Jane Wollman Rusoff is a ThinkAdvisor Contributing Editor specializing in interviews with thought leaders. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and Esquire, among numerous other publications.
With its “zombie” public companies and small-business failures, the U.S. economy is “dead,” and a second stimulus won’t revive it, Harry S. Dent Jr. argues in an interview with ThinkAdvisor.
“The Contrarian’s Contrarian,” as Dent is known, forecasts that the pandemic-afflicted U.S. economy, amid an enormous Federal Reserve-created bubble, won’t bottom out until 2023.
“The crisis ahead of us is a big detox of the biggest financial drug stimulus in history,” he warns.
The stock market will bottom late in 2022 or early 2023, he predicts. It will be “the lowest stock market of our lifetime.”
Dent, 67, accurately called Japan’s 1989 economic collapse, the dot-com bust and the populist wave that delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. He uses propriety research and bases predictions mainly on demographics and trends.
As head of HSD Publishing, the Harvard Business School MBA puts out the monthly HS Dent Forecast and Rodney Johnson Report, along with free daily insight “e-letters.” (www.harrydent.com)
Detractors say Dent is mostly an ace marketer whose forecasts have often been wrong.
In the interview, he discusses his grim outlook for the market, discerned mainly from a “megaphone pattern” he sees, and provides an analysis of the “dumb money” and “smart money” going into and out of it.