Peter Schiff Video: Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One

[drelly]

Mar 16, 2009: One of the Greatest Peter Schiff speeches ever. Peter Schiff at the Mises Institute's 2009 Austrian Scholars Conference. It's an hour long video but very informative and entertaining.

MARC Added or watch below

From: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMclXX5msc

[Marc]

Also watch the series Peter mentions in the video above from 2006 where he predicted whats happening now.

Nov 2006 Peter Schiff Mortgage Bankers Speech - click here to watch...

[atiff]

Cheers for posting it. He's a dramatic speaker but makes sense.

[AndyB]

It's quite in an American context I think. I mean, does NZ have the same debt levels of sub prime stuff and bailouts, as well does NZ have indicators that go clear off the graphs as the US has?

[drelly]

It's quite in an American context I think. I mean, does NZ have the same debt levels of sub prime stuff and bailouts, as well does NZ have indicators that go clear off the graphs as the US has?

No we don't, although our credit card lending is far too high.

The biggest concern is that the US economy is such a huge driver of the world economy. They are one of our biggest trading partners and a big trading partner of all our other trading partners.

For instance, Japan is our 4th biggest trading partner. Last month Japan's exports dropped by 49% and their auto exports dropped by 70%! How can this not affect us?

Our saving grace is that people still need food and timber. Japan and China produce things like flat screen TV's, which are not necessities (no, really!). However, the tourism industry will take a pounding!

[outspoken]

All we need now is a natural disaster, like a massive earthquake, of which there have been several small ones recently, to top it off. Insurance co's beware.
On a brighter note:

Astronomers catch a shooting star for the first time:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090325/ap_on_sc/sci_asteroid_match

[Davo36]

Yeah I just watched all of that. Very good.

It occurred to me part way through why we have such high commercial real estate prices at the moment. (I've tried to buy a couple of properties just recently but they sold for well over their value)

The housing bubble in the states was caused by low interest rates and lax lending which a) make it cheap to borrow money and b) makes it unworthwhile to keep your money in the bank so you have to do something riskier with it.

And that's what we're seeing right now. People are taking thei money out of the bank, where they see it as being unproductive and putting it into commercial real estate. And it's becoming bubble-like.

If we have a reasonable no. of businesses go under or downsize in this country we're going to see vendors having to offload their overpriced commercial property. It may take a while, but I reckon it's going to happen.

David