Steve Forbes has a massive brainfart: "Here's How to End the Panic". His solution? Just sweep the crap mortgages under the rug. Presto!

Panic?

What panic?

I thought everything was gonna be fine?

I thought there was no housing bubble?

I thought the subprime fallout was contained?

But come on Steve-O. Junking the nation's accounting standards as the solution to the problem? ARE YOU F*CKING OUT OF YOUR MIND?

Yeah, that'll instill even greater confidence worldwide in the ol' USofA. Just fudge the numbers! Cook the books! Brilliant! The numbers aren't bad if you just say they're not bad! Crisis over!

Monkeys I tell ya. Monkeys. And the world may never trust the United States again.

Here's How to End the Panic
Steve Forbes

The Bush administration must take two steps immediately to quickly halt the unending, enervating credit crisis: shore up the anemic dollar and, for the time being, suspend "marking to market" those new financial instruments, such as packages of subprime mortgages.

The Treasury Department and the Fed should get together with the SEC, the Comptroller of the Currency and other bank regulators and announce that financial institutions for the next 12 months will no longer write down the value of exotic financial instruments (primarily packages of subprime mortgages).

Instead, writedowns will occur only when there have been actual losses on those assets. If a mortgage defaults, a bank will then--and only then--recognize the loss.

Steve Forbes, after being schooled like a little girl on Fox News by Peter Schiff, and watching his wealth go away, does a hit piece on Schiff

Actually, I've gotta give it up for Forbes' good little slave reporter, Michael Maiello, because doing a "go out and trash this guy" article on a guy who's NAILED IT, and been COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY RIGHT on ALL of his predictions has actually got to be a tough thing to do. But Forbes sent the right guy, since Maiello bizarrely is a fiction writer, not a journalist.

Steve Forbes, Mr. Establishment, is obviously sick and tired of all this "doom and gloom", with the banks failing, housing crashing, trillions being lost in real estate, the dollar tanking, gold and commodities soaring, and his wealth going away. And Steve Forbes' massive ego just couldn't take the beating it took on Fox the other day I guess.

Forbes magazine, and Steve Forbes himself, are now completely and totally discredited, just like Schiff's other two defeated Fox News hacks Mike Norman and Tom Adkins. I could just hear Forbes in his gold-plated office, yelling out to the newsroom after being schooled by Schiff - "Go out and get this guy - tarnish him, ruin him, take him down! I'll show that gold-bug jackass who's boss!"

I actually feel sorry for Steve Forbes. A man's reputation is more important than his bank account, especially if he portrays himself as a journalist, and Steve Forbes should now be seen as the propagandist he is. His little minion, Michael Maiello, should be excused. Guy was just doing what he's told to do . Like Lawrence Yun. Or Eichmann.

Here's the hit piece and some lowlights - read the whole thing and feel free to add your comments on their rag - and don't be nice.

Spin Cycle - Want to make a pile in money management? Step 1: Attract attention. Step 2: Attract assets.

"As the dollar goes down, my clients are getting the same bargain as tourists from Europe: They have rising income from assets in euros, Swiss francs and Canadian dollars," gloats Schiff, who then squirms into a sport coat and dashes to his bmw and a date to trash the dollar on the Fox Business Network.

Schiff, dubbed the Doctor of Doom by CNBC, is a favorite of magazine, newspaper and TV journalists looking for a particular point of view--namely, that U.S. stocks, U.S. real estate and the dollar are bad for investors. Type his name into YouTube and you can find 300 clips from his appearances on cable shows. Many feature him talking up Ron Paul, the libertarian with presidential aspirations, for whom he is an economic adviser.

Herein is a formula for making a lot of money as a money manager. Have a shtick, get known, wait for your sector to get hot.

Schiff's Chicken Little take on the U.S. economy--that it is on the brink of collapse--isn't new. He's been serving up the same spiel for a decade.

In 2006 Schiff told a roomful of mortgage brokers at a meeting of the Western Regional Mortgage Brokers Conference that they would all be out of a job soon and that their only hope was to buy foreign stocks. Geoff Zwemke, an organizer of the meeting, notes, "I hear people saying they wished they'd taken his advice."

Schiff learned the power of a rallying cry from his father, long-running tax protester Irwin A. Schiff. Press mentions of the elder Schiff, who argues that the Internal Revenue Service has no right to force people to reveal their incomes or collect taxes, would fill a very fat scrapbook. But in the end, Schiff Sr. got a little too much attention for his own good. He is being held in a federal prison in Otisville, N.Y. for tax evasion.