Storm clouds are gathering for the U.S. economy, with ominous signs accumulating among both fundamental and technical indicators, according to veteran stock market timer Sy Harding.

Harding, author of “Riding the Bear — How to Prosper in the Coming Bear Market” that accurately predicted the 2000-02 bear market, wrote in his StreetSmartReport.com commentary that economic weaknesses are being confirmed by sagging commodity prices.

“Declining commodity prices usually indicate demand for goods is dropping and the economy is in trouble,” he said.

Among the basket of fundamental ills he cited were declines in new homes sales, durable goods and retail sales, as well as plunges in consumer sentiment.

Capping off the bad news was the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators, which dropped 0.1 percent in March versus a consensus forecast for a 0.2 percent increase.

On the technical end, Harding detects a “negative divergence” forming between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Dow Jones Transportation Average, and also between the blue chips of the Standard & Poor’s 500 and the Russell 2000 Index and thirdly between the U.S. market and big emerging markets.

“As the old saying goes, the market does like to climb a wall of worry,” Harding wrote.

“But with the economy stumbling again as it has in each of the last three summers, commodity prices tumbling and important global markets giving up, it’s no time to be made complacent about the U.S. market by its continuing resilience, which seems to now be on shaky underpinnings.”

“The telltale signs of another midyear slowdown are already evident in softer consumer spending, a barely growing manufacturing industry and a slower pace of private-sector hiring. The same seesaw pattern also occurred in 2012 and 2011,” wrote MarketWatch columnist Jeffry Bartash.

Economists polled by MarketWatch predicted economic growth in the United States will slump to 1.8 percent or lower in the second quarter.