Não declarar trabalho doméstico vai deixar de ser crime

[trader de elite]

Mais um excelente artigo do Sr.SCHIFF.Economia do padeiro,do homem do talho e do homem das velas.Espectacular.

February 27, 2009

Obama Puts the Economic Cart Before the Horse


In his first televised speech before Congress, President Obama asserted that prosperity will return once the government restores the flow of credit in the economy. It may come as a surprise to him, but an economy cannot run on consumer loans. Furthermore, credit stopped flowing in the U.S. for a very good reason: there was no more savings left to loan. Government efforts to simply make credit available, without rebuilding productive capacity or increasing savings, are doomed to destroy what’s left of our economy.

The central tenets of Obamanomics appear to be that access to credit will enable people to borrow money to buy stuff, the spending will spur production and employment, and thus the economy will grow. It’s a neat and simple picture, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with how an economy works. The President does not understand that consumption is made possible by production and that credit is made possible by savings. The size and complexity of modern economies has obscured these simple concepts, but reducing the picture to a small scale can help clear away the fog.

Suppose there is a very small barter-based economy consisting of only three individuals, a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. If the candlestick maker wants bread or steak, he makes candles and trades. The candlestick maker always wants food, but his demand can only be satisfied if he makes candles, without which he goes hungry. The mere fact that he desires bread and steak is meaningless.

Enter the magic wand of credit, which many now assume can take the place of production. Suppose the butcher has managed to produce an excess amount of steak and has more than he needs on a daily basis. Knowing this, the candlestick maker asks to borrow a steak from the butcher to trade to the baker for bread. For this transaction to take place the butcher must first have produced steaks which he did not consume (savings). He then loans his savings to the candlestick maker, who issues the butcher a note promising to repay his debt in candlesticks.

In this instance, it was the butcher’s production of steak that enabled the candlestick maker to buy bread, which also had to be produced. The fact that the candlestick maker had access to credit did not increase demand or bolster the economy. In fact, by using credit to buy instead of candles, the economy now has fewer candles, and the butcher now has fewer steaks with which to buy bread himself. What has happened is that through savings, the butcher has loaned his purchasing power, created by his production, to the candlestick maker, who used it to buy bread.

Similarly, the candlestick maker could have offered “IOU candlesticks” directly to the baker. Again, the transaction could only be successful if the baker actually baked bread that he did not consume himself and was therefore able to loan his savings to the candlestick maker. Since he loaned his bread to the candlestick maker, he no longer has that bread himself to trade for steak.

The existence of credit in no way increases aggregate consumption within this community, it merely temporarily alters the way consumption is distributed. The only way for aggregate consumption to increase is for the production of candlesticks, steak, and bread to increase.

One way credit could be used to grow this economy would be for the candlestick maker to borrow bread and steak for sustenance while he improves the productive capacity of his candlestick-making equipment. If successful, he could repay his loans with interest out of his increased production, and all would benefit from greater productivity. In this case the under-consumption of the butcher and baker led to the accumulation of savings, which were then loaned to the candlestick maker to finance capital investments. Had the butcher and baker consumed all their production, no savings would have been accumulated, and no credit would have been available to the candlestick maker, depriving society of the increased productivity that would have followed.

On the other hand, had the candlestick maker merely borrowed bread and steak to sustain himself while taking a vacation from candlestick making, society would gain nothing, and there would be a good chance the candlestick maker would default on the loan. In this case, the extension of consumer credit squanders savings which are now no longer available to finance other capital investments.

What would happen if a natural disaster destroyed all the equipment used to make candlesticks, bread and steak? Confronted with dangerous shortages of food and lighting, Barack Obama would offer to stimulate the economy by handing out pieces of paper called money and guaranteeing loans to whomever wants to consume. What good would the money do? Would these pieces of paper or loans make goods magically appear?

The mere introduction of paper money into this economy only increases the ability of the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker to bid up prices (measured in money, not trade goods) once goods are actually produced again. The only way to restore actual prosperity is to repair the destroyed equipment and start producing again.

The sad truth is that the productive capacity of the American economy is now largely in tatters. Our industrial economy has been replaced by a reliance on health care, financial services and government spending. Introducing freer flowing credit and more printed money into such a system will do nothing except spark inflation. We need to get back to the basics of production. It won’t be easy, but it will work.

President Obama would have us believe that we can all spend the day relaxing in a tub while his printing press does all the work for us. The problem comes when you get out of the tub to go to dinner and the only thing on your plate is an IOU for steak.

Mr. Schiff is president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of "The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets" (Wiley, 2008).

