The Great Depression Ahead: How in the debt crisis of 2010 to Prosper – 2012
The Great Depression Ahead: How in the debt crisis of 2010 Prosper – 2012
Description:
The first & the last economic depression that you experience in your life just ahead. The year 2009 will be the beginning of the next long winter season & the first end of the wealth in nearly any market, the era in a downturn, as most of us have never experienced. Are you aware that we have seen in our long-term stock market & economy very mountains every 40 years by generations of spending trends in the area: as in 1929, 1968, & the next at 2009? Are you aware that oil & commodity prices have peaked nearly every 30 years when, in 1920, 1951, 1980 – & the next probably around the end of 2009 into mid 2010? The three massive bubbles in the last few decades is booming – equities, property & resources – all have reached their peak & at the same time sobering. Bestselling author & renowned economist Harry S. Dent, Jr., has observed this trend for decades. Then he showed for the first time in his bestseller The Great Boom Ahead , he has analytical techniques into predict the effects of it, allow it into develop. The Great Depression Ahead explains: “The Perfect Storm ‘as oil prices high point collide with peaking generation spending trends by the year 2010, which has developed into a severe downturn in the worldwide economy & private investors. He predicts the following: • The economy appears from the subprime crisis & recession recover little into mid-2009 – “the calm before the real storm.” • stock prices start into crash again between mid & late 2009 in the second half of 2010, & finally down probably around mid-2012 – 3800-7200 Dow. • The economy enters a deep depression between mid 2010 & early 2011, probably extended from time into time in the late 2012 or mid-2013. • Asian markets down by end of 2010, along with health care, & buy the first major opportunities in equities. • Gold & precious metals appear into be, but on a hedge at first, ultimately as a collapse after the mid-to late 2010. A first major stock rally, probably between mid 2012 & mid-2017 • will follow a final end 2019/early setdback around 2020th • the next broad-based worldwide bull will be from 2035 into 2036 in 2020-2023. Conventional wisdom
investments is no longer valid, & investors at every level – from billion-dollar company into the individual merchants – must drastically re-evaluate their policies in order into survive. But in spite of the terrible news & dark predictions, there are real opportunities from the largest fire sale financial assets since the early 1930s come. Dent outlines the critical issues that our government & other vital institutions are facing, will provide long-and short-term tactics for weathering the storm. It makes recommendations that enable families, businesses, investors & private individuals manage their money properly & come on top. With the right knowledge & preparation, you can take advantage of new opportunities for wealth, rather than caught in a downward spiral take you. Your life will change for reasons beyond your control. You can never change the direction of the wind, but you can set your sails!
Rating: 
List Price: $ 16.00
Price: $ 8.99
June 29th, 2010 at 12:13 am
Review by Finance Guy for The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Debt Crisis of 2010 – 2012
Rating:
1st, Harry Dent is NOT an economist, he works with demographics. 2nd, in his last book “The Next Great Bubble Boom: How to Profit from the Greatest Boom in History: 2006-2010″ he predicted the Dow to be 40,000 in 2009. You call that spot on?? Is that just a finer detail?? Was 2006 the start of the Greatest Boom in History as the title indicates? Harry Dent is very good at putting quotes in books and his newsletters that he can draw on as being right no matter what happens much like a psychic reading. When he has made big calls to the extent of making it the title of a book, he was dead wrong. Both AIM and Mass Mutual once had mutual funds based on the Dent philosophy and were sub-managed by him. Both have gone bust as being some of the worst performing mutual funds in recent history. If you followed his investment advise over the last 5 years you would be flat broke by now.
June 29th, 2010 at 12:17 am
Review by Befragt for The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Debt Crisis of 2010 – 2012
Rating:
The specifics of Dent’s thesis are more than covered in other reviews, so I’ll focus on considerations that someone might want to know when trying to decide whether to buy the book or follow its advice.
First off, the book is fairly “readable.” Although Dent uses charts and graphs frequently (indeed, his methodology is to study past demographic trends to ascertain long term stock market performance), he presents his conclusions in an easy-to-follow format.
Secondly, Dent does an excellent job supporting his central thesis that demographic trends can affect economic cycles. His book provides a well-thought out argument that the US, and indeed, the world economy is going to continue to decline as the result of the deflation of three bubbles, the stock market, real estate, and commodities.
Thirdly, it appears Dent has previously made several significant contrarian predictions that have proven correct, perhaps most notably the collapse of the Japanese stock market in the late 1980′s and the tech bubble of the early 2000s. While Dent’s predictions aren’t always 100% accurate, they do appear to often hit near the mark (with the exception of his prediction that the Dow would hit 40,000, and probably a few others that I am unaware of).
