Peter’s Blog

Most people believe members of the Federal Reserve are highly trained experts who are imminently qualified to run monetary policy.  Guided by this perception, the mainstream treats Fed pronouncements as gospel. But if you compare Fed projections to actual outcomes, it looks like they’re just guessing. In fact, you would probably get more accurate results […]

A month ago, the fake debt ceiling fight ended and Congress suspended the federal government’s borrowing limit for two years. Since the debt ceiling deal, the US Treasury has added a staggering $851 billion to the national debt.

Since the end of the fake debt ceiling fight on June 2, the Treasury has borrowed an additional $700 billion pushing the national debt over $32 trillion. Looking at the interest rates on this new debt, it becomes clear that the US government has a big problem.

Last week, the national debt pushed above $32 trillion. This is a ticking time bomb that will eventually explode.

There is the mainstream and market perception of what going on in the economy and financial system. And then there’s the underlying economic reality. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks about the growing divergence between the two in the context of the June Federal Reserve meeting and the […]

As was widely expected, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) put rate hikes on pause at the June meeting, although it indicated we should expect additional hikes before the end of the year. The question is how long will the pause last and will the next Fed move actually be a rate cut?

Congress “solved” the debt ceiling problem by effectively eliminating borrowing limits for the next two years. But it did nothing to address the underlying problem. And that underlying problem is painfully obvious when you look at the monthly budget deficits the federal government continues to run month after month. In May, the Biden administration piled […]

Despite the high interest environment intended to slow down borrowing, American consumers continue to run deeper and deeper into debt as they cope with sticky inflation. Consumer credit spiked by another $20 billion in April, a 5.7% increase year on year, according to the latest data released by the Federal Reserve.

I warned you. I said when the fake debt ceiling fight ended, the real problems would begin. Well, the debt ceiling fight is over, and here we are. On the first working day after the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act went into effect, the national debt surged by $359 billion.

With a debt ceiling deal done, the threat of a US government default is off the table for the time being. But a wave of corporate defaults is on the horizon according to Deutsche Bank’s annual default study. This is the inevitable consequence of central bank monetary policy and it was entirely predictable.