When the promotional product industry’s leaders converge on Salt Lake City May 5-7 for PPAI’s sold out North American Leadership Conference, they will bring their own sets of goals, obstacles and current priorities. But one thing they all have in common is that they are navigating the unpredictability of the current economy.

While no one can predict the financial landscape going forward, the NALC attendees will hear a presentation by a man whose qualifications and credentials make him a more than credible voice on the economy of the near future.

  • Andrew Busch is a “economic futurist” and consultant who spent 20 years as a currency trader and was the U.S. government’s first chief marketing intelligence officer, providing briefings to the U.S. House and Senate as well as the White House, Federal Reserve Board and U.S. Treasury staff.

Busch’s NALC session is titled “Connecting Today’s Chaos to Tomorrow’s Growth: Domestic Economy Predictions.”

  • It is scheduled for Tuesday, May 7.

“I don't just talk about the here and now,” Busch told PPAI Media in anticipation of his presentation. “I really provide people with the path to the future. I don't give them the future. I give them the path. It's up to them to decide which path they want to go down.”

A Track Record To Back Up His Title  

After his years of trading currencies, Busch wrote detailed research to help his clients understand the economy as it applied to them.

“When you do that, you start to see patterns in this world,” Busch says.

Those patterns led to some eerie predictions in his first book World Event Trading in 2007. The only problem was that he was over a decade early with his prescience. The book’s topics, in order, started with:

  • Infectious disease outbreaks and their impact on the economy.
  • Short-term war.
  • Disputed elections.
  • Big climate events such as tsunamis.

Seventeen years later, we can see that Busch was successfully predicting some of the most prevalent factors in our current economy.

Do Your Homework

One piece of Busch’s advice that you don’t need a ticket to NALC to hear is simple: “Don’t doomscroll.”

That doesn’t mean avoiding the news, quite the opposite, actually. It means staying informed while trying to prevent yourself from conflating every development with a negative financial outcome.

“I think people who spend most of their day being negative looking at the bad things that are going on in the world will be occupied,” Busch says. “But if you do your homework, and you start to dive below the chaos, that's where all the opportunities are.”

Busch will discuss topics such as inflation, how either presidential candidate might negatively impact the supply chain and why China should be factoring into the priorities of most companies.