Never mind that fruit trees are blossoming all over the Northern Hemisphere. It doesn't matter that Punxsutawney Phil of Pennsylvania saw his shadow on February 2. We're in for a lot more of a long, harsh Winter—a real whopper in terms of the Kondratieff cycle that the Longwave Group's Ian Gordon has become expert at analyzing and interpreting. In this exclusive interview with The Gold Report, Ian pulls no punches about the dreadful times ahead as economies wring out decade's worth of accumulated debt. The only gleams shining through in his dreary forecast: ample opportunities in precious metals equities.

The Gold Report: According to your analysis based on the Longwave Principle, we are in a period of the cycle when the economy dies, the stock market crashes and we enter depression. Could you provide readers who may not be familiar with the Longwave Principle a high-level description of this concept?

Ian Gordon: The basis of the Longwave Principle is the Kondratieff Cycle. Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff developed his thesis on this in the 1920s. The cycle lasts approximately 50 to 60 years. I call it a lifetime cycle, because we live only one cycle in a meaningful way. For that reason, it is also very difficult for anyone to recognize where we are in the cycle because we haven't lived it that period before.

For example, we are now in the depression stage, but no one really refers to it that way. I do believe we are in depression because the real number on U.S. unemployment is somewhere around 17%. That to me is a depression.

TGR: You call this period the Winter.

IG: I've broken the cycle into the four seasons, and others have done the same—with Spring being the birth and rebirth of the economy, Summer being the time when the economy reaches its fruition, Autumn being the feel-good period. Kondratieff called Autumn the plateau period because it's when the economy levels out and it's also the season—always—of massive speculation in stocks, bonds and real estate.

There are indications of each season changing, and you have to know where you are in a cycle to be able to predict where you're going. At the Longwave Group, we've been able to demonstrate with a lot of comfort where we are in each of the seasons, when we change seasons and so on.

TGR: And the debt created in the previous period, Autumn, led to this depression stage?

IG: Debt is a major part of it. Speculation is also a contributing factor. We went into Autumn between 1980 and 1982 and similarly between 1920 and 1921. Four events anticipated each of those Autumns. One was a peak in interest rates, second was a peak in prices, third was a bear market in stocks and fourth was a recession.

And then you go into this massive speculation in stocks, bonds and real estate in the Autumn because once the Federal Reserve takes interest rates quite dramatically down from the peak, money floods into the banks. It's also the season when you get the biggest build-up in debt. Any debt chart in the United States, for instance, shows that the debt really starts to take off at the beginning of Autumn.

When the big speculative bull market ends, it indicates that we're going into Winter. And Winter is when all the huge debt that's been built into the economy is wrung out, through either payback or—in most cases—bankruptcy. Creditors and debtors alike suffer very, very much during the Winter period. It causes a crisis in the banking system because banks are the biggest creditors. If you look at the last Winter after the 1929 stock market peak, 10,000 U.S. banks failed by 1933. In fact, when Roosevelt became president, he closed all banks for 10 days and sent in examiners. Banks deemed to be okay were allowed to reopen, and basically the doors stayed closed on the rest.

So, we're now in the Winter. I've argued the real peak in the stock market occurred in 2000; that was certainly the speculative peak on the NASDAQ. At that time, too, consumer confidence peaked. Alan Greenspan decided he didn't like Winter and to save the American economy from a depression, he cut interest rates from 6% to 1%, and pushed enormous amounts of money back into the banking system to try to refloat the economy. He did that to some extent, but in effect, he really built up the debt level to absolutely unmanageable proportions and particularly in the housing market, which resulted in this huge speculative phase in real estate.

That housing market bubble burst, and it has a lot further to go on the downside. The stock bear market that began after the NASDAQ peak—and it has never gotten anywhere close to that level since—began for the Dow in October 2007.

TGR: If we infer that each season lasts about 15 years, give or take five, we're pretty much halfway through Winter now. Is that right?

IG: I don't think we are. This is the first Kondratieff Winter in which the entire world has been subjected to a fiat system. It's so much easier through the printing process to try to stave off the bad days. As I've said, Greenspan made it appear that Winter hadn't started by printing all this money. And we did have a bear market. The Dow dropped—what?—35%, and the NASDAQ dropped almost 80% into 2002.

TGR: You indicated that the major thing that happens during Winter is debt gets taken out, either through bankruptcy or payback. Where does hyperinflation fit in that picture?

IG: I am very much a deflationist. Taking the debt out of the system is in itself a deflation process. You can see it in falling housing prices. As debt comes out of the housing and mortgage markets, it deflates prices. We're going to see the same in stock prices. Wealth is being reduced considerably, and that is deflationary.

A lot of people who argue for inflation say that all the money being printed eventually has to go through the banks back into the economy. But it's like being on a treadmill. You running as fast as the treadmill goes, but you don't get anywhere. The Federal Reserve is printing copious amounts of money trying to re-start the economy. Unfortunately, the rate of debt being taken out of the system eventually will overwhelm their ability to do that.

TGR: Your Winter Warnings indicates that as we move through this collapse, China will become a scapegoat in terms of other governments implementing policies that will harm Chinese exports. If the Chinese GDP is growing and they're already becoming less reliant on exports, could they have a milder Winter than Europe and the U.S.?

