The Top 7 Money Trends for 2013

FutureMoneyTrends.com believes that these 7 trends will have the biggest impact on your money opportunities for investment.

7. Hyper-gridlock in D.C. If you think the last few years have been ugly, wait until you live through 2013. Congress is in a non-election year and the President is in his final term, so both sides will be bolder than ever when it comes to drawing a line in the sand. Post-Fiscal Cliff deal the IMF and Moody's have come out with statements, Moody's saying, "Medium term actions may be needed to support Aaa" and the IMF says, "More remains to be done on U.S. public finances." The odds of anything being done about our fiscal mess is probably pretty low, since the entire revenues of the U.S. pay for just our entitlements and interest on our debt. Borrowed money goes towards everything else in the Federal Government including the entire defense budget. Fixing the U.S. spending problem with the very people who advocate for more government and cherish their pet projects is probably impossible. Expect significant volatility during the debt ceiling increase and the new fiscal cliff deadline in 60 days, both these political talks will create excellent opportunities to trade as well as buy in on any big dips of companies you may be watching.

6. Recession in the U.S. to be official. We know that for many of you reading this, you are probably asking when did the 2007 recession end. Well officially according to National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession ended around June of 2009, even though for those of us living in reality, the recession never ended. Food stamp use continues to make new all time highs, with 1 million people added in the past 2 months, coincidentally the same amount of people who have dropped out of the workforce during the same time frame. Gallup's polling information continues to give us a real unemployment number in the teens with it being steady at 20% when you include everyone who wants a full time job that doesn't have one. With that said, even the mainstream media and economists will admit this year that the U.S. is in a new recession, perhaps even stating that it started in late 2012.

FutureMoneyTrends.com sees too many economic indicators slowing and several strong catalysts to send a shock wave throughout the economy like the debt ceiling debate. A recession being official simply means more headwinds to the propaganda machine trying to get us to all buy mutual funds, max out 401k's, and steer clear of gold. This new recession could slip into a currency crisis, so be careful because things may not play out like they have in past recessions. If the dollar begins to fall, we may see stocks continue to rally during hard times on Main Street.

5. A new downgrade in U.S. credit rating by S&P and perhaps Moody's. This week Moody's fired a warning shot to the U.S. Treasury, we believe if Moody's plans to remain credible, they will need to downgrade the U.S. this year. Probably in the next 90 days during the debt ceiling crisis, if this happens, expect a massive shift to the precious metals as the world begins to acknowledge that the U.S. will have to print to keep interest rates artificially low.

4. China Bubble begins to deflate, China currently has 65 million vacant units of real estate, these cities have been rightly dubbed, ghost cities. China has also been stockpiling commodities, this growth is now on edge due to China's wage dilemma. If China allows wages to rise so that their citizens can begin to purchase a lifestyle of a middle class family, China may as a result lose jobs to lower wage countries like India and other parts of Asia. However, if China continues to keep wages low, they will basically be stuck building an empire that no one can afford to live in. To top it off, China has a long term demographics problem, probably the worst the world has ever seen due to China's 1 child policy. China over the last generation has created a population of 4 grandparents, 2 parents, and 1 child. China in the next 20 years will have more old people than the entire U.S. population. As t he world slows down, China will potentially see the worst of the downturn as jobs move out of China and demand for Chinese goods collapse in the West as those nations experience depressions and dramatically lower incomes from austerity.

3. Iran to announce enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. The U.S. and Israeli window of prevention is likely closing in the next few months, in our opinion the world is going to learn how to live with a nuclear middle east. We won't see the arms race as many have predicted since Saudi Arabia knows they have the U.S. military on stand by. We would expect an initial bump up in oil prices but nothing sustainable. However, we can expect the media to go into a panic for the first 72 hours, maybe even some verbal threats from the west.

2. A Silver Rush in 2013: As attention turns to gold with the debt ceiling debate, the average person who wants to protect themself will buy silver. Already we are seeing the same dollar amount of silver purchases as gold, Eric Sprott recently pointed this out in his latest article (which everyone needs to read), it is important that we all profit together off of this great trend of the decade!

FutureMoneyTrends.com likes silver anywhere near the $30 level, if it drops below $30 we'll buy call options to maximize short term profit, if it remains around $30 we plan to continue a regular accumulation of the physical metal as well as mining shares.

1. The #1 Money Trend is likely to be the rise of Uranium. In fact a supply shortage may begin in late 2013 that will put uranium in a bull market for the next several years. The big catalyst for 2013 is the end of an old Cold War treaty between Russia and the U.S., this treaty is currently providing about 24 million pounds (16% of the entire market) of uranium per year to the market from decommissioned nuclear weapons, this treaty expires at the end of 2013. The price for uranium is down 30% since Fukushima and nearly 60% since hitting an all time high in 2007. These low prices have caused BHP Billiton, Paladin Energy, and Cameco to all announce a reduction in investment or production in the uranium sector.

Buying at these levels where many companies aren't even profitable due to the depressed uranium price reminds us of early last decade when silver miners were mining silver for $5 and selling it for $4.50. Obviously this type of distortion in the market can't remain for too long, silver saw a rally of 1,000% since $4.50. Especially when demand is set to rise consistently over the coming decades; India plans to increase its nuclear power by 200% over the next 25 years, China currently has 26 nuclear reactors under construction, in Russia 10 are beginning to be built with 14 in the planning phase. This is a big trend, we don't expect prices to skyrocket tomorrow, but we do feel this is a safe level to begin an accumulation of Uranium producers.