Gerald Celente is not your garden variety doom-and-gloom crackpot. Celente, director of Trends Research Institute, forecasted the subprime mortgage financial crisis, the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis and the fall of the Soviet Union. “We are going to see economic times the likes of which no living person has seen,” he told United Press International.

Wait a minute. That includes people who lived through the so-called “Great Depression.” Does Celente think the “Panic of 2008? will be worse than the Depression? It would appear so.

“The Panic of 2008 will lead to a lower U.S. standard of living, he said.”

“I have no crystal ball, nor do I claim to have well-developed psychic powers, but I’d be willing to bet almost anything that next Thanksgiving season will be dramatically different from this one,”writes Carolyn Baker.

We are confronting “dollar plummeting hysteria, monumental levels of debt, foreclosure, bankruptcy, unemployment, energy depletion, skyrocketing gas and food prices, illnesses treated without health insurance coverage—or just not treated, unprecedented levels of homelessness, and by all indications,within a few months into 2008, America will be well on the road to a re-run of 1929-or something inconceivably worse,” Baker frets. “These are the good ole days, my friend, and these are also the dark new days. Happy Thanksgiving; savor every bite.”

“Derivative dealers, hedge funds, buyout firms and other market players will also unravel,” Celente predicts.

Massive corporate losses, such as those recently posted by Citigroup Inc. and General Motors Corp.,will also be fairly common “for some time to come,” he said.

He said he would not “be surprised if giants tumble to their deaths…”

Some giants, however, stand to gain, especially when it comes to real estate. “There is going to be a grab on this property by people who have cash, and that’s not going to be the middle class. People will lose their homes if they have large mortgages that they cannot comfortably sustain or pay off,” Jerome Corsi, economic expert and foe to the emerging North American Union told Alex Jones last August. “There’s going to be a grab where the institutions and the people already wealthy will only gain, it’s not going to be an opportunity for the average person to gain.”

Corsi believes the economic crisis now revealing itself is engineered. “It is engineered because again, the move toward globalism, the pumping of this liquidity to stimulate the markets was totally artificial.”

The federal reserve is going to get caught right now in a total dilemma, if it raises rates to protect the dollar, its going to further tank the economy and cause the housing markets to be in even more of a crisis. We have economic stagnation, the loss of real income, the loss of real wealth and inflation at the same time. With the dropping of the dollar the crisis is going to be manipulated to the point where people will take the Amero or any regional solution if it is proposed as the way you get out of your problem.

It’s all about wiping the chessboard clean, or rather turning it over and dumping all the pieces:

“This is the fastest run I’ve seen ever to get to the goal line of creating a United States regional economy, a North American Union. The elite are running like they’ll never have this chance again. It is the tenth hour, the eleventh hour where this battle will be fought. They believe that they can win now and they are going for broke to create a North American Union and tank the dollar.”