As we return from the Christmas / New year break and pour over the 100’s of emails we received during that time, we begin to think about the year ahead. What will we achieve? What will our children will be doing? And when is that next holiday?

What are your predictions for 2008?

Here are a few predictions from The Australian Newspaper:

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

THE West is set for another year of strong economic growth fuelled by record business investment to increase the production capacity for key exports, and more than $100 billion of investment projects waiting in the wings.

But with 800 people moving to the state each week to fill an insatiable job market, the Government faces a major challenge tackling the housing affordability crisis and chronic rental shortages causing hardship to many families.

With an election due in early 2009, there will be renewed pressure to loosen the purse strings to provide significant tax relief, including cuts to stamp duty on property sales.

FASHION

“YOU don’t bring me flowers any more,” trilled Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond in the 1977 anthem but that’s just what you’ll be getting into in 2008 as designers deliver up a blinding array of blooms in the new season collections.

The fresh mood is more about a softening of lines than an endless Interflora remix of floral prints.

Gone are the sharp shoulders, leather and metallic’s of 2007, replaced with fluidity and lightness best
rendered by Lanvin’s superlative designer Alber Elbaz and also seen at Prada and Marc Jacobs.

There’ll be floaty frocks and soft separates, flowing trousers and feminine blouses to flatter any figure and age.

In line with the new Garden of Eden feel, there’ll be sustainable and organic products and production, as featured in Tamsin Blanchard’s book Green is the New Black: How to change the World with Style. Blooming marvelous.

BUSINESS

THERE are two opposite and approximately equal forces staging a tug of war with the sharemarket.

One is the subprime meltdown, a financial and social catastrophe that has seen hundreds of thousands of first home buyers in the US hand back their keys and walk away from heavy losses.

The other force is the China-India boom, which is showing no signs of going away and is underpinning our resource market in a way that has rarely been seen in the past century.

The latter, most likely, will win which means that share prices will go up. So will the sharemarket and the relevant indices, but to a lesser extent than in 2007.

The US dollar is moving downwards fast but at some point the giant economy will find itself having really competitive exports, which is the turnaround it so badly needs.
By then it may have got to parity with our dollar. One Aussie dollar will equal one greenback, say mid-year.

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