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Peter Schiff
It is a self perpetuating death spiral. I don't care what you think about bitcoin. You could disagree with me. You think maybe in the long run it's going to be a new digital gold, it's going to have some kind of value of who knows what. But before bitcoin can get to the promised land, it's got to get through the liquidation of strategy. This whole company has to go bankrupt. This whole thing has to be unwound.
The Peter Schiff Show. I got to an Anchorage a little later in the day than I had planned. So I'm starting this podcast after 6:00 in the evening, east coast time. But we had even more turbulence in the markets today than I did at sea. In fact, it was a turbulent week, a lot of bad weather, particularly for crypto. But everything got caught up in the storm today. Not quite everything, but most risk assets, including the precious metals and the miners they got beat up to tech got clobbered. The catalyst for the carnage was the better than expected jobs report. Although I don't really think that's the reason, it's the excuse. I think this whole thing is a powder keg and it was going to find a spark. Whether it was the jobs report or something else. I've been warning that a sell off was coming and here we are. So I'm going to talk about the jobs numbers, the sell off, precious metals, a lot of important stuff in this podcast. So stick around, don't go anywhere and you know, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about anyway. First off, I want to get into the jobs numbers even before I get into the market. I want to go over the jobs report that came out today. And of course, Donald Trump wasted no time in hitting truth social, bragging about this very strong jobs report and upset that the stock market was going down and not up. Because according to Donald Trump, the market should be rising on this great economic news. And he did point out that growth does not cause inflation and so we should not be concerned. The market should not be concerned about this strong jobs report. Well, he's right about one thing. Growth doesn't cause inflation. The Federal Reserve does and he does with the US Congress and their massive deficit spending. So inflation is a byproduct of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve working together to expand money supply, stimulate demand, increased credit. That's where all the inflation is coming from. It doesn't come from economic growth. And we don't really have economic growth. We have inflation masquerading as growth. And Donald Trump doesn't understand that, nor does he understand that today's job report was not even strong. Yes, it was not as weak as what had been expected. In fact, the number came out double what was expected. But what was expected was just 85,000 jobs. That's not a lot of jobs. We got 172,000 jobs. Big deal. That's not a lot of jobs either. And last month it was revised upward from 115,000 jobs to 179,000 jobs. So the May number was a little bit lower than the upwardly revised April number.
But who cares about these numbers?
First of all, almost all of the jobs were service sector jobs.
Leisure and hospitality, health care, welfare services, government, state and local government hiring. These are service sector jobs paid for by the taxpayer, either directly or indirectly. They're not productive jobs. Yeah, there were 7,000 manufacturing jobs.
Big deal.
That's nothing. Last month we added 1,000 from, you know, the original estimate was minus 2,000. But again, these are all just estimates. They don't mean anything. In fact, the birth death model added
by itself 158,000 jobs. The birth death model, that is more than 90% of the jobs that the government claims were created. So who cares?
Because that entire number is made up.
And one of the main reasons that we have the huge revisions later in the year or the following year is
they go back and they reassess the
birth death assumptions and they realize that they were wrong. But there's a lot of pressure, probably political pressure, especially now, to guess high.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
Remember, if Donald Trump doesn't like the numbers, he tends to shoot the messenger.
Peter Schiff
Remember he, he fired somebody for bad jobs numbers.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
So probably the people at the Bureau
Peter Schiff
of Labor Statistics, when they have to guess how many new businesses were created and guess how many jobs they think they added, what do you think they're likely to do?
Podcast Guest or Co-host
Guess high or guess low.
Peter Schiff
Right. They don't want to disappoint the boss. And so these numbers mean nothing. The market shouldn't even respond to them. And they're low anyway.
They're low paying jobs. These are non goods producing. That means all of the social workers, all of the bartenders and orderlies and teachers or whoever it is that are
getting these government paychecks, what are they doing with them? They're going to spend them. What are they going to buy?
Imports. They're going to buy products that they
didn't make and that we didn't make.
And so that means bigger trade deficits,
ultimately a weaker dollar, higher prices. This is all inflationary.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
It's not real economic growth.
Peter Schiff
Now, Donald Trump is upset that the stock market didn't rally on, on this number.
Well, the main reason the stock market
didn't rally is because it's already so overpriced. The market needs to come down regardless of the numbers. But also the bond market is still holding at relatively high rates. The yield on the 10 year is still right around 4 and a half
percent and the yield on the 30
year is right around 4.5%, just over 5%.
