Peter Schiff Quotes

One thing is certain. At some point global investors will lose confidence in our (U.S.) easy dollars and debt-financed prosperity, and then the chickens will come home to roost.

Following Greece's defeat at the hands of Turkey in 1897, Greece's fiscal house was entrusted to a Control Commission. During the 20th century, the drachma was one of the world's worst currencies. It recorded the world's sixth highest hyperinflation. In October 1944, Greece's monthly inflation rate hit 13,800%.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose

I come from a country in which I experienced economic collapse.

Economies typically do not function well in hyperinflation. The real value of government debt might disappear, but the economy is likely to disappear with it.

I don't think we will ever go the way of Zimbabwe, but people are concerned.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all.

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 best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

Long before we wake up from our dream of prosperity through an inflated currency, our gold … will have vanished and no rate of interest will tempt it to return.

At the end of Friday, March 3, 1933, thirty-two states had closed all their banks ... Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other ten states and in the District of Columbia withdrawals were limited to 5 percent of deposits and in Texas to ten dollars per day. The U.S. financial system had reached the last extremity before it would collapse completely, taking the life's savings of tens of millions of people and what was left of the international economic system with it.

Americans have seen the value of the dollar slowly decline due to the steady erosion of inflation.

Look at the Weimar Republic and their hyperinflation in the early '20s. It didn't happen overnight. I've used the analogy, it's a lot like soybeans: you plant 'em, you wait. Conditions take some time. You need some sun; you need some water, but ultimately things start to grow, and are we in that phase or not?

I can tell you what happens to countries that go bankrupt. I've been to Argentina. I'm familiar with the history of Mexico and Great Britain. We'll see the same things here shortly: inflation, huge tax increases, capital flight and, eventually, capital controls.

The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.

Inflation has ... become the cruelest tax, destroying the value of the dollar and adding new costs to every purchase.

If the practice persists of covering government deficits with the issue of notes, then the day will come without fail, sooner or later, when the monetary systems of those nations pursuing this course will break down completely. The purchasing power of the monetary unit will decline more and more, until finally it disappears completely.

Throughout history, every government that's printed money, the money has eventually gone to its ultimate value which is zero. Remember? The confederate dollar went to zero. The continental went to zero. That's what happens when you have a bank that's allowed to print as much money as it wants to.

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.

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.

With the loss of the American dollar as its own currency and its devaluation, I think that people will not even be able to afford bread and milk. They're facing a real crisis in America and I think the solution is Islam.

Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.

This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American "Greenbackers" in the nineteenth, had resulted, under the Orleans Regency and Louis XV, in ruin to France financially and morally, had culminated in the utter destruction of all prosperity, the rooting out of great numbers of the most important industries, and the grinding down of the working people even to starvation.

Debasing your currency sometimes works in the short term, it has never worked in the long term and does not even usually work in the medium term. Lots of politicians like to do it because it is an easy way.