Gerald Celente is not your garden variety doom-and-gloom crackpot. Celente, director of Trends Research Institute, forecasted the subprime mortgage financial crisis and the decline of the dollar a year ago and gold’s current rise in May. He also predicted 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.”

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…”