So this is very problematic for the stock market, the fact that interest rates are not behaving, that they're not going down. And this makes the stock market valuations all the more expensive because stocks are always a function of interest rates. And the lower interest rates are, the more valuable stocks can be when you discount their income. And so the stock market is overpriced and looking for a reason to go down. And finally it found one. Now, one of the main reasons for the weakness, before I get into that,
let me, let me do a little
bit more on the jobs numbers. So the unemployment rate held steady at
4.3% and the labor force participation rate stayed at the lowest it's been in many, many years at 61.8. So no improvement there. And average hourly earnings up as expected, 0.3 year over year, up 3.4. Again, this is below even the official inflation rate. So the official inflation rate year over year is up more, maybe 3.9 and wages are up 3.4. So real wages are falling, but they're actually collapsing because the official inflation number doesn't really capture the true degree of, to which consumer prices are in fact rising. Consumer prices are rising a lot more than the government claims, which means real wages are falling a lot more, which is one of the reasons that Donald Trump is so unpopular with the voters, because the voters paychecks are being eviscerated by inflation. Yes, they got an official tax cut, but they got an unofficial tax hike because the inflation tax more than trumps the income tax cuts that they got
from the big ugly bill.
And so overall, Americans have lower purchasing power, not more purchasing power, because government got bigger and more expensive and now
they have to pay for it.
But anyway, moving to the catalyst for the stock market or the real reason it went down.
And I've been talking about this, you know, we have this big AI bubble, right? The stock market, crazy valuations. And I've been talking about the fact
that we're investing all of this money
in, in building out the data centers and all the, the infrastructure for supporting artificial intelligence, whether we end up needing it or not, who knows? But there is the equivalent of an
arms race going on with the hyperscalers. And I've always been saying, where's all
the money going to come from? We're all talking about the trillions of
dollars, this massive capital investment.
How is it being paid for?
What are we not doing in order to afford this? Where's the money coming from?
Because we don't have an unlimited amount of resources. So if we're going to redirect resources to building out this AI, you know, what are we not going to do? Where's the money going to come from? Even if, and I do believe that ultimately we'll benefit from AI, but in the short run, we have to bear
the burden of building it out before
we can get all the benefits. We have to absorb the cost. So in the short run, it's a negative, it's a drain on our resources, and we're making an investment that's going to pay off down the line. But, you know, we got to get to that point. We got to get to the payoff and we got to go through the sacrifice. But nobody wants to acknowledge what the sacrifice is to finance all of this. Now one place is coming from is layoffs.
And, you know, even though the numbers, the jobs numbers beat estimates, look at the jobs numbers we got. The Challenger job cuts came out yesterday. I think it was the biggest number of job layoffs announcements. It was over 90,000.
It was the most in any may
since the pandemic in 2020. Obviously, companies were laying off a lot of people because of the pandemic.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
There's no pandemic now.
Peter Schiff
One of the reasons that tech companies are laying off people and tech companies were among the biggest companies that were laying off people is because they're freeing up cash to invest in capex. So they're cutting their workforce.
And they think they won't need as many workers anyway once they build out all the AI. So in order to cover the costs,
they're cutting their, their, their payroll. And so now those incomes are gone. People don't have those paychecks anymore because their employer now needs to spend that on computer equipment instead. But the other place that the money comes from is instead of funding other
investments, it's funding AI.
And look at what's going on now with these big IPOs that are coming. You got Space X that's, you know, doing the roadshow right now, talking about, I don't know, one and a half, $2 trillion valuation, I forget, you know, it's definitely well over a trillion. The same thing with Anthropic and Open Air. You've got these three juggernauts, you know, trillion dollar companies coming to the capital markets raising tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, whatever they're doing. Where is the money coming from? From investors to buy all this stock? They're not just sitting on a pile of cash. So if you want to get into anthropic or SpaceX, you got to get out of something else.
You got to sell something.
And it's not just these new companies.
Look, look at all the money that Meta needs to raise.
They're talking about all the money that they have to raise.
They got to sell a bunch of stock. So where's the money coming from?
It's got to be pulled out of something else. So those other things have got to go down. There is a short term price to
be paid for what we're doing and
nobody is talking about it, nobody is discussing it.
It's like, oh, it's all free, right? It's not all free and the government just can't pay for it by cranking out money, you know, running the printing presses because then it's just inflation. We need real capital which comes from under consumption, sacrifice, savings. If you just print money and say, hey, just spend this money, you know, on, on the capex. That's not real. That just makes the price of everything go up, including the CapEx. But I think people maybe start to think about this and what started it and I've been talking about this is crypto and bitcoin bubble popped a while ago, right? It's all part of the tech bubble, the AI bubble. It's all caught up. Well, the weakest link in the chain has always been crypto because it's pure hype. It's all sizzle and no steak. At least there's a real story to AI. There's stake there. There's a lot of sizzle too. But beneath the sizzle there's actually a nice piece of meat. There's nothing behind crypto. So just like in the mortgage bubble when the dot coms blew up before the overall NASDAQ, remember the NASDAQ dropped 80% after the 2000 peak. Yes, the, the, the dot com stocks, many of those dropped 100% because they went to zero, but others dropped 90% but the whole NASDAQ still was down 80%. But it started with the weakest links, but then the same thing with mortgages
as the fact that's like what I started talking about.