[Branc0]

Resposta de Peter Schiff

My popularity on television and the internet has led a very small money manager to use his popular financial blog to promote his fledgling business by attacking the recent poor performance of my long-term investment strategy. The post is causing quite a stir and compels me to provide some badly needed context.

To achieve his ends, this individual has distorted much of what I have been saying and writing, and has twisted the facts to support his own preconceived conclusion. In essence, his piece is nothing more than an overt advertisement (and a highly deceptive one at that) to use my popularity to advance his career. In so doing he has given my critics, particularly some who have been embarrassed by their roles in the "Peter Schiff was Right" video, their moments of retribution. In addition, some members of the press who have never been among my greatest fans are seizing the opportunity to discredit me as well.

The crux of the blogger's arguments are that my beliefs in "decoupling, hyperinflation, and that the dollar is going to zero" have been completely discredited by the events of 2008, and that the resulting investment losses suffered by my clients last year confirms the fatal flaws in my approach.

In addition to mischaracterizing many of my beliefs, he also is confusing short-term market fluctuations with long-term economic trends.

First of all, the hyper inflation issue is a straw man at best. While I often talk about the possibility of hyper inflation, I have always said that it would be a worse-case scenario that would play out over many years. The fact that it did not appear in the first year of the economic crash (2008) does not invalidate my position. I have always maintained that this worst-case scenario will likely be avoided by what will ultimately be a dramatic shift in policy once our leaders come to their senses. However, until then the dollar will likely lose a substantial portion of its value.

Second, I never said that the dollar would go to zero, either in 2008 or any year thereafter. I have said that in the event of hyper inflation the dollar's value would approach zero. My actual forecast in my book "Crash Proof" was that the Dollar Index would fall to 40 (currently about 85), with a realistic worst case scenario, assuming very high but not hyper inflation, of 20 or lower.

Third, the blogger points out that because the decoupling theory (foreign economies improving while the U.S. falters) that I wrote about in "Crash Proof" has yet to occur, that the theory itself was ridiculous. In my book I wrote that this process would not occur overnight, that initially our creditors would come to our aid, and in so doing our problems would become manifest abroad. I wrote that it would take time for the world to realize that what had been decoupled from the economic train was not the engine but the caboose. In fact, that is precisely the way it is playing out.

Chapter Ten of "Crash Proof" is specifically focused on the need to keep funds liquid to take advantage of the buying opportunity that would initially develop once our stock market began its collapse. I specifically mentioned that when U.S. stocks began to fall, we could expect sympathetic declines overseas. While I did not know the precise timing of those events, I advised readers to prepare.

I did not expect the huge dollar rally of 2008. But to discredit my long-term view of the dollar based on an eight month move is absurd. So while I believed that a weak dollar would cushion the temporary decline I expected in foreign stocks, a strong dollar ended up exacerbating it. In the meantime, I believed that the high dividends these stocks were paying would make it easier to ride out any correction. The problem was that the dollar fell so far leading up to the crisis (in 2005-2007) that by the time the crisis finally erupted the dollar was poised for a bounce.

Central to the argument that my investment thesis is wrong is the belief that the crisis is over or that the recent trends will continue until it is. But the crisis is just beginning and the movements thus far in the dollar, commodities, and foreign stocks, are mere head fakes. Once the speculators have been flushed from the markets, the underlying long-term trends I have been following should return in earnest.

To illustrate the flaws in my investment strategy the blogger has posted a client's statement that shows a loss in excess of 60%. In addition, he claims to know of other Euro Pacific clients who have experienced similar losses. The inference of course is that most, or all, of my clients must have suffered similar losses, and the existence of such losses proves that I am wrong. In fact, some have gone a step further, claiming that such losses prove that I am a fraud.

First let's deal with the one client's account. I have been following several key investment themes for the past ten years. The basis for my strategy is that recent U.S. prosperity has been false, and that the consequences of the bursting of our bubble economy would ultimately play out in a substantial decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, higher commodity prices, the re-monetization of gold, and foreign equities substantially outperforming U.S. markets. From an investment perspective, those themes played out extremely well in the eight years from 2000-2007. Recently we have seen a sharp, and I believe temporary, reversal of these trends. Those that came late to the party (at least based on where we are today) now have to ride out a particularly difficult correction.

For example, the account in question belongs to the son of a long-standing Euro Pacific client, who is still adding funds to his accounts. Without specially commenting on the performance of the father's account, it must have been compelling enough to finally persuade the son to come on board himself in early 2008. However, as is often the case, by the time he came on board, foreign stocks and commodities were about to sell off, and the dollar was about to begin its unexpected rally. Following such a sharp correction, the son now regrets his decision and must blame me for my part in helping him make it.

