Peter Schiff - People Need to Wake Up: Recession, Inflation & A Dollar Collapse

Full transcript: Peter Schiff on London Real

2:38 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Peter Schiff, the economist, author, financial commentator and podcast host.

2:56 Your career began as a stock broker in the early ’90s, and you held positions at a number of major financial institutions before co-founding Euro Pacific Capital, as the founder of Schiff Gold. You’ve been a staunch advocate of investors allocating 10 to 20% of their portfolios to physical precious metals as the safest hedge amid a collapsing world economy. You’re one of the first expert forecasters to correctly predict the 2007 housing market collapse and subsequent 2008 financial crisis, making you one of the most sought-after commentators in the game.

3:26 Your analysis and predictions are regularly featured on CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and publications from the Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times. You believe that we are now facing a worse financial collapse than 2008 and an inflation crisis that could last for another decade. Peter, welcome back to London Real. Uh, thanks, Brian, for having me back on. And, uh, oh, by the way, you know, I haven’t been on CNBC for years, so you might want to scratch that network off your list.

3:52 I used to be on quite often. Other networks too that stopped having me on were Bloomberg. I used to be on a lot. CNN doesn’t have me on anymore. MSNBC, uh, Fox News, uh, still has me on Fox Business.

4:05 So, to their credit, and there’s a lot of international uh, news stations that have me on quite a bit, but, uh, you know, my hometown, or the United States, uh, I’m not welcome on most of the mainstream media. Why is that, Peter? I guess I got too many, too many things, right? They got tired, and they got tired of being made fun of, you know, because, uh, you know, that people would put up clips of me saying stuff and everybody else getting it wrong and me getting it right.

4:34 And I guess it’s kind of embarrassing, but, you know, I, you know, I don’t really know, because I know I’m a good guest, and a lot of these networks that stop inviting me on used to tell me how much they liked having me on, and how you know, their ratings would always pick up. In fact, when they knew that, you know, people were looking at their ratings, they would go out of the way to make sure I was there, because they knew that whenever I was there, I would bump up the numbers. In fact, a lot of people used to come up to me, you know, when I was on CNBC a lot, and they said, you know, the only time I even turn up the volume on CNBC is if I see you there.

5:07 So I know I’m a good guest. You know, I’m, I have a good sense of humor, so you know, and I, you know, I, I have a quick mind when it comes to these, uh, you know, sound-bite discussions. So I think it’s a lot of politics uh, involved. Uh, maybe the advertisers didn’t like me because I, you know, was criticizing some of the products they were pushing. I didn’t have, you know, the mainstream view.

5:32 I think most of the guests that come on these networks share the same opinion. I mean, they may have slight differences on the margin, but you rarely get somebody that’s really outside the mainstream. Yeah, I mean, I’ve had this discussion quite a lot with, uh, well, say Max Keiser back in the day, who said, look, they always bring on the military. They never say anything bad about their pharmaceutical advertisers. Like, there’s a lot of compromised media on these channels, and, uh, yeah, maybe you don’t fit into that nice little mold, so maybe that’s why they ditched you.

6:05 Yeah, I mean, they had me on, I mean, for years. You know, they called me Dr. Doom on CNBC when I was forecasting the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis in 2008. Uh, so they, at least they let me come on, and then they would make fun of me. I was almost like comic relief, because everybody else would laugh when I was coming on making these forecasts, and then after everything came true, they briefly, you know, gave me credit, and then they all of a sudden really, you know, stopped inviting me on.

6:33 Well, thank God for independent media. That’s for sure. You don’t need them. Uh, so, right, and now I’ve got, you know, my own podcast, which I didn’t have back then. In fact, I think I have more regular listeners to my podcast than CNBC has viewers.

6:46 So I think I’m reaching a larger audience on my own. And then I go on podcasts. I’ve, you know, I’ve been on the Joe Rogan podcast four times, and I, you know, I actually got to reach out and go on. I’ve been a while. I got to go on a show again, but play, you know, you had me on.

7:01 I got a lot of views on, on, on some of your videos, and so I can get the message out there. You no longer have these mainstream media outlets that are the gatekeepers, you know. There are enough independent channels on the internet that are willing to have, beyond, and now they have a large enough audience that the message gets out there. Yeah, I, um, you know, independent media, obviously, something we’ve been doing for 11 years. We had you on back in, I think, 2013, and the episode blew up again back then.

7:32 It was like half a million views. I love listening to you on Rogan. I love it when you school Rogan about, um, what was that company in China that makes the iPhones, and you’re talking about how, you know, look, it’s, they’re clearly working there, so it’s a better option than other things. I just like, could you bring a fresh perspective to Joe? Um, I haven’t been on Joe’s show since 2012.

7:50 I probably need to get back there. Um, and again, independent media is where it’s at. I mean, we’ve got more subscribers than most of the major papers here in England, and, um, that’s important. So we’ve come a long way in, uh, 10 years, that’s for sure. Peter, I want to jump in and ask you about inflation, because this is something I think you can bring a lot of clarity to people that are listening, especially some of the kids.

8:12 And look, I think we’re probably about the same age, and I have faint memories of gasoline lines in the ’70s and the concept of double-digit inflation. I remember that song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, where he says, I got a bum education, double-digit inflation, that was 1982. By the way, Grandmaster Flash was here a few months ago in the studio. But is it different now, as we approach a double-digit inflation target, than it was, say, back in the ’80s?

8:42 And then how do you explain it to someone who’s never experienced anything like double-digit inflation? Well, first of all, I don’t think we’re approaching double-digit inflation. I think we’re already there. I think that if the government was still reporting inflation the way they reported it in the 1970s, using the same methodology to calculate the CPI, the, you know, month-over-month number that we just got, which went from 9.1 to 8.5, I think it would be well north of 15.

9:13 Wow. So, um, yeah, if we, if we kept score, remember back in the 1970s, they didn’t use owner’s equivalent rent. They used home prices. They used actual rent. Well, year over year, those things are up 15 to 20%, whereas owner’s equivalent rent is up like 5.5%.

9:30 That’s a third of the CPI right there. Uh, that is dramatically undercounting the cost of shelter. But we also have things like substitution that we didn’t have back then. Back in the ’70s, the basket never changed. Now they just keep changing the basket.

9:46 They put up, they take out stuff that went up, and they put in stuff that didn’t go up as much. So the whole thing is manipulated. So we have double-digit inflation. We’re just not being honestly told that we have it. But, you know, you go back to those gas lines of the 1970s, that wasn’t the result of inflation.

10:06 Higher gas prices were the result of inflation. The lines and the shortages were the result of price controls and stuff like that, which the government may, in fact, implement again. But Americans have been living with inflation for over a decade. It’s just that the inflation didn’t show up in a dramatic way, you know, on consumer prices until more recently, because all of the monetary policies that we have pursued since the 2008 financial crisis, it can all be summed up in one word: inflation.

10:41 Inflation was deliberately created not only by the Federal Reserve, but by the ECB, by the Bank of England, which, by the way, today actually reported 10.1% year-over-year inflation, uh, and the Bank of Japan. Quantitative easing is simply another word for inflation. What is quantitative easing? Printing money and buying government bonds. That’s inflation.

11:07 Inflation is an expansion of the money supply. That is literally where the word inflation comes from. You get an old Webster dictionary, and you can even find these on the internet, and you see how inflation was defined, and it’s defined as an expansion of the money supply. Prices going up are just a result of inflation, but the government really wanted to change the definition of inflation from an expansion of the money supply to an increase in prices, so they can confuse the public as to the source of inflation, because if the public realizes that inflation is expanding money supply, well, they know exactly who’s controlling the money supply.

11:45 But if they think inflation is rising prices, the government can blame it on the people who are raising prices, greedy businessmen, or Putin, right, or somebody like that. They could they can point fingers at everybody, you know, but accept responsibility for themselves. So the government has created the inflation. And by the way, the Inflation Reduction Act will result in even more inflation being created, uh, by the government. The, the difference is that for years and years and years, the inflation that entered the economy predominantly affected asset prices.

12:20 So why did stock prices go way up? Inflation. Why did real estate prices go way up? Inflation. Why did bond prices go way up?

12:30 Inflation. Why did the price of, you know, antique cars or, you know, art? Why did all that? Why did everything go up in price? Inflation.

