The outlook for 2026 might surprise you. Markets are buoyant, tech feels strangely practical, and the biggest shock of all may be that the world muddles through without the crash everyone has been primed to expect. In a year built on Saxo Banks “outrageous” scenarios, the calm might be the punchline.

A Weirdly Calm Roller Coaster
The year opens on a strange contradiction: stock markets flirting with record highs, inflation backing off, and central banks finally sounding less like stern parents and more like mildly concerned uncles. At the same time, politics is anything but dull, with President Trump’s muscular approach to South America reviving an old-school, resource-driven foreign policy that feels ripped from another era. The new “Donroe Doctrine”, a swaggering remix of US hemispheric dominance, puts Venezuela’s oil and regional influence back at the centre of global risk conversations.

Against this backdrop, CES 2026 in Las Vegas is a showroom for how boringly useful artificial intelligence has become. AI is baked into everything from toothbrushes to tractors, less a sci-fi villain than the new electricity, invisible, everywhere, and most of the time just making things work a little better. The vibe is less apocalypse, more “upgrade available.”

Q-Day, Crypto Humility and Quantum Panic
Quantum computing, long the overachieving intern of tech buzzwords, finally lands some real-world hits. A new generation of quantum-resistant tools rolls into blockchain like an emergency locksmith, promising to secure Web3 before the truly scary quantum machines show up.

But one outrageous 2026 scenario has those machines arriving early and cracking today’s encryption like stale bubble wrap. In that timeline, cryptocurrencies don’t just wobble; they crater. Wallets are exposed, trust evaporates, and suddenly the wildest “number go up” asset class is reminded that math can work both ways. Gold, the asset grandparents have been quietly hoarding for decades, gets to say “told you so.”

The Swiftie Put and the Mood Economy
Economists have spent years ignoring the thing that maybe matters most: vibes. Enter the Swiftie Put. In a playful but plausible 2026 scenario, a mega-celebrity wedding becomes the cultural moment of the decade, uniting timelines, breaking streaming records, and nudging people toward optimism.

Younger generations start doing outrageous things like forming households, booking flights, and planning weddings instead of just wedding playlists. Housing demand gets a sugar rush. Travel, luxury, and lifestyle brands feast on the glow. Analysts start using “Swiftie Put” to describe the new reality, when the right cultural moment can give markets a psychological floor.

Trump’s South American Gambit
In the background of this feel-good mood, US geopolitics goes aggressively retro. Trump’s South America moves revive a hard-edged, resource-first approach to the region, with Venezuela at the centre as both oil prize and political theatre. The message is blunt: energy, minerals and influence in the Western Hemisphere are no longer abstract diplomatic topics; they are items on a shopping list.

One outrageous spin on 2026 extends this logic across the map. Rare earths in Greenland, lithium in Bolivia, critical minerals in the Andes all become potential props in a showy doctrine that treats the Americas as a strategic storefront. Markets respond the way they always do: defence names perk up, energy traders live on caffeine, and Latin American assets start to swing in wider arcs than investors would like to admit.

Weight-Loss Pills, Skinny Dogs and the Leanness Economy
The blockbuster weight-loss drugs that reshaped consumer behaviour in the mid-2020s now go fully mainstream. Pills are available for humans, pets, and the occasional influencer brand collaboration.
Wardrobes shrink as waistlines do. Fast fashion discovers that selling people their “after” clothes is a surprisingly good business.

Food companies scramble to reinvent comfort food as light indulgence, stacking low-sugar and low-fat claims on old favourites. Health systems quietly cheer as obesity-linked complications ease. Even pet insurers have to redo their models when your labrador suddenly weighs what the brochure always said it should. The Leanness Economy becomes a theme, an ETF, and inevitably, a meme.

Space on the Balance Sheet
Space in 2026 is less about inspirational rocket launches and more about spreadsheets. Launch costs keep falling, satellite constellations thickening, and lunar projects inch toward something that looks suspiciously like an industrial plan.

A giant space-infrastructure IPO finally lands, and the valuation slips into the trillion-dollar club with the kind of swagger only orbital bandwidth can muster. When pension funds start talking about exposure to low Earth orbit, it is clear something has flipped. Space stops being a screensaver of the future and becomes yet another asset class where analysts argue about EBITDA multiples. Somewhere, a portfolio manager casually says, “We’re overweight space this quarter,” and nobody laughs.

The AI CEO and the Ego Recession
Artificial intelligence has already eaten the intern’s job. Next on the menu is the corner office. One especially spicy 2026 scenario imagines a Fortune 500 board deciding that if algorithms are already making most of the decisions, they might as well be honest about it and appoint an AI CEO.

The humans do not vanish. Instead, they become translators, ethicists, and professional second-guessers. Investors initially panic, then notice that the AI does not tweet, does not storm out of meetings, and does not buy trophy acquisitions just to impress its friends. Governance rules twist themselves into new shapes. Business school case studies write themselves. The biggest loser is executive ego.

The Dollar Gets Company
For decades, every end-of-the-dollar prediction has aged badly. 2026 does not kill the dollar either, but it does finally give it serious company. A gold-linked offshore yuan gains traction in commodity trades, regional payment systems proliferate, and central banks quietly diversify their reserves.

The monetary world becomes less king-and-subjects and more crowded dinner party. The dollar still sits at the head of the table, but now it has to share the conversation. For markets, the outrageous part is not collapse, but the slow, slightly awkward drift toward a genuinely multipolar currency ecosystem.

Dumb AI and the Cleanup Crew
For every polished AI demo on a keynote stage, there are a hundred ugly implementations in the wild. Chatbots hallucinate legal advice, automated systems knock logistics networks off balance, and one overeager procurement tool ends up ordering a year’s worth of printer toner for the wrong continent.

An entire industry springs up to clean up after the robots. Audit-as-a-service, AI crash investigation teams, synthetic-data therapists for traumatized models. The second act of the AI boom is part boom, part repair shop. The big money may lie not in building ever-smarter systems, but in fixing the damage done by the dumb ones.

The Real Outrage of 2026
Taken together, these scenarios sketch a year that feels more like a plot twist than a finale. Markets hold up. Tech gets more useful. Culture moves capital. Washington revives old doctrines while pretending they are new. AI runs companies, weight-loss drugs run wardrobes, and space turns up in pension reports.

The most outrageous prediction of all is that 2026 might not be the collapse year everyone keeps forecasting. Instead, it might be the year the world stumbles into a messy, oddly functional equilibrium, where the shocks are real but the system bends instead of breaks. In a world addicted to doom, that kind of boring resilience is about as radical as it gets.