Peter Schiff - amazing to see how he is ridiculed out of hand.
edit - the inflation prediction he makes at one point hasn't happened - not yet anyway.
http://interestingtimes.blogspot.com/2008/11/casandra-of-wall-street.html
2nd one
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZV5jt9puc
I've looked into this guy a bit more now
He called much of this right - a lot of his calls have yet to happen if they do at all.
I disagree with him on his solution -
He subscribes to the Austrian school of economics, which is strictly laissez faire. A let it all fail and rise from the ashes approach.
This medicine was used in the 1930's and it was not a solution to anything, it simply made things worse by encouraging a downward spiral.
The 30's depression was ended as a result of huge government interventions and eventually war, where governments are in effective command of the economy.
The Austrian school refuses to acknowledge is that markets can fail.
They believe that market failure is and can only be a result of government intervention.
Of course government meddling can cause markets to fail - that is a given.
But markets can and do fail as they are imperfect in practice, only in theory do they work perfectly.
One example is that left unregulated, markets will tend to produce monopolies and cartels, with a small number of huge companies dominating markets.
In "theory" this should not happen in a perfect market, in practice it always does without government intervention through antitrust laws.
The financial crisis is at least in part down to financial institutions worldwide growing too large by acquisition of smaller rivals and effectively making the market too small to operate anywhere near perfectly.
ebay works as a market with millions of players in a way it could not work with a few hundred extremely rich people making all the calls.
This situation has got worse since the crisis broke, with banks being pushed together in forced marriages of convenience by governments trying to find a route through the mess. So a tick against government intervention there for the Austrian school.
But this situation started two decades back when regulation was gradually repealed and the market left to run free.
Regulation that ironically was put in place after the Great Depression to avoid the same mess happening again!
Different time so different strokes, but government intervention is a necessary evil now
But in future it will require more government intervention.
These behemoth financial institutions need to be forced to split up into many more smaller players.
The retail/mortgage type traditional banks should be divorced from running like investment banks, they can stay large as size is needed for stability - but only if they are very boring and risk averse. A herd of big old Elephants.
Leave the financial fast risk lane to the many more smaller players that can be allowed to go bust if they get things wrong. A bunch of carnivourous cats - Lion. Tigers and Cheetahs - none of which threaten the Elephants.
Hedge funds are closer to traditional investment banking - risky stuff.
Banks like Citibank have evolved into one of those rediculous animal composites. Head of a Lion, body of a Hippo, legs like an Elephant.
Get the eco system back to normal without this schizo identity crisis these institutions have.
WTF was AIG doing with huge exposures in these exotic markets - an Elephant with a Donkey head trying be a Cheetah.
Look at it run!
Everybody was kung-fu fighting
Those cats were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they fought with expert timing
Carl Douglas was a visionary :)
Yeah.
Fitting anthem to the crisis.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lC0HGQ9N4DE
