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Make no friends in the pits and you take no prisoners. One minute you're up half a million in soybeans, and the next, boom. Your kids don't go to college and they've repossessed your Bentley. Are you with me? The revolution starts now. Starts now. We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it. Turn those machines back on. You are about to enter the Peter Schiff Show Me the Money. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. The Peter Schiff show is on. I don't know when they decided that they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness. Your money, your stories, your freedom. The Peter Schiff Show. Well, earlier today, the Federal Reserve did exactly what everybody expected them to do, including yours truly, and that was leave interest rates unchanged. The Fed funds rate remains at 3 and a half to 3 and 3 quarters. Of course, the right thing to have done would have been a substantial rate hike, but of course, that did not happen. But what I wanna discuss before I get into the details of the Fed's decision and the press conference that followed, I want to talk about some of the economic data that came out before we got the news that really set the tone for the markets, particularly the precious metals markets. We got news on inflation, producer prices, and this is for the month of February. So it's really before Trump started a war. And remember last week I went over the horrible GDP numbers. In fact, I went over them on the Shift Gold Friday market wrap, because I think we got the GDP numbers at the end of the week. So I didn't address them on my main podcast. I did it at Schiff Gold. Make sure you are a subscriber to the Schiffgold YouTube channel to get the weekly Friday market wraps. But I went over the GDP numbers, which shocked everybody in how weak it was. Q4 GDP grew at just 0.7 annualized. Annualized. Not even 1% economic growth. Donald Trump is talking about this economic boom, this miraculous turnaround that he has presided over. And growth is anemic. In fact, for all of 2025, GDP grew at 2.2%. That's 20% below the 2.8% GDP growth from Biden's last year when we supposedly had the worst economy in the history of the world. And now that we have the greatest economy in the history of the world, it's substantially weaker than what Trump describes as the worst. In fact, there was not a single year where Biden was president where the GDP grew as slowly as it did during Trump's first year. So what is this guy talking about when he's talking about a boom? Right? It's all a fantasy. Now I had listened to an interview with Chris Christie and I forget where he was interviewed, but he was recollecting a dinner conversation he had with President Trump and he said that Trump told him. And I have no reason to believe that Chris Christie didn't remember this accurately, cuz it seems like it's a statement that you would never forget. He said that the President told him, hey, Chris, you know, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes true. Not that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it's true, but that it actually becomes true. That you can kind of will a lie into being true if you just say it often enough. And that seems what Trump does with respect to everything. So he's talking about how the economy is great and hoping if he lies about it often enough that the economy will become great because he lies it into greatness. But we have a very weak economy now. We have more confirmation that inflation is really on the rise. And of course, Donald Trump has been taking credit for vanquishing inflation. It's gone, it's dead and buried. He killed it. Right. We had horrible inflation under Biden and he has already gotten rid of it. The numbers that we got for February, just like Q4 GDP numbers, were barely growing before the war. Right? So if the economy was, was that weak before we were having a war, imagine how much weaker it's gonna be now that there is a war, assuming the war continues. The same thing with the PPI numbers. These are prices from February. Prices are much higher, especially for energy. Oil's about $100 a barrel right now. I could check. I got the live quote. 99 and a half is West Texas. Brent is above $110 a barrel. But so oil prices are at least 50% higher now than they were in February. So wait till we get the March PPI numbers. They're probably going to be a lot worse. But the February was already bad. So the prior increase, the January increase, was 0.5, which in and of itself is a big number. Now the expectation was that it would cool off in February to an increase of 0.3. In fact, 0.3 was the upper end of the range that had been expected. The range went from 0.1 2.3. The actual number. I don't have a drum to roll, but the actual number was 0.7% increase. 0.7. More than double the upper end of the consensus forecast. Think about that number for a minute. 0.7 if you annualize that. Because unlike GDP numbers that we get, this is not an annualized number. Prices were up 0.7% on the month. So if they did that every month, you would be looking at like 8.4% inflation. 8. Now, this is not consumer prices. These are producer prices. But obviously if prices are going up for producers, what are they gonna do? They're not gonna eat it, right? They're gonna raise their prices. Right. Because the first to feel the impact of inflation are the producers wholesale. It's not that they're just jacking up their prices. Their costs have gone up. And consumers buy retail. They don't buy wholesale in most cases. And so they only feel the effects of inflation after the wholesaler passes it on. So they get the price increase first and then they give the bad news to their consumers by raising their prices. So if producer prices are going up, consumer prices are gonna go up. That's how it works. That's the process. So this is bad news on inflation. Now people are gonna say, oh, Peter, you're, you know, exaggerating. You can't annualize 0.7. Well, why can't I? I'm just taking the most recent month and annualizing it. But it's also possible that, that the next few months are actually worse than 0.7. So it may be more than 8.4%. Now, if you just look at the year over year number, now it's 3.4%. So not as bad as my annualized February number, but 3.4%. That's well above 2. In fact, the prior year over year increase, the January number, was 2.9. So in one month, the year over year increase in producer prices has gone from 2.9 to 3.4. That is a huge move in the wrong direction. The Fed wants prices to go down, right? It has to get down to the 2% target. We're moving further and further away from that target before the war, before the increase in oil prices. Now if you take out food and energy, it's actually worse. The one month increase was actually not worse. It was up 0.5, which was still much hotter than the point three they expected. But look at the year over year number. 