Peter Schiff
Trade deficits are OK under certain circumstance. 1. An emerging nation imports capital goods necessary to enhance its productivity. 2. A developed nation, with a current account surplus, uses some of its investment income to finance the purchases of additional consumer goods from abroad.Collection: Finance
I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.Collection: Technology
My investment advice is rooted in my understanding of economics.
The only thing I can do with my bitcoin is give it to somebody else.
The middle class today would be poor by the standards of the 1950s. Today, with two people working, they would still live paycheck to paycheck.
The government can't create jobs; they'll destroy jobs trying to do it. The government doesn't have any money; all they have is a printing press. We need to free markets to create jobs; if the government wants to help, they should reduce their burden on the economy.
Gold actually has properties - you can use gold for all sorts of things. People value gold for the metal. Nobody values bitcoin for the bitcoin; they value it because they believe that they can exchange it for something else.
The Fed is the biggest enemy of this economy. In fact, Ben Bernanke, as far as I'm concerned, he's public enemy No. 1. We're never going to have a recovery while this guy's in charge.
One day we're going to look back at $1,700 with nostalgia. People are going to be shocked at how inexpensive gold was when it could be snapped up for such a bargain price.
At some point, the dollar has to give. You can't just keep printing money, and monetizing debt, and buying bonds, without the dollar imploding.
People should have an escape valve for their money, their assets. If you have substantial financial assets, the government is going to confiscate the purchasing power of those assets and spend it.
When the dollar collapses, it's not doing it in a vacuum. If the dollar loses value, it's doing so relative to some other currency. So the purchasing power that we lose, somebody else gets.
Wall Street is in trouble because Main Street is broke.
Gold has intrinsic value. The problem with the dollar is it has no intrinsic value. And if the Federal Reserve is going to spend trillions of them to buy up all these bad mortgages and all other kinds of bad debt, the dollar is going to lose all of its value. Gold will store its value, and you'll always be able to buy more food with your gold.
Greed is normally balanced by fear.
What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.
The left-wing agenda wants us to think that the reason there was a depression was because the government didn't do anything. That's not true.
My mother always taught me that two wrongs don't make a right. We shouldn't bail out Wall Street. We shouldn't bail out Detroit. It will cost the economy more than the cost of the bailout which is more than the politicians think. We'll run into the hundred of millions to prop these companies up.
To get great again, we need to recreate what made us great in the first place, and so we're going to have to let interest rates go up.
You don't help the economy by spending money.
The American middle class used to be envy of the world. It was a byproduct of economic freedom. We had a very dynamic free-market economy and limited government. People were out there pursuing their own self-interest and creating employment opportunities.
We had a very upwardly mobile economy, and that peaked around the 1950s when the typical middle-class American family consisted of a father with a job and stay-at-home mom who took care of the kids.
Remember 'The Brady Bunch' TV show? That 1970s family had a full-time live-in housekeeper called Alice. Mrs. Brady worked at the PTA and did community work. She didn't clean her own house. That was middle class. Now you have to be very rich to employ a housekeeper. Everything it meant to be middle class has changed dramatically.
That's what's really bothering me about Trump is the hypocrisy, because when Trump was a candidate, and he got elected - because, by and large, he told the truth about the phony nature of the recovery.
When Trump was a candidate, he talked about the stock market, because, oh, the stock market was going up when Obama was president.
The market needs to set prices, including interest rates and allocate resources. If it were up to me, we would abolish the Fed and return to the gold standard. Absent that, the Fed should be completely removed from the political sphere, its dual mandate replaced by a single mission to provide the nation with sound money.
There is no such thing as agflation. Rising commodity prices, or increases in any prices, do not cause inflation. Inflation is what causes prices to rise. Of course, in market economies, prices for individual goods and services rise and fall based on changes in supply and demand, but it is only through inflation that prices rise in aggregate.
I would say to people of a libertarian conservative position on an issue, do not do a taped interview. You're going to come out looking really bad. No matter what you say, no matter how eloquently you answer a question, your answer is not going to be what you said.
In a free market, businesses compete for customers by keeping prices down and for labor by keeping wages up.
Every time the market has corrected, since 2008, it's always been the Fed that's made the bottom. The Fed has always saved the market either by cutting rates, launching QE, or threatening to launch another round of QE.
Wal-Mart creates entry level jobs for people who don't have a lot of skills; those jobs don't pay a lot.
Gold has worked for thousands of years, but now with the Internet, it works even better.
The one place that bitcoins seem to be used as money is in crime.
Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.Collection: Government
The United States is like the Titanic, and I'm here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship... I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States.Collection: Real
When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed.Collection: Running
It is production that creates purchasing power, not the printing press!Collection: Printing
The U.S. dollar is in terminal decline. America is tragically bankrupt, unable to pay its lenders without printing the dollars to do so, and enmeshed in an economic depression. The clock is ticking until the dollar faces a crisis of confidence like every other bubble before it.Collection: Clock Is Ticking
Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.Collection: Thinking
Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.Collection: Government
Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.Collection: Doctors
The only way to buy more is to produce more.Collection: Way
The strength in gold is revealing the general weakness in the dollar.Collection: Gold
It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.Collection: Banking
There are no checks and balances if the gov is wrong. If a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut; if he bets wrong, he loses; if the gov bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money. It's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press.Collection: Running
Printing money is merely taxation in another form.Collection: Printing Money
You don't drive an economy by consuming - the consumer is not the engine, the consumer is the caboose.Collection: Economy
Most governments, not all of them, but most, certainly don't want their citizens using gold. They want them in the currency that they are creating. When they are debasing money, or printing money, they are spending it and they want it to have as much value as possible when they originally spend it. Of course once they spend it, it will lose value for them and everyone else that holds it. But they need demand for their currency. They need as many people as possible holding it and transacting it. The more people that use gold, the harder it makes it.Collection: People
You have countries that have lived beyond their means, with bloated governments, huge trade deficits, and people living off the government. Then you have others where poor people are working hard and underconsuming and their governments are buying all this debt and propping up the extravagant countries. All of this has to change. There's a tremendous moral hazard involved with this system.Collection: Country
The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.Collection: Real