12:41 Why did cryptocurrencies go up in flight? Inflation. The Fed inflated these massive asset bubbles with all the money that it created. But as I was warning, going back to day one, when they first did quantitative easing, when they did QE for the first time, they didn’t call it QE1 until they had QE2. But when they did the first QE, I said that there would be a QE2.

13:05 I said there would be a QE3. I said back then that we would have more QEs than Rocky movies. We’ve now had four. QE5 is coming up. That’s how many Rocky movies we had.

13:14 But the reason I knew the government would keep repeating it is because I knew it wouldn’t work. All they would do is blow air back into a bubble, and then every time the air started seeping out, they would want to blow more back in, because QE doesn’t solve the problem. It exacerbates the problem. But now the problem is that all that monetary inflation has now worked its way through financial assets, and it has ended up where I always knew it would, in goods prices, consumer goods, producer goods.

13:44 And this is where it’s going to stay. And if the Federal Reserve goes back to QE again, which I think it will, because we’re already in a recession, and they’re going to try to stimulate the economy at some point, especially when we really start hemorrhaging jobs again, when they go back to QE, it’s not going to look anything like the previous doses. Uh, we’re going to have an explosion in consumer prices, because inflation is already well above their so-called 2% target.

14:13 And if the Fed throws gasoline on this fire, even with inflation three or four times, it’s sealing, uh, the markets are going to react very differently. I think we’re going to have a crisis in the dollar. I think the dollar is going to crash, and I think bond prices are going to soar. It’s going to be a sovereign debt crisis, and so it’s going to look a lot different than what we’ve experienced in the past decade or so. So do they always know, always knew this would ultimately trickle down into goods prices?

14:42 And, you know, then was it going to be easier to explain it, because it’s the businessman, it’s the war, it’s the famine? Or was this a little unintended, that this was going to happen so quick? Or was this always somewhere in government or at the Fed that knew this and just lied about it, but I’m sure there’s so many incompetent people there that, no, they didn’t expect it. They’re so clueless about economics, about inflation, and so they’re just surprised.

16:16 But the whole purpose of the policy that we’ve pursued, it’s just kicking the can down the road. We’ve got this huge problem, and we don’t want to deal with it. Why does no politician want to deal with it? Because it means if they deal with it, they might not get re-elected, because you don’t get re-elected by being the bearer of bad news. Right?

16:38 There’s an old saying, you know, don’t shoot the messenger. Right? So nobody, incumbent, no politician, no central banker, wants to level with voters about how bad things are and what they actually need to do in order to correct the problem. What they want to do is kick that can down the road, because then they can get past the next election. And so that’s all we’ve been doing, but every time we do that, we make the problems that everybody is afraid to deal with even worse, and now they’re even more afraid to deal with them, because the consequences of doing it are even worse.

17:15 So again, the can keeps getting kicked, but at some point you run out of road, right? Or the can is simply too large and you can’t kick it anymore. And, you know, we’ve got to be there. You know, we’ve got a $9 trillion Fed balance sheet. We’ve got almost 30, 31 trillion in national debt.

17:34 We’ve flooded the economy with money, and we’ve really kicked it into a higher gear with COVID when we had the, you know, the worst combination of monetary and fiscal policy I’ve ever seen, and I called out the Fed in Congress in March of 2020 for the asinine policy response to COVID. They, on the one hand, they ordered businesses to shut down and workers to stay home, so they ordered a big reduction in supply. At the same time, they flooded the economy with cash to increase demand.

18:09 In fact, they were dumb enough to send checks to people who are no longer working that were two or three times as large as the money they earned when they were working. So we had less supply, we had tremendous demand, and of course prices went straight up. The opposite of what they should have done. The government should have cut spending during COVID. This federal reserve should have shrunk the money supply.

18:34 If we were going to stop production, which was a mistake. I never believed we should have shut down the economy. I think it was overreaction uh, to the COVID. But if we were going to do that, if we really thought it was necessary to shut everything down and everybody stay home, then we also needed people to stop spending. We couldn’t give people money to buy stuff when nobody was making stuff.

18:58 We had to have a more serious recession than the one we had. But again, the politicians didn’t want that. They wanted people to keep spending even though they weren’t working. And, you know, the consequences were obvious to me. It’s just amazing that so many other people in government, you know, couldn’t see it, or even in the private sector.

19:19 I think I’ve asked you this before. I’m gonna ask you again, Peter. If I could put you in to the Oval Office for the next four years and say, guess what, let’s bite the bullet, let’s just, let’s clear all this out and clean all this out. What would the economy look like for four years in the US and globally? What, how much pain?

19:37 And then what would the consequences be for the American public to get this right, to set things straight? It would be a combination of pain and relief. Okay, so I mean, it wouldn’t just be all pain, and I don’t know exactly how long it would take to play out. Remember, we have so many malinvestments. The misallocation of resources is so great.

20:00 Uh, we’ve made so many mistakes that obviously unraveling this mess isn’t going to be easy. Asset prices are going to collapse, um, companies are going to default. Investors are going to lose money. There’s no way around that. It’s just impossible to avoid that.

20:23 A lot of jobs are going to be lost. Now, a lot of jobs are going to be gained too, but you know, jobs are going to be lost. I mean, we have to lose the wrong jobs to create the right jobs. If people are employed in areas where they shouldn’t be, you know, that labor needs to be freed up to be reallocated to where it needs to be. No, interest rates have to be much higher.

20:46 Now, what does that mean? A lot of defaults, a lot of bankruptcies. But of course, it’s going to encourage savings, which will finance capital investment. Again, I mean, the economy will repair. The government is going to have to slash government spending, so obviously, if you’re dependent on that spending, it’s not good for you.

21:03 If you used to get a big check from the government and now you get a much smaller check, or you get no check at all, you know, that’s going to be a big deal. I mean, I think doing the right thing is going to require substantial cuts to Social Security. You know, so a lot of people are not prepared for that, but that has to happen. Now, if we don’t do that, then the Social Security benefits are going to be worthless anyway, because inflation is going to destroy them.

21:28 You know, so I think, you know, a measured approach to cutting, uh, um, in Social Security and maybe means testing it is much better than just wiping out everybody’s benefits equally through inflation. So we’re gonna go through pain one way or another. At least the pain that we would go through, with me, you know, you know, call it the shots, would be constructive pain. It would be pain that would eventually lead to gain. But the course we’re on now is just going to be pain followed by even greater pain.

21:59 You know, so we need to do the right thing, and if we could make government much smaller, and we could eliminate a lot of the government. I mean, I would like to liberate the people from having to pay the income tax. I don’t want any personal income tax. I don’t want any corporate income tax. I mean, I don’t want people to have to waste money and time calculating the income tax and keeping track of it.

22:20 I don’t want people rearranging their affairs or spending time trying to avoid taxes. I want them spending their time and their resources trying to generate income, not try to shield it from taxation. We need to go back to taxing consumption. We need a tax system that taxes people when they spend their money, not when they earn their money. That’s what the country was founded upon.

22:44 That was a basic principle that existed until 1913, and I want to go back to that, and that would be a major boom for the US economy. And of course, if I was president, there are so many regulations that I could eliminate with the stroke of the pen that would immediately free up capital and allow for American business to be much more efficient and much more productive, and money wasn’t wasted on complying with all these ridiculous regulations. That money could then be used productively in the real economy.

23:16 So, look, I think capitalism is a very dynamic economic system, and I think it has the ability to deliver substantial gains in standards of living. It worked in the 18th century, or rather the 19th century, very well. Unfortunately, we didn’t have it for most of the 20th century, but if we can go back to it, it could work even better in the 21st century than it worked in the 19th century, and it worked great in the 19th century. And on average, asset prices would be slashed by a third under President Schiff’s plan.

23:51 Well, I think the market would take them down a lot more than that. I mean, at least most assets. There might be some assets that would increase in value, and I mean, I think that, you know, they would. But obviously you’ve got a lot of companies that have crazy earnings, you know, huge multiples, that would crash 50%. There’s a lot of companies that would go to zero.

