The speeches by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Sudan, the first stop of his Africa tour, are historical. He said, "They have been interested in nothing, but your oil and mines. Imperialists are like sharks, and the smell of blood is the smell of oil for them. The West has unsettled Africa," exclaiming all the facts that no leaders have voiced on the African territory so far. These remarks also foreshadow a future through the exclamation that over 200 years of unjust Western hegemony is ending.

However, we cannot see Erdoğan's prediction in the Western media. As it happens in the last days of every year, there are estimates about the next, and the year 2018 is especially important for the global economy. However, the estimates are rather vague.

An important distinction has caught my attention this year: The forecasts at the end of this year do not only cover the coming year, but all future forecasts - from the U.S. economic condition to developing countries and to the global monetary system - include a "broad" time frame that we will be covering for almost a hundred years starting with 2018.

Sometimes, we also see striking analyzes that are no different from the prophecies that about events a hundred years from now. These "traditional" predictions of the future at the end of the year are explained as an envisagement of the future at the end of the century. This can be explained as a total acceptance or awareness of the fact that we have come to the end of an era.Indeed, it is now rising to the surface that a global crisis based in developed countries (the West) will lead to serious changes in the systemic hierarchy, which will be far more different and widespread than the systemic crises of the 19th and 20th centuries, destroying the core of the system.I have always thought that seriously-debated prophecies of famous clairvoyants such as Nostradamus and Baba Vanga go beyond mysticism, have material foundations and are based on intelligence and a strong ability of analysis and observation. We see analyses of Nostradamus or Baba Vanga's predictions at the end of every year. Oddly enough, however, what these two prominent seers said about 2018 are quite interesting. The Bulgarian government formally recorded Baba Vanga's oracles before her death. Baba Vanga said that China would surpass the U.S. in 2018, taking a major step toward becoming a superpower. She also foresaw that new energy resources would be found on other planets. Her prognosis about China is no longer a prophecy, but a concrete economic situation.

The West's incorrigible economists say at the end of every year that China is on the verge of a new financial crisis, will enter a decline process next year and the Shanghai stock exchange creates bubbles. China, however, passes the test predicted by such estimates every year, does not experience a crisis and, moreover, ensures that the West's crisis does not escalate into a systemic collapse. Nostradamus's augury about the U.S. for 2018 is even more important than Baba Vanga's accurate prophecy about China.

There was no U.S. in the century when Nostradamus lived, but he said the gold of the country, which he defined as the guardian of the cross beyond the ocean, would run out, it would stagger and would be divided before a big row. Well, it seems like a prediction that can be quite realistic if not as much as that of Baba Vanga.

It would be very difficult and futile to try to explain these prophecies scientifically. However, given the systematic functioning of the global economic order, we can see that the global order has undergone tremendous changes, first with ripples lasting up to 100 years and then with ripples lasting 40 to 50 years after the industrialization, since the beginning of mass commercial production and trade with general exchange instruments. Famous Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev explains the crises of capitalism as a wave ranging from 40 to 50 years and attributes the beginning and rising of these waves to the emergence of new sectors and accompanying major political developments.

Kondratiev, not a soothsayer but unquestionably a good economist, explains the dynamics of the system, such as the beginning, rise, collapse and crises, with waves of 40 to 50 years, using the metaphors of spring for the beginning, summer for the rising, autumn for the collapse and winter for the crisis. Accordingly, autumn ended and winter began in the early 2000s.

Some argue that this winter will last until 2020. However, considering the latest developments and the situation both in the EU and the U.S., even the year 2020 seems to be late for the crisis to end, to the detriment of the EU and the U.S. I think the winter of crisis will start ending within the next two years. The West is coming to the end of its hegemony after over 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. So, as Erdoğan said, we are at the dawn of an era where all the oppressed, especially those in Africa, will come to have their rights.

Of course, the Western press does not, or cannot, see it. The U.S. and EU-based new year analyses are full of unknowns. They are trying to make predictions based on hope and imagination, not about the near future, but about the distant future. For instance, they cannot see the results of the Brexit process. They do not want to see the China that was foreseen by Baba Vanga. As of 2018, Western economic theories will be disproved as long as countries such as Turkey produce their economic programs, institutions and policies. They cannot see that either.

The most familiar of these theories still iterate that Turkey will not grow in 2018 like in 2017 and if it grows based on demand, it will face a crisis. These forecasts, which are even more irrational than mystical prophecies of hundreds of years ago, without knowing the degree of the Turkish economy's efficiency and capacity, and estimating its power of generating and using capital, will come true neither in 2018 nor in the following years.