Peter Schiff: Will Trump Achieve a Golden Age?

On Tuesday, Peter went live with analysis of this week’s major events. Most notably, he comments on Joe Biden’s controversial final acts as president and on Trump’s return to the Oval Office. He also analyzes the prospects for Trump’s second term and bashes the newly-inaugurated president for promoting a new cryptocurrency bearing his name.

Peter slams Biden’s mass pardons, which constitute a blatant abuse of presidential powers:

The problematic aspect of these pardons is people are not being pardoned of a crime that they’ve been convicted of, or even a crime that they’ve been charged with. People are being pardoned who have never been charged with anything. Basically what Biden is saying is if any of these individuals did anything wrong at any point over the last 11 years, I pardon them for whatever they might have done that I don’t even know that they did, that somebody might discover that they did, which I think is a real abuse of the whole system of a pardon to just preemptively pardon people. 

Not to be outdone in the controversy department, Peter explained why he considers Trump’s creation of a “meme coin” both unseemly and unwise:

But it’s not just former President Biden, I think, that was acting inappropriately in the days leading up to the inauguration. Donald Trump also, I think, was very inappropriate in the launching of his meme coin, the Trump coin, which came out on Friday evening. And just as inappropriate, the Melania coin, which I think came out the following day, was it Saturday or Sunday, I forget, but over the weekend, both these coins came out. And I really think it is shameless. I think it diminishes the office of the president for Donald Trump to be profiting in this way off of his presidential win.

Some argue it’s just harmless hype, but Peter warns that many Trump supporters will be duped by this coin:

Some people have already made a tremendous amount of money. The people that got in really early that were prepared for it and knew about it, bought them and flipped them and made millions and millions of dollars. But whatever money is made equals the money that’s lost by a lot of other people. The people that voted for Trump, the people that Donald Trump supposedly cares about, a lot of them are going to lose money.

Shifting gears, Peter noted how tech giants are swarming to the White House and forming new ventures under the president’s watch. To him, this cozy relationship may signal genuine investment or simply a hedge against an unpredictable economy:

You’ve got all these CEOs that are cozying up to Donald Trump and at first blush, you would think, oh, this is great. This is a pro-business president and so it’s good that all these businessmen want to be so tight with the president. Well, I don’t necessarily look at it that way. You got to see the other side of the coin. One of the reasons that a lot of businessmen want to get into the president’s good favor is because they’re afraid of him. On the other hand, he could do something that will help them, because I think Donald Trump intends to try to micromanage parts of the economy from the Oval Office to try to pick winners and losers, his own version of central planning.

Next, he touches on the newly-repealed ban on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, a hot-button issue in energy policy, underscoring how shifts in regulation can impact inflation and supply dynamics:

It’s a good thing that they reversed it, but it does mean higher natural gas prices because one of the reasons that I think the Biden administration wanted to prevent us from exporting our natural gas is to keep more of it here. And that would reduce the price because we’d have greater supply. But if we’re allowed to export that supply to Europe, then that’s less domestic supply. And that means higher prices. 

Finally, Peter runs through some of Trump’s more eye-catching executive orders, which have stirred the economic pot in the US. He especially notes the national emergency at the southern border and the folly of renaming geographical landmarks:

He did declare a national emergency on the southern border. This is separate from the drugs– just to keep the immigrants from coming in. I guess they’re going to try to step up the efforts on the border. … The Gulf of America could mean South America too. It doesn’t necessarily mean the United States. It could have called it the Gulf of the United States. I don’t know the significance of that stuff, but again, this is form over substance. We have real serious problems in this country, and they’re not going to be solved by renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

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