Peter Schiff: Coronavirus Is Exposing the Truth About the Economy

It wasn’t long ago that all of the pundits were telling us that the economy was strong. As a result, a lot of people seem to think that once the coronavirus situation is resolved, the economy will quickly go back to normal. In his podcast Friday, Peter Schiff said that’s not going to happen. The coronavirus is actually going to reveal that the “great” economy was an illusion — a big, fat, ugly bubble that has now been popped.

US stocks ended a very volatile week down again on Friday. The Dow Jones shed another 913 points and has now lost all of the gains made during the Trump presidency. On the week, the Dow dropped over 4,000 points. It was the worst week ever in terms of a drop in points. On a percentage basis, it was the worst week since the 2008 financial crisis.

In his podcast Friday, Peter Schiff said this looks an awful lot like a financial crisis even though everybody keeps saying it’s not a financial crisis.

The difference is this is a bigger financial crisis than the one we had in 2008.”

In fact, March is on track to be the worst percentage drop in the US stock market in one month since 1932.

That was the depression. And you know, it’s not a coincidence that the market is behaving today the way it behaved in a depression. Because we’re entering another one. Only this is going to be much worse. It’s going to be an inflationary depression. … This is not your great-grandfather’s depression.”

The conventional wisdom is that everything will be fine once we get through the coronavirus shutdown. Meanwhile, the government can keep us all afloat with bailouts.

This is so laughable and shows how little people understand basic economics.”

Peter raises the key question: where is the money going to come from to pay everybody? Of course, it will be created out of thin air. The Federal Reserve will once again monetize the debt. In the process, its balance sheet is going to explode. Once this is over, how can the central bank possibly shrink that balance sheet and say “it’s business as usual?” How are we going to let interest rates rise when there is all that debt? Keep in mind, we are already up to our eyeballs in government, corporate and personal debt thanks to the easy money policies of the Fed after the 2008 crisis.

The only alternative will be to leave all of those assets on the Fed’s balance sheet. As we saw a couple of years ago, the Fed wasn’t able to normalize rates or shrink its balance sheet after the Great Recession. It certainly won’t be able to this time. In other words, the central bank will have to permanently monetize the debt. But that raises another question.

What is going to happen to the US dollar when this liquidity squeeze is over? If we can’t withdraw that liquidity, then the dollar is going to completely implode.”

Peter used a WWII analogy. After the war, taxes remained high and the government was able to eventually pay off all the debt. This time, the government is trying to promise sacrifice without pain. It doesn’t work that way.

There is a difference between real credit that comes from savings and the fake credit that the Federal Reserve conjures into existence just by creating money. There’re no resources that are made available to the government. There’s just inflation. You’re just printing money. Everybody is still operating under the delusion that the money we print has real value. And they keep going back to the idea that everything is going to be fine. We just have to make the sacrifice and they don’t realize that the sacrifices we made in World War Two were completely different. It’s not a sacrifice if everybody gets bailed out. The sacrifice is when you don’t get bailed out; you have to deal with it yourself.”

The key thing to understand is that even if the coronavirus is quickly controlled, everything is not going to go back to normal. Everybody thinks we had a great economy before the coronavirus started spreading around the world.

But it wasn’t. It was a bubble. And the coronavirus pricked the bubble. And that doesn’t mean that after the coronavirus problem is over the bubble just magically relates. It’s not going to happen. There’s no way to reflate this bubble. The bubble has popped. It’s because we didn’t have a viable economy before the pin pricked the bubble, that’s why we’re not going to have a recovery when the pin is gone.  Once this whole house of cards comes tumbling down — it’s down.”

Peter said this is going to expose the US economy for what it was – an illusion.

The coronavirus is going to expose the truth. It’s going to be laid bare for everybody to see. So, it’s not going to be fine when this is over, even if it is over soon.”

In this podcast, Peter also explains why the dollar is rising now, but why we are on the cusp of a dollar crisis.