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be appropriate for your personal financial situation. You should therefore seek the advice
and services of a competent financial professional before utilizing any of the investment
strategies advocated in this book.
THE REAL CRASH. Copyright 2012 by Peter D. Schiff. All rights reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
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1
supply and interest rates. America needs to start making things again, and
the government needs to stop taking. As individuals and as a nation, we
need to get out of debt.
And ultimately, we’ll have to face up to the fact that we can’t pay off all
our debts.
The later chapters spell out the solutions, but these first two chapters
describe the problem.
Our economy today is once again built on imaginary wealth. Like the
proverbial house built on sand, it will collapse. When that happens, when
America’s tab finally comes due, it will probably be as bad, or worse, than
the Great Depression. You’d better be ready for it.
To understand how bad things are and where we’re headed, let’s quickly go
back a decade or so, and retrace the steps that brought us here.
Throughout the 1990s, the Federal Reserve injected tons of money into
the economy, which fueled a stock bubble, focused particularly on dot-com
companies. In 2000 and 2001, when the stock market turned down and un-
employment started to creep up, that was a correction.
Assets that had been overvalued (such as stocks) were returning to a
more appropriate price. The dot-com and stock market bubble had misal-
located resources, and while investment was fleeing the overvalued sectors,
inevitably the economy shrunk and unemployment rose while wealth be-
came more rationally allocated around the economy.
Readjustments in the economy involve short-term pain, just as the cure
to a sickness often tastes bitter. Short-term pain, however, was unacceptable
to the politicians and central bankers in 2000 and 2001.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan manipulated interest rates
lower. This made borrowing cheaper, inspired more businesses to invest, and
softened the employment crunch. But the economy wasn’t really getting
stronger. That is, there weren’t more businesses producing things of value.
As there were few good business investments, all this cheap capital flowed
into housing.
As housing values skyrocketed, Americans were getting richer on paper.
This made it seem as if things were okay. In other words, Greenspan accom-
plished his goal of forestalling any significant pain. By the same token, he
Where We Are and Where We Are Headed 9
also kept the economy from healing properly, which would have laid the
foundation for a stronger and lasting recovery.
When market realities started to bear down on the economy, and the
housing bubble popped, with the broader credit bubble right behind, the
government was running out of things to artificially inflate. So the Fed and
the Obama administration decided to pump money desperately into govern-
ment.
I’ll explore this “how-we-got-here” story in more depth in Chapter 2,
but for now, I’ll make this point:
Just as the housing bubble delayed the economic collapse for much of last
decade on the strength of imaginary wealth, the government bubble is prop-
ping us up now. The pressure within the bubble will grow so great that the
Federal Reserve will soon have only two options: (a) to finally contract the
money supply and let interest rates spike—which will cause immensely more
pain than if we had let this happen back in 2002 or 2008; or (b) just keep
pumping dollars into the economy, causing hyperinflation and all the evils
that come with it.
The politically easier choice will be the latter, wiping out the dollar
through hyperinflation. The grown-up choice will be the former, electing for
some painful tightening—which will also entail the federal government ad-
mitting that it cannot fulfill all the promises it has made, and it cannot repay
everything it owes.
In either case, we’ll get the real crash.
State of Bankruptcy
In some ways, our state governments are in worse shape than the federal
government. While most states don’t have huge ticking time bombs like Medi-
care, they have just as much—or more—trouble breaking even.
For Fiscal Year 2012, more than forty states were in the red. Twenty-
seven states (a majority of states and a vast majority of the country) were
running deficits of 10 percent or more, according to data from the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities.
California is probably the most famous of the insolvent states because
of the massive size of its annual shortfall: more than $25 billion in 2012.
To poison the fiscal waters so completely, it took a special brew of big-
government liberalism, anti-tax-hike ballot measures, powerful public em-
ployee unions, and ridiculous public pension laws. These factors created
what Manhattan Institute scholar Josh Barro calls “California’s permanent
budget crisis.”
Indeed, since 2005, the California state legislature has been fighting an
annual “crisis.” Barro explains:
Where We Are and Where We Are Headed 11
California is special in many regards. (For instance, no other state has city
managers paying themselves nearly a million dollars a year, as the folks of
Bell, California, were caught doing.) But many of the problems with Cali-
fornia are present elsewhere.
One is the tendency of states to go wild during boom years in revenue.
Many individuals who did well during the boom years bought McMan-
sions with huge mortgages on the assumption that every year would be just
as good. Many states did the same thing. Nevada is a classic example. Ne-
vada enjoyed faster population growth than any other state in the 1990s
and most of the 2000s. This coincided with the nationwide housing bubble,
and sent home prices through the roof. As a result, property tax receipts
went way up. State and local politicians spent all this money on the crazy
theory that Las Vegas—in the middle of a desert—was being “Manhattan-
ized.”
