I'm sure people are arguing that it's not phony growth, but it very obviously is. How much of that spending ("GDP growth") was due to tax credits, CARS, etc? How much of it was just money created out of thin air that was spent? If they print a million dollar bill and give it to me today, I could spend it very quickly. When GDP was calculated, that spending would be included. There was no actual economic growth, though. If that was economic growth, then Zimbabwe would be the most prosperous nation on earth.

12/16/2009 1:47:43 PM

^ Yes, and any talk of the "NBER numbers!" has vanished here. It's very similar to talk of the NIE concerning Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Damned peculiar.

12/16/2009 2:01:18 PM

sounds like he really tore up the first debate as i thought he would.

ive been sporting a schiff for senate bumper sticker for about a month now.

if this guy gets beat by the money machine out there i give up on politics. how can someone like this not win over the voters

3/10/2010 12:53:36 AM

You can not be elected without promising 50% of the people free stuff paid for by the other 50% of the people.

3/10/2010 7:41:12 AM

People on this forum would argue that if only we could force more people to pay for more free stuff, we could exit this recession and return to prosperity.

3/10/2010 1:31:20 PM

I watched the video on this thread, and while I was only marginally surprised that someone was able to predict one thing right, and several other things wrong. But intrigued by this, I investigated, as someone who was a good investor, and knew the crash was coming, could have cashed in BIG time. Unfortunately it seems that Peter Schiff is a retard, I looked into his performance and it's massive amounts of fail. It seems his investment strategy and his rhetoric are both "America's economy sucks!" fortunately, as his performance as well as reality proves, he is wrong. Many thought that China would be the lone life raft that we would cling to, what ended up happening is that we were the life raft. The real problem that he seems to be suffering from is hubris, never forget the first law of investing: "diversify".

[Edited on March 10, 2010 at 7:57 PM. Reason : ]

3/10/2010 7:56:35 PM

^ not going to dignify that post Schiff's track record over the past decade is phenomenonal.


ahahaha now Schiff is saying Krugman should have his nobel laureate taken away from him for his shameful economics.

this is unreal, and completely worth watching him shred Krugman's recent batshit obama propaganda op-ed in the WSJ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11WlFlO_mDg&feature=player_embedded

[Edited on March 22, 2010 at 12:05 AM. Reason : a]

3/22/2010 12:01:26 AM

Schiff does seem to suffer from stopped-clock syndrome.

3/22/2010 12:10:56 AM

http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-ticker/2009/01/30/peter-schiff-responds

3/22/2010 12:11:50 AM

excellent ad campaign, check this out. discouraging that he's not surging immediately but he's still making good progress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxiXg_RP8B8

4/29/2010 8:02:17 PM

Im getting fucking pissed that a homo like supplanter can keep his John edwards blowjob campaign alive in a forum where people proclaim to actually be pro-growth and this thread has no lift.

5/19/2010 8:49:12 PM

That's because you're an idiot.

5/19/2010 9:03:53 PM

^^^ That ad is horrible. Too long, too much for the average, economically illiterate, voter to digest. The material is good, but it needs to be split up across several different ads, not crammed into one that was as long as the time-outs I took in kindergarten.

5/20/2010 7:07:28 PM

Quote :

"Schiff's track record over the past decade is phenomenonal."

Are you kidding me?

* US Equity Markets Will Crash.
* US Dollar Will Go To Zero (Hyperinflation).
* Decoupling (The rest of the world would be immune to a US slowdown.
* Buy foreign equities and commodities and hold them with no exit strategy.

He is WAY WAY more wrong about the other THREE things then he was right about the ONE thing.

He attempted to "predict" the same downturn back in 2002 and was insanely wrong. In fact

Quote :

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11WlFlO_mDg&feature=player_embedded"

Well he said the US dollar was "ready for a fall" in mid-March, so let's just compare. The Euro is down compared to the dollar about 10% and the the Canadian dollar is down as well. I guess by "US Dollar" he meant "Euro" right?

I have yet to see him right about about anything, and his investing strategy would have lead to huge losses over the past year, ASTRONOMIC loses when compared to the growth of everything else.

5/20/2010 10:01:23 PM

He didn't say those things would have happened by now. Those things are coming, the writing's on the wall. He's been bullish on gold since the 1990s. If you had invested in nothing but gold since the late 1990s and 2000, you'd have a 500% return. If you continue holding it for the next few years, you'll make an even bigger killing.

The dollar is still weakening, just not as much as the Euro. If you're only judging a currency by comparing it to other currencies, rather than its actual purchasing power, you're not going to come to any meaningful conclusions.

Or you could trust in Kris and invest in paper. Yeah...no. Have fun going broke.

[Edited on May 21, 2010 at 12:39 PM. Reason : ]

5/21/2010 12:38:26 PM

Quote :

"He didn't say those things would have happened by now."

So the prediction was longer than five years away, and oh yeah, during that period the prediction would be completely wrong? At what point does your prediction become wrong? Apparently a prediction can be right much easier.

Quote :

"He's been bullish on gold since the 1990s. If you had invested in nothing but gold since the late 1990s and 2000, you'd have a 500% return. "

Which is bad. Nothing stable yields returns like that.

Quote :

"If you're only judging a currency by comparing it to other currencies, rather than its actual purchasing power, you're not going to come to any meaningful conclusions."

Should I compare it to commodities, which have fallen?

Quote :

"Or you could trust in Kris and invest in paper."

Well this statement makes it obvious you know nothing about investing.

5/21/2010 5:23:15 PM

Quote :

"So the prediction was longer than five years away, and oh yeah, during that period the prediction would be completely wrong? At what point does your prediction become wrong? Apparently a prediction can be right much easier."

ehe, that pretty much sums up the Global Warming argument completely, lol.

5/23/2010 7:38:21 PM

Are you really comparing global warming to economics?

5/23/2010 9:40:40 PM

Quote :

"He didn't say those things would have happened by now. Those things are coming, the writing's on the wall. He's been bullish on gold since the 1990s. If you had invested in nothing but gold since the late 1990s and 2000, you'd have a 500% return. If you continue holding it for the next few years, you'll make an even bigger killing. "

i'm not sure why this was brought up, but there are lots of things that you could have invested/not invested in in the 1990s that would have given amazing returns/savings.

Gold has been going up recently too because of the weakening dollar, not in spite of it.

5/23/2010 9:46:13 PM

I would say that they are similar in that everything we know is based on past models predicting future behavior, with the exception that economic predictions are much more likely to be totally full of shit.

5/23/2010 9:46:43 PM

Quote :

"Gold has been going up recently too because of the weakening dollar, not in spite of it."

Gold had been bid up for no good reason. Gold is purely speculative, it's has not at all followed inflation as people claim it should. If you want to protect yourself against inflation you're far better off with TIPS than gold.

Quote :

"I would say that they are similar in that everything we know is based on past models predicting future behavior, with the exception that economic predictions are much more likely to be totally full of shit."

Well the time scale is completely different for one.

5/23/2010 11:50:25 PM