Interesting Video: Peter Schiff from 2006/2007

[Dave Schwartz]

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

Basically this guy predicts the current financial situation and gets laughed
at by all the other fox news so called experts.

And a great follow-up article from last month:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/15/AR2008101503166.html

[toetoe]

Hey, Ron Paul tabbed this guy as his economic adviser.

:ThmbUp: , Ron.

[sammy the sage]

were's my props? ;)

[PaceAdvantage]

Another intereting Schiff clip (posted elsewhere on PA):


9kW64YYcUso

[DanG]

Hey, Ron Paul tabbed this guy as his economic adviser.

:ThmbUp: , Ron.

Great point TT; :ThmbUp::ThmbUp:

[Dave Schwartz]

PA,

Whether he is a genius or a loon is not the issue. The point is that he had it right and they laughed at him.

(I wonder if the guy who said he wanted a public statement of how wrong Schiff was ever gave out his own statement. I bet not.)

Dave

[PaceAdvantage]

PA,

Whether he is a genius or a loon is not the issue. The point is that he had it right and they laughed at him.Well, I never tried to intimate he was a loon. If the point is he had it right and they laughed at him (and obviously, this is true), how come his fund isn't making boatloads for everyone involved?

For a guy who hit the ball out of the park regarding what he thought would happen, it's almost comical that he is losing money along with most everyone else.

A guy like him, with his convictions, should be swimming in money (along with his clients) right about now after the drop we've seen this past year. The client in that video has only been with Schiff six months, and he's LOST A SMALL FORTUNE (on paper)? Huh? This makes absolutely NO sense.

Again, I ask, what's the point of being right if you can't profit on it...he's a money manager for crying out loud!

[wonatthewire1]

Well, I never tried to intimate he was a loon. If the point is he had it right and they laughed at him (and obviously, this is true), how come his fund isn't making boatloads for everyone involved?

For a guy who hit the ball out of the park regarding what he thought would happen, it's almost comical that he is losing money along with most everyone else.

A guy like him, with his convictions, should be swimming in money (along with his clients) right about now after the drop we've seen this past year. The client in that video has only been with Schiff six months, and he's LOST A SMALL FORTUNE (on paper)? Huh? This makes absolutely NO sense.

Again, I ask, what's the point of being right if you can't profit on it...he's a money manager for crying out loud!


Have you ever worked for a brokerage house? There are plenty of "analysts" who can be "right" but have absolutely no ability to take a trade, no matter how much conviction they have. Most of the time, it is the traders without a brain in their heads that have to take the equity or option position, not the guru who would waiver too much before pulling the trigger.

Perhaps the syndrome can be related to a person at the track with the 'woulda, coulda, shoulda' syndrome...

Money managers and traders are two different animals with a completely different mindset. It is a rare one who can do both successfully.

:)

[LottaKash]

Perhaps the syndrome can be related to a person at the track with the 'woulda, coulda, shoulda' syndrome... It is a rare one who can do both successfully. :)

My sentiment as well, there are many good Horse Pickers that should be making tons of Kash, but they just haven't got the betting part in focus as of yet, if ever.....This may also be true of P.S, but he sure does have this ring of truth and realism in his views.....

Hey, the Merry Optimists and copy-cat winners of the world have always laughed at the Realists and the Truth Seekers, in this regard (of Peter Shiff) nothing has changed......haha.......

Truth is truth, and it holds for all of us, whether we choose to believe it or not......same as in life and it' realities, as it is in hoss racin' and it's realities.....:jump:

best

[ddog]

A time for humility
November 27, 2008by FT
This is the text of a speech given by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, at the FT’s annual economists’ drinks party in London last night.

Last year I enjoyed telling a number of entirely unfair jokes about economists. This year, I looked at the same source and found only one joke about the profession’s involvement in depressions. Here it is:

“Such a severe depression and banking crisis could not have been achieved by normal civil servants and politicians, it required economists’ involvement.”

This, in short, is a time for humility. Why did we mostly get “it” so sensationally wrong? How did something that looks increasingly like the precursor of a slump creep up on almost all of us this year? It is a pretty good question. It is a pretty embarrassing one, too. It is one everybody I meet now asks. Even Her Majesty has asked why we didn’t do a better job of forecasting this mess.

Perhaps this was more than could reasonably be expected. But I do think we need to ask ourselves whether we could have done a better job of understanding the processes at work.

The difficulty was that we all tend to look at just one bit of the clichéd elephant in the room. Monetary economists looked at monetary policy. Financial economists looked at risk management. International macroeconomists looked at global imbalances. Central bankers focused on inflation. Regulators looked at Basel capital ratios and even then only inside the banking system. Politicians enjoyed the good times and did not ask too many questions. And what of commentators? Well, they tended to indulge in the fantasy that the above knew what they were talking about. I am embarrassed to admit this.

