without the electorate turning against them and throwing them out of office, that is a democratic gag reflex that Putin doesn’t have to contend with.

Damaging the economic well being of your enemies is an easier and faster way way to rebalancing power than building back economically. Expect Russian Hackers, Organised Crime and Intelligence Agencies to cause maximum harm amongst a tsunami of sabotage to European interests everywhere.

Israel/Gaza:

There is a madness currently being spread by the MAGA Trolls that Donald Trump deserves some sort of ‘praise’ for the ceasefire in Gaza.

What a load of bullshit for 3 reasons.

1 – All Trump did was threaten people who had suffered a Genocide with more violence.

2 – A ceasefire during a genocide isn’t justice, it’s just a pause in torture

and 3 – Fucking Trump cause this uprising!

WHY DO YOU ALL HAVE THE MEMORIES OF GOLDFISH???

In January of 2023, 9 months before Hamas launched their attack, I wrote that all the ingredients of another Palestinian uprising had been met thanks to Trump’s insane pandering to the evangelical vote to make Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Trump made Jerusalem the capital of Israel in 2017 because his lunatic evangelical voter block believe one of the pre-conditions of the rapture is Israel going back to its Old Testament Boundaries.

This naked pandering by Trump to the happy happy joy joy evangelical Apocalypse club set off an explosion of Zionist land grabs focused in the West Bank while continuing to brutally occupy Gaza with a never ending blockade.

Those land grabs wound their way through Israel’s judicial system and went against the Zionists who in turn politicised and formed important fringe groups who cut deals with the deeply corrupt Netanyahu which culminated in a show down between the far right Zionists who wanted to over ride judicial orders against their illegal settlements and Israeli civil society who were disgusted by the abuse of power, state over reach and the strangling off of an Independent Judiciary.

The perverse outcome of Trump’s Abraham Accords that sought to normalise relations between Israel and the Sunni Petrostates, is that it cut the Palestinians out altogether meaning their suffering under the oppressive (and illegal) Israeli Occupation would never find hope and their aspirations silenced.

All these ingredients came together on October 7th as Hamas launched a highly organised attack on Israel murdering 695 civilians, 71 foreigners (mostly Thai), 373 security/soldiers and taking 250 hostages. That attack has generated a disproportionate genocidal response from Israel that has killed over 46 000 + the 10 000 under rubble + the 182 000 Palestinians that have died from secondary causes because of the immense violence.

We are knocking on quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, over 60% of Gaza flattened and the startling reality the IDF have in one year dropped more bombs on Gaza than London, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined…

 

…watching Israeli apologists scream that their disproportionate ethnic cleansing war crime against the Palestinians isn’t a Genocide and that you are anti-semitic for suggesting so in the shadow of the mountain of dead Palestinians they have killed, manages to encapsulate the insanity, malice and blind hate of the last year.

There won’t be any real investigation into Israel’s war crimes, the IDF will continue to carry out atrocious levels of violence and Netanyahu will look for any chance to escalate.

The goal of total victory over Hamas has been revealed for the fools quest it always was with United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitting that Hamas’s ability to recruit during the genocide has replaced those the IDF had killed!

The reverberations of this violence will erupt next in the West Bank where Palestinians who had been promised some level of life quality have found that ripped away from them.

More civilians will be murdered. More atrocities will be committed and the world will see the weeping wound of occupation mutating the oppressor as much as it mutilates the oppressed.

The West will lose all moral high ground once the promised relief never arrives in the amounts agreed to.

Israel will have gotten away with a genocide while the West stood and watched.

Syria:

God knows what perverse secret war interests will drive the next wave of slaughter in Syria, but there will be a next wave of slaughter in Syria.

Expect Biblical level refugees.

 

China: 

China is building new detention centers all over the country as Xi Jinping widens corruption purge

China has built or expanded more than 200 specialized detention facilities nationwide to interrogate suspects ensnared in Xi Jinping’s widening anti-corruption drive, a CNN investigation has found, as the Chinese leader extends his crackdown beyond the ruling Communist Party to a vast swath of public sectors.