One thing that I find interesting is that, using demographics, Dent not only predicts economic cycles, he explains WHY the economy behaves as it does. In this regard, I find that Dent’s use of charts and past cycles is more persuasive that many other authors who simply identify patterns and make predictions based upon them (think of the Superbowl winner predictions, skirt length, or what have you).
The major downside to the book, to me, are the fairly constant adds for “free e-mail updates” – do these e-mails include solicitations to buy Dent’s newsletter? I don’t know, but I sometimes felt like the book was a teaser to sell more stuff to me. I also felt that Dent’s free confession of mis-calling Dow 40,000 cut a couple ways – I appreciated his candor, but his post-facto rationales at points led me to wonder what might be missing from his current book. He’s certainly had his share of misses, and it brings to mind the old saying that “even a broken clock is right twice a day.”
Anyone considering this book might also want to review behavioral finance – the notion of “availability error” (viewing current events through superficially similar previous events) and “confirmation bias” (we observe events that confirm our hypotheses). Behavioral psychologists note that the use of so-called judgmental heuristics (shortcuts to manage large amount of information) can make assessments of market odds difficult. I can’t say whether Dent’s predictions suffer from any of these flaws, but readers may wish to consider books like Taleb’s “The Black Swan” (one key point being humans see patterns where there are none), Paulos’ “A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market” (overview of behavioral psychology) or even Dreman’s “Contrarian Investment Strategies: the Next Generation” (extensive discussion of pattern-seeking) before committing their assets as suggested in Dent’s book. This is not to criticize the book itself, but simply to suggest that as with anything that purports to predict the future, readers should go in with their eyes open.
I can’t say that I’d follow Dent’s stategies for investing, but the book at least made me think about how demographics could affect the economy. For that, I’d say its a decent read.
June 29th, 2010 at 12:48 am
Review by Professor Donald Mitchell for The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Debt Crisis of 2010 – 2012
Rating:
The main reason to read The Great Depression Ahead is to see the most persuasive case that can be made for an extended economic decline in the United States and other developed countries. After understanding that case, you’ll be in a better position to make decisions that will leave you better off regardless if the economy recovers quickly or keeps sliding down for several years (as it did in the early 1930s). Mr. Dent is better than most forecasters for this purpose because he provides lots of documentation for why he develops the scenario forecasts that he does.
What’s the essence of the case he’s making?
1. Developed countries are facing many years when there will be declining numbers of people in their peak spending years.
2. A multi-decade commodity price cycle is about to peak to be followed by lower prices.
3. The burst bubble in real estate will be with us for some time, and prices will fall further and longer than most people expect.
4. There are no new innovations waiting in the wings to drive economic growth forward.
He takes that scenario and develops investing, business, and personal financial planning solutions over the next century.
The essence of the advice is to play it safe for now by being in short-term Treasuries and to later switch into Treasury bonds after interest rates rise a lot (expecting that the bond prices will soar as the yields once again fall to near zero). If you can sell your house now, sell it and rent. If you can sell your business now, do it. Otherwise, play it safe, hunker down, and wait for competitors to disappear.
Economic forecasts are notoriously wrong. In fact, some forecasters “predict” the opposite of the consensus. Financial forecasts are even worse.
Mr. Dent is famous for vastly overestimating how much the stock market would climb in the 2000s period. In this book he explains what he missed (commodity and real estate inflation coupled with unsettled world conditions due to terrorism and the U.S. trying to stamp out terrorism is unlikely places like Iraq).
He repeats and updates all the graphs you saw in earlier books and adds some new ones. He has so many cycles that I wasn’t quite sure how he puts them all together. He offers free updates on this book’s forecasts via an address on his Web site.
I’m pretty pessimistic about the economy and the financial markets over the next 18 months, but I can see that Mr. Dent is much more pessimistic than I am. He wrote this book before the U.S. and other governments began spending over $10 trillion to prop up the economy. As we saw in the second quarter of 2008, the government can spend enough to prop up the economy for a few months. There seems to be a will by government leaders to spend another $10-20 trillion in this cause. Since you and I will pay the bill, I can see why they are enthusiastic. Otherwise, everyone will want to kick them out of office as the economy sags and stays down.
Don’t take the book seriously. Learn from the assumptions, keep your eyes open, retain lots of cash in safe places, and look for terrific bargains.