24:08 A lot of companies that have a lot of debt and no earnings, they would, they would go bankrupt, and real estate goes down, and a lot of assets would go down. Yeah, but you know, that means real estate is more affordable if you want to buy it. I mean, there’s two sides to every coin, right? But also, if I own a piece of real estate that goes down in value, but stocks go down in value too, well, if I want to, you know, sell my house and buy stocks, I mean, maybe it’s a push, right?

24:33 Because everything has gone down in value. But you know, we’re living in a huge bubble, and the bubble has to deflate, and, you know, if you’ve been getting rich off that bubble, you know, you got a problem as the air comes out. And that’s why there’s, you know, a big vested interest in continuing this. But, you know, if I had been president 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, and had I been able to do the right thing, then, assuming, you know, I can get the right thing through Congress, I mean, I wouldn’t, you’re not making me king, you’re just making me president, so we’ll see if I could actually get anything done.

25:11 But I mean, I would try my best. I mean, I would veto every budget, you know, that was not balanced. I mean, I would force these massive cuts, and I would, you know, level with the public. I’d do a lot of talks to try to, you know, educate the public to understand, you know, the mess that we’re in and how big the stakes are, and why we need to do the right thing. Um, good night.

25:34 What was I saying? I just, uh, I, I just lost I think you were talking about how you’d get these policies through, uh, if you were president. No, no, my point was that had I been president 10 years ago and been able to do this, it would have been a lot easier. I mean, it would have been hard. I mean, it would have been hard even back then.

25:50 There would have been a lot of pain, but because 10 more years of mistakes have been made and the bubble is ten years bigger, it’s going to be worse now. And if you know, and if you know, we wait another five or ten years, if we even have that long, you know, it would be even worse than if we did it now. Yeah, it gets worse. It’s almost like, uh, yeah, a bad drug habit. You just need to do more to feel the same, and then more.

26:16 That’s the analogy, and my, the problem is, if you have to keep doing larger and larger doses of a drug, yeah, the risk is you eventually overdose, and that is the point where I think we’re at, where the next batch will be the batch that, you know, where we overdose and kill the dollar and destroy the economy. Right? I want to get into the dollar as well, just inflation for the average American or person out there, or Englishman, who’s looking at potentially 15% real inflation, whether it’s reported or not, maybe more.

26:47 How does that start to change, you know, who you are as a consumer and what your daily life is? I, I read an article in the New York Times about Argentina’s way of life and how it’s been over the last 10 or 20 years. And by the way, I am embarrassed that I read that publication, but I read it anyways, and it talked about all these crazy aspects of their lifestyle that we never realized. There was a guy at a hardware store who didn’t know the prices of his goods.

27:09 He had to go look it up on a piece of paper that got printed every couple of days. And it was all these weird choices that, it turned out, this very strange economy that didn’t make sense the way we know an economy with low inflation. Is this something that’s coming up, and are we going to have to start thinking differently? experience. It’s going to be a way of life, and of course businesses are going to have to figure out how to deal with it, and of course that’s going to make American business even less efficient than it is now.

30:27 We’re probably going to end up having a larger underground economy, which is probably one of the reasons that the IRS is gearing up with 87,000 more agents, because as more people operate in the underground economy, uh, you know, they may be not paying as much taxes as the IRS, you know, would like. And so that’s probably why they want more agents out there to go after, you know, the small businesses and self-employed workers who you may end up, uh, being forced into the underground economy, uh, by inflation. But inflation is over.

31:01 That’s a cash economy. Is that with the underground economy? Yeah, cash economy, and the cash may not be dollars. I mean, inflation may force people to use you know, other currencies, or maybe, maybe gold or silver. I doubt it would be Bitcoin, but uh, it will be something viable as a medium of exchange and as a store of value.

31:19 Um, and so, but yeah, I mean, they’re going to be cracking down on Bitcoin too. I mean, that’s part of what uh, what they’re trying to do. And when you see that 87,000 new agents going after small businessmen, does that make you sad? Does that make you confused? Oh yeah, I mean, look, the IRS is the most hated agency in the government, and for good reason, right?

31:37 I mean, yet now we’re going to make it much bigger, and people are supposed to be happy about that. I mean, how many Americans are excited about the prospect of getting audited more often, or if they’ve never been audited at all? You know, having to be audited, nobody. Everybody is in fear of getting a letter from the IRS. No, nobody wants that.

31:55 Now, of course, more and more people are going to get it, and the Democrats are proud uh, that they voted for this. But the point I wanted to make is that Americans are already dealing with high inflation. Look at what’s going on. Credit card debt has exploded. Why?

32:10 Because people can’t afford things, they have to borrow. Savings have collapsed to the lowest level since the Great Recession of 2008. Why? Because people are having to, you know, clean out their savings. Look at the surge in moonlighting.

32:24 You know, almost all the jobs that we’ve created the last four months have gone to people who already had jobs. So these are people that have full-time jobs, taking a part-time job, or people that have two part-time jobs, taking a third part-time job. In fact, we now have a record number of Americans who have two full-time jobs at the same time. So what’s happening? Because paychecks are being eviscerated by inflation.

32:48 People are having to, you know, supplement their job with another job, and so obviously people don’t want to work two or three jobs. They like to have some leisure time. They like to spend more time, you know, with their families, but they can’t, because one job won’t cut it anymore. You can’t feed your family. You can’t pay the rent, so people are forced to take additional jobs.

33:09 So this is already showing up, but it’s really going to impact Americans when the dollar tanks, because so far the dollar has gone up, and that has actually been a relief. That is helping keep a lid on prices. US prices would be going up a lot more if we had a weak dollar rather than a strong dollar, which seems like a paradox, because we have inflation, and so by definition the dollar is weak. It’s losing purchasing power, but on international foreign exchange markets it’s gained value, and that’s helped keep the price of our imports down, and of course America relies on imports.

33:42 We import pretty much all the products, and so those products have been kept lower in price because of the strong dollar. When the dollar reverses and gets killed, which I believe it will, then those import prices are going to surge, and that’s going to really hit Americans hard. Now, that dollar crashing, why do you think that’s imminent? Well, I think the dollar has risen based on the false expectation that the Fed is going to win its fight against inflation, and that to win that fight it’s going to raise interest rates, and those higher rates are helping the dollar.

34:19 But I think the markets are wrong. I think the Fed is going to surrender. Inflation is going to win the fight. I think the Fed is going to ultimately pivot. Powell is going to turn his attention from inflation to the economy, that the Fed is going to go back to stimulus, because the recession that we’re already in, and that so many people are denying, is going to get much worse.

34:41 We are in danger of an actual financial crisis if the Fed continues to raise rates, which it may, and if that crisis hits, uh, the Fed is going to go back to QE. Well, uh, not only by trying to cut rates, but by you know, printing more money to buy up more bad debt. But unlike the last few times they did that, the Fed is going to be doing that with inflation already very high. So what the Fed was able to hide behind with QE1, 2, and 3, and even QE4, was that inflation was still below their 2% target, and so therefore they could still print a lot of money.

35:19 And even if inflation went up, well, that wasn’t a risk. That was actually a benefit, that was enabling the Fed to kill two birds with one stone: help the economy and achieve their 2% inflation, uh, target, which never made any sense to me. And I called the Fed out for that lunacy. And you had the same thing in Europe and in the UK. They kept saying, we don’t have inflation, we need more.

35:40 Yeah, we needed more inflation like a hole in the head, and now, now we’ve got it, right? But I knew that that was just a bunch of nonsense. But if the Fed tries to go back to zero percent interest rates, if the Fed tries to go back to QE with inflation at six percent or higher, you know, right now it’s still eight and a half, but if inflation is triple 2%, you can’t justify throwing gasoline on an inflation fire. And so when the Fed does that, I think the dollar is going to burn to a crisp.

36:11 I think the world is going to recognize that inflation is going to go on forever, that the balance sheet is going to expand forever, and then the bottom’s going to drop out, not just of the US dollar, but of the US Treasury bond market. And when bond prices start to crash, that’s when the Fed is going to have to really up the size of QE, because the Fed is not going to let the bond market crash. The Fed is going to stop that crash by buying those bonds itself.

