While everyone else is focused on winding down for the holidays, one economist is ringing the alarm bell about the biggest financial crash of our lifetime.
“Since 2009, this has been 100 percent artificial, unprecedented money printing and deficits; $27 trillion over 15 years, to be exact. This is off the charts, 100 percent artificial, which means we’re in a dangerous state,” Harry Dent told Fox News Digital. “I think 2024 is going to be the biggest single crash year we’ll see in our lifetimes.”
Dent, who is strongly against the stimulus spending from the 2020 COVID pandemic, is actually hoping for a crash in order to set things right:
“I’m the guy that’s praying for a crash while everybody else is not. We need to get back down to normal, and we need to send a message to central banks (…) This should be a lesson I don’t think we’ll ever revisit. I don’t think we’ll ever see a bubble for any of our lifetimes again.”
Dent has been writing books about financial crashes and booms for years, starting with The Great Boom Ahead (1992) and most recently with Zero Hour: Turn the Greatest Political and Financial Upheaval in Modern History to Your Advantage (2017). He also published an anthology of his writings on finance called Spending Waves in 2019. He attended Harvard Business School for an MBA, earning the “Baker Scholar” honorific title. He then worked at Bain & Company consulting for Fortune 100 businesses. He now operates his own research firm, HS Dent Publishing.
Harry Dent’s unique contribution to economic commentary is to use statistics on demographics to inform his predictions. While many other market researchers narrowly focus on conventional economic indicators, like trends in the stock market and in employment, Dent believes the best way to measure the economy is by looking at what real people are doing in their lives.
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However, Dent has received his fair share of criticism. Gene Epstein writing for Barron’s said “Harry S. Dent Jr. knows how to sell books. But whether his stock-market strategies make sense — or money for investors — is another question.” In a thorough critique of Dent’s track record, Chuck Jaffe in Market Watch said of him, “Tell the people what they want to hear, and they will flock to your door.”
Nevertheless, Dent has some indicators to back him up, not least the sharp rise in the stock market that followed the pandemic.
“The Roaring 20s bubble was not an everything bubble. [A] real estate barely bubble [in 2008], it was stocks and urban real estate that bubbled,” Dent said. “This is the one time I’m telling you, do not listen to your financial adviser. Things are not going to come back to normal in a few years. We may never see these levels again. And this crash is not going to be a correction. It’s going to be more in the ’29 to ’32 level. And anybody who sat through that would have shot their stockbroker. That’s an 86 percent crash in the S&P and a 92 percent crash in the NASDAQ. And crypto, it’s going to be 96 percent. So that is a big deal. And real estate, by the way, is only projected, by me, to go back to its 2012 lows… but that’s a 50 percent crash for the average house, which went down 34 percent in the last crash, more than the Great Depression, more than any time in history. That is what’s going to hurt people the most.”
Dent is recommending people take their money out of the stock market for 6-12 months and wait out the storm. If the market stays at this — its highest valuation in history — during that time, “maybe you miss a little more gains if I’m wrong,” he said. “If I’m right, you’re going to save massive losses and be able to reinvest a year or year-and-a-half from now at unbelievably low prices and magnify your gains beyond compare.”
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