Stansberry and Associates

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'''Stansberry and Associates''' is something like what you'd get if [[Zero Hedge]] was an investment firm. Owned by Frank Porter Stansberry, their websites<ref>http://stansberryresearch.com</ref><ref>https://web.archive.org/web/20110531230612/http://www.ronpaulupdate.com/</ref> are a mix of economic doom and gloom combined with oodles of painfully obvious [[pump-and-dump]]-type schemes. They appear on US television in the usual time slots frequented by the broke and gullible, with none other than [[Ron Paul]] pitching for them<ref>http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/ron-paul-radio-and-internet-ads-watch-out-for-the-coming-eco#.qwokomw6mM</ref> to hit exactly the market you expect. Stansberry himself is an occasional writer for [[WorldNetDaily]] and promoter of various [[conspiracy theories]] surrounding [[President Obama]]. 

==Forecast: ''Mad Max''==
As is rather common with [[right-wing]] financial doomsayers, Stansberry's particular ooga-booga is hyper[[inflation]], pointing (as you do) to [[Weimar]] [[Germany]] and the like as what will happen if the US continues with its eeeevil [[Keynesian economics|neo-Keynesian]] economic policies. Their predictions have been sufficiently histrionic and widely distributed to gain the attention of [[Snopes.com]],<ref>http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/hr2847.asp</ref> and the "super secret strategies" rhetoric in their marketing materials<ref>https://web.archive.org/web/20131026074510/http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2013/10/24/another-stansberry-con-job/</ref> is right in line with other "don't trust the banksters" forms of economic fraud as [[high yield investment program]]s, implying that Stansberry can provide access to these behind-the-scenes banking instruments that only the rich have access to.

==Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain==
Stansberry himself is exactly the sort of unrepentant [[bigot]]<ref>http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/13/right-wing-financial-huckster-uses-racist-and-a/195375</ref> that you'd expect someone who's made a living off of [[affinity fraud]] to be. He was fined US$1.5 million in 2007 by the Securities and Exchange Commission in a case that was upheld by the [[US Supreme Court]]; perhaps surprisingly, some of his biggest defenders were newspapers who were afraid that the case could be used to set a precedent where brokers could be prosecuted for passing on bad information in good faith. SCOTUS did not particularly care for this argument and refused to hear the appeal. Journalist [[Brian Deer]] (the same one who took down [[Andrew Wakefield]]) has written extensively about Stansberry's, um, business model,<ref>http://briandeer.com/stansberry/stansberry-associates-investment.htm</ref> including one particularly cruel 2003 incident where Stansberry promoted a fictitious [[AIDS]] [[vaccine]]. After all this, it should come as no surprise that Stansberry's pitches (with their clichéd "let me let you in on a secret" writing style) are in regular rotation on right-wing junk mail lists, even long after being repeatedly debunked. 

If you're into whatever the opposite of tubthumping is, Stansberry has a podcast. It's probably more of the same, but we can't be bothered to listen.

==References==

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[[Category:Conspiracy theorists]]
[[Category:Financial fraud]]

Categories: Conspiracy theorists, Financial fraud