36:36 Well, where is it going to get the money to buy those bonds? It’s got to print it, so it’s got to create more inflation to buy bonds. But the more inflation the Fed creates, the more people who own bonds want to get rid of them, so it’s a self-perpetuating spiral, and it just ends in a dollar crisis. Now, while we’re on inflation, you mentioned that people sometimes blame Putin for the oil, or, you know, the Ukraine crisis for, uh, wheat prices going up.

37:00 Is that a factor? How has the war affected all of this? Well, the war can affect certain prices, but not the overall level of prices. So if money supply stays the same, and gas prices go up, or food prices go up because of individual shortages in, you know, those sections of the economy, prices are going to fall someplace else, and, you know, it’s all a function of individual supply and demand. The only way prices can go up across the board is if the government accommodates that with an increase in the supply of money.

37:36 Now we have more money to pay higher prices for everything. So inflation is always created by government. It’s not created by economic growth. It’s not created by too many people having jobs. It’s not created by greedy businessmen gouging their customers.

37:51 It’s not created by workers demanding raises. None of this nonsense. These are all excuses to try to put the blame of inflation on the public instead of accepting responsibility, which is what politicians never want to do. So that’s really well explained. I’ve never heard that before, Peter.

38:10 I like that. Um, tell me how much damage was done to the dollar when the US decided that they would pull the dollar privileges from people around the world, kind of on the back of this invasion? Maybe I’m talking mainly about Russians. is another nail in the coffin for the dollar. Although we haven’t buried it yet, but it certainly sends a message to the rest of the world that you better get off the dollar standard, that you need to divest yourself of dollars.

41:45 You need to make sure that your economy does not depend on dollar-denominated trade, and so move away from the dollar, because by relying on the dollar and depending on the dollar, you give a lot of power to the United States. You create a weapon that the US could then turn and use against you. So why do the Chinese want to create a weapon for the US to use against China? I mean, doesn’t make any sense. I mean, look, look what we did to Russia.

42:10 I mean, Russia had already moved a lot of its reserves to gold, and so those reserves, you know, we couldn’t touch, but they still had reserves in dollars, and those were frozen. So, you know, what good was that? And so it calls into question the viability of the dollar. It’s not really sacrosanct. I mean, the US government can decide if they’re going to withdraw your privilege to use the dollar and to utilize a SWIFT system that runs on dollars.

42:37 They can, you know, yank that privilege away from you if they don’t like something that you did. And that doesn’t make any sense for a nation to put themselves in that predicament, especially if we’re out there claiming there are enemies. So if we’re saying, hey, the Chinese are our enemy, well, why does the enemy, you know, want to be in a position where it holds all these dollars and all these Treasuries? They wouldn’t. They’d want to get rid of them.

43:02 And so I think that this will accelerate a process that was going to happen anyway, and I think it just shows you how little American politicians understand the predicament that we’re in and how dependent we are on the dollar being the reserve currency. That is what makes our bubble economy function. The only reason we can run these, you know, trillion-dollar-plus per year, uh, trade deficits is because of the dollar’s role. We’re able to exchange the money we print for the goods everybody else makes.

43:37 If the dollar is no longer the reserve currency, we can’t do that anymore. The only way we’ll be able to import goods is if we export goods, which means we have to produce stuff, and producing actual goods that people want to buy is a lot harder than just printing money. And it consumes a lot more resources and maybe even a lot more pollution than just creating numbers out of thin air, or digits, you know, on a computer. Uh, so it’s amazing that the politicians do not appreciate how valuable the dollar’s role has been to maintaining our standard of living, and how catastrophic it’s going to be if we lose that position.

44:17 And we are making it more likely that we lose that position. By the way, we’ve weaponized uh, the dollar, and the fact that people now rely on it for global trade. Yeah, I think we, you know, we’ve always grown up in the US and been so used to it being the global currency. I had Jim Rickards on a couple weeks ago, and he talked about some big oil trade being priced in the UAE currency, in dirhams, that Russia had traded with an entity, and, uh, you know, prices were now being quoted in this kind of third currency, and that it was a little bit concerning, that this just obviously could continue, and potentially, you know, in the future it’s, it’s no longer the petrodollar.

44:58 It’s other things. So that’s something, I guess, to be concerned about as well. Yeah, I mean, and you never, the petrodollar only really came into existence after Nixon took us off the gold standard. I mean, he really realized at that time that the dollar was in a lot of trouble, now that it was no longer backed by something real. And so they got that deal with the Saudis to start pricing oil in dollars, so now at least you could buy oil with your dollars, and now the dollar had some value, uh, because if you wanted oil and you wanted to buy it from OPEC, well, you needed dollars.

45:30 So that really helped create demand for our currency. Let’s talk about financial collapse and recessions. Obviously, all of these things are recessionary indicators, but what about the economy as a whole? America, you made a couple allusions to it, and again, in my intro I said you think we’re facing the worst financial collapse than 2008. What do you think about recessions?

45:52 Well, I mean, in general, recessions are actually the beneficial part of the government-created business cycle. You have this boom-and-bust cycle that is not some kind of naturally occurring part of capitalism, but it happens when governments interfere with capitalism. What happens is, sometimes governments will manipulate interest rates and keep them artificially low, and in that environment a lot of mistakes are made. But while the mistakes are being made, you get this economic boom.

46:24 You have a lot of investment, a lot of spending that really shouldn’t be done, right? Or spending that is being pulled forward from the future. So we have a big party, and everybody is high on drugs, because the government, you know, got everybody drugged up or liquored up, and then eventually the market tries to correct the mistakes that were made as a result of having the interest rates artificially low, and then you get the bust. Then you get the recession.

46:53 Now, the recession doesn’t feel as good as the boom, right? Because everybody loses money. The party’s over. You’re sobering up, right? You always have more fun at a party than the hangover, than the next morning, right?

47:04 But, um, you know, sobering up that’s the good part, right? Your body is, you know, getting better, you know? All the crap is leaving your system, and so in the recession, the free market fixes what the government broke. Right? So recessions aren’t fun, but they’re necessary and healthy.

47:22 Now, we’re in a recession now, but this recession is not healthy, because the government, you know, never lets it run its course. Right now it started, and it’s going to get a lot worse, because, you know, we’ve got a lot more mistakes to correct. We have far more debt now than we had in 2008, and so this is a much bigger credit bubble and a much bigger bust. But before the market has a chance to really start correcting these mistakes, the Fed is going to intervene again, just like it did in 2008, just like it did in 2001, right?

47:57 The Fed is going to print money and lower interest rates and prevent the market from, you know, performing these necessary, uh, corrections. But we’re in a recession, you know. People want to deny that we’re in one, uh, but it’s here, and it’s still early. Even though it’s been going on for more than six months, we’ve been in a recession the entire year. And by the way, last year I predicted that we would enter a recession in the first half of 2022, and we did.

48:26 I also predicted that inflation would get stronger as the economy got weaker, when you had so many people that were calling for peak inflation, or inflation was transitory. So I got both of those things right. I got the economy going into recession and inflation getting worse. What I didn’t get right was the market forecast. I thought that combination would be positive for gold and negative for the dollar.

48:50 That hasn’t happened yet, but I still believe that I will be vindicated in those predictions as well. It’s just taking a little longer. And talk to me about precious metals, silver and gold, the price action, uh, whether people should hold them or not, and then, of course, I kind of ask you about crypto after that. So go ahead, tell me. Well, look, you know, gold and silver are real money.

49:11 Uh, they are the, uh, most, uh, viable alternatives to the fiat monetary system that we have now, and if people want something that can be used as a store of value, as a unit of account, and as a medium of exchange, gold is it. You know, and, and, you know, you could use silver too, I believe, but gold is something that has functioned as all, as, you know, all three in the past, and it can function as all three in the present and in the future. You know, a lot of people think, well, no, I mean, we should use Bitcoin.

49:47 Bitcoin is not going to be able to be a reliable store of value, nor will it really be a, a viable medium of exchange or unit of account, due to its, uh, volatility. But its lack of inherent value means that it can never be a store of value. But where I think there is some, you know, room is with blockchain and that technology, because you could certainly have a crypto currency backed up by gold, and you could transact in that, and that would be both a store of value and an efficient unit of exchange, uh, and, and, uh, immediate exchange, rather, and unit of account.

