Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic made an important admission during a CNBC interview. He confessed the Fed wasn’t really going all-in on the inflation fight. That raises a question: how is it going to tame the inflation monster? Peter Schiff talked about this admission during his podcast, along with a head-scratching article about the trade deficit in the Wall Street Journal.
American consumers ran up more debt in December, wrapping up a year in which consumer debt increase at the fastest pace in five years.
This could prove problematic for the Federal Reserve as it contemplates raising interest rates.
The markets continue to brace for the Fed’s impending inflation fight. But as Peter explained in his podcast, they’re not bracing for the Fed to lose that fight.
And the Fed is going to lose that fight.
With little fanfare, the national debt crossed the $30 trillion threshold this week. That is an unfathomable number. And as host Mike Maharrey explains in this week’s Friday Gold Wrap podcast, it’s worse than that. Most people aren’t concerned. Maharrey argues that they should be, likening the federal government’s borrow and spend policy to a monetary Jenga game.
The Federal is supposedly on the path to tighter monetary policy, although it is currently still pouring gas on the inflation fire. The central bank says it is tapering its asset purchases even now, and will eventually begin shrinking its balance sheet. It also plans to raise interest rates.
Peter Schiff has been saying the Fed can’t do what it claims it’s going to do. Economist André Marques agrees. He says the Fed is trapped. It doesn’t really have room to raise rates or taper.
Peter Schiff recently spoke at the January 2022 Virtual MoneyShow. He talked about the impacts of inflation and said stagflation is going to shock the markets.
Is bitcoin an inflation hedge?
Peter Schiff recently appeared on RT Boom Bust with Natalie Brunell of Coin Stories to discuss inflation and whether bitcoin is a hedge. Peter said bitcoin is not an inflation hedge. He called it a “speculative token” with its price driven by supply and demand.
But what about gold? It didn’t perform like an inflation hedge in 2021 despite the inflation freight train. Peter said the reason gold has had some problems is because the market wrongly believes the Fed.
The Federal Reserve held its first FOMC meeting of 2022. The central bank didn’t do anything, but the tone coming out of the meeting was widely perceived as even more “hawkish.” Everybody is convinced the Fed really means it now. The inflation fight is on. Is it though? Host Mike Maharrey talks about the messaging and perceptions coming out of this meeting and calls it a big flim-flam.
The Federal Reserve wrapped up its first Federal Open Market Committee meeting of the year yesterday without any real surprises. Despite everybody screaming about an inflation problem, the Fed will keep its loose, inflationary monetary policy in play for at least two more months.
The Federal Reserve is talking about raising interest rates. But the US economy is buried under piles of debt. I’ve been asking how this is going to work for months. Apparently, the question has finally occurred to the mainstream.
A CNBC article declared, “Fed rate hikes will intensify a global debt crisis, research warns.”
