YouTube Provides Outlet for Economic Anxiety

Along with the Conference Board’s index tracking the decaying state of consumer confidence, add another, less scientific measure of economic anxiety: the YouTube videos predicting economic collapse.

When the words “financial” or “economic” are typed into YouTube’s search box, the site automatically suggests pairing them with the words “collapse,” “crisis” and “depression” as the most commonly searched-for phrases. The searches bring up thousands of videos uploaded within the last year, with an outsized portion added in the last month.

A large portion of the videos are breathless recaps of the decline of the U.S. economy made by amateur videographers, with images and stock charts representing rising food and oil prices and falling home values, often with titles in all caps and laden with exclamation points.

A grimmer amateur subcategory, found under variations of the title “Surviving the Economic Collapse,” gives advice on how to store food, generate electricity, keep wealth in precious metals and buy and maintain reliable firearms.

As an informal barometer of economic worries in popular culture, YouTube anxiety tracks well with more formal indices, including the consumer confidence index, which dropped in June to its lowest level since 1992, and the American Association of Individual Investors’ survey of investor confidence, which shows bearish or neutral investor sentiment outnumbering bullish sentiment by a ratio of 2 to 1.

Not all of the YouTube videos dealing with an eminent collapse of the U.S. economy consist of predictions and advice from amateurs. Two investment professionals in particular tend to appear in the videos: commodity and currency investor Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, and Peter Schiff, a contrarian money manager and author of “Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse.”

Both investors are critics of the Federal Reserve, its chairman, Ben Bernanke, and its former chairman, Alan Greenspan, whom they believe exacerbated the Internet and real estate boom-and-bust cycles and failed to control inflation.

And both Rogers and Schiff believe things are going to get a whole lot worse for the U.S. economy, the U.S. dollar and the U.S. stock market — they advise selling U.S. equities in favor of foreign currencies or commodities including precious metals.

“I think that crash, that collapse I envision has already begun,” Schiff says in a promotional video for his book that appears under the YouTube searches. “You’ve got to understand what’s happening, and then you have to protect yourself and your family from the consequences.”

Whether gloomy sentiment can buck its long losing track record this time around remains to be seen. –Ed Welsch