June 29th, 2010 at 12:53 am
Review by Jake Gay for The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Debt Crisis of 2010 – 2012
Rating:
This is not a book for the ages, i.e. this book will not be read at all ten years from now. But even as for reading it in the present, this book pretends to be an exhaustive summary of today’s illness rather than what it actually is: amongst other things, a play to get scared folk, wannabe financiers and wannabe real-estate types to shell out the cash to subscribe to Harry Dent’s newsletter.
The only positive about this book is that if you are completely ignorant, then this book has some information. But it is precisely these people that are easy to lead down the wrong path. The information about demographics is illustrative and makes sense, if you can separate it from the claims and propaganda that surround it. And finally, none of this book will be new at all to those who are interested in such things, the information all being available.
This book is shilled by plenty of financial people, a head of a Federal Reserve bank and even a governor. To counter such power, let me critique it chapter by chapter:
Prologue – Sounds very reasonable. Makes the case for everything being explained by an analysis of a lot of ‘cycles’ in history, and the process of Dent’s continuing evolution of his research methods.
1.The Great Crash of late 2009-2010 – A full chapter of forecasts without any explanation why. Many of them sound reasonable, but it slowly starts to stretch your belief.
2.The Fundamental Trends that drive our economy – Contains the two cycles that make sense, a demographic cycle and a technology cycle. However, the combination of the two cycles at the end of the chapter seems wrong.
3.New Geopolitical, Commodity and Recurring cycles – Is he dreaming? This chapter seems fantastical. A civilization cycle every 5000 years?? A terrorist cycle every 8-9 years (based on 1993 WTC and 9/11, and therefore 2010!)??? Or, is that some kind of warning?
4.The Greatest Bubble ever in real estate – This seems to be his area of expertise. Combines demographics to make sense in different real estate categories.
5.Echo boomers continue to move – This chapter on migration makes sense ONLY given existing assumptions. But what if Americans cannot as many cars as they have in the past? What if oil reaches new peaks? These fundamentals will change migration trends.
6.Changing Global Demographic trends – This might be new to many people, but if you’re aware of this already, again there’s nothing new. There is an investigation of many individual countries across the world.
7.The Clustering of Risks and Returns – Seems designed to intimidate and seems out of place in a supposedly non-technical book. A clustering of various mathematical concepts and didn’t seem to have any connection (at least to me, and I don’t think I’m dumb), and the chapter ends by stating, out of the blue, that conventional investing strategies won’t work.
8.Investment, Business and Life Strategies for the great winter – This chapter has his investing ideas. Invest in bonds; How to invest each year from now on; and what to do with your business, education and healthcare in the coming years.
9.Political and Social impacts of the Great Depression – This chapter makes sense and ends with forecasts that might or might not be true.
All in all, this book sounds like a wishlist of what Dent wants to come true. But is it reliable? He states that inflation cannot happen, but what if it does. Will you lose your money? Wolves like these among the sheep make this book dangerous, which is why the book insert has the ‘Read this at your Own Risk’ disclaimer. Ultimately, the topic he is addressing is a very complex topic which needs time and effort to be understood. But there is a mass market for instant comprehension that Dent is trying to satisfy. All said and done, in the Great Depression, the financial sector will collapse from being 15% of the US economy to less than 5%, and people like Dent have to find ways and means to survive. What better than coming up with a mass-market bestseller to enrich oneself and continue doing so.
June 29th, 2010 at 1:08 am
Review by T. Church for The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Debt Crisis of 2010 – 2012
Rating:
I can’t believe this guy is back again. Just recently, I happened to see “Roaring 2000s” still sitting in my bookcase, laughed hard, and threw it in the trash. I read it back in 1999 because it was on all the bestsellers list. Everyone was talking about the Y2K and was grasping for anything that will shine a light on what’s to come. It was an interesting read, but most of his predictions did NOT come true. He said the technology of the 21st century is like the auto industry in the early 20th century, so invest in the internet and the technology now. I thank the starts I didn’t have any money back then to follow his advice. Not that I expected all his predictions to come true, no one has a crystal ball. But, Harry Dent is way off. (Dow never reached 35,000 in 2008, not 25,000, not even 15,000.) He is brilliant at making money for sure- he seems know what people want to hear at the moment and writes a book about it with an eye-catching cover, after the trend had already begun. Then He exaggerates it to seem like he is ahead of the curve. Duh, US has been in recession for over a year by the time this book comes out.
Please do not reward someone who’s feeding on your fear. If you read his previous books, you’d know that he built his wealth by selling books and not by investing.