The inflation freight train is still hurtling down the track at breakneck speed.
Everybody expected a big Consumer Price Index number for March. When it was all said and done, we got what was expected. And then some.
There was a little March Madness on Wall Street. In fact, the month turned into an old-fashioned blood bath. But you wouldn’t have found any carnage in the stock market. In fact, the Dow Jones gained a decent 2.3% on the month. But beneath that glittery stock market stage (that attracts the most investor attention) there was some chaos in the orchestra pit. The normally sleepy bond market just experienced one of its worst months ever, and one of its worst quarters in over forty years, down almost 7%. The municipal bond market just posted its worst quarter since 1994, down more than 5%.
Earlier this week, Lael Brainard said the Federal Reserve will run off its balance sheet at a considerably more rapid pace than it did last time around. SchiffGold Friday Gold Wrap host Mike Maharrey thinks Brainard and the rest of the Fed officials suffer from delusions of grandeur if they think they can really pull this off. In this episode, he explains exactly why balance sheet reduction is doomed to fail.
Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard sounded a hawkish tone on Tuesday, promising to ramp up the inflation fight. As Peter Schiff put it in his podcast, the uber-dove started talking like a super-hawk. But the Fed members aren’t really going to be able to follow through on this inflation fight. In reality, they aren’t hawks. They’re chickenhawks.
Despite the biggest increase in average hourly wages for production and non-supervisory workers in 40 years, these people are actually worse off.
Why?
Rising prices are eating up their income gains.
Most people seem to think that tighter monetary policy will bring on a recession, but they believe that it will solve the inflation problem. In his podcast, Peter Schiff explained why they’ve got it half right. We are heading toward a recession, but it’s not going to solve the inflation problem. In reality, we’re heading for stagflation.
Last month, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by one-quarter percent in its first salvo against rampant inflation. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has indicated that the central bank will get more aggressive in its inflation fight in the coming months. Conventional wisdom holds that monetary tightening will reverse the impacts of the extraordinarily loose monetary policy we’ve seen over the last two years and bring inflation under control.
Will it though?
When you change the definition of words, it can create confusion. This is exactly why politicians have worked so hard to change the definition of inflation. As a result, a lot of people are very confused. In this Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey explains how the meaning of inflation has changed and why it matters. He also talks about signals flashing from the bond and real estate markets.
During a recent podcast, Peter Schiff talked about how the Bank of Japan lied about inflation being too low in order to justify its reckless monetary policy and keep interest rates artificially low in order to prop up the country’s massive debt. In a subsequent podcast, Peter talked about similar lies coming out of the European Central Bank.
Is the US about to go the way of Japan?
The Japanese yen tanked after the Bank of Japan vowed to buy an unlimited number of Japanese government bonds in order to hold the 10-year yield under its 0.25% target.