I am not seeking to deny that a few people saw important pieces of the emerging puzzle and some saw more than a few pieces. In my gallery of heroes are Avinash Persaud, who told us early and often that the risk-management models on which regulators foolishly relied were absurd individually and lethal collectively, a point also made by John Eatwell; Kenneth Rogoff, who warned of the US external deficit; Wynne Godley, who warned no less powerfully of the domestic financial imbalances associated with those external imbalances; Charles Dumas and Brian Reading of Lombard Street Research, who warned of the global imbalances; Roger Bootle of Capital Economics, who pointed out the fantasy of believing that we could become rich by selling second-hand houses to one another at ever more exorbitant prices; Raghuram Rajan of Chicago Business School, who identified the frailty of the new financial capitalism; Bernard Connolly of AIG, who warned of the ongoing “Ponzi game” and George Magnus of UBS, who foretold the consequent “Minsky moment”; Stephen King of HSBC, who argued that US growth was built on sand; Andrew Smithers of Smithers and Co and Martin Weale of the National Institute, who told us that UK fiscal policy was far too loose; Bill White of the Bank for International Settlements who insisted again and again that monetary policy should not ignore asset prices and associated credit explosions; and Nouriel Roubini, of course, who was Dr Doom before almost anybody else.

The list is not exhaustive and I apologise to all those offended by my omissions. But I would insist that one of the big lessons of this experience is that economics is too compartmentalised and so, too, are official institutions. To get a full sense of the risks being run, we needed to combine the worst scenarios of each sets of experts. Only then would we have had some sense of how the global imbalances, inflation targeting, the impact of China, asset price bubbles, financial innovation, deregulation and risk management systems might interact.

Alternatively, we could have spent more time studying the work of Hyman Minsky. We could also have considered the possibility that, just as Keynes’s ideas were tested to destruction in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Milton Friedman’s ideas might suffer a similar fate in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. All gods fail, if one believes too much. Keynes said, of course, that “practical men … are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”. So, of course, are economists, even if the defunct economists are sometimes still alive.

These might seem idle thoughts: these errors are now bygones. But what if we are now making new and even bigger errors in rushing back to Keynes? The thought worries me. What if now that households in the US and UK are no longer able, or willing, to borrow any more, we are set on breaking the back of taxpayers, instead? Is the end of this crisis the destruction of the credit of some of the world’s most creditworthy governments? It is a thought I would like to suppress. But it haunts me. It should haunt you, too.

http://blogs.ft.com/wolfforum/2008/11/a-time-for-humility/


A bit more at the site, make no mistake, we are "making new and bigger errors" he worries about.
It is being tilted away from what could have been a sharp adjustment to a total melt down.

Sorry 'bout that.

[PaceAdvantage]

I think there is too much doom and gloom out there. It can't be that easy. It never is...

ddog sees a total melt down.

I see a slow melt up....like I said, when everyone else is zigging, you must zag. EVERYONE thinks we're going to hell in a hand basket...so I am going the other way...

Of course, if we do melt down, I'll be along for the ride as well...that's the beauty of being a day trader.

[lamboguy]

its to easy to be negetive, it does no one any good at all if we go to hell in a handbag. it just ain't happening.

there will be plenty of jobs, and prosperity will come back. we were are and always will be the best nation in the world.

[ddog]

I am not negative toward the "normal" boom bust type, I am negative toward the hyper bail out economy I am afraid we are creating for all the best of intentions I am sure, but that is not the way back.

There are many reasons beyond what I am going to bother putting up here as to why I fear for a very bad next 5-10 years.

I will say to those who blandly assert anything has always been thus and so will this that times do change, you can hit limits and there are limits.

Things are much more complex and inter-related now than 50-60 years ago.

That is a two edged sword as it allows for opportunities that were not possible as to capital formation and movement, but the velocity/speed of events can overwhelm the decision makers and thus I think that a greater degree of REAL oversight and regulatory structures need to be put in place.

That's a tough nut to crack and I am not hopeful we will get that in place or correct given the compressed timeframes.

[ddog]

I think there is too much doom and gloom out there. It can't be that easy. It never is...

ddog sees a total melt down.

I see a slow melt up....like I said, when everyone else is zigging, you must zag. EVERYONE thinks we're going to hell in a hand basket...so I am going the other way...

Of course, if we do melt down, I'll be along for the ride as well...that's the beauty of being a day trader.


Pa

I have been buying little bits and in and outs all along, as you no doubt know you play the hand you are dealt , not the one you wish you had

However, things did/will go partly to hell in a hand basket and I think there were and WILL be soon shorting opportunities there for those who could consider the gloom and doom possibility.

[ddog]

its to easy to be negetive, it does no one any good at all if we go to hell in a handbag. it just ain't happening.

there will be plenty of jobs, and prosperity will come back. we were are and always will be the best nation in the world.

lambo, actually the easier path is to be positive, even irrationally so at times.

that is the politically/corporate correct attitude to exhibt at all times.