http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/business/howard-ruff-quirky-conservative-economist-and-author-dies-at-85.html?_r=0

I have a hard time thinking of any members whom I have known who haven't read the decaffeinated tea leaves and seen anything but the apocalypse coming with bells on it. Buy more gold! Buy more food storage! Buy more guns! Don't trust anybody! (Except me..)

And why do so many members who hit it big with products or services of dubious value end up blowing through their wealth? Especially people who claim to be prescient (or even inspired!) when it comes to markets and money management? Could it be they were just lucky pandering to like-weak-minded customers?

As the church slowly fades to irrelevance, it will be people like Ruff who stick in the public's memory as representative of the church. Quirky indeed.

Yeah, I bought his book. My parents bought silver on his book's advice.

Years ago, I got occasional promotional copies of "The Ruff Times" in the mail. They were quite something, and I'm sure it made for a reasonable living for Mr. Ruff. His rag read like the National Enquirer.

For various reasons, we human beings are always susceptible to certain End-Times scares and scenarios ("scenaria?"). In the 1950s and 60s it was nuclear armaggedon, then in the 1970s it was an impending ice age. As a Christian, I do believe in an Earth-wide Apocalypse, but should that come, there won't be anything I can do about it. Economic collapse is a scare that comes in cycles. Now the big fear is "global warming." In a few years, there will be something else to make us sh*t our pants--and take our money, willingly or otherwise.

Pardon the hijack, but you brought it up.
Nobody in the 1970s was predicting an impending ice age. This myth is a recent concoction invented to try and discredit "global warming".

There were a few research papers that postulated that there were influences that would lead to a cooling climate (not an ice age). One magazine article, Time Magazine, June 24, 1974 did use the term ice age, but that is the popular press, not a scientific research paper.
See: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?f=ice-age-predictions-in-1970s&l=2

There have also been repeated claims (including here on RFM) that there has been no global warming since 1998. The aphorism has it that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This is a lie of the "statistics" variety. They specifically pick 1998 because it was far and away the hottest year ever (up until that time) in the historical record. So yes, the next few years reverted to the mean, so the running average temp was flat for a few years. Those days are now long gone.

It would have been equally misleading to say that the period from 1992 to 1998 was the steepest temperature climb ever recorded. That happens to be true, but again, it was a temporary spike up, just like 1998 to 2004 was a temporary leveling out.
Here's the actual data. You look at it.

Yeah, I know, NASA lies. Look how they faked the moon landing to keep their budget from being cut. :)

http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/


My personal theory is that the purveyors of "disaster porn", like Howard Ruff, get cranky when there are competing disaster narratives, and pull out all the stops to discredit them.

BTW, my HT in the 1970s was a big Ruff Times fan, and bought lots of gold. He was a senior airline pilot and had some spare change. It wasn't until around 2014 that the price of gold finally surpassed the high from the 1970s, and adjusted for inflation, it is still well under half the price it hit in the late 1970s.

I totally ignored my HT's advice, and was so glad. I decided to lose lots of money in the dot com meltdown of 2001 instead. :-/

His local obituary didn't say as much as the one from the NY Times. I was around here in SL Valley during the time he was doing his thing, and have never heard of him.


http://www.heraldextra.com/lifestyles/announcements/obituaries/howard-j-ruff/article_619dc876-0dd4-540a-8ccb-9968e846488a.html

...I met Howard Ruff in 1975... at his home in Danville, CA....his son Eric was my roomate at Deseret Towers BYU. Eric was a pretty talented guy. He started GAZELLE Software in Provo, and ran it for a few years. Have not talked with him for a long time now.

Like all prophets, Howard Ruff was wildly wrong. I remember reading him, and he said that the economy would suffer total collapse in the eighties. The only thing to invest in was silver dimes and any gold you could get. If you followed his instructions, you'd live to regret it.

Same old story.