Big Pickles

(Updates below.)

Peter Schiff was an economic adviser for the Ron Paul campaign and a frequent guest on financial news shows. Over two years ago he predicted that we would be in exactly the mess we're in now, when all those around him were predicting the opposite.



The thing that gets me about this video isn't so much that he was right and Art Laffer, Ben Stein, and all the rest were wrong. It's that they all find his opinion so detestable that they can't resist interrupting him even when they all have equal time to talk in a non-confrontational format. The animosity they have for his prediction seems to betray that deep down they know he might be right.

If that's the case, than he is committing the ultimate betrayal among financial pundits. These guys don't have to be any better than astrologers, and the news shows will keep inviting them back because they can always find an excuse for why they were wrong--especially if they are all wrong together. Usually they just claim that "no one could have predicted this" and they go right on making predictions. (Like Karl Rove, who is somehow still considered credible after his "The Math" blunder on NPR.) But Peter Schiff takes this out away from them by actually doing his job--examining the fundamentals and basing his prediction on his best analysis of reality--and they hate him for it.

UPDATE: Turns out Peter Schiff loves a good analogy.

UPDATE II: NPR picks up the story.

UPDATE III: Hey, no media fad would be complete without a conspiracy theory. In this video, CNN loses the feed right before Schiff is about to say that everything the government is doing is just making things worse (at about the 4:00 mark). Or should I say, "loses the feed," wink wink, nudge nudge.

Labels: economy, video