Happy New Year! It’s the day you’ve all been waiting for: the 2024 version of Fletch Predicts!
I’ve been on a pretty good roll – AI was the buzzword for 2023 just like I thought it would be, and I hit on one sports pick too. And rates pretty much did what I predicted as well. Now onto 2024.
Sports first: for football, let’s go with a rematch of a super bowl of my youth: San Francisco 49ers vs. the Miami Dolphins. It’s not Dan Marino vs Joe Montana this time, but it should be fun. And in a reversal of last time, a Miami win!
*Note that I do write these a little ahead of time, so I hope both are still alive when this publishes!
In Baseball, I picked the Braves last year, and they rewarded me with a great regular season that crashed and burned in the playoffs. But not this year – this year our locals take it! For an American league finalist, let’s go with the Baltimore Orioles to take the next step and make the world series.
Basketball… I hit with Denver last year, but this year I am going old school Celtics. They’ll beat Denver (who makes it to the finals again.)
Hockey – the hardest to predict. The NY Rangers look mighty strong though, so that’s my pick. Let’s go with them vs the Vancouver Canucks in another old-time rematch.
Ok, onto economics: Rates are going to start to come down in 2024. How many rate cuts remain to be seen. The Federal reserve has said perhaps three, but I’m going to put a little caution there and say two. Last spring and mid-autumn.
I also expect the US economy to be fairly stable, assuming world events don’t get out of hand. I also think our presidential election in November to take a week to resolve. That seems to be the way moving forward. Hopefully you’re happy with the result!
Ok, enough politics – onto more fun stuff. AI is going to continue to dominate, as it changes everything. We’re already seeing this in search engine results. I do expect a little pushback though as we become increasingly uncomfortable with certain aspects of it. For example, I just saw a new AI technology from NVidia that makes it so your eyes are always looking at the camera during a video call. Yea, neat… but also not real. So are we ok with what we are seeing not being real? It’s a weird area for sure. But I do expect the “fun and useful” parts of AI to be more prevalent than the creepy ones.
We’ll also start to see AI combined with robotics, which will reshape entire industries. I was talking with a friend who paints houses, and he mentioned how hard steep roofs can make painting. Then he said “I can’t wait to buy an AI controlled drone to do it”. It doesn’t exist yet, but he expects it to come. Maybe not this year, but we’ll start seeing things like that more and more.
I’m pretty optimistic about 2024, and I hope you are too. If you look at how things truly are, and not how they are portrayed on social media, there’s a LOT to like.
Bye 2023 – it was real. Hello 2024. Let’s do this.