Subprime blew up first. But remember, everybody said, oh, it's contained as subprime.
Right?
I mean, not me, but the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, don't worry, it's just subprime. And I said, look, subprime is the weakest link. That's why it broke first. But it's the whole mortgage market that's got a problem. Subprime is the tip of this iceberg.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
Right?
Peter Schiff
Right.
You haven't seen what's under the surface. And of course, I was right about that.
Same thing is happening now. People are dismissing, oh, the air is coming out of crypto, okay, but people are just moving money into other tech stocks looking for better opportunities. I think it's a harbinger. I think it's an early warning sign. The weakest link snapped first. But that's an indicator of, of what's coming. We're going to see this big drop in, in, in the whole market. And that's what started over the last couple of days. I think it started yesterday and then kicked into a higher gear today. So I'm going to talk about that in a lot more detail right after this. Commercial break so stick around. We're coming right back.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
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Peter Schiff
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Peter Schiff
I want to get into the tech, sell off the tech wreck in AI related names and the semiconductors and other big hyperscalers. Let me backtrack and go to crypto because it wasn't just a bloody day for bitcoin and Etherium and Solano and the rest of the tokens. It was a bloody week. And I think what got it started. Although again, it was going to happen anyway. They're looking for something to blame it on. But early in the week, it may have even been Monday. I forget. It's been, it's been a long week. But Strategy reported that it sold 32 Bitcoin. I mean, it owns 840,000 plus Bitcoin. So this is just a few million bucks. But to me that was kind of like a warning flag of what's coming. It's not that they sold 32 bitcoin, is that they sold any bitcoin. And if they sold 32, they didn't buy any. And Strategy is the main buyer. And if this is just the tip of the iceberg, if there's more selling behind it, that's what investors are worried about, that the biggest buyer of bitcoin is now a seller and will soon be the biggest seller. Now, Saylor tried to quickly do damage control. Oh, look, we're always going to be a net buyer. And then he tried to say, oh, I just sold 32 bitcoin to show that we could do it right. People didn't think we could. And see, we're proving that bitcoin has liquidity. I mean, we know it has some liquidity. If you want to sell 32, that's not the problem. What happens if he has to sell 3,000 of them? 32 is no big deal. But he is just trying to do damage control to try to stop the bleeding.
But he's not going to be able to do it because again, it's not
even about these 32 Bitcoin. Or how many more bitcoin he's going to sell. This was a gigantic bubble. In fact, he announced, and I mentioned
Podcast Guest or Co-host
this earlier, that he had to pay
Peter Schiff
down a lot of debt that didn't even mature for another two years or three years. But it was callable in two years, but it was zero percent interest.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
Why the hell would he pay it
Peter Schiff
back if he didn't have to? Yes, he paid it at a discount, but the discount was the fair value given that he had an interest free loan for two years that he paid
Podcast Guest or Co-host
back two years early.
Peter Schiff
So if you do that, yes, you're going to, you know, you're going to be able to pay it back at a discount because now the person who got the 92 cents can invest it and earn interest for the next two years instead of earning nothing. But the problem is it caused strategy
to lose a lot of badly needed liquidity. And so you can see that the wheels are coming off this thing.
And so he's trying to prevent it. But anyway, so it started to sell off earlier in the week and then it continued. And so on the week, Bitcoin dropped 16%, 16% on the week, most of the decline yesterday and today, but 16%, it's now down 33% on the year, although it is bouncing back. So it's maybe I looked at those numbers before the rally, so I guess it's not down quite as much now. But intraday the low for bitcoin was just over 59,000. So we took out the low from February of this year and we actually went all the way back to October of 2024.
So in other words, all of the
Trump victory related rally, all those gains were completely wiped out by today. So everything that the market had gained because of Trump Strategy's average cost on its 840,000 Bitcoin is about 70, 75,
76,000, something like that. They're down like $12 billion on this position. But here is the bigger ticking time bomb.
And I've been talking about this in Stretch, right?
Stretch is the preferred stock with an 11 and a half percent yield that he's been selling. And he said it's the greatest product since the iPhone because they're selling so much. That's the problem. They sold so much because they basically defrauded the buyers. And I was talking about this. Even though the prospectus for Stretch tells you how risky it is, how you can lose all your money, don't invest unless you're willing to lose all of your principal. Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is insured.
Right?
