Peter Schiff is president of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc, a brokerage firm in Darien Connecticut.

In an August 2006 interview Schiff generated much controversy when he repeated his long-held investment thesis:  "The United States economy is like the Titanic and I am here with the lifeboat trying to get people to leave the ship …I see a real financial crisis coming for the United States."

On May 16, 2006 in debate on Fox News, Schiff accurately had forecast that the U.S. housing market was a bubble that would soon come to bust.

On December 13, 2007 in a Bloomberg interview on the show Open Exchange, Schiff further added that he felt that the crisis would extend to the credit card lending industry.

What's remarkable about this montage of video clips of Peter Schiff from 2006 and 2007 is how the other talking heads just laugh openly at Schiff's predictions.

I also happen to agree with Schiff in his assessment that the current recession is not a problem, but a solution to this country's bad habits of borrowing and spending on bad credit.  It's a necessary, albeit prolonged and painful, correction – kind of like the olden days, when they innoculated you from smallpox by infecting you with a little bit of smallpox.  The cure was painful, but it was necessary to prevent the disease from really getting you.