During his keynote speech at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference, Peter Schiff said we are at the beginning of the end.
The Fed appears to have paused interest rate hikes in order to save the stock market. The markets have reacted positively and a lot of analysts seem to think we’re out of the wood. But Peter traces the moves of the Federal Reserve all the way back to the first rate hike of December 2015 and shows how the central bank has put us on a path toward a financial crisis that will be bigger than 2008. Peter insists he’s been right about what would happen all along, it’s just taken us a little longer to get here than he expected.
Tocqueville Management Corp. chairman John Hathaway says the growing US government debt to GDP ratio poses “the most viable threat” to the US economy.
In his fourth-quarter investment letter, Hathaway said the ballooning US debt, coupled with a bear market and a recession, will likely weaken the dollar and send gold much higher in the near future.
Wall Street has been on a roller coaster ride over the last few months. If you listen to the pundits on the financial networks, you’ll hear the word “volatile” used over and over again. That word certainly seems to describe the current state of US stock markets and in a broader sense the economy. But during a recent interview on RT News with Rick Sanchez, Peter Schiff said it’s not that the economy is volatile. It’s actually a bubble. And we are on the verge of a bigger crisis than the one we went through in 2008.
There was no Santa Clause rally on Christmas Eve. Instead, US stock markets continued to tank. The Dow Jones dropped 653 points. The S&P 500 fell another 2.7% and officially entered into bear territory. It was the worst Christmas Eve’s on Wall Street in history. The Washington Post put it in stark terms.
By the end of Monday’s shortened holiday trading session, the great bull market that began in the lows of March 2009 lay lifeless, capping a three-week, 16 percent sell-off of the S&P 500.”
As Peter Schiff put it, “The Grinch stole the Santa Clause rally.”
The mainstream is starting to get a little bit nervous. As we reported yesterday, a CNBC interview with DoubleLine Capital founder Jeffrey Gundlach got the mainstream talking about the possibility of a bear market. There is also increasing concern about a looming recession. In a recent New York Times survey, almost half of the 134 CEOs polled said they thought the country could be in a recession by the end of the year.
Peter Schiff has been warning about a recession for months. In October, he said the recession that’s coming is going to be brutal. On Monday, Peter appeared on Fox Business with Lisa Kennedy to talk about the coming crisis and its political ramifications.
This is shaping up to be a December to remember.
Wall Street is on pace for its worst December since 1980.
A strong dollar in recent months has created the biggest headwinds for gold. But will dollar strength continue? Most foreign currency traders recently polled by Reuters don’t think so.
Reuters surveyed more than 60 currency analysts and the consensus was that the dollar would be weaker against major currencies in a year. The exchange strategists say slowing economic growth in the US will drag the greenback down in 2019.
The stock market got a nice bump on Monday with the news that there was a “truce” in the trade war. That lasted all of one day. The markets tanked on Tuesday as investors realized the “truce” really didn’t mean anything. The Dow Jones plunged 799 points, a 3.1% drop. The S&P 500 declined 3.2%, while the Nasdaq was down 3.8%. As one news outlet put it, “investors are quickly realizing that the US-China trade war is not over. The tariffs already put in place remain. And new tariffs could be implemented if the two sides fail to make progress.”
Well, yeah. Duh.
In his latest podcast, Peter Schiff said he wasn’t surprised at all by the drop.
Bankers, investors and executives are increasingly worried about corporate debt, according to a Reuters report.
Specifically, the concerns center around “leveraged lending.” These are loans made to firms already deeply in debt. Think subprime loans for corporations. As the Reuters report put it, “the concern is that the loans would be difficult to either collect or resell in a downturn, putting both the borrower and lender at risk.”
