That's the thing though, there is always a lot of warnings and clear indications of upcoming hardship or even catastrophe like 2008 but we always have a lot of people who live in denial and don't want to see those warnings so they end up paying a dire price.

Can we get out of such situation unharmed? Definitely not. Every single person is affected by the economy whether it is during good times or bad. The only thing we can do is to reduce the "damage" we are going to experience.
For example over the past couple of years certain investments have been very risky, specially in tech sector. So if you were a stock market trader you would stay away from those.

With recession and inflation we have certain other types of companies showing better potential which could be very profitable. Specially with the Great Shuffle where a company shutting down in one place means open market for similar companies in another country to fill that gap.
For example over the past year that I've been talking about economic crisis, all my topics could act as signals for the market. We saw companies that crashed in a lot of sectors (eg. detergent, energy and fertilizer/food industries) while soared in another country in the same sector. Shorting their stock in the crashing market while buying it in the soaring market that was filling that gap was super profitable.