Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9004010257
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHIP BROWN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: DALLAS LENGTH: Medium
Batra is republishing his 1977 book "The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism," this month, 13 years after the India-born economist predicted the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall would come down.
"When I took the book around to American publishers in 1977, they fought back laughter and said they weren't interested in such an outrageous forecast," Batra said.
"Dr. Doom" still is scorned by most mainstream economists, but he no longer lacks an audience.
Batra, a 46-year-old professor of economics at Southern Methodist University, attracted international attention when his 1987 New York Times best-seller "The Great Depression of 1990" predicted a cataclysmic drop in the stock market for that year. That Oct. 19, the Dow Jones average fell 506 points.
The crash helped bring Batra's alarming forecasts into focus. He expounded his theories on television talk shows and was invited to advise a U.S. Senate committee on economic growth.
Batra's 1987 prophecy and a follow-up called "Surviving the Great Depression of 1990" paint worldwide unemployment, deflation, stock market crashes and bank failures beginning this year and lasting at least seven years.
"I predicted then and I am sticking to my guns that capitalism and communism will both endure a complete collapse around the year 2000," he said in a recent interview.
"Except for an introduction and one additional chapter outlining what I think will happen in the 1990s, `The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism' is exactly as I wrote it in 1977," he said.
Britain's Macmillan Press printed 5,000 copies of the book in 1978. Now Batra's publishing it again via Dallas-based Taylor Publishing Co.
"Every depression starts with a recession," Batra said. "We are already seeing signs of a recession with the recent collapses of Campeau and Drexel Burnham."
Problems in the market for high-risk junk bonds pushed the U.S. retailing operations of Campeau Corp. and investment banking business of Drexel Burnham Lambert into bankruptcy court earlier this year.
"The junk bond market is in shambles and the savings and loan failures are magnifying. Unemployment is also beginning to rise and will probably reach 8 percent by the end of 1990," Batra said.
By 1995, he said, the country will be plagued with "soup and kitchen lines worse than in the 1930s."
Batra wrote in 1977 that communism's bare-bones living standards combined with the continued repression of basic freedoms "will force Marxism to crumble under its own weight, perhaps in the next 25 years."
He's revised that scenario since communist governments began unraveling in the East bloc last year, a result of the liberalizations created by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. But Batra suggested communism as a system is likely to make a last stand before succumbing.
"Soviet hard-liners and army officers, who have lost out in the recent realignment of power, could take advantage of growing unrest and economic stagnation and overthrow Gorbachev in a military coup," the book states.
"Even when communism recovers to make a last stand, it will prove to be a rearguard action, delaying, not stopping, the inevitable."
Batra said he hired a bodyguard after Black Monday in 1987 to protect himself from death threats. He has drawn worldwide criticism for columns published in prominent newspapers heralding economic nightmares.
Batra said his forecasts are born from the teachings of Indian mentor P.R. Sarkar, a spiritualist whose writings outline a history of social cycles dominating history.
Sarkar heads an Indian sect called the Path of Bliss, some of whose followers have been known to take part in rites such as dancing with human skulls.
by CNB