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On this week's broadcast, Christian economist Jerry Robinson interviews top trend researcher, Gerald Celente.
Gerald Celente joins Jerry Robinson to discuss the ten most important trends he sees on the horizon this year. Below is the full transcript of the interview.
Jerry Robinson, Host: Joining us on the line today is the founder and director of Trends Research Institute and publisher of the Trends Journal. He’s also a friend of the show, and his name is Gerald Celente. Gerald, it’s great to have you back as a guest on Follow The Money Radio.
Gerald Celente: Thank you for having me back on, Jerry.
JR: It’s great to have you back. I was looking over your first 2016 issue of the Trends Journal which you put out regularly, and in it, you discuss the top ten trends that you see for this year. I was fascinated by them, as always. You’ve been doing this since 1980 and have had a lot of influence on many, many people. You have a great number of videos on YouTube, and people certainly can follow your work and see how you’re forecasts have turned out. Let’s start with the very first one that I noticed here, and that is that you expect, in 2016, to see global recession and a depression this year. Talk to us about that.
GC: Well, what’s the name of this show? Follow The Money, right? So, let’s follow the money. Let’s start with that. If you look at the European bank stocks, they’ve plunged 24% in the first six weeks of this year. That’s 24%. Follow the money and look at the indices in the United States on the banking sector. For the first six weeks, they were touching bear territory. Then, you look at how the markets reversed course since Friday. What happened? Well, Jamie Dimon over here in the States, bought back $26 million of JPMorgan Chase stocks.
JR: Yes, it’s the same thing they always do. Buffet came out back in 2009 and bought stocks. Maybe it was 2008. It’s kind of the same play, isn’t it?
GC: Well, yes and no, in the sense that this is Jamie Dimon’s company. He’s the CEO. This is like the old carnival shows when you had a snake oil salesman. “I drink this stuff, so step right up and have a bottle. Buy one.” And, then you look at what else happened. Over in the Eurozone, as I mentioned, you’re looking at the European bank stocks plunging 24%. All of a sudden, Deutsche Bank comes out and says, you know, we’re going to buy back $5.4 billion of our bonds. So what? It’s just one gig like that after another. Spain’s Santander Bank is buying back their own stock to show confidence as well. Confidence? Where does the word “confidence” come from? Confidence men, con game, follow the money. The banks are in trouble, and they’re doing everything they can to push the prices back up. They are extended far beyond what they’re telling us because when you look at the trends, all things are connected. Now, of course, oil prices are bouncing back because the Saudis and Iraqis and Russians are going to hold back on production levels. Well, that’s just oil, and that’s only part of the story because commodity prices on the whole, according to the Bloomberg Commodity Index, are down to 1991 levels. And so, what we’re talking about here is a global slowdown. The banks are exposed in so many different ways. It’s not only in the oil fields, and if you just take oil and mining at the junk bond level in the United States, it’s almost 20% of the junk bonds in those two fields. Now, look at all the interrelated fields like transportation. They’re not moving the stuff like they used to. Look at all the companies that support them. So, the banks are over exposed globally. Oh, and I forgot to mention those wonderful emerging markets that are now submerging because a lot of them were resource rich, and as you well know, what boosted the emerging markets was all that quantitative easing, that cheap dough flowing out of the United States into the emerging markets. The hot money. So, the banks loaned money not only to corporations but to countries. Now, as their commodity prices are collapsing, they’re selling less of their products and they have to pay back those loans in dollars. Are they going to pay it back? So, now you’re even seeing, as we speak, Saudi debt being downgraded. What a surprise! Some 90% of Saudi revenue comes from oil. You can go around the world and start looking at Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, one after another,Angola, Nigeria, Congo, South Africa. Look at the Rand. It’s at all time lows against the dollar.
JR: I’ve got to tell you, Gerald, I’ve been watching these markets now for 17 years. I’ve been trading the markets for 17 years. Here on our website, ftmdaily.com, we actually track 40 different global markets. We attach a red, yellow, or green to them to make it real simple, based upon the trend. Is the market up? Is the market down? What’s happening? I can not recall, Gerald, a time whenever nearly every single market we track is flashing a red signal, and they have been now for some time indicating this thing is pretty well advanced. We’re already into it. Do you believe that 2016 is the year that people lose faith in money printing as the solution, or do you think that the Fed is going to pull something else out of its hat? What do you expect from the Fed in 2016?
