Anthony Wile interviewed Peter Schiff for The Daily Bell this past weekend. This is a long and thorough examination of Schiff’s worldview and investment advice – a great introduction for those new to the concepts of sound money and government manipulation of the marketplace.
“I think we’re going to have a crisis. I think it’s going to be a real collapse and that’s going to be the catalyst, potentially, for constructive change. But until there’s a crisis it’s going to be more of the same until more of the same precipitates the crisis.
I think in the meantime we prepare personally, we get our investments in order, we make sure we have our money invested properly so it’s not a financial crisis for us, it’s just an economic crisis for the country – not that I want to belittle that but I think it’s important that you not go down with the ship financially, that you put yourself in a position to be able to help other people by being in a lifeboat.”
I want to correct, if I may, a mistake that Peter made a couple of times in his interview with Anthony Wile. He said that the U.S. was put on a gold standard by the Founders. Technically, not true, although gold was part of the coinage originally authorized by the Coinage Act of 1792.
Silver was the actual standard, with gold coins, in a ratio of 1 gold dollar to 15 silver dollars, allowed to circulate at the same time. Officially, the dollar was defined in terms of a certain number of grains of silver, to be roughly equivalent to the Spanish Milled Dollar of that era.
Otherwsie, good interview, Peter.