3.9. Year over year increase in core PPI. That's almost 4 double double the 2% target that the Fed claims to have. So this is really bad news. The minute this news came out, gold tanked. In fact, Before I even saw the news, I saw gold was down about $150. I was like, what the hell? What happened? I mean, and I went and looked at the PPI and then I knew what happened. And silver was immediately dropped, like two and a half bucks. Now, the reason for this reaction is the minute this news came out, the expectations for Fed rate cuts were pared back significantly. And that was later confirmed, you know, later today when we got the FOMC announcement and we saw the dots and what everybody is projecting. So the expectations of a rate cut were pushed back. In fact, a lot of people now believe that there won't be any rate cuts at all for the rest of the year. And the other opinion is that we might get one, which is not that many. And so because the odds of a rate cut went down, gold went way down because gold was pricing in, or at least the traders believe that gold is pricing in rate cuts. And now that the rate cuts aren't coming or aren't coming, as soon as people had expected, the price of gold sold off. It's probably programmed in an algorithm. You get hot inflation numbers, you automatically sell gold, right? You don't even have to ask any questions, you just kind of do it automatically. But this is not bearish for gold, nor is it bullish for the dollar. What this does is validates what I have been saying all along, what I have been saying for years, because the Fed has been wrong, Wall street has been wrong, the Trump administration has been wrong, I've been right. What I've been saying is that inflation is not dead and buried, it's alive and well, that it's going to make a comeback, that it never really went away because, because the Fed never put out the flame, that it aborted the fight prematurely, that it never should have hiked rates. All the rate cuts that started in the summer of 2023 when the fed funds rate was five and a quarter to five and a half. That basic, you know, 200 points, almost 150 basis point rate cuts or 170, whatever it was, they were all a mistake. And that the Fed never really put the inflation GD back in the bottle and now it's, you know, it's running amok. And I've been saying that. And so what this data confirms is that the Fed is way behind the curve, that inflation is running out of control and that the Fed has no ability to rein it back in. Because even if the Fed is going to put rate cuts on hold, it's not going to hike that is the key. So what is the reality is it's not that the Fed's failure to cut is bearish for gold, it's that the Fed's failure to hike is bullish for gold. Because it's not nominal rates that count. It's real rates. That's what matters. And if inflation surges and the Fed sits on its hands, even if it doesn't cut rates, real rates are plunging. Let's say the Fed were to raise the Fed funds rate, which it isn't even doing, but let's say it raised the Fed Funds rate from 3 1/2 to 450 basis points up, right? Oh, the Fed has tightened. But what if during the same period of time, inflation goes from 3% to 6%? What's happened to real rates? They've gone way down. They've gone from positive 50 basis points to negative 200 basis points. That is bullish for gold. That is bearish for the dollar. The traders haven't figured that out yet. They're not thinking long term. They're not connecting the dots right. They're not playing chess here. They're just reacting to a move at face value. And they're just saying, oh, the Fed's not going to cut. Yes, they're not going to cut, but the bigger point is that they're not going to hike either. Despite what was said today, the Fed's not hiking. And that is the problem. Inflation is running out of control. And that's not bullish for bearish for gold. That is extremely bullish. And you should buy today's dip. As soon as this podcast is over, go over to shiftgold.com I got a quick commercial break. We're coming right back, so don't go anywhere. A few decades ago, private citizens used to be largely that private. So what's changed? The Internet. Think about about everything you've browsed, searched for, watched or tweeted. 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So the total index was down almost 11% with mortgage purchases were pretty flat. But the refi market completely dried up and the purchase market is going to be drying up because mortgage rates are rising along with bond yields. And that's despite the fact that that the GSEs purchased $200 billion worth of mortgage backed securities in order to artificially suppress mortgage rates to keep bubble like home prices from deflating, which of course would help solve the affordability problem. But Trump has made it clear that he doesn't want to solve that problem by creating another problem, which is real estate prices going down. Which is going to happen because when real estate prices are this overpriced and mortgage rates can't really collapse, the only thing that can happen is prices go down because real estate prices are a function of what the buyers can pay. Because ultimately your house is worth what you can sell it for, not what you want to fantasize about selling it for, not what you want to pretend that you could sell it for. Cause anybody could put a house on the market. You could list your home for anything and pretend that's what it's worth. But at the end of the day, it's worth what you actually get when somebody buys it. And we're gonna start to see