Product Description

With a nineteen-year history of making bold yet astonishingly accurate forecasts, it is little wonder that when Dr. Stephen Leeb speaks, smart investors take heed.

In his 1986 book, Getting in on the Ground Floor, Dr. Leeb prophesied the great bull market of the 1990s. In his 1999 book, Defying the Market, he warned investors of the coming collapse in technology shares. And in February 2004, when crude oil cost under $33 a barrel, Dr. Leeb’s book The Oil Factor predicted soaring energy prices were just around the corner.

Now, in THE COMING ECONOMIC COLLAPSE, Dr. Leeb proves that the U.S. economy is standing on the brink of the biggest crisis in its history. As the fast-growing economies of China and India push global demand for oil beyond production capacity, Americans will experience a permanent energy shortfall far worse than the one in the 1970s. The result will be severe financial hardship for most people, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for investors to become incredibly rich.

Backed by meticulous research and analysis, Dr. Leeb exposes the psychological "groupthink" that has caused leaders in government, Wall Street, the oil industry, and academia to ignore the approaching crisis, until now when it is almost too late. He debunks the myth that petroleum supplies are limitless, and reveals the truth about an alternative energy source that is fast becoming cheaper than oil. In addition, he offers practical solutions such as:

· The #1 skill investors need, and why advice from most financial experts will prove disastrous

· How to make a fortune in oil, gold, and other inflation-sensitive sectors

· Today’s leading alternative energy stocks, the new super-growth industry

· Steps the government must take immediately to avoid crippling energy shortages.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #284683 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780446579780
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Steven Leeb is President of Leeb Capital Finance and editor of Personal Finance, a financial newsletter that has been honoured as 'the best in North America'. A Ph.D and academic prodigy, he has degrees in economics, maths and psychology and has written four previous books

Customer Reviews

Get out of oil-dependent assets, as long as politics corrupt, energy policy will never be real

I am giving this book a 5 instead of a 3 or 4 because I believe that it does a superb job of laying out some facts that every normal adult needs to understand, and I want to encourage everyone to buy and read this book.

That having been said, I also found it disappointing. The author's main points can be summed up in this review, and take less than an hour to absorb in the actual book:

1) Peak oil and the need for alternative energies are being over-shadowed by myopic media and lack-luster academics that focus on poverty, climate change, terrorism, everything but the core Achilles heel of the Western world, its addiction to cheap oil which is no more.

2) Cheap oil is made possible by blatant political and financial maneuvers that enrich a few and set the rest of us up for life long poverty. Government subsidies and tax breaks purchases by expensive lobbyists giving expensive gifts and cash bribes to our politicians are directly responsible for pre-determined failure of our energy policy and the lack of an energy strategy.

3) The catastrophic nature of the collapse of cheap oil is dramatically enhanced by the combination of the *huge* U.S. deficit and by the increased prospects of war over oil.

The author concludes with some bottom line advice for investors: get out quickly from stocks associated with high oil usage (airlines, autos, chemicals; followed by cosmetics, food requiring processing and transport, and retail dependent on far away factories and raw materials).

I disagree with one key point he makes. He assumes that Wall Street and the media have been ignoring this problem because of "group think." I certainly do agree that the larger mass of the public and the average bureaucrat that do not know any better have fallen prey to unethical propaganda, but I am quite persuaded by Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy; Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil; The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and other books that this catastrophe in the making was clearly understood by the White House and the US Senate in 1974-1979, and a very deliberate selfish even treasonous decision was made to profit in silence and let the people fry.

This is a much simpler book than most of the others I have read and recommend, but I give it a solid five stars because if you can only afford to buy and read one book, this is the one that will be easiest and most to the point.

And just to drive the point home, when WIRED had the cover story on alternative energy, Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon, and went on to amass 25 documented high crimes, 23 of itemized in my review of this book (Cheney makes Agnew and Johnson look like wall-flowers--this is the guy that put HIGH into "High Crimes."
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

Ignore the lurid, juvenile title.
The only disappointing thing about this book is the title. If I had not already read Leeb's previous book, 'The Oil Factor', I probably would have passed on this. Instead, I bought it immediately. The title puts it in the same crackpot category as Ravi Batra's rantings and the old gold bug diatribes from the 1970s, and that's a shame.

The book itself is an interesting sequel to the 'Oil Factor', but not quite as eye-opening since I've had 2 years to get into Peak Oil literature and energy investing. Leeb is an investment advisor, and his books are clearly biased toward the profit motive. His best contribution in the new book is his neat explanation of why Peak Oil isn't all over the media. Leeb's background is in psychology (a PhD), and he explains the psychological theory of "groupthink" where the best and brightest in government, industry, and academia simply go along with a consensus way past the point where it makes sense. In this case, the idea that there's plenty of oil out there is the groupthink chant coming from the likes of Rex Tillerson (Exxon CEO) and Daniel Yergin. The rest of the world then follows along. On the other hand, Leeb's investment advice is conservative enough that if Rex and Dan turn out to be right, you will end up owning some fairly conventional large cap investments like GE, Exxon, Schlumberger, P&G, and a few utilities, as well as some gold. Not a bad portfolio.

Leeb also differs from James Kunstler ('The Long Emergency') in his optimism for alternative energy sources. Kunstler would call this "cargo cult" mentality, where those technological/free market demigods will come down from the sky and give us the great gift of a cheap, non-polluting replacement for oil/gas/coal.

I'd give 'Oil Factor' 5 stars simply because it made me some money and clued me in, and this one 3 stars -- a decent book but kind of superficial compared to the other peak oil lit. However, the seriousness of the situation is starting to dawn on people like Leeb. The energy situation, if it's as bad as peak oilists think, is more than just a chance for a few clever investors to make a pile of money (see Richard Rainwater's comments in a recent issue of FORTUNE), it's a real emergency. Leeb thinks it's a matter of survival, and believes that whether we like it or not, families with the most money will have a better chance of survival in a very dangerous future.

A Must-Read
This is a funny book. I am quite interested in the subject of peak oil, and for a non-geologist, fairly well acquainted with the science behind it.

What's funny about this book is that the title and the cover lead one to think that it's another "How to profit from the coming asteroid strike!" investment books. I picked it up expecting little more than a good laugh, and ended up shelling out hard cash for a full price copy -- something I rarely do, and I have the receipts from Amazon to prove it.

I find much to agree with in the review written by "a diplomatic historian," but here's the nub of the problem:

"This book is based upon the major notion that growing energy demands from China and India will squeeze us and propel oil prices into the stratosphere. This is self-correcting through normal economic processes."

No, it isn't self-correcting through normal economic processes, unless one includes stratospheric oil prices as a normal economic process.

Almost 30 years ago, a song by the band Tower of Power warned that "there's only so much oil in the ground." The song was written during the first oil crisis, which as Leeb points out was really a political crisis rather than a supply crisis. It turned out that there was considerably more oil in the ground than most people would have thought in the late 1970s. However, Tower of Power basically had it right. Natural economic processes hold great sway over natural resources -- up to a point. But if a resource is truly in short supply, economic processes cannot conjure more of it out of thin air. If they could, we would be buried in cod, what with the prices having gone up manyfold in the last decade or so.

In any event, this book is very much worth reading for its clearly argued contention that a shortfall of oil supply is about to push us towards a very serious economic and social crisis. Leeb is right about the growth of China and India and he's right about the lack of growth in oil production. In short, he's right.