WASHINGTON — Given his history of successful economic predictions, Ron Paul’s latest forecast could cause chills. In a recent televised appearance, the author, physician and former U.S. Congressman suggested an impending economic collapse will be “quick and unexpected” when it comes.
Appearing in April on CNBC’s “Futures Now,” Paul said the United States is nearing a massive “financial crisis” based around overvaluation of the dollar.
“It’s not so much that the dollar is a great currency. It’s the fact that nothing else is any better,” Paul said on “Futures Now.” “The fundamentals are a disaster. The economy is in bad shape when you have more than half the people hardly making ends meet.”
He reiterated this prediction in another appearance on the same show last month. Paul said a stock market crash is inevitable, but would not say exactly when it would occur. He explained:
“I don’t think there’s any way to know what the time is, but after 35 years of a gigantic bull market in bonds, believe me they cannot reverse history and they cannot print money forever, seed the market forever. Eventually, the markets will rule. And of course that is only a question of when this will happen.”
He also forecast: “We’re all on the verge ‒ the country, the world is on the verge of looking more like Detroit and Greece than anything else.”
Paul’s history of economic prognostication
Although Paul served as a Republican Congressman, he ran as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1988 and much of his platform is more closely aligned with that party than today’s GOP. Widely seen as a maverick for his views on topics like support for marijuana legalization and an end to the death penalty, Paul has amassed a broad fanclub that cuts across party lines. His latest prediction comes as his son, Rand Paul, who some see as continuing his father’s legacy, attempts a 2016 Republican presidential campaign.
It’s not Ron Paul’s first time to try to read the tea leaves to predict world events and the United States’s place in them. In 2002, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Paul spoke before the House of Representatives and issued a series of predictions that many argue have come to pass. His speech can be interpreted as predicting worsening inequality and civil unrest, ongoing conflict with Iraq, and the rise of Islamic extremist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). According to the Christian Science Monitor’s David Grant, he also lamented the growth of big government at the hands of both parties. “Government will grow to record levels, satisfying both left and right as liberals gain an expansion of the welfare state and conservatives see more security spending,” Grant wrote in 2012, paraphrasing Paul.
Paul first mentioned a dollar-based crisis in 2002, but also made a few predictions that haven’t yet come to fruition, such as a boycott of U.S. oil or runaway inflation — the latter of which James Sunshine, writing for the Huffington Post, highlighted as one of the “12 Worst Predictions About the U.S. Economy.”
However, with even analysts for mainstream publications like Forbes expressing concern about an impending stock market crash, there’s ample reason to believe Paul is at least correct in his concern.
Watch Ron Paul explain “This is the next financial crisis” on CNBC in April: