In this week’s Friday Gold Wrap Podcast, JD and Joel discuss why gold is down this week, soaring tech stocks and plummeting gold stocks, and other market and precious metals news.
It looks like Joe Biden will ultimately win the presidential election, although it will likely be weeks before all of the official votes are in and the legal wrangling could go on even longer. One thing that is clear is that the polls were horribly wrong. They were projecting a Biden landslide. If Trump did lose, it was barely.
In his podcast, Peter Schiff offered some post-election analysis and said investors are as clueless as the pollsters.
I have a love-hate relationship with social media.
On the one hand, I now have a number of really close friends that I would have never met without Facebook. I’m talking people I connected with on the social media platform and now hang out with in real life. It’s pretty amazing to be able to interact with like-minded people across the US, and even around the world.
Many people have likened the battle against coronavirus to a war and invoked imagery of the US fighting World War II. President Trump has even deemed himself a “wartime president.”
The president told reporters at a White House briefing that fighting the virus would require a sacrificial national effort just like it took to defeat the Axis in the Second World War.
Stocks took off on Friday on several big news items – most significantly President Trump’s announcement that the US and China have worked out phase one of a trade deal. In his podcast, Peter broke down the news. He also made an interesting observation: Trump and the Federal Reserve seem to be reading off the same script.
The “Powell Pause” is not enough. President Donald Trump not only wants interest rates cuts; he wants to put quantitative easing back in play.
During an interview Friday, the president once again complained about the Fed’s 2018 interest rate increases, saying “they really slowed us down.” Trump wants stimulus and called on the Fed to resume Obama era QE.
The second quarter GDP number released Friday came in at 4.1%. It represents the fastest rate of growth since 2014. President Trump called the number “amazing,” bragging that, “We’ve accomplished an economic turnaround of historic proportions.”
Peter Schiff wasn’t quite as impressed. In his latest podcast, he said this “peak GDP” is an aberration and it’s setting the stage for a major economic fail.
Peter Schiff talked politics in his latest podcast and raised a sobering question: Could the US be on the path toward a socialist administration?
Peter noted that we are long overdue for a recession. There are plenty of signs a major economic downturn could be lurking right around the corner, including stock market weakness. And as we reported today, US Treasury yield curves are flattening. The average global yield curve has inverted. Inverting yield curves are a strong predictor of recession.
This is bad news for President Trump, who has taken credit for the “great” economy and strong stock market. Peter said the president has set himself up as the fall-guy when the crash happens. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is drifting further left.
Jobs numbers came out Friday better than expected.
According to the Labor Department, the US economy added 313,000 jobs last month, the most since October 2015. Economists had anticipated a gain of about 200,000. Wage growth was less stellar, ticking up just 0.1%. Analysts projected a 0.2% increase after a pretty significant jump of 0.3% in January spooked markets with inflation fears.
In his latest podcast, Peter Schiff said if he was a conspiratorial person – and he’s not – he would say, “Wait a minute, this looks too good to be true.”
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.
