Economist Reveals How to Turn Political and Financial Upheaval to Your Advantage

November 16, 2017

WRITER

Economist and bestselling author Harry S. Dent, Jr. joined Glenn on radio Thursday morning to discuss his new book, Zero Hour: Turn the Greatest Political and Financial Upheaval in Modern History to Your Advantage.

Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below. Here's the teaser for his latest book:

About the Author

Harry S. Dent, Jr. studied economics at Harvard in the ‘70s, but found it vague and inconclusive. He became so disillusioned by the state of his chosen profession that he turned his back on it. Instead, he threw himself into the burgeoning new science of finance where identifying and studying demographic, technological, consumer and other trends empowered him to forecast economic changes. He is a lecturer, bestselling author and founder of Dent Research, which publishes several influential financial newsletters.

GLENN: All right. I've got somebody that's going to scare the hell out of you.

STU: Wow. I can't wait.

GLENN: Yeah. Yeah. Kids will mess with the environment. Actually we're looking at priorities. Harry Dent is the author of a new book Zero Hour, which I've read. And it will scare the hell out of you. Scare the hell out of you. Because it has a lot of charts and graphs and everything else.

Harry has been on with us many times. He's the guy that predicted the 2008 struggle and what we're going through right now. This is a book on how to turn the greatest political and financial upheaval in modern history to your advantage. Harry Dent Jr. is with us now. Hello, Harry, how are you?

HARRY: Oh, hi, Glenn, good to be back.

GLENN: So, Harry, I know you have a lot of charts and graphs, but I have a lot of questions that I think you're going to be able to actually answer for me.

There is a story that I saw on Business Insider and a couple of other places today, that the stocks are flashing ominous signals. Not seen since the financial crisis. And one of them is the -- Stu, help me out. The Hindenburg omen. And the other is the Titanic Syndrome. A, do you find any credibility in either of those, and what do they mean if you do?

HARRY: The Hindenburg, yes, I do track that. And there have been many, many more signals on that. Much more than usual. That is not a guarantee of a crash. The more important thing I've been looking for, Glenn, because you know I've been talking that this bubble is going to burst at some point. It's going to burst violently when it does. It's the only way it happens in history. The Dow transports are tanking while the Dow Industrials keep edging up. That is a big diversion, and the small --

GLENN: Wait. What does -- what does that mean to the average person? Explain that.

HARRY: Well, it means -- okay. If the industrials are going up, it means, okay. We're still producing stuff. But the transport is not going up. Yeah, but we're not distributing them. People aren't buying it.

And when the small caps go down, in which they've down recently. They're down 4 to 5 percent, with the Dow up. It says, hey, the smart money, who buys small caps because it takes more sophistication, they're getting out of the market, while the everyday person, which buys Apple and GE and all the big names, that's what they know. They're piling -- those are the two diversions I've been looking for. They are starting to show warning signals.

You know, I take that more seriously than the Hindenburg. Because the Hindenburg can happen a lot and still not get a crash, although it's a sign it is more likely.

This is the biggest thing I look for. And this is starting to happen. I think we're in a topping process between October and December and January. And I think the thing, Glenn, that I warn people -- because everybody says, well, Harry, if this things going to burst, I'll just wait till there are signs and when my stockbroker tells me to get out. First of all, your stockbroker will never tell you to get out.

GLENN: Yeah.

HARRY: When bubbles crash, and I've averaged every major bubble in the last century -- the first crash tends to be 41 percent in two and a half months, so it's too late when that happens. Better to get out a little early and be cautious. So I think these warning signs are saying that we are getting close. If you look at the chart -- I mean, this is just like -- we said in November, as soon as Trump got elected against the odds -- and, of course, we were warning that was likely because of this populist movement we were seeing happen. We said, hey, we're going to have another 20, 25 percent rally.

Even though I had been talking about -- this market says, it is going up. It is expecting a big tax cut, but we've seen that rally. And it has been 20 to 25 percent since then. So I think this is -- we're getting very near atop. And when this thing goes and people say, oh, governments won't let this happen. Governments create the damn bubble. You know, they created the roaring 20 bubble. And then the Great Depression.

The fed was created in 1913. And then 20 to 30 years later, you get the Roaring Twenties and the greatest depression of all time, because they boosted up the economy artificially, by cutting rates, cutting rates. Making money cheap. Free money always creates bubbles. Well, that's what they've done here. So for somebody to say, oh, the central banks, the federal reserve won't let this market crack, they're the ones that have created this extreme thing. Stressed the market so far. And when they go, it's like a rubber band, going to the extreme. I'm just telling people, I didn't create this bubble. Get out of the way.

