The Art of Business

Trend Spotting: Gerald Celente Tracks the Future



WAs a recent keynote speaker aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, shared topped billing with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. If the trend forecaster’s name sounds familiar it’s because you probably have heard him on radio, remember his talking head from TV, or read his analyses in the national press. The self-styled “voice of the millennium” lists among his numerous media credits “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Oprah”, CNN, CNBC, NPR, Canadian Radio Systems, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Time, US News and World Report, and Business Week. A bona fide cultural hierophant, his craft requires synthesizing masses of information into encapsulations he calls “trendposts” and then predicting how these will evolve and affect domestic and global affairs in the foreseeable future. Through his institute, which extends to a group of 25 advisors, he specializes in “custom designing detailed trend forecasts” for businesses and professional organizations. The group likewise creates a widely circulated annual list of “Top Ten Trend Picks.”

“We are all architects of our future—you create the future,” Celente told me by phone. “We have to understand the current events of today because they affect our immediate lives of tomorrow. The future doesn’t happen in a vacuum; we’ll all do what we’re doing as individuals and as a society because of choices that we’ve made.”

In addition to offering appearances and consultations, Celente publishes The Trends Journal, a quarterly newsletter tracking socioeconomic, political, business, consumer, and lifestyle patterns. For instance, the Spring 2002 issue profiles the “ugly American” as “back on track”; announces “smart wear,” a high style that “will dominate the fashion industry for at least a decade”; and considers the merits of water and gold as potential investments. Celente, who authors much of the copy, claims to be neither optimist nor pessimist in offering information, but rather a “political atheist” who doesn’t say whether a trend “is right or wrong.” When I mention that his water trendpost occurred to me in the mid –‘80s but bothered my conscience too much for me to act upon it, Celente rejoined, “We’re running out of water whether you invest in it or not—that’s just the way things are.” The forecaster does admit that people buy his journal, which carries a subscription rate of $185 per year, to make money. “I talk about globalization and how US foreign policy can crash the world economy,” he said, aware of the import to these readers.

Celente is equally unabashed about chronicling his own 20-year-plus rise in the trend forecasting trade. As a Washington, DC lobbyist during the mid ‘70s, he watched the Iranian political situation unravel under President Jimmy Carter. Celente claims that a million people were revolting in the streets of Iran when Carter proclaimed the Shah “the island of stability in the Middle East.” This development led the author of Trends 2000: How to Prepare for and Profit from the Changes of the 21st Century (1997) to a personal epiphany, which left him asking, “How can I make money off this?” His first move was to invest in gold and oil futures. Eventually, he did well enough in the stock market to quit his job. Decamping to Rhinebeck in 1979, he started the Trends Research Institute.

At the institute’s inception, Celente defined trends as “definite, predictable, and foreseeable” in nature; and as “having social, political, and economic consequences [that] follow a sequence of events.” He set about pursuing them by reading four to six hours a day (cut back with his acquisition of permanent knowledge), mostly newspapers, magazines, and trade journals. The director also brought in a loosely knit group of people to provide input and advance his thinking in specific fields. For instance, turning his gaze to millennial esoterica in 1988, he consulted with eminent (though unorthodox) Egyptologist Mark Anthony West and predicted New Age Spirituality. Condensing ideas set forth by West in Serpent in the Sky (1979), as well as by Graham Hancock in Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), Celente continued to track this phenomenon in Trends 2000. The book opens with an explanation of “the precession of the equinoxes,” the slowly changing relationship of the Earth to the zodiac that transpires over a 25,920-year cycle. Once every 2,160 years (one-twelfth of the cycle) our planet enters a different astrological time zone, such as the current Age of Aquarius, from which New Age derives its name and power. “Prodigious changes are taking place,” Celente concludes.

Among his best-known trendpost “hits”, Celente predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the rise of green marketing. His Fall 1999 Trends Journal led with the story “Dot.com This,” which said that “the great dot.com circuit would overload and short circuit by mid-2000.” As early as 1990, Celente foresaw the anti-globalization movement and described a worsening geopolitical situation. In 1993, he foretold of a rise in global terrorism with significant strikes against the US, particularly in densely populated areas. Given that the year of this prediction coincides with the first World Trade Center bombings, the trendpost seems obvious in retrospect. But what was indeed prescient about the researcher’s assessment of the situation was his articulation of how US foreign policy would take shape as consequence, resulting in what the soothsayer labeled “the war on terrorism.”

Committed to forecasting in ordinary language, the Trends Research Institute director underscores this position when he states, “It’s no mystery why any of these trends are happening. Why people see things and why they don’t reflects not only their own ideology but also our system of misinformation and junk news, which stifles and places restrictions on free thinking.” Maintaining that the business of trend spotting itself has been somewhat elitist, with “libertarian” (read: free market) leanings toward the global economy, Celente lately aims to be part of a “progressive” movement in the field, focusing on environment, health, and family. Additionally, progressive trend forecasters locate issues familiar to the managerial classes and make them accessible to the masses, or for those who don’t have time to read for hours each day.

Celente promulgates the progressive philosophy in his recently released What Zizi Gave Honeyboy (2002), in which he merges trends writing with memoir. A book that offers the wisdom of Celente’s 83-year-old aunt Zizi, it represents her nephew Gerald’s attempt to put “a human face on the trends he tracks.” Its subtext, according to the author, is to explain “how America lost its soul and how we can get it back. It concerns things we think but that people won’t say out loud.” As an example, Celente offers a remark made by Zizi in a fit of disgust over TV reporting: “I listened to the news all day yesterday…what a bunch of shit. They must think we’re all morons.” This zeitgeist became the rallying cry of his inspirational familial story, which looks at our lives today as well as “the future we deserve.”

Gerald Celente’s forthcoming book, Discover the Future, will extend his earlier volume, Trend Tracking, a handbook for identifying and studying trends. As with his past work, Celente’s latest guide to the “pitfalls and opportunities” of the new millennium promises to signal trendposts pointing to “prosperity in a radically altered world.” As the forecaster says, “The future can be yours.”

To book Gerald Celente for speaking engagements or trend consultations, or to order The Trends Journal, contact: Trends Research Institute® Inc. PO Box 660, Rhinebeck, New York 12572-0660 www.trendsresearch.com. (888) ON-TREND.

—Pauline Uchmanowicz