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AbhiJ
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 5:35 am

There are a small number of pessimist- Peter Schiff,Nouriel Roubini, Gerald Celente,Nassim Taleb, who say that we are in for a a depression similar to The Great Depression.Peter Schiff appears logical when he says that socialism(read bailout) cannot correctfundamental mistakes (housing bubble).
 
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pgeek1
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 6:27 am

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/53858/Roubini is the only one with any credibility in your list. Rest are just good entertainers; i believe Obama will successfully re inflate the credit bubble by his reelection time, we will certainly not go into a "depression", more like the pre 1990s time i imagine.
 
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AbhiJ
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 6:55 am

Now is the best time to develop a time machine.If times go bad go back 20 years or go in future when the market has improved.
 
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cryptic26
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 12:47 pm

It's definitely worse than the pre-90s. Even as we emerge from the crisis, I think there shall be more job in risk management than in asset management and that too in the structured products, commodities, ABS space.
Last edited by cryptic26 on May 9th, 2009, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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HyperGeometric
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 5:52 pm

All these people are being realistic so I don't think they're pessimists. Roubini was talking about this mess a couple of years before it started. He continued to explain this to other economists at IMF meeting in '06 when everyone laughed at him. I don't understand Taleb however. He has made his money and is now talking about nationalizing banks. He talks about unbearable risk traders take to print money for themselves. He might have a different metric for calculating risk but afterall, this is how he made his fortune.
Last edited by HyperGeometric on May 9th, 2009, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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spice
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 7:35 pm

Peter Schiff is my favourite.Can't stand Roubini. He is totally over-stepping the line trying to give stock picks these days. If he wants to, he should just get a job on Wall Street.
 
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AbhiJ
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 7:35 pm

You can google "peter schiff was right", people were laughing at him then and people are still dismissing him.He may be exaggerating but he has a point,he has learned economics from the steet.
 
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KackToodles
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 10th, 2009, 9:51 pm

QuoteOriginally posted by: cryptic26I think there shall be more job in risk management than in asset management if there is less asset management, what risk are those new guys in risk management going to management?
 
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Nomade
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 11th, 2009, 12:59 am

Of all those clowns yo mentioned none of them actually put their money where their mouth is. If they were so sure, wouldn't they have made loads of money in the process?I recall P. Schiff calling oil at $200 or something like that. He lost on oil. He also lost on gold. Yeah he called the housing bubble but if you look at what Schiller was putting out back in 2005 it doesn't take a genius to realize things were overvalued. Remember: a broken watch is right twice a day. How about J Paulson? Instead of going on CNBC to claim that he was right, he's probably busy counting the 600% or so returns he got in one of his funds that shorted ABX to the hilt.
Last edited by Nomade on May 10th, 2009, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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pgeek1
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 11th, 2009, 7:10 am

peter schiff was right one time in 10-15 years and since then all he has done is chest beating.
 
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DominicConnor
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 11th, 2009, 7:24 am

I don't know the number of professional economists in the world who are "substantial" enough that they might get noticed if they prediuct.If you take that as having the word "professor" somewhere in a job title, I'd guess that is in the order of 5,000 in the USA, Britain and Europe.If you let them make forecasts, then you have a state space that is 5 years long then you have 25,000 prediction years. If they randomly choose positions then you have every economic situation that has occurred since cavemen bartered for stone knives to the impact on food markets of a rogue computer leading a revolution on the Lunar colonies.You have events that are so improbable that they would not be predicted by the most bizarre SciFi, varying from the biggest industrial growth since the 1940s caused by highly purifed lumps of stone, and a large number of people who make money by using the standard deviation of random events in the stock markets.Set in that context, of course some predicted a rough picture of what has happened.A few friends of mine have sort of betting club where we gamble on tail events. I for instance have money on British troops occupying Belgium and at least 1% of the citizens of China dying in civil violence.Neither are really very likely, but the mean time between failure of a countries since the industrial revolution is <50 years. (France is the 5th Republic, Britain's land area has shrunk by more than 1/3, Sweden used to have a suprisingly large empire that almost everyone has forgotten, etc.Economic crashes happen more often than you might think. The reason so many people are jumpy this time is that we've gone so long between large scale fuckups, indeed I suspect this is the longest period of monotonic growth in the world economy since the fall of the Roman Empire.Already, less than 18 months in, positive growth is already drifting into some Western contries, and places like China and India never stopped growing.Its been bad, but anyone who actually paid attention in history class, knows that much bigger shit happens much more often.
 
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CEexs
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 11th, 2009, 8:23 am

Personally, I appreciate to have a few different opinions out there. There is quite a few out there that show good reasoning. Take Schiff for example. His conclusions are not totally out of the world given his assumption that a bail-out does not cure is correct, so that the delay and all the additional money will make things rather worse than a crash right now. Some people may point out that his assumption is extreme. They may be right, but my point is that this current crisis is nothing anyone has experienced so far. Since the global economy is quite a bit to complex for me to forecast what scenario will turn out to be true, I prefer to spend a few thoughts on all of them. So having people out there that come up with a few good and well thought scenarios safes me time to come up with it myself. Judging how likely these scenarios are is a different thing.
 
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AbhiJ
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 11th, 2009, 8:48 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: DominicConnorIf you let them make forecasts, then you have a state space that is 5 years long then you have 25,000 prediction years. The only thing is that only two people(in my knowledge) namely Peter Schiff and Roubini predicted the coming market crash back in 2005-6.One can say that was a chance but you when you see the you tube videos taken back in 2006 and how they were laughed at publickly, however they still continued to defiantly stand by their opinion appears to me as a quality and not as a chance.One has to give some credit to these guys.
Last edited by AbhiJ on May 10th, 2009, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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AbhiJ
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 11th, 2009, 9:06 am

QuoteOriginally posted by: pgeek1peter schiff was right one time in 10-15 years and since then all he has done is chest beating.The sad part is nobody listened, inspite of the chest beating.
Last edited by AbhiJ on May 10th, 2009, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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phil451
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What do you think of Peter Schiff and other pessimists ?

May 11th, 2009, 9:53 am

Back in the 1980s, there was an analsyt by the name of Bob Beckman. From about 1984 onward he was calling an end to the bull market and when the crash came in 1987 he hailed himself as the man who predicted the crash. However, if you had followed his investment advice and sold every year from 1984 you would have lost far more than if you had bought every year, including the crash.There are always doomwatches who seem to forget that human beings are ingenious and resourceful and get themselves out of bigger messes than we are in at the moment.Although i enjoy Nassim Taleb's books i do find him rather depressing and pessimistic. However, i guess that is a result of growing up in Lebanon during the eighties!