A lot of people seem to think that if the Fed had just started fighting inflation a little earlier, we wouldn’t have seen the rapidly rising prices that continue today. The mistake, they say, was thinking inflation was transitory. But as Peter Schiff has pointed out, this problem didn’t start last year, or even with the pandemic. This problem was decades in the making.
And at the root of the problem was year after year of easy money. Wall Street was drunk on cheap money for a decade and it is ultimately going to end in another financial crisis.
The Federal Reserve is between a rock and a hard place, and it’s going to have to make a hard choice – inflation or economic implosion. Peter Schiff talked about it on his podcast.
Even as US stock markets rally and people anticipate a quick recovery as economies open up, a tsunami of defaults and evictions looms on the horizon.
The mainstream narrative has been that although the coronavirus shutdowns have rocked the economy, it’s not a financial crisis like we saw in 2008. Back in April, Peter Schiff said that we were absolutely heading toward a financial crisis and it will be worse than 2008.
Gold sold off overnight and stock futures soared after President Trump offered some guidelines to “reopen America.” There was also news of a promising COVID-19 treatment. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey throws a bucket of cold water on all of the optimism. He explains why the economy won’t likely just roar back to life even with an end to the economic lockdown.
A lot of people in the mainstream still insist this isn’t a financial crisis like we saw in 2008. They say this is just a self-inflicted shutdown of the economy. Since we decided to shut it down, we can decide to start it back up again. Peter Schiff begs to differ. In his podcast, he explains that this is absolutely a financial crisis and it’s going to be worse than 2008.
The 11-year bull run is over.
After a rebound on Tuesday based on hopes of government fiscal stimulus, US stock markets plunged again Wednesday and officially moved into bear territory.
With the madness in the markets over the last couple of weeks that led the Federal Reserve to implement a 50-basis point interest rate cut, Peter Schiff is starting to get some love in the mainstream media.
Peter was a regular on MSNBC, Fox News and other mainstream outlets in the months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. He was typically the lone contrarian, insisting that the economy wasn’t great. Of course, in 2008, he was proved correct.
The conventional wisdom is that demand for gold and silver has been somewhat tepid over the last couple of years. In fact, global gold demand grew by about 4% in 2018 and was in line with the five-year average. Much of that growth was due to a surged in demand through the fourth quarter as stock markets tanked, and concerns about debt and the global economy grew.
We tend to be pretty short-sighted when we look at market trends. Most investors focus on the day-to-day gyrations. As a result, we often completely miss significant long-term trends. For instance, investment demand for gold and silver has increased dramatically in the decade since the financial crisis.
The SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap podcast combines a succinct summary of the week’s precious metals news coupled with thoughtful analysis. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.
If you look at past financial and economic crises, what is the common denominator?
Debt.
That’s why we talk so much about debt on these pages.
