The Great Depression of 1990 [Hardcover]

Ravi Batra (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Southern Methodist University economics professor Batra bases his prediction of a "great depression" around 1990 on a pattern of 30- and 60-year recession-depression cycles in the U.S. dating back to the 1780s. He cites factors leading to the stock market crash of 1929 that also are present today: intense concentration of wealth, a depressed farm economy, heavy speculation, bank vulnerability, protectionist trade sentiment and fiscal corruption. The author relates all this to a theory of India's social scientist Prabhat Sarkar who divides human experience into ages of "laborers, warriors, intellectuals and acquisitors," the latter with their "merger mania" being dominant today. Batra's defensive formula for weathering the next slump includes such steps as converting one's assets (home and all) into cash, which, if widely followed, could bring on recession all the sooner. He does, however, propose a tax plan, admittedly unlikely to be adopted, which could puncture the Federal deficit and make a true depression virtually impossible.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Doomsayers have always been part of the landscape of economic forecasting. Batra, international trade economist, has ventured a bit afield from his specialty to predict that the economic sky will fall in late 1989 or early 1990. Using P.R. Sarkar's theory of historical determinism, Batra projects a collapse of the Western economies and a world depression that will arrive in 1990 and plague us for seven years. He analyzes the historical cycles of monetary growth, inflation, and regulation to extrapolate a confluence of cycles in 1990 reminiscent of the crash of 1929. Will it happen? The majority of economists think not. For those who are convinced, chapter 8 recommends financial strategies prior to and during the depression. Not recommended.Gene R. Laczniak, Coll. of Business, Marquette Univ., Milwaukee
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 175 pages
• Publisher: Liberty Pr (August 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0939352028
• ISBN-13: 978-0939352029
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,744,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Only his timing was off, January 11, 2011

By 

Old Engineer - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Depression of 1990 (Mass Market Paperback)

I read this book in the 1980's, when it first came out. What made the biggest impression on me was not his forecasted date, but rather the social cycle theory upon which his forecast was based. Even 20 years later I can still recall the cycles and how they evolve from one to the other. The step from "acquisitor" to "laborer" societies is pretty ugly, with a lot of social upheavals and instability, and the majority of wealth in the hands of very few.

I think the main error the author made was trying to predict a single year for a change that is part of a cycle that takes hundreds of years to evolve through. My own prediction is that he will eventually be proved right, only his timing was wrong.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Another great entry in fantastically wrong predictions, April 18, 2006

By 

Ananda Gupta (Columbia, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Great Depression of 1990: Why it's got to happen---How to protect yourself (Hardcover)

It's wonderful, in a way, when a person writes a book whose predictions turn out to be completely wrong. (Less wonderful when people keep buying his nonsense!)

A review of this book can be very brief -- just two points need be made:

1. There wasn't a great depression in the 1990s (to the posters who say there was a "recession" in the early 90s, I say: the unemployment rate in the US during the real Great Depression was 25% at its peak. It never cracked 6.5% in the 1990s. A mild recession does not a depression make, nor does it justify the title or apocalyptic tone of this book.)

2. Had the US adopted Batra's recommended policies -- dramatic increases in trade restrictions, etc. -- there WOULD have been a depression. One of the central causes of the real Great Depression was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which increased tariffs dramatically. Batra proposed similar measures in this book. In other words, in order to prevent a depression that never came, Batra argued that we ought to adopt measures that caused an actual depression in the past.

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars We should all thank Ravi Batra, February 2, 2001

By 

Peter N Caress (Bethesda, MD USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Depression of 1990 (Audio Cassette)

We should all be for Mr. Ravi Batri. By selling enough copies of this book and its sequel ("Surviving the Great Depression of 1990"), he singlehandedly prevented worldwide economic collapse!