Shortly before the 1929 stock-market crash that ushered in a global recession, US economist Irving Fisher made a rightly celebrated forecast: "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

That should be enough to warn anyone off making predictions, particularly where finance and business are concerned. Still, we are stuck in some quiet space between Christmas and New Year, so here are a few things that might happen in 2008.

One: The dollar recovers.

Dollar bulls were about as easy to find in 2007 as a Led Zeppelin reunion ticket. The tumbling dollar was one of the big financial stories of the year. But the laws of economics haven't been repealed quite yet. They tell us that after a currency is devalued, exports pick up, imports decline, and the trade deficit starts to shrink. We'll see that happen in 2008, and by the end of the year, the currency markets will have noticed, and started pushing up the dollar again. Pretty soon, everyone will be describing the US as the new Germany — an export powerhouse with huge trade surpluses, and everyone fretting about how they can get consumers shopping again.

Two: Europe gets a free airline.

The three most powerful words in marketing are "new," "improved" and "free." That third one is the best of all. The "free" culture of the Internet is spreading into the real economy. Some newspapers are now free. So are broadband deals. It won't be long before someone launches a free budget airline. Plenty of flights are sold for a fiver. So why not get rid of the token charge most of the budget airlines now ask for? You can give the flights away and make the money on car rentals, baggage allowance, and onboard cups of coffee.

Three: Alistair Darling gets fired.

The UK economy is likely to face its toughest year in more than a decade. The housing market looks weak, the government will be forced to turn off the spending taps, and London's financial district is facing big layoffs. Somebody will have to take the blame for that, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, even though he spent the last 10 years as chancellor, certainly isn't going to volunteer. Instead, his hapless replacement as chancellor, Alistair Darling, who is already ensnared in the Northern Rock Plc fiasco, will take the rap. And his successor? Brown's chief crony, Schools Secretary Ed Balls.

Four: The Facebook IPO tops the bull market.

The social-networking Web site Facebook Inc. has become one of the hottest properties on the planet. Back in October, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the business, valuing the whole thing at $15 billion. If it stages an initial public offering late in 2008, expect Facebook's value to have multiplied several times since then. Amid a frenzy of wildly bullish predictions, and with stock markets surging again, its value will go to $50 billion or more. Years later, however, we'll look back at the Facebook deal as the top of the 2002-2008 bull market.

Five: UBS gets sold.

In soccer, there is a useful phrase: "Form is temporary, but class is permanent." In European banking, there is no more class act than UBS AG. Its form, however, has been terrible. The Swiss bank has been forced to write off $10 billion in losses on subprime investments. With a burnt-out share price, UBS looks like a bargain. It recently raised fresh capital from an "unidentified Middle Eastern investor." Why remain "unidentified" unless you plan to raise your stake further? Don't be surprised if UBS is owned by one of the oil-rich sovereign wealth funds by the end of 2008.

Six: Bring back the peseta.

For years, people have been warning that Spain's massively overheated property market is a catastrophe waiting to happen. We have seen the wobbles already. In 2008 we'll see the crash. The trouble is, there won't be anything Spain can do about it. The European Central Bank didn't stop prices from soaring and it won't stop them from plummeting either. The result? The Spanish will start to wonder if handing over control of their currency to Frankfurt was such a good idea after all.

We have already seen campaigns in Italy to bring back the lira. By the end of next year, we'll see campaigns in Spain for the return of the peseta.

Seven: Paris gets the 2012 Olympics.

The least surprising news of 2007? That was the soaring cost of the 2012 London Olympics. The bill will rise to more than 9 billion pounds ($18 billion), triple the original estimate. And there are still four years to go. At the current rate of price inflation, the Olympics will soon be devouring the entire British economy. In 2008, Londoners will wake up to the madness. French President Nicolas Sarkozy will step in with an offer to take the games back. The reaction? Londoners will breathe a sigh of relief, start muttering "Merci, merci" and tell him Paris is welcome to the circus.

Eight: Yet more Greenspan predictions.

To coincide with the paperback of his memoirs "The Age of Turbulence," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will return to the lecture circuit and the television studios with a series of nerve-shaking predictions. The bull market? It's finished. The dollar? Kaputt. A new Ice Age? It's imminent. Fluffy bunnies from Mars? They are about to invade our planet. Well, if big Al says it, it must be true.

(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)