A Complete Meltdown Is Coming

Summary

The Peter Schiff Show Podcast | “A Complete Meltdown Is Coming”
Host: Peter Schiff
Date: June 13, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Peter Schiff delivers a sobering outlook on the U.S. and global financial system, warning that a sovereign debt crisis and accompanying dollar crisis are not far off. Schiff analyzes headline events, particularly the historic SpaceX IPO and its wider implications for financial bubbles, discusses surges in U.S. deficit spending and interest costs, delves into the latest inflation data, and explains why he believes precious metals and mining stocks are still the best hedges against what’s coming. Throughout, he remains sharply critical of both political parties, the Federal Reserve, and widely-accepted Wall Street narratives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Warning: The Coming Meltdown

• Timestamp [00:00]:
  • Schiff immediately sets a dire tone:

    “We will have a complete meltdown. A sovereign debt crisis, a US Dollar crisis.”
    “The Fed has lost the fight against inflation… it can’t win because it can’t fight hard enough. It is impossible. Which means that crisis is not too far off.”

  • Emphasizes, repeatedly, the inevitability of this crisis due to compounding government debt and fiscal irresponsibility.

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2. The SpaceX IPO: Bubble Benchmark or ‘Peak Mania’?

• Timestamp [00:28 – 09:32]:
  • Schiff details the dynamics and historical significance of the SpaceX IPO:
    • IPO at $135/share, closed near $160, briefly above $170.
    • Company valuation crosses $2 trillion, making SpaceX the world’s sixth largest, “the most valuable money-losing company ever.”
    • Elon Musk becomes “the first trillion dollar man” by net worth, surpassing historical figures like J.D. Rockefeller even after inflation adjustments.
  • Interesting Quote [03:38]:

    “Rockefeller was earning the equivalent of $2 billion per year in income. Now, Elon Musk today… basically has no income. SpaceX loses money. His net worth is a function of the valuation of his publicly traded companies.”

  • Schiff argues SpaceX’s valuation, and much of Musk’s wealth, is “all about the bubble valuation” ([07:00]):
    • Massive premiums paid “to ride along on Elon Musk coattails.”
    • He likens current valuations to “the mother of all stock market bubbles,” a result of “years of monetary excesses, artificially low interest rates and money printing” ([07:49]).
  • Notes that other major, money-losing companies simply don’t approach this scale.

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3. Market Performance Recap and Precious Metals Volatility

• Timestamp [09:24 – 14:34]:
  • Market Recap: Despite the SpaceX hype, the broader Nasdaq was down for the week; “The standout performer… was the Russell 2000.”
  • Precious Metals: Huge intraweek plunge in gold, dipping below March lows (“just under 4,100”), but finish the week with a rebound to $4,218 ([11:29]).
  • Links the gold rally to global news—Trump’s abrupt reversals on threatening Iran ([11:38]):
    • Quote:

      “Yesterday morning, Donald Trump was promising to bomb the shit out of Iran... And then he put out a Truth Social, ‘Okay, I decided to call off my bombing.’ ...That turned the metals around.”

  • Emphasizes that “wars are inflationary” due to deficit spending and central bank monetization ([12:22]).
  • Positive divergence: Mining stocks finish week up despite gold/silver declines ([13:47]):
    • GDX +0.6%, GDXJ +2%—signaling potential leadership in next bull phase.

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4. Exploding US Deficits & Interest Costs: The Crisis Point Approaches

• Timestamp [16:26 – 21:42]:
  • Highlights a stunning 32% jump in May’s budget deficit over prior year ($292.6 billion), with interest expense up 44% year-over-year—now $1.6 trillion annualized ([16:26]).
  • Memorable Comparison:

    “We are now spending in interest alone as much as the entire government spent as late as 1997.”

  • Warns: At current trajectory, interest expense could consume 100% of tax revenues within a few years ([20:47]):

    • “We will have a complete meltdown, a sovereign debt crisis, a US Dollar crisis, before we get there” ([21:30]).

  • Cites ex-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson: “the US needs a break-the-glass plan for when foreigners stop buying our bonds” ([21:42]).
  • War with Iran factors heavily in deficit surge, but “the peace is going to be expensive” ([22:43]).

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5. Political Finger-Pointing & Historical Inflation Causality

• Timestamp [24:10 – 29:16]:
  • Criticizes Trump for blaming the war for economic woes—arguing both parties contribute to deficits and inflation ([24:10]):

    • “All of those tax cuts created larger deficits. Trump did not reduce the size of government… now we’re spending even more recklessly.”

  • Debunks the idea that present inflation is solely Biden’s fault:

    • “All of that inflation in 2021 and 2022 was created in 2020…by the massive increase in money supply under Trump’s presidency” ([26:27]).

  • Warns that the same mistaken policies have been “expanded” under Trump’s current term.

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6. Inflation Data: A Hidden Fire

• Timestamp [29:16 – 34:24]:
  • Reviews latest CPI and PPI data:
    • CPI up 0.5% in May, after 0.6% in April—2.52% YTD in just five months. On track for potentially 6.2% annual inflation ([29:16]).

    • “The Fed supposedly has an inflation target of 2%...but we’re at two and a half percent in the first five months of the year!”

  • PPI data even worse: consecutive 1.1% monthly increases—annualized, a “14% gain in producer prices,” which “are a leading indicator of consumer prices.”
  • Insists the true story is not “will the Fed fight harder,” but “the Fed can’t win because it can’t fight hard enough.”
    • “The Fed can bark… but it can’t bite.” ([32:39])

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7. Other Markets: Oil, Bonds, Dollar

• Timestamp [36:50 – 40:35]:
  • Oil prices drop ~$5-6 amid renewed optimism over ending the war with Iran ([37:05]).
  • Schiff doubts “the President’s” (Trump’s) repeated ceasefire declarations, reiterating that real supply disruptions will linger regardless.
  • Bond yields barely fall despite weak economic news; bond market remains “very, very weak... looking for a major breakdown” ([39:14]).
  • US Dollar Index slips; the usual “flight to safety” during war is far less potent than in past crises.

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8. Labor Market, Fed Balance Sheet, Quantitative Easing Returns

• Timestamp [38:20 – 39:14]:
  • Weekly jobless claims hit a four-month high, suggesting “weakening labor market.”
  • The Fed’s balance sheet jumps by $13.9 billion—signs that quiet quantitative easing is back.

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9. Deep Dive: Bitcoin, MicroStrategy, and the Crypto Flywheel

• Timestamp [45:45 – 54:26]:
  • Revisits the “death spiral” thesis for MicroStrategy (“Strategy”) and Michael Saylor:
    • Schiff claims Saylor’s latest “damage control” Bitcoin buy was funded by selling common stock at a discount, which was “deliberately dilutive” ([48:13 – 49:01]).

    • “He destroyed shareholder value on purpose to prop up bitcoin.”

    • Explains that the so-called “yield” on bitcoin is a fallacy:

      “There is no yield on bitcoin… There is no business that generates income.”

    • Notes that the flywheel is now running in reverse: every time Saylor must bail out Bitcoin by selling MSTR stock, the dilution worsens, exposing the fragility of the strategy:

      • “The only way Strategy is going to keep buying bitcoin is if it keeps diluting and creating a negative bitcoin yield.” ([51:10])

    • Predicts that MicroStrategy’s balance sheet constraints will, eventually, force a reckoning and may spark further declines.

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10. Investment Outlook: Metals & Miners Over Tech

• Timestamp [56:53 – 59:43]:
  • Schiff reaffirms conviction that precious metals and mining stocks (especially juniors) are the greatest speculative buys of the decade ([57:08]):

    • “I think the real money that's going to be made over the balance of this decade is not going to be in tech, it’s going to be in metals and mining.”

  • Compares current enthusiasm for tech to the dot-com bubble, predicting that “the opposite of what everybody expects is what’s going to happen.”

  • “We have a bigger stock market bubble now than we had then, and a bigger housing bubble than we had in 2007, 2008… potentially both bursting at the same time.”

  • Urges preparation for the looming crisis.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Opening warning:

  “We will have a complete meltdown… The Fed has lost the fight against inflation… it can’t win. Which means that crisis is not too far off.” ([00:00])

• On Musk/Rockefeller bubble wealth:

  “Elon Musk today… basically has no income. Space X loses money… His net worth is a function of the valuation of his publicly traded companies.” ([04:28])

• On the US fiscal path:

  “We are now spending in interest alone as much as the entire government spent as late as 1997.” ([17:55]) “It won’t take that many years before the US government is spending 100% of its tax revenue on interest on the national debt…” ([20:47])

• On political blame games:

  “All of that inflation… was created in 2020… by the massive increase in money supply under Trump’s presidency… The big increase in consumer prices didn’t hit until 2021, 2022.” ([26:27])

• On inflation and the Fed:

  “The Fed can bark… but it can’t bite…” ([32:39])

• On MicroStrategy/Saylor’s predicament:

  “He destroyed shareholder value on purpose to prop up bitcoin.” ([49:01]) “The only way Strategy is going to keep buying bitcoin is if it keeps diluting and creating a negative bitcoin yield.” ([51:10])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] – Opening warning: “A complete meltdown is coming”
• [00:28] – SpaceX IPO: bubble, Musk’s “trillion dollar man” status, history vs. present
• [09:24] – Market recap, precious metals volatility/rebound
• [13:45] – Positive divergence: mining stocks performance
• [16:26] – U.S. budget deficit and exploding interest expense
• [21:30] – “We will have a complete meltdown, …crisis is not too far off”
• [24:10] – Political blame games, Trump’s ‘scapegoat’ and inflation causality
• [29:16] – May CPI, PPI, and implications for inflation trajectory
• [32:39] – The Fed has “lost the fight”; it “can bark but can’t bite”
• [36:50] – Oil, bond market, labor market
• [45:45] – Bitcoin/MicroStrategy “death spiral” analysis
• [56:53] – Precious metals, miners, and the coming asset rotation
• [59:43] – Closing outlook; preparing for crisis

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Tone and Language

Peter Schiff's delivery is direct, urgent, and often caustically skeptical of mainstream financial and political narratives. He marries historical analysis and present-day market watch with sharp criticism and (self-described) “unbiased coverage,” making compelling arguments for preparing for “the mother of all financial crises” by pivoting away from overvalued tech and into hard assets.

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Summary

This episode is a tour-de-force of Schiff’s economic concerns: record-setting market events like the SpaceX IPO serve, for him, as loud signals of an unprecedented bubble. He sees the surging federal deficits, ballooning interest costs, and relentless inflation as mounting to a point of no return, one neither the Fed nor politicians (of either party) can forestall. As “mania” persists in stocks and crypto, Schiff doubles down on precious metals and miners as both safe haven and high-upside plays. Above all, he urges listeners to recognize the signs, reject popular narratives, and position themselves for the inevitable financial reckoning he forecasts.

Transcript

[Peter Schiff]

We will have a complete meltdown. A sovereign debt crisis, a US Dollar crisis.

The Fed has lost the fight against inflation. And it's not that it has to fight harder to win, it's that it can't win because it can't fight hard enough. It is impossible. Which means that crisis is not too far off.

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Host]

The Peter Schiff Show.

[Peter Schiff]

So, first of all, the big story of the day of the week is the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO. SpaceX first started trading early this morning. I believe the IPO price was $135 a share. If you were lucky enough to get any on the IPO, it was the biggest IPO in history, raising $75 billion. But that's still a small percentage of the overall value of the company. At that price, Space X was valued at about 1.8 trillion. But it opened for trading at about $150 a share. I think it closed at about 160. Intraday High was somewhere north of 170. So it closed with not quite a 20% pop, but that was enough to push the total value of Space x north of $2 trillion. I think that leaves Space X as the sixth largest company in the world with that valuation. And it also pushed Elon Musk over the one trillion mark. He is now the first trillion dollar man. He has a personal net worth of $1 trillion. Not only is Elon Musk the richest man alive, he is the richest man to ever live. Now, it may not be true with a couple of, you know, government rulers over history, I'm not really sure. But if you look at private individuals who amass their wealth in a market economy, he's number one. And a lot of people don't realize this, but up until Elon Musk came along, J.D. rockefeller held that spot. Yes, we've had a lot of wealthy people in the last 10 years, tech titans who have amassed 50100 billion, 200 billion net worths. But adjusted for inflation, none of those guys could hold a candle to J.D. rockefeller until Musk. And I think, adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller's net worth, and this is over 100 years ago in the early 1900s, his net worth, adjusted for over 100 years of inflation was about $700 billion, something like that. An astronomically high number that nobody came close to until Elon Musk. And now he's topped it. And not only just adjusted for inflation, but relative to the overall US gdp, Elon Musk's personal net worth is now a greater share of US GDP than was John David Rockefeller's he's again the first person, I think, to have done that. But to put all this into perspective, Rockefeller made his money predominantly with Standard Oil. And his personal share and his various trusts amounted to about $2 billion a year, adjusted for inflation. That is a hell of a lot of income. I'm not talking about capital gains. I'm talking about a business that's generating actual income that you can spend at its peak or his peak.

J.D.

rockefeller was earning the equivalent of $2 billion per year in income. Now, Elon Musk today, even though he's richer than Rockefeller, he basically has no income. Space X, even though it is the fifth most valuable company or six most valuable company in the world, and it just had the biggest ipo, Space X loses money. It operates in the red. And even when you take into account Trump, I mean, Musk's profitable companies, I don't know that he actually makes any money. I think he operates at about a break even now. Sure, he has a lot of wealth because he owns assets that he can sell and generate cash to spend. He can generate capital gains by selling stock, but his net worth is a function of the valuation of his publicly traded companies. Now, SpaceX, based on where it closed today, at about $160 a share, it's trading at around 100 times revenue. That is a crazy valuation for a company this big. SpaceX is by far the most expensive major company. Now I'm sure there's tiny little companies, you know, biotech companies, whatever, that can trade for 100 times revenue, but big companies, mega cap companies or Fortune 500 companies, none of those companies trades at anywhere near 100 times our revenue. So Space X is the most expensive major company and it's also the most valuable company in the world that loses money. There can't be any company. I don't know what number two is as far as this list of of high value for money losing companies, but there's no way there's another company anywhere close to a $2 trillion valuation that is losing money.

That is Space X.

But you know, to compare Musk and

Rockefeller, the point I'm making is this is all about the bubble valuation.

It is about the market ascribing an

insane valuation to the assets, particularly the

publicly traded companies

Tesla and Space X

that Elon Musk owns. Because back in the John D. Rockefeller

days, we didn't have a stock market bubble.

So his shares of Standard Oil weren't

valued anywhere near where the market values SpaceX. And not only is that valuation based

in large Part on what people hope was going to happen, but just based on the overall excess valuations that we have because of years of monetary excesses, artificially low interest rates and money printing

that have created the mother of all stock market bubbles. And SpaceX may be the epitome of that.

Now, setting aside crypto and bitcoin, which,

you know, completely take the cake as far as actual businesses, this might be it. Now I know the markets are still looking forward to the open air IPO and anthropic IPO. Those are the other $2 trillion companies waiting in the wings. So maybe we didn't peak with Space X.

But look, we've had so much hype

around the Space X ipo. So much of it wrapped up in the Elon Musk Persona. And a lot of the valuation of

the company is simply because of the

premium that investors are willing to pay to ride along on Elon Musk coattails. And you know, there's a lot of pressure for people to buy into this

stock and that's helping to drive the momentum. But we'll see if this is the peak of the mania and if it, you know, we got the peak at the SpaceX IPO. The overall market itself did not do much on the week. In fact, the Nasdaq was actually down and Space X is now a NASDAQ stock. It's got a four letter ticker symbol. But the overall Nasdaq was down about a third of a percent on the

week and that weighed down the S&P

500 to finish slightly, slightly negative on the week.

