Sounds interesting but I would really have liked some better counter-argument to see how he reasoned out that hyperinflation is the likely outcome of the proposed stimulus plan. I'm not much of an economist so it helps to have these things spelled out.
He does sound a bit like someone who believes in the power of the market to sort itself out but then markets are rarely perfect and therein lies the problem when you have a credit-based economy that suddenly runs out of credit. How the economy will then "adjust" without any government intervention (or at least clamping down on the bankers who screwed things up) seems unclear to me.

It'll be interesting to see how his predicts pan out this year. But someone saying something passionately doesn't mean it's true.

Many people predicted this recession, all for different reasons, so his prediction doesn't mean what he says is true either. People on the sift have a predisposition to believing him because they have repugnance toward consumerism.

Obama's smart enough that he's aware of what all the leading economics experts say the best thing to do is. If Obama doesn't follow Schiff's advice, that means he's considered it along with all the other differing points of view, and found it to not be the best course of action, regardless of Schiff's confidence.

Also, there are Nobel prize winning economists like Krugman that have the opposite point of view as Schiff. ('It's cheaper to save jobs than to create new jobs later.')

I think the best course of action to fix the economy depends on an enormous amount of economic data, and depends on theoretical frameworks about how macroeconomies work that are very open to interpretation.

I think many sifters assume Schiff is right, but since they don't have PhDs in economics, they're relying on other heuristics... rules of thumb for organizing information... and I think their primary heuristics here are that he's very confident, and that they already oppose consumerism.

Pitch forks.

Pitch forks and torches.

That's the only answer.

Build an economy on under-consumption, savings, and production?

Nonsense!

We're much better off with over-consumption, spending, and endless debt.

Whether Schiff is right or wrong, I believe he has a better understanding of the fundamentals going on than most economists. Schiff is likely very right about the things he is talking about, but no one can see everything.

For instance, Schiff predicted that the Dollar would fall throughout 2008, resulting in an increase in prices. However, he didn't predict the massive sell-offs and inventory liquidations of American companies that pushed prices down and, in part, helped strengthen the US currency. I see many economists point to the increased value of dollars as a sign that the recession is turning around, but Schiff argues that it is only temporary since these businesses do not have unlimited inventory to liquidate.

One of Schiff's big predictions is that foreign creditor nations will eventually stop buying US debt and will instead start selling the currency, pushing the dollar's value way down and increasing consumer prices as a result. What I don't know is how likely foreign countries are to do this. Will they see it as a viable option, or will that be too far outside "business as usual" for them to seriously consider it as a real alternative.

I don't claim to know the answers, but I have been following Schiff's interviews and writings... he makes a lot of sense. That doesn't mean that his predictions will come true, but I don't think he's dead wrong either. It will be very interesting to see if we have another "Peter Schiff was right" compilation on youtube.

Yup, I'm not a Nobel prize winning economist. But somebody's gotta explain to me how policies that would utterly destroy a family could possibly be good for a nation. At some point we'll have to pay for all this borrowing we're doing. Nobody talks about what this spending is really going to cost us.

Definitely one to mark down:

Schiff says we'll have a crash of our economy driven by hyperinflation by the end of the year, or maybe in 2010.

Krugman (who unlike Schiff is a Nobel prize winning economist) also predicted the problem we're having now, and says if we don't do something even bigger than an $800bn stimulus, we're in for a deflationary problem, just like the Great Depression.

Clearly, someone will be proven right, even if disaster ensues.

Flim-flam artists like Schiff should know better, if the problem now is because Greenspan made the interest rate too low in 2002 then the real problem is that our current 0% interest rate will cause a new asset bubble that will collapse, so he should allow for a much longer period of time for it to gestate, like say Obama's second term, 2014 or so.

But that wouldn't get him on the TeeVee machine to throw bricks at Democrats as often.

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