Perhaps as a stockbroker I should have persuaded the son to wait for a correction. However, while this clearly would have been the right call with the full benefit of hind-sight, it was certainly not as clear given the information I had at the time. However, I never held myself out to be a market timer. My advice was always geared to long-term investors. Given the thousands of clients that I have, and the large number who joined near the recent dollar peak and market tops, it's no wonder that a few have contacted this blogger to complain; especially since he has actively sought them out. Of course, the fact that the overwhelming majority of my clients are not complaining, to him or anyone else for that matter, says a lot more about what is really going on.

To the extent that the long-term trends I have been following continue, I am confident that even those whose short-term timing was bad will still do well in time. This is especially true if they take advantage of this pull back by adding to their accounts, either with new funds or by re-investing their dividends. However, to examine the effectiveness of my investment strategy immediately following a major correction by looking only at those accounts who adopted the strategy at the previous peak is unfair and distortive.

Since I have been advising investors to follow these trends for ten years, I will leave it to the public to draw their own conclusions as to how long-term followers of my strategy have fared. However, for those who only recently adopted my approach in 2007 or 2008, the road has been a lot bumpier than they or I thought it would be when they climbed on board. Yet if these long-term trends re-emerge, though the journey may be different than planned, the ultimate destination will remain the same.

The blogger in question implies that all of my clients are down by levels similar to the account he cites. He has asked me to refute his allegations by providing broader performance figures for more clients. But, since Euro Pacific Capital is a brokerage firm and not a Registered Investment Advisor, I am prohibited by regulators from providing any details on the investment performance achieved by my clients. The blogger in question makes his challenge knowing full well that I am legally prevented from accepting it. He then uses my failure to refute his false claim as validating its accuracy.

In addition, to look only at the performance of foreign stocks, while ignoring other aspects of my investment strategy only tells part of the story. What about gold, foreign bonds, short positions in financials, home builders and subprime mortgages (or merely avoiding long exposure to those sectors), or other investments people have made, either at Euro Pacific or elsewhere based on my insights? What about dividends earned, or gains realized on closed positions?

Mainstream economists, journalists, and investment professionals have never liked my message and have never resisted the temptation to shoot the messenger. When my investment strategies were performing well, I got little credit for it. Instead, all the attention was focused on the apparent failure of my dire economic predictions to materialize. Now that the economy is collapsing along the lines that I correctly forecast, criticism is being focused on the recent poor performance of my investment strategy (a fact that I have never tried to hide). Of course by the time my investment strategy is once again in step with my economic forecasts, an event that I believe will occur sooner than most people think, it will likely be too late for most people to do adopt it.

My critics have often referred to me as a stopped clock. I believe that the accusation is best leveled at the accusers. Having been wrong for so long, they are now enjoying their brief moment in the sun. They should enjoy it while it lasts. For now, they are creating fodder for some future "Peter Schiff was Right" piece where those who now criticize my investment performance will look just as foolish as those who once criticized my economic forecasts.

[salvadorveiga]

e os 30+% que ele ganhou antes? eu n disse q n perderam 40% era dificil n perder que mercado e' q n desceu or esses valores? axo q nenhum...

mas como as teses de investimneto dele n se baseiam no preço da acçao mas mais em Dividen yields...

obviamente se alguem entrou no ultimo ano para a brokerage dele, vai com perdas consideraveis, mas na minha opiniao axo q a longo prazo essas perdas vao ser minimizadas e passaram para ganhos consideraveis...

sobretudo pq estou ao lado do schiff relativamente ao comportamento do usd no longo prazo

[LTCM]

sim se calhar os indices estrangeiros cairam mais mas se formos a ver a rendibilidade a 5 anos, enquanto o SP ganhava aos 10% e menos q isso, ele no DAX, China, Australia, Taiwan, Canada entre outros tinha rendibilidades de 30% (com taxa de cambio incluida).

Deve ser por causa disso que os clientes dele estão a perder mais de 40%

[salvadorveiga]

Afinal quantos Dr Doom é que há?

Ao Roubini tb lhe chamam Dr Doom (ou pelo menos passa por tal). Cá para mim são os média que inventam esses nomes (até porque só nesses artigos é que aparece o suposto "nick name").

E ainda o Faber

Para mim bate de longe estes todos.

O Marc Faber e' muito bom ainda m lembro ele na Bloomberg...

"Mr Faber what can Mr Bernanke do that would make you happy??"

"To quit his job..."

lol

[Panizzi]

Afinal quantos Dr Doom é que há?

