Latest rantings from guru Peter Schiff

tradetime

I might suggest that the current crisis is somewhat unprecidented, at least since the 30's, that's not to say that it is the 30's you understand, there are many differences but the scale of this problem is somewhat unprecidented and is far from over.
Do we need gold, if you have the resources, money wise to allocate to gold, then it isn't a bad thing to hold an amount, but I personally am somewhat dubious as to what real use a holding of gold will be to most people if their worst fears are recognized, think I'd rather have an Uzi and a basement full of ammo
But back to serious comment, for those who do not have the resources to have a holding in gold, I doubt they are missing anything.

sabretoothtigger

Schiff is switching into overdrive and pretty much posting a video everyday

Here he talks about warren buffets warning 6 years ago about the terrible economic fundamentals being used so whats changed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAomyD_IOrE

he makes a good point at the end which I did think myself about obama telling g20 to follow the usa lead on spending.

if other economies were to use stimulus packages on the scale of usa that would cause some bad problems for usa because they will be denied this lent money propping them up. Most t bills are short term?


The sound quality is distorted as well as schiff having his usual irritating tone :laugh: Someone sell these rich guys decent audio equipment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3Vs_SB4SA0

sabretoothtigger

Just posting this 2007 vid especially because its an old clip where Schiff argues against a possible rally in the dollar and obviously he was wrong, the guy who agrees with the coming downturn but not the exact details is called: Michael Panzer

He foresees a rush to the dollar as positions are cashed in, which is what we saw happen last year




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nacIvVYQp8

StevieJ

wombat42 wrote: »

It is facile to just dismiss him as a gold ramper. He is closely associated with Ron Paul and the Austrian School of Econmonics. Quite a diverse selection of people have called $2000 gold for this year or next year.

The Austrians have had their moment of glory I don't know if it is just me but they sound to me like SS prison guards.

sabretoothtigger

http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/schiff/archive.html

tradetime

Love them or hate them, this is a pretty interesting video. It was filmed back when Rogers was still living in the US, Oil and commodities were booming. Greenspan was still FED chairman.

I will say the picture quality is bad, particularly as it goes on the sound and picture loses sync which produces the badly dubbed look, but you don't actually need to watch the picture, nothing to see.

Jim Rogers Hosts Marc Faber to discuss world economy 2005 pt 1/5

Jim Rogers Hosts Marc Faber to discuss world economy 2005 pt 2/5

Jim Rogers Hosts Marc Faber to discuss world economy 2005 pt 3/5

Jim Rogers Hosts Marc Faber to discuss world economy 2005 pt 4/5

Jim Rogers Hosts Marc Faber to discuss world economy 2005 pt 5/5

Actually listening to it all, I'd date this 2002/3

sabretoothtigger

Much better sound quality thankfully



https://www.europac.net/outlook.asp

The above forecasts are made with much regret, as we realize that they foretell significant hardships for millions of our fellow Americans. However, it is our mission to caution as many of our countrymen as possible from suffering the fate that we foresee. In fact, we feel that it is our patriotic duty to help as many Americans as possible to attempt to safely protect their wealth though the acquisition of foreign assets. We believe that it is only through such actions that at least some Americans will retain ownership of financial wealth which may be repatriated in the aftermath of the collapse. We remain hopeful that dire economic conditions will at least create a climate in which America can finally return to her constitutional traditions of sound money and limited government, providing a foundation upon which a sounder economy can one day be rebuilt. If out of the ashes of this collapse, the spirits of our founding fathers can rise again, it may one day be possible for America to reclaim her former glory, and once again be that shining city of which Ronald Reagan so eloquently spoke.

If Obama is the next Jimmy Carter then whose Americas next Ronald Reagan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-p-Nuu8hYQ - Reagan shining city

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJDhS4oUm0M&feature=related - Reagan on inflation in 1948


Why Greenspan was wrong by Alan Greenspan (1966)

Gold and Economic Freedom

by Alan Greenspan
[written in 1966]

This article originally appeared in a newsletter: The Objectivist published in 1966 and was reprinted in Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Emphases added.

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.

Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.

The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.

What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. First, the medium of exchange should be durable. In a primitive society of meager wealth, wheat might be sufficiently durable to serve as a medium, since all exchanges would occur only during and immediately after the harvest, leaving no value-surplus to store. But where store-of-value considerations are important, as they are in richer, more civilized societies, the medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal. A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity. Precious jewels, for example, are neither homogeneous nor divisible. More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable. Wheat is a luxury in underfed civilizations, but not in a prosperous society. Cigarettes ordinarily would not serve as money, but they did in post-World War II Europe where they were considered a luxury. The term "luxury good" implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron.

In the early stages of a developing money economy, several media of exchange might be used, since a wide variety of commodities would fulfill the foregoing conditions. However, one of the commodities will gradually displace all others, by being more widely acceptable. Preferences on what to hold as a store of value, will shift to the most widely acceptable commodity, which, in turn, will make it still more acceptable. The shift is progressive until that commodity becomes the sole medium of exchange. The use of a single medium is highly advantageous for the same reasons that a money economy is superior to a barter economy: it makes exchanges possible on an incalculably wider scale.

