There is a growing demand for early warning systems in business.

Everyone is getting into the prediction business.

The reason is pretty simple - the predictable certainty has gone out of almost everything. Think about it.

In the UK supermarket chains are starting to build "Plan B" strategies because they think that their suppliers have a good chance of going under.

In the US the collapse of Bernie Madoff's company for $50 Billion and at the same time apparently pulling down a bunch of well known charities, is just the latest brick in the wall of trust in the US financial system's regulatory process.

And here in Australia the announcement by our own "Dear Leader" that the country is going to wimp out on its greenhouse emissions targets just goes to show (as if we needed it) that you can't trust a politician's promises.

Well, we know that this sort of stuff happens, but it seems that the only thing that you can now rely on is that within an ever shorter time span another great trust will be broken.

What we now have is a kind of "trust anarchy". Maybe that is a legacy of the Bush administration, although I suspect that it has been going on for a lot longer than the last 8 years.

As a result of this there is now a greater than ever need for prediction of what will happen next. And on top of that there is a need for prediction of positive news.

But let's think for a moment about the implications of this wholesale breach of trust that is running rampant, not just through the consumer space, but also through the business and professional space.

The quantity of the breaches of trust are such that now we are no longer surprised when a trusted brand totally breaks the faith with its customers. Think about it. Brands that are under serious threat now include General Motors, Ford, Woolworths (in the UK), the major banks in most countries, consumer electronics companies, food products that utilise Chinese milk products (how many of them are there?),

These are of considerable significance, and unthinkable only a few years ago. What are we going to be left with?

I read a month or so ago that Gerard Celente, one of the grandfathers of the trend spotting business, was predicting that in the next few years people would need to pay a lot to buy food and even then they would not be able to trust what they bought. Seems to me that we are pretty much there already.

So how will we measure trust going forward? And what brands will be be able to rely on?

Will advertising be held to account for motivating people to purchase things that do not meet the proscribed standards for the product? Will executives in companies be held to account for not performing the appropriate due diligence on ingredient product purchases?

My expectation is that over the next two years Obama will unfortunately prove that he can not walk on water, and that the task in the US is too great for anyone to solve without a total change in culture. That culture will not change overnight. It will take a generation. This will mean that the population of America is doomed to be disappointed.

This will lead to mass dissatisfaction.

Consumers will revolt against the breach of trust. They will be driven by web sites that organize mass protests across the nation. These will spread globally.

There will be concurrently a mass movement to share information, entertainment etc digitally through peer to peer networks and this will effectively lead to the total break down of copyright regulated industries like the movie, TV, music businesses as an asymmetric distribution system becomes the norm rather than the exception...

And Google will rise in dominance along the way. They are without doubt the "greatest disrupter"