Since our last roundup, Mr Schiff has produced three more videoblogs for all of us slavish Austro-Schiff diarists to view, discuss, and annotate. Let’s tackle each in turn:
Friday, August 27th: 2nd Qtr. GDP, Bernanke, economists, gold stocks, my crib
In this first report, a rather wide-eyed Peter Schiff opines into a fish-eye lens about the remarkable and completely unpredictable news on how the US government recently revised its GDP projections downwards. He next analyses those Bernanke statements, from out of Jackson Hole, which promised that this clueless Greenspan disciple would stand manfully by the ‘print’ button on the Fed’s printing press, under all possible circumstances, and how Nouriel Roubini has hedged his bets on predicting a double-dip recession, squeezing half a buttock over the fence by now predicting a 40% chance of such a thing occurring.
Why can’t Roubini make a solid prediction, asks Schiff, who himself is predicting a 100% probability of a double-dip recession?
Our Connecticut hero then pours scorn upon the scare stories of the Keynesian/Monetarist deflationists who have all forgotten that the maximum period of economic growth in both the UK and the US occurred in a century of monetary price deflation between the end of Napoleon in 1815 and the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
In playful mood, Schiff also offers us a couple of anti-Keynesian economist jokes, my favourite of which was:
Q: What do you get when you cross a [Keynesian] economist with a Mafia Godfather?
A: An offer you can’t understand.
Schiff then covers a short-term fall in bond prices combined with increasing commodity prices.
[This reminded me of a Cassandrine prediction of the coming day when hyperinflation will suddenly happen in the US, which I read recently, written by Gonzalo Lira.]Here is the BBC interview, mentioned above by Mr Schiff, which includes the segment with the unintentionally-hilarious Laura Tyson; Schiff appears at 3:55 minutes.
[On a personal note, it’s really good to see that Schiff-style Austrianism is making inroads, for the first time to my knowledge, into a tax-consuming statist bastion like the BBC.]Monday, August 30th: Markets, Obama, Krugman, Reich
In his second video blog, shot three days later, Schiff discusses one of the worst ever August periods for the US stock markets and contrasts this news with gold stocks hitting 52-week highs.
Moving on from there, Schiff thinks that a global recovery is real but that the US will de-couple from this and fall away into recession, especially when a fourth planned ‘stimulus’ package fails to work any better than the first three.
He finishes off by pointing out Obama’s confusion between savings and credit, and wonders if Paul Krugman is even more confused.
[Krugman probably needs to read either Frédéric Bastiat’s essay on The Broken Window or its more modern treatment in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson if he wants to know why Schiff is laughing at him so much.]Friday, September 3rd: Jobs, global economy, SBA loans, stimulus, GI bill
Here’s a short synopsis covering the third member of this triumvirate of excellent Peter Schiff video blogs:
- Schiff discusses the latest US jobs figures, including the loss of a further 27,000 manufacturing jobs, which Obama has been crowing over because these figures weren’t as bad as they had been predicted to be
- The need for Obama to shrink his consumptive government and to lift the burden of taxation, business loan micro-management, and regulation, to allow US production to grow
- The wasteful dangers of trying to stimulate the US economy by funding ex-GI soldiers from the Iraq war to study liberal arts degrees at over-priced colleges which can afford to over-charge for study due to government guarantees on student loans
