THE REAL CRASH: AMERICA'S COMING BANKRUPCY - HOW TO SAVE YOURSELF AND YOUR COUNTRY by Peter Schiff

St.Martins Press  2012. ISBN 1250004475

The author is worth paying attention to since he was right about the internet and housing bubbles and predicted the collapse of both of them.

Now,(published 2012) he sees a bond bubble with the same root in FED enabled artificially low interest rates, and he spends some time on the sleazy alliance between fiscally irresponsible politicians and a currency debasing central bank.

He takes the entirely believable line that large deficits can't be funded for ever by dollar printing, and that politicians will never allow the massive tax rises and/or massive spending cuts necessary to reach budget stability, so the only route left is inflation with a consequent crash in the value of the dollar and government bonds.

I see some problems here with the evidence, and issues that could have been in the book but weren't.

The evidence (as of April 2013) is that FED liquidity isn't producing inflation. On the contrary, the banks are channeling liquidity into speculative market bubbles rather than real investments that would counteract societal deleveraging. Why should they do anything else? All sectors need to reduced debt and don't want to take on any more. The result is general deflation apart from the "bubble asset du jour" class with the evidence including falling commodity prices - particularly precious metals (which are on his list of recommended investments).

He wants to return government to the basic functions given in the Constitution and he is surely right that government has got involved in many areas where it should never have gone. Nevertheless, modern societies need a sophisticated "nerve centre" that is fairly large and expensive and the successful ones all have large and active governments. Because it is corrupt and inefficient doesn't mean that it isn't necessary.(top)		 The author speaks as if the United States is a homogeneous country like Germany, Holland, China or Japan, when in fact the government clearly states that it is multicultural. The evidence unfortunately shows that it is fast pulling apart (see The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart). Societies like this don't seem to react well to severe economic stress. If they can't pull together they fly apart like the once great multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Schiff recommends that people without capital store food and basic goods as a protection against 1) inflation and 2) societal disruption. The inflation may eventually come if a desperate government hands out wads of dollars to government workers, but the situation would probably be so chaotic that his recommendation would not work. A real possibility of dictatorship combined with some kind of civil war may well produce regimes like the Bolsheviks or Nazis who both outlawed food hoarding with a death penalty. In the winter of 1932/33 the Bolsheviks actually declared that all the food in the Ukraine was government property, and removed it, resulting in at least 3 million deaths from starvation (see Holodomor Kaganovitch in Google). A better recommendation if things go this way would be to leave the US temporarily or emigrate to a more functional country.

There's also the problem of how you get from here to there. If America is to return to a simple Constitutional style alliance of States with a minimal central government (which may work) and it can resolve its corruption and cultural issues, how under a Democracy will people (particularly minorities and the poor) be persuaded to vote to give up social medicine, schools, welfare benefits etc. etc? I may be wrong, but it seems very unlikely.