You might recall that Nevada was hit harder by the housing bust than any
other state. Record foreclosures both sent people out of the state and dragged
down property values. Revenues dropped, but expenditures didn’t keep pace.
The result: huge deficits.
Public employee unions are another central cause. Like any union, the
American Federation of State, County, & Municipal Employees, the Ameri-
can Federation of Teachers, and their cohorts exist to get as much pay and
benefits as possible for their members.
But unlike most unions, government unions are negotiating with people
who are spending someone else’s money: politicians. Often those politicians
were elected thanks to campaign contributions from the unions. This is a vi-
cious cycle: taxpayers pay government workers whose money goes to govern-
ment unions, whose money goes to the campaigns of politicians, who approve
more taxpayer money for the unions, who then contribute more to the politi-
cians.
12 the real crash
dollars you sock away today are worth less when you pull them out next
month. Better to spend them today.
Even when there is not a significant increase in consumer prices—such as
existed from late 2008 through 2011—the Federal Reserve deliberately
warded off falling prices by inflating the dollar supply. Put another way: the
Federal Reserve is putting upward pressure on prices, and thus keeping the
dollar from gaining in value.
The Fed also keeps interest rates artificially low. Were interest rates as
high as the market would set them, and were dollars not being cheapened,
people would have more incentive to save and less incentive to borrow.
Spending Is Patriotic
Part of the problem, peddled by the media and politicians, is the notion that
prosperity comes from consumer spending.
Listen to any TV or radio newscaster discuss economic news, especially
during a downturn, and there’s one hard and fast rule for them: consumers
spending more money is good, and consumers spending less money is bad.
Shopping is good for the country. Paying down debt or saving is bad for the
country.
That’s not just overly simplistic, it’s almost completely wrong. If people
are spending money they don’t have, that may be good in the short term for
stores and manufacturers, but it’s often bad in the long term for the whole
economy.
If people are borrowing as a way to finance productivity, then indebted-
ness isn’t bad, and it is often beneficial.
Sure enough, this isn’t the first time Americans have borrowed lots of
money. But in the past, we borrowed money to invest in productive capacity,
such as building a factory. That factory makes goods at a profit, and that
profit then pays off the loan. Today’s borrowing and debt, however, isn’t
primarily for investment.
These days, because people are going into debt for the sake of
consumption—buying a fancy dress or tickets to a basketball game—then
U.S. indebtedness grows while productive capacity doesn’t. That credit card
debt doesn’t go away. The dollar a person charges today is a $1.10 he’ll have
to pay off tomorrow.
Imagine a rational, well-informed owner of the general store in a small
town. If he sees all his customers running up credit card debt, what is he
14 the real crash
going to do? He’ll stop stocking the shelves as much, because he knows the
day will come when his customers will max out their cards. Not only will
the customers no longer be able to spend more than they earn, they won’t be
able to spend even as much as they earn, because some of their income will
go toward paying off debt, plus interest.
When that day comes, the prudent storeowner might be fine—if he saved
up his surplus from the boom days. Many downtown businesses will suffer:
if they believed this boom in spending represented real wealth and so they
expanded or hired more employees, those higher overhead costs will not be
sustainable when the town’s shoppers become more austere.
Yet, whenever the economy slowed down in the past decade, politicians
always looked for ways to get people borrowing and spending as much as
before. In other words, Washington wouldn’t let people recover from their
spending binges.
On September 20, 2001, nine days after terrorists took down the twin
towers, President Bush told average Americans how they could help the econ-
omy: “Your continued participation and confidence in the American economy
would be greatly appreciated.” Bush urged Americans to go out and spend.
(In contrast, when World War II broke out Americans were urged to save. The
public purchased war bonds and consumer goods were rationed.)
Barack Obama rightly mocked Bush’s version of civic duty, saying on the
2008 campaign trail of Bush after 9/11, “when he spoke to the American
people, he said, ‘Go out and shop.’ ”
But Obama was no different during the recession in 2009. A month into
his presidency, he declared it his goal “to quicken the day when we re-start
lending to the American people and American business.” One of Obama’s
programs, “Cash for Clunkers” was designed to get Americans to buy cars
they otherwise could not afford. So we destroyed fully paid-for cars that still
worked, to go deeper into debt to buy newer ones, many of them imports,
saddling car owners with additional debts at times when they should have
been rebuilding their savings.
He put it more forcefully elsewhere in the same speech: “We will act with
the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that
Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend
even in more difficult times.”
Of course, banks’ lending more means consumers’ borrowing more.
Both Bush and Obama told the American people that when times are bad,
they should run up credit card debt—it’s the patriotic thing to do.