Monday, November 24, 2008
When the winds of finance Schiff
If you haven't seen this video yet, consider it a must. An absolute must.
This video sequence offers a compendium of appearances (covering the 2006-2007 period) by Euro Pacific Capital president Peter Schiff, who is a frequent -- and frequently disrespected -- talking head on cable news shows. What astonishes is not just the accuracy of his dour predictions about the economy but the sheer arrogance of every other person appearing on these programs.
I don't know who comes off as worse -- the supremely snotty Ben Stein, or the well-named Arthur Laffer. I just wonder how Ben Stein feels about the financial markets as an investment now.
This is an astonishing compilation of clips. It just keeps getting more outrageous as it goes along.
Every time Schiff says something sensible, the pundits surrounding him snort and howl. They treat him with undisguised contempt and hatred, as though he had just called for ending the laws against homicide or reducing the age of consent to three.
What did these "experts" hope to gain by attempting to conspire against reality?
(By the way, I am aware that Schiff was the economic adviser to Ron Paul. I still don't like Libertarians, and I'm sure that Schiff has an ideological angle. But when a guy proves that he can call the shot, then one must give him credit.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
19 comments:
I'm feeling so pleased with myself because I just posted a link to that video here on 14 or 15 November (date I downloaded the video). Seems like it was near, or at the end of a short thread of comments. Unfortunately, I can't find the post/thread at this time.
Wish I could remember where I ran across it, but it escapes me. Pretty good post along with it there.
Breathtakingly arrogant crooks.
These "experts" are the minions of the "experts" running our planets economic system. We are players in a very great tragedy.
Arrogance in this situation can actually be a personality trait stemming from a divine unity one of which isn’t well understood at the moment. It will be later though as more surfaces to explain what has been going on but right now everyone is just trying to figure everything out. It’s much like seeing red flags when someone is deliberately trying not to be obvious as they follow through on their deceitful trickery right under your/our radar. What are those red flags telling us? What should we know that we aren’t being told? Reading articles like this explain someone’s radar is being lowered!
Marty Didier
Northbrook, IL
Marty, To me, it seems we ARE being told, have been throughout history too, but the tellers/teachers tend to get smeared (physically or otherwise) by the "experts"-that-be.
Maybe things getting bad or desperate enough tends to lower the collective radar, or rather that of more and more us individuals as the general situation gets worse.
Unfortunately, conspiracy or collusion-wise, the opposition knows this, and turns to "attacking the radar" by using their power to throw everything into chaos to interfere with the progress. Wars, irregular warfare/terrorism, and assassination of leaders are a means of doing that.
If they can pull one off while Bush-Cheney are still in office, we are in deep do-do.
Astonishing. The other interviewees should have been jailed a long time ago. At the very least they shouldn't be allowed to utter a word on TV without first playing this clip in its entirety.
Schiff has predicted 15 of the last 4 recessions...
As in other respects, the real root of the problem here isn't that someone, at the time, called things correctly, but that the talking heads and naysayers retain the same level of respect and argumentative authority after they have been thoroughly discredited by current events. The obvious correlative is the Iraq war, where all the talking heads who bought the US-walking-on-rose-petals narrative hook, line and sinker while mocking input from those who provided a forward-seeing, and in many times critical and subsequently validated assessment of what is to come maintain their media prominence with no repercussions, free to pontificate on the next area of expertise they know nothing about with the same faux knowledgability they feigned at the time. One of our real problems is the failure to call out our obviously failed punditry class for their vast failure of prediction and what should be their banishment from their class as such.
I've heard about that video for a couple of weeks now. I intentionally didn't watch it until now. The thing that strikes me about all of those so called experts is that they really think they are much more intelligent than they really are. Hubris. That one dip actually thought that the DOW would reach 16,000 this year. Breathtakingly stupid for a money manager.
None of those guys seemed to understand what Schiff was saying and were not even curious about where he was getting his information. To a man every one of them were uninformed and totally clueless. I got a great laugh out of the guy who argued that all these fraudulent accounting schemes, inflated housing prices and inflated stock prices were real wealth. Yes, he is right in a sense. It is real wealth when you pay for something (stocks, houses, whatever) with cash and then when that something peaks in value you sell it. You've made real money. What most people did the last 10 years is not this scenario. They borrowed to buy and then when the prices went up they borrowed against their equity. Now that prices have crashed someone has lost money and it was not necessarily the homeowner.