GLENN: Okay. So, Harry, we've been warning about this for a long time. I thought we were not as resilient as we are.

I expected this thing to come crashing down just because of the money printing and the extraordinary levels of debt, which -- not just the government debt. But the debt that we have as Americans. Our credit card debt is, what? 119 billion. And -- and we're starting to default on those. And people have jobs now.

I expected this to go a lot earlier. Why do you think it's this time?

HARRY: Well, you know, it's hard to argue with $14 trillion of free money being created. It's hard to argue with mortgage rates that are 4 percent, when they ought to be 6 percent. Car loans are, you know, two to 3 percent, and they ought to be six to seven.

I mean, everybody is getting a free lunch here. And stocks are going up 20 percent a year, instead of the normal 7 percent adjusted for inflation. You know, everybody is getting a free lunch. You know, mortgage -- housing is going up 10 percent, instead of the 3 percent inflation. So everybody is getting a free lunch. And it makes everybody kind of high. I don't know a better way to say it. And people don't want to hear the bubble is going to burst. I get lambasted all the time. And I'm like, look, I'm just the messenger. I've studied history. Bubbles build. They're totally recognizable.

I have a whole bubble model that tells you how it's going to build, how much it's going to crash, how long it's going to take to crash. There's nothing black swan about these bubbles at all. It shouldn't be a surprise. People go into denial because they don't want it to end because everybody is getting something for nothing. So governments don't want it to end.

GLENN: So you put -- the reason why your book I think is accurate on at least diagnosing the problems is you have several chapters on -- on revolution. And the world is going into revolution.

HARRY: Yeah.

GLENN: Most people are not -- they're absolutely denying what is happening. Even the Trump thing was a revolution. And it has just begun. It's only going to get worse. Tell me -- give me the highlights of your take on what's happening globally.

HARRY: Well, you know, I had been talking about for a long time, yeah, we're going to have a crisis financially just because we've got bubbles and debt bubbles. And these things are totally predictable. But I've also been saying we have a 250-year revolution coming. The biggest thing to happen in all of modern history was when Sally met Harry. Free market capitalism met democracy, in the late 1700s.

I mean, that's the biggest thing that's happened ever. And this is going to happen again. And the reason I pushed this book. And this book focuses more on the political side of what I'm talking about, is because I've been waiting for signs. It was Brexit. And it was the surprise Trump election. That told me, okay. The political side of this is starting to happen. And this is going to take decades. We've got a backlash against globalization. The special interests have total taken over democracy. Central banks have totally taken over free market. We're destroying the golden goose that made us rich in the first place, since the late 1700s. And all of modern progress has come since those two things came together. This is going to be that big or bigger. And this is going to go down in history. And people aren't going to realize it until later. We're telling you now. This is going to happen. It's going to be unsettling. It's going to change a lot of things.

You know, we really need a bottoms-up economy. Get out of all this top-down management. All this social and financial engineering, where economists try to create La La Land, with three or four percent growth and two percent inflation, which is the worst thing you can do for the economy. You have no innovation when that happens. Japan has had no innovation for 30 years. No growth for 30 years. Because they've been living off of quantitative easing.

GLENN: But, Harry, you and I know that, a lot of this audience knows that, but that is not where the world is headed. They are -- trust me, even Donald Trump, we go through a Great Depression, and Donald Trump will be FDR. He will.

He will not cut it back. He will become the great state that will take care of everyone. And if he won't do it, there will be somebody there to promise it. Socialism is popular now.

HARRY: It is. And we've been living on more than that for now nine years, with all this quantitative easing and free money.

The problem, Glenn, is this, governments created this. Central banks created this bubble, extended it, took it to extremes. And when it burst, it is going to be out of control. It is going to be impossible to stop. And they're going to lose credibility. My theory is central banks, of course they're going to want to -- they're going to want to do ten times the quantitative easing. It's just people are going to say, hey, you already did that, and it failed. Why would we believe you this time?

I think governments are going to lose credibility. I think central banks are going to lose credibility. And that's a good thing. That's -- that's the revolution, when people say, cut off their heads. We don't want anymore of this baloney.

GLENN: We're going to get into the he says there's six triggers. And then there's some safe havens for you. We'll get into that here in just a second. Harry Dent Jr. the name of the book is Zero Hour.