All the risks are plainly disclosed in the fine print that nobody reads. But then Saylor goes on all kinds of podcasts. He goes on CNBC or Fox. He goes on X, he posts on X, he reposts other posts and creates marketing material that basically says Stretch is safe. It's for retirees who don't want to lose their principal, who want something safe that has no volatility but has a high yield. This is what you should do. If you're a retiree and you can't afford to lose money, then don't buy MicroStrategy by stretch because we took out all the volatility and we're giving you this high return. It's better than a cd. It's better than a bank. It's better than Treasuries. These are the false statements that deliberately deceptive, violating SEC marketing rules that he's been getting away with. I've been pointing it out, you know, to no avail. Nobody cares, right, what I say when I point out that this guy is a fraud. Why do you think I've been calling him a big fraud? You know, it's really a Ponzi. But here's what just happened. So today, shares of Stretch traded almost at $90, not $100, like $90.20 was the lower. That means if you bought Stretch last week at a dollar, which it traded at, I mean, a hundred dollars, that was par. You were down almost 10% at the low today.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
10%.
Peter Schiff
That's almost an entire year of your 11 and a half percent yield. And in fact, I think. Let me see where it closed today. It didn't close. I think it closed at maybe 91 or 92ish, something like that.
Let me see. But a strc, I'm going to look up where it closed. I mean, it didn't close right on the low, so it closed at 93.4. But that's still, you know, a big decline. Almost a 7% decline in principle. But here's the problem for Saylor.
Saylor has committed to keeping the price at a dollar at 100.
Rather, I keep saying a dollar at $100, because if you bought it at $100, in order to maintain the fiction
that it's safe and you can't lose
money, he's got to keep the price at $100. So the people who paid $100, when they look at their statements, they don't
see that they're down. Well, the only way to do that is to increase the dividend. So in order to make, let's say a $90 price, in order to make the stock go back up to 100, you have to raise the official coupon to match the yield at 90 cents, which is like 12 and a half
percent, something like that. More than that.
But the problem for Saylor is that
every time he has to raise the
dividend in order to get the price back up to a dollar, it increases his cash burn. Because now he has to pay the 12.5% to everybody that owns Stretch.
All the people that were getting 11.5%,
he now has to pay them 12.5%.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
So the cash that he has available
Peter Schiff
in his war chest, which he depleted 60% of it by retiring that preferred early, that zero percent preferred, he's going
to deplete that faster.
Because now he's got to pay the
Podcast Guest or Co-host
12 and a half percent.
Peter Schiff
Now, if he doesn't raise the dividend, if he leaves it at 11 and
a half percent, then the stock doesn't
go up, it stays at 90.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
In fact, it's going to keep falling.
Peter Schiff
Because now the people who bought it
at 100, who thought it was safe, and now they see it's only worth 90, they want to sell, they want to get out. It's not what they thought. They thought it was a safe piece
Podcast Guest or Co-host
of paper, they couldn't go down.
Peter Schiff
So in order to keep those people
on board, he's forced to increase the dividend.
But now he increases the burn.
And the only way he can pay the dividend once he depletes his cash
is by selling bitcoin.
But the problem there is bitcoin is going down. So the lower the price of bitcoin, the more bitcoin he has to pay, has to sell to raise the money to pay the yield.
But as the price of bitcoin goes down, that puts more downward pressure on Stretch.
And as Stretch goes down, then he has to raise the dividend again. But raising the dividend again means he has to sell more bitcoin to pay
it, which puts more downward pressure on bitcoin, which puts more downward pressure on
Stretch, which means he's got to raise the dividend again. It is a self perpetuating death spiral. I don't care what you think about bitcoin. You could disagree with me. You think maybe in the long run it's going to be a new digital gold, it's going to have some kind of value of who knows what. But before bitcoin can get to the promised land, it's got to get through the Liquidation of strategy. This whole company has to go bankrupt. This whole thing has to be unwound because there's no way out of this. And even if Saylor tries to stop the bleeding by halting the dividends on Stretch, okay, we're not going to pay any dividend. Then stress crashes. It's almost worthless, but it still has a residual claim on the assets. And so that means strategy has to crash too. Once you, once you stop paying the dividends on, on Stretch, you blow up strategy. And once you blow up strategy and you blow up Stretch, well, there, there goes Bitcoin. Because it's only a matter of time until all that bitcoin gets sold. And if you know there's seven hundred and forty thousand Bitcoin that are going to get sold at some fire sale price, why would you want to buy it now? You would want to get the hell out. You would want to front run that. You would want to wait until this forced selling is over. It is a giant albatross around the neck of the crypto market. Now, you know, I know a lot of people want to say, oh, you see, Sailor ruined Bitcoin. Look, if it wasn't for Saylor, we wouldn't even be $60,000 bitcoin. He is the reason that the price got so high. And not just him, all of the other companies that copied him, all of the other bitcoin treasury companies. You know, I noticed that Yakima, Nakamoto 1 did a 40 for 1 reverse split in order to get the stock price back up from like a dime,
you know, two, you know, whatever, four bucks.
But it's down 99.5% from where it came out. But all these other companies, by the way, it's not just bitcoin, it's Ethereum. In fact, as bad as the bitcoin chart looks, Ether, Solano, they look even worse. But Tom Lee has his own Etherium Treasury Company. It's bit mined something.
