Gerald Celente

Infowars

June 30, 2009

Empire America is on the verge of collapse. Its social, economic and political systems are failed and failing, observes Trends Research Institute Director, Gerald Celente, in the Summer Trends Journal.

“The measures taken by successive governments to save the politically corrupt, morally bankrupt, physically decrepit giant from collapse have served to only hasten its demise. While the decline has been decades in the making, the acceleration of ruinous policies under the current Administration is leading the United States — and much of the world — to the point of no return,” says Celente.

The “green shoots” sighted by Field Marshall Bernanke this past Spring were a mirage. The 2010 economic “recovery” predicted by the same experts, authorities and financial boy scouts and cheerleaders who didn’t see the economic crisis coming is pure delusion.

By 2012, even those in denial and still clinging to hope will be forced to face the truth. It will be called “Obamageddon” in America. The rest of the world will call it “The Greatest Depression.”

We provide the hard data and indisputable facts that support our forecast for an unsettling future. There will be opportunities to seize and measures to take to withstand, and even profit in the increasingly turbulent times.

Laura Martin
Media Relations

The Trends Research Institute

lmartin@trendsresearch.com

www.trendsresearch.com

May 15, 2009 -  The biggest financial bubble in history is being inflated in plain sight. This is the Mother of All Bubbles, and when it explodes, it will signal the end to the boom/bust cycle that has characterized economic activity throughout the developed world. Either unwilling or unable to call the bubble by its proper name, the media, Washington, and Wall Street describe the stupendous government expenditures on rescue packages, stimulus plans, buyouts, and takeovers as emergency measures needed to salvage the severely damaged economy.

All of this terminology is econo-jargon. It’s like calling torture “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Washington is inflating the biggest bubble ever: the Bailout Bubble. This is much bigger than the Dot-com and Real Estate bubbles which hit speculators, investors, and financiers the hardest. However destructive the effects of these busts on employment, savings and productivity, the Free Market Capitalist framework was left intact. But when the Bailout Bubble explodes, the system goes with it.

The economic framework of the United States has been restructured. Federal interventionist policies have given the government equity stakes, executive powers and management control of what was once private enterprise. To finance these buyouts, rescue and stimulus packages – instead of letting failed businesses fail and bankrupt banks and bandit brokerages go bankrupt – trillions of dollars are being injected into the stricken economy.

Phantom dollars, printed out of thin air, backed by nothing … and producing next to nothing … defines the Bailout Bubble. Just as with the other bubbles, so too will this one burst. But unlike Dot-com and Real Estate, when the Bailout Bubble pops, neither the President nor the Federal Reserve will have the fiscal fixes or monetary policies available to inflate another. With no more massive economic bubbles left to blow up, they’ll set their sights on bigger targets. Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war. Since the Bailout Bubble is neither called nor recognized as a bubble, its sudden and spectacular explosion will create chaos. A panicked public will readily accept any Washington/Wall Street/Main Stream Media alibi that shifts the blame for the catastrophe away from the policy makers and onto some scapegoat.

At this time we are not forecasting a war. However, the trends in play are ominous. While we cannot pinpoint precisely when the Bailout Bubble will burst, we are certain it will. When it does, it should be understood that a major war could follow.

Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”

From Lew Rockwell.

The merger of corporate and government powers in modern America is plain and simple fascism, believes Gerald Celente, the founder of the Trends Research Institute and publisher of Trends Journal.

Celente takes an in-depth look at what AIG and Goldman Sachs really are and the people behind them; explains the policies of the Obama’s administration, and the moral basis for a forthcoming new American Revolution.

RT: I’d like to begin by talking about the Treasury department. They’ve decided to extend bailout funds to a number of struggling life insurance policies. This is in addition to the auto industry and the banks. Do you think Americans are aware of what’s going on?

G.C.: They know about it, it’s a new trend. America is going from what used to be the major capitalistic country in the world of free market – a crusader – into what Mussolini would have called fascism: the merger of state and corporate powers. So it is not socialism as people believe, it is socialism’s egalitarianism. It’s not communism where the state controls monopolies – it’s fascism, plain and simple. The merger of corporate and government powers. State-controlled capitalism is called fascism, and fascism has come to America in broad daylight. But they’re feeding them it in little bits and pieces. First AIG was too big to fail. Mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were too big to fail. Banks too big to fail and auto companies. And now we give money to the people that make the auto parts. And now there’s talk about the technology companies, wanting their piece of the action. The merger of state and government is called fascism. Take it from Mussolini; he knew a thing or two about it.

RT: What can Americans do if they are opposed to the road that government officials are bringing them down?