50:29 So that, that that could happen, whether the governments allow it to happen, we’ll see. They may, uh, try to prevent it, because that would be a real threat to the fiat-based system we have now. But if you remember, before there was a Federal Reserve, how did currency come into existence in the United States? It was created by private, central, by private banks that operated all around the country. They issued their own note currency, and all of it was backed by gold.

50:56 That’s how it worked, and in fact, the original Federal Reserve notes, they were backed by gold too, you know, uh, and they were redeemable in gold. So we were on a gold standard both before the Federal Reserve was created and after. But the original note currency was put into circulation by private companies. So the same thing could happen again, except instead of paper currency, you would use a digital currency. Private companies could put digital currency into circulation, just like they’ve done now, except instead of putting fiat digital currencies in, they could put legitimate digital currencies in, those that are backed by gold, and that would make them similar to the type of currency that was issued before the Federal Reserve, except even more efficient when it comes to the ability to utilize them as a medium of exchange, because you would have a digital token that you can transfer instantaneously anywhere in the world, instead of just having a bill or having to use a checkbook or something like that.

52:06 So you can get all of the, uh, benefits of blockchain without the drawback of a Bitcoin. When you have a legitimate uh, crypto that is backed by real money, gold, I mean. So gold is money, and the crypto would be, uh, currency that could circulate, you know, in place of money, but backed by money, but it would be more convenient to use. Interesting. I’ve never heard you talk about this, but you’re basically saying you like blockchain because it’s basically a public ledger, and it allows everybody to see everything that’s going on, and you can check it.

52:45 Similarly, I guess you could with, you know, a checkbook in an old-school bank, where there was gold on deposit. So you’re not against blockchain per se, as long as it has something real as an asset behind it, and that would be gold in this case. Yes, I mean, that would be an improvement, making gold more convenient to use, because that’s the more suited for the digital age, is just to use uh, a blockchain to make gold more efficient, but ultimately the monetary standard has to stay the same.

53:15 You can’t just reinvent gold and say, oh, forget about gold, we’re going to say Bitcoin is gold. Bitcoin is not gold. It doesn’t have any of the physical properties that gold has, so you can’t use Bitcoin to make jewelry. You can’t use Bitcoin to conduct electricity, so you can’t replace um, gold with Bitcoin. And, and, and so you can use that.

53:38 It’s going to be able to be money. You can use NFTs to make jewelry. Now, of course, not really. Well, Tiffany says you can. But, uh, but yeah, I see your point.

53:47 Well, your, uh, your good buddy, uh, Michael Saylor, you know, is his chief, uh, argument against gold that you know, to move it you have to put it on a freight train and, you know, move it across the country. He’ll be here in a few weeks. I know the debate between you two we’re still waiting for, but that’s his main, you know, drawback against gold, that you can’t move it. Uh, well, first of all, most people will never own enough gold that you need a freight train to move it.

54:11 I mean, most people won’t be able to afford enough gold to fill up a shoe box, and so you could easily move all your gold. You don’t need a freight train. I mean, maybe Michael Saylor is so rich that he needs a whole freight train to cart out. How heavy is a billion dollars’ worth of gold? You probably, I don’t know, I don’t know.

54:29 Okay, is that a truckload? I’ve never, I’ve never held a billion dollars’ worth of gold, but a million dollars’ worth of gold is very light. I mean, again, you know, you can put it in a, in a, in a briefcase uh, and, and, and walk around with it. I mean, you might have, you know, so, um, I think that that is not a valid reason to oppose gold, and certainly, you know, that didn’t stop gold from functioning as money, you know, 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, or 300 years ago.

54:57 It worked just fine, despite the fact that, you know, if you had that much of it, uh, you know, it was difficult to move. And, you know, we didn’t even have freight trains. You know, gold was money, you know, before we had engines. I mean, they were able to cart it around in a horse and buggy. And so, if you couldn’t say, hey, gold is too heavy to, for a horse to pull, I mean, clearly, you know, the argument might have had more validity back then than it does now.

55:21 That’s just a bunch of nonsense, and pretty much everything that comes out of Saylor’s mouth when it comes to Bitcoin or gold is a bunch of nonsense. That’s why the guy doesn’t want to debate me, because I expose all, you know, all the nonsense that he says about Bitcoin and about gold. Look, he talks his book. He owns a bunch of Bitcoin, and he’s got to convince other people to buy it, and so, you know, he has to say whatever crazy stuff comes to his mind in order to convince people to overpay for Bitcoin and not buy gold.

55:52 All right. Well, let’s, let’s jump into crypto then, because, uh, I know you’re, you’re one that you seem to debate a lot of people on crypto. I think including your son, Spencer. You guys go back and forth with your Twitter wars. Has your view of crypto changed at all?

56:04 You and I were talking right before we went live here, and I think when you were on the show here almost 10 years ago, you were talking about Bitcoin back then, really early on. Um, has your view changed at all? I mean, obviously, I’ve never heard you talk about blockchain and gold, so that’s interesting, but, you know, with Bitcoin, with the DeFi protocols, with the stablecoins, with all that stuff, has anything changed in your mind, or has it always been like you and Warren Buffett say, just the rat poison?

56:32 Um, no. I mean, when I first heard about it, which was even years before I was on your show, I mean, I heard about it. I didn’t hear about it at the very beginning. I didn’t know about it when, you know, it was less than 10 cents, or even less than a dollar, but I, I believe I heard about it maybe when it was under 10, certainly when it was well below 100. But I think it might have been below 10.

56:54 Um, but I know I learned about it early on, but my opinion about it hasn’t changed. What has changed, obviously, is the fact that I did get wrong, or underestimated, the fact that other people would not understand Bitcoin and would be fooled into buying it. I just did not see early on that a bubble could get so big in this asset, and not just Bitcoin, because one of the things I didn’t like about Bitcoin when I first heard about it, I was like, well, what’s stopping somebody else from coming up with another cryptocurrency to compete with Bitcoin?

57:32 And it was like, well, nothing. I said, well, then what’s so special about it? I mean, it’s just a digital token. I mean, there’s no limit to the number of digital tokens, and of course now there’s more than 20,000 of these things, yet there’s still demand for them. So I, I did not believe that, you know, demand could be this great, and, you know, they clearly have utility, right?

57:52 So they clearly have, well, they don’t have utility. I mean, they’re, you know, that they’ve gone up in price despite their lack of utility. What the reason that Bitcoin has gone up is because people believe they’re going to get rich buying it, and a lot of people did get rich buying it, and that’s what’s, you know, motivating so many other people to think that they can get rich too, but they’re not. I mean, it’s a pyramid. It’s, you know, it’s a Ponzi or a chain letter.

58:16 I mean, you know, it’s on a blockchain, but, you know, it’s still a chain letter. Uh, but all of the people who make money are only going to make money because a lot more people are going to lose money. It is a zero-sum game. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game, because you have to pay the miners, and there’s a lot of other costs involved. So people are going to lose money, and in fact I think most of the people who bought Bitcoin are losing money.

58:42 I think more than half the people who own Bitcoin paid more than, you know, $24,000 a Bitcoin, uh, that’s you know, approximately the current price, uh, or a little less, I think, today, but I think most people who own Bitcoin paid more than that. Um, and you know, so they’re down. I think most institutions that are involved in Bitcoin are way down, including Michael Saylor, who’s down about a billion dollars on his purchase. He still claims it’s a home run, you know, which, you know, I mentioned on Twitter.

59:14 Twitter, if losing a billion dollars is a home run, I’d hate to see how he defines a strikeout. Um, but you know, I don’t think anything has changed as far as that. My early call on the ultimate demise, I mean, when I first heard about Bitcoin, I thought it would go to zero, and I still think it’s going to go to zero. I just didn’t realize it would go to $69,000 first. Because, obviously, I could have bought it.

59:40 I could be the richest man in the world right now if I’d have, you know, put any significant amount of Bitcoin money into Bitcoin when I first heard about it. Now, of course, a lot of people could make that same claim, right? We all could be super rich had we bought a lot of Bitcoin back then. Um, let me ask you about, let me ask you about stablecoins, in this case, I won’t talk about, say, a Terra Luna stablecoin. I’ll talk about a USDC stablecoin, the, um, the gold standard, if you will, of stablecoins.

