Doctor doom: Gerald Celente on Weekly

For 2008, Gerald Celente predicts the total collapse of an already

damaged economy

By Steve Hopkins

These are the times that make Gerald Celente salivate. The Mid-Hudson region’s resident internationally-renowned talking head, Celente – and his alleged organization, the Trends Research Institute – are again swinging into high gear to herald what he has dubbed an “Economic 9/11,” a meltdown that sometime this year he claims will be equal to and perhaps surpass the devastation wrought by the Great Depression. Here’s a typical passage from his Winter 2008 issue of The Trends Journal newsletter, which should go down as a classic even amongst avid Celente collectors: “With the nation on the skids and heading down … and with bigger problems coming up on the horizon … the biggest media mouths were busy broadcasting primetime slime for endless hours about Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, lost Boy Scouts, kidnapped kids and the sexploits of Teachers Gone Wild. … Their minds saturated with junk news, bodies bloated on junk food, working non-stop, talking constantly, hardly listening, self indulged or just tuned out … the reasons for Americans being out of touch, ignorant of the facts and unprepared for what’s to come are academic. How they prepare to deal with the future is what will count. … But just as they didn’t see 9/11 coming and were frozen in shock when terror struck, they’ll be frozen in shock when terror strikes again.”

Yikes!

It’s the kind of stuff that warms the hearts of constitutionally pessimistic misanthropes such as myself, but doesn’t exactly endear itself to the American mainstream horde Celente has courted so effectively over the past decade and a half. The Trends Journal, available a from a post office box in Rhinebeck for $99 for a one-year on-line subscription, goes on to pontificate darkly about the coming economic meltdown. “Just as the Twin Towers collapsed from the top down, so too will the U.S. economy from an Economic 9/11, when the high-stakes speculators, banks, brokerages, and buyout firms that leveraged billions with millions get hit,” writes Celente, breaking down the carnage into easily digestible “trendposts,” including this priceless chestnut: “‘Self Storage’ will soon live up to the meaning of its name. Down and out, thrown onto the streets … homeless Americans will empty out storage lockers of useless junk … to store themselves. When Panic strikes, it will only be a matter of time and a question of survival before they move in. Whether on their own or with family in tow, living in concrete and steel 4x8s will be a step up from sleeping in the streets or risking a night at a homeless shelter.” As somebody who rents a 6x10 to store all the unclassified detritus from my former three-story Victorian house that I can’t stuff into a two-bedroom apartment, I feel somehow ahead of the curve on this one. Thanks, Gerald.

It feels like the truth, Oprah says

Celente, whom I interviewed early last week as stocks were tumbling from the mid-13,000s to almost 12,000, says the predicted economic apocalypse is already underway. Under pressure from President Bush, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernenke on Thursday of last week relented and alluded to another round of interest rate-lowering that temporarily kicked things out of a free-fall, but according to Celente, that sort of tinkering won’t do any good in the end.
But should we believe him? What are Celente’s credentials? His Web site doesn’t make clear where he learned his skills or who in the murky world of prognostication he admires; neither does he reference the work or thoughts of any professional colleagues or fellow experts. The man eschews footnotes. Besides the fact that he’s been on cable television news and talk shows more times than most retired two-star generals, Celente’s qualifications as a socioeconomic prognosticator include running a mayoral campaign in Yonkers, serving as executive assistant to the secretary of the New York State Senate and shuttling between Chicago and Washington D.C. as a “government affairs specialist” during the 1970s before becoming a “political atheist” in 1978 after hearing Jimmy Carter pronounce the about-to-be-disposed Shah of Iran “the island of stability in the Middle East.” This revelation prompted him to sink some of his money into gold and oil futures, and jump-started him on the path of using his newly tested analytical skills to create a cottage industry advising others how to profit by looking dispassionately at the numbers and other data without letting one’s feelings get in the way. “That’s how I was able to leave my job, and when I realized that if you keep following these things, current events form future trends,” says Celente for about the millionth time in his career. “So when you read all we’ve written, it’s all backed up with data.”