IG: I think perhaps the Chinese Winter will be the worst of all, and again we have a parallel. China is the U.S. of the '20s. The U.S. came out of World War I as the world's largest creditor nation, with a major significant growth in its industrial prowess—all of which China is today. At that time, the U.S. government was paying down debt, and it wasn't that significant anyway.

And now, the Chinese government doesn't have much debt; either. But in the U.S., corporations and consumers of the "Roaring '20s" built up huge amounts of debt. You see parallels in the housing market in the '20s to what we see today in China. A lot of suburbs were developed because people had automobile or railway access to the suburbs. At the same time, we had a major development of skyscrapers in city centers, monstrous buildings carrying monstrous debt.

China is in that kind of process. What happens when you get so wealthy, you're exporting so much, particularly to the United States, the Chinese government takes the U.S. dollars and credits the bank with renminbi. The bank has all this money on hand. So a local businessman goes to the bank and says, "I want to build a factory and build toys for Toys 'R' Us in the United States." The banker says, "Fine." He has all this money; he makes the loan; the borrower goes and builds his factory. Somewhere across town, someone else goes to another bank and does the same, and again and again with different borrowers and lenders. It's the mal-investment that occurs when you have so much money floating in the system.

TGR: And then what?

IG: Eventually, the United States, the biggest importer of Chinese products, cannot continue buying at that level. Despite the pace of growth in China's economy, it still takes probably at least 50 years, maybe more, to develop a middle class. Those are the people who have the wherewithal to spend. So, it's going to take China a long, long time; it's still very much an agrarian economy.

For these reasons, I think China's banking system will go the way the U.S. banking system did in the '30s, and the whole economy will go into a collapse. But out of it, she will rise as did the U.S. as the greatest economic, financial and political power. She will be the world leader.

TGR: You went into Gold early on, back in 2000, but you've also said that cash is one of the best investments. What makes cash a good investment during the Winter period?

IG: Because it's deflationary. The value of everything your cash can purchase is going down, so you can buy more. For instance, when we were renting a house in Phoenix, we were told you can buy 4,500-square-foot homes here for $150,000. You can't even build them for that kind of money today. If you have $1 million in cash now, it might buy you one really nice home where I live in White Rock, BC, but in four or five years' time, it might buy you five of them. We're seeing that in all sorts of things; even automobiles are getting cheaper.

TGR: Why wouldn't U.S. investors have all their money in gold? And when they need to pay bills, they convert it into cash? That's assuming that gold ultimately will retain its value, whereas all fiat currencies are going to come down.

IG: I don't know that all currencies are going to come down relative to each other. For years I said the Euro was a cobbled political currency that would never survive a Kondratieff Winter. And we're starting to see that's likely to happen. Everybody is trying to pick the winner. Right now they're picking the U.S. dollar. Before they were picking the Euro. Except maybe the renminbi, all the currencies are vulnerable. Definitely the yen is very vulnerable because the ratio of debt to GDP in Japan is so massive already.

TGR: So if the currencies are all vulnerable, should we put all of our cash into gold and basically liquidate it for cash when we need it?

IG: One problem with that is we don't know how the government will respond to those who own gold. It's dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket. You'd be trusting the politicians not to do what Roosevelt did in 1933. After he confiscated gold, Americans kind of got around it by investing in gold companies. They were very profitable, and all the money, all capital ultimately flowed to gold because it was the only thing people trusted. It was going to gold because that's where people wanted to be.

That led to a major number of discoveries made, including, in Canada, all along the Abitibi Greenstone Belt and in British Columbia. They couldn't have been made without money. By 1940, according to the U.S. Bureau of Mines; 9,000 gold mines were operating in the United States. Of course, those were the ones that people reported. People panning gold up in Alaska didn't tell anybody that they were an operating mine. They were just hoarding the gold.

TGR: So, it's a combination of owning gold and gold stocks. Or should we say precious metals—we'll expand it out to silver. Should our portfolios consider other elements?

IG: As for silver, it didn't really work as a monetary instrument in the early 1930s. Although at that time U.S. coinage from the dollar to the dime was minted in silver, so there was certainly hoarding of Silver coinage during the last depression. During this depression silver may well take on a monetary role, since the price of gold might take that metal out of reach of many people. I think only the precious metals work—again because of the stock market debacle that I see occurring. We know that investing in precious metals worked in the '30s. People were pushing their money into gold stocks because they wanted to be in gold in any shape or form.

TGR: Because you're suggesting that all gold companies will increase in value during this timeframe, should the average investor be concerned about which specific gold companies to invest in?

IG: Certainly the producing companies will go up with the rising price of gold. Don't forget in the early '30s the gold price was fixed at $20.67 and it wasn't raised to $35 until 1934. But even so, people were investing in the gold companies, both explorers and big producers such as Homestake.

Today, I tend to put my money into the juniors because that's where I see the leverage to a rising gold price. But you've got to be very, very selective and very cautious. You have to evaluate management of these companies. In Canada, particularly in Vancouver where most of the junior precious metals companies are situated, we're living with these people. It's very tough in the United States, where you have to rely much more on what others tell you. Fortunately, a lot of very reputable newsletter writers and so on are trying to do a good job in their recommendations.

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