Skeptic Project

Not that I know of, unfortunately, but if you find anything I'd be interested in seeing it. I made a blog post about it some time ago:

http://conspiracyscience.com/blog/2009/09/17/economic-collapse-really-is-coming-soon/

Investor Sounds Alarm on Hyperinflation.

http://www.personalliberty.com/preserving-wealth/investor-sounds-alarm-on-hyperinflation/

Refer to my blog post linked above, casey, it's more the of same stuff.

It seems that there is a prediction for hyperinflation by the end of the week by one Jim Sinclair. He predicted hyperinflation would hit the United States by Nov. 6-7th. I first heard of Sinclair from my former financial advisor. He totally believed Sinclair, and rather than pay down his mortgage he put most of his money in silver, believing the death of the dollar is upon us. I bought it, up to a point, and purchased some extra food (maybe a months worth) but never was totally sold on it. I later actually read Sinclair's site, and found his writing laughable. I also found out he has been predicting hyperinflation for over 30 years. Anyway baring some collapse by Saturday, I probably will give my advisor a call and ask if he still believes this guy and his nonsense.

http://jsmineset.com/2009/08/19/the-countdown-to-the-implosion-of-the-dollar/

If I had time I would create my own site to debunk the hyperinflation bunk that is being spread by the doomsayers and commodity speculators. There are 50 sites for every one that even remotely attempts to debunk it. The ones that try to debunk it usually just try to discredit one doomsayer, while not really trying to discredit the idea that hyperinflation is around the corner. I have to wonder why the Alex Jones crowd loves Jim Rogers, the so called "Legendary investor" and dollar bear? Rogers was once a partner with George Soros, a man who is considered the face of evil by the Truther movement. Usually any kind of association with anybody remotely considered evil is enough to label you an NWOer.

As for my former advisor, I called him and despite Sinclair's prediction of a dollar collapse failing to materialize, he firmly believes it is just around the corner.

I found a few more predictions from one Bob Moriarty, who founded 321gold.com. At the end of 2008 he claimed that by the end of the 1st quarter, we would have food riots, by the end of summer the US will default, and the US government will not exist in its current form by the end of 2009 (this one still has a chance). You can read a lot of his nonsense at: http://www.theaureport.com/pub/na/1991

I've noticed that many of these economic doomsday forecasters, if you check into their writings and interviews online, cite something called "Austrian economics" as a source for their predictions. (Examples: Charles Goyette, Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Ron Paul and Jim Rogers.) Austrianists seem emotionally committed to condemning the U.S. to a hyperinflationary collapse as punishment for not following their ideology, even though the economy has managed well enough without their ideas since the Great Depression.

And Austrianists have used this scare tactic for generations. You can read Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged" as an example of Austrianist doomsday porn from the 1950's.

Yet these obsessives keep getting on mainstream business shows like on CNBC, and nobody holds them to account for their failed predictions. Go figure.

How about this for cognitive dissonance: Libertarians like Ron Paul want to privatize as many of the functions of government as possible, yet they complain about the allegedly privately owned Federal Reserve. Indeed, Paul wants to violate the Fed owners' property rights by abolishing it.

We really should call these guys "Amish economists," because their world view reveals a nostalgic past-orientation. (Some of the guys who write for the Mises.org website even admire the antebellum American South. I guess they feel they would have gotten their gold money's worth for the slave labor it could buy.) For example, they say things like how the dollar has allegedly lost "ninety-six percent of its value," or whatever figure they pull out of their ass, since the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

Well, yeah, I can see why that would bother someone who lives like people did in 1913 and still orders stuff out of the 1913 Sears catalog.

But in the world the rest of us live in, we've gotten vastly wealthier in real terms since 1913. We just use dollars as an arbitrary means of keeping score. Most of the goods and services available today didn't even exist as ideas in 1913. The richest man in the world in 1913 couldn't have bought a jet trip to Australia, a computer or a modern diagnosis and treatment for his cardiovascular problems for all the gold on the planet. Yet today a waitress's tip money can buy monthly prescriptions for generic drugs like statins which increase healthy life expectancy. Would Goyette, Schiff, etc. want to live in 1913, when they had "real money"? Or would they rather live today with our fiat money and the far better quality of life it can buy?

"In fact it isn't surprising that most gold bugs are big on organic food. That is strange considering libertarians could be celebrating genetically modified food is a free market innovation (which it is )."

That sounds more than strange because libertarian websites like Reason and the Cato Institute have published dozens of articles about the wonders of pesticides and the irrationality of fearing them in our food supply. You'd almost get the impression from those articles that libertarians want to consume bug spray as a salad dressing:

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=site%3Awww.reason.com+pesticide&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Awww.cato.org+pesticide&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Alex Jones along with most Ron Paul supporters I know believe gm foods are designed to reduce your life. They seem to think you'll never need to see a doctor again if you just ate organic all the time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9-d7FDkc3Q&feature=related

http://www.dailypaul.com/node/101157

The hyperinflationists seem to have backtracked on their predictions. Rather than hitting us by the end of 2009, our impending economic doom will be in 1-3 years (maybe even longer). Earlier this year, Jim Rogers, claimed we would have a currency crisis in November, however later he later said we would have one in November and if didn't happen then we would eventually have one.

Gary North said by the end of the year malls would become ghost towns and we would have a massive amount chain restaurants going under (he also said the Y2K bug would destroy us after predicting hospitals would not have enough space because of the AIDS epidemic by 1992) is claiming that the ghost town thing will have to wait another year and that the hyperinflation might be more like a 10% inflation rate similar to what happened in 1979 (bad but certainly not Weimar Germany bad).

Even Peter Schiff seems to think we'll have to wait another three years to pay $10 million for a loaf of bread.

The only one being consistant is Marc Faber who believes gold will absolutely, positively, 100% not fall below $1,000 although he believes it could fall back around $800.

Personally I have better things to do than waste my life and my money worrying and preparing for a crisis that has been predicted to happen for generations but never shows up.

"Personally I have better things to do than waste my life and my money worrying and preparing for a crisis that has been predicted to happen for generations but never shows up."

Well, yeah. Austrianists and similar economic doomsayers like Gerald Celente and Lyndon LaRouche remind me of the christians who keep saying that we live in "the last days" and expect to get raptured in their lifetimes. Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye have spent decades hustling this nonsense, and they've both reached their 80's without seeing even one of their toenails snatched up into heaven.

I'd like to know of at least one Austrianist who writes that he thinks the economy will muddle through without any disaster. But I suspect they've all committed themselves to economic doom as a strategy to try to get heard in a noisy and competitive media environment.

I wonder if these Austrianists have considered the possibility that abolishing the Fed (1) wouldn't really solve the problems we face, and (2) might in fact make them worse. The Austrianists' goals -- "hard money" and minimal government -- could easily exist in the context of a greatly reduced and stagnant economy. Their policies, if enacted, might even cause or accelerate the collapse to that state.

I work for an Arizona business man who owns several million dollars' worth of real estate. He tells me that inflation has actually helped him in the past by appreciating the nominal worth of his assets and making it easier to pay back the money he borrowed to buy them. How did he mysteriously acquire all this wealth in a fiat system? Certainly not by running a bank or by putting his money into gold.

BTW, how would bankers benefit by inflating the currency any way? Inflation allows debtors to pay back their loans with depreciated dollars, so don't bankers screw themselves by supporting inflationary policies? If anything, we should thank these bankers for the indirect subsidy they've given us by lending us money and then discounting the value of the loans through inflation.