Ao Roubini tb lhe chamam Dr Doom (ou pelo menos passa por tal). Cá para mim são os média que inventam esses nomes (até porque só nesses artigos é que aparece o suposto "nick name").

E ainda o Faber

Para mim bate de longe estes todos.

[salvadorveiga]

Já tinha falado dele aqui neste post

Está lá o video e tudo

Penso que não está lá a parte a bold.

Que é o que realmente interessa.

12 Ways Schiff Was Wrong in 2008

* Wrong about hyperinflation
* Wrong about the dollar
* Wrong about commodities except for gold
* Wrong about foreign currencies except for the Yen
* Wrong about foreign equities
* Wrong in timing
* Wrong in risk management
* Wrong in buy and hold thesis
* Wrong on decoupling
* Wrong on China
* Wrong on US treasuries
* Wrong on interest rates, both foreign and domestic

That's a lot of things to be wrong about, especially given all the "Peter Schiff Was Right" videos floating around everywhere. The one thing he was right about was the collapse of US equities and no part of his investment strategy sought to make a gain from that prediction.

http://www.crossingwallstreet.com/archi ... schif.html

errado... esse artigo ta um pouco biased... apenas olhar para o curto prazo... alias no livro dele, ele praticamente previu como o governo ia reagir...

sim se calhar os indices estrangeiros cairam mais mas se formos a ver a rendibilidade a 5 anos, enquanto o SP ganhava aos 10% e menos q isso, ele no DAX, China, Australia, Taiwan, Canada entre outros tinha rendibilidades de 30% (com taxa de cambio incluida).

Alias, a filosofia de investimento dele, nem olha muito para o preço das acçoes, ele diz que o valor das acçoes e' um pouco "gambling", por isso prefere investir em boas empresas com altos Div Yields com payout ratios muito reduzidos...

Ha umas empresas bem jeitosas nos research dele, com dividendos de 10-15% em empresas no canada---

[LTCM]

Já tinha falado dele aqui neste post

Está lá o video e tudo

Penso que não está lá a parte a bold.

Que é o que realmente interessa.

12 Ways Schiff Was Wrong in 2008

* Wrong about hyperinflation
* Wrong about the dollar
* Wrong about commodities except for gold
* Wrong about foreign currencies except for the Yen
* Wrong about foreign equities
* Wrong in timing
* Wrong in risk management
* Wrong in buy and hold thesis
* Wrong on decoupling
* Wrong on China
* Wrong on US treasuries
* Wrong on interest rates, both foreign and domestic

That's a lot of things to be wrong about, especially given all the "Peter Schiff Was Right" videos floating around everywhere. The one thing he was right about was the collapse of US equities and no part of his investment strategy sought to make a gain from that prediction.

http://www.crossingwallstreet.com/archi ... schif.html

[MarcoAntonio]

Afinal quantos Dr Doom é que há?

Ao Roubini tb lhe chamam Dr Doom (ou pelo menos passa por tal). Cá para mim são os média que inventam esses nomes (até porque só nesses artigos é que aparece o suposto "nick name").

[atomez]

Já tinha falado dele aqui neste post

Está lá o video e tudo

[LTCM]

'Dr. Doom' became a star by predicting last year's market meltdown. And now his 2009 forecast is even scarier.

(Fortune Magazine) -- A couple of years ago, when Peter Schiff first began appearing regularly on TV to warn of an impending real estate collapse that would crash the U.S. economy and stock market, he was surprised and disappointed to find that he was rarely, if ever, approached by strangers in restaurants.

"I'd walk down the streets of New York and figure, 'Gee, you know, I'm on CNBC, CNN,'" says the brash 45-year-old president of brokerage Euro Pacific Capital. "But nobody ever recognized me."

Those days, as Schiff will triumphantly tell you, are over. Perhaps no market soothsayer has had his profile raised higher over the past six months. As one of the few talking heads who loudly, relentlessly, and more or less accurately sounded the alarm about the mortgage bubble and its consequences - in the process becoming the latest bearish commentator to earn the moniker "Dr. Doom" - Schiff has suddenly emerged as a cult hero and something of a minor celebrity.

Recently he's even gone viral. One ten-minute video on YouTube that's packed with some of his "greatest hits" - with, for instance, clips of Schiff predicting a brutal recession and massive credit crunch while prominent debate partners, such as writer and actor Ben Stein and former Reagan economic advisor Art Laffer, make what now sound like laughably optimistic counterarguments - has been viewed just over a million times at last count.