some sales as the economy really goes into recession, and the war will help push it there, as well as the higher prices that will result. And you're gonna see big drops in real estate prices, which is gonna be a huge problem. And that is one of the reasons that shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been imploding. In fact, they were probably the worst performers of the day. I think Fannie Mac was down about 13, 15%. You know, Fannie Mae, rather, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I mean, they're two separate companies, but, you know, they're pretty much the same trade. But Fannie mae closed at $4.63. It got to 16 bucks last year. Now, it was a big run up to 16 bucks on all the talk about an IPO or releasing them from conservatorship. And if you remember, I was saying that this was impossible to do, that you can't really privatize them unless you're willing to let mortgage rates go up, which Trump doesn't want. So he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to try to privatize it, but maintain the government implicit guarantee, which would make the guarantee explicit, which I would be a disaster. So I was speculating that nothing was ever gonna happen, and it was just all a bunch of hype so that some of his donors could cash out the Fannie and Freddie shares that they bought prior to the election. But I think one of the reasons that the story is quickly evaporating, not only because of Fannie and Freddie having bought 200 billion of mortgages that they're now losing money on as mortgage rates are now rising. But I think that people are starting to realize that Fannie and Freddie insures something like $7 trillion of mortgages. And if this is a real estate bubble, which it is, and the real estate bubble is going to pop, which all bubbles do, there are massive losses that are coming for these GSEs, probably bigger than the losses that bankrupted them last time. So who the hell wants to buy into that? How do you privatize Fannie and Freddie ahead of massive losses? The whole idea was that these businesses are cash cows. They're cash cows as the bubble is inflating. The problem is you got to give all that cash back when the air comes out. That's what happened before. Before Fannie and Freddie went into conservatorship. Yeah, they were making money hand over fist as they were underwriting and insuring bad mortgages. Then, of course, when they all went bad was when all the losses piled up and the taxpayers got stuck with them. The same thing is gonna happen again. It's ironic. They were talking about, hey, let's privatize it, right? And I knew this was a huge bubble. Yes, they've been making a lot of money, but all the profits of the past simply sow the seeds for the losses of the future. Yes, the US government has got a lot of money in prior years because of Fannie and Freddie. Now they're gonna have to give all that money back because they've guaranteed all these mortgages. They're gonna have to make good on the guarantee, only this time it is explicit because they are in conservatorship. And so there's no doubt now that everybody who is holding debt that is guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie is gonna get paid back. The question is, where's the money gonna come from? Well, the money's gonna be created out of thin air by the Fed, just like they do everything else. So it's massive inflation, but you can see that. So we got weak housing data. And even the Fed acknowledges that housing is probably the weakest part of the economy, and the economy is weak overall. And the President is trying to prop up the market, but anything he does to prop up the market ultimately weakens it further and weakens the fundamentals of the economy. But so we've got weak economic data, we've got strong inflation data. And it was with that backdrop that we got today's FOMC decision. It was nearly unanimous, but there was one dissent. You could guess who that was. Moran, the President's lackey. Although last time there were three dissents. And I think there were two guys that wanted a bigger cuts or one guy that didn't want any cut. When they did a cut, or I think it was the last, was that what happened last time was a 25 basis point cut. But there was one dissent who wanted a cut, I guess 25 basis point cut. But what is more significant is that not a single FOMC member wanted a hike. And based on the data, a hike is what we need because everything the Fed was claiming turns out to have been false. The Fed has been wrong about everything. And they don't even admit that. You know, when, when Powell was given his prepared remarks, you know, he did mention inflation and he described it as being somewhat elevated, which I think is one of the most, you know, Gross understatements that you can make. Somewhat elevated. It's not just somewhat elevated, it's way above target. It's at least 50% above target but if you look at the more recent data, it's more like double the target. So how is that somewhat elevated? I mean inflation was not anywhere near below the 2% target as it is now. Above it mentioned, the housing market is weak and again I think that's an understatement because it's massively weak. It's about as weak as it's ever been. I mean just you know, before the collapse. Cuz the reason it's so weak is that nobody can afford to buy houses because the prices are too high. Well, we know how that's gonna be resolved. But he said that the Fed is attentive to both sides of the market but that they are well positioned to deal with either side. Meaning that the Fed feels that if the economy weakens, they're positioned to cut rates and if inflation worse, gets worse, they're somehow in position to do something there as well. Which I don't know what they're gonna do. I mean not cut rates, cuz that's not gonna cut it, right? If inflation is getting worse and all you do is nothing, you know, you're not gonna put out the fire by doing nothing, right? You need to hike rates and you know that ain't happening for a number of reasons. So Powell basically said, look, we think the Fed funds is pretty much going to stay in the current neighborhood, 3.4, maybe as low as 3.1 over the course of the next year. So maybe a cut. Right. But he also admitted that policy is not