The Dow up a tad under 0.2%.

The standout performer is in the US equity markets was the Russell 2000, which was actually up about 3% on, on the week. But I think the big moves in the week happened with precious metals. We had a big sell off in gold and silver intra week. In fact gold earlier in the week think it was Wednesday and then again on Thursday morning. Gold actually took out the low from March 23rd, my birthday. That's when gold had a low of just under 4,100. And what turned gold around and it almost got back up to 4800 in the ensuing weeks. But what turned it around was Trump calling off, you know, he was going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age. He was going to send him into oblivion. I forget whatever it was. And then all of a sudden on Truth Social he said, okay, everything looks great, I think we got a deal, the war is over and everything turned around and we got the big rally in Gold and silver. Well, gold now has not only gone all the way back down to the March 23rd low, which was just under 4,100. It was 4,098 or something like that. We took out that low by at least 30 or 40 bucks. I forget exactly where we got, but we were down around 4040 or 4050. We never got to 4000 and we

didn't take that marker out.

So I suppose that that's still possible. But so far it looks like we had a successful retest of that low

because gold closed a week above 4200. We closed at 4218, had a big move yesterday up about $140.

Again, a similar catalyst. Yesterday morning, Donald Trump was promising to

bomb this shit out of Iran and he was threatening it from the previous evening.

And then he put out a truth social. Okay, I decided to call off my bombing. I'm not going to bomb the shit out of him tonight because we're having

some great talks with some high level representatives of the Iranian government.

And that turned the metals around.

But again, a long drawn out war

is more bullish for gold and silver

than the end of the war.

The markets have convinced themselves that the war is bearish for precious metals.

Investors are wrong. The war is very bullish for precious metals because wars are inflationary. They're inflationary not because they make the price of oil go up. It's because of the way that governments pay for wars. They pay for wars with deficit spending and those deficits get monetized by the central bank. And that's where the inflation comes from. So this is actually bullish for gold. Traders just haven't figured that out. But also I think that this was a positive week. Not only did we successfully retest the low, yes, we took out the low, but we closed comfortably above it. That's a successful retest. You can go below it slightly. The question is, what do you do when you get below the low? Do you collapse or do you recover? In this case, we recover.

So I think we took out some

of the tight sell stops. People might have thought the low is going to hold. Let me get long some gold futures and I'll put a stop beneath the prior low. They got stopped out. But instead of the break of the lows causing a cascade of selling, buyers stepped in to buy those news. New lows sending gold back up. So we'll see what happens next week when we get the FOMC meeting. But another positive divergence on the week

was the mining stocks.

Gold and silver stocks actually finished positive on the week despite declines in the metal. Gold was down 2 1/2% on the week. Silver held up relatively well, only down 1.1%. The GDX was up 0.6% on the week and the Juniors GDXJ up 2% on the week despite the sell off in gold and silver. So that is a positive divergence. But I think what's really going to be driving the metals higher is the explosion in U.S. deficit spending in part

attributable to the war.

But nobody is talking about these numbers and what they portend. But I'm going to talk about it right after this break, so stick around

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Host]

and don't go anywhere.

[Peter Schiff]

I'll be right back.

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Host]

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[Peter Schiff]

on its own terms.

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Host]

The tickers are GRL on the TSX venture or GRLMF on the usotc. This segment is disseminated on behalf of Greenlight Metals. I have been compensated for this content. This is not financial advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principle. Do your own research.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, while everybody is Talking about the SpaceX IPO and what might be going on up in space. Nobody is talking about what's going on down here on planet Earth, especially with the US Government. We got the numbers for May that were released this week. I think it was yesterday. This was the amount of money, the deficit spending that is going on with the US government. The May budget deficit exploded, exploded by 32% over the same month last year. $292.6 billion is how much money the US government borrowed just last month. That is to, that is well above the 269 billion that had been expected a year ago. In May, it was $215 billion. But what's more incredible than the increase in borrowing is the increase in interest expense. Interest expense exploded by 44% in just one year. The US government is now spending $1.6 trillion a year on interest. If you take the interest from last month and you multiply it by 12, that's what you get. We spent, the U.S. government paid $133 billion in interest in a single month. That's $1.6 billion, 1.6 trillion annualized. Now, to put that number in perspective, that's 30% of what the government collects in taxes. All the taxes that we pay, income taxes, payroll taxes, Social Security taxes, whatever the government's collecting, the tariffs, all that revenue combined, 30% of it is now earmarked just to pay interest on what we spent in the past, not to cover any of the current spending. As a matter of fact, in 1997, the entire budget of the federal government was 1.6 trillion. So we are now spending in interest alone as much as the entire government spent as late as 1997. But what's even more dangerous is the trend, because it wasn't that long ago that that interest expense topped 1 trillion for the first time. Now we're zeroing in on 2 trillion. And I said this back when it hit 1 trillion, that we would get to 2 trillion. I said we would be at 2 trillion before Trump finished his term. And we're going to get there because we're already more than halfway there at 1.6 trillion. And what happens is every month you have low yielding debt that matures, money that the government borrowed when interest rates were at rock bottom, when rates were at zero. And as this debt matures and the government has to roll it over, it has to reborrow the money to pay back the old lenders. It has to refinance at the now much higher rates, somewhere between 4 and 5%. And so that adds tremendously to the debt servicing cost. So probably by next year, the US government is going to be spending $2 trillion a year, more than $2 trillion a year, just in interest on the national debt.

