Posted on 11/24/2008 5:15:55 PM PST by Michael Eden
You don't think a 48% reduction in the stock market value is a panic?
"NEW DELHI: As if the global meltdown and soaring food prices are not enough, now brace up for food shortage in the coming two years."
I agree with you. This guy is offering the far out version of the next four years...but if only half of what he says happens, we’ve all got a lot of problems. And it’s plausible that half of what he is talking about does come to pass.
Being long gold isn’t a bad place to be right now. Gold is the only asset that has held up the past year.
The problem is we are in unprecented territory. Compared to the Great Depression we are many times more leveraged in every sector of our economy. Foreign entities own a large part of our debt. We have an electronic economy for transacting commerce.
If the dollar crashes, interest rates go thru the roof, and the banks fail, there will be little the govt can do. Commerce could very well grind to a halt. People today don’t know how to survive like they did back then. Lots of people will die.
If that happens the whole country will collapse, it’s that simple.
BFFR
Count me in, too. ;-)
Perhaps some of what Celente says will come true. But isn’t he largely a legend in his own mind? What is the real evidence that he accurately and specifically made all these predictions? If he has been so good at predicting, over such a long period of time, why isn’t he richer than Warren Buffet?
Maybe the CRA is overreaching and should be overhauled if not repealed. But, the CRA doesn't regulate mortgage companies like the ones that sold all those subprime mortgages to borrowers with bad credit. The CRA only regulates depository institutions like banks, and it requires borrowers to be creditworthy. IMHO, the real culprits are the Federal Reserve for lowering the interest rates thus creating the housing bubble, the companies that sold subprime mortgages to uncreditworthy borrowers, and the borrowers themselves. I know people who lost their homes due to illness/medical bills, and I do have sympathy for them. But, too many others simply borrowed more than they could afford.
Frightening prediction, btw, in that article. All great nations fall, and the politicians and voters have led us into this mess. We'd all better stock up on canned goods, I guess.
A good day is when you get a nice tax revolt in before dinner :)
I am surely no doom-and-gloomer, but I got a real bad feeling:
Private well and septic - check
Several acres of fertile ground - check
Several acres of woods, plenty of deer and other edible creatures - check
Big cast-iron woodstove with cooktop for heat and cooking - check
Relatively little debt and only a small mortgage - check
Shotguns, rifles, handguns, ammo - check
Okay. Bring on the economic meltdown.
Actually, the banks WERE forced to reduce their credit policies in order to make loans to minorities.
In fact, Barack Obama was one of the lawyers in a landmark 1994 case vs. Citibank.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/700499,CST-NWS-Obama-law17.article
In addition, the Clinton administration pressured the banks to make such loans. Basically, the banks were forced to make the loans, and were then assured that Fannie and Freddie would guarantee the loans. So they made them like nuts after that.
Too bad people didn’t realize who really caused this meltdown due to media propaganda/disinformation.
The problem is that the “real assets” have been leveraged a hundredfold, and the result is $700 trillion dollars in derivatives.
The implosion will dwarf anything from the Great Depression. Nothing like this existed.
You said:
But the article is say something about the Panic of 2008. That only leaves 1 more month for the panic to begin. I don’t think that’s really going to happen so soon.
Celente is credited with predicting a lot of what would happen in 2008 - and it certainly HAS been a panic. We’ve lost something over $40 trillion dollars and nearly 40% of the market.
The article I cite refers to what he NOW sees happening around 2012.
Yes they do, and apathy and moral decline are early warning symptoms. If George HW Bush was our Tiberius, and Bill Clinton our Caligula, then Dubya was Claudius and 0bama looks destined to be our Nero. Take away the Roman intrigue and the comparisons are amazing.
You said:
The problem is we are in unprecented territory. Compared to the Great Depression we are many times more leveraged in every sector of our economy. Foreign entities own a large part of our debt. We have an electronic economy for transacting commerce.
If the dollar crashes, interest rates go thru the roof, and the banks fail, there will be little the govt can do. Commerce could very well grind to a halt. People today don’t know how to survive like they did back then. Lots of people will die.
If that happens the whole country will collapse, it’s that simple.
You said:
Perhaps some of what Celente says will come true. But isn’t he largely a legend in his own mind? What is the real evidence that he accurately and specifically made all these predictions? If he has been so good at predicting, over such a long period of time, why isn’t he richer than Warren Buffet?
Thought I’d post this UPI article from November 2007:
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2007/11/19/Forecast_US_dollar_could_plunge_90_pct/UPI-48761195499806/
RHINEBECK, N.Y., Nov. 19 (UPI) — A financial crisis will likely send the U.S. dollar into a free fall of as much as 90 percent and gold soaring to $2,000 an ounce, a trends researcher said.
“We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen,” Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente said, forecasting a “Panic of 2008.”
“The bigger they are, the harder they’ll fall,” he said in an interview with New York’s Hudson Valley Business Journal.
Celente — who forecast the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the dollar’s decline a year ago and gold’s current rise in May — told the newspaper the subprime mortgage meltdown was just the first “small, high-risk segment of the market” to collapse.
Derivative dealers, hedge funds, buyout firms and other market players will also unravel, he said.
Massive corporate losses, such as those recently posted by Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) and General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM), will also be fairly common “for some time to come,” he said.
He said he would not “be surprised if giants tumble to their deaths,” Celente said.
The Panic of 2008 will lead to a lower U.S. standard of living, he said.
A result will be a drop in holiday spending a year from now, followed by a permanent end of the “retail holiday frenzy” that has driven the U.S. economy since the 1940s, he said.
He had 2008 pegged a lot better than I did.
It is interesting to me that many bearish writers — whom I’ve been reading for years — have been saying pretty much the same things regarding destructive economic trends and the ultimate disposition of derivative-related securities and companies. Celente, however, is uncanny in his timing abilities. Where the other writers were way early by years in their forecasts of economic upheaval, and were marginalized by the seeming failure of their predictions, Celente really did nail 2008 precisely. I look forward (not) to see what 2012 holds.
It’s a bit creepy, but it seems that the predictions in the book, The Sovereign Individual, are coming to pass. The authors say that nation states are on the decline, and that power will become more decentralized. Just look at how impotent the major countries have been against a small band of crack-head Somali pirates. We could be in for some dark, chaotic years, similar to what happened when the Roman Empire fell apart.
One thing missing on your list is medical self-sufficiency. A real tough one, unless you live in a commune staffed with ex-ER and pharmacy personnel, and associated matériel. I hope at least your well pump runs on solar or another alternative source. Grid power will be subject to easy sabotage.
Yes. A generator and gasoline storage will be good things to look at if the collapse snowballs.
As far as medical is concerned, I have two sisters-in-law and a niece who are nurses.
Hope that’ll be good enough. We’re pretty healthy anyway.
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