on a preset course, you know that, you know we're going to remain data dependent and it depends on what's on what's on what's going to happen anyway. Of course most of the interesting stuff was not in the prepared remarks but in the Q and A that followed. And again looking at the markets, most of the damage in the markets, although the markets ended up closing on their lows. Gold was down close to like 200 bucks, $190, silver was down over $4. The Dow was down I think over 700 points. Percentage wise, I think the NASDAQ was down a little bit less. You know, Bitcoin which had rallied, you know, back over 74,000, I think over 75,000 was down. Now it's down to about 71,000. It's still hanging in there. I mean I don't know what's keeping it up. I mean, it's gonna collapse any day. But it got another bounce. I mean, a lot of buying from Michael Saylor. There's a lot of pumping going on, trying to keep this market from imploding. But it was down, so it wasn't as much. But there was one particular comment, and I'm gonna get to that shortly, that was made during the Q and A that caused the markets to hit new lows, including precious metals. And I wanna take a look at what's going on in the markets right now. And that's a. And is a good opportunity to introduce a new sponsor to the program. What did I do with my screen? Oh, here it is. That has it. But we got a brand new sponsor, Investing.com and it's interesting that Investing.com is sponsoring the podcast now because I've actually been using Investing.com for years just as a reference for stock futures, not just for the US Market, but for the world. In fact, if you look at my screen right now, this is the tab that I usually have open while I'm doing my podcast. Cause it's live quotes that you get. You know, they're not. They're free. And you can see right now that The Dow Jones US 30 is off 74 points. That's 0.16%. You can see the S&P 500 off a little less 7.6, which is just over a tenth of a percent. You see the US 100, that's the QQQ down about 1.2%. And Russell Small caps, you've got all these indexes. And then also you get all of these global markets. You get a lot of European markets, South American, Asian markets. So it's a great way to get quotes. And there's a lot of other information that you get for free@investing.com that I have found helpful over the years. And so now it's fortunate that they're sponsoring me. In fact, I just recently signed up for their Pro. And I hadn't been using their Investing Pro. That that is a paid tool that has all sorts of extra bells and whistles that I'm just now taking a look at. And that's where they're offering my audience a great deal because they're having this flash sale right now anyway where they're offering up to 50% off their investing Pro product. But if you use the link that I have that we have in the description to this podcast, in addition to that 50% off, you'll get an extra 15% off on top of the 50%, right? So close to 65% off. That's how the math works. If you use my link and if you somehow, if you don't use the link, my promo code, you know, is Peter Schiff. So just my whole name. And so if you want data, not just headlines guiding your market views, this is probably one of the best tools you can use. So again, click the link in the description to secure access to Investing Pro at the lowest possible price available. One of the things I've already done is I set up a watch list of a lot of the stocks I own. And I'm scrolling through them now, you can see that most of the stocks are in the red, right? Cause my stocks, I own a lot of gold stocks that got clobbered. Most of the green on my screen were stocks that went up overnight, like in Asia, that weren't impacted by the US sell off. And of course I own a lot of oil stocks and the oil stocks were pretty much all in the green today, but most of my holdings were in the red, you know, the biggest drops in the mining sector. But again, this is a great buying opportunity for those gold mining stocks because the traders have got it completely wrong. We need 55% off, not 50%. Oh, maybe the. All right, well, I don't know, I guess the sale is 55% off and then I get an extra 15% on top of that. Is that the deal? Anyway? Hopefully that's it. But either way it's a great deal. So just, just use my link. But these, the gold stocks really sold off. They were down like what, 6%, 7%. Again, investors don't get it. Higher inflation is good for gold. It's not bad for gold. It doesn't mean that. Oh no, the Fed is gonna just leave rates alone and that's gonna do it. That's gonna do the trick. It's not gonna do the trick. The Fed needs to go Paul Volcker on inflation and that's not gonna happen. The Fed has to get medieval and there's no chance, there's no chance of that happening. And you can easily figure that out if you listen to the press conference. But anyway, let me talk about some of the stuff that went on during today's press conference. So the first question he got was should the Fed look through the war related increase in oil prices now, first of all, oil prices were going up before the war, right? But now they're going up even faster. And the Fed basically, or Powell rather basically, said look, we're not even gonna Think about that right now, because we're still trying to figure out the effect of tariffs. We're still trying to figure out if the tariff effect is over. And that seems to be the more important thing right now before we start thinking about oil. And the guy also said, the same guy that asked this question asked Powell, look, you know, you've been above target for five years in your inflation, which is true, well above target for five years now. And he said, does the fact that you've basically been so wrong for so long, does that influence how you're thinking? And again, Powell just fell back onto tariffs. And he said, well, you know, we've had things happen to interfere with our progress. And he said, tariffs did that. Okay, but that was last year. Tariffs are only an issue in 2025. That's one year out of the five years that they've been way above target. So what's your excuse for all the other years? You wanna blame 2025 on tariffs? Okay, what about 2024? What about 2023? What's your excuse there? I mean, obviously the Fed doesn't