1:00:09 I had Jeremy Allaire on the show, who’s gone up in front of Congress a few times, and, you know, for every one of those stablecoins they mint, there is a, I think, a US Treasury bond behind it, and it’s audited, et cetera. Um, clearly people are using those things. What do you see? I think stablecoin has its utility. I think I think most of the stablecoins that are being used are being used to trade Bitcoin or Ether or other tokens.

1:00:34 I don’t think a lot of people are using stablecoins for day-to-day, you know, transactions, commercial transactions. I don’t think people are, you know, buying goods and services with stablecoins. I think more people would be using their credit card, their debit card, PayPal, Venmo, you know, any one of the number, Zelle. There’s all kinds of services through the banks where you can electronically send and receive US dollars. So I don’t know that there’s any reason uh, to take the added risk of a stablecoin that blows up and to introduce that extra, uh, counterparty risk that you don’t really need to assume, uh, in my mind.

1:01:18 If you want to be in crypto and you want something stable, why would you want stability to the US dollar when the US dollar is not stable? The US dollar is losing purchasing power over time. So I think having a stablecoin that’s stable to gold makes a lot more sense to me, because a lot of the people who are attracted to cryptocurrencies, like, hey, there’s high inflation, we don’t trust central banks, we don’t trust fiat currencies. Well, what good is going into a stablecoin that’s tied to the very currency that you don’t like?

1:01:48 So to me, I’d rather have stability to real money, gold, than have stability to a fiat currency, uh, like the dollar or any of these other currencies. Is that coming soon from Euro Pacific, the uh, the Schiff Gold coin? Yeah, uh, you know, I’ve, I’ve talked to a lot of different companies, and there are companies that have these tokens, and I, I think it is something that I will ultimately get behind. I thought about doing something like that, uh, but, you know, when you do that, you know, I mean, my experience uh, with regulators, you know, in when it comes to payments or banking, so far has not been a great experience, so I’m not really sure if it’s something that I could risk getting into, because it certainly, I believe, would, uh, uh, draw a lot of scrutiny, uh, from, from the government.

1:02:38 You know, the government hates competition. You know, uh, you know, try to deliver the mail. You know, they’ll put you out of business, right? You know, even a little kid trying to deliver mail out of a bicycle, the government will stop you. Uh, you know, so, but there are some companies, you know, Federal Express came around, you know, Uber comes around to compete with, you know, uh, taxicab and other licensed entities, so it is possible, but the government really, really doesn’t like competition when it comes to money, which means they will be regulating, so, which means they will be regulating stablecoins by the end of the year, and they would be regulating the hell out of these coins with AML and KYC, and I think the cost of regulation is going to be so great that it’s going to undermine the viability of even using them.

1:03:24 They’ll just be, because the compliance costs will be so great that, you, you won’t even use it. Yeah, because it’d be too expensive. Um, Peter, I had, um, Chris Giancarlo in my studio a couple months ago. He was former, uh, chairman of the CFTC, and he wrote a book called Crypto Dad, and he’s part of the Digital Dollar Association. I think it is where it’s a proactive group of people that are trying to bring in, I guess, it’s a Fed coin, or a CBDC, that has the values of freedom in it, as opposed to control and oppression, which he says the digital U1 is now all about, and has been rolled out to 70 million people, and it’s all bad news.

1:04:03 Um, what do you think about the upcoming Fed coin? Do you know much about Chris and what he’s doing? Do you think there’s hope for a CBDC that has good things for Americans or the world? No. In fact, I think the opposite.

1:04:18 I think to the extent that the US government could get everybody, or maybe even force everybody, into utilizing a Fed coin, they will be in a position to do even more damage to the economy, and America will be in a position to strip Americans of even more of their individual liberties and of their rights, because right now with the system we have, if you have cash in your pocket, you can go out and spend it, and the government doesn’t know what you bought. Right, the government doesn’t see that transaction, and they don’t like that, but that gives you a degree of privacy and a degree of freedom, because they can’t stop you from using that cash. And, and, also, on the other end, I mean, if you are paid cash, the government doesn’t know that you got it unless you tell them.

1:05:08 Uh, but if we completely eliminate cash, and the only way you can transact is with a Fed coin, the government knows every single dollar that you spend and what you spend it on, and every single dollar you’re paid and what you sold and who paid you. That is a very dangerous uh, position to be in. And not that I’m saying, hey, I want people to get away with crimes. No, but I don’t want the government to have so much power that it can start taking things that are not crimes and make them crimes and turn law-abiding citizens into criminals.

1:05:46 Remember, if you have a corrupt government and then you have an uprising to try to throw out the corruption, now you’re a criminal, right? Because the government can redefine the rules, right? I mean, there were criminals, you know, in, uh, in, in Nazi Germany, not that I want to make the comparison, but, you know, if you are helping Jews escape, you are a criminal, right? But, you know, so, but was that a crime? No, those were the good people that resisted bad laws.

1:06:14 But the more powerful the government is, the harder it is for the underground to fight back, and you don’t want the government to know every single thing you do. And of course, if the Federal Reserve is able to expand the money supply with paper, imagine how much easier they could do it with crypto, and they can even micromanage it. They can, they can, they can say, okay, we’re gonna, you can, you have more currency, but you have to spend it here, or you have to spend it there, or you can’t use it for this, or there’s an expiration date, you got to spend the money.

1:06:47 They can really try to micromanage the economy, which means they’re going to screw it up even more than they’re doing it now. So no, I, I, I think that we should resist giving the government that much more power and surrendering what’s left of our individual liberties and what’s left of our privacy. We don’t have much financial privacy left. I mean, that’s what all this banking rules are about. So nobody has any privacy.

1:07:14 So every single transaction you make is reported to the government. And again, you know, yes, they may be able to catch a few criminals, but they’re soon going to be catching a lot of honest people, because they can harass their political enemies by having all this information about where you spend your money, what you buy with your money. It may help the government identify the people who they don’t like, because you’re buying things that they don’t approve of, whether even if they’re legal things.

1:07:45 Um, you know, it’s a George Orwellian society that we should not want to live in. We want to keep government power in check, so that individual liberty and freedom can be secure. And, you know, the smaller the government is, the greater our freedoms and our liberties. Yeah, and we saw some glimpses of that with, uh, well, I guess the Canadian government went in and shut some people’s balances down and their crypto down when they were supporting the truck, because they gave money to the truckers that were opposed to the vaccines.

1:08:19 You know, I mean, look at all the stories about how, you know, the IRS was targeting conservatives, conservative organizations. Right? Well, one of the ways they know if you’re a conservative, they look at where your money goes. Right? Who, who did you, what, you know, what political organizations did you contribute to?

1:08:37 You know, what events did you go to? I mean, they will know everything about you. You know, a lot of people get upset because, you know, Facebook knows where they’re spending their money. You know, I don’t care if Facebook knows where I’m spending my money. What are they gonna do?

1:08:51 They’re going to sell it to advertisers. Can they harm me with that information? No. All they can do is show me products that I might want to buy. I mean, the fact that advertisers know what I like, that’s actually a good thing, because they may point me to products that I didn’t know about, and now I’m going to improve my lives by buying them, because private businesses can’t hurt me knowing what I like.

1:09:11 All they can do is help me. They can’t take my money. They have to earn my money. I have to give them my money voluntarily, and I’ll only do it if I think what they’re giving me has more value than what I’m giving them. Otherwise I won’t make the transaction.

1:09:25 The problem is when the government knows everything about you, because the government has power. They have brute force. They can take stuff away from you, and you have, there’s nothing you can do about it. They have the guns, right? And so that’s where you have to worry about power and information.

1:09:42 You don’t want the government knowing every single thing about you, because they will use that information to harm you. Will we be able to resist a Fed coin? I mean, that would be hard, right? I think Americans have a hard time resisting anything the government wants to do. You know, at one time we were a nation of rugged individuals that wouldn’t stand for that, that knew the evils of government and were committed to keeping government in its place, but now you have so many people, uh, that look to government to solve all their problems.

1:10:12 They look at government like Santa Claus, and government can do no wrong. You know, there’s no right that they’re not willing to surrender to get something from government. So the nature, the character of the American public has changed dramatically, you know, probably over the last 50 years. So the government can pretty much get away with anything. It’s very unfortunate.

