The main stars of America’s financial trash TV are broken clocks and contrarian indicators who deliver the same sales pitch day after day, week after week, year after year. That is what salesmen do after all.
Once they have been finally called out for being completely wrong for years, they fight back by changing their talking points to focus on trivial rants, such as when the Fed is going to taper or raise interest rates.
Keep in mind that these talking heads focus on this type of nonsense as a way to distract from their investment failures and lousy predictions.
Schiff couldn’t even get this right. The guy is a complete failure, so why does the media promote him constantly?
Peter Schiff has become a very frequent participant in this media dog-and-pony show. Schiff receives interviews every day, and many times multiple times per day from every segment of the Jewish media, from CNBC and FBN, to Bloomberg.
He also gets quoted or discussed in in the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Forbes, Fortune, The Financial Times, you name it.
Accordingly, Peter Schiff could be considered the male version of a “financial Kim Kardashian.”
For anyone out there who isn’t too bright, let me make sure you get the point. That was by no means a compliment.
Think about it. Schiff runs a brokerage firm, Euro Pacific Capital.
So naturally one would expect him to discuss topics like compelling investment sectors and stocks, valuations, earnings, asset allocation strategies and so forth; you know, things competent financial professionals talk about. The same kinds of things an audience wants to hear about.
Even though he is really only a stock broker and not an analyst, he calls himself Euro Pacific Capital’s chief global strategist. But this too is only a superficial designation.
In my professional view, Schiff is really a marketing strategist because that is how he spends the majority of his time. I state this with complete confidence because I have been noting Schiff’s schedule for several years.
Regardless, surely Schiff has people to do “research” for him, letting him know what is going on, right?
Yet, he is constantly talking about trivial topics, like whether the Fed will raise rates over and over instead of talking about relevant issues.
Why might that be?
Maybe, his research results are complete dog shit.
Once you carefully examine Schiff’s track record as well as his record of investment performance and you will see why he has been focusing on trivial events instead of discussing investment and economic forecasts.
Smart Lists
Machine learning determines which users are most likely to convert in subsequent sessions.
A Smart List is a Remarketing Audience that Analytics generates to maximize your conversions. If you are new to remarketing, you’ll find that using Smart Lists helps you quickly achieve favorable results.
How Smart Lists work
Analytics applies machine learning to your conversion data to determine which users are most likely to convert in subsequent sessions, and dynamically manages the remarketing audience to focus on those users.
Machine learning uses dozens of signals, including location, device, browser, referrer, session duration, and page depth to identify users for the audience. The model is typically updated daily to reflect the latest data to which Analytics has access, and users are automatically added to or removed from the audience based on that model.
In the event that Analytics cannot use your data to update a Smart List for more than 90 days, it reverts to a model based on similar businesses.
What’s required to generate a Smart List
If your site generates at least 500 monthly ecommerce transactions and 10,000 daily pageviews, your Smart List is generated based on the specific factors that influence your users to convert. If your site does not generate at least 500 monthly ecommerce transactions and 10,000 daily pageviews, your Smart List is generated based on conversion data from businesses similar to yours that have opted to share their anonymized conversion data with Analytics.
The psychology of digital marketing. Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy
In his keynote address at our CMO Insight Summit, Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy & Mather explained why “psychological insight is just as valuable as technological advance.”
Will Trump Be the Sage One?
Only one person can save us from the dangerous belligerent in the White House.
And that person is Donald Trump.
How screwed up is that?
Will the president let himself be pushed into a parlous war by John Bolton, who once buoyed the phony case on W.M.D.s in Iraq? Or will Trump drag back his national security adviser and the other uber hawks from the precipice of their fondest, bloodiest desire — to attack Iran?
Can Cadet Bone Spurs, as Illinois senator and Iraq war vet Tammy Duckworth called Trump, set Tom Cotton straight that winning a war with Iran would not merely entail “two strikes, the first strike and the last strike”? Holy cakewalk.
Once, we counted on Trump’s advisers to pump the brakes on an out-of-control president. Now, we count on the president to pump the brakes on out-of-control advisers.
.. “On one side, you have a president who doesn’t want war, who simply wants to do with Iran what he has done with North Korea, to twist the arm of the Iranians to bring them to a negotiation on his terms,” said Gérard Araud, the recently departed French ambassador. “He thinks they will suffer and at the end, they will grovel in front of his power.”
But in a way, Araud said, the face-off with the Iranians is more “primitive and dangerous” because, besides Bolton, other factions in the Middle East are also “dreaming of going to war.”
“Even if Trump doesn’t personally want war, we are now at the mercy of any incident, because we are at maximum tension on both sides,” said Araud, recalling Candidate Trump’s bellicose Twitter ultimatumsin 2016 when Iran’s Revolutionary Guards held American sailors blindfolded at gunpoint for 15 hours.
Given their sour feelings about W. shattering the Middle East and their anger at Trump shredding the Iran nuclear deal, Europeans are inclined to see the U.S. as trying to provoke Iran into war. This time, the Europeans will not be coming along — and who can blame them?
I’m having an acid flashback to 2002, when an immature, insecure, ill-informed president was bamboozled by his war tutors.
In an echo of the hawks conspiring with Iraqi exiles to concoct a casus belli for Iraq, Bolton told members of an Iranian exile group in Paris in 2017 that the Trump administration should go for regime change in Tehran.
“And that’s why, before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran!” Bolton cheerily told the exiles.
When Bolton was the fifth column in the Bush 2 State Department — there to lurk around and report back on flower child Colin Powell — he complained that W.’s Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) was too limited, adding three more of his own (Cuba, Libya, Syria). Then, last year, Bolton talked about “the Troika of Tyranny” (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela). His flirtations with military intervention in Venezuela this month irritated Trump.
The 70-year-old with the Yeti mustache is an insatiable interventionist with an abiding faith in unilateralism and pre-emptive war. (The cost of our attenuated post-9/11 wars is now calculated at $5.9 trillion.)
W. and Trump are similar in some ways but also very different. As Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio notes: W. was interested in clarity. Trump wants chaos. W. wanted to trust his domineering advisers. Trump is always imagining betrayal. W. wanted to be a war hero, like his dad. Trump does not want to be trapped in an interminable war that will consume his presidency.
Certainly, the biographer says, Trump enjoys playing up the scary aspects of brown people with foreign names and ominous titles, like “mullah” and “ayatollah,” to stoke his base.
But Trump, unlike W., is driven by the drama of it. “It’s a game of revving up the excitement and making people afraid and then backing off on the fear in order to declare that he’s resolved the situation,” D’Antonio said. “Trump prefers threats and ultimatums to action because that allows him to look big and tough and get attention without doing something for which he will be held responsible. This is who he is at his core: an attention-seeking, action-averse propagandist who is terrified of accountability in the form of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base.”
David Axelrod, who had the military briefing about what a war with Iran would look like when he was in the Obama White House, said: “I’m telling you. It’s not a pretty picture.”
He says he is not sure which movie Bolton is starring in: “Dr. Strangelove” or “Wag the Dog.”
“If part of your brand is that you’re not going to get the U.S. into unnecessary wars,” he said, “why in the world would you hire John Bolton?”