G.C.: The people don’t really have a choice, there is no ballot box. I’m of Italian descent and I’ve heard enough of mafia stories for the rest of my life. If you want to look at a mafia, you can call it a republican and democratic party. And if you want to look at the two families, the heads of the mafia, all you have to do is to look at the Bushes and the Clintons. They’ve been running the show now for some 24 years. We heard about Obama who is going to bring in ‘change’. A change you could believe in if he is dumb, stupid and blind. Look who he’s brought in as his chief policy makers. Retreads from the old Clinton administration. It’s a two-headed one-party system. So it’s very difficult for the people to vote in a new administration that isn’t part of the old one.

RT: Can you tell me one thing that you like about President Obama?

G.C.: In the Trends Journal, the top trends of 2009, one of our trends was that people are going to be putting out ‘recession gardens’. And now as we see the Obamas, they are planting their own garden, and that trend is taking hold. So he is doing that in positive ways, he’s bringing an element of dignity back to society. Those are positives. But now let me look at whether it’s true or the hypocrisy. So, they are talking about planting their own gardens. And they are talking about buying local. Oh, all that is wonderful, but on the other side of the coin they are pushing genetically modified foods while they’re eating organic. So it’s like ‘let them eat Frankenfoods’ – this is the message. So I see hypocrisy at every level. When they show me truth and justice, and the real American way – then I’ll believe.

RT: If I revert to our previous interview, I asked you – “what kind of revolution do you think would happen and when, and why would it happen?” and you said there would be a tax revolt. And now we are hearing more and more about these ‘tea parties’. What do you make of that? Do you think that that’s just the first action and many actions to follow from the American public?

G.C.: There is going to be a lot more. This is just a beginning. As a Bronx boy, my saying is: ‘when people lose everything and they have nothing left to lose – they lose it’.

You’re gonna start see people taking to the streets, like they do in other countries. People have had it, they are fed up. They can’t afford it anymore. Look at what is going on. Ten major states are raising taxes again as people are losing their jobs, income is going down, they are losing their pensions, they are losing their investments – and the government is saying: more taxes, more taxes, more taxes…

At the same time, what’s happening is, on the top, they are changing the regulations so the thieves could steal more, just as they did with the new banking act. They call it mark-to-market. So it is now allowing them to do rather than putting the real loss of their assets – the toxic assets that they are holding – they are letting them make up what they want! Come up with fictitious numbers and you are going to start seeing ‘bank stocks going up again’.

It is fake, and what they are doing is they’re changing the regulations on the top so the big thieves could steal more, while they clamping down on the little people – and the little people have had it.

RT: These stimulus plans, both with former President Bush and with President Obama, were rushed through so quickly and you make a comparison to the way that the US launched the War on Iraq with the same urgency of the plans.

G.C.: They push it through so that people are kept off guard – they put fear into the people’s hearts. Remember the mushroom cloud that was going to explode if we did not do it very quickly with Iraq? And remember the financial system was going to collapse if we didn’t save AIG? And who ever knew the AIG was, to begin with?! “What’s an AIG?! I’ve never heard of one before!” most people would say.

When the AIG plan was rushed through, the only person outside of the Federal Reserve and Washington to sit on that AIG bailout was Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs got $13 billion of taxpayer money so that they wouldn’t take the loss of the AIG bailout because they bet bad with AIG.

And who was the Treasury Secretary at the time? Former CEO of Goldman Sachs Henry Paulson. Oh, and who did Obama bring in to run AIG now for the government? Ed Liddy. And where is Ed Liddy from? Goldman Sachs. The fix is in, the game is rigged. Forget about calling this ‘government’, Wall Street has hijacked Washington.

RT: So now what?

G.C.: We need a revolution. And we’re going to talk about that more in the future. And we’re going to be announcing our plans for the revolution in the coming weeks. And it is going to be much greater than the tea parties or the tax revolts.

My morality, the way I was raised, there are two things in the moral code that are against everything that I was taught. The first is that you don’t kill innocent people, and the US is involved in killing innocent people both in Iraq and Afghanistan. The facts speak for themselves. It has been proven that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, nor ties to Al-Qaeda. Yet the US is still waging war in Iraq. Number two, this whole thing about Afghanistan, taking over the country for whatever reasons, and the Russians know it even better than the Americans, and the English knew it before the Russians – this has been going on and on. The Afghani people have done nothing to the Americans. And now President Obama has sent another 21,000 troops into Afghanistan. So, killing innocent people is against my morality.

The second part of the revolution, why we are calling for revolution is that we are getting robbed in broad daylight. The numbers and facts we have discussed speak for themselves. They’re pick-pocketing the little people to pay off the big guys. This is against everything that has ever been taught to us in this country growing up as a free market society. It’s fascism.

RT: When somebody calls you a gloom-and-doomer, somebody that’s scaring the public… what is your response to that?

G.C.: My response is suppose you go to a doctor as if you feel that something is really wrong with you and the doctor gives you a diagnosis and this diagnosis is maybe cancer. Do you call the doctor a gloom-and-doomer? It’s the fact, people better grow up. The ship has hit the iceberg and it’s sinking.

