Review of Schiff’s The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets

A marketing company was kind enough to send me a review copy of Peter D. Schiff's The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets.  Mr. Schiff is the president of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc., and has earned the nickname “Dr. Doom” for his bearish take on the US markets and the US economy in general.

I've been known to be more than a tad bearish in my chatting with friends about where the economy is heading, but some of his predictions are even more so.  He speaks at length about inflation and gives some of the history on how we arrived at a fiat currency, and talks about the perils of where we're headed with it. 

He then continues with discussion on where to take statistics, facts, and figures with a grain of salt by explaining what he perceives to be conflicts of interest from the entities generating said statistics, facts, and figures.  Whether you want to go so far as to think “conspiracy theory” is up to you, but I don't think it's surprising that statistics can be made to say pretty much whatever you want them to say.  I don't really buy his M3 argument, but I'm in the minority there.

As the title implies, though, he does give a few suggestions for shifting things around in an effort to profit from what's to happen.  Most of them are some variant of “get the heck out of Dodge.”  Get out of dollars.  Get into real stuff like commodities.  Get into foreign dividend-paying stocks in stable regions.  And, just maybe, get out of the country.  He elaborates on this, of course.  He explains his “top-down” approach to international investing, recommends some sources for doing commodities investing and international equities investing.  The top-down approach is also helpful should one think it necessary to emigrate.

The book is largely geared toward folks with a fair bit of wealth that they are free to invest as they please.  For each main investing area he suggests types of investments that might be appropriate for someone with a lot of money or someone with less than a lot of money.   They're all fairly broad strokes but with enough detail to get pointed in the right direction with a little bit of study.  (I wasn't familiar with every type of investment he mentioned.)

The one chapter that everyone can benefit from, though, is Chapter 11: A Decade of Frugality.  I talked about this in another post and its advice is consistent with the rest of the book.  Things will be tough in this country for quite a while, and frugality will make it bearable.

Overall, I was glad that I read The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets.  I have a lot of new investing terms to learn about, and new ways of thinking about where the economy is headed.  It's also a good starting point for investigating what kinds of investments to make in the coming years.