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After his start as a Hong Kong-based equity analyst back in the mid 1980s, Mr. Duncan has served as global head of investment strategy at ABN AMRO Asset Management in London and worked as a financial sector specialist at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

He is currently chief economist at Singapore-based Blackhorse Asset Management.

Mr. Duncan first made waves back in 2002 with his book, The Dollar Crisis, in which he predicted the financial meltdown of 2008 due to what he called flaws in the post-Breton Woods financial system. The near implosion of the financial system wasn’t caused by an evaporating greenback, but experts say there was much about his analysis that was correct.

His latest book, titled The New Depression, offers similarly dire predictions. By abandoning the link between the dollar and gold, the U.S. paved the way for politicians and central bankers to take control of the printing presses, switching them on and off in support of whatever policy initiatives were deemed important. Now it’s reached the point that the only way to keep the economy going is by quantitative easing (printing money), but even that won’t work for ever.

“The explosion in credit drove economic growth in the U.S. and around the world, and now that’s the only thing that’s keeping us from collapsing in a debt/deflation spiral,” he said. “[What] I think everybody needs to understand is that the kind of economy that we have now, it’s not capitalism. It has very little in common with capitalism. Capitalism was an economic system in which the government played very little role …. Under capitalism, gold was money and the government had nothing to do with it. Now the central bank creates the money and manipulates its value.”

Policymakers are fully aware of what’s happened, but they’re at a loss as to what to do about it. Mr. Duncan says that the most likely outcome is that they continue to run the printing presses for another five or 10 years. But the endgame doesn’t have to be another depression like the one in the 1930s.

According to Mr. Duncan, if enough is invested in “21st-century industries” like solar energy, genetic engineering or nanotechnology, the U.S. can pay the interest on the trillions of dollars of accumulated debt and set the stage for a new phase of economic growth.