have any. They don't wanna acknowledge how wrong they've been because you go back to their forecasts and it's always, 2% inflation is coming, 2% inflation is coming, and 2% inflation never arrives. Now, another reporter asked a good question, said, okay, given the fact that the inflation numbers have been hotter than you thought, what is the basis for cutting? Why is the committee looking to cut rates? And by the way, of the 19 members, right, 12 think that there'll be one more cut between now and the end of the year, and 7 think there'll be no more cuts, that the cuts won't happen until 2027. Right, but there's still a bias to cutting. Right? Because you got 12 members thinking they're gonna cut rates. But why, if inflation is now higher than it was before, why are you still thinking about cutting rates when you're not making any progress? In fact, you're going backwards. And this was his answer. Again, I'm not making this up. Powell said that the reason that they are forecasting rate cuts even though inflation is headed in the wrong direction is because their forecast is that they're going to make progress on inflation. Their forecast is that inflation is gonna go down. And because they are forecasting that inflation is going to go down, they are assuming that they're going to cut rates. But based on what have they assumed that inflation is gonna go down based on? Nothing. Because, remember, at an earlier fomc meeting, Powell let the cat out of the bag. He said the reason that they forecast 2% inflation is because that's their mandate and they believe they're going to achieve their mandate. So because their mandate is 2% inflation, they forecast 2% inflation. Not because there's any actual evidence that inflation is going to be 2%, is because their mandate is 2%. So that's what they wanna forecast and that's what they're doing here. They believe they're gonna make progress on inflation because they believe they're going to achieve their mandate. Because their mandate is 2%, they're not gonna say, we're not gonna achieve our mandate. So they wanna say, yes, we believe we're going to achieve our mandate. And because we believe we're going to achieve our mandate, we believe we're gonna cut rates. But it's all based on belief. And the belief is based on nothing other than a wish. It's a fantasy. It's make believe. This is what they hope. They're basically saying, we hope inflation comes down. And because we hope inflation comes down and we hope that we're right, we're forecasting rate cuts based on what we hope happens, happens. That's basically what they're saying. And Powell actually admitted that he's made no progress. He said, despite the fact that we've made no progress, we still believe we're gonna make progress in the future, even though we're basically making no progress in the past. Now, another question, he said, do you think the higher inflation is based just on the oil shock? And he really didn't have an answer to that. The only thing he kept saying about oil shocks is that history shows that you should look past them. Not really. I don't know where he's reading that. What history books. In fact, it didn't work out too well when we looked past it in the 1970s. But he immediately pivoted that question back to tariffs. And he implied, or not just implied, flat out stated that the slow progress now was due to tariffs, that if it wasn't for these tariffs, maybe we would be at 2%. But the tariffs have got it all screwed up. Somebody else asked them a good question, said, what gives you confidence that inflation will return to target if your policy is only moderately restrictive? Which is a good question. And the answer is it won't. Right. They even admit that they're not very restrictive. They're modeling restrictive now. I don't think they're restrictive at all. I think they're easy. I think they're accommodative. I think rates are way too low. So they are stoking the inflation fire. Not only are they not putting it out, they're adding fuel. Right. And. But the reporter said, well, what makes you so confident? And again, he didn't even answer the question. He just pivoted over to tariffs again. And he said, well, we're waiting to see what happens with tariffs. He says that we're hoping that when the tariffs work their way through that, we're gonna go back to the low goods inflation that we had of the past. He said, back in the past, goods prices didn't really go up very much. They were flat to negative. And so we're just hoping that it goes back to the way it was in the past. Well, why? Why should it go back to the way it was in the past? Look at all the money we've created, look at all the inflation we created and look at what's happening with the dollar and look at what's happening with trade. Why would we go back to the way things were in the past? There's no reason to expect that. It's actually different. The cheap goods that we got in the past are in the past. In fact, Donald Trump has made that clear. The goal of the Trump administration is to stop importing cheap products. That's the whole purpose of the tariffs. That's what Trump wants. He wants the world to stop ripping us off by selling us cheap stuff. Well, the reason we got cheap goods in the past was because of that ripoff, because we got to import all this stuff. Well, if we can't import it all because the tariffs make it more expensive, and now we gotta make the stuff ourselves, and when we do that, it costs more money. Well, that benign effect, those low goods prices that Powell is counting on to bail us out, to come back, they're not going to happen. You know, he's got like an ostrich, he's got his head in the sand and he can't see what's going on, so he should have no confidence. There's no way inflation is going back to 2%. Either the Fed knows that and just doesn't want to admit it, or they don't know it because that's how ignorant they are. Now, somebody asked them too, how high, like, you know, would prices have to go up? Oh, I'm gonna hold that, hold that thought for a second. Now, he reiterated that there is a risk, right, that inflation could go higher and there's a risk that the economy and the labor market could get weaker. And Powell said, we are prepared that if the economy gets weaker than we