The symbol is MB NR.
That thing was down
14% on. On was that? I think. No, it was down like 20% today or something like that. It's down for 14% today maybe, but it's down 49% on the year. Ethereum, right? Ethereum was down 21% today. No, I think it bounced back in the aftermarket. So it's probably not down. This is when the US stock market closed. Ethereum was down about 21%, down 47% so far on the year. But he's down over $10 billion on the Ethereum he bought. But he just announced, I think it was yesterday, maybe, that they're filing to sell $300 billion or $300 million worth of
Podcast Guest or Co-host
convertible.
Peter Schiff
I mean, it prefers, just like Strategy with a 9.5% coupon, $300 million.
Why?
So they could take the money and buy more Ethereum. Well, why does he have to borrow money at nine and a half percent to buy more Ethereum? To prop up the Ethereum price, which is collapsing.
So he's desperately trying to prop up
the asset that he's already underwater in
by borrowing more money. But this thing is not even going
to get off the launch pad.
It is going to blow up.
Nobody is going to want to buy
this 9.5% paper when, if you go
and buy Stretch right now and get Bitcoin back credit, you're getting 12%. So why would you take nine and a half on Ethereum when you can get 12 on Bitcoin, when it's pretty much known that Bitcoin is the more conservative, I mean, if you want to describe it that way, than Ethereum? Because if all you're going to get is the yield, right, if you're not
going to get any of the upside,
Podcast Guest or Co-host
then it doesn't matter.
Peter Schiff
If you think Ethereum has more upside potential, you don't get the upside potential. So if you're buying one of these preferreds, the one that you want is the one with a higher yield attached to a crypto token that has less downside risk. And most people in the crypto space would agree that there's less downside in Bitcoin than there is in Etherium. And so if that's the case, then why would you settle for a 9 1/2% yield on Ethereum when you can get a 12% yield on Bitcoin? You wouldn't. But obviously Tom Lee is desperate. He was hoping to repeat the same magic trick that Saylor was pulling off without actually realizing that the jig is already up on Saylor, right? The markets aren't being fooled. The entire thing is unraveling in real
time right now, even as he is trying to basically get into the same pool of money.
And again, that pool is getting shallower and shallower.
The risk capital, there's only so much
of it, there's only so much money for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for all these
AI companies to finance all this.
There's not unlimited investment capital. All of these risk assets are competing for the same pool of capital. And now the whole thing is blowing up. I want to get into, though, the tech stocks and of course, gold and silver, right? You know, gold and silver were down today. Gold, silver stocks got clobbered today. But year to date, obviously they're in much, much better shape than bitcoin. And it's a completely different asset class. And talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the miners and the gold stocks. To me, these are the safe haven trades. This is where money should be flowing. It wasn't flowing there today, but I think it will be flowing back there shortly. But I got another quick commercial break and we're coming right back, so stick around.
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Peter Schiff
so before I get into the overall market again and the precious metals, a couple more things about bitcoin. So first of all, you know, bitcoin has only had four calendar years since it started, what, in 2009 when it went down. One of those years was last year and the decline wasn't that great. On the year was only about 6%, although Bitcoin probably finished around 30% off the high for the year. But it had a big rally and then it fell, but it ended up down. But if you look at the other three years where bitcoin went down. It really went down. The average of those three declines was 65%. So when Bitcoin goes down, it normally goes way down. Now that didn't happen last year. It was just a small drop. Now, bitcoin has never had two consecutive down years. I think that streak is going to be broken because I'm confident, you know, we're already down over 30% this year. So I think it's a very slim chance that bitcoin is going to end 2026 in the black, it's going to
end in the red. But I think if it is a
down year, which it will be, it'll
be similar to the prior three down
years before last year, which was kind of an aberration. So if bitcoin is down 65% this year, it'll end the year at around 30,000.
But the problem is if bitcoin is
anywhere near 30,000, it's going to set
Podcast Guest or Co-host
off a cascade of selling.
Peter Schiff
And so there's so much more downside potential for bitcoin to have its worst year ever. Not just a typical decline, but the worst decline it's ever experienced. And that may coincide with a bear market now, a full blown decline in the tech stocks.
And it makes sense that maybe the
peak is, you know, punctuated with a frenzy around Space X and all these other big IPOs that are coming, which was a catalyst for everybody wanting to buy these stocks because everybody thought, oh,
these IPOs are going to be great.
And so all that got priced in before the IPOs even happen. But looking at the overall stock market, so the Dow was only down, let me see.
On the day, the Dow had a
relatively good day because it was, you
know, the Dow actually finished the week slightly positive.
Let me look. So the Dow Jones on the week was up like 0.1 15.
It was down like 600, 700 points. Maybe, maybe with the futures down 800. I'm looking at the futures they sold off after the close. But on the week the Dow was up slightly and it's only down about 0.6% year to date. So the Dow is holding up.
