Peter Schiff Quotes

The United States is like the Titanic, and I'm here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship... I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.

The government can't create jobs; they'll destroy jobs trying to do it. The government doesn't have any money; all they have is a printing press. We need to free markets to create jobs; if the government wants to help, they should reduce their burden on the economy.

When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed.

Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.

At some point, the dollar has to give. You can't just keep printing money, and monetizing debt, and buying bonds, without the dollar imploding.

The strength in gold is revealing the general weakness in the dollar.

The U.S. dollar is in terminal decline. America is tragically bankrupt, unable to pay its lenders without printing the dollars to do so, and enmeshed in an economic depression. The clock is ticking until the dollar faces a crisis of confidence like every other bubble before it.

Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.

It is production that creates purchasing power, not the printing press!

I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s.

One day we're going to look back at $1,700 with nostalgia. People are going to be shocked at how inexpensive gold was when it could be snapped up for such a bargain price.

Minimum wage laws make it illegal for a worker to accept a job that pays less, even if the worker needs that job.

We're on a collision course for disaster. All we can do, all your viewers can do is brace for impactBuy gold. Buy silver Get as far away as you can from U.S. currency and the U.S. economy.

The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

Fifty-dollar oil is just another stop on the road to much higher crude prices.

Well, I don't like the UK. I haven't ever been a fan of the pound (sterling), and even though they are taking some steps in the right direction - more so than the US - in addressing some of their problems, I still think they're doing it much too slowly. So, I think that the pound will continue to lose value relative to some of these other currencies. I ultimately expect the pound to rise against the dollar, but that's not the best way to take advantage of dollar weakness.

Greed is normally balanced by fear.

There are no checks and balances if the gov is wrong. If a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut; if he bets wrong, he loses; if the gov bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money. It's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press.

A federal bailout would spare California from having to make spending cuts needed to bring its budget into balance. The matter has become urgent since California voters rejected several tax-hiking ballot initiatives. Rather than taking the vote as a signal to dramatically curtail spending, the state turned to the feds. If they get a free pass, the politicians can avoid fixing any of their past mistakes or preparing California for the future.

In a speech at the just-concluded G20 summit in London, President Obama urged Americans not to let their fears crimp their spending. It would be unwise, he argued, for Americans to let the fear of job loss, lack of savings, unpaid bills, credit card debt or student loans deter them from making major purchases. According to the president, 'we must spend now as an investment for the future'....instead of saving for the future, we must spend for the future.

Contrary to the rhetoric emanating from the American left, the 'rich' are currently paying a lot more than 'their fair share.' It is only a handful of mega-rich, those whose entire incomes are derived from dividends and capital gains, rather than salaries or business profits, who have the ability to pay lower tax rates than some members of the middle class. The left knows this but continues to build their 'freeloading millionaire' straw man because it makes good politics.

The real bubble in China is in US Treasuries, in US dollars.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form.

All those commodities are going to have to rise in value as we are in short supply and we are printing too much money.

The primary factor that enables our government to peddle economic snake oil is the dollar's unique role as the world's reserve currency, and our creditors' willingness to preserve its status. By buying up dollars and loaning them back to us through Treasury debt, productive countries give American politicians cart blanche to play Santa Claus.

Gold has intrinsic value. The problem with the dollar is it has no intrinsic value. And if the Federal Reserve is going to spend trillions of them to buy up all these bad mortgages and all other kinds of bad debt, the dollar is going to lose all of its value. Gold will store its value, and you'll always be able to buy more food with your gold.

The Fed is the biggest enemy of this economy. In fact, Ben Bernanke, as far as I'm concerned, he's public enemy No. 1. We're never going to have a recovery while this guy's in charge.

There is simply no way to sustain an economy based on consumer credit.

Over the past decade or so, you have seen the flip side of that as you've seen stock prices have come down a lot relative to gold. Now you are getting a change where people are more comfortable holding gold because in the rear-view mirror it doesn't look so bad for gold. Bonds have not come down as much relative to gold, but I think the bond bubble is going to burst and will be falling for years too. And gold will look that much better.

What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.

The Philadelphia Feds manufacturers report for September revealed that despite a sharp slowdown, its prices paid index surged 257 points.

Often President Obama's worst critics are Senator Obama and candidate Obama.

We share management's vision that the recent regulatory changes, the large presence of Sprint Nextel in the 2.5 GHz band, and the near-term implementation of 4G systems make Oneida the right company in the right place at the right time.

The only way to buy more is to produce more.

Most governments, not all of them, but most, certainly don't want their citizens using gold. They want them in the currency that they are creating. When they are debasing money, or printing money, they are spending it and they want it to have as much value as possible when they originally spend it. Of course once they spend it, it will lose value for them and everyone else that holds it. But they need demand for their currency. They need as many people as possible holding it and transacting it. The more people that use gold, the harder it makes it.

It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.

You have countries that have lived beyond their means, with bloated governments, huge trade deficits, and people living off the government. Then you have others where poor people are working hard and underconsuming and their governments are buying all this debt and propping up the extravagant countries. All of this has to change. There's a tremendous moral hazard involved with this system.

Once the dollar begins to collapse beneath the weight of all this new deficit spending, accumulation of contingency liabilities and the socialization of our economy, commodity prices and interest rates will head skyward.

Most paper money initially existed as a substitute for gold. That's what gave it value. But right now what gives a currency value is other currency. Most countries hold reserves and the reserves are other currencies. If you are a backing up the euro with the dollar, what's backing up the dollar? I don't think it is going to go to a point where all you have is coins and bars of gold, but I do think that we are going to have to go back to a monetary system based in gold, not based on paper.

People should have an escape valve for their money, their assets. If you have substantial financial assets, the government is going to confiscate the purchasing power of those assets and spend it.

The president says we need to raise the debt ceiling because America pays its bills. No if we paid our bills we wouldn't have all this debt. The reason we have to raise the debt ceiling is because we can't pay our bills and we have to borrow money because we don't have any money to pay our bills.

Confidence by itself, unless it has a valid basis, can get us into trouble.

Gold is not overvalued at $500, and gold will not be overvalued at $1,500 or $2,000. The real money is buying gold and putting it away.

Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.

You don't drive an economy by consuming - the consumer is not the engine, the consumer is the caboose.

Mutual funds are an overrated investment heavily promoted by Wall Street.

You're worth what you're worth

Miners produce the bullion. If there is going to be more demand for gold from investors and central banks, where is the gold going to come from? They have to dig it out of the ground and sell it. As the price of gold goes higher, their profit margins increase. So if you are very bullish like I am and think there is going to be a big increase in gold, it's a huge opportunity for miners.

Of course if you happen to time the market really well, you can make more money with some of these smaller companies, but for someone with no exposure I wouldn't want to take the risk that they timed it wrong.