And at that point, we'll be devoting

40% of our tax revenue to paying interest on the national debt.

And it won't take that many years

before the US government is spending 100% of its tax revenue on interest on the national debt, meaning there's no money left over for anything else. No money for Social Security, no money

for Medicare, no money for national defense, no money for anything.

Because all of the money the government

collects in taxes will already be earmarked

to pay interest to our creditors. Now, of course, that would mean the US Government would have to borrow money

to finance all the other spending.

This is impossible. We are not going to get to a situation where 100% of tax revenues go to interest.

We will have a complete meltdown, a sovereign debt crisis, a US Dollar crisis, before we get there.

Which means that crisis is not too far off.

That's why Hank Paulson said that the US Needs a break the glass plan to deal with the situation when foreigners

no longer want to buy our bonds,

because looking at the data, they should

already be balking at buying our bonds.

They should already be dumping our bonds for across the board, given the trajectory of the debt.

And one of the reasons that we

are now borrowing and spending so much more money than we were borrowing and spending a year ago when we were borrowing and spending a lot of money, is the money to fight the war with Iran. But even if this war ends, and I don't know that it's actually going to end, the President has cried wolf many, many times in the last three or four months on this war being over. And so I don't believe any of this. I'll believe it when it actually happens. But even if the war ends, the

peace is going to be expensive. We're going to spend a lot of money after the war, much more than we were spending before the war because of the war. The war is going to cost us a lot of money even after we win it. Plus, everything else is getting more expensive. But, you know, one of the things that Donald Trump is, you know, basically, you know, using as a scapegoat is the war. I hear him talking in interviews, and he says that, you know, before the war, we had the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had no inflation whatsoever. And I kind of hated to do this because things were just so great. And we had the greatest stock market ever Everything was great, all thanks to me. But then, you know, I had to do this thing with Iran because if I didn't, they would have nuked us by now. And so I had to deliberately harm the greatest economy in the history of the world, which is all BS because if we really had the greatest economy in the history of war of the world, we could afford the war. The reality is we didn't have it. But the war allows Trump to pretend that we had it and to now blame all of the problems on the war, which is one of the reasons I don't believe the war is going to end. Because if the war ends, then the scapegoat is gone. What is Trump going to use then? To blame all the problems, to blame

the inflation, to blame the weakness in the economy? My feeling is that what Trump probably

wants to do is, is end the war within a couple of weeks of the midterms, because then he can have this great accomplishment, although he's already claimed the greatest victory in the history of warfare. So I'm not really sure what actually winning is going to do beyond, you know, what we've already taken credit for,

what he's taking credit for.

But if he waits till right before the midterms, then, you know, there's not a lot of time for things to keep getting bad. Because Trump says that as soon as the war ends, the economy is going to boom, oil is going to crash, everything's going to be great. And if the war ended next week and by Election Day, none of those things happened, it would be difficult. But if he waits till the election is around the corner, then he could promise the big boom after the election. But if the elect, if the war ends next week, and if things are worse come Election Day, if oil is

actually more expensive on Election Day than

it is now, which it could be, and the economy is in worse shape, then what is he going to do? What are the Republicans going to do? So it may serve the political interests of Trump and the Republicans to keep this war going so it can be

blamed for everything bad that happens between now and the midterms.

And speaking about bad things that are happening, look at the inflation numbers.

And again, the inflation numbers are being

driven by this reckless government spending.

You know, I'm getting sick and tired of the Stephen Moore is out there, the Art Laffers and Larry Kudlow talking about how high inflation was under Obama and how it's gone now under Trump.

No, it's not.

2026 could be higher.

You know, the CPI could move up

more in 2026 than any year under Biden. Now right now it's on pace to be a bigger year than all but one year under Biden.

I think 2022 was the peak year.

But what none of these pundits understand is that all of that inflation in

2021 and 2022 was created in 2020.

It was created by the massive increase in money supply under Trump's presidency to fund the deficits during COVID that Trump signed on to. So the inflation was created by Trump and by the Fed under Trump. The results of that inflation, the big increase in consumer prices, didn't hit until 2021, 2022. Now they're blaming all that on Biden. All that inflation would have been there even if Trump had been reelected to a second consecutive term. The best thing to happen to Trump was that he didn't win in 2020. So none of the inflation that he created manifest on his watch. So he was able to take a step back and say, look, inflation was really low when I left office. And look what Biden did. All Biden did was inherited the inflation fire that was lit under Trump. And if you look at what happened to inflation during the last couple of years of the Biden, it was, it was lower. Not that Biden did anything right. But the, all the big increases in consumer prices were front loaded based on what Trump did and what Congress did before Biden even took the oath of office. But we're going to see massive inflation during Trump's second term, mainly because of the big beautiful bill. You have all of these Republicans embracing the big beautiful bill. They keep crediting Donald Trump for cutting taxes on tips, cutting taxes on overtime, cutting taxes on Social Security. All of those tax cuts created larger deficits. Trump did not reduce the size of government. He signed a bill that made government bigger and more expensive. They expanded on all the reckless spending of the Biden era. And so now we're spending even more recklessly than we were then. We have even bigger deficits now than we had then, and we're going to have even higher inflation. Yet all of these conservatives are criticizing Biden for his deficits and pretending that Trump doesn't have any. They're pretending that we've done this massive 180 and we've put the inflation genie that the Democrats let loose back in the bottle when the genie is going to be out there doing more damage than ever because we continued and expanded on the very policies that the conservatives are criticizing. And the numbers speak for themselves. All you have to do is look at the CPI and the, the pie. We got these numbers. They just came out this week. The CPI came out first.