Wow- that was certainly the correct analysis and prediction by Mr. Schiff. It's motivated me to see what else he is saying- here's a link to a recent article about the bailouts, which I fear may also be true.
http://tinyurl.com/5bh32l
My question to him would be- for those of us that have no debt and have saved for years, can we still purchase some good things for xmas, like a new computer?
Or do we have to save everything to survive the next few years- like for food?
Peter=Hillary.
True competence and clear-seeing are the minority, laughed at by the idiots of the majority. That is the norm.
People like Arthur Laffer have been so influential on the republican party even up until now. The reason Laffer believed the way he does is because Supply Siders only have one cause for recessions. Taxes and Regulation. And after two decades of tax cuts and deregulation Laffer thought things could only get better and better.
The tragic thing though is that the GOP still buys into this. What was/is the ultimate Republican solution to the financial crisis? Get rid of the capital gains tax. I don't think there is a bigger indication of the intellectual bankruptcy of the right than this.
Anon you are so right about the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republicans on this issue. However, I'd like to see some real ideas from Pelosi, Reid and Obama. What are they going to do to actually fix the problem? This is a prime opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate their leadership capacity and their creativity. This problem goes way back to Reagan. Members of both parties have stuck their heads in the sand while entire industries picked up and moved to Mexico, South America, China and elsewhere. What are they going to do to get those jobs back? We need to start making things in this country like we used to.
By the idiots and the crooks of the majority, I should have said.
An enormous number of commentators called this right. Take a quick browse of Calculated Risk or Naked Capitalism. Peter Schiffs argument was really economics 101. There was really no sensible controversy. The argument was between interested parties - with entrenched bull market interests desperate to keep the fantasy going as long as possible. I wonder how many of the bulls were really positioned that way?
The next stage is that taxes will rise. First on the rich and then on everyone. The Labour party over here has already announced its intentions. I wouldnt complain so much but given they have spent the money on war, and frivolity so far Im not sure why I should cooperate.
Im not rich enough to leave the country. But if I was I would think about it. Sod them for their arrogance, their thieving and their lying. The really rich dont pay taxes. Its the middle classes who will pick up this tab, one way or another.
The stage afterwards will be set for rising crime rates, and all the other urban diseases. Im up beat about the future, but only cos it will be a while before they are capable of another silly war of aggression. However reality seems to intrude late on the current crop of the political classes in both the UK and the US. So just cos they cant afford it doesnt mean they wont try to send a massively reinforced expedition to Afghanistan. Are they stupid or malevolent?
Harry
PS
The academic economic definition of income is not money. Its goods and services. The surplus of goods and services beyond that needed to sustain current consumption. In that sense the US (and UK and Spain) has been consuming beyond its means for nigh on 10 years. How clever do you need to be to figure out what happens next?
The question the US should be asking itself now is can the dollar maintain its reserve currency status? If it cant, then Americas ability to borrow (on good terms) from the rest of the world will decline sharply in the future. One could view this episode as having damaged Americas longer term credit-worthiness.
Harry
Schiff's predictions are laudable, but he wasnt the only one. Just check out what leftist economists (real leftists, not Rubinistas of the Democratic Party) were saying long ago: "Boom and the Bubble" by R. Brenner, "The Subprime Crisis" in New Left Review, for starters.
"... he wasn't the only one."
No, he was not. I must recommend Jim Sinclair. To say that Jim is a good man, an honest man and that he knows what he is talking about is just a huge understatement.
http://jsmineset.com/
I suggest (links in left blue column)
General Editorial
In The News
Jim's Mailbox
As the video summary above would tend to suggest, watching TV for any insight into what's happening with financial affairs is worse than a waste of time compared to daily review of items at this site. He's not political, not cynical, not self-promoting. He's been working his butt off for years trying to help investors to understand how things work and how to protect their hard-earned assets.
Kudos to Mr. Schiff for sticking to his guns but he certainly wasn't alone in his predictions. Hell, thousands, millions of Americans have known for several years that this fake economy was built on fake equity because we needed to feel "wealthy" in order to put up with the looting of the economy (ie Iraq and all of its related "privatization") by the people currently in power.
The people laughing at Schiff are laughing at Americans who are facing foreclosure. Unfortunately, the other people laughing at Americans are the ones who run companies like AIG, Lehman, Citigroup etc who are getting billions now with NO repercussions to their management teams. Indeed, they're being asked to take charge of this mess and fix it - the ones who mucked it up in the first place.
It goes beyond arrogance, and the bought and paid for talking heads in this video who are laughing at Schiff need to be taken down a notch or twelve.
Check this OUT!
THE COMING DEPRESSION
I'm just curious...are there similar clips from networks that are NOT Fox News?
Post a Comment