Harry S. Dent, Jr.

Harry S. Dent, Jr. (born 1950) is an American financial newsletter writer. His latest book, The Great Depression Ahead, appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Dent was born in Berkeley, California, United States, North America.[1]

Dent received his B.A. from the University of South Carolina, where he graduated #1 in his class. He earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar.[citation needed]

Dent is the Founder of HS Dent Investment Management, an investment firm based in Tampa, Florida that advises the Dent Strategic Portfolio Fund mutual fund. Dent is also the president and founder of the H.S. Dent Foundation and H.S. Dent Publishing.

Dent writes an economic newsletter that reviews the economy in the US and around the world through demographic trends focusing on predictable consumer spending patterns, as well as financial markets, and has written seven books, of which two recent ones have been bestsellers:

The Great Depression Ahead (2009)
The Next Great Bubble Boom (2004)
The Roaring 2000s Investor (1999)
The Roaring 2000s (1998)
The Great Jobs Ahead (1995)
The Great Boom Ahead (1993)
Our Power to Predict (1989)
The basis of Dent's research is the highly predictable nature of consumer spending based on a family's formation pattern: minimal spending as young adults, increased spending while rearing children, peaking their spending as their children leave home, and then slowing spending during the last 15 years of working life (48-63) while saving more and preparing for retirement.

In the late 1980s, Dent forecasted that the Japanese economy, then the darling of the world, would soon enter a slowdown that would last more than a decade. In the early 1990s, he predicted that the DOW would reach 10k. Both of these predictions were met with much skepticism, and yet both eventually came to pass.

In Japan, Dent was using their peak of 45-50 year olds (1990-1994) as the beginning of a long slowdown. In the US, he used, and continues to use, the peak year for 48-year-olds, 2009, as the top of a long term growth pattern.

In 2000, based on his forecast that economic growth would continue throughout the 2000s, Dent predicted that the DOW would reach 40k, a prediction which was repeated in his 2004 book. In his book, he also predicted the NASDAQ would reach 13-20k. In late 2006 he revised his forecasts to much lower levels, estimating the Dow would reach 16-18k and the NASDAQ 3-4k. In January 2006, he predicted that the DOW would reach 14-15k by the end of the year. It ended 2006 at 12,463, 11% below the lower end of his prediction. It ended 2007 at 13,264, again significantly lower than Dent's revised prediction of 15,000 by early 2008. Since then, the Dow crossed 14,000 in late 2007 before retrenching.

Dent popularized the baby boomer spending wave theory.[2] According to him, after baby-boomers' children leave home, they begin paying down debt and saving for retirement, which means spending less. That means that the stock-market should peak sometime between 2007 and 2009. This is based on his observation that spending peaks at around age 50 for individuals, the average age for a family's children to leave home.