And in May, consumer prices rose 0.5%. That is a big number. That's just one month. And they rose 0.6% in, in the prior month. So back to back, big increases in consumer spending. I wrote something on the annualized pace of how much inflation we've had just in the first five months of, of this year. I'm trying to scroll through my X feed. Here it is. In the first five months of 2026, the CPI is already up 2.52%. So the Fed supposedly has an inflation target of 2% that it hasn't hit in like what, six years or something like that. But we're at two and a half percent in the first five months of the year. If you just annualize that, if this, if the next seven months have the same increase in consumer prices as the first five months, that's 6.2% increase in CPI. That's the most since 2020. And you know, if we go much higher than that, we're going to take out the 2022 high and it'll be the highest inflation since 1981 under Trump, not under Biden. And as bad as the consumer price numbers are, the producer price numbers are even worse. But you know, the markets didn't react that much other than precious metals. Now gold and silver, you know, got clobbered as a result of the hot numbers. It was CPI and PPI that really drove gold and silver down. Because again, traders look at these hotter than expected or hot inflation numbers as indicating that, okay, the Fed's going to have to work harder to rein in inflation. They don't yet get that. The real meaning of these hot inflation numbers is that the Fed has lost the fight against inflation. And it's not that it has to fight harder to win, it's that it can't win because it can't fight hard enough. It is impossible. The Fed cannot raise interest rates nearly enough to rein in runaway inflation. That's why inflation is going to run away because of all the debt I just mentioned. We're spending $1.6 trillion and rising annually on interest with interest rates where they are. As the Fed increases interest rates to fight inflation, the net interest expense of the US Government goes higher and higher and higher, putting more upward pressure on already exploding annual budget deficits. So the Fed is backed in. The Fed can bark when it comes to fighting inflation, but it can't bite. And we're going to see that, you know, next week when we get the rate decision. And Kevin Wash doing a press conference to explain the Fed's likely inaction. But we're in a box.

Now.

The markets like the fact that producer prices rose slightly less than expected. They rose or not. I mean, the core cpi, I jumped ahead of myself. Core consumer prices rose just 0.2. The expectation was for a rise of 0.3. Big deal. Yes, it was up 0.4 the prior month, but it doesn't matter. It's one month. Meanwhile, the year over year core was up 2.9. That was hotter than the 2.8 from the prior month and in line with the 2.9 consensus. So all in all, the numbers met expectations, but the expectation was for a bad number and we got a bad number, but the producer prices were worse. Producer prices. Now, last month it was reported that producer prices rose by 1.4% in one month, which was a shockingly big number. That got revised down to a gain of just 1.1%, which is still big. Now, this month was supposed to be just 0.7. Instead it was another 1.1. So taken together, these two numbers are worse than we thought. Because the 1.1 exceeds the 0.7 by more than their downward revision from 1.4 to 1.1. We have back to back monthly increases of 1.1. That's 14% annualized gain in producer prices. This is a insanely hot number that is going to get hotter and hotter

as the inflation that is already in

the pipeline starts to manifest itself in rising prices. Remember, there is a lag. As I said, we created all this inflation under Trump, but due to the lag, the effect that inflation has on prices, it showed up when Biden was president. The inflation is the expansion of the money supply, the expansion of credit. The result of that is that prices go up, but there is a lag. It doesn't happen immediately. It takes some time for the increased money and credit to work its way through the economy and to push up consumer prices. And also producer prices are a leading indicator of consumer prices. Producer prices go up first and then consumer prices follow. And so what we're seeing is indicative of tremendous upward pressure on inflation that the markets are completely ignoring. Anyway, stick around. We got a little bit more to talk about in our final segment, so don't go anywhere.

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[Peter Schiff]

a look at what happened in some of the other markets. It's not just the stock market or the precious metals market. You really got to take a look

at what's happening in the bond market, the oil market.

With the US dollar, one of the bigger moves on the week was oil.

Oil did drop 5 or $6. I think we closed just above $84

a barrel, which is about as low as we've been in a while on

renewed hopes that we are on the

cusp of a deal to end this war and fully reopen the strait of our moves. Now again, as I've said, the President has cried wolf too many times for

me to believe him.

But we'll see.

The markets are look like maybe they

believe them this time where oil is. But I think when the war is

finally over, we could get a big rally in oil, maybe a slight decline. But we have been pricing in an end of the war for many, many months now and by the time it does end, it's old news and the market should rally because we have had a major disruption to supply. It's going to take many, many months to clear up the bottleneck. I think we're still underestimating the damage that has been done to global oil supplies and how much higher the price

of oil is going to go.

Even if the war Ends next week

and we'll see if that happens.

But one thing that's also interesting is that the bond market barely got a

lift from this data. Oh, and by the way, I didn't mention the jobs numbers, the weekly unemployment

numbers that we got. Remember we got a stronger than expected

jobs report a week ago and I

talked about that on the podcast.

But the, the weekly jobless claims jumped to the Highest in about four months.

229,000 weekly jobless claims again, four, four months high.

