When Peter Schiff was making the rounds on U.S. cable news shows in 2007, warning about the collapse of the housing market, anchors and fellow guests literally laughed in his face when he launched into his gloomy predictions. That kind of meltdown could never happen, they said. The economy was on rock-solid ground. In those rosier economic days, Schiff, the president of Darien, Conn.’s Euro Pacific Capital, was repeatedly cast as a successful broker who’d gone off the deep end.

These days, a vindicated Schiff is back on the talk show circuit with an even darker message. The current recession, he argues, is only the beginning of a larger economic restructuring. The American economy has been destroyed by years of reckless spending and borrowing. And now, the U.S. government is so deeply in debt that at some point in the very near future, he says, its lenders—namely China—are going to come to their senses and cut America off. “We can’t have one country that just borrows and one country that just consumes that’s supported by the rest of the world. It doesn’t work.” When this system collapses—and it inevitably must, he insists—inflation will run wild as the U.S. prints money to support its spending habit. Interest rates will jump and everyone will suffer. The real day of reckoning is still to come.

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