We’re on the cusp of a new year. We certainly had a wild ride in 2021 with continuing coronavirus drama, inflation that turned out to be not so transitory, and a record-breaking stock market bubble. So, what was the biggest story of 2021? Friday Gold Wrap host Mike Maharrey thinks it was a story that wasn’t told – the story of real interest rates. He wraps up the year by telling that story.
Peter Schiff appeared on Judging Freedom with Judge Napolitano to talk about inflation.
Why are we suffering from it? Who’s to blame? And where is this leading?
Inflation is sizzling hot. Gold has historically served as an inflation hedge. So, why hasn’t gold caught a bid?
In a word, confusion.
Taper tantrums and fear of Fed rate hikes have generated massive confusion in the markets. People are selling gold when they should be heavily buying gold in the dips.
And at the root of this confusion is the failure to account for real interest rates.
Last week, the Fed sped up its timetable for tapering its asset purchases and raising interest rates. While this represents a slightly tighter monetary policy, it’s far from truly tight. And yet, the central bankers at the Fed and a lot of people in the mainstream seem to think these small steps will tame the inflation dragon. In fact, this slight tightening is a little like taking a pea shooter to a bazooka fight.
Despite finally acknowledging inflation will likely runner hotter and last longer than expected, there is still widespread belief that it is transitory in the long run. After all, we had a couple of decades of tame inflation, and that’s now viewed as the norm. In this podcast, Peter Schiff explains why the only thing that’s transitory is the era of low inflation.
After President Biden announced he was reappointing Jerome Powell for a second term as Federal Reserve Chairman, Powell went hawkish, saying it’s time to retire the word “transitory” when it comes to inflation and talking about speeding up the taper. In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks about the Powell transformation and questions whether a dove can really change his feathers.
The Federal Reserve pulled off a magnificent manipulation of the junk bond market, facilitated a massive wealth transfer from savers to speculators, pocketed millions of dollars, and then washed its hands of the matter.
In March 2020, as governments shut down the economy for coronavirus, the Fed slashed interest rates and launched a massive quantitative easing program. But that wasn’t enough, so the central bank took the unprecedented step of announcing it would purchase $750 billion in corporate bonds, junk bonds, bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and junk-bond ETFs.
The Federal Reserve has held interest rates artificially low for decades. This causes all kinds of distortions and misallocations in the economy.
And it’s creating quite a problem for the Social Security Administration.
The Federal Reserve wrapped up its November FOMC meeting on Wednesday and finally did something other than talk. The central bank announced it will begin to taper its massive quantitative easing program.
We know that the Federal Reserve pushes interest rates artificially low by manipulating the federal funds rate (the target interest rate that commercial banks borrow and lend their excess reserves to each other) and using monetary policy maneuvers such as quantitative easing. But could we have low interest rates without Fed intervention? In this clip, Peter Schiff explains the difference between artificially and naturally low interest rates and how the Fed messes up the economy with its intervention.
The Fed keeps talk, talk, talking about tapering quantitative easing, but the balance sheet continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
The Fed balance sheet stands at $8.45 trillion, up by$115 billion from the prior month-end.
