This is the guy who'll be on with Jon tonight:
Peter David Schiff ... is an American economic commentator, author and licensed stock broker who currently serves as president of Euro Pacific Capital Inc., a brokerage firm based in Darien, Connecticut which he owns.
Schiff is best known for his bearish views on the United States economy and for his prescient predictions of the economic crisis of 2008. He has risen to media prominence following the publication of his book Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse, published in 2007.
Schiff appears on American financial news programs on networks such as CNBC, CNN, CNN International, Fox News, Bloomberg TV and Fox Business.
Schiff is a supporter of the Austrian School of Economics and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and was an economic adviser for Ron Paul's campaign in the 2008 Republican Party primaries, through which Schiff also expressed support for sound money, limited government, and free market capitalism.
It looks like this is his claim to fame:
Yet Schiff, 46, is not just some opinionated boor. He possesses a self-awareness that renders him a bit less obnoxious than I've described, and he happens to have done a better job than just about anyone else of forecasting in 2006 and early 2007 what was about to happen in U.S. financial markets. This wasn't a broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day thing: Schiff appeared on the national scene just as the credit bubble was reaching maximum inflation and offered a critique of the nation's unsustainably debt-fueled economic trajectory that is now--after the fact--widely accepted.
As markets collapsed late last year, Schiff, who runs the Connecticut-based brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, briefly got to bask in the glory of his spectacular call. He ran a victory lap of sorts on the cable news networks. A fan put together a 10-minute YouTube clip of his precrash predictions on CNBC and Fox News--complete with smirking and dead-wrong rebuttals from the likes of Arthur Laffer and Ben Stein--that has been watched more than 1.3 million times. ("What makes that clip so good is not so much me as everybody else," Schiff says. "People like laughing at people.")
This year, though, Schiff's TV bookings are down 75% to 85%, says his younger brother Andrew, who handles p.r. for him. About the only things written about him lately have been negative--the result of financial blogger Michael (Mish) Shedlock's pointing out that Schiff's investment recommendations were money losers in 2008. How could a bear have managed to lose money last year? Schiff was blindsided when global investors piled into dollars and U.S. government bonds during last fall's panic. But that rush to safety has already abated, and over longer periods, Schiff's decade-old strategy of steering clients out of U.S. securities and into commodities and overseas stocks has been a big winner. His investment record surely can't be the reason for his fall from media grace....
...Of course, Schiff isn't mainstream. His father Irwin decided in the 1970s that the federal income tax was unconstitutional and has spent the years since shuttling between courtrooms and prisons. Schiff's parents divorced when he was 5, and he was raised by his mother. But it was his father who got him reading libertarian icons Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. And taxpaying Peter is wistful about failing to follow fully in Dad's footsteps. "I'm taking the easy way out," he says....
There's a book, of course. From the excerpt:
I don't think we're going to see any light at the end of the tunnel until we have a clear, objective understanding of how we got into this mess in the first place. There is a tendency whenever major problems occur in the economy to place blame on external factors and to assume that the external factors can be prevented from causing similar problems in the future by expanding the government's regulatory powers. The problem I have with this kind of thinking is that it makes government bigger and more intrusive without ever getting at the root of the problem, which is usually the government itself. The other thing it does is reduce the sphere in which market forces move freely and would otherwise prevent the problem from recurring. Finally, as we face the challenge of rebuilding an economy, whatever lesson might have been learned from the government's role in the problem is lost on us because it was never brought to light in the first place....
...The approach we need to take to our present crisis is not to expand government, but rather to understand government's role in creating the problem. The solution is to limit and control the power of government, not to create more unnecessary regulation to interfere with the free market forces that would have prevented the problem.
And then there's this:
Peter Schiff, a Connecticut-based brokerage firm owner who has been widely hailed for predicting the U.S. financial meltdown, says he’s "leaning towards" challenging Chris Dodd’s reelection next year, a move that could make the contest a nationally watched media event.
"It’s better than 50-50," Schiff told me a few moments ago, saying he’d decide in the next "two to three weeks."...
Complete with grassroots draft campaign.
Sigh. |