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11 Predictions Of Economic Disaster In 2015 From Top Experts All Over The Globe

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Economic Collapse Blog

Will 2015 be a year of financial crashes, economic chaos and the start of the next great worldwide depression?  Over the past couple of years, we have all watched as global financial bubbles have gotten larger and larger.  Despite predictions that they could burst at any time, they have just continued to expand.  But just like we witnessed in 2001 and 2008, all financial bubbles come to an end at some point, and when they do implode the pain can be extreme.  Personally, I am entirely convinced that the financial markets are more primed for a financial collapse now than they have been at any other time since the last crisis happened nearly seven years ago.  And I am certainly not alone.  At this point, the warning cries have become a deafening roar as a whole host of prominent voices have stepped forward to sound the alarm.  The following are 11 predictions of economic disaster in 2015 from top experts all over the globe…

#1 Bill Fleckenstein: “They are trying to make the stock market go up and drag the economy along with it. It’s not going to work. There’s going to be a big accident. When people realize that it’s all a charade, the dollar will tank, the stock market will tank, and hopefully bond markets will tank. Gold will rally in that period of time because it’s done what it’s done because people have assumed complete infallibility on the part of the central bankers.”

#2 John Ficenec: “In the US, Professor Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio – or Shiller CAPE – for the S&P 500 is currently at 27.2, some 64pc above the historic average of 16.6. On only three occasions since 1882 has it been higher – in 1929, 2000 and 2007.”

#3 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, one of the most respected economic journalists on the entire planet: “The eurozone will be in deflation by February, forlornly trying to ignite its damp wood by rubbing stones. Real interest rates will ratchet higher. The debt load will continue to rise at a faster pace than nominal GDP across Club Med. The region will sink deeper into a compound interest trap.”

#4 The Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, which correctly predicted the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble in 2007: “Clearly the direction of most of the recent global economic news suggests movement toward a 2015 downturn.”

#5 Paul Craig Roberts: “At any time the Western house of cards could collapse. It (the financial system) is a house of cards. There are no economic fundamentals that support stock prices — the Dow Jones. There are no economic fundamentals that support the strong dollar…”

#6 David Tice: “I have the same kind of feel in ’98 and ’99; also ’05 and ’06.  This is going to end badly. I have every confidence in the world.”

#7 Liz Capo McCormick and Susanne Walker: “Get ready for a disastrous year for U.S. government bonds. That’s the message forecasters on Wall Street are sending.”

#8 Phoenix Capital Research: “Just about everything will be hit as well. Most of the ‘recovery’ of the last five years has been fueled by cheap borrowed Dollars. Now that the US Dollar has broken out of a multi-year range, you’re going to see more and more ‘risk assets’ (read: projects or investments fueled by borrowed Dollars) blow up. Oil is just the beginning, not a standalone story.

If things really pick up steam, there’s over $9 TRILLION worth of potential explosions waiting in the wings. Imagine if the entire economies of both Germany and Japan exploded and you’ve got a decent idea of the size of the potential impact on the financial system.”

#9 Rob Kirby: “What this breakdown in the crude oil price is going to spawn another financial crisis.  It will be tied to the junk debt that has been issued to finance the shale oil plays in North America.  It is reported to be in the area of half a trillion dollars worth of junk debt that is held largely on the books of large financial institutions in the western world.  When these bonds start to fail, they will jeopardize the future of these financial institutions.  I do believe that will be the signal for the Fed to come riding to the rescue with QE4.  I also think QE4 is likely going to be accompanied by bank bail-ins because we all know all western world countries have adopted bail-in legislation in their most recent budgets.  The financial elites are engineering the excuse for their next round of money printing . . .  and they will be confiscating money out of savings accounts and pension accounts.  That’s what I think is coming in the very near future.”

#10 John Ing: “The 2008 collapse was just a dress rehearsal compared to what the world is going to face this time around. This time we have governments which are even more highly leveraged than the private sector was.

So this time the collapse will be on a scale that is many magnitudes greater than what the world witnessed in 2008.”

#11 Gerald Celente: “What does the word confidence mean? Break it down. In this case confidence = con men and con game. That’s all it is. So people will lose confidence in the con men because they have already shown their cards. It’s a Ponzi scheme. So the con game is running out and they don’t have any more cards to play.

What are they going to do? They can’t raise interest rates. We saw what happened in the beginning of December when the equity markets started to unravel. So it will be a loss of confidence in the con game and the con game is soon coming to an end. That is when you are going to see panic on Wall Street and around the world.”

If you have been following my website, you know that I have been pointing to 2015 for quite some time now.

For example, in my article entitled “The Seven Year Cycle Of Economic Crashes That Everyone Is Talking About“, I discussed the pattern of financial crashes that we have witnessed every seven years that goes all the way back to the Great Depression.  The last two major stock market crashes began in 2001 and 2008, and now here we are seven years later.

Will the same pattern hold up once again?

In addition, there are many other economic cycles that seem to indicate that we are due for a major economic downturn.  I discussed quite a few of these theories in my article entitled “If Economic Cycle Theorists Are Correct, 2015 To 2020 Will Be Pure Hell For The United States“.

