"anyone who has ever read Larry Kudlow wonders how he's able to manage a folding chair without assistance"

your funniest line ever, Ezra.

When was this video from?

Just to harp on this fact even more so, even Shif, as right as he was about the coming collapse, was totally wrong on the effects. He prediction that the dollar would crash has been way, way off. The dollar has gained in strength. He predicted that gold would be good, but the price of gold has dropped dramatically.

So in that entire video, EVERYONE was wrong. Shiff is a slightly better dunce than the rest of them.

To be fair, the dollar did collapse until the whole global financial system went into meltdown and US Treasuries became the only asset class in the world that anyone wanted to hold.

The video is interesting... but I think it leads to easy to score zings like Ezra's offering and the reality's a bit more complicated - in retrospect Schiff was clearly far more accurate; but nay saying and doomsday speak not only doesn't play well, it wasn't where anyone else was. I don't necessarily fault someone like Stein for believing, in good faith, that he was assessing things based on his understanding. For these guys, who really saw one way of stock analysis only, their numbers told them a story that looked good (that's also true of Cramer), it just turns out their analysis was utterly wrong. And anybody who makes investment decisions based on soundbites from a TV show is really getting what they deserve. In hindsight, it's easy to tease and make fun of them... but honestly - we'll buy new snake oil from the next convincing salesperson. That's the American way.

Schiff is no angel. His book "C- P-" is full of advice to buy gold overseas and liquidate all your dollar-denominated assets.

While his advice is interesting and perhaps profitable in the short term, I suspect that his book has made him far more money than he has saved for people.

Ben Stein is incredible. How is it that Bush didn't make him Secretary of the Treasury? The amazing thing is that Ben is the son of the distinguished economist Herb Stein. He really makes the expression "regression to the mean" come alive.

Watched the clip 3 times, found it grimly fascinating. I liked Schiff, but I also found myself sympathizing with the stock market bulls he was debating. They're very good salespeople, but they need to be selling a better product than easy money in the stock market, unmoored from fundamentals.

Anyway, the clip had me googling this excerpt from a great Dorothy Sayers essay, "The Other Six Deadly Sins":

http://gashwingomes.blogspot.com/2008/02/seven-deadlies-covetousness.html

". . .Every time we expect, as is said, our money to work for us, we are expecting other people to work for us; and when we expect it to bring in more money in a year than honest work could produce in that time, we are expecting it to cheat and steal on our behalf. . .

. . .The virtue of which covetousness is the perversion is something more positive and warm-hearted than thrift. It is the love of the real values, of which the material world has only two: the fruits of the earth and the labor of the people. . ."

Also reminded me of this: "A Bit of Fry and Laurie - Market Forces"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOMqfx5Ers4

Ginger Yellow:
Gold did top $1,000 very briefly. I don't know why it dropped down as low as $700 since then(meaning the fundamentals).

i give peter schiff credit.

peter schiff has been predicting this scenario for a very long time.....
he was being insultingly mocked by cavuto and his round~table and kudlow, laffer and friends even two years ago, i think.
i think he has been the only one, to the best of my knowledge, on these financial news shows, to speak honestly about what he saw in the future....while jim kramer was busy going through his frenetic antics with raging bulls and people calling in from tennessee and new jersey, yelling, "booyah" and proclaiming him a genius.
kramer espouses the wonderful philosophy that if you want to make money, forget about high-minded morality when choosing your investments.
does he still have his show?
do people still want his advice?
i have marvelled at the absolute lack of knowledge of the squawkbox commentators and the bevy of "money honeys" pretending to be economists, as they fly off to interview warren buffet, sultans and ceos on skiing trips at gstaad.
it seems the only one who has been honest enough to speak truthfully about the disaster which has become the economy, has been peter schiff.

He prediction that the dollar would crash has been way, way off. The dollar has gained in strength. He predicted that gold would be good, but the price of gold has dropped dramatically.

He was a Ron Paul advisor...goldbug, maybe? That would of course add to the ridiculousness of him being the only one with a half a clue.

What's most amusing to me is the idiots' reaction to Schiff. It's like they're having a delightful conversation at a cocktail party and he just dropped his trousers and took a dump.

That analyst said the Dow would go to 16,000!! And he laughed at Schiff when he said the market was going to collapse.
I've never even heard of this guy, but he foresaw the collapse of the financial giants-- he was right. They were toxic.

But, on Ezra's larger point, even Schiff himself is a part of the entertainment packaging of financial news. He is the "court jester", or "village idiot" if you prefer, whose only purpose served is to be beaten down by all the other so-called experts. Without his counterpoint, it would simply be boring experts nodding in agreement. That wouldn't be anymore entertaining than the doom and destruction Ezra mentions. FOXSPEWS only books the doomsayers who offer clear entertainment value. Ditto for the fake 'moral outrage' of O'Reilly, Olbermann, etc. Let's face it, most viewers don't care, or don't even know what the hell they are screaming about half the time. They just like to see someone get angry on TV.

I think that there are some good, legitimate ways to make good money on the internet. The trick is to be careful.... there are a lot of great internet making tips in Ken Lizotte's book, "The Expert's Edge."

That video is shocking. I knew the financial press was silly, but I didn't know it was worse than the political press.

it just turns out their analysis was utterly wrong.

Well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? "Merrill Lynch is an astonishingly well-run company."

Financial advisers are selling a product, and they make money if you buy it. End of story.

Part of the problem is that actual, useful financial advice tends to be boring, somewhat technical, and long term. The basic rule is that personal finance is the opposite of sex-- if your finances are exciting, you're doing it badly.

MattF is right. The selling of expert financial opinion is about creating the best sounding noise, not genuine insight. And to be fair, on average, everybody is equally bad at fortelling the future. Those who are successful at this game simply advertise the times they were randomly right, rather than the times they were randomly wrong. For example, Jimmy Rogers is oftened referred to as someone who "correctly called the bottom in commodity markets in 1999." The problem is that he also called the bottom of the commodity markets in 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, etc..

The reason this works is that people want to believe there is some secret--and moreover, an amazingly simple secret--that will make them rich. The easiest way to part someone from his or her money is to appeal to greed. There is no sucker like a greedy sucker.

But he has a finance show. Because like with political commentary, ratings come from entertainment, not insight and accuracy. And a broadcast that was all doom and destruction and frank admissions of ignorance wouldn't be very fun to watch.

You know Ezra, I think you are interesting but this is pretty rich. Haven't you been on cable networks giving your opinion on the economy and the bailouts? (weren't you on the cable networks talking about Georgia and Russia?)
I'd be interested to know if you ever turned down an invitation to do a broadcast because you were ignorant about a subject.
Or is it just that other people shouldn't be opining?

This is really unbelieveable. If there were an award for wrongheaded smugness, these guys would be in the hall of fame. Wait! There is: a talking head slot on Fox!