The S and P dropped 2.3% on the week, almost all of it today. Year to date, though, the S and P is still up 8%. The Nasdaq down 4.6%. On the day, looking at the futures, they're down 5%, but year to date down up about 10.7%. So still positive, even though we had this big drop, pretty much Today, a
little bit yesterday, but today the Russell
2000 is still up 13% on the year. It's the leader now on the year above the Nasdaq, but It was down
1.9% on the week.
But to me, we're just starting the
decline right this, even if it's a
correction and not a bear market, there
should be a lot more coming. We'll see what happens. On Monday, gold, gold was down 3.3%.
Today it was down about $145. It closed at 4,000, 328.
Gold, you know, on the year, gold is about flat. It may be slightly down on the
Podcast Guest or Co-host
year,
Peter Schiff
but silver, Silver was down 8.7% today, today, year to date.
Now silver is down.
Yeah, gold is down about a half a percent on the year. I wrote it down. Silver is down 6.4% on the year, meaning before today silver was still positive on the year.
And unlike, you know, like bitcoin, which
is way down, silver was positive until today and now it's negative. It dropped just over $6 today. It closed below $68. I think it was $67.72. And again, Catalyst being the stronger than
expected jobs report, which is meaningless.
But again, the computer algorithms, in a liquidity driven market, they sell everything that they believe is related to interest rates. Oh, a stronger than expected jobs number. That means the Fed can't cut rates. That means the Fed might hike rates. All of this is irrelevant because inflation is rising rapidly and the Fed is sitting on its hands. The Fed is not going to start hiking rates. And even if it did, it would be too little, too late to do anything on moving the needle on real rates, which are collapsing. All of this is bullish for gold and silver. Just that those algorithms haven't been programmed to understand that yet. But ultimately, and not too far into the future, that is going to happen because the real flows, the real money that's buying gold and silver is going to buy this dip, right?
They're not trading with these programs.
They're buying to own the assets and they're going to keep buying because everything that's happening right now is bullish. Which is why I would recommend this is a great weekend, by the way,
to buy gold and silver. I think we could potentially have a big drop in the stock market on, on Monday unless the Trump administration does something to prevent it.
But anything they do to prevent it
is going to be very bullish for gold and silver. But even if they don't prevent it, this sell off should turn the money should start flowing into gold and silver. Because what does a big drop in
Podcast Guest or Co-host
the stock market mean?
Peter Schiff
It means the Fed is going to
Podcast Guest or Co-host
have to rescue the market.
Peter Schiff
Of course it will. There'll be massive pressure from Trump on the Fed to do something, because Donald Trump is hanging everything on the stock market. All he does is talk about how high the stock market is when it sets a record claiming credit. This proves my economy is great, my policies are working, and there's going to be tremendous amount of pressure on the Fed.
What can the Fed do to bail
Podcast Guest or Co-host
out the stock market?
Peter Schiff
They got to print money, they got to cut rates, and all of that is great for gold and silver. So I would buy this.
Silver below 70 right now is a gift. Gold is not as big a gift,
but it's still, you know, well off the highs, it was over 55, almost 5,600. So we're just barely above 4, 300. The real support is around 4,000, 4,100. This is the support right here in silver. I don't think you get silver much cheaper. I don't think we're going anywhere near
50, which was the breakout. So it's a great weekend to go
to shift gold and buy some gold and silver. If you don't have your T Gold account yet, go to t gold.com and buy some gold and silver. By the way, bitcoin has diverged from both risk assets and gold and silver because gold is basically flat on the year.
The Nasdaq is still up almost 11%
and Bitcoin's down 30%.
Right.
So Bitcoin is going in its own direction.
It's not correlated really to the risk assets anymore. It's not correlated or never was correlated to gold. It's just going down because the air
is coming out of the bubble.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
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Peter Schiff
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Podcast Guest or Co-host
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Peter Schiff
Another thing I wanted to talk about today.
So earlier, I don't know if it was before, I think it was before the markets opened, or yesterday, Donald Trump came out and he talked about Fannie and Freddie, and he said that they're worth a trillion dollars. These companies are worth a trillion dollars. And of course, you know, a lot of people own them because they expect some ipo, and Trump says they're worth a trillion dollars. Now, that is about four times what analysts claim that they're worth. And of course, they're not even worth that.
I don't even think they're worth anything.
And in fact, one of the reasons that I think Trump might have been
wanting to come out and say that
Is that Bill Pulte, right, who was
running Fannie and Freddie? Basically, he's now got him in charge of national security. Right. And even though he has no experience
and knows nothing about it, that's the guy that Trump picked to replace Tulsi
Gabbard, who's leaving at the end of the month.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
Now, of course, a lot of people
Peter Schiff
are upset that Trump is putting his henchmen in charge of national security. And who knows what he's going to do with it? Because, you know, we know how, you
know, he was using all these mortgage records to go after, you know, people on the Fed. Who knows what he's going to be doing with all the national security information. But Trump has appointed him just as
an interim head because he knows he can't get him approved, because if he actually tried to give him the job note, the Senate wouldn't confirm him. So he's allowed to appoint him as to as an interim head, and he can do the job for over 200 days without having to be approved. So now Trump gets to put his buddy there to dig up some dirt. But meanwhile, that probably scared some of
the people who invested in Fannie and Freddie.
