Why an Indian is satisfied about the prospect of gloom in the US

The publication of his book, The Great Depression of 1990, won him a place atop the New York Times bestseller list in 1987. But the ensuing decade of unprecedented prosperity has nearly destroyed his reputation. He says colleagues don’t talk to him, his old publishers won’t touch him, and while other economics professors are getting big raises, he has had to plead for small increases.

Thus it isn’t surprising that “Dr. Doom” is heartened by the stock market’s malaise and signs the economy is slowing. “Once the US economy starts to go down,” he says, “foreign money will begin to leave and the dollar will collapse, creating either an inflationary recession or an inflationary depression.”

But even as the Federal Reserve hastens to avert a recession, Batra is learning a hard lesson about depression economics: Publishers and readers are a lot less interested in prophecies of economic peril than they used to be.

“People get enough gloom and doom from the newspapers, the magazines and their brokers,” says Steve Ross, a Crown Publishing Group editorial director. Crown’s Harmony Books division published Batra’s 1999 book, The Crash of the Millennium: Surviving the Coming Inflationary Depression. But the publisher decided to take a pass on printing more copies of the book until readers show a greater inclination to buy it. Crown printed 18,000 copies in 1999, and 1,500 still sit on its shelves.

The public’s appetite for books about bad times could grow if the economy worsens. Yet even prognosticators with good records of calling the future aren’t selling very many bad-news books these days.

Batra’s The Depression of 1990 was on the New York Times bestseller list for months and sold more than a million copies in hardback and paperback in the late 1980s, making him an overnight millionaire.

Batra earned a Ph.D. at Southern Illinois University in 1969. But academic credentials haven’t swayed doubters. “He’s not a serious economic or financial thinker,” says Barton Biggs, a stock-market strategist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter who is quoted on the jacket of Batra’s latest book praising the author. Biggs says any praise is at least 15 years old.

Batra concedes his reputation as a Cassandra has hurt him a lot. Soon after The Depression of 1990, friends in Dallas stopped inviting him to dinner. He became isolated in S.M.U.’s economics department, where he once served as chairman. His agent, Jan Miller, moved on to titles like God Wants You to Be Rich.

It hasn’t helped that Batra’s own investment strategy has been based on his forecasts. He says he sold all of his stocks in the late 1970s, missing out on one of the great bull markets in history. “It has put a big crimp in my living standard,” he says.

But Batra argues that his critics are too harsh. Of 33 predictions he has made since the late 1970s, he says, he has gotten 31 right. He says he was correct in forecasting the collapse of communism and the 1979 revolution in Iran. And he says he never said capitalism would fall before 2000, so he deserves some breathing room. He also says he was partially right in calling for a long depression in the 1990s. The US downturn, he says, was forestalled temporarily by a large inflow of foreign capital, but Japan has been in an extended downturn.

Batra did have a good run in Japan. His 1994 tome, Great World Depression 1995-2010, sold 180,000 copies, according to the publisher, Sogo Horei Shuppan. But his message of doom is even wearing thin there. The Crash of the Millennium has sold just 11,000 copies, according to publisher Tachibana Shuppan.

Batra is planning a new book with Pema Gyalpo, a Tibetan professor in Tokyo who once served as the Dalai Lama’s chief representative in Japan. The title, says Pema, will be, “World Depression, or something like that."

— with Hiroko Fujita

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL