Jon Stewart created a hilarious introduction for Peter Schiff when the ardent defender of free market capitalism and possible Senate candidate appeared on the The Daily Show this week.
Stewart showed a collage of clips from as far back as 2006 in which Schiff warned the economy wasn’t sound and predicted the collapse of the housing market would cause a serious recession, to the guffaws of other experts and anchors on CNBC and Fox News.
“All the profits people have in real estate are going to vanish,” Schiff said, and “…It’s not just subprime, it’s the entire mortgage market.”
“Well you’re simply wrong about that,” celebrity economist Ben Stein told him.
Uh, sit down and shut up, Ben.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Peter Schiff | ||||
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Of course Schiff spends much of his time criticizing the government’s meddling in the economy.
I’m not sure I buy Schiff’s argument that we’d have been better off not to bailout all of the banks that caused the financial crisis with their stupid lending.
Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke says that would have caused a cataclysmic economic meltdown and Great Depression II. (The panic that followed Lehman Brothers’ collapse lends lots of credence to that fear.)
But you sure can’t argue with Schiff when he lays part of the blame for the financial crisis on Bernanke’s doorstep.
“The Federal Reserve has kept interest rates artificially low, and that has encouraged reckless consumption and reckless borrowing,” Schiff says. “If the Fed would get out of the way and let the market set interest rates, interest rates would have been a lot higher all along. And higher interest rates would have discouraged borrowing and rewarded savings.”
Amen.
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