GC: Let’s look again at why the markets are going up. You take China, for example. They’re on holiday for the new year. So after losing 47% since their high last year, the markets open up on the good news that Chinese exports fell 11.2% and imports plunged almost 20%. I mean, those are catastrophic numbers, but the markets go up. To answer your question, why? Well, the People’s Bank of China said they’re coming out with some more schemes to boost the market. The same thing is happening in Japan. The Nikkei falls back into bear territory getting bashed after they come out January 29th with their negative interest rates scam. Why did the markets go up? You don’t have to believe me. You can read it whether it’s in the New York Times, Financial Times, or Wall Street Journal. It’s because of optimism that the Bank of Japan will now institute another round of stimulus. So, let’s go back to the States. If they blew that monetary bazooka over there with abenomics twice, and it shot blanks, how is the third round going to work? Negative interest rates aren’t working. They’re out of it. They’re going to try anything. Then you heard Mario Draghi come out for the third time in as many weeks promising more stimulus. So everything, Jerry, that used to be standard market procedures, true price discovery, economy’s GDP growth being related to stock market growth, is now distorted.
JR: Yes, it’s all distorted. I can’t even tell where we are in the business cycle anymore. It used to be fairly simple, fairly straightforward. Everything is so distorted now that you don’t even know where the baseline is. Let’s move on here and talk about war because that’s something that has been a theme of your work for some time, Gerald. You’ve been talking about war. You see war coming, World War III or whatever we want to call it. As we look out and we see the tensions in the Middle East. We see the tension, of course, in Europe, as the Middle East is spilling over into it. Russia, NATO, I mean there’s all kinds of flash points. What do you think will be the initial spark for this war that you envision, possibly beginning this year, and is it something that has already occurred, or do you think it’s something that’s going to happen? What do you think?
GC: It’s already occurred, and where it’s going to spill out is very hard to tell. There are so many wild cards in the deck. For example, just starting in the Middle East, the Saudis are slaughtering the people in Yemen. It’s a crisis, according to the UN. People are starving. And, by the way, they announced they were going to war against Yemen at our capitol in Washington, D.C. on March 26th of last year. And, of course, we are their allies. Yemen didn’t do anything to Saudi Arabia other than overthrow the dictator that followed the last dictator that was in for 33 years, and they want to put back in their dictator, so they’re destroying the country. Now, at the same time, Saudi Arabia just got downgraded. Where do most of the Yemenis in Saudi Arabia live and work? That’s in the eastern fields where all their oilfields are along with the Shia, whose cleric they beheaded at the start of the new year. So, Saudi Arabia could be that place that explodes. The other areas are, of course, in Syria, in Israel, and in the continuation of the destruction of Libya brought to us by the United States of America, France, and the UK. In the United States, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Powers, and Susan Rice insist Gaddafi has to go. So, now they have destroyed that joint that Gaddafi kept under control, terrorists are breeding there, and the migrant crisis out of Africa with all of those resource rich countries going broke, are now flooding into Europe. Then, of course, the Afghan war is building up again, the Iraq war is building up again. Where will it explode? I’m going to say that it doesn’t have to explode in one spot. What could happen is there could be a “terrorist strike”, false flag or real, that sets nations to war. You saw it with 9-11, and now you’ll see it happen in spades, if it happens again. The one to keep the eye on right now is what’s going on in Ukraine. You know, we have a distorted media that says that Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia did not invade Ukraine, and Russia did not invade Crimea. They’ve been in Crimea longer than America’s been a country, and they have a deal to use those ports over there. They had an election, like it or not, just like they did in Kosovo, and the people said “no” we don’t want to be a part of this anymore. But, the Russians did not invade eastern Ukraine. All they do is keep coming out and saying that it’s 10,000 or 50,000 tanks. Could you show me a photo? In this world of selfies? No, but here’s what I’m saying is the United States overthrew that government of Vidacovich, like them or not. Now, the IMF has come out and said the Poroshenko government, which the United States installed, is corrupt, and they have to straighten it out because they’re not going to get any more money. Russia, today, just brought them to court. They own $3 billion in bond payments that they refuse to pay. I believe, and I say this all the time, when all else fails, they take you to war. Western Ukraine is going to heat up the war with the Eastern Ukraine Russian separatists. And, NATO has already announced that they’re building up more troop power in eastern Europe. And the United States has just quadrupled the budget for that to support NATO. So, those are the hot spots, but right now, I think the next big news is going to be a re-flare up of Ukraine.