think, if the labor market gets weaker, we can cut rates. And that is the appropriate policy for weakness in the labor market is to cut rates. And he said, however, if inflation is higher and basically the way they assess the risks, and at least they assessed it correctly, the risk to the labor market is that it gets weaker and the risk to inflation that it gets higher. So there are risks to both sides of the mandate that have opposite policy responses. And he acknowledged that dilemma, although he downplayed significantly the extent of it. But he said we're ready to cut rates if we need to, but if inflation is stronger than we think we can raise rates. Cuz that argues for high rates. And then he immediately corrected himself and said, well we can at least not cut them. So first he said that we may raise rates and they said well no, we'll just not cut them. So that's how they're gonna fight inflation, by not cutting rates, not by hiking them, but simply by not cutting them. But that's not enough. That won't cut it. If inflation is going up, you need to get ahead of the curve. You need to get aggressive on your rate cuts. If you just leave rates where they are, you fall further and further behind the curve as inflation accelerates and you're staying still. Right? Quince has the everyday essentials I love with quality that lasts. Lightweight cashmere sweaters, short sleeve Mongolian cashmere polos, linen bottoms and shorts. Tees in 100% Pima cotton and European jersey linen. These are the versatile pieces that make a wardrobe actually work season to season. Quince works directly with top factor and cuts out the middlemen. 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But what, what, what really got Powell is somebody asked him or got the markets, Rather, somebody asked Powell about rate hikes. If the subject had come up, and he said yes in their discussion, the possibility that the next move on rates could be a hike that was raised. So they talked about it, maybe for the first time. They talked about, is it possible maybe we'll have to raise rates. Now he downplayed it by saying, look, nobody believes we're gonna raise rates. Nobody has that in their model. But the possibility did come up, and that really hit the markets again. But I'm sure if somebody brought up the possibility, it was quickly shot down. They're not gonna do it. And I think that was obvious when Powell corrected himself about hiking rates in response to higher inflation and walking that back to not cutting them. So basically, there are two things that the Fed is considering, cutting rates or not cutting rates. They're not considering hiking rates. But by any objective measure, that's what they should do. Now, of course, we have a weak economy, so hiking rates are going to harm the economy. But you know what? That's what you have to do. We had a weak economy when Volcker put interest rates up to 20%. And in fact, it made the economy weaker, obviously. So we've got a big inflation problem and it can't be solved without some sacrifice. You're gonna have to weaken the economy, especially when the economy is a bubble. Part of the reason for inflation is excess consumption, excess spending as a result of cheap money. You take the cheap money away, you take this consumption away, you take the spending away. Well, there's all the gdp. So the GDP has to collapse. You can't get rid of the inflation without getting rid of the phony GDP growth that the inflation has created, which is why they're not going to do it. Now, one of the most ridiculous responses had to do with stagflation. Somebody asked Powell, has the Fed considered the risks of stagflation? Now, of course, we already have stagflation. So they're basically saying, have you considered what's actually happening? The actual economic environment that we're in can best be described as stagflation. So we're already there. I mean, so you're basically saying, have you considered the actual reality of the current situation? Has that ever come up? And Trump, I mean, Powell immediately caught distance, the economy from stagflation by saying, look, we don't even have anything close to stagflation. He says, I don't know how you define stagflation, but I define it as what happened in the 1970s. And he said there we had double digit inflation, we had very high unemployment. And he said today it's nothing like that. He said we have historically low unemployment and inflation is only 1% above our target. So we have low inflation, we have low unemployment. So I don't even consider this stagflation. So I don't know why you're even talking about it. Right. So first of all, stagflation doesn't only relate to the 1970s. It simply is a condition of slow economic growth. Check, we got that. And higher inflation. Check, check, we got that too. Yes, we don't have double digit inflation yet. We're not in recession yet. But those are not conditions that make stagflation possible. They just mean it's a lot worse. If you have recession, not just stagnation, if you have really high inflation, then I think it's like an inflationary depression. That's really where we're headed. But you can't forget that. One of the reasons that if you just do a numbers to numbers comparison, which is what Powell was doing, if you just compare the official inflation rate today to the official inflation rate in the 70s and you compare the official unemployment rate with the official unemployment rate, you're not making an apples to apples comparison. I don't even think you're making an apples to orange comparison. Right. You're making like an apples to bricks. I mean, they have nothing to do with one another because the methodology for computing both unemployment and inflation has so dramatically changed over the decades that they have no relation to one another. So if you wanted to compare inflation and unemployment now to the 70s, you would have to adjust how we compute it now. You would have to use the same methodology that we use in the 70s to the same data sets. And if you did that, you would find that both inflation and unemployment are at least double what we are currently reporting. And if you double our inflation rate and double our unemployment rate, you get similar to what we had for most of the 1970s, which