1:10:31 I’m wondering if they, uh, they bring in the Fed coin and, uh, you don’t want to be monitored. I might see Peter Schiff using Bitcoin. Well, again, well, then I could just lose my money, because Bitcoin can crash. I, I want to use the cryptos that are backed by gold, or more like, I could use actual silver, you know, in barter and stuff like that, or as money, because then the government wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t know what I was doing um, especially if, you know, what I want to do is not criminal.

1:11:02 Remember, if the government, let’s say the government goes for price controls like they did in the 1970s, well, if there’s price controls, that means there’s shortages, and you won’t be able to get things because they’re not going to be there, but there will be an underground economy, right? Where you’ll be able to buy stuff for prices that are much higher than the legal, legally allowed price. But anybody who is selling on the black market is committing a crime.

1:11:32 If you’re buying on the black market, you are committing a crime. But is that really criminal if you want food and the only way to get it is to buy it illegally? Is that a crime? I don’t think so. I think it’s a crime to impose price controls.

1:11:48 It’s a crime to create shortages. If I have to break the law in order to get the food that I need or the gas that I need, I don’t consider people who are breaking that law law breakers. It’s the government that is breaking the law, uh, by imposing these unconstitutional uh, restrictions in the first place. But the government would make the underground economy impossible if we had no way to transact without the government knowing it. Right?

1:12:17 Yeah, you mentioned, you mentioned places like Argentina earlier. I mean, that’s how some of these countries survive. I mean, I remember, I would, you know, what time I was in Buenos Aires, and I went, uh, close shopping, and the way I was able to get a really good deal on clothes was to pay US dollars cash, because by doing that the guy’s like, oh yeah, come over here, let me show you the good stuff that we’ve got, right? He didn’t want to get paid in local currency, so he sold me stuff illegally, and I bought stuff illegally, and I got a really good deal on it.

1:12:47 But I mean, but, you know, this was what’s going on. This is how people are surviving in this world, is, you know, they’re transacting on the black market. But, you know, I didn’t feel like a criminal, and the guys that sold me this stuff, to me, I mean, Kitty, we were just making a legitimate transaction. The fact that the government outlawed this transaction to me was what was criminal. I mean, nobody was getting hurt.

1:13:11 We were, you know, we were making a transaction. He wasn’t stealing my money. I was, it was a voluntary transaction, but the government didn’t allow it. But, you know, I don’t, I don’t consider it wrong. And so there’s a lot of things that oppressive governments do that true law-abiding citizens aren’t going to consider wrong, and they may have to do them.

1:13:32 But the ability to resist corrupt government is much harder when the government has so much power that they can spy on every single thing that you do. And, you know, who knows? I mean, maybe the punishment for buying food on the black market could be 10 years in jail, or 20 years in jail. Right? It could be a pretty big punishment.

1:13:52 Yeah, well, stranger things have happened. I mean, there are guys in jail right now for 20 years for selling marijuana that’s not legal in their state. So you know, some crazy things have happened. Yeah, I’m talking about Brett. I’m talking about, yeah, yeah, that too.

1:14:05 Um, yeah, it’s pretty scary, uh, and again, if you look at what’s happening with the digital yuan. Again, you can see a lot of this already in practice, and like you said, the monitoring, and then again, issuing currency that you can only use to buy certain things, and then that being able to be pulled from you digitally in an instant, based on, yeah, your behavior. That, imagine, or a tweet. Imagine that. Imagine that kind of stimulus, and of course, imagine the blackmail.

1:14:30 I mean, Walmart gives a lot of money to some politician, and now there’s a stimulus, and you have to spend the money at Walmart. Yeah. You know, you have, there’s certain things that you must buy, or you have, you know, 30 days to go out and spend it, or you were going to take it away, to try to really give the economy a boost. Of course, you don’t boost the economy by spending money. You boost the economy by saving money.

1:14:51 You just don’t see it right away, because what do you need to have a strong economy? You need production. You know, it’s funny, I was watching on CNBC this morning, and I got into a, a Twitter spat with this Becky Quick, because she said something so incredibly, you know, ridiculous, and then she had amnesia to saying it, because I tweeted it out like 20 minutes after she said it. And she said, I must have been smoking something, because she didn’t say it, but she was talking about the economy, and this guy, Steve Liesman, was talking about how there’s not a lot of stuff, how the shelves are empty, there’s not a lot of supply, and then Becky Quick’s response was, yeah, that’s one of the problems of our booming economy.

1:15:29 We have all this demand, and we don’t have enough supply. So in her mind, an economy is booming if you just print money and give it to people and spend, to spend it. You know, a booming economy creates stuff. In a booming economy you have more supply. That’s what constitutes a boom, and when you have more supply, then you can buy more.

1:15:49 If you just print a bunch of money and give it to people to spend, but we don’t make anything to buy, that’s not an economic boom. We’re in a recession. She doesn’t even realize we’re in a recession, and then she even thinks that the economy is booming. It’s not booming. This is a massive bust.

1:16:06 She just doesn’t understand it, and of course that’s who’s on CNBC, because she’s a regular anchor, you know, and even their chief senior economist, when she talked about our booming economy, he didn’t correct her, because he thinks the economy is booming too. I mean, that’s how clueless the people are about economics on mainstream media, even if their title is senior economist. But guys like me that understand economics, you know, they don’t, they don’t want me on.

1:16:33 You know, they don’t want me telling the truth. They want their, their viewers to continue to get spoon-fed lies so they’ll live in a fantasy. Well, it’s all an information war, as I’ve learned over the last couple years, Peter. I mean, it really is. It really is.

1:16:48 And so if they can control the narrative to the American public, you know, that’s just as important as anything else. Uh, what, what do you make of what Joe Biden and the Democrats are doing in the government? I think you said that the US government is addicted to spending money and the Federal Reserve is Washington DC’s pusher. How do you rate the Democrats, and would Trump and the Republicans fix it or change anything for the better if they come back? and they just made the problem worse.

1:20:46 Trump didn’t cut any government spending. He increased government spending. He increased spending on welfare, he increased spending on warfare. He even created the Space Force, a whole new government agency. Um, so no, I mean, Trump signed every budget that, uh, made it onto his desk.

1:21:04 Uh, the, the budget deficits not only got bigger every year he was president, the trade deficits got bigger every year he was president. So I don’t believe that the Republicans would act any differently if they got back in power. I think they’re good at criticizing the Democrats when they have power, but then the minute they have it, they act just like the Democrats they criticized, because again, once they’re in power, they want to stay in power. How do you stay in power?

1:21:30 Well, not by telling the truth, not by asking the voters to swallow bitter-tasting medicine. So when they’re not in power, yeah, they can criticize all the big spending, but the minute they have power, they don’t want to lose it. Well, they become the big spenders themselves. Now, is it possible on the margin the Republicans will be somewhat less, uh, you know, reckless than the Democrats? Yeah, maybe, but that’s not what we need.

1:21:56 You know, we just don’t need the lesser of two evils. We need actually somebody to do good. And while there may be a handful of Republicans that would do good, there’s just not enough of them. They can’t get anything done. I guess vote shift 2024, right?

1:22:14 Make a change. Um, yeah, well, you know, if I run, I won’t be able to vote for myself, because I do live in Puerto Rico, and so I can’t vote, but I can run for president. I just can’t vote for myself. Have you ever considered running? Well, I mean, considered it seriously, or just considered it like, you know, like a crazy thing that you daydream about?

1:22:34 But yeah, I mean, it is something that I’ve thought about. I mean, obviously, I, I did run for Senate in 2010. Yeah, of course you did. Yeah, and, and so, you know, had I won, right? Well, I might have seen that as a stepping stone to a higher office.

1:22:48 I don’t know. I didn’t want to stay in the Senate. I mean, my goal was to have one term and get out. I mean, even if I could have won, which I didn’t even win the primary, so it’s, you know, it’s a big jump to talk about you know, that I would have won. Um, but look, Donald Trump won the presidency, and he did it because, you know, he spent a lot of his own money and he ran a good campaign.

1:23:12 I think a lot of the stuff that Trump said resonated with a lot of people, and I think I would say a lot of the same things. I mean, I agreed with a lot of things that Trump claimed he was going to do if he became president. He just didn’t do those things. He did some of those things. I’m not saying Trump did nothing, right?

