Kickstart: Happy New Year!

And just like that's it's 2020, a new calendar and (for most companies) a new fiscal year. So do you start fresh? Build toward some new plan? Put away the old way of doing things?

I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, personally, but a part of me does love the idea of the potential for new things in the coming seasons. Maybe you've got big ideas for your business in the months ahead. Landing a new client? Launching new products? Getting into a new market? Making acquisitions? New skills? Finally getting a handle on Industry 4.0?

They're all great goals, but we all know that those aren't accomplished easily. There's a lot of day-to-day grinding it out between now and that goal. And there will be hurdles. A key employee takes a new job, or your biggest customer is purchased by someone else, and that acquirer wants to trim the supply base. So making plans is one thing. Being able to adapt those plans is also important.

OK. Pep talk over. Let's go!

Before you get ahead of yourself, maybe you should take stock of what the big picture is out there for the plastics industry. Economist Bill Wood has some ideas of what to expect.

In a pair of columns he wrote in the past few weeks, Wood wrote that he expects the plastics industry overall to grow more slowly than the overall economy in 2020, but there are markets that could see a little better returns.

That will likely be good news after a few frustrating quarters: "It is clear to me we have been in a phase of moderate contraction for the past year," he wrote. "Whether you call it a period of recession, consolidation or contraction is a matter of personal taste. But it is clear the domestic plastics industry is not growing at the same pace as the overall economy."

Read more on his take for 2020.

In case you took a couple of days off from the news, the big headline to finish off 2019 came from Japan and Lebanon, where Carlos Ghosn, the former head of the Nissan and Renault alliance, facing financial impropriety charges in Japan, managed to slip away to Beirut.

Ghosn was one of the "larger than life" automotive leaders of the past two decades. His appearances at auto shows from Detroit to Tokyo to Frankfurt always generated headlines. Under his leadership, Nissan was a major customer of plastic suppliers, from polyolefin lift gates to the lithium ion batteries in the Leaf electric car.

Then, just a little more than a year ago, police in Japan arrested him, and he spent months in jail before the court finally released him on nearly $14 million in bail, and under condition he surrender his passports and agree to intense monitoring.

On New Year's Eve, Ghosn announced he was in Beirut: "I have not fled justice -- I have escaped injustice and political persecution."

How did he manage it? A lot of people are asking that same question. You can catch up with more details via our sister publication Automotive News and its Tokyo-based reporter Hans Greimel.