But the evidence of his popularity hardly ends there. An admirer has launched a tribute website that compiles his written commentaries and weekly radio broadcasts. There's a Facebook page pushing him as a Senate candidate in Connecticut for 2010. Both of the books he's published in the past couple of years are in the top five of Amazon's list of investing bestsellers.

"And I do get recognized now," says Schiff excitedly. "In the health club. In restaurants. The other day I called Cablevision to switch my service, and the guy says, 'This isn't the Peter Schiff from CNN, is it? I'm a big fan!'"

While Schiff's mood has gotten a boost from his newfound fame and enhanced status, his outlook for the U.S. economy has only grown grimmer while watching the federal government throw unprecedented amounts of capital into circulation to prop up banks and car companies. A response, he likes to point out, that he also predicted. "I'm as negative as I've ever been," he says, "because everything the government is doing now is going to make the situation much, much worse. They're trying to reflate this bubble. All along I knew that what would potentially be fatal wasn't the recession itself but the government's response. But what they've already done exceeds even my worst-case imagination."
'Ponzi economy'

As he outlined in 2007 in his first book, Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse, Schiff believes that the U.S. economy has become dangerously and unsustainably dependent on consumption - fueled by trillions of dollars borrowed mainly from Asian countries like Japan and China.

"We have an economy that's based on the same principles as Bernie Madoff's investments," he says. "It's a Ponzi economy. It's not real. We don't save and we don't produce anything anymore. We simply borrow from the rest of the world, and then we spend it. We've had a giant party. We bought all these plasma TVs and iPods. We remodeled our houses and took vacations. But you know what? The bills are coming in."

Schiff is predicting a wicked post-party hangover. He sees a multiyear recession ahead marked by rampant inflation, a steadily weakening dollar, soaring commodities prices, slumping U.S. stock indexes, and falling wages.

Last year Schiff was an economic advisor to the presidential campaign of libertarian Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Like Paul, Schiff is an adherent of the Austrian school of economics, which advocates a laissez-faire approach. And Schiff's prescription for how the U.S. can dig out of our current mess comes straight out of the libertarian playbook: Shrink the government radically, cancel all bailouts immediately, take plenty of tough medicine, and let the free market do its job - however harsh it may be for, say, autoworkers in the meantime.

It's no surprise that Schiff grew up with an unconventional outlook. His father, Irwin Schiff, is a well-known longtime tax protester who has published several books arguing the illegality of federal taxes. The elder Schiff, 80, is currently serving 13 years in federal prison for various tax crimes. "My dad has basically taken a certain principled stance, and unfortunately to his detriment," says Schiff. While expressing sympathy for many of his father's views, he acknowledges the futility of his crusade. "I pay my taxes," he says.

Schiff attended college at the University of California at Berkeley - not the obvious choice for a rabid free-marketer. After graduating in 1987, he found his way to a job as a broker at Shearson Lehman. Schiff did okay there financially, he says, but he never meshed well with his bosses. He also says it bothered him that actually making money for clients seemed to be a secondary priority to racking up commissions or pushing hot stocks. In 1996 he and a partner bought an existing broker-dealer business and renamed it Euro Pacific Capital. Operating out of a small office in Los Angeles, Schiff spent those early days cold-calling potential clients with warnings about a growing bubble in tech stocks.

In 2005 he moved his headquarters to Darien, Conn. Currently Euro Pacific has just over 60 brokers in six offices around the country, and it recently had about $1 billion of clients' money invested. But Schiff is moving to capitalize on both his new guru status and the chaos on Wall Street. He has applied to become a licensed investment advisor so that he can actively manage clients' money for the first time, and he's hiring analysts to begin generating independent research.

Schiff's current investment advice is the same as it has been for years: Get your money out of the U.S. dollar and into more fundamentally sound currencies like the Swiss franc or the Singapore dollar; buy some precious metals; and buy foreign, dividend-paying stocks, with an emphasis on natural-resources companies.

Ironically, though, the year that Schiff became a star prognosticator on TV was also one of the worst periods ever for his clients. In most cases the foreign markets he likes got hit even harder than the U.S. in 2008 (Australia's ASX 200, for instance, fell 41.3%, vs. 38.5% for the S&P 500), and even more surprising to Schiff, the U.S. dollar rallied strongly as investors rushed to the perceived safety of Treasuries.

It would be wrong to think that Schiff is doubting himself or his advice, however. "None of this shocks me," he says. "Oftentimes in the short run markets are irrational. And my problem has always been that I see things too clearly and too far in advance. Other people don't understand what I do, so the markets might not validate what I'm saying right away. But they will eventually. In the end the fundamentals are going to prevail, just as they did in the housing market." Spoken like a true prophet of doom.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/20/magazin ... /index.htm