HOW TO PROFIT FROM THE NEXT GREAT DEPRESSION

Predictions of calamity from a self-styled economic historian whose views can most charitably be described as murky. King can't hold a candle to heavyweight apocalyptists like Ravi Batra (The Great Depression of 1990) and Alfred L. Malabre Jr. (Beyond Our Means), whose dour audits of a debt-ridden domestic economy are informed by insights as well as analytic intelligence. In the main, the author inveighs against traditional practitioners of the dismal science for failing to divine an imminent collapse and offers some decidedly aberrant interpretations of business-cycle theory. By way of example, he argues unpersuasively that the FRB has little influence on, much less control over, the money supply. Almost equally eccentric are his appreciations of compound interest and the future role of government in credit and resource allocation. Nor are King's unsystematic appraisals of socioeconomic woes redeemed by original proposals on safe havens. Against the indeterminate day when disaster strikes, he counsels immediate liquidation of all conventional debt and equity positions--stocks, bonds, mutual funds, savings accounts, CDs, et al. Proceeds would be committed largely to Treasury bills and gold or silver coins with an eye to acquiring real-estate bargains when the bottom falls out. By King's account, the world's increasingly interdependent economy makes precious little sense; in his inept text, no sense is made of it.