JR: You’re listening to the voice of Gerald Celente. He is the founder and director of the Trends Research Institute and the publisher of the Trends Journal. We’re talking about his ten top trends for 2016. We’ve talked about a couple here, Gerald. Another one is this concept that you just continue to see migrants, human beings on the move. The amount of migration that is occurring now is just simply epic when we go back and look throughout time. I’m really curious, from your perspective as a trends researcher on this. Since the beginning of the European Union, there have been two warring philosophies on underlying its growth, those who say it should be wide, and those who say that the European Union should be deep. Some think that the European Union should accept and embrace any country in the region and then sort out all the details later. That’s kind of what they did. Others believe that the European Union should have expanded at a much slower rate with a focus on forging deeper roots before moving on and accepting and embracing more nations. So, my question is, is it conceivable that one current European solution to the refugee crisis could be greater economic integration with the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, either through existing agreements like the Mediterranean Union that already exists now, or the European Neighborhood Policy, or the Barcelona Process, could we see that or even new proposals? One way to eradicate terrorism, of course, is to unleash the animal spirits in the free market, some argue. Could Europe move in that direction? Could we see further integration between the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Europe as a result of this?
GC: I don’t believe so and there are a number of reasons. First of all, no one that I hear in the major media or with the politicians, is talking about who caused the refugee crisis. It couldn’t have been the United States destroying Iraq, killing over a million people, blowing Afghanistan to smithereens, the Nobel Peace prize winner, Obama, destroying Libya, or what’s going on in Syria with over 4 million refugees. Assad has to go. So, no one’s talking about that. You can go back to our Trends Journal. We referenced it in the new edition that just came out, in the 2011 Spring edition, we had “The Great Migration” as one of the stories. Remember, this is 2011. Two months after this, Obama launched the war, excuse me, the humanitarian mission, I have to be politically correct, against Libya. The Italian Interior Minister is complaining that over half a million refugees were flooding out of Libya. This is 2011, totally off the radar. The German Interior Minister said Italy is a big place. “You can take them in,” to which the Italian Minister replied, “It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company.” What we’re going to start to see with the Schengen Agreement that allows going between European Zone countries with no passport, a change. This could be the beginning of the breakup of the European Union. Just as you’re seeing in the States with immigration being a big issue, that issue in Europe with the migrants and the refugees is big as well. To distinguish between the two, migrants and refugees, migrants are the ones leaving because of all these commodity prices collapsing and corrupt governments going down, whether it’s South Africa, Congo, Algeria, Nigeria, all these resource rich nations. It’s going to happen from Argentina to Mexico. Look at the Mexican peso, it’s down 30% against the dollar as oil prices keep going down. That’s the migration trend, people leaving to find work. The refugee trend is because of the wars. The combination of those two in Europe, they can’t handle it. You’re going to see more and more nationalistic parties, and I believe, more of a breakup of the European Union. I think this is just the beginning of it. To take your point, yes, it would be intelligent for the Western powers to say, “Look, we need peace in the Middle East. How are we going to rebuild these countries?” But, just think about this, Jerry. The United States has spent more money, accounting for inflation, to rebuild Afghanistan than we did with the Marshall Plan after World War II, and it’s a total failure.
JR: It’s outrageous. And, you know what I like about you, Gerald, is the fact that you have gone on record and said that you are a political atheist. I think that’s what many people are waking up to, the fact that this Republican versus Democratic charade is really nothing but a shell game. It really betrays the intelligence of people. Of course, that’s assuming that you believe that there’s much intelligence left in the country with the dumbing down of the public school system and all this. Let’s move on to a final trend because I know that we are running out of time, and I want to encourage folks that if you want to get all of these trends, be sure to pick up a copy of the Trends Journal. You can pick it up online at Gerald’s website which is trendsresearch.com. Right there you can pick up a copy of the Trends Journal. Gerald, one more trend before we’ve got to go, and I think it’s fitting. The presidential reality show, what you call the greatest freak show on Earth. My wife and I have been watching this. It seems that every single four years, you have to bear down, really take a few more antacids, maybe try to tape some hair to your head so that it doesn’t fall out. It’s a terrible time of year or a terrible time of the calendar to have to deal with this. Presidential elections have become so cumbersome. It lasts forever. You’re making some predictions, though.
GC: Well, we actually own the trademark, “Presidential Reality Show.” It was the cover of the Spring 2015 Trends Journal, and that was before a true reality show champion got into it, Donald Trump. So, at that time, we had said that barring a pay scandal about the dough the Clinton’s got, the pay for favors scandal, if they could escape that, particularly, Hillary should be ok. Bernie Sanders, Wall Street public enemy number one, has tied Hillary Clinton into it. But it’s bigger than that. It’s all that dough that flowed in from foreign countries when she was Secretary of State, into the Clinton Foundation. So, it’s pay for favors kind of deal. If that explodes, she doesn’t win. If she can bypass that, we believe this race at this point, is going to be between her and Trump. And, having said that, nobody can predict the future. You can only look at the trends and there are too many wildcards, and Trump is a wildcard, a real “Trump” card in every meaning of the word. The thing that Trump has done by his antics and by being a reality show champion, is exposed what a fraud the whole game is. And, that’s all it is. It’s a game show. It’s brought to us by six major corporations, not we the people. They control the debates. I’ll tell you what, Jerry, give me your position on foreign policy. You have 90 seconds to answer that question, and if someone mentions your name, you’ll get a 60 second rebuttal. It’s beat the clock. It’s a game show. They’re making $250K for a 30 second ad. So, this has nothing to do with democracy. It’s a freak show. When you look at the whole setup, the stage, the lights, the camera, the action, it’s up for grabs. There’s still time right now for a third party, and I say this from experience. At a graduate school, I used to run political campaigns in Westchester County, the richest county in America, just north of New York City. I was the executive assistant to the secretary of the New York State Senate. I was the chief government affairs specialist for the chemical industry in D.C. for many years in the 70s. I know what the game looks like. In the old days, the elections really didn’t kick off for the President until after Labor Day. You mentioned how tired you are of this already. It’s just begun. There’s still time for a third party candidate. Anything could happen in this election.