Hey, our boy is going to be doing something else. That means this, you know, maybe we're not going to get this ipo.
So the stocks were coming down. So then Trump comes out and says they're worth a trillion dollars.
And they jumped way up on the open. Of course, they sold off from that gap. I wonder how many of Trump's friends knew that he was going to say that or post that before he did. And they got long and they sold into the rally, but the stock still ended up closing positive on the day. But the reason I say that the companies don't actually have any value.
Fannie and Freddie insure like a third of all the mortgages in the country.
That is a huge liability.
It's not an asset. Because you insure all these mortgages, that leaves you on the hook. Now, their asset is, well, they've got cash, they've got some capital.
But ultimately, if we have a big
drop in the real estate market, which
looks inevitable given the housing data and given how expensive. Housing prices have never been this expensive,
ever, Even before the DOC, even before the housing bubble popped in 2007, 2008,
houses are less affordable now than they
were then, and Americans are deeper in debt, their financial position is worse.
So ultimately, we should have a bigger decline in home prices than we did then. And it's more than enough to wipe out all of the capital that Fannie and Freddie has. So in other words, they're not worth anything, and they're never worth anything to the government.
Donald Trump wants to pretend, oh, this is this trillion dollar asset that I
helped create that we can take advantage of through an ipo. The government is the reason that Fannie and Freddie exist because the government is standing behind all the debt. Well, the government doesn't even need Fannie and Freddie to stand behind mortgage debt.
Right.
Fannie and Freddie could just be government agencies like the fha. They don't have to be these separate companies. Does the FHA have all this value because it guarantees mortgages?
No, it's a liability.
It's not value. The only reason Fannie and Freddie have
value as private companies is because the taxpayer is on the hook for the losses.
That is the value. The value was the implied or implicit guarantee that Trump wanted to make explicit that the US Government stands behind the company. So it was socialized losses and privatized gains. That was the value in the private market that you had a monopoly on. Issuing or ensuring. Mortgages were the government guarantee.
But to the government itself, Fannie and
Freddie have no value. That's all nonsense. You know, it's just a government guaranteeing debt. Like the student loans. Look at all the student loans that the US Government guarantees.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
Is that an asset to the government
Peter Schiff
because it's guaranteed all these student loans? No, it's a liability. We're all on the hook when all these student loans go bad. We got to pay for them. And in fact, Fannie and Freddie underpriced
because of the government guarantee.
The risk is underpriced. They don't have nearly enough capital to withstand the type of losses that we're going to have.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
That's why they went broke the first
Peter Schiff
time, because the government guarantee, even implicit, allowed them to insure mortgages without accurately pricing them. I mean, normal insurance companies, you know, life insurance companies, property insurance companies, you know, fire insurance, all that, they're pricing the risk accurately because the government doesn't stand behind them. The insurance companies are underwriting their own risk and they're pricing it right. And so the premiums are designed to provide the insurance companies with enough money. And if they don't, they have reinsurance. There's an entire industry that works, but when the government comes in and says, hey, we guarantee it, then it screws up the free market. You don't get and accurate pricing, the price is too low. Companies that are getting insurance on mortgages are getting it too cheap. That is the so called value created by Fannie and Freddie. Is that it it allows mortgage insurance to be underpriced, which means mortgage rates are lower than they otherwise would have been had they been accurately priced. But you can't say that creating that is an asset to the US Government. It is a liability to the US Government. Fannie and Freddie is not this trillion dollar asset that the US Government owns. It is a massive liability. It's exposure for the US Government. It's not an asset. It's all fiction. It's fake. Right? He but Trump wants to pretend that we're rich because we've guaranteed all these mortgages. No, because we've guaranteed all these mortgages. We're going to go broke. Right? If we would be better off if we didn't guarantee any of these mortgages, the US Government would be in better fiscal shape if it wasn't on the hook for the mortgages, if it wasn't on the hook for the student loans, if it wasn't on the hook to make Social Security payments and Medicare payments and Obamacare payments and government pensions. Does Trump think all those obligations somehow represent assets to the U.S. government? No. They're the liabilities. They're the unfunded liabilities that are part of the hundred trillion dollar plus real national debt that the United States has. Right. The 39 point whatever trillion is the tip of a huge iceberg.