You got to go back to early

February to get a number that high. So that shows a weakening labor market. And by the way, the Fed's balance sheet is on the rise. The most recent week saw a $13.9 billion increase in the Fed's balance sheet. We are doing quantitative easing. The Fed has not officially acknowledged that yet, but it's going to crank up the presses as the budget deficits get bigger and we get more upward pressure on interest rates. Bond yields, as I started to say, barely declined on the week despite the big drop in crude oil prices and the spin that was put on the CPI where the core was not quite as bad as they thought it was going to be. You barely had a decline. The Yield on the 10 year treasury slipped to 4.48 I think for maybe 4.51 or 2, so barely went down. And the 30 year went to 4.98. Maybe from 5.01 or.02 it was just north of four and a half and now it's barely south. So the bond market is looking very, very weak. Looking for a major breakdown. The US Dollar index lost a little ground. It had moved back above 100 last week and now it closed back below, I think just below 99.8 again. The rally that we got in the dollar as a result of the war with Iran was nothing compared to dollar rallies that we've seen in the past. When you've had that kind of military action, there's been a flight to safety, a flight to quality that put a much bigger bid not only in the US Dollar, but in the US treasury market.

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[Peter Schiff]

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[Peter Schiff]

A lot.

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[Peter Schiff]

This time the dollar barely rose and treasury prices fell.

So the game has changed.

It's just that the Fed and Wall street and our elected leaders don't understand how that game has changed. But one place the game really seems to be changing is in crypto. And I want to follow up on the Bitcoin story because the title of my podcast last week was all about the death spiral in strategy. Well, Michael Saylor did some damage control. Remember he sold 32 bitcoin and, you know, everything collapsed. I mean, it was hardly anything compared

to the, you know, 800,000 or so that strategy owns.

So he was in a lot of trouble. And so he had to do damage control. And so what Strategy ended up announcing on Monday was a new bitcoin buy. They bought way more bitcoin. They bought like 100 million worth of bitcoin, way more than they sold. And so this was Michael Saylor's trying to show the market. So you see, I'm not a seller. Look, look how much I bought. And you had the crypto community talking about him like he was a genius because he sold 32 bitcoin at a higher price. And then the market crashed and he was able to take advantage of the dip that he caused by buying even more. So what a genius. Look how smart this guy was. He outsmarted everybody. His real goal was to buy more cheap bitcoin. And so he sold a little bit to make the market go down so he could snap up bitcoin on the cheap, which is all bs. Saylor is never trying to buy cheap bitcoin. If he was, he would just shut up and buy. He's trying to use his buying to prop up the price of bitcoin. He always telegraphs his buys in advance. His buys are designed to push the market up, not to get a good price for strategy. But what everybody missed, right, everybody but me, was how did Michael Saylor pay for the 100 million worth of Bitcoin? He didn't sell any more stretch because he couldn't do that because that's still below 100. I think stretch closed about 95 or 96, something like that, on the week. So he can't issue any more stretch because it has to be at 100 unless he wants to raise the dividend, which he doesn't want to do.

So where did he get the money? He sold common stock. You know, he has an at the market agreement. He can sell at will, shares of strategy.

And he did.

But the problem is strategy went down

even more than bitcoin.

If Saylor was so smart, he would have sold those shares a week earlier. No, he had no intention of having

to buy all this bitcoin.

He was forced to do it because he had to do something to try

to get out of jail. It was damage control.

So he sold shares of strategy at a big discount to the bitcoin per share value.

So in other words, he destroyed shareholder value on purpose to prop up bitcoin.

Saylor has always been talking about the bitcoin yield.

And I've never liked the expression yield, because bitcoin doesn't have a yield in the traditional sense. Just like I mentioned earlier in the podcast that Rockefeller was earning 2 billion

a year in actual income, whereas Elon Musk generates his money through capital gains. But selling appreciated stocks or borrowing money

against appreciated stocks is not the same thing as earning actual money from an operating company.

And so there is no yield on bitcoin.

There is no yield on strategy. There is no business that generates income. Strategy tries to make money by playing

around with its balance sheet. By issuing stock at a premium and then buying bitcoin. That's not really a yield. Yes, it's a gain, but it's not

to be confused with an actual yield. It's deliberate deception on the part of Saylor.

But be that as it may, he always said that the value of strategy

was its ability to generate a yield on bitcoin. So that when you buy shares of

strategy, you end up owning more bitcoin.

The bitcoin per share keeps going up,

and so why buy bitcoin when you can buy strategy, when strategy grows your ownership of bitcoin? Because owning strategy is like owning a bitcoin fund that has bitcoin, but your bitcoin per share is going up because

of this, you know, flywheel that he's created.

Well, it's running in reverse. What Saylor did was he sold strategy,

and the money he got per share

was not enough to buy a whole bitcoin.

So he had to reduce the bitcoin per share. It was dilutive.

It was not accretive.