JR: Well, as I look out, I hear you say Trump, and I hear you say Clinton. That would be somewhat interesting. I think that would be good for ratings. I think the one that would probably be very epic would be Trump versus Sanders. Do you think that Sanders stands a chance against Hillary?
GC: Yes, because people are tired of the Clintons. And, by the way, I don’t know if you know this, we launched “Occupy Peace” this past September, and we had Ralph Nader here, Cindy Sheehan, Dr. Robert Thurman, Gary Knell, and it’s based on honoring the founding fathers, beginning with George Washington. No foreign entanglements, bring home the troops, secure the homeland, rebuild the infrastructure, and force Congress to go to war which they have not done, that’s my stance on peace. I’m not a pacifist. I taught close combat, had my own school for many years. You know, kill anybody that tries to kill me. So, it’s not about only peace. It’s about respecting what this country is all about, and fixing this country up, but don’t tell me how you’re going to fix a foreign country when you can’t drink the water in Flint. I could go on for an hour. So, Sanders is playing the peace candidate, but we’re not really saying that. He has a terrible record of war. He supported all of Clinton’s murderous wars, bombing Baghdad, the sanctions that they put on, the no-fly zones where they were bombing. He supported the Yugoslav, Bosnia, Kosovo wars. Going fast forward, he says he voted against the Iraq war. He voted to fund every war. He was right there waving the flag with Afghanistan. He voted for a resolution to co-sponsor for Gaddafi to stand down. So, he’s a fraud. He’s playing the card. But, people are so tired of the Clintons that he has a shot.
JR: Very interesting insights. The name of this show, as you mentioned earlier, is Follow the Money. Let’s leave our audience one good opportunity that you see in 2016.
GC: Oh, there are a number of them, and we outline them in the Trends Journal. The baby boomers are turning 70, the Davy Crockett, Howdy Doody Crowd, right? All products and services geared toward this huge market sector who don’t want to end up as inmates in nursing homes present opportunities. Also, for baby boomers, you hear it all the time, I hear it anyway, I am in the county seat over here and I talk to government employees, I say, “How do you like your job?” The answer is, “Three years, six weeks, and eight days.” They are counting how much time they have left. So many people have not done what the wanted to do, and now with the baby boomers reaching this age and being in better financial shape even though they’re not in great shape, this could be a whole renaissance of a boomer age. It’s a sector to tie into with whole health appealing, with new exercise programs appealing to the elderly, housing, a whole group, very different than boomers parents. The boomers want to stay young before they die. That is a huge untapped market.
JR: Very good insights there, and all of that is covered in the latest issue of the Trends Journal. Gerald, tell us how we can find out more about that.
GC: Simply go to trendsresearch.com, and you can see that. You can see all of our top trends. We do Trends in the News broadcast each weekday night. We do a Trends Monthly, and a Trend Alert each week. And, really, it’s the only place, I believe, that you can read history before it happens. And, we know people are having a difficult time, so there’s a discount request page as well. We want to help people prepare for what lies ahead, seize the opportunities, and avoid the dangers. So we try to make it available to everyone.
JR: I know many people appreciate that and, Gerald, we sure do appreciate having you back on the program, as always. We really do want to tell folks to visit your website. You’ve been doing this since 1980. Nobody has a crystal ball. No one can get every single call right, but, you know what? You have provided a lot of good insights. Before we brought you on, I was watching an old CSPAN clip with you, and it was uncanny some of things you were saying back in 1997. So, again, I just want to testify to your credibility. We’ve had you on in the past and have heard a lot of great things from you. Looking forward to having you back on soon.
GC: Thanks so much for having me on, and I look forward to being back.
For more from Gerald Celente, visit the Trends Research Institute online.
Precious metals advisor, Tom Cloud, discusses the latest moves in the precious metals markets.
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