Podcast Guest or Co-host
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Peter Schiff
Anyway, I think all these forces seem to be coming together. You know the dollar rose, the dollar index back above 100 again, the stronger than expected jobs report pushing the dollar. But this is also going to be putting pressure on the yen, on the South Korean yuan. I mean, look where these currencies are. That's going to be putting pressure on the bank of Japan, on other central banks, the Korean Central bank, to intervene in the foreign exchange market and start selling dollars, selling Treasuries at a time where we can't afford to have anybody else sell Treasuries when we've got to
sell so many because we already have so much debt. So there are so many things, you know, Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Well, I have a corollary. I think everything that can go wrong
will go wrong at this point because there are so many things that can go wrong.
Yet we had a stock market that was priced for perfection, for nothing going wrong, when in fact everything might go wrong because that's how vulnerable the position
that we are in right now. And the only real safe haven from the stock market, from the US bond market, I think is going to be gold and silver as a safe haven.
But look what happened to value stocks today.
If you look at the names that we own, not the mining stocks which
got beat up, but a lot of
our defensive dividend paying value stocks actually had solid gains today. Even as the market was bleeding red, a lot of these companies were up 2, 3, 4%. Those are big gains now, not big enough to offset the even bigger declines in the mining stocks for example. But it's a good sign to show where the money is headed, where the flows are going. What is the transition? Right? It's a rotation out of momentum and hype and speculation into value and dividend payers. And that is our strategy. That is where we have been investing the whole time. We've been staying away from the high flying momentum stocks, preparing for the air
to come out of the bubble.
But at the same time we've been investing in quality dividend paying value stocks
and combining that with EM exposure and precious metals exposure.
So right now it's the precious metals EM is getting hit with the sell off in risk assets, but this is really a whole new ballgame.
These are not the risk assets.
They're going to be where the risk capital is going to rotate into because this is where you have real investment value. And ultimately when the dollar really gets hit, which it's going to do, the reason that you're still seeing weakness in those stocks and in precious metals is the dollar strengthened.
But the big move for the dollar is down when forex traders figure out
the box that the US is in the amount of money the Federal Reserve is going to be forced to print to stop long term interest rates from soaring and to prop up the stock market. Who knows, they may even have to prop up the crypto market.
I mean, maybe Trump is going to have to announce that we're going to
print a bunch of money to actually get this strategic Bitcoin reserve going.
I hope he doesn't do that, but I know there's going to be a lot of pressure on him from his donors, probably from his kids, his family
business now is going down the drain.
Unless Trump could do something to plug up the hole.
But there's going to be all this pressure. But what it ends up doing is causing money to flow into precious metals as real safe havens. And these mining stocks are a great buy right now. They're not the type of risk assets
that should be sold.
They're actually the one type of risk asset that needs to be bought because the risk reward is so asymmetric in my opinion for these stocks that the amount that they could go up and what I expect them or how much I expect them to them to go up dwarfs how much I expect them to go down. Anyway, I gotta wrap up this podcast.
You know, I'm out here in, in the Bahamas. I hope it's not too windy.
We're in the Exumas and I'm going
to be here maybe for another week.
So the next podcast I do, I still might be on the boat, but I'm going to keep watching the markets. You know, obviously this was a huge week, huge couple of days. So even though I'm on vacation, I'm kind of stuck paying attention to, to the markets.
Now, of course, the portfolio managers, they're
still back in Puerto Rico working. It's not like, hey, nobody's watching your money just because I'm on vacation, but I'm also watching the markets. I got one eye on the markets and one eye on the beautiful scenery here in the water and the stuff that's going down. But. So I'll be back. Keep watching. In the meantime, as I said, go to shiftgold.com over the weekend, buy some gold and silver, go to europack.com and talk to the advisors there about adding money to our strategies, getting more money out of the US if you like this podcast, I know, give it a thumbs up, share it with your friends. If you're not currently a subscriber to the YouTube channel, if you're watching it on YouTube, make sure and subscribe. Anyway, bye for now. And I'LL see you next time.
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Host: Peter Schiff
Date: June 6, 2026
Peter Schiff delivers a high-energy, critical analysis of the week’s market carnage, focusing on sharp declines in crypto, tech stocks, and the so-called “Stretch” preferreds, anchored by the latest jobs report. Schiff argues that the “death spiral” across risk assets has begun, with symptoms now visible in everything from Bitcoin to gold miners. Throughout, Schiff maintains his trademark bearish stance on crypto, skepticism about official economic numbers, and a bullish outlook for gold and value stocks.
Timestamps: 00:28–09:07
Timestamps: 09:07–14:48
Timestamps: 17:27–32:25
Timestamps: 32:44–42:55
Timestamps: 41:04–44:55 / 60:28–63:12
Timestamps: 48:17–55:58
Timestamps: 59:18–63:12
Tone:
Schiff is as bluntly critical and deeply skeptical as ever, peppering technical analysis with sarcasm and historical analogies, emphasizing the perils in speculation and government intervention, while remaining staunchly defensive of real assets.