we concede was bad. We have the same thing today. We're just not acknowledging it. We're pretending it doesn't exist because we've made it disappear through the magic of government statistics. But the other thing that Powell said about the 1970s was he said that the risks that we face now are nothing like the 1970s, meaning that the 70s were way worse. I mean, we got it easy now. I mean, don't worry, it's not nearly as bad as the 70s. He said all we got now was a little tension between our policy goals. Right. Nothing to really be concerned about. I mean, the one thing he got right in a way was when he said that it's nothing like the 1970s. And in that sense I agree only in that it's way worse than the 1970s. That is the difference. See, in the 1970s the national debt was not even a trillion dollars. It didn't even get to a trillion until the early 80s. So we didn't have all this debt. You know, I think our debt to GDP back then, I don't know, was it 30, 40%? Let me take a look at, I'm going to take a look at that. Let's see if I have it national. Hold on, because I wanted to bring this up anyway, but let me look at the national debt. Let's see if it has that just off the top of the head. Debt to GDP. So 1980. Yeah, so 1980 our debt to GDP was 34.5%, 34.5. Now it's 125% of GDP. It was 34 and a half. Again, this is just the bonded debt. I'm not talking about any of the unfunded liabilities. And obviously during the 70s it may have been a little less than that because we were racking up a lot of debt in the 70s. So during the 70s it was probably a bit lower than that. But let's say it's 34%. And so we had the ability in 1982 put an end to the high inflation. We were able to raise interest rates to 20% because we could afford to pay 20% because we didn't have a lot of debt. And the majority of the debt that we had was financed with 30 year bonds. So even though we had to pay 20% to issue new bonds, we still had locked in a lot of debt at very low rates that we didn't have to worry about. Contrast that to the current situation where we have 39 trillion in debt. In fact, just yesterday, for the first time, the national debt eclipsed 39 trillion. So we will be at 40 trillion shortly. In fact, the war is going to make sure we get there even faster. In fact, Donald Trump they're already thinking about an extra 50 billion in an emergency defense appropriation to fund the war, which of course is just gonna be a down payment. Now, nobody is asking for a tax hike to cover that. Nobody is saying, hey, let's cut spending someplace else to offset the extra 50 billion for defense. No, let's just borrow it, throw it on top of the debt pile with everything else. Again, Donald Trump says we have to sacrifice to win the war. And by sacrifice he means higher gas prices. Right. We need some short term pain for long term gain. Okay, how about let's sacrifice and pay for the war. How about government spending cuts or tax hikes to cover the 50 billion, which again is just a down payment. What about the next 50 billion? And the next 50 billion? Where's all that gonna come from? Well, we know where it's gonna come from. We're gonna borrow. It could be more debt and it's going to be more inflation. In fact, I think there's a chance that during the remainder of Trump's term, which is what, about three years, the national debt might hit 50 trillion. 50 trillion. That would be an extra 11 trillion, which is what, 3.5 trillion a year in debt. Very easy to do that. We go into recession, that lowers tax revenue, increases expenditures. We know interest rates are going up, that increases the cost of servicing the debt. And the war is gonna add a tremendous amount of spending. Even if we win, we're gonna have to pay to rebuild. So even if there's peace, we get stuck with another tab after we pay for the war. So this is gonna be a massive increase. But the point I'm making about the comparison between now and the 1970s is that we have all this short term debt. And so if interest rates just went to 10%, let alone 20%. Let's not even talk about 20, let's talk about 10. And obviously, if rates went to 20% in 1980, when we were a much better credit risk than we are now, when our debt to GDP was only 35%, and now it's 125%. When we had a trade surplus instead of a trade deficit, when we were a creditor nation instead of a debtor nation, in fact, we were the world's biggest creditor, now we're the world's biggest debtor. We were a much better credit risk in the 70s than we are now. And so given the deterioration in our credit quality, we should be paying higher interest rates than we paid back then. But let's assume that it's only 10%. How are we going to pay 10% on 40 trillion in debt? That's $4 trillion a year in interest. The government only collects 5.4 trillion in taxes. But how much tax revenue would the government collect if interest rates were 10%, a fraction of what it is now? In fact, my belief is that if interest rates went to 10%, government tax revenue would collapse and they wouldn't even get 4 trillion a year in tax revenue. But we would owe 4 trillion a year in interest on the debt. Not right away. It would take a few years to cycle through. But remember, we keep adding debt. If we're adding 3 or 4 trillion of new debt a year, all of that new debt has to be financed at 10%. And all the debt that matures has to be rolled over at 10%. It's not going to be long before our interest expense exceeds 100% of our tax revenue. Now, of course, before we got anywhere close to that, we would have a major sovereign debt crisis, which we could be having soon. So when Powell just brushes over stagflation and claims, oh, we got nothing to worry about. It's nowhere near as bad as the 1970s. We got a lot to worry about because we're in much worse financial position than we were in the 1970s. And he knows he can't hike rates. All the Fed is thinking about doing to fight inflation is to not cut rates. But that won't work when rates are already too low, when money supply is growing, when credit supply is growing and it's continuing to grow, we have a massive problem. Warning. The following ZipRecruiter radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words when you're hiring.