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VIDEO: Both Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama are radicals, but there's one HUGE difference

Biden backs yet another criminal justice policy with disastrous consequences

The number of people serving life sentences now exceeds the entire prison population in 1970, according to newly-released data from the Sentencing Project. The continued growth of life sentences is largely the result of "tough on crime" policies pushed by legislators in the 1990s, including presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Biden has since apologized for backing those types of policies, but it seems he has yet to learn his lesson. Indeed, Biden is backing yet another criminal justice policy with disastrous consequences—mandatory drug treatment for all drug offenders.

Proponents of this policy argue that forced drug treatment will reduce drug usage and recidivism and save lives. But the evidence simply isn't on their side. Mandatory treatment isn't just patently unethical, it's also ineffective—and dangerous.

Many well-meaning people view mandatory treatment as a positive alternative to incarceration. But there's a reason that mandatory treatment is also known as "compulsory confinement." As author Maya Schenwar asks in The Guardian, "If shepherding live human bodies off to prison to isolate and manipulate them without their permission isn't ethical, why is shipping those bodies off to compulsory rehab an acceptable alternative?" Compulsory treatment isn't an alternative to incarceration. It is incarceration.

Compulsory treatment is also arguably a breach of international human rights agreements and ethical standards. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have made it clear that the standards of ethical treatment also apply to the treatment of drug dependence—standards that include the right to autonomy and self-determination. Indeed, according to UNODC, "people who use or are dependent on drugs do not automatically lack the capacity to consent to treatment...consent of the patient should be obtained before any treatment intervention." Forced treatment violates a person's right to be free from non-consensual medical treatment.

It's a useless endeavor, anyway, because studies have shown that it doesn't improve outcomes in reducing drug use and criminal recidivism. A review of nine studies, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, failed to find sufficient evidence that compulsory drug treatment approaches are effective. The results didn't suggest improved outcomes in reducing drug use among drug-dependent individuals enrolled in compulsory treatment. However, some studies did suggest potential harm.

According to one study, 33% of compulsorily-treated participants were reincarcerated, compared to a mere 5% of the non-treatment sample population. Moreover, rates of post-release illicit drug use were higher among those who received compulsory treatment. Even worse, a 2016 report from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found that people who received involuntary treatment were more than twice as likely to die of an opioid-related overdose than those with a history of only voluntary treatment.

These findings echo studies published in medical journals like Addiction and BMJ. A study in Addiction found that involuntary drug treatment was a risk factor for a non-fatal drug overdose. Similarly, a study in BMJ found that patients who successfully completed inpatient detoxification were more likely than other patients to die within a year. The high rate of overdose deaths by people previously involuntarily treated is likely because most people who are taken involuntarily aren't ready to stop using drugs, authors of the Addiction study reported. That makes sense. People who aren't ready to get clean will likely use again when they are released. For them, the only post-treatment difference will be lower tolerance, thanks to forced detoxification and abstinence. Indeed, a loss of tolerance, combined with the lack of a desire to stop using drugs, likely puts compulsorily-treated patients at a higher risk of overdose.

The UNODC agrees. In their words, compulsory treatment is "expensive, not cost-effective, and neither benefits the individual nor the community." So, then, why would we even try?

Biden is right to look for ways to combat addiction and drug crime outside of the criminal justice system. But forced drug treatment for all drug offenders is a flawed, unethical policy, with deadly consequences. If the goal is to help people and reduce harm, then there are plenty of ways to get there. Mandatory treatment isn't one of them.

Lindsay Marie is a policy analyst for the Lone Star Policy Institute, an independent think tank that promotes freedom and prosperity for all Texans. You can follow her on Twitter @LindsayMarieLP.

BOMBSHELL: 'It wasn't just Hunter,' Rudy Giuliani says Joe Biden was target of Ukraine corruption investigation — and he has the evidence to prove it

President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani joined Glenn Beck on Tuesday's radio program discuss the Senate's ongoing investigation into former vice president Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and reveal new bombshell documents he's currently releasing.

Giuliani told Glenn he has evidence of "very, very serious crime at the highest levels of government," that the "corrupt media" is doing everything in their power to discredit.

He also dropped some major, previously unreported news: not only was Hunter Biden under investigation in 2016, when then-Vice President Biden "forced" the firing of Ukraine's prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, but so was the vice president himself.

"Shokin can prove he was investigating Biden and his son. And I now have the prosecutorial documents that show, all during that period of time, not only was Hunter Biden under investigation -- Joe Biden was under investigation," Giuliani explained. "It wasn't just Hunter."

Watch this clip to get a rundown of everything Giuliani has uncovered so far.

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Revealing Bernie’s dark side — one 1980s quote at a time

For most Americans, the 1980s was marked by big hair, epic lightsaber battles, and school-skipping Ferris Bueller dancing his way into the hearts of millions.

