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Mike Gleason: It is my privilege to speak with Gerald Celente, published of the renowned Trends Journal. Mr. Celente is a frequent and highly sought after guest on news programs throughout the world, and has been forecasting some of the biggest and most important trends before they happen for more than 30 years now, and it’s a real honor to have him speak to our listeners and readers today.

Mr. Celente, welcome back and thank you for joining us again.

Gerald Celente: Thanks for having me back on Mike.

Mike Gleason: Well to start out here, the first two months of the year were very bad for stocks, and now the markets have come roaring back. What is behind the rebound? Is the economy really improving or is something else driving the recent gains we’re seeing in equities?

Gerald Celente: Sure, the U.S. economy’s doing great. What did we have? Existing home sales were down 7.1% in February. We’re seeing profits plunging from Fortune 500 companies. That’s all positive, isn’t it? Of course, we just saw consumer spending roar ahead 0.1% in February. They downgraded January’s 0.5% gain in consumer spending to 0.1. Oh yeah, that’s real strong. And you look at wages, and it’s declining a bit, but so what.

What’s keeping the markets going, obviously is not the economy. The economy’s stagnant. You’re looking now at GDP growth in the last quarter came in at a roaring 1.4%, and now in the first quarter of 2016 estimates are around 1 or 1.25% growth. What’s only keeping the markets alive are the criminal Ponzi scheme by the central bankers, and that’s they’re dumping they’re dumping in all this cheap dough, fiat money, and negative or low or zero interest rate policy that’s just fueling equity markets. That’s all its done.

And that’s not a speculation, it’s a fact because when you go back to 2009 when this criminal operation really started to grab hold where quantitative easing fueled world growth you saw, for example in the United States, the numbers are there. 95% of the wealth gains from 2009 went to the 1%. So the only thing that’s fueling the equity markets is the Ponzi scheme.

Mike Gleason: We see an unbelievable amount of flip-flopping from the Fed. For instance, in March alone, they indicated their intent to scale back the number of potential rate hikes from 4 to 2, economic conditions are too weak to stay the course – yadda, yadda. Then the next week we hear the economy is doing just fine, and they may go ahead and raise rates as soon as April, and then Yellen backtracked again making some dovish remarks during a talk in New York earlier this week.

Why do people and the markets continue to hang on every work they say Gerald? At what point does the Fed lose all credibility?

Gerald Celente: The market’s hanging onto it because they need the cheap money. When you look at the reality here, what’s juiced the markets? As I said, it’s not corporate profits.

That’s for sure. What were they down in 2015 over 5%.

The market’s holding onto it so they get the cheap money for stock buybacks and mergers and acquisitions. End of story. That’s all they’re doing. It’s a carry trade. They’re borrowing for nothing to gamble. What they call investors are nothing more than gamblers. So this has nothing to do with true price discovery. The markets are hanging onto every word because that’s what’s driving the Ponzi scheme.

Look, go back to just a few weeks ago. We heard the former President of the Dallas Fed, Dick Fisher say that what the stimulus and the easy money policy has done was like adding cocaine and heroin, injecting cocaine and heroin into the financial system. He used the words cocaine and heroine. We’ve been calling it monetary meth for the money junkies since they began this whole scam.

That’s what’s going on. That’s all it is, it’s a scam. The Wall Street gang are nothing more than money junkies. If they don’t keep feeding their habit, the markets go down. What we’re looking at is just with Yellen’s, “dovish” statement is more promise to keep the interest rates low so that the markets could be juiced up.

Mike Gleason: Leads me right into my next question here. Is it realistic to believe the U.S. Fed would be raising interest rates when so many central bankers elsewhere are experimenting with negative interest rates?

Gerald Celente: No, it’s not because here’s the deal. You go back to when Yellen announced on Tuesday that they were not going to be raising rates, or hinted as such, and what were the effects?