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Another thing that Powell mentioned, and they do this all the time to try to deflect blame, when he talked about the big inflation that we had coming out of the pandemic, he said that we had this inflation all over the world. It happened everywhere. And the reason the Fed likes to remind everybody that inflation was a global problem and not an America problem is to try to say, look, it wasn't our fault. There was nothing we could do. Inflation happened all over the world, so you can't blame us. And that is all bs. The reason inflation happened all over the world is central banks all over the world made the exact same mistake. So that doesn't get the Fed off the hook just because the ECB had bad policy, just because the bank of Japan had bad policy, just because all these other central banks had bad monetary policy and they all slashed interest rates and printed a lot of money doesn't let the Fed off the hook for doing the same thing. In fact, the fact that there was inflation all over the world in response to the fact that every country in the world did the same wrong thing, that just proves it right. No country escaped inflation because every country made this mistake, right? Every country said, oh, we gotta cut interest rates, we got to print money, we got to have our people stay home and we got to flood the economy with cash, right? That was a boneheaded move, but all the central bankers made it because they all read from the exact same playbook. The final point I want to make before I sign off for today, Powell did acknowledge that he is not going anywhere, even after his term is up and we have a new Fed chair. As long as the investigation, the criminal investigation, grand jury investigation against him is open, he ain't resigning, he's staying at the Fed. And I think the reason he's doing that is leverage, cuz he knows that Trump wants him gone. So Trump can replace Powell with another one of his lackeys. And so what Powell's gonna say as well, as long as you're gonna continue to investigate me, I ain't going anywhere. And so the only way that Powell's gonna resign is if they close the investigation and give him a clean bill of health, which I know from experience they never do. Right? You know, the government investigated me for tax evasion and money laundering for over two years. And that was, you know, 2020. They started the investigation in 2020, they ended it mid-2022. Right. Found no evidence that I did anything wrong. So the grand jury disbanded. Nobody was indicted. Nobody at the bank was indicted. None of the customers have ever been indicted. They. Nobody associated with the bank was ever indicted. I was never indicted. But the government never closes the investigation. I asked my lawyer about this, I said, look, can we get the government to officially say the investigation is over and we didn't find anything? And they said no, they never do that. They never admit that they found nothing. They never admit that they stopped investigating you. It's just. They just don't do anything, right? They don't charge you, but they don't say, you know, you're innocent. They just don't do anything. And which I think is unfair, especially when they illegally leaked the investigation. And in my case, it was worse, cuz they implied that I was guilty even though they knew I was innocent. But if they know that the investigation's been leaked, the least they could do is, is admit, you know what, we didn't find anything, the guy was clean. But they don't do that even in my case. Now, obviously the Powell investigation wasn't leaked. Everybody knows, right? You know, it's not a secret investigation. They made the whole thing public that Powell is under investigation by this grand jury. But even then you know, it would be a stretch to actually get the government to do this, but maybe Powell is trying to leverage the fact that, that he's got this one card he can play, which is I ain't leaving, and see if he can get the Trump administration and the Justice Department to do something they never do. And that is admit that an investigation is over and that they found no evidence of wrongdoing. But anyway, that's it for today. Again, I'm gonna do a shift Gold Friday market wrap on Friday. We'll see if we get a big a bounce back in the price of gold and silver. Maybe cooler heads will prevail. You know, we're at 48, 34 right now on gold, so we're below 5,000. I've been saying that any move below 5,000 probably won't hold and that we won't stay below 5,000 for long. We'll see if I'm right. We'll see if we can get back above 5,000 by the end of the week. Silver is about 75, 66. It's been very volatile, but it's still all the volatility is way north of the $50 breakout. So Silver's still a massive breakout as far as I'm concerned. So buy gold and silver. But the biggest pullback has been in the mining stocks. They have been killed 25, 30% from their peak prices, still positive on the year, unlike the US stock market which is negative on the year. But we're gonna get some phenomenal earnings. Even if the price of gold and silver, if they just stay where they are, the earnings should be phenomenal. Gold companies should have huge beats. And I don't even think the earnings that they're gonna beat have been factored into their stock prices, let alone the beats. So take advantage and get yourself some of these mining stocks. If you were underinvested. Now's your opportunity to bring up your investing, bring up your weighting, you know, do it yourself. Talk to my advisors at Euro Pacific Asset Management, Europact.com or just buy my fund. You can buy my gold fund. No load the advisor class. EPGIX is on the platform of every major discount broker. So do yourself a favor and take advantage of people who don't understand inflation, don't understand the Fed, don't understand money and don't understand gold, and who have been selling into what amounts to very bullish news for precious metals. Bye for now. Yeah, the thing, this is Bayard Winthrop, founder of American giant. We make all our clothing right here in the US with American cotton and American workers. Get 20% off your first order when you use code GIANT20ME@american-giant.com Craving the coffee
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