We repeat for the umpteenth time --- this is not 1933, this is not the Great Depression, Obama is not FDR -- the strategies used to mitigate the painful economic impacts of seventy years ago will not work in this unique financial environment.
[We do disagree with Schiff's assessment of FDR ... the New Deal certainly did ease the economic pain for millions of Americans, and because the U.S. was still an industrial power (and also not a debtor nation) during the Great Depression, attempts to spur spending was the correct prescription -- indeed Roosevelt probably did not deficit spend enough.]
Peter Schiff: Stimulus Bill Will Lead to "Unmitigated Disaster" | Tech Ticker/Yahoo Finance
The fiscal stimulus bill being debated in Congress not only won't help the economy, it will make the recession much worse, says Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital.Schiff scoffs at the notion the economic decline is starting to level off and concedes no government action means a "terrible" recession. But the path of increased government intervention will lead to "unmitigated disaster," says Schiff, who gained notoriety in 2007-08 for his prescient calls on the housing bubble and U.S. stocks.
The problem, he says, is the government is trying to perpetuate a "phony economy" based on borrowing and spending. With the U.S. consumer tapped out, the government is "now taking on the mantle" of consumer of last resort, he continues, predicting the bond bubble will soon burst - if it hasn't already - ultimately leading to a collapse of the dollar and an "inflationary depression worse than anything any of us have ever seen."
If nothing else, Schiff is an nonpartisan critic of American policymakers, comparing President Bush to Herbert Hoover and President Obama to FDR, and neither in a favorable way.
Financial Coup d’Etat | Catherine Austin Fitts
In the fall of 2001 I attended a private investment conference in London to give a paper, The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group.The presentation documented my experience with a Washington-Wall Street partnership that had:
- Engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble;
- Illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the U.S.;
- Used “privitization” as form or piracy - a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder.
Other presenters at the conference included distinguished reporters covering privatization in Eastern Europe and Russia. As the portraits of British ancestors stared down upon us, we listened to story after story of global privatization throughout the 1990s in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Slowly, as the pieces fit together, we shared a horrifying epiphany: the banks, corporations and investors acting in each global region were the exact same players. They were a relatively small group that reappeared again and again in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia accompanied by the same well-known accounting firms and law firms.
Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’etat underway. ... MORE
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