But just like in 2000 and 2007, there are a whole host of doubters that are fully convinced that the party can continue indefinitely.  Even though our economic fundamentals continue to get worse, our debt levels continue to grow and every objective measurement shows that Wall Street is more reckless and more vulnerable to collapse than ever before, they mock the idea that a financial collapse is imminent.

So let’s see what happens in 2015.

I have a feeling that it is going to be an extremely “interesting” year.

Economic Bubbles Take From the Poor, Give to the Rich

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At the Economic Populist Blog, Robert Oak posted an excellent analysis of the Pew Research report, A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%, based on Census data on wealth taken since the so-called economic recovery after 2009. Oak highlighted one of the most important findings of the report:

During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%.

In other words, what the report shows is that there was never an economic recovery for most people other than the wealthy 1%. The economic bubble and resultant policies effectively served as a mechanism to transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy.

According to Michael Snyder at the Economic Collapse blog, it’s extremely likely that we’re about to witness another massive transfer of wealth to the 1% judging from the following 15 signs:

#1 Bob Shiller, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for economics, says that “bubbles look like this” and that he is “most worried about the boom in the U.S. stock market.”

#2 The total amount of margin debt has risen by 50 percent since January 2012 and it is now at the highest level ever recorded.  The last two times that margin debt skyrocketed like this were just before the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and just before the financial crisis of 2008.  When this house of cards comes crashing down, things are going to get very messy…

“When the tablecloth gets pulled out from under the place settings, you’re going to have a lot of them crash and smash on the floor,” said Uri Landesman, president of Platinum Partners hedge fund. “That margin’s going to get pulled and everyone’s going to have to cover. That’s when you get really serious corrections.”

#3 Since the bottom of the market in 2009, the Dow has jumped 143 percent, the S&P 500 is up 165 percent and the Nasdaq has risen an astounding 213 percent.  This does not reflect economic reality in any way, shape or form.

#4 Market research firm TrimTabs says that the S&P 500 is “very overpriced” right now.

#5 Marc Faber recently told CNBC that “we are in a gigantic speculative bubble”.

#6 In the United States, Google searches for the term “stock bubble” are at the highest level that we have seen since November 2007 – just before the last stock market crash.

#7 Price to earnings ratios are very high right now…

The Dow was trading at 17.8 times the past four quarters of earnings of its 30 components, according to The Wall Street Journal on Friday. That was up from 13.7 times its earnings a year ago. The S&P 500 is trading at 18.7 times earnings. The Nasdaq-100 Index is trading at 21.5 times earnings. At the very least, the ratios are signaling that stock prices are rich.

#8 According to CNBC, Pinterest is currently valued at more than 3 billion dollars even though it has never earned a profit.

#9 Twitter is a seven-year-old company that has never made a profit.  It actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter.  But according to the financial markets it is currently worth about 22 billion dollars.

#10 Right now, Facebook is trading at a valuation that is equivalent to approximately 100 years of earnings, and it is currently supposedly worth about 115 billion dollars.

#11 Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital recently stated that he believes that “markets are riskier than at any time since the depths of the 2008/9 crisis”.

#12 As Graham Summers recently noted, retail investors are buying stocks at a level not seen since the peak of the dotcom bubble back in 2000.

#13 David Stockman, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, believes that this financial bubble is going to end very badly…

“We have a massive bubble everywhere, from Japan, to China, Europe, to the UK.  As a result of this, I think world financial markets are extremely dangerous, unstable, and subject to serious trouble and dislocation in the future.”

#14 Bob Janjuah of Nomura Securities believes that there “could be a 25% to 50% sell off in global stock markets” over the next couple of years.

#15 According to Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, the U.S. stock market is repeating a pattern that we have seen many times before.  According to him, we are experiencing “a well-defined syndrome of ‘overvalued, overbought, overbullish, rising-yield’ conditions that has appeared exclusively at speculative market peaks – including (exhaustively) 1929, 1972, 1987, 2000, 2007, 2011 (before a market loss of nearly 20% that was truncated by investor faith in a new round of monetary easing), and at three points in 2013: February, May, and today.”

Read the full article here: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/15-signs-that-we-are-near-the-peak-of-an-absolutely-massive-stock-market-bubble

How to End the National Debt

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One solution is to stop the war machine. At Boiling Frogs there’s a great recent post from Sibel Edmonds called “What National Debt? US Taxpayer Dollars Continue to Flow to the World’s Despots, Torturers & Human Target Practice Fields”. Among her findings:

Afghanistan gets around $7 Billion= $7,000,000,000. Now, don’t mistake this for our money spent on our war in Afghanistan. That’s in the trillions of dollars. That’s a separate deal. No, this money goes to Afghanistan’s government – known for being crooks, criminals, heroin dealers, and terrorist breeders. They take the money, and misplace it- so the money, some of it, ends up with the guys we are supposedly bombing and waging war against. Then we point at those guys and say, hey, you see these armed terrorists, and then we go bomb the hell out of them. They take the money and invest it in some highly lucrative poppy fields and heroin production, so that we can spend billions of dollars pretending to destroy those poppy fields and production centers.  And then we give more money to these government guys, so that we can go and bomb them some more, and target more poppy fields … and the cycle continues, and continues. Trust me, it makes sense …Not necessarily to you and me, but it makes lots of sense to our fat war-profiteers here at home. After all, who gives a damn if things make sense to the people-since when have they counted?