Since taking power in 2012, Xi has launched a sweeping campaign against graft and disloyalty, taking down corrupt officials as well as political rivals at an unprecedented speed and scale as he consolidated control over the party and the military.

Now well into his third term, the supreme leader has turned his relentless campaign into a permanent and institutionalized feature of his open-ended rule.

And increasingly, some of the most fearsome tools he has wielded to keep officials in line are being used against a much broader section of society, from private entrepreneurs to school and hospital administrators – regardless of whether they are members of the 99-million-strong party.

The expanded detention regime, named “liuzhi,” or “retention in custody,” comes with facilities with padded surfaces and round-the-clock guards in every cell, where detainees can be held for up to six months without ever seeing a lawyer or family members.

It’s an extension of a system long used by the party to exert control and instill fear among its members.

As Xi expands his campaign of terror into the bureaucracy of China in a desperate bid to punish corruption in an economy that is faltering so badly it is causing the peasants to revolt, Trump is preparing for the militarisation of Immigration with private prisons…

Trump allies, private sector quietly prepare for mass detention of immigrants

Donald Trump’s allies and some in the private sector have been quietly preparing to detain and deport migrants residing in the United States on a large scale, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.

And with the former president becoming the president-elect, those preparations are now expected to ramp up.

Immigration was a cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and while he repeatedly touted promises of mass deportation on the trail – putting increased emphasis on interior enforcement compared to his 2016 fixation on the border wall – members of his orbit and some in the private sector discussed what that plan would look like, according to the sources.

Trump’s day one priority is to reinstate his former administration’s border policies and reverse those of President Joe Biden, senior Trump adviser Jason Miller told CNN.

Early discussions among Trump’s team have focused on removing undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, a source familiar with the team’s preliminary plans told CNN. A key issue under consideration is how, when and if to deport immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, commonly known as Dreamers.

…Trump is going to use private prisons to build the massive detention camps required for his immigration sweeps.

Both Trump and Xi are turning on their own people in an attempt to control their respective countries with a mix of fear and abuse of power.

With Trump’s insane tariff promise looking more like a religious experience than economic plan, the Chinese economy will be as wrecked as the American one.

War becomes the only means out of this doom loop.

Trump wants to move American military assets away from Europe after he forces Zelensky to surrender and reset them against China, because that’s where the MAGA Plutocracy around Trump believes the next conflict will be.

Trump and Xi are the same fists in different gloves and it warns us that 2025 will be far worse a year than 2024.

 

Iran:

This scoop from earlier this month…

Scoop: Biden discussed plans to strike Iran nuclear sites if Tehran speeds toward bomb

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan presented President Biden with options for a potential U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities if the Iranians move towards a nuclear weapon before Jan. 20, in a meeting several weeks ago that remained secret until now, three sources with knowledge of the issue tell Axios.

Iran is mutilated and terribly weakened by Israel’s ruthless war violence.

They have lost their proxy powers.

Iran will successfully test a nuclear weapon if they feel they have nothing left to lose with Trump. If Iran does that, Israel will immediately launch a counter strike that will kill an enormous amount of civilians.

This will plunge the region into open conflict.

 

Climate change + surge in refugees:

We are so outside the norm now that the scale of shut down and speed of it will terrify even the most staunch climate denier…

Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries

The global economy could face 50% loss in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.

The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.

Their report was published after data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.

Without urgent action to accelerate decarbonisation, remove carbon from the atmosphere and repair nature, the plausible worst-case hit to global economies would be 50% in the two decades before 2090, the IFoA report said.

At 3C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.

…we simply do not appreciate the cascade risks of collapse that face us economically, politically, environmentally and socially from run away climate change.

It is going to spark a level of climate change refugees fleeing to the relative safety of the West while the West starts to burn as well…

This Paris theatre gave free tickets to hundreds of migrants five weeks ago. Now they won’t leave

…the resentment this breeds will empower the global right to build higher walls, not longer tables.

 

Failed States:

We currently have 20 countries that are becoming failed states with all the social carnage that brings with it…

The Emergency Watchlist report is the International Rescue
Committee’s (IRC) assessment of the 20 countries at greatest risk
of new or worsening humanitarian emergencies each year. The
report is based on an analytically rigorous process that deploys 74
quantitative and qualitative variables, as well as qualitative insights
from the IRC’s experience of working in more than 40 countries, to
identify which countries to include on the list and where to rank them.

