Crude oil prices, just below $108 per barrel, will surge north, but not before they dip for a while, according to
David Gurwitz, managing director at Charles Nenner Research, which forecasts markets based on independent research.
Gurwitz appeared Monday on
Newsmax TV’s "America’s Forum."
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"They're down now," he said. "They're going to come back up to our target of $122, but it's approaching our short-term target of $108, and it's going to head down for a while first," he said. "So it will go up there based on its own cycles and also based on another set of cycles we look at."
The expected increase, according to Gurwitz, isn’t necessarily tied to the unrest in the Middle East, where the Sunni militant group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has seized control of a number of cities in Iraq, but something known as war cycles, which predict market trends based on both national and international conflicts. The war cycle concept is a complex formula that forecasts economic trends based on historical conflict cycles that can run in 50-, 80-, or 100-year increments.
"The news is showing horrible things going on, but crude prices are topping because cycles are topping, and they're actually heading down," he explained.
Iraq is just one of several "hot spots" around the globe, according to Gurwitz, who said
natural gas is also predicted to drop to $2 per million btus before it starts climbing again. It’s currently $4.50. Seven years ago it sold for $14.
Gurwitz’s other predictions:
- Gold and silver will go up.
- Grain prices will increase over the long term.
- Stocks have a very poor outlook until 2020.
"Stocks are near a top," he forecasted. "2020 looks like it's going to be an incredible time for stocks. So shorter term, it doesn't look very good, according to us, but again, it's important, [the stock market] could be sideways for a while and not a major crash downward, though there could be one violent move coming soon, and that's why it's important that people at least pay attention to what we consider fundamentals called cycles."
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