Still, it’s no picnic. Celente has carved out an almost impossible-to-fulfill niche for himself as a forecaster of the next big thing in economics, geopolitics and social change. A prisoner of his own middling success, when Celente is not on the road appearing on television shows and speaking before various trade groups and corporations for his bread and butter, he’s trapped in his sun-dappled John Street headquarters – the partially renovated former Mohican Market – for much of the week doing free telephone interviews with down-market radio stations. The author of several books including the bestselling “Trends 2000,” Celente is a relentless self-promoter who bristles angrily when he loses access to even the most pedestrian media outlet, as he did when Taconic Newspapers publisher Ira Fusfeld apparently decided to ban his periodic editorial contributions. “It was deemed that my views were unpalatable; the advertisers complained, and the publisher said they’re not being run,” seethes Celente. “Whoever did it in my estimation is a coward. What, are they afraid of hearing what I have to say? It’s disgusting.”

Celente is obviously no shrinking violet, and despite his slender resume seems to possess the ironclad sense of self-worth necessary to compete and even thrive on the mine-encrusted playing field of cable TV, commonly characterized by egotistical personalities mouthing over-the-top hubris in the most dumbed-down manner they can. Perhaps the most telling artifact in this respect is the nightmarish YouTube promo video showing Celente being interviewed and/or introduced on a slew of TV shows, including by Matt Lauer on Today; The O’Reilly Factor (“a guy that obviously knows his trends,” Bill O’Reilly gushes), and Oprah (who asks her audience, “Doesn’t this resonate with you? Doesn’t it feel like the truth?”) The thing devolves from a series of sound bites into a blizzard of jump cuts featuring all the introductions by helmet-haired anchor-people over the past 10 years, chanting: “Gerald Celente … Gerald Celente … Gerald Celente … Gerald Celente … Gerald Celente …” interspersed with the occasional lightning bolt intended to hasten the sense of unease. The voices are then spliced together into a frightening unison mass: “Gerald Celente! Gerald Celente!” as the images multiply and re-arrange themselves to fill a spinning globe. Talk about media overkill.

Anyway, whatever Celente is doing, it keeps him in food and drink and pays the bills, but is apparently insufficient to cover the considerable nut needed to fund his dream of converting the Mohican Market into a first-class eatery and hangout for the local glitterati, to be called Zizi’s after his stunning and tough-minded late aunt. “Culture and dignity … class … ethics … style … passion … respect,” intones Celente as he gives me a tour of the second floor of his domain. “Do me a favor, don’t walk on the cement, only because it carries the dust. This used to be an oven here before I got here. Mohican Markets, there was a chain of them on the East Coast. They were known for their breads. There were 13 of them, I understand. This becomes a boutique catering facility.”

Nobody’s perfect

Although he takes every opportunity to brag about the trends he has forecast – including the demise of the Soviet Union; the October 1987 world stock market crash; the current quagmire in Iraq (about which he stuck his neck out back in 2003, a month before the war began); the 2000 dotcom stock correction and his year’s real estate downturn – he doesn’t claim to be infallible. He admits to having wrongly bet against George W. Bush twice. Celente has a balanced, noncommittal early take on the upcoming presidential election cycle, which he likes to call the “Presidential Reality Show.” He’s not impressed by Barack Obama, substance-wise. “Obama has Oprah-quality production. And I’ve been on Oprah twice, so I know what Oprah-quality production looks like,” he says. “And I know that there’s not a moment when they don’t have Obama like this (poses presidentially) or like that (strikes another thoughtfully presidential pose). That whole speech that he gave – it made it seem like it was extemporaneous – and it was teleprompted. … Meanwhile, he’s a cipher. He voted for the Patriot Act.”

