President Trump threw a wrench into coronavirus stimulus relief, calling the massive spending bill “a disgrace” and threatening to veto the legislation if Congress doesn’t go back and up the individual checks from $600 to $2,000.
It remains unclear how the politics will play out. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted “Let’s do it!” putting pressure on Sen. President Mitch McConnel to go along with the increased stimulus. What is pretty certain is stimulus is coming down the pike – whether sooner or later. Before Trump made his surprise remarks, Peter Schiff talked about the stimulus bill on his podcast.
The US government is stimulating everybody. Just not you.
Congress finally pulled together a stimulus deal. Both houses of Congress passed the $900 billion measure. It ranks as the second-largest “stimulus” bill in history, only behind the CARES Act passed earlier this year.
The money supply grew by 37.08% year-on-year in November based on the True Money Supply Measure (TMS). It was effectively the same rate of growth we saw in October and remains near September’s all-time high rate of growth.
The staggering growth in the money supply becomes more clear when you compare this year with last. TMS growth in November 2019 was just 5.9%.
The big story last week was the dollar’s slow meltdown. The dollar index broke below 90 for the first time since the spring of 2018.
The financial media hasn’t ignored the dollar weakness, but Peter said they don’t seem to grasp the significance of what’s going on, nor do they realize how much further the dollar has to fall. In fact, a lot of the talk has focused on the positives of dollar weakness. In his podcast, Peter argues this growing dollar weakness is not America’s win.
The Federal Reserve held its last meeting of the year this week. There were no big surprises policy-wise. But Jerome Powell and company made it clear that the easy-money spigot will remain wide open pumping trillions of dollars created out of thin air into the economy. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, Mike Maharrey talks about the Fed meeting and the ramifications of its monetary policy.
In its last meeting of 2020, the Federal Reserve made it clear the easy-money spigot will remain wide open into the foreseeable future. During his post-meeting press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell seemed clueless about the ramifications of this policy – particularly the impact of inflation. Peter Schiff talked about the Fed meeting and Powell’s comments in his podcast, saying Powell’s ignorance won’t be bliss.
Three bills prefiled in the South Carolina House would cut taxes on precious metals and take important steps toward treating gold and silver as money instead of as commodities. Passage of these bills would also set the stage to undermine the Federal Reserve’s monopoly on money.
South Carolina is the first state to propose this kind of legislation for the 2021 session, but more states will likely follow suit. This is part of a broader movement at the state level to support sound money.
It appears the government lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has hastened the deflation of the commercial real estate bubble.
According to CoStar Group, an estimated $126 billion in commercial real estate will be forced to sell at distressed prices over the next two years. That will eclipse the amount of distressed commercial property sold during the first two years after the 2008 financial crisis.
The US government kicked off fiscal 2021 with the biggest October deficit in history. But with the first of November falling on a weekend, some November spending got shifted into October, inflating that month’s deficit. Now that we have the November monthly Treasury Statement, we have a better sense of how big deficits are running in the new fiscal year.
In two words — really big.
There were two big IPOs last week – DoorDash and Airbnb. Both companies raised over $3.5 billion in their public offerings. In his podcast, Peter Schiff talked about the IPO frenzy. He argues that it has very little to do with funding great business ventures. It’s more about making a quick buck in a market juiced by easy money from the Federal Reserve.