But for Bernie Sanders — who, by the way, was at that time the oldest-looking 40-year-old in human history — the 1980s was a period of important personal milestones.

Prior to his successful 1980 campaign to become mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was mostly known around the Green Mountain State as a crazy, wildly idealistic socialist. (Think Karl Marx meets Don Quixote.) But everything started to change for Sanders when he became famous—or, in the eyes of many, notorious—for being "America's socialist mayor."

As mayor, Sanders' radical ideas were finally given the attention he had always craved but couldn't manage to capture. This makes this period of his career particularly interesting to study. Unlike today, the Bernie Sanders of the 1980s wasn't concerned with winning over an entire nation — just the wave of far-left New York City exiles that flooded Vermont in the 1960s and 1970s — and he was much more willing to openly align himself with local and national socialist and communist parties.

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Over the past few weeks, I have been reading news reports of Sanders recorded in the 1980s — because, you know, that's how guys like me spend their Saturday nights — and what I've found is pretty remarkable.

For starters, Sanders had (during the height of the Soviet Union) a very cozy relationship with people who openly advocated for Marxism and communism. He was an elector for the Socialist Workers Party and promoted the party's presidential candidates in 1980 and 1984.

To say the Socialist Workers Party was radical would be a tremendous understatement. It was widely known SWP was a communist organization mostly dedicated to the teachings of Marx and Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution.

Among other radical things I've discovered in interviews Sanders conducted with the SWP's newspaper — appropriately named The Militant (seriously, you can't make this stuff up) — is a statement by Sanders published in June 1981 suggesting that some police departments "are dominated by fascists and Nazis," a comment that is just now being rediscovered for the first time in decades.

In 1980, Sanders lauded the Socialist Workers Party's "continued defense of the Cuban revolution." And later in the 1980s, Sanders reportedly endorsed a collection of speeches by the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, even though there had been widespread media reports of the Sandinistas' many human rights violations prior to Sanders' endorsement, including "restrictions on free movement; torture; denial of due process; lack of freedom of thought, conscience and religion; denial of the right of association and of free labor unions."

Sanders also traveled to Nicaragua and met with socialist President Daniel Ortega. He later called the trip a "profoundly emotional experience."

Comrade Bernie's disturbing Marxist past, which is far more extensive than what can be covered in this short article, shouldn't be treated as a mere historical footnote. It clearly illustrates that Sanders' brand of "democratic socialism" is much more than a $15 minimum wage and calls for single-payer health care. It's full of Marxist philosophy, radical revolutionary thinking, anti-police rhetoric, and even support for authoritarian governments.

Millions of Americans have been tricked into thinking Sanders isn't the radical communist the historical record — and even Sanders' own words — clearly show that he is. But the deeper I have dug into Comrade Bernie's past, the more evident it has become that his thinking is much darker and more dangerous and twisted than many of his followers ever imagined.

Tomorrow night, don't miss Glenn Beck's special exposing the radicals who are running Bernie Sanders' campaign. From top to bottom, his campaign is staffed with hard-left extremists who are eager to burn down the system. The threat to our constitution is very real from Bernie's team, and it's unlike anything we've ever seen before in a U.S. election. Join Glenn on Wednesday, at 9 PM Eastern on BlazeTV's YouTube page, and on BlazeTV.com. And just in case you miss it live, the only way to catch all of Glenn's specials on-demand is by subscribing to Blaze TV.

Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org) is editorial director of The Heartland Institute and editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com.

Candace Owens blasts leftist cancel culture: 'Godless', 'societal atom bomb'

Candace Owens, BLEXIT founder and author of the upcoming book, "Blackout," joined Glenn Beck on Friday's GlennTV for an exclusive interview. available only to BlazeTV subscribers.

Candace dropped a few truth-bombs about the progressive movement and what's happening to the Democratic Party. She said people are practically running away from the left due to their incessant push to dig up dirt on anybody who disagrees with their radical ideology. She explained how -- like China and its "social credit score" -- the left is shaping America into its own nightmarish episode of "Black Mirror."

"This game of making sure that everyone is politically correct is a societal atom bomb. There are no survivors. There's no one that is perfect," Candace said. "The idea that humanity can be perfect is Godless. If you accept that there is something greater than us, then you accept that we a flawed. To be human is to be flawed."

Enjoy this clip from the full episode below:

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BlazeTV subscribers can watch the full interview on BlazeTV.com. Use code GLENN to save $10 off one year of your subscription.