Chris Martenson Straight Talk With John Rubino: The Damage Is Already Done

by Tyler Durden
03/22/2011 15:22 -0400
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Submitted by Chris Martenson.com

"Straight Talk" features thinking from notable minds that the ChrisMartenson.com audience has indicated it wants to learn more about. Readers submit the questions they want addressed and our guests take their best crack at answering. The comments and opinions expressed by our guests are their own.

This week's Straight Talk contributor is John Rubino, publisher of DollarCollapse.com, a popular hub for news impacting the economy. John is the author of several best-selling books foretelling (years in advance) the collapse of the housing market and the decline of the US dollar. Before starting his website, John was a featured columnist with theStreet.com, Institutional Investor, and a number of other influential financial publications. His perspective on Wall Street and the currency markets is shaped by his past roles as a Eurodollar trader, equity analyst and junk bond analyst in the 1980s.

1. Several times, you’ve published prescient forecasts when it mattered. For example, you and James Turk published The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It in 2004 – about a year and half before the US Dollar Index dropped from 90 to nearly 70. Similarly, How to Profit From the Coming Real Estate Bust was released in 2003. What led you to accurately predict these major market moves so far in advance?
I’ve been involved, one way or another, with financial bubbles for most of my life. Back in the late 1970s I picked up a book by Harry Brown, a Libertarian philosopher who, it turned out, was also a gold bug investment advisor. So I got interested in precious metals and watched with interest as they soared in that decade’s monetary crisis and then crashed in the early 1980s.

After grad school in the mid-1980s I went to Wall Street as an equity analyst, but when junk bonds got hot -- and demand for junk bond analysts exploded -- I switched sides. Just in time for the junk bubble to burst. In the 1990s I became a tech stock columnist with TheStreet.com and spent the next few years covering the dot-coms as they soared and then crashed.

So by 2003 bubble dynamics were pretty familiar and it was clear that housing had all the classic traits: prices through the roof, regular people making fortunes doing things like flipping condos that even pros used to find difficult, and tried-and-true business practices being tossed overboard in favor of “innovationsâ€