Friday, December 2, 2011

The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide

By Martin D. Weiss     Copyright 2009

This book is subtitled: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times. The author is an investment advisor. His father was an economist and also an investment advisor during the Great Depression of the 1930's. The author frequently quotes his father to support his belief that the economic crisis of 2008 is the beginning of a new economic depression that parallels the 1930's depression.

This book focuses on investment strategies which should be implemented at a later date. The author tells readers to sign-up at his website to receive updates of when to make specific investment moves.

His basic investment strategy is to sell stocks and real estate, and to buy US government bonds and speculate in gold and currency ETF's. The author's main reason for following this strategy is because it would have worked well in the 1930's. This doesn't seem like a very sensible rationale for making an investment. The best investment strategy is usually diversification into all asset classes.

The book does contain some limited discussion about economic theory and philosophy, which seems sensible. Specifically, the discussion about the government and the Federal Reserve encouraging the accumulation of excessive debt at all levels of society which has led to the current economic problems. And these economic problems won't end until some of the excessive debt has been eliminated.

The author is optimistic that the United States will one way or another reduce it's debt and a new age of prosperity will begin. He also seems to believe that this new age of prosperity will exist within the same political configuration as today. That may happen, but it seems just as likely that the economy won't improve until there are dramatic changes in the political boundaries and configuration. The author seems to base his opinion on the fact that the United States continued along the same path after the Great Depression as before and continued to prosper.

But the author's views seem to be based on the theory that history always repeats itself. History does seem to follow similar pattens, but it never exactly repeats itself. Since most of the author's advice is based on history exactly repeating itself, the advice probably isn't very good. And the authors advice to speculate in currency ETF's, which is just gambling, is further evidence that the advice in this book is not very good.

So you can skip this book as a waste of time.

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