Gerald Celente — Knowledge Fight

Gerald Celente is a long-time guest of Alex Jones’ who is always credited as being a super-accurate “trends forecaster.” “Trends forecaster” is the perfectly vague title; you give yourself the air of credibility, while simultaneously giving yourself an out when you are consistently wrong (“hey, I’m just looking at trends here”).

Gerald’s Credibility

The argument that people should listen to Celente is largely based on vague proclamations that he has a proven track record. When a specific example is needed, he is inevitably credited with predicting the market crash of 1987.

This is actually not an example of him having great predictive power, but of how his constant “the market is about to crash” fear-mongering is inevitably going to be correct if you say it for long enough. Celente predicted the market crash in January 1987, and the crash did not happen until October. Beyond that, his prediction also included president Reagan resigning, among other extraneous failures.

This is the pattern of Gerald Celente: be super vague, and constantly remind people of the times you’ve been close to right, while refusing to acknowledge the thousands of times your “forecasts” have been wrong.

Celente On InfoWars

Gerald Celente exists on the Alex Jones Show essentially as an assistant gold salesman. Ted Anderson has gold to sell, so Alex Jones interviews “financial experts” who preach impending doom and the coming collapse of the dollar, which is always just around the corner. These people (Celente, Bob Chapman, Peter Schiff, etc.) all may or may not personally believe the things they say on the show, but they are on the show to lend credibility for Alex’s sales pitches for Ted’s gold.

He’s a bit like a financial Chicken Little, if Chicken Little was getting working for a guy who sold bunkers to protect yourself from the falling sky.

Every year, Celente has predicted a complete collapse of the economy. In 2008, he was in the ballpark, but ultimately that prediction is meaningless because it comes from the same person who predicted total financial meltdown in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and pretty much every other year you can think of.

One of the reasons his predictions are not very good is that his process is not very good. He told the authors of the book Invest In Yourself that he came up his predictions by basically just skimming two newspapers a day and making whatever connections you want to between stories. Celente basically has the same process as your grandfather, and probably a lot of similar predictions, he just has a much larger platform to yell them out into the world.

Some Of Celente’s Predictions

It is really hard to track down a list of Celente’s failed predictions because his Trends Journal is not available online, and the cost is beyond what we are willing to pay to make fun of him. That said, there are a number of remnants of dumb predictions he’s made in the past outside his journal that are illustrative of his inaccuracy.

In 1999, he disparaged the idea of bubble tea to the San Francisco Chronicle saying, “unless you're going to have some kind of mystical, ancient Chinese power from drinking it, it is not going to go anywhere.” Leaving aside the vaguely racist explanation for his position, this was a profoundly bad prediction. In 2016, the bubble tea market was valued at $1.9 billion, with projections of it reaching $3.2 billion by 2023. The US bubble tea market represents approximately 50% of that total.

This was not a prediction from someone who knew anything or had any particular insight, it was little more broad dismissal from a cranky old xenophobe.

In anticipation of New Years 2000, Psychology Today interviewed Celente about the things we could expect to see, and his answers ran the gamut from dumb to hilariously dumb.

He predicted that people would begin turning their suburban lawns into gardens and this would transform society: “Somewhere around the year 2000, the revelation--and revolution--will come. The lawn!”
He predicted that music would become much less angry: “Just as rock and roll replaced swing and ragtime music, a new genre of millennium music will emerge. It will be upbeat without the anger and despair of today's cutting-edge rock and rap.” (note: Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff came out in May 2000, and Nu Metal owned the early 2000’s)
He predicted that we would begin going back to the old ways: "Voluntary simplicity, once merely a counterculture ideal, will finally become a reality in the twenty-first century. Moderation, self-discipline, and spiritual growth will be the personal goals of the future, not material accumulation.”

This is a glimpse of how terrible Celente is at predicting trends. He thought we were heading toward moderation and self-discipline in 2000? VH1’s reality show programming was just getting going, The Real World was mid-way through its pivot into being about hot drunks having sex, and the fad of grills (or “mouth jewelry”) was right around the corner.

Generally speaking, Celente has no idea what he’s talking about, and the times he’s even close to right, it’s not a product of accuracy, it’s a product of him saying the same vague thing over and over until it is inevitably kind of right.

Celente Is A Globalist

Celente’s bio that appears everywhere from his Amazon author’s page to any time he needs a bio clearly says that, “while Celente holds a U.S. passport, he considers himself a citizen of the world.” One wonders if Alex knows that one of his regular guests feels this dismissively about his American citizenship. This is really nothing short of an affront to this country’s borders and sovereignty.