Can anyone recommend financial and investment services with Austrian or similar bend? Aside from Peter Schiff, of course.
Mike Shedlock and Jim Rogers are two I can think of.
I think your best bet would be to sort of “create your own.” For example, a manager with a goal of capital preservation or an inflation hedge, or a commodity fund manager doesn’t have to be Austrian. As I said in the recent investment thread, I think a lot of people who are Austrians may tend to allow their judgments about the Fed to cloud things – like always expecting runaway inflation and a perpetual bull market for gold. Just MHO, don’t bash me!
Schiff isn’t really Austrian from an investment standpoint.
Too many fallacies to mention. Decoupling, emphasis on trade deficits, emphasis on manufacturing…
I bet if you contact Doug French, and ask for some suggestions, he might be able to point you to some such names. Gary North immediately comes to mind as an advisor.
If you’re taking investment advice from a serious Austrian economist, he’d probably say “Buy gold and silver! Take physical delivery!”
I’ve concluded that the stock market is a ripoff. Gold has done MUCH better over the past 10 years.
Most financial advisers make money from commissions. Therefore, they will steer you towards mutual funds where they can earn a commission.
You’re a fool to buy bonds for a long-term investment. You’ll get ripped off by inflation. As my above analysis indicated, the stock market also is a losing proposition.
Stick with gold and silver, and you’ll do fine. If your savings are in an IRA, then GLD and SLV are good enough.
Chris Leithner:
And his foreign stocks are doing better than U.S. stocks. Go figure. Must be a ton of fallacies.
Well, that doesn’t really prove anything, for a while people who thought realestate prices cannot fall were doing great too.
But I don’t agree the mentioned things are fallacies. Trade deficits were always shown as a symptom of things going bad in the US, not the cause, while decoupling and emphasis on manufacturing is nothing more then rephrasing Say’s law - you don’t get stuff unless you give stuff, and the only reason you got stuff so far was because people accepted your paper money.
The other thing about Schiff that people don’t talk about is the fact that he’s looking at areas like Australia and NZ that people simply don’t buy into that much. I spent three days trying to find a cost effective way to buy Aus/NZ stocks with my dad, and we’re investment advisors. It’s like this magical hidden market down there where the people with money just ignore it because they are smaller companies. In all of ten minutes of searching I found a stock yielding a steady 10% div yield that’s selling for less than it’s cash in the bank. Sometimes I think Australia now is what Ben Graham was looking at when everyone left the stock market after the crash in 29’ and he was able to find all those companies selling for less than cash on hand.
China may start becoming overpriced like US stocks often get because right now that’s where everyones eyes are. It’s easy to look at his picks and say they are doing better than US stocks, but US stocks are almost all marked up by a certain percentage just because they are US stocks. The “his stocks are doing well he must be right” argument doesn’t mean he’s right for the reasons he focuses on in his books.
Thanks for the tips everyone.
I’m mostly concerned with our 401(k) and IRA plans. I have doubts about ever seeing this money but it would be irresponsible to completely ignore it.
I’m not sure I agree with his completely ignoring US investments, especially for US citizens. Even in the times of depression people have a need for food, clothes, shelter, transportation, medical care.
I’ve seriously considered cashing out my IRA, paying the withdrawal penalty, and buying physical gold and silver.
Alternatively, you could buy GLD or SLV. That won’t be any good when the financial system completely collapses.
What do these have to do with investing, tough?
They’re all consumption expanses, and Schiff advices to keep some liquid assets like cash and gold.
Very funny [^o)]
re: trade deficits - Polleit says it’s not a big deal here, http://mises.org/daily/1955 ( Sennholz kind of agrees, but also shows a bit of worry here: http://mises.org/daily/560)
re: decoupling - I think Schiff is flat wrong. He thinks that if China wasn’t selling us their stuff all these years they would be better off. Of course, this goes against the action axiom - of course the Chinese are better off - otherwise they wouldn’t have been doing it. In each trade, both people gained. If the Chinese could have gotten more from their goods selling in the Chinese market, they would have sold them there.
re: manufacturing - it’s really just another good or service. If another country can do it cheaper (or if we can just get robots to do it), great, let them do it, and then labor here will be freed up to perform more skilled labor and technologically-advanced activities.
These things lead Schiff to perhaps overvalue Asian/China markets. He got burned during the crash, but has made it up lately. We’ll see where it goes over time, but I believe if there is a huge market decline in the US over the next 1-5 years, the Chinese market will be affected, just as it was in the initial decline.
Still love Schiff though - from a political/oratorical perspective he’s great.
Good question. Actually, I don’t have any personal business experience w/ any such people, but there are a couple of people who come to mind.
One is a fellow writer/blogger named Greg Feirman - we’ve read each others blogs & exchanged a few comments. I believe he is an Ayn Rand admirer, not sure if he identifies himself as an Austrian or not. He is a financial planner out in CA.
Here’s his site: http://www.topgunfp.com/
Another guy whose site I was checking out just the other day is Quint Tatro. Quint is someone I’ve become familiar with through his writing & his contributions to the StockTwits community. Again, I have no knowledge of his business (he runs a “fee based advisory firm”) but here’s a link to his site:
Almost forgot Jim Puplava who runs Puplava Financial Services & is the proprietor of the Financial Sense website (which I write for). He is very steeped in Austrian school thinking, just listen to his broadcasts or read some of his past articles to get a feel for his philosophy.
Links to FSO & PFS Group: http://financialsense.com/
There seems to be an increasingly visible segment of traders & investment professionals who are aware of Austrian school or who hold strong free-market viewpoints. Hope this will give you a few leads in your search!
David
What do you mean?
And here Murphy shows a lot of worry.
If I contract to exchange goods with someone, but he turns out to be fraud and I get nothing, then say “I would have been better of, had I not traded with him” would that go against the action axiom?
Likewise the fraud here is the Chinese government printing money to buy US treasuries, which transfers wealth from the Chinese people to the US government.
Right, but the point is the Americans do not provide enough goods or services to justify the amount of goods they import from other countries.
The major American export is the US dollar, once foreigners stop accepting it, Americans will have to start providing real goods and services if they will want to trade. Schiff says that means the US will have to restore it’s manufacturing base in order to do that. He might be wrong, it might turn out that the US will provide some kind of services to other countries, like, say, the Swiss do. I find that unlikely, but even if that would turn out to be the case, the broader point stands - the American economy will need to restructure dramatically in order to cater to the needs of other nations.
I think he might be overestimating China, because there’s word of pretty crazy credit expansion going on there, in order to keep the growth statistics up - the commissars don’t want to look bad you see.
I disagree about the effect the US economy has on the Chinese. The US provides them with paper money, the Chinese provide goods. Well, they don’t need the paper money, and can just as well consume the goods themselves.
Exactly how are you going to “decouple” Walmart in US from Walmart in China? Or Toyota factories in Japan from Totyota factories in the US?
There’s Walmart in China?
In either case: as the dollar declines importing goods from China becomes economically unfeasible, so Walmart either sells domestic goods, goes bankrupt, or the US economy restructures to restore the balance of trade (tough that might take time).
The Toyota factories are likely to stay, tough instead of providing cars for Americans, they will provide cars for foreigners.