don't buy it, you'll regret it, you'll just be throwing money away

it's a bunch of fluff & nonsense with maybe a LITTLE truth

you'll be throwing money away buying this

Ancient history - no longer relevant.

Schiff's advice about storing up reserves of breakfast cereal not to mention guns and bullets appears to have disqualified the book from serious consideration in the minds of many readers. However, those recommendations: 1. must be seen from the perspective of the 2008 reader, pummeled by fear-mongering from all directions, and fully vulnerable to the notion of desperation verging upon starvation and leading to violence; 2. do not strike those of us with a sense of irony as directives meant to be taken seriously. Doubtlessly, the point they exaggerate is taken seriously by the author, but the hyperbole is intended to lighten up an otherwise dire-sounding book, allowing readers a chuckle or two at their own alarmism and reminding them of the unproductive extremes in psychology and behavior that such fear can lead to.

Although the above is meant as somewhat of a defense of the author, it's hard to recommend the book two years after its authorship. At the time he wrote, Schiff saw the recessionary environment as largely confined to America (Jimmy Rogers was of much the same opinion, like Schiff urging American investors to think internationally, even to the extent of moving to China). But now we know differently. It wasn't as simple as: they got it right; we got it wrong. The problem was widespread yet endemic. The economic problems went far beyond the U.S. real estate bubble and the irresponsible behavior of the banks that created it by dumping extra cash on small loan operations and mortgagees with no assessment of the American consumer and the practicality of such loans ever being repaid. As every college student should have inferred (assuming "Marx" has not been banned from texts as an obscene 4-letter word), the "exchange value" created by the money industry had grown so out of proportion to its "use value" as measured by empirical data based on the life quality of the majority of the world's citizens, that all but a privileged few were living insupportable pipe-dreams. (That metaphor can be taken even in a literal sense, since despite the faith invested in commodities by many of the equity skeptics, oil--or gold, too --may be neither affordable nor sufficiently critical to justify its accumulation by individuals.) It had to end, and the cost of repair is unlikely to be bullish for any of us, including readers of this book.

Schiff simply doesn't have the advantage of hindsight and of writing from the perspective of the big picture. Yet one could argue that we should have known that the failure of the "trickle down" economics of the 1980s followed by the bursting of the dot-com bubble followed by the massive debt of a war of world civilizations (!) giving rise to, beyond the war, an explosion in the terrorist population, now draining our depleting defense resources more rapidly than ever, would have a devastating effect on economies and consumer priorities the world over. Besides, we had Japan's 20-year-recession, just after its economy had been declared unsinkable, as a model of what not to do. Unfortunately, we still never caught on.

Schiff would have done better writing a book about the inevitability of higher taxes and what you can do about it (but not if his solutions--breakfast cereal and guns--are the same). A better approach might be examining and emulating the communal economy and industry of Japan that enabled that nation's rapid, dramatic return to prosperity after World War II. (This can happen only if it is first agreed upon that the words "socialism," "communism," and horrors, "liberalism" are dispensed with and replaced by a different word--perhaps "teamwork.")

Good information and analysis, poorly organized/presented

The book has really solid advice backed up with nearly(entirely!?) flawless reasoning.

The one thing I don't like about it though is that it has no index and the chapters don't really reveal well what they have to do with or discuss. The chapter names might sound cool but they don't really provide the reader or re-reader with any sort of good hint about what the chapter is about. Example, Ch.4 = Of Babies and Bathwater. Ch.5 = Hot Stuff, Ch.6 = The Ring in the Bull's Nose.

Definitely worth reading but make sure to take notes on where the important information is otherwise when you want to look back at a few pages or subjects you'll get kind of angry at the difficulty your having finding the correct section.

One of the Worst Investment Books I Ever Read

Aside from the disappointment of thinking I was getting a book about hedging strategies, the book is still a waste of money. Basically, you can get Schiff's bull-move-in-bear-market advice for free from talking heads on CNBC or from a lot of advisory firms: go where there is likely to be growth (foreign markets and commodities). He compounds the feeling of being cheated by then touting a brand of right-wing economics (the Austrian School) as the ONLY way of understanding the economy.

People will give this book more credit than it is due because he predicted a major crash and we had one shortly after the book was published. However, he was only half right: his beloved gold dropped right along with every other asset class, as did oil and foreign markets. Looks like commodities can drop, too, and the world is not as decoupled as he thought it was.

The real low point to the book is when he recommends buying guns and bullets, partially as an investment strategy and partially, presumably, to fend off the benighted masses. I mean, really, is this a bull move in a bear market, or fear mongering?

The occasional plugs for his investment firm are annoying, too.

A Commmercial for a Brokerage Firm

This looked like a good book with a lot of good reviews so I bought it. It is nothing more than commercial for the author's brokerage firm, Euro Pacific Capital which he shamelessly promotes throughout the book. In doing further research, the guy did not follow his own advice and lost a lot of money for his clients an example is this article (http://selfinvestors.com/tradingstocks/news/peter-schiffs-euro-pacific-capital-down-40-70-in-2008/). All in all a disappointment. While I share some of his concerns about the US dollar and our government's continued printing of money, I'm not confident that his solution is the right one and I don't appreciate paying for a commercial. He should give this book away if he wants to promote himself.