Peter Schiff

Peter David Schiff (; born March 23, 1963; nicknamed "Dr. Doom") is an American stockbroker, financial commentator, and radio personality. He is CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital Inc., a broker-dealer based in Westport, Connecticut. He is also involved in various roles in other financial services companies including Euro Pacific Asset Management, an independent investment advisor; Schiff Gold (formerly Euro Pacific Precious Metals); a precious metals dealer; and Euro Pacific Bank, a full-reserve bank. He forecast the 2008 financial crisis. Personal life Schiff was born to a middle-class Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Irwin, who was the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, served in the US Army during World War II. Schiff's parents divorced when he was young and he moved around the country with his mother and his brother, Andrew, from Connecticut to Manhattan to Florida and finally to Southern California. Peter Schiff credits his father for introducing him to the Austrian School of economic thought. Irwin Schiff was a prominent figure in the US tax protester movement. He died in federal prison in October 2015 while he was serving a sentence of at least 13 years for tax evasion. Peter Schiff did not share his father's radical stance and by 1980, had urged him to stop his tax protest activities which he saw as "futile resistance". He later stated that while he had come to find his father's intellectual case "compelling", he was disinclined to follow his methods and his "idealism". Schiff commented, "The problem with my father is that he's not practical. He was always going to lose". On October 20, 2015, four days after the death of his father, Schiff accused the Federal Bureau of Prisons of inhumanely treating his father and not allowing the usual humanitarian release. Business career Schiff began his career as a stockbroker at a Shearson Lehman Brothers brokerage in the early 1990s.