He’s also not convinced that manipulated events won’t tear into Obama’s obvious experiential weakness in foreign policy. A day before the New Hampshire primary, he offered this typically prescient assessment: “Having said that, now that we’re hearing more Iranian news, we’ll probably see a move back toward people like Hillary or John McCain – people who make us feel safe,” says Celente, before covering all his bases by predicting the possible emergence of a none-of-the-above dark horse into the race who could take it all. He’s more surefooted regarding his dire economic prognostications. He is certain that Wall Street will not be able to handle the disruptions it is encountering. “The panic is on. It’s on, it’s on; it’s now. The financial markets are unraveling at warp speed,” he says. Celente is easily every bit as glib on his feet as Sen. Obama, and without the teleprompter. Last Monday afternoon, I dropped back into his office while Celente was doing a radio interview with someone at 1610 AM in Pensacola, Fla., and heard virtually the same spiel he had given me an hour earlier, with minor variations in response to the business orientation of the interviewer, who was of course asking how to profit off the upcoming Doomsday scenario. “I believe gold prices are going to escalate way above $1,000 an ounce in the near term, and probably hit about $2,000 an ounce if not more,” says Celente, sitting behind a computer with nothing on it but a goofy screensaver. “Because, adjusted for inflation the gold price right now is about $860 an ounce. It should be around $2,000. And having said that, I began my career in D.C.; I began tracking and forecasting trends in the late 1970s, and I started buying into gold when the Iranian crisis broke out. I realized that current events form future trends, so I speculated that gold and oil futures would go up. And we’re saying the same thing now about gold futures.”

Garbage in, garbage out

During an interview of an hour and a half, Celente was personable and relentlessly engaging on any topic I brought up. He’s a music buff, and wants to install a house band of young players in Zizi’s, to play classic jump-style blues from the ’40s and early ’50s on the donated drums and a nice-sounding Steinway spinet. He’s not just a doom-and-gloom prophet, but espouses a reasonable-sounding agenda for making things right, including an emphasis on quality over quantity. “Slim down, America. Cut the fat,” he chides the Pensacola radio audience. “Cut the fat out of the budget, cut the fat out of your diets, and really go back to small. Smaller in every way. Buy local. Build quality, and support local in every way you can. That goes for food as well. Microfarms. A great opportunity for investment; people are looking for higher quality product.”
“I’m talking to you now from Kingston, New York,” he says, giving props to his adopted home base. “It was the former capital of New York State in the Revolutionary days. And I’m in this beautiful, beautiful local community right off the most historic four corners in these United States; the only place where on each corner there’s a building from the 17th century made of stone. These are the kind of communities; because right out from me, there are farms. There are cheese processors, and the local farmers’ markets thrive.

“We’re in the USSA,” he continues, coining a phrase that probably won’t ever be repeated, not that he really cares. “Just like back in the days of the Soviet Union, in the USSR. They’re doing the same kind of things. When you look at the government numbers, for example, they don’t add in food – for which prices have gone up over 25 percent in the last year – and fuel – oil prices have gone up some 60 percent year to date. They don’t add those numbers into core inflation. This is criminal; it’s criminal activity. And the government is taking over the country in a lot of different ways, so people have to take steps themselves. They have to stop buying a lot of garbage that they don’t need. And here’s a country with self-storage units? This is something unique around the world; nobody’s ever heard of such a thing. So we have to start cutting back, we have to start doing a lot of smart things and becoming more locally involved. Because if a lot of people do little things collectively, big things can happen. And I believe the vacuum is so big right now; that it can be filled with anything.”

Good luck with that, Gerald. At least you’re out there trying. Me, I’m going to take that extra two Gs out of what’s left of my Roth IRA and try to score a couple of ounces of gold while there’s still time. If there’s any change from the deal I’ll run over to Gander Mountain and plunk it down on an AK-47 knockoff and a couple of 30-round clips of ammo, just in case.