NOVEMBER 22, 2011
\nBy Sara Morano ’14, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
\u201cThe shelves of Wal-Mart will be empty!\u201d<\/p>\n
Just hours after the Congressional Super Committee announced it would not meet a midnight deadline for cutting $1.2 trillion from the federal debt, Peter Schiff, global strategist and Chief Executive Officer of Euro-Pacific Capital, was speaking on campus Monday night about\u00a0the implications of the debt crisis.<\/p>\n
The Thanksgiving holiday and the nominal opaqueness of his subject resulted in\u00a0a modest crowd of about 60 students, professors and community members\u00a0in the\u00a0Watkins Room.<\/p>\n
The hour-long program defied expectations of a dry and inaccessible discussion on one of the most complicated problems in current politics, however, and Schiff\u2019s arguments informed and stirred chuckles from the thin crowd.<\/p>\n
The successful international investor\u2019s apocalyptic predictions for Wal-Mart came at the conclusion of a\u00a0discussion of\u00a0the sustainability of the United States’\u00a0trade deficit with China.<\/p>\n
Schiff reasoned that growing debt will\u00a0force the U.S. to restructure, rather than repay, devaluing the dollar and restricting the country’s\u00a0ability to import the Chinese-made goods that stock Sam Walton\u2019s retail giant.<\/p>\n
Other pointed thoughts on cell phones and tight-fitting pants served, as did Schiff\u2019s Wal-Mart comment, to illustrate his economic ideas in a way that avoided his use of such terms as\u00a0\u201cPE ratios,\u201d \u201cT-bills\u201d and \u201cbasis points,\u201d which peppered but by no means dominated the lecture.<\/p>\n
Schiff\u2019s overall forecasts\u00a0were characteristically grim. At the peak of real estate prices in 2006, he\u00a0earned the nickname \u201cDr. Doom\u201d for predicting\u00a0a coming collapse in the housing market.<\/p>\n
During Monday night\u2019s lecture he asserted there has been\u00a0no real economic recovery\u00a0and that the coming recession will\u00a0entail high interest rates, rising food and fuel prices, and a decreased standard of living for Americans.<\/p>\n
If Schiff\u2019s predictions were dire, however, the solutions he proposed were simple.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the good things about debt is counterbalance,\u201d Schiff said.\u00a0\u201cIt took me a long time to get dressed for this event because I couldn\u2019t find pants that would close. I\u2019m too cheap to go out and buy all new clothes; I\u2019ve got to lose weight. We\u2019ve been buying stuff from the world on credit for 40 years. The world\u2019s biggest consumption binge is ending. We need to recognize the problem and allow real market-based solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NOVEMBER 22, 2011
\nBy Sara Morano ’14, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
\u201cThe shelves of Wal-Mart will be empty!\u201d<\/p>\n
Just hours after the Congressional Super Committee announced it would not meet a midnight deadline for cutting $1.2 trillion from the federal debt, Peter Schiff, global strategist and Chief Executive Officer of Euro-Pacific Capital, was speaking on campus Monday night on the implications of the debt crisis.<\/p>\n
The Thanksgiving holiday and the nominal opaqueness of his\u00a0subject resulted in\u00a0a modest crowd of about 60 students, professors and community members in\u00a0the Watkins Room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,46,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-economics","category-politics-and-international-affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}