Dr. Ravi Batra predicted all this 19 years ago.

Does anybody else here keep up with Dr. Ravi Batra? He is an economics professor at Southern Methodist University.

He wrote "The Great Depression of 1990" which predicted the collapse we're facing now, due to the policies of the Republicans since Reagan. He just thought it would happen faster than it did.

He also wrote a book called "Surviving the Great Depression of 1990" which is basically how to survive a Great Depression like our parents and grandparents did.


His webpage:
www.ravibatra.com

Check out his forecasting page:
QUOTE
Batra's Forecasting Record (from Ch 4, The Crash of the Millennium)

In 1978, to the laughter of many and the applause of a few, I wrote a book on world history and titled it The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, predicting that both systems would collapse by or around the year 2000. Thus began for me a new career, riddled with land mines and booby traps, fraught with risks as well as acclamation, of a forecaster. In spite of its manifold hazards, I have continued to remain in that profession, and the current work is no exception. I have persisted with the business of predictions and written many more books since 1978. Some prophecies have been general and some specific. Here’s a menu of the forecasts I have made in recent years:

(go to www.ravibatra.com/Forecasting.html for the rest)

panics of 1857, 1866, 1873, 1886...need I go on?

& all have the same general causes. Under our economic conditions, recessions & depressions are inevitable & dependable.

So if he didn't time it right, he didn't predict squat.

BTW, I read that book in the 80's, & waited for the big depression...that never happened.

I thought that this crash was artificially postponed by printing more money, extending more credit, and whatever else they do to make the economy look good, when the common people know that it's far worse than the talking heads will ever admit to.

Like the dot-com crash of 2000, but it was extended during the Bush II years.

And before that, even though Bill dug us out of a deficit, a whole lot of us lost our careers (mine in 1994 and I never recovered) and slipped down the economic ladder.

What do you think?

Economists have predicted 12 of the last 8 recessions.

Claiming that someone predicted the next depression but missed by two decades is like predicting that Paul Newman was going to die in 1983 and claiming they were vindicated this weekend.

Reagan's policies did lead to economic problems--runaway deficits, trade imbalance, falling wages, and unbelievable deficit and debt, etc. Congress began reversing his policies even before he left office--they passed, and he signed, six straight tax increases after his initial reckless tax cuts. They weren't enough to overcome the damage he had done, and Bush had to sign another increase. It wasn't until Clinton reversed Reaganomics that the economy began to recover, as he shifted the tax burden back towards the wealthy and away from the middle and lower classes. This freed the middle and lower classes to invest more money in their own startups, so that you saw a sudden burst of small and midsize business growth, combined with a shrinking of corporate business. The key economic trends in the 80s were mergers and hostile takeovers, but under Clinton they became about downsizing, spinoff companies, employee takeover of smaller departments, etc.

Clinton reversed Reaganomics by empowering the middle and lower income classes in America. That's why we had the growth of the 90s. It was imperfect--there was not enough growth in production, too much service-sector growth. Clinton definitely made mistakes by allowing the Republicans to continue deregulation, and by not responding to the increasing amount of personal debt.

But overall Clinton's policies interrupted Reagan's, and short-circuited the depression Reaganomics had been heading us towards.

The problem is, Bush, and even moreso, Cheney, revived Reagan's policies, took deregulation to unfathomable levels, and did not reign in the problems as they began to emerge. Reagan had a Democratic Congress force tax increases on him to reduce his deficit, but even so, Reagan saw that the deficit was a problem. Bush neither had a Democratic Congress to limit his idiocy, nor the ability to understand what was happening.

Today's issues are not the same problems that Reagan created. They have the same source, but they were interruped in the 90s, and good government could have prevented what's happening now. Sadly, the good government part was stolen by us by a Supreme Court ruling on December 12th, 2000.

It's going to get a lot worse
they can't stop it