“I’m very, very sorry to say that my business is skyrocketing,” the personal-finance guru Suze Orman said one late January afternoon. The Dow was down almost 200 points, and Orman was lounging on the terrace of her San Francisco town house, wearing a leopard-print tunic and cowboy boots. She looked up and popped a grape into her mouth. “This is happening because of the lies and deceit and greed of Wall Street, the mortgage companies, the SEC, the Administration,” she said, growing agitated. Her outlook on the economy is practically apocalyptic: Millions more jobs will be lost, the stock market will probably continue to drop, and things won’t start to get better until 2015. “Shysters! They’re all shysters!” she said. “I have said it over and over and over again.”
The mortgage crisis, the deficit, the mass layoffs and the home foreclosures sweeping the country are all signs that the economy is a wreck, but for Orman, 57, things could hardly be better. Like a medic tending injured soldiers on a battlefield, she spends her days fielding calls from people who are in financial peril–drowning in credit-card debt or facing adjustable-rate mortgages that threaten to bury them alive. Each week they phone in to Orman’s CNBC show for advice or buy one of her nine books, which offer the hope that they might save themselves from the financial hell they’ve created. Orman rushed out a paperback response to the economic crisis called Suze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan, which is on the New York Times best-seller list, and the ratings for her TV show are among the highest at CNBC. She promotes savings accounts for TD Ameritrade and hawks identity-theft kits on her website. Requests for her to speak, at $80,000 a pop, are flowing in from all over the world. It’s a sign of just how bad things are that watching her is so compelling–in a rubbernecking sort of way–because people have done such reckless things with their money. When Orman talks about the government officials responsible for fixing the crisis, her voice often drips with contempt. During a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, she asked Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby why Americans should trust members of Congress who can’t manage their own personal finances. And the suggestion by Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, that Americans should start buying cars again to help jolt the economy was “the most irresponsible thing anybody could say,” said Orman. “Mr. Summers, I am so sorry. I understand we have to spur the economy of the U.S., but don’t do it off the people who don’t have jobs, who don’t have a pot to pee in.” She went on: “Sir, there are tent cities. Go and look at who is standing in line to get soup. There are white collar workers in those lines now.” Over the top as she is, Orman’s ubiquitous presence has become a sort of unofficial economic barometer: the worse things get, the harder she is to avoid. Her style seems almost intentionally annoying: she screams on camera, her blue eyes practically bugging out of her head. But she has long been saying what America needs to hear, crusading against credit-card debt and urging people to save money and pay down their mortgages. Since the onset of the recession, she has made some subtle adjustments to her image, positioning herself more as a populist crisis manager than as a promoter of the American Dream. That hasn’t shielded her from criticism for not foreseeing the deepest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, or at least for not making it the core of her message. But if some analysts question the soundness of Orman’s advice, especially given today’s extreme financial conditions, few of her fans do, in part because she sounds so convincing when she says she’s on their side. When asked whether she could have done more to warn people about the real estate, stock-market and credit bubbles of the past few years, Orman said, “I did everything I could.” See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.
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