Of course Israel gets quite a lion’s share. That goes without saying. They get nearly $3 billion=$3,000,000,000, in military aid and another large sum as financial aid for …well, let’s put aside all the diplomacy and political correctness and call a duck a duck: They get all the military and foreign aid so that they can turn around and spend those dollars through their powerful network and lobby here, to make sure we are all screwed up in developing and implementing our foreign policy. Does that make sense? Just think about the billions of dollars, directly or indirectly, spent by the Israel lobby to form and control our foreign policy, aka war-war and more war. They get all those billions of dollars in foreign and military aid, come over here, get us into wars so that we go spend trillions of additional dollars in wars and screwing up the world … and ourselves… and then give Israel more in foreign and military aid. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Of course not, It’s not supposed to make sense, dude!

Egypt gets its $1 billion of our tax money for … for what? Thank God it’s been in the news lately so even the mass ignoramus population in our nation is able to have an idea: guns and bullets to kill political dissenters, tanks and tear gas to be used against civilians, helicopters to fire at civilians below … bring about a coup de tat, and then bring about another one …Okay, so that one we get. We know what they use our money and military equipment for. No brainer. As to why we would shower Egypt with all this money and military power? Why in the world do we end up giving all these dollars to the side that gets in via a coup, and to the side who takes out those who brought about the coup and gets in with its own coup … and another coup after that, and many dead … Why? Well, duh. It’s because that’s what we do. Since when has our government been in the business of providing reasons and justification to its people? Since when do they worry about having to make sense to their lowly people? Maybe, referring to the paragraph above, maybe it’s because of the billions of dollars we gave Israel, which came back here and were spent so that our government would put together this policy of giving billions of dollars to many different sides in Egypt – so that they would continue coups and butcher their people.

Pakistan gets more or less $1 Billion. They get military aid to make sure they create desirable conditions so that our military can send its drones out there and bomb the hell out of them every day. Makes sense. No? All right, try this: How else do we give these drones and our other killing machines a real-life test run? See! Like shooting ranges, our government needs to go out there, pick countries (and their inhabitants), and make them viable war-practice fields.  Call them Human Target Practice Fields. You haven’t heard?! Nothing like a real test drive. Of course these things ain’t free, so of course the money has to be spent, thus, our foreign aid to countries like Pakistan. Why is the price so high? Because Pakistan is dangerous, and it has nuclear weapons that we made sure they would get, and that makes Pakistan kinda expensive.

Those are just the largest recipients. For the complete list read the full article here: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/10/08/what-national-debt-us-taxpayer-dollars-continue-to-flow-to-the-worlds-despots-torturers-human-target-practice-fields/#more-24922

Another way to end the national debt is to switch to government issued debt-free money. Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse Blog describes what the process might look like:

#1) The U.S. Congress votes to take back all of the functions that it has delegated to the Federal Reserve and begins to issue debt-free United States Notes.  These United States Notes would have the exact same value as existing Federal Reserve Notes, and over time all existing Federal Reserve Notes would be taken out of circulation.

#2) The U.S. Congress nationalizes all debt held by the Federal Reserve.  That would instantly reduce the national debt by 1.6 trillion dollars.  In fact, there are a few members of Congress that have already proposed this.

#3) A Constitutional amendment is passed limiting future U.S. government deficits to a reasonable percentage of GDP.  Any future deficits would not be funded by borrowing.  Rather, future deficits would be funded by newly created United States Notes.  Therefore, the federal government would never again accumulate another penny of debt.

And it would be important to inject new money into the economy from time to time.  When existing money is destroyed or when the population grows it is important to inject a certain amount of new money into the system in order to avoid deflation.

#4) The existing national debt would be very slowly paid off with newly created United States Notes.  The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal year 2011, and over time this expense would go to zero.

If the national debt is paid off slowly enough, it would not create too much inflation.  I believe that it could be paid off gradually over 50 years without shocking the economy too much.

Read the full article here: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/debt-free-united-states-notes-were-once-issued-under-jfk-and-the-u-s-government-still-has-the-power-to-issue-debt-free-money

Such a solution may seem simple, but the obvious obstacle would be overcoming the immense political and economic influence of the central banks. The only U.S. presidents who challenged the central banking scheme were John F. Kennedy, James Garfield, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. Kennedy, Garfield and Lincoln were assassinated in office. Jackson would have been assassinated in an attempt in 1835 were it not for two guns miraculously misfiring. Jackson later famously stated:

The Bank is trying to kill me – but I will kill it!

…If the American people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system – there would be a revolution before morning.