The Federal Reserve launched its fight against inflation earlier this month, but it wasn’t exactly shock and awe. The Fed raised interest rates by just a quarter percent. Peter Schiff called it the most anticipated and least significant rate hike ever. Meanwhile, the central bank continued to expand its balance sheet.
While the Fed’s tiny monetary policy adjustments won’t likely put a dent in inflation, they are already having an impact on the economy. Last week, mortgage rates charted their biggest weekly increase in 11 years.
How long will it take for rising rates to pop the housing bubble?
During a recent podcast, Peter Schiff talked about how the Bank of Japan lied about inflation being too low in order to justify its reckless monetary policy and keep interest rates artificially low in order to prop up the country’s massive debt. In a subsequent podcast, Peter talked about similar lies coming out of the European Central Bank.
Is the US about to go the way of Japan?
The Japanese yen tanked after the Bank of Japan vowed to buy an unlimited number of Japanese government bonds in order to hold the 10-year yield under its 0.25% target.
We’ve seen a number of inversions in the Treasury bond yield curve over the last couple of weeks. This is a recession warning signal.
In his podcast, Peter Schiff said the markets are right about the looming recession. But they’re not getting the whole picture.
The national debt stands at $30.3 trillion and the US government continues to run massive deficits. But does it really matter?
Some people say that it doesn’t because “we just owe the debt to ourselves.”
As the ruble collapsed under the strain of economic sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russian people turned to gold to protect their wealth.
Russians went on a gold-buying spree in the first couple of weeks after the invasion.
As Peter Schiff put it in a recent podcast, government solutions make every problem worse.
The solutions being floated to help Americans deal with high gas prices are no exception.
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve launched its first salvo against inflation, raising interest rates by a quarter-percent. It was a pretty weak shot given 7.9% CPI, but Jerome Powell and other Fed presidents ratcheted up the tough rhetoric last week. Powell raised the possibility of 50 basis-point rate hikes at future meetings and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, “With the labor market so strong, inflation, inflation, inflation is top of everyone’s mind.”
The big action in silver occurred early in the month, making March a pretty large outlier. First, it continues the recent trend of increasing deliveries. Second, deliveries were 8.7% of the max open interest for the month. This is the highest percentage since July 2020 when prices took off. There are still 24 open interest contracts remaining.
The Fed threw a pretty weak first punch at inflation with a quarter-point interest rate hike last week. But Fed Chair Jerome Powell followed up with some tough talk this week. The question is what will he do when the economy punches him in the face? In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks about Powell’s attempt to bully inflation and if it might backfire.