…that’s 11% of the planets population in the failed state cancer, that is an enormous reservoir of pain and human suffering that can easily radicalise and become a breeding ground for a very warped anger and righteous resentment.

Ranked top 10
1. Sudan
2. occupied Palestinian
territory
3. Myanmar
4. Syria
5. South Sudan
6. Lebanon
7. Burkina Faso
8. Haiti
9. Mali
10. Somalia

Unranked second half
• Afghanistan
• Cameroon
• Central African Republic
• Chad
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Ethiopia
• Niger
• Nigeria
• Ukraine
• Yemen

This desperation will feed into a refugee crisis made worse by climate change. Africa will hurt in 2025..

 

AI:

Ummmm, this is deeply concerning…

Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’

Tech boss suggests move to self-learning synthetic data though some warn this could cause ‘model collapse’

…so AI has consumed all human knowledge and is now creating synthetic data, but this sometimes manifests in the AI ‘hallucinating’ as if it is dreaming?

Jesus wept.

How soon does this bloody thing become sentient?

Before we need to start worrying about Terminator, the impact of AI to cause massive job losses has not been fully comprehended. The ruthlessness of AI redundancy makes us all horse and carriage operators in an age of uber.

Mass job losses are looming as corporations manage to get their heads around AI in their individual industries.

The breakthroughs AI will also manage will allow those with the skill set to become a new uber elite.

The distance between those on the bottom of the human scrap heap vs the god like powers of the AI enabled elites will become dangerously disconnected.

 

Solar Storms:

I know, all this shit to worry about AND SOLAR FLARES?

SAY IT AIN’T SO!

I’m afraid it be so…

Inevitable solar storms will be catastrophic for energy supply

Exploding transformers and crippling worldwide power outages: NZ’s disaster experts say the threat posed by solar storms is comparable to nuclear war

…we will face the Solar Maximus by July this year so if we are to face a Carrington Event, it will be this year.

Next Global Pandemic:

We thought Covid was bad, it ain’t nothing compared to what a new Bird Flu could do if it spills over to humans in 2025…

Bird Flu Is Raising Red Flags Among Health Officials

On January 6, the Louisiana Department of Health announced that a patient hospitalized last month for H5N1 avian influenza had died, becoming the first U.S. death from the virus. To make matters worse, samples taken from the individual suggest that the virus mutated within the patient after infection—meaning it had begun to adapt to infect humans better—raising new questions about H5N1’s pandemic potential.

…research shows us that the antivaxx community have been so successful with their disinformation campaign that people won’t heed the warnings of a new pandemic…

Inquiry warns distrustful public wouldn’t accept COVID measures in future pandemic

The government-appointed inquiry into Australia’s COVID response has warned public trust won’t be so high in a future pandemic and people would be unlikely to accept again many of the measures taken.

…let’s watch how this unfolds with stupid people dying first.

 

Deep Fake Disinformation and Misinformation:

The technology is so advanced now that deep fakes will quickly exploit people’s ability to differentiate between reality and fake. This is going to see a surge in scams and terrible decisions made by those who have been fooled.

Rise of global extremism in the West:

The polarisation generated by social media hate algorithms will radicalise to the point of a new domestic terror act every week with newly uploaded manifestos to read. Domestic terrorism will become the ultimate in performance art.

Super Trans National Criminal Gangs:

The expose in the Financial Times at how wide spread Chinese shadow banking for criminal organisations has become also notes Auckland in the global chain of this criminal empire.

With the friction points in American/Chinese relations about to hit boiling point, we risk Grey Zone blowback from China that would see Chinese Shadow Banking allowing a tsunami of cheaper and purer Meth to enter the Pacific as a means to corrode.

America is seeing it with Fentanyl.

Russia and China will openly help enable their organised crime gangs to exploit drug addiction as part of their Grey Zone tactics.

