Uh oh, Howard Ruff, the man who first told Chicken Little that the sky is falling, is back with a new book. That must mean we're in for . . . Ruff Times!
Well, the rougher the better as far as Howard's concerned. Soaring stock market? Low unemployment? Inflation only a memory? Interest rates the lowest since the '60s?To Ruff, those seemingly positive economic signs are all just proof that we're now "at the intersection of several deadly serious threats to social peace, financial stability and political continuity."
That's the dire warning Ruff uses to open his new book: "How to Prosper During the Hard Times Ahead," subtitled: "A Crash Course for the American Family in the Troubled New Millennium."
Published by Regnery Publishing Inc., the book is arriving in stores this month.
Does the title sound familiar? It should. It's a near clone of his big best seller of the 1970s and '80s: "How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years." If you look in your bookcase, you probably have it. Ruff sold some 3 million copies of the original "Prosper" during its run, and Utahns bought a ton of them.
In case you've forgotten, Ruff gained national fame back then as the "Prophet of Doom" and "Gold Bug," sobriquets stemming from his penchant for predicting the worst and advising people to buy and hoard precious metals as protection against the "coming bad years."
Back then, Ruff operated out of Springville and lived in a sprawling estate in Mapleton. In 1991, he announced that he was battling cancer and had decided to pull up stakes and move back to the Bay Area in California where he and his wife, Kay, had their roots.
Didn't happen. He beat the cancer but struggled to sell the house. He also dropped off the media radar screen. But that's history. Today, he lives in Springville, the "Ruff Times" newsletter is alive and well, and Ruff's got a new book out, which means he'll be returning to the talk-show circuit to promote it. Yep, Howard Ruff is back. Big time.
Which is just great as far as I'm concerned. Whether or not you agree with Ruff's philosophy of life, subscribe to his apocalyptic view of the future, or bemoan his track record as an investment guru, you have to admit one thing: He's never boring.
Whether he's comparing America to ancient Rome before the fall, castigating President Clinton's morals or lauding his hero, Jonah, the original prophet of doom, Ruff is entertaining and never takes himself completely seriously. Unlike most people who spend their lives telling other people how to think and what to do, he can laugh at himself.
But Ruff isn't laughing when it comes to the year 2000 computer bug, known by its acronym Y2K. The Y2K crisis is made to order for Ruff. The possibility of global chaos when the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, and the world's computers going berserk because they think it's 1900 or something . . . this is the kind of issue that gets Ruff licking his chops and was probably the catalyst for his new book.
Ruff compares Y2K to "HAL," the malevolent space ship computer in Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction classic book and 1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
HAL came to "life" and took over the ship, requiring "Dave" -- the last man left alive -- to shut HAL down or die trying.
"Incredibly," writes Ruff, "life is imitating art, and the real-world 2001 HAL crisis may arrive a year ahead of schedule."
Beginning in July of this year and running through Dec. 1, "with financial overshocks that may rock the civilized world for years," Ruff says we will experience "what might be the most unthinkable, amazing problem faced by civilization in our lifetimes, and we did it to ourselves."
Y2K, says Ruff, will "attack us where we are weakest, exposing the hidden fault lines in civilization's infrastructure."
Even in a best-case scenario, Ruff says, Y2K is going to cause "a worldwide recession, a bear market and disruptions of government services and benefits." His worst-case scenario calls for a worldwide depression, soaring bankruptcies, millions of failed businesses and trillions of dollars in "paper assets or cybermoney" vanishing.
Phew. Sounds bad all right. Guess we'll find out in about nine months. Meanwhile, Ruff's "action steps" call for people to move to a smaller town, buy guns and a six-month supply of nonperishable food.
E-mail (max@desnews.com) or fax 801-236-7605. Max Knudson's column runs each Monday.