Peter Schiff

Peter David Schiff (born March 23, 1963; nicknamed "Dr. Doom") is an American stockbroker, financial commentator, and radio personality.

He co-founded Echelon Wealth Partners in Canada (formerly Euro Pacific Canada).

He is involved in other financial services companies including Euro Pacific Asset Management, as an independent investment advisor, and Schiff Gold (formerly Euro Pacific Precious Metals).

Schiff cited the US's low personal savings rate as one of the causes of its transformation from the world's largest creditor nation in the 1970s to the largest debtor nation in 2000.

He attributed the low savings rate to what he asserts are high inflation and artificially low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

Peter Schiff did not share his father's radical stance and by 1980, had urged him to stop his tax protest activities which he saw as "futile resistance".

He later stated that while he had come to find his father's intellectual case "compelling", he was disinclined to follow his methods and his "idealism".

Schiff commented, "The problem with my father is that he's not practical. He was always going to lose".

Schiff began his career as a stockbroker at a Shearson Lehman Brothers brokerage in the early 1990s.

In 1996, Schiff and a partner acquired an inactive brokerage firm and renamed it Euro Pacific Capital, and began operating it from a small office in Los Angeles.

They relocated the firm to Darien, Connecticut, in 2005, and later to Westport, Connecticut, where it is currently headquartered with branch offices across the US in Scottsdale, Arizona; Boca Raton, Newport Beach, Manhattan Beach, California; and New York City.

Schiff sold Euro Pacific Capital and now renamed as Alliance Global Partners.

Schiff founded Euro Pacific Bank, a full reserve banking operation originally in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

On June 30, 2022, the Puerto Rico Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF) announced they had suspended the operations of Schiff's Puerto Rico-based Euro Pacific International Bank, which was suspected of having facilitated money laundering and tax evasion.

The Commissioner stated that it had found numerous violations of its regulations and that the bank had "not wanted to comply".

Regulators liquidated the bank, and Schiff paid $300,000 in fines.

Peter Schiff claimed that the OCIF actions were due to allegations made by 60 Minutes Australia, and The Age newspaper, saying, "There was no way those allegations were true, but once those stories broke, the bank's business imploded".

In 2022 Schiff filed a civil action against the Nine Network and The Age newspaper for defamation over the Australian 60 Minutes interview and subsequent Age articles.

On November 21 the civil action was settled.

Schiff stated that he lost millions of dollars due to the actions of the regulatory authorities.

In a settlement of his defamation claim, he was paid $360,000 to settle the litigation, and the respondents removed all versions of the broadcast.

In an August 2006 interview, Schiff said, "The United States is like the Titanic and I am here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship.... I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States."

On December 31, 2006, in a telecast debate on Fox News, Schiff forecast that "what's going to happen in 2007 is that real estate prices," which had peaked in December 2005, "are going to come crashing back down to Earth."

In his 2007 book Crash Proof, Schiff wrote that US economic policies were fundamentally unsound.

Since then he has said many times that without a change in US government economic policy, there will be hyperinflation and that the imbalance between the number of goods the US consumed and what it produced would eventually lead to problems for the US economy.

As a remedy, he favored increased personal savings and production to stimulate economic growth.

On December 13, 2007, in an interview on the Bloomberg TV show "Open Exchange," Schiff added that he felt that the crisis would extend to the credit card lending industry, and he called consumer credit "a cancer on the free-market economy."

Schiff said that interest rates would rise, that the dollar would "collapse," and that all classes of dollar-denominated assets would fall in value relative to non-US assets.

He predicted the 2008 financial crisis.

Schiff was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut.

His father, Irwin Schiff, who was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, served in the US Army during World War II.

Schiff's parents divorced when he was young and he moved around the country with his mother and his brother, Andrew, from Connecticut to Manhattan to Florida and finally to Southern California.

Peter Schiff credits his father for introducing him to the Austrian School of economic thought.

Irwin Schiff was a prominent figure in the US tax protester movement.

In 2008 and 2010 appearances on Fox News and financial news network CNBC, Schiff mentioned factors such as speculation and "the absence of lending standards" as factors that had contributed to the housing crisis, which began in 2007.

He predicted "a huge crisis" and "the blow-up of credit card finance" in 2008, with the result that consumer credit card spending limits would be "slashed" by card issuers.

He added that Americans would no longer be able to make purchases using their credit card lines.

This prediction went unrealized.

He died in federal prison in October 2015 while he was serving a sentence of at least 13 years for tax evasion.

On October 20, 2015, four days after the death of his father, Schiff accused the Federal Bureau of Prisons of inhumanely treating his father and not allowing the usual humanitarian release.