 

Global Economy:

My speculation, purely based on Trump’s inane narcissism, is that he is incapable of backing down, especially now he thinks God has saved him to Make America Great Again and that he won’t be able to accept the Tariffs are a bad decision and the economic carnage he triggers by implementing them will drive him to double down rather than back down.

I can see his Billionaire Libertarian Crypto-Bros convincing him of removing the American Dollar and replacing it with an American Crypto-Currency as the solution the way taking America off the Gold Standard in 1933 helped expansionist growth…

Under Trump, cryptocurrency is set to go mainstream – but that won’t make it any safer for investors

As the United States prepares for Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, all eyes are on the cryptocurrency markets. After Bitcoin’s price reached $100,000(£81,917) for the first time in history in December 2024, the cryptocurrency community is eagerly anticipating Trump’s fulfilment of his campaign promise to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet”. Some analysts predict that Bitcoin’s price could range between $78,000 and $250,000 in 2025.

Blockchain technology has numerous applications beyond crypto payments – for example, in supply chain and logistics. But it is the price surges of Bitcoin, Ethereum and “meme coins” that capture the majority of public attention. Speculative demand and the potential for abnormal returns, which are rarely found in other financial markets, remain key drivers of their prices.

Investors are often motivated by the prospect of short-term profits rather than a belief in the asset’s true or fundamental value. In the case of meme coins, speculative demand is primarily driven by social media culture and community enthusiasm, with little focus on the utility of the underlying technology or long-term success of the project.

Fuelled by expectations of a more favourable regulatory environment under the Trump administration, there is now increased institutional interest in cryptocurrencies. Major players such as BlackRock are entering the crypto derivatives market, increasing liquidity and drawing even more investors. This industry and political support for cryptocurrency demonstrates higher adoption and greater acceptance of crypto assets. At the same time, the speculative nature of crypto assets raises concerns that political endorsements could inflate a bubble, similar to the dotcom bubble that lasted between 1998 and 2000.

Financial market bubbles occur when asset prices far exceed their fundamental values and no longer reflect actual risks. When these bubbles burst, they can trigger a contagion effect, causing the collapse of related securities – even in industries with no direct connection to the troubled assets.

In my research, alongside fellow authors, I analysed companies that had rebranded with crypto-related names to boost their stock prices, despite no changes to their business models. This superficial association made these companies susceptible to contagion from the broader crypto ecosystem. If investors did not investigate whether these companies genuinely adopted blockchain technology, they are likely to sell these stocks swiftly at the first sign of negative news or a crisis in the crypto market.

…Trump is dumb enough and will be desperate enough to find a disruptive new way to make money as the American Economy tanks because of his Tariffs.

For the first month after replacing the American dollar with a Crypto Currency, the new American Crypto Currency will make more money than any of them dreamed, and then on day 31, for reasons none of the Billionaire Libertarian Crypto-Bros will be able to explain to any of us, it will crash because the whole thing is one giant speculative bubble that will implode in a way that makes the Wall Street Crash look like a gentle trip.

 

War:  

Once Trump inadvertently implodes the entire global economy with his Tariffs and Crypto gamble, then the world will turn slowly to open War. Conflict will become the norm as climate change and failed states combine to generate a desperation only violence can sate and fuel.

Open conflict between China and America will come to the surface once the economic pressures become impossible to contain socially.

The Military Industrial Complex will make an enormous profit this year.

WILD CARD: UFOs

This could be the year we finally get irrefutable proof of UFOs!

WILD CARD: QUANTUM COMPUTERS BECOMING AWARE

The craziness of Quantum Computers ability to conduct calculations in multi-dimensions is almost magic in of itself, but at what point does such a hyper intelligent, trans-dimensional computer become self aware?

WILD CARD: METHANE BURP + FIRST WAVE OF MASS HEAT DEATHS

The giga tonnes of methane locked into permafrost and on the ocean floor are near the tipping points for massive methane burps that will send the temperature spiking an extra degree each year for a decade. This in turn sparks the first mass deaths from extreme heat waves.

WILD CARD: FIRST MAJOR HACK

Get ready for the first major hack of a social media platform that exposes everyones secrets to the world.

 

Conclusion:

Shit goin’ to git cray.

Try and stay alive in 2025.

 

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.