Doomsday Books May Mean It's All Sunshine Ahead by Susan Antilla
May 14 (Bloomberg) -- Pop a couple of Prozacs and sit back for a roundup of the scariest financial books on the market. It's gloom-and-doom season for purveyors of financial books, so pull out a can of beans from your ammo case in the bomb shelter and warm it up. You're going to need some nourishment.
Book titles are getting scarier than an auction-rate security, with titles such as ``Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism'' trumping Dale Carnegie and Suze Orman on the Amazon Top 100 list of business books.
Other cheerful titles to get you stuffing your money in the mattress: ``The Great Bu$t Ahead: The Greatest Depression in American & UK History Is Just Several Short Years Away'' and ``The Second Great Depression: Starting 2007, Ending 2020.''
Contrarians, of course, will take heart to know that emotions about the economy and the market are so negative that doomsday books have become publishing's spring fashion. At this point, all we need is a Time magazine cover declaring ``The New U.S. Depression'' to confirm that it's time to buy stocks.
Still, if your assets are anything grander than the deed on a house with negative equity, a perusal of today's the-sky-is- falling books could be alarming. James Turk and John Rubino, authors of ``The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It,'' warn of a ``financial crisis the likes of which few living Americans can even imagine.'' Daniel A. Arnold, author of ``The Great Bust Ahead,'' says the coming depression ``will be several times greater than the 1930s. No maybe or perhaps.''
Get to the End
Doomsayers may agree that the end is near, but they don't speak in one voice as to the reasons why. Peter D. Schiff, who wrote ``Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse'' with John Downes, says the decline of the U.S. economy is the reason for impending disaster. It is a ``house of cards'' that has ``deteriorated beyond the point of no return.''
Author Arnold, though, says demographics will be the culprit leading to a big bust in the U.S. and the U.K. The ``catastrophic decline'' of the big spending 45-to-54-year-old age category is at the heart of the problem, he writes.
Nor do the writers agree on how an investor should prepare. Stephen Leeb, author with Glen Strathy of ``The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel,'' says gold, energy and real-estate investments are best, and that the only type of bond to consider is a Treasury inflation protected security, or TIPS.
Don't like that advice? Schiff says ``buying TIPS is a perfect example of trusting the fox to guard your henhouse,'' because they are indexed to the consumer price index. The CPI ``can be manipulated to produce any result the government wants,'' Schiff writes.
Make No Mistake
Today's financial Armageddon writers tend to be a confident group, assuring readers that their theories are ironclad. Some go further and take the opportunity to tell you that they are terrific guys.
Arnold says his concepts are ``unchallengeable.'' Author Stathis, who mysteriously doesn't share his first name with buyers of the book ``America's Financial Apocalypse: How to Profit From the Next Great Depression,'' says on the back cover that his forecasting concepts have been proven ``beyond any doubt.''
William Brussee, author of ``The Second Great Depression,'' asks the question: ``Could this book be completely wrong?'' but dismisses the possibility. ``It is difficult to believe that the premise put forward in this book is completely wrong.''
I'm so glad we got that straight.
Old Times
Howard Ruff, whose ``How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years in the 21st Century'' has sold 2.5 million copies, is so smitten with himself that he includes a 21-page autobiographical passage in which he drops names (a phone call from Ronald Reagan, a cruise with Art Linkletter, dinner with Chiang Kai-shek) and celebrates triumphs.
Ruff published the first edition of ``How to Prosper'' in 1978, getting tagged with the label ``Prophet of Doom'' as a result. His critics have said he's a hard-money extremist; he has defended himself partly by noting that he once switched the name of his newsletter from ``Ruff Times'' to ``The Financial Success Report'' in 1982.
Amid the hyperbole, several financial-scare books stand out for their high credibility and low hysteria. ``The Trillion Dollar Meltdown'' by Charles R. Morris and ``Bad Money'' by Kevin Phillips avoid the wild predictions of mass economic destruction, instead giving thoughtful, if alarming, histories and analyses of how we got into the mess we're in today.
Should you wind up as a purchaser of a panic book, get ready for authors who woo with book covers promising how to profit as well as some giant caveats.
On Your Own
``Readers are solely responsible for the consequences'' of actions they take based on Arnold's ``The Great Bust Ahead.'' Neither author Leeb nor publisher Warner Business Books is engaged in giving financial advice in ``The Coming Economic Collapse,'' which is a neat trick for a book with a chapter titled ``Making Money in the Coming Collapse.''
Stathis, he of no first name, includes a full-page disclaimer that decrees ``by continuing to read the book, the purchaser agrees'' to accept its seven-paragraph legal proviso. Consult with your lawyer if you have any confusion over what it all means, he advises.
It's scary to read all the discourse about an imminent economic collapse. From the looks of things, though, it's even scarier to think you might be held accountable for the advice you give as a doomsday writer. Peruse these books in the library if you must. And save your $30 to buy a half-tank of gas.