We are telling people, just as the doctor would tell a patient, “Look, there are ways out of it but first we have to recognize what the disease is. And then we are going to have to be very inventive about trying to attack it in a number of different ways. We could go through complementary medicine, we could go through traditional… we could even go through a combination of things.” But you respect what the doctor is saying, and you don’t call him a gloom-and-doomer. It is a childish response that people have that want to believe that they have a new leader, and that the new leader would lead them down the yellow brick road of happiness. Rather than understanding that there is nobody behind the curtain. It’s the Wizard of Oz. They’d better grow up; nobody is going to save them.

So, we put out the information, we’re saying: “This is the direction things are going in. This is where we believe they are going to end up. Here are some strategies to consider so you don’t go down with the ship.”

From Russia Today.

The following interview from Russia Today with Gerald Celente is shocking but totally down to earth. Open your eyes… In 2009 we’re going to see the worst economic collapse ever, the ‘Greatest Depression’, says Gerald Celente, U.S. trend forecaster. He believes it’s going to be very violent in the U.S., including there being a tax revolt.

The Worst Economic Collapse Ever

RT: The fragile U.S. economy has been met with bank bailouts and stimulus plans. So what’s to come in 2009? Joining me now to answer that question is Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute. Thank you for joining me.

Gerald Celente: My pleasure.

RT: How would you define the economic trend that you have forecasted for 2009?

G.C.: We’re going to see the economic collapse the likes of which the world has never seen before. It’s not only in the United States; it’s going global. At the end of 2008 we saw Christmas retail sales: women’s apparel down 23%; home furnishings and electronics off 27%; luxury items down 35%. These are Depression Era collapses. We saw major bankruptcies, such as retailers Circuit City and Linens and Things. One bankruptcy after another. Then we saw store closings. Starbucks, Home D&D Power and down the line.

The question becomes who is going to take all of the vacant retail space? Who is going to rent it? The answer is – nobody. Now we look at the financial collapse in 2008, we saw the Merrill Lynch mob go under the bed and the Lehman boys went bankrupt. You saw bond companies, brokerage firms, and banks go belly up. Who is going to rent all the vacant commercial business space that they used to occupy? The answer is – nobody. The commercial real estate collapse that’s going to happen in 2009 is going to dwarf the residential real estate collapse.

RT: You use the Great Depression as an analogy, as a comparison. During the Great Depression unemployment was 25%. Now it has increased, it’s I think over 7.2. Is that number going to get much, much bigger?

G.C.: We have to look at the real number. There are two sets of books that the government keeps. When they measure up unemployment they don’t add in the people who are no longer looking for jobs because they have become discouraged since they cannot find employment after looking so long. And they don’t include part-time workers. When you put that number into it, the number is 13.7%. And that’s a government number. And this is just beginning. And again, current events form future trends.

What did we see? We saw in one day some 61,000 jobs evaporate off the map. You’re going to see Great Depression numbers. Because, as I mentioned, with this commercial real estate collapse, all of these retail stores closing, like Starbucks and Macy’s, you go down the line. You look not only at people who work for these places that no longer have jobs, but how about all the supportive industries – the advertising, the manufacturers, the products. They’re going to be laying off people as well. We’re going to see Great Depression numbers. In that effect, this is going to be worse than the Great Depression.

RT: What are we going to see happening to the society, to people’s day-to-day lives in terms of how they treat one another, how they behave, crime?

G.C.: When I say it’s going to be worse than the Great Depression, we call it the Greatest Depression. By the way, to be using 1930s models to get the U.S. out of this is really stupid. Back then when we first crashed most people didn’t have homes. There was no such thing as home equity loan. And back then, people didn’t have credit cards. The consumer wasn’t 14 trillion dollars in debt. We had a manufacturing base that built the world out of the Great Depression following World War Two. We no longer have that.

Now people are at the edge. They’re stressed out. Look, the Americans are the most depressed nation on the world already. They take more antidepressant drugs than anybody, plus the other kinds of drugs that they are taking. You’re going to see crime levels in America that are going to rival the third world. Welcome Mexico City. You’re going to start seeing people being kidnapped in this country like they do in other underdeveloped nations. So it’s going to be very violent in America.

RT: You’re not exaggerating?

G.C.: I’m not exaggerating, the facts are there. I have a saying: when people lose everything and they have nothing to lose, they lose it. You’re going to see people saying, off with their heads. There’s going to be another revolution in this country.

RT: When will this revolution that you have forecasted in your Trends journal happen and what will ignite it?

