The Dow to Crash?

Author Harry Dent says stocks will take a tumble

The man who predicted several major economic trends over the past 30 years... including the 1991 recession, Japan's lost decade, the 2001 tech crash, the bull market and housing boom of the last decade and, most recently, the credit and housing bubble...  is now predicting that the DOW is going to crash.

"We'll see a historic drop to 6,000,” says Harry Dent, whose latest book, “The Great Depression Ahead,” appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List. “And when the dust settles, it'll plummet to 3,300. Along the way, we'll see another real estate collapse; gold will sink to $750 an ounce and unemployment will skyrocket... It's going to get ugly."

Dent, born in Columbia, S.C., in 1950, is the founder of HS Dent Investment Management of Tampa, FLa., which advises the Dent Strategic Portfolio Fund. He also writes an economic newsletter that reviews the economy in the US and around the world and has written seven books on the financial markets.

Dent's predictions are based in part on consumer spending and aging of populations.

In the late 1980s, Dent correctly forecast that the Japanese economy would enter a slowdown that would last more than a decade. In the early 1990s, he correctly predicted the DOW would reach 10,000.

In the early 2000's, Dent wrongly predicted that the DOW would reach 40,000, and the NASDAQ would reach 13,000 to 20,000. In late 2006, he revised his forecasts that the Dow would reach 16,000 to 18,000 and NASDAQ 3,000 to 4,000.

The DOW is at around 15,000 and NASDAQ around 3,400.

Dent popularized the baby boomer spending wave theory, which suggests that once baby-boomers' children leave home, the baby boomers pay down debt and save for retirement, spending less.

Www.maxfunds.com, a financial reporting site, awarded Dent "The Ultimate Charlatan" award, citing several of his incorrect predictions.

In 2011 and 2012, Dent made several predictions on the Dow Jones and the S&P 500. Among these was a prediction that the S&P 500 would fall 30 to 50 percent inside of 2012. However, the S&P 500 ended the year 2012 up 13.4 percent.

Now Dent says, "The Dow will drop… (M)y research indicates… the Dow Jones Average… falling through the 12,000 mark… below 10,000, then 9,000, 8,000… to 6,440 — where it’s likely to rally briefly… before ultimately dropping as low as 3,300. And there’s nothing you or I, or any politician or government, or any team of monetary experts can do to stop the Dow Jones Index from dropping."