Global Investing

If it were about age, 40-somethings would cringe. But it seems a dead certainty that 40 now means 50 -- or even higher -- when it comes to predicting the chances of a recession taking place.

Going by past Reuters polls of economists, every time the probability hits 40 percent, the recession's already started or is perilously close to doing so.

After the brief recovery period from the Great Recession, Reuters once again started surveying economists several months ago on the chances of developed economies stumbling back into the muck.

As the data get nastier and euro zone politicians wrangle over the sovereign debt mess, the probability goes higher. Just not high enough or fast enough.

The probability that Britain slides back into recession hit 40 percent in the Reuters poll this week, up from one in three last month.

From whom would you rather take investment advice:  one of the thousands of bankers or wealth managers who did not see the financial crisis coming or one of the few economists who predicted it?

In his 2003 bestseller “The Dollar Crisis”, Richard Duncan forecast how the unbridled creation of liquidity was set to spark a financial crisis. Three years after the crisis unfolded, Duncan’s new book, “The Corruption of Capitalism”, paints an even bleaker future.

Duncan expects that, in the years ahead, governments will prop up economies with ever-bigger doses of fiscal and monetary stimulus, but that eventually the extreme imbalances in the world economy will be corrected by market forces.