President Trump recently took aim at the Federal Reserve once again, accusing the central bank of “holding back” America’s economy. The president was responding to a FOX Business Varney & Co. segment about negative interest rates in Europe and Japan.
Trump said the Fed should follow the lead of European and Japanese central banks into the world of negative rates.
Foreign central banks have been stocking up on gold for months. According to the World Gold Council, a dozen central banks have increased their gold reserves by at least 1 ton through the first eight months of 2019. This continues a trend we saw through 2018. In total, the world’s central banks accumulated 651.5 tons of gold last year. The World Gold Council noted that 2018 marked the highest level of annual net central bank gold purchases since the suspension of dollar convertibility into gold in 1971, and the second-highest annual total on record.
Peter Schiff has talked about central bank gold-buying. He has noted that the US went off the gold standard in 1971, but he thinks the world is going to go back on it.
Years ago, markets used to pay a lot of attention to the money supply and trade deficits. Now, these numbers barely get a passing mention. In his latest podcast, Peter Schiff said he thinks what is old will become new again and trade deficits and money printing will once again come front and center.
We’ve talked a lot about government debt and consumer debt. In this episode of the SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap, host Mike Maharrey highlights the massive corporate debt bubble. As he explains, it’s eerily similar to the mortgage debt bubble the blew up in the years prior to the 2008 crash. It’s a little like deja vu all over again. He also covers another round of gloomy economic data that came out this week.
There is a massive corporate debt bubble floating around out there, and when it pops, it will likely take a lot of companies down with it.
Outstanding corporate debt in the US stands at almost $10 trillion, according to SEC Chairman Jay Clayton. That’s nearly 50% of GDP.
Rene Magritte’s 1929 painting “The Treachery of Images,” depicts a tobacco pipe with a caption that reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” (French for “This is not a pipe”). Everyone who has taken a course in modern art knows that Magritte’s exercise in contradiction was meant to draw a distinction between a real thing and a representation of that thing. Perhaps we should send Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell a beret and an easel as he is attempting a similarly surrealistic take on monetary policy.
“In case the people in this room didn’t know, the financial crisis of 2008, which I had been forecasting for some time, and the Great Recession that ensued, was caused predominantly by the Federal Reserve.”
This was the opening line of Peter Schiff’s talk at the Las Vegas MoneyShow.
The Fed managed to “rescue” the economy after the financial crisis, but in the process, it created an even bigger bubble than the one that popped in ’08. This bubble is about to burst and the Fed will try to repeat the process. The difference is this time it won’t work, as Peter explains.
The Federal Reserve is set to begin what a MarketWatch article called a “massive” bond-buying program.
Jerome Powell announced the program last Tuesday and the central bank released more details about the plan on Friday. The Federal Reserve will buy $60 billion in short-term Treasury bills each month. According to a statement, the purchases will continue, “at least into the second quarter of next year.” That would amount to around $400 billion worth of Treasurys added to the Fed’s balance sheet.
Stocks took off on Friday on several big news items – most significantly President Trump’s announcement that the US and China have worked out phase one of a trade deal. In his podcast, Peter broke down the news. He also made an interesting observation: Trump and the Federal Reserve seem to be reading off the same script.
When I was a kid, we used to play the opposite game. Everything you said had to be the opposite of what you meant. For example, if you were hungry, you’d say, “I’m not hungry.” Or if you really liked the song on the radio, you’d say, “This song sucks.”
Well, politicians play the opposite game pretty much all the time.
