Background and career
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). He has criticized US banking and credit practices.
Schiff was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Irwin Schiff, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. 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. He died in federal prison in October 2015 while he was serving a sentence of at least 13 years for tax evasion. 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." 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.
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, Florida; Newport Beach and Manhattan Beach, California; and New York City. Schiff sold Euro Pacific Capital, which is now called 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. 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 60 Minutes Australia interview and subsequent Age articles. Later in 2022, an Australian judge ruled that 60 Minutes had defamed Schiff but The Age had not. By December 2023, the civil action was settled. Schiff was paid $360,000, and the respondents removed all versions of the 60 Minutes broadcast. Schiff has stated that he lost millions of dollars due to the investigation. In August 2024, Schiff filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on claims that it failed to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to provide information regarding its suspension of Euro Pacific Bank's operations.
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. 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. 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. 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 "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. Referring to the housing market, Schiff went on to criticize the policy of the Bush administration to "vilify and threaten the lenders" for reckless borrowing. In a March 2009 speech, Schiff said that it would be impossible for the US public debt to China to be repaid unless the US dollar's value is substantially diluted through inflation. In September 2009, with gold below $1,000 per ounce, Schiff said that he foresaw gold at over $5,000 per ounce in the future, and that the stock market rally which began that year was a "rally in a bear market".
In March 2011, Schiff stated that a national sales tax should replace both personal and corporate income taxes, as he believes that the latter discourages work as opposed to a consumption tax. His second choice is a flat tax rate, which would abolish all deductions including the very popular home mortgage tax deduction, as he believes that the state should not subsidize buying homes as opposed to renting.
