The Real Crash Quotes

“Let me illustrate what I mean by “the opportunity costs of working.” I was recently in the market for domestic help, and a young woman I wanted to hire as a housekeeper refused the job because I wouldn’t pay her under the table. No, she wasn’t an illegal alien—she just wanted me to treat her as one. The reason she made this unusual demand was that if she had income to report, she would suddenly have to start making student loan payments and paying taxes. To work for me would have cost her hundreds of dollars every month, creating a big enough hit to her bottom line that it wasn’t worth working anymore. (Perhaps she wasn’t savvy enough to apply for all of the available government programs, but she could have just as well pointed out that my hiring her would have cost her thousands annually in food stamps and other welfare payments.) Just imagine—there are so many unemployed people today, and yet government is making it too expensive for anyone to come and clean your floors for a fair wage. (By the way, the job I offered paid close to $40,000 per year.) Here was someone who admitted that reality quite bluntly—and I still regret the fact that I couldn’t hire her legally.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“I invest for a living. I look for where other people are making mistakes. I look for companies or commodities that are mis-valued by the market, and I study who”
― Peter D. Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“For one thing, this steady devaluation of the dollar is a new practice, relatively speaking. For most of our country’s history, the dollar gained value. The dollar was worth 75 percent more in 1912 than it was worth in 1800. You know those stories your parents or grandparents tell about how they used to buy a sandwich and a fountain soda for a dime? How everything was so much cheaper back in the day? If you were around in 1900, for instance, the old folk didn’t tell those sorts of stories. What cost a dime in 1900 probably cost fifteen cents in 1875, and twenty cents in 1800.
Of course, since 1912, the dollar has lost more than 95 percent of its value....You will remember what happened in 1913: the Fed was created.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash

“I don’t expect policymakers to adopt my plan any time soon. I think it will take some serious economic pain before politicians are willing to do anything outside of the ordinary. When the situation is ugly, Washington will have to consider the sorts of ideas I prescribe. The”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“If you have a workplace openly antagonistic to meritocracy, you will (a) attract the unmotivated, (b) drive out the motivated, and (c) suck the motivation out of those who remain.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“(You can watch this highly entertaining video, “Is a College Degree Worth the Cost, You Decide,” either by going to my YouTube channel, “The Schiff Report,” or by searching for the title on YouTube.) The reason that so”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“Starting in 1930 and continuing through 1933, almost 9,100 commercial banks failed with deposits of $6.8 billion. The deposits of these failed banks represented 13.3 percent of total commercial bank deposits as of 1929. Net losses to depositors of these failed banks were about $1.3 billion, or approximately 19 percent of the deposits of failed commercial banks. Sounds bad, right? But do the math. If 19 percent of deposits were lost at those 9,100 banks, and those 9,100 banks held 13.3 percent of all deposits, then the total loss of deposits at failed banks in those years was 19 percent of 13.3 percent—or 2.5 percent. So, in the worst period of bank failures our country has ever experienced (by far), 2.5 percent of all bank deposits were lost because of bank failures. I’m not saying that’s nothing, but most years that much value is erased in Americans’ checking accounts by inflation alone.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“Obama wasn’t wrong to criticize Bush’s policies, but he was wrong to put the blame on “shred[ding] regulations.” More important, Obama didn’t mention the Fed’s culpability in the crisis, nor the way government guarantees of banks—explicit and implicit—drove banks to engage in the massively risky behavior that created the crisis. Of course, Obama wasn’t in a position to critique government guarantees of banks—he was supporting Bush’s TARP. I pick on Obama only as one example of the conventional wisdom that blames all economic problems on insufficient regulation. Hundreds of commentators and politicians said the free market was the cause, and that government would be the solution. The problem with our banking system has not been too little regulation, but too much. To curb excessive risk taking, we do need more “adult supervision,” as Obama put it, but that supervision should come not from government officials, but from creditors and customers. So, the big-government types are correct that our financial system is dysfunctional, and that this dysfunction is the key destabilizing factor in our economy. But the solution isn’t more regulation, or even “smarter regulation.” To fix our financial sector and make our economy more stable, we need something far more drastic: an actual free market. Government needs to stop telling banks what to do and stop bailing them out when they fail. No regulator will ever be as effective as the threat of failure.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“For those still looking for a real-world example of how a minimum wage destroys jobs, there is no better example than American Samoa. In 2007 the U.S. Congress applied the federal minimum wage to Samoa, a U.S. territory. The increases walloped the Samoan economy, with the unemployed rate soaring to 30 percent and inflation hitting double digits. Its largest employer, Chicken of the Sea, shut down its Samoan canning operation completely in 2009, laying off 2,041 employees. The island’s second largest employer, StarKist, laid off 400 workers the following year with plans to lay off 400 more.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“If the value of the dollar goes down faster than the value of an hour of work, your nominal wages will go up. But that’s still a wage reduction, because this inflation will drive up the price of consumer goods even faster. If your wages rise slower than your cost of living, you’re getting poorer, but you might not notice it as easily, which is good for the politicians.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“Most important, though, was the way this string of bailouts fit the government pattern: prevent the economy from correcting itself. Once again, rather than let an inefficient allocation of resources shake itself out, politicians and central bankers decided that the right cure for a drinking binge was “the hair of the dog that bit you.” That is, when confronted with a crisis caused by government-created moral hazard, cheap money, and central planning, Washington responded with more moral hazard, even cheaper money, and heightened central planning.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“Because the private sector originated subprime loans without any official government backing, many like to blame capitalism, or more specifically Wall Street greed, for the problem. But take the Fed and Fannie and Freddie out of the picture, and subprime would have been a trivial part of the mortgage market.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“After months of calling for inflation of housing prices, Krugman in 2002 came right out and said the Fed needed to create a housing bubble. Since 2007, Krugman has repeatedly and angrily denied that was what he was saying, so let me run his comments in their full context: A few months ago the vast majority of business economists mocked concerns about a “double dip,” a second leg to the downturn. But there were a few dogged iconoclasts out there, most notably Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley. As I’ve repeatedly said in this column, the arguments of the double-dippers made a lot of sense. And their story now looks more plausible than ever. The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.6 Well, Krugman got exactly what he wanted.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“there were growing pains. Warren Harding addressed the unemployment and lack of growth with a response America would never see again. “We will attempt intelligent and courageous deflation,” he said at the 1920 Republican Convention, “and strike at government borrowing which enlarges the evil.” The rest of the passage is astounding to the modern ear: We promise that relief which will attend the halting of waste and extravagance, and the renewal of the practice of public economy, not alone because it will relieve tax burdens but because it will be an example to stimulate thrift and economy in private life. Let us call to all the people for thrift and economy, for denial and sacrifice if need be, for a nationwide drive against extravagance and luxury, to a recommitment to simplicity of living, to that prudent and normal plan of life which is the health of the republic. There hasn’t been a recovery from the waste and abnormalities of war since the story of mankind was first written, except through work and saving, through industry and denial, while needless spending and heedless extravagance have marked every decay in the history of nations.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country

“Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has actually argued that the federal government should buy and destroy surplus houses as a solution to the housing crisis. According to Greenspan, the problem is that prices are too low. If we reduced the supply of houses, prices would rise. While Greenspan is correct, the destruction of our housing stock so that the remaining homes will be more valuable is the ultimate in economic folly.”
― Peter Schiff, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy: How to Save Yourself and Your Country