2009 start of Greatest Depression.

Gerald Celente's Top Trend for 2009 is that this year will become the Greatest Depression.
'In 2007, we predicted the Panic of 2008 and that was mostly in the financial areas. Now we're going to see it in the Collapse of 2009 spread beyond financials throughout society. It's underway. It's happening before our eyes. This is a collapse of monumental proportions. Every day the news is filled with one disaster after another. There's nothing, nothing, they can do to stop this - other than a productive capacity and maybe an alternative energy, something along the lines of the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel! (laughs) But it has to be really monumental. We can't do it by printing money....We are calling this the Great Collapse because you are going to start seeing two factors take place very shortly. One is going to be collapse in the retail sector. It's already estimated that about 150,000 stores, retail shops, are going to close - both chain stores and smaller stores are going to close in 2009.... If you thought the sub-prime problem was bad, wait until you see this one. Commercial real estate is much more heavily leveraged than even in the sub-prime sector.

And then we look at the collapse already in the financial sector. We saw Wachovia, we saw IndyMac and Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns, Merill Lynch, Lehman Brothers - either get gobbled up or go under. And all the bond companies - names people don't know. The point being: Who is going to take up all that commercial space and business parks they have emptied?

The answer in both retail and the office space - the people who are going to take over that vacant space is nobody! You're going to see a glut of real estate that we have never seen before - ghost malls are going to be spreading around the country. So now, that's where the collapse really happens because how are these people who leveraged all this commercial real estate going to service these loans? The answer is: they are not! We're going to be moving into the Greatest Depression."