If Saylor were really trying to manage his book and optimize shareholder value, he would sell bitcoin and then buy back stock, which is at a discount. To close the discount, that would actually increase the bitcoin per share if he sold some bitcoin and bought back his shares. But he can't do that because he's already proven he can't do that because he tried to sell 32 and the market imploded. So he sold the only thing he could sell, which was strategy common stock, despite the fact that it was dilutive and reduced bitcoin per share. So strategy shareholders are worse off despite this bitcoin buy. So they're all celebrating it. Hey, this is great. Look, he's buying bitcoin and they're missing the bigger picture. What he had to do, and the only way strategy is going to keep buying bitcoin is if it Keeps diluting and creating a negative bitcoin yield. And the longer it does it, the bigger the yield. Now, also, one of the things that Strategy did when it sold stock, it didn't take all of the cash and buy bitcoin. It kept an extra hundred billion to increase its dollar cash reserve from 900 million to a billion. Why did it do that?

Because Stretch shareholders were getting worried about the ability of Strategy to pay that cash dividend because they had already depleted 60% of their cash reserves, paying off some zero interest preferred a couple of years early. So in order to placate the Stretch shareholders and to get that stock to bounce a bit, he increased his cash reserves to say, hey, look, we've got extra money. Don't worry about that dividend. Well, you still have to worry because he doesn't have that much cash. He's going to have to sell even more bitcoin to pay that dividend. And that means he's going to have to. If he doesn't want to sell bitcoin to pay that dividend, which he doesn't, because he can't, he's going to have to sell Strategy common stock. He's going to have to keep selling Strategy stock both to buy more bitcoin and to raise cash to keep paying the dividend on the preferred.

This is the death spiral that I

talked about, and it is about to run out of control. Yes, there was a small little bounce in Strategy stock, but it actually ended up closing slightly negative on the week, down about a quarter of 1%. Even though Bitcoin itself was up about

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Host]

a quarter of 1%.

[Peter Schiff]

Bitcoin managed to take out the, you know, the $60,000 low. But as I am recording this podcast right now, it's about 6, almost 6:30 Eastern Time. Bitcoin is trading at 63,600. So it's above that 60,000, but it's still below the 65,000 support level. I think all of this is just consolidation. We're consolidating above the old lows. We took them out, we did rally a bit, but on a chart, it doesn't look that convincing to me. I still think we're in a major downtrend in bitcoin and we're likely to take out the lows.

I think the next big move is going to be down and I think

it's going to be fueled by strategy.

I think strategy is going to lead bitcoin lower, and a lot of the

selling pressure on bitcoin is going to come not only from Strategy actually selling shares but the market starting to realize

the box that Saylor is in.

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[Peter Schiff]

some point strategy is going to trade at such a big discount to its bitcoin per share because of what it's doing that it's going to cut off sailors ability to continue to do it. Because at some point the discount is

so great that the market would implode if you continued the fiction of basically

sacrificing your own shareholders to prop up bitcoin. It's using your stock as a bitcoin bailout fund. Because strategy or Saylor knows that if bitcoin collapses then the whole game is over anyway. And so he's kind of in a,

in the same kind of rock and

a hard place that the Fed is it.

It's damned if it does and it's damned if it doesn't.

But I think we're really starting to run out of time when it comes to Saylor. In the meantime, Look, I think 4,000 is about as low as we're going

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Host]

to get here in gold.

[Peter Schiff]

You know, maybe we'll get a little bit below it depending on the reaction next week to the FOMC meeting. But of course it could spark a huge rally in gold. So I would be front running, getting positioned before that meeting.

Now by buying gold and silver, I'd be loaded up if there's, you know,

it is a great dip. Silver prices are, you know, they, they, as I said, they held up pretty good this week.

They had some volatile trading.

Let me look at where they are

as I'm winding up this podcast here. Gold, as I mentioned, is just, just above 4200, 4218. Silver is just below 68, 67, 91. I doubt we're going to go below 60. We did get down to like 63

[Podcast Sponsor/Ad Host]

or something like that.

[Peter Schiff]

I forget exactly where the low was, but I think anything below 70 at this point is a great buy for silver. So I would be going to shift gold over the weekend and buying some gold and silver or if you haven't opened up your T Gold account yet, go over there tgold.com and buy some gold and silver there. The mining stocks again, I divergence. They were actually positive on the week, but they're still, I think the greatest speculative buys out there where everybody is focusing on tech and on space X. I think the real money that's going to be made over the balance of this decade is not going to be in, in tech, it's going to be in metals and mining. It's going to be in inflation hedges. The opposite of what everybody expects is what's going to happen. This is the same type of enthusiasm that we had in 1999, 2000 for tech and then we had a decade where the outperformance was in hard assets, real things, gold, silver, energy, commodities, emerging markets. I think the setup is perfect to repeat the same types of returns that we saw following the bursting of the dot com bubble with the bursting of an even bigger bubble. Not only do we have a bigger stock market bubble now than we had then, but we have a bigger housing bubble now than we had in 2007, 2008 and they're both gonna be bursting potentially at the same time, creating the mother of all financial crises that will be a sovereign debt and a US dollar crisis. So make sure and prepare yourself. Anyway, that's it for today's podcast and I am finishing up my vacation at sea. So the next time I do a podcast, I will be back on land in my vacation home in Connecticut. So I guess I'll still be on vacation, but I won't be on the boat. I'll be back at sea and I'll be doing these, these podcasts from land. Probably a better quality. I think I, when I recorded this

one that the sun was right or

shining on me somehow. It might have made it harder for everybody to see me, but I'll be it'll be easier for me to control the lighting when I'm inside. Meanwhile, if you like this podcast, don't forget to give it a thumbs up, give it a like and leave a comment. And if I able to, I will reply. Anyway, bye for now and have a great weekend everybody.