NIA is not a “group of Austrian economists”. They are a bunch of pump and dump scammers that know how to regurgitate Schiff, Rogers, Faber, and Paul. The group was exposed at least 2 years ago.
And here’s a nice one were some random host of some no-name financial show exposes Jonathan Lebed, the mastermind of NIA:
As for College Conspiracy, I have to say it was really disappointing. Having watched all the NIA documentaries more than once, I’ve seen how their production values have gone up, and the content has gone down. They’ve gotten much more focused on their strategy and are much more interested in ginning up fear rather than educating. When the videos started being released with Hyperinflation Nation, the content was basically a well-done compilation of everything Schiff and all the others listed above say. It was more just a nice promotion piece for them. In fact, all four of those men were named specifically and their pictures flashed on the screen as being “good men, warning about the coming crisis”.
As the focus of generating fear became more dialed in, NIA got farther and farther away from this education approach, and more into a “be very afraid” approach, with films like End of Liberty…and even Dollar Bubble before that, showed signs of movement in that direction. That was actually the transition film. It was the last one that had any significant resemblance to the first two films in terms of quality content and education focus.
Of course, even with this latest film there is some good info…but the whole thing is tainted with enough pure propaganda that is nothing but embellishment at best, and outright lies at worst, simply to invoke fear in viewers. At the very least it’s a total missed opportunity. (Much like Michael Covel’s film). But then again, unlike Covel, I don’t exactly believe the motive of NIA was to educate people in the first place. Half the “info” presented in the film is hearsay and anecdotes from nameless “NIA members” about how terrible things are for them. If I had a gram of gold for every time I heard: “One NIA member…” I’d be set for actual hyperinflation.
The film is peppered with little comments like “Goldman Sachs has never created one dime of wealth for our country” and similar nonsense. It claims “the only way for a country to produce real wealth is by farmers growing food, miners mining for gold, silver and other precious metals, drillers drilling for oil, natural gas and other commodities, and manufacturers manufacturing real goods that can be exported to the rest of the world.” And while there is a lot of truth to that, it comes right before a barrage of implications and outright lies, like the previous statement about Goldman, as if there is no social function for stock speculators, insurance, futures markets, credit default swaps, and even banks. Sure there are too many people on Wall Street and in the financial sector, but that doesn’t mean that GS “has never created one dime of wealth for our country.” It’s miseducation like this that does us no good, and actually just creates more populist syndicalists like Michael Moore.
Yes, there was plenty of blame and attention paid to the Federal Reserve and federal government, but there was enough pure propaganda and misinformation to make the majority of the film useless. If someone would just take the decent parts (like the incredibly well-done intro animation) and edit them together, cutting out all the useless hearsay and fearmongering, they might actually come out with a decent 10-12 minute film. But otherwise, much like Covel’s Broke: The New American Dream, and the Oscar winning Inside Job, it’s an overall disappointment, and on net, a waste of time.