G.C.: It’s going to be a tax revolt. We’re going to start seeing a tax revolt in the United States. People are one job away from losing everything. We’re seeing more and more closures, people are being laid off. People are stretched to the limits. And what do they do in New York State? Some130 new taxes are being proposed, they’re raising sales taxes. There’s going to be a tax revolt in this country from property taxes first and school taxes second. That’s what we’re going to see start to happen.

RT: Do you feel people are not hopeful that Obama will make a difference?

G.C.: People are hopeful, they are desperate and they are fearful. And they’ll hang on to anything. Let’s look at the facts. A man of change, who did he bring into Washington? You know they say by their deeds you shall know them. Let’s look at his Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, former Robert Rubin from the Clinton administration, the former president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Change? How about Larry Summers, the former Clinton Secretary of Treasury? I mean, I’ve been around a long time. I never remember a newly elected president bringing in basically the national security team from the last administration who happen to be from another party.

RT: Do you not think Obama’s different in any way?

G.C.: By their deeds you shall know them! If I bring in a baseball hitter that strikes out every time and I want him to play in the World Series is he going to hit the ball over the fence? They brought in Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner. Look at the crew. Look who they are. They’re strike out artists, every one of them. The only thing that they know how to do is not to get their finger nails dirty.

RT: There was a sentence in your report, the Trends Journal, that really caught my attention. You wrote: ‘On 9/11, those who listened to the authorities and returned to their offices went down with the towers.’ So are you saying that Americans should not be listening to the officials who are saying the Stimulus Plans are going to make everything better? Is that the analogy?

G.C.: Read my lips. No new taxes. I didn’t have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinski.
I smoked but I didn’t inhale. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda. Why would anybody believe these people?

RT: So what are Americans supposed to do if they’re not supposed to trust their leaders?

G.C.: Personally, I buy gold. And I’ve been talking about gold since the Trends Journal 2001. We peg the bottom and we said it would start going up at 275. Number two, you don’t spend a dime you don’t need to spend.

RT: What would be the good jobs to benefit from in this year?

G.C.: Anything having to do with health. Anything. It’s going to be a growth industry. And fortunately a lot of them are going to pay a lot of money in that field because a lot of that is going to be care for the elderly. And the other thing really is anything having to do with conservation engineers, anything that’s going to prove technologically sound and smart to save money and to make money.

RT: What about geopolitics, what trends are we going to see in terms of the relationships between the United States and the rest of the world?

G.C.: Well the rest of the world is very hopeful, using the word ‘hope’, with the Obama administration. And again, we’re going to have to see what transpires, but so far, and again, by their deeds you shall know them.

Obama, when he first started to run, he was going to be out of Iraq. As soon as he became president he was going to start bringing soldiers home. Now they won’t be out for 16 months and now their reports say they’re going to bring upwards of 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He was also talking about preventive strikes in Pakistan. So it really doesn’t look like it’s going to be much of a smoothing of geopolitical relations.

The one factor we’re looking at, at a time that could only be the worst time for it to happen, is what’s going on in the Middle East, in the Israel-Gaza war. Israel, as they said, they were trying to do as the reports have come out, if they attack Iran at any level, it will begin World War Three. Because if this war spreads beyond Gaza, it’s going to inflame the Middle East. It can cause an oil crisis as we saw in 1973, that’s what ended the Arab-Israeli war when they embargoed oil going into the U.S. That’s our major concern. We’re also seeing, and we’re going to wonder, if Obama continues with putting the so-called missile defense shield in Poland and in Czech Republic in Eastern Europe and if they keep pushing more and more into Georgia. If that keeps happening we’re going to see a reignition of the Cold War.

RT: You have been trend casting since 1980, more than two decades. How do you compile your information and why do you believe you’ve been so spot-on most of the time?

G.C.: Current events form future trends. You can see what’s going on. A great scholar said, “In today already walks tomorrow.” So we say current events form future trends. But when people look at the trends, they colour them or shade them with their own ideology, their own beliefs. It’s what they want, what they hope for, what they wish for.

I’m a political atheist. I look at things for the way they are, not the way I want them to be. I don’t colour them or try to change them because of an ideology. The other major factor that we do differently at Trends Research Institute than anywhere else is we look at over 300 different categories on a global basis. So we’re looking at economics, we’re looking at politics, we’re looking at changes in the family, we’re looking at geopolitics. We’re making connections between different fields continually.

RT: How can America get out of the situation?

G.C.: All you have to do is to look back to the 1990s when America entered into a recession. We had 7.2 unemployment rate in 1993. What got the U.S. out of the 1990s recession was something called the ‘internet revolution’ that had a productive capacity. Products were invented, designed, manufactured, marketed and serviced. So you’re asking about new jobs, ask about alternative energies. Anything that’s going to advance the U.S. into the 21st century in an intelligent way. That’s where the job opportunities are going to be.

RT: Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute, thank you very much for taking time to speak with us.

G.C.: My pleasure.