Whether the single medium is gold, silver, seashells, cattle, or tobacco is optional, depending on the context and development of a given economy. In fact, all have been employed, at various times, as media of exchange. Even in the present century, two major commodities, gold and silver, have been used as international media of exchange, with gold becoming the predominant one. Gold, having both artistic and functional uses and being relatively scarce, has significant advantages over all other media of exchange. Since the beginning of World War I, it has been virtually the sole international standard of exchange. If all goods and services were to be paid for in gold, large payments would be difficult to execute and this would tend to limit the extent of a society's divisions of labor and specialization. Thus a logical extension of the creation of a medium of exchange is the development of a banking system and credit instruments (bank notes and deposits) which act as a substitute for, but are convertible into, gold.

A free banking system based on gold is able to extend credit and thus to create bank notes (currency) and deposits, according to the production requirements of the economy. Individual owners of gold are induced, by payments of interest, to deposit their gold in a bank (against which they can draw checks). But since it is rarely the case that all depositors want to withdraw all their gold at the same time, the banker need keep only a fraction of his total deposits in gold as reserves. This enables the banker to loan out more than the amount of his gold deposits (which means that he holds claims to gold rather than gold as security of his deposits). But the amount of loans which he can afford to make is not arbitrary: he has to gauge it in relation to his reserves and to the status of his investments.

When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth. When gold is accepted as the medium of exchange by most or all nations, an unhampered free international gold standard serves to foster a world-wide division of labor and the broadest international trade. Even though the units of exchange (the dollar, the pound, the franc, etc.) differ from country to country, when all are defined in terms of gold the economies of the different countries act as one-so long as there are no restraints on trade or on the movement of capital. Credit, interest rates, and prices tend to follow similar patterns in all countries. For example, if banks in one country extend credit too liberally, interest rates in that country will tend to fall, inducing depositors to shift their gold to higher-interest paying banks in other countries. This will immediately cause a shortage of bank reserves in the "easy money" country, inducing tighter credit standards and a return to competitively higher interest rates again.

A fully free banking system and fully consistent gold standard have not as yet been achieved. But prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled. Periodically, as a result of overly rapid credit expansion, banks became loaned up to the limit of their gold reserves, interest rates rose sharply, new credit was cut off, and the economy went into a sharp, but short-lived recession. (Compared with the depressions of 1920 and 1932, the pre-World War I business declines were mild indeed.) It was limited gold reserves that stopped the unbalanced expansions of business activity, before they could develop into the post-World Was I type of disaster. The readjustment periods were short and the economies quickly reestablished a sound basis to resume expansion.

But the process of cure was misdiagnosed as the disease: if shortage of bank reserves was causing a business decline-argued economic interventionists-why not find a way of supplying increased reserves to the banks so they never need be short! If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely-it was claimed-there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was organized in 1913. It consisted of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks nominally owned by private bankers, but in fact government sponsored, controlled, and supported. Credit extended by these banks is in practice (though not legally) backed by the taxing power of the federal government. Technically, we remained on the gold standard; individuals were still free to own gold, and gold continued to be used as bank reserves. But now, in addition to gold, credit extended by the Federal Reserve banks ("paper reserves") could serve as legal tender to pay depositors.

When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve's attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain's gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates. The "Fed" succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market-triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930's.

With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. If the gold standard had not existed, they argued, Britain's abandonment of gold payments in 1931 would not have caused the failure of banks all over the world. (The irony was that since 1913, we had been, not on a gold standard, but on what may be termed "a mixed gold standard"; yet it is gold that took the blame.) But the opposition to the gold standard in any form-from a growing number of welfare-state advocates-was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.

Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which-through a complex series of steps-the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

Schiffy baby speaks to Dr. Fab

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Dear Investor,[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Marc Faber may be one of the great financial and investment minds in the world today. Many of his market calls have been extraordinarily accurate. In 2000 he predicted $100 oil; in 2001 he said buy gold; in 2002 he warned of a deteriorating dollar and an overvalued stock market.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Marc and I have spoken at numerous investment conferences together, and have similar outlooks on many investment strategies and economic trends.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Marc agreed to an interview a few weeks ago. I caught up with him by telephone a few weeks ago at his Hong Kong headquarters. We have produced a Special Report, The Marc Faber Interview, for our clients and friends. You can view it by CLICKING HERE. I hope you enjoy it.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Sincerely,

Peter Schiff
President and Chief Global Strategist
Euro Pacific Capital[/FONT]

marc_faber wrote:

Feb 2009

Many people think that the global recovery will begin in late 2009. I seriously doubt that. I think it will be at least two years from now, worst case maybe 10. And when we do start recovery, interest rates will rise and inflationary pressures will be enormous

Its the slight hints these guys give that matter most, though it might all seem ott, how it happens exactly is not obvious.
Well worth a read I think

Masomnia

What do we think the future of gold is now?

Dropped below $900/oz yesterday, and showing no signs of a significant bounce back today. We're probably not out of the woods as far as the stock markets go, but they're doing ok. People who want a safe haven still seem to have faith in the USD as a reserve currency.

Is there still the same incentive to invest in gold?

Reaper

It might get a bit of help when inflation starts to kick in, and if the world does move away from dollars as a reserve currency that would weaken the dollar and raise the price a bit - the dollar price anyway.

However in my opinion all the "gurus" trotted out on this board expecting it to hit $2000 are looking pretty silly right now, along with those early in the crisis saying there was no point trying to prop up the banking system because it was going to collapse and nothing could save it.

wombat42_2

We are in a deflationary phase at present. Many think inflation will kick in about the end of this year which should make gold rocket. No-one is expecting any fireworks for another 6 months at least.