Book Review: The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets

For those of you who know me, you know I'm always in the middle of several books. I'm currently reading The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton and just finished The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets by Peter Schiff. I'm planning on doing a post on The Wealthy Barber in the future but for now let's look at Peter Schiff's newest book.

This book gives excellent, in-depth analysis of how America got into the mess it is in today. There are times when it's hard to work past some of the jargon but he does give definitions of all the terms in the beginning of the book. I would occasionally find myself having to flip back to these to find out what he was talking about. I really enjoyed how logical all of his reasoning was and it makes me interested in learning more about the school of Austrian economics which he touts throughout the book.

The premise of this book is to learn how to make money during a time when our country is going to enter a severe recession/depression. When we left the gold standard our money no longer had any actual item of worth backing it, it became a glorified IOU, otherwise known as fiat currency. This allows us to print more of it without having anything to actually back the money. Unfortunately, if too much fiat money is printed, this leads to inflation. If way too much money is printed, such as our current situation in America, that leads to hyperinflation. There is a very interesting article on Seeking Alpha, one of my favourite investment sites, about this issue.

Based on the projection that the American Dollar won't be worth much in the near future (next couple of years at the latest I'm guessing), Peter Schiff makes suggestions of where to put your money. The goal is to have it holds its worth at worst and make more money at best. I won't give the list of countries and industries in this blog because you can check that out in the book itself (it's free at a library). I can say that all of the choices are, once again, backed by sound logic.

Although I don't want to believe all of the doom and gloom touted in his book I can't help but admit he's been consistently right on these issues in the past. Just take a look at his last book, or at the clip below:



This guy clearly knows what he's talking about and has been spot on, even when people laughed at him to his face (3:40-45 for example). It scares me to realize what may become of this nation in the near future. It disturbed me so much so that I had to put the book down at one point and just walk away because I couldn't deal with it. Each bailout we have and each attempt the government makes to get us out of this recession is just worsening the problem in the long term. Our economy is a deck of cards already crashing to the ground.

Of the many things that he says people can do to help keep their wealth, one thing in particular hit me hard and that is to actually leave the country. As far as I know, people have been trying to immigrate to America. I think we're going to start seeing the reverse happen after things crash. It's hard to fathom for some reason since I am very proud of our country, albeit currently very disappointed in its actions.

I don't know what is going to happen but I do think that some hard times are coming for us as a nation and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. I would highly suggest people read this book, I just want to warn you that it's a difficult read due to its hard to swallow truth factor.