1:23:27 Uh, but he didn’t, he didn’t do the big things that he needed to do to make America great again. I mean, he just did not have the political courage, and I was hopeful that maybe he would, that he wasn’t a politician, that he would be a statesman, and he would rise above politics and just do what was right, even if it wasn’t good politics. Uh, but look, he couldn’t even grant the temporary waiver of the Jones Act for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. I mean, that’s how much he was bought and paid for, uh, by special interests.

1:23:56 Uh, you know, he didn’t drain the swamp. You know, he just, you know, swam it. And so I would actually like to do the stuff that Trump campaigned on. I mean, that would be one thing. If I ever ran for president, you’d better believe that I would do exactly what I said I was gonna do.

1:24:13 The problem is I don’t know if I could get elected promising to do what needs to be done, because there’s an army of people who would vote against me. There’s so many people who want the government gravy train to continue that if I threaten to end it, you know, there’s going to be a, you know, a wave of people who want to vote against me. Uh, so it’s almost like the only way to get into the White House would be not to be honest. I mean, that’s one of the things Trump did.

1:24:39 I mean, Trump, when he campaigned, never talked about cutting Social Security, never talked about cutting Medicare, and that’s one of the reasons that he got so many votes, because he didn’t promise to do that. I was hoping that when he got elected, he would do that anyway, right? He was like, okay, now I’m president, I got four years, I’m going to do all the unpopular stuff that I didn’t mention when I was running, and I don’t care if it makes people hate me.

1:25:03 I know it’s the right thing, but the minute he became president, he was more concerned about people liking him and about the economy doing well so he can claim credit for it. So he didn’t want any part of the bitter-tasting medicine. In fact, you know, one of the things that Trump did, he criticized Janet Yellen for being political with monetary policy and keeping interest rates artificially low to help, look, make Biden look good and to help inflate asset bubbles.

1:25:31 Yet the minute he became president, he started criticizing Powell, because Powell wasn’t doing that. He demanded that Powell slash interest rates. In fact, he wanted Powell to make interest rates negative. He demanded more money printing. He wanted more quantitative easing.

1:25:45 He wanted exactly what he ran against, and so he became the very thing that he promised to rid us of. So you know, he should have done the opposite, but, but, but he didn’t. Uh, but you know, if I ever found myself in that position, I would never sell out my principles. I would do exactly what I knew needed to be done, no matter how unpopular that would make me in the short run. And I would have no, uh, designs on a second term.

1:26:15 I would not think, well, I’m going to fix it in my second term, because, you know, what if you do the right thing? You probably won’t have a second term. Yeah, and so you got to do it all while you’re there. And of course, you know, you may get assassinated by somebody. I mean, if I was in there doing the right thing, there are so many special interests that don’t want the right stuff being done.

1:26:35 Who knows how long I would survive as president? Well, Oliver Stone says that’s why they got rid of Kennedy, and, uh, his argument’s pretty convincing. So, uh, he was trying to get rid of that, what a military-industrial complex. So that’s another show. I ran to be Mayor of London here, uh, and took about seven months out to do that, and uh, got a real education in politics.

1:26:55 It’s a different game than finance, let’s just say that. Um, Peter, a couple, couple more questions. I briefly mentioned the war, but how do you think things play out with Russia and then with China? You know, I don’t know, um, how things are going to end. Um, you know, I, I think that things are not going to go as badly for Russia as everybody seems to think.

1:27:24 Um, and, and so, you know, I, I think again we’re driving Russia closer to China, closer to India. You know, there’s an old saying about the, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and, and so, you know, we’re creating all these friendships that could come, both, you know, back in and bite us in the end, especially if it hastens the demise of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Now, you know, China, you know, I believe we’ve sufficiently alienated China.

1:27:58 I mean, China has been our biggest, uh, banker, our biggest supplier of goods, and we’ve completely, uh, vilified them, you know, rightly or wrongly, but I think the rhetoric obviously doesn’t sit well in Beijing, and especially the recent trip, uh, to, uh, Taiwan. I mean, look, I want to support Taiwan. I wish the United States wasn’t in such a vulnerable position that we couldn’t afford to do it, but we are. The situation is what it is, and we’re deliberately poking a hornet’s nest.

1:28:28 I mean, we knew Nancy Pelosi goes to Taiwan for what reason? What did she accomplish except angering, uh, uh, Beijing? That’s what she did, and, um, you know, so we are pushing and pushing China to do something that they should have done anyway. I think that it was a mistake for China to peg you on to the dollar. I think they’ve screwed up their economy as a result of this, but despite that screw-up, I think fundamentally the Chinese economy is in much better shape than the US economy, and I think China is poised to be the dominant economy in the world for, you know, most of the 21st century.

1:29:11 In fact, I think this decade will end with China being the number one economy. I think China’s GDP in 2030 will be higher than US GDP, and it will, you know, be the number one economy in the world, and it will probably maintain that position, you know, for most, if not all, of the century. And the digital yuan will then take over the world. It could, especially if it’s backed by gold. I mean, that would really help it, you know, to give it some real value.

1:29:45 Interesting. Um, I wanted to finish and ask you a little bit about, um, income tax, because you mentioned it earlier, and, uh, I know your dad, Irwin Schiff, was not necessarily a fan of income tax. I wanted to, tell me a little bit about the man himself, your relationship with him and some of his thoughts on income tax. Yeah, no, he was not a fan at all, but again, neither would the Founding Fathers have been. I mean, the whole concept of an income tax, uh, was completely abhorrent to everything the Founders believed in, and you know that’s why.

1:30:16 We didn’t have an income tax until 1913, and the only reason that we gave birth to this monstrosity was because the government convinced the public that it was only going to be on the very rich. It was going to be on the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts. In fact, it was sold to the public as being, uh, the beginning of a tax cut. What Americans were told was, hey, if we tax the rich with an income tax, we could get rid of these tariffs, and so instead of relying on tariffs, which the middle class pays, we’ll rely on this one percent, two percent income tax, which the billionaires will pay.

1:30:53 And the American public believed this nonsense, and of course, as soon as, uh, the camel’s nose was under the tent, they jacked those rates way up, and by the Second World War, middle-class Americans were paying the income tax for the first time, and now the whole country is struggling with that oppressive tax. So the thing that my father especially didn’t like about the income tax was the unconstitutional and illegal way, uh, that the IRS enforced it, the way it collected it. And so my father stood up for the Constitution and for the rule of law, and in fact for the Internal Revenue Code, because in his opinion, the government even violated their own code in the way they collected and enforced the income tax.

1:31:34 So he stood up for those, uh, principles, and unfortunately spent a lot of his, uh, adult life, you know, in his 60s, 70s, 80s in jail, and ended up dying in prison of skin cancer. You know, if he hadn’t been in prison, they would have cured it, but because the government did nothing about his skin cancer, even though he was in a hospital, supposedly a facility run by the government, it metastasized and spread, and he ended up dying of lung cancer. Um, so you know, that’s the quality of health care that you get when you get it from the government.

1:32:08 But you know, I learned a lot from my father. Everything I know about economics, everything I know about, uh, the Constitution and government and all that, I learned from my father. Um, and I also learned how corrupt the, uh, the US judiciary is, and the US government, and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t follow in his footsteps. And, you know, I’m a good Nazi in that respect, right? I do what the government tells me, because, because I know that I’m not going to get justice in the American legal system if I, if I stand up for myself, because we’re not really a nation of law.

1:32:44 We’re a nation of men, and unfortunately we’re a nation of very corrupt men. Uh, but you know, I still try to work within the system, uh, as corrupt as it is, and, uh, you know, and do what I can, uh, you know, to do my best in that system. And it was corrupt, because it didn’t give him a fair trial. It didn’t actually go by the law and the code. He was making, not at all, he was making real arguments, and they weren’t being considered.

1:33:10 They just wanted my father. My father was not a criminal. Um, you can argue that he was mistaken in his views, and that maybe he should have paid a civil penalty for those mistaken views. But if you hold a view in good faith in this country, and you believe you’re abiding by the law, you know, that should not be a crime, especially if you’re exercising your constitutional rights. If you think you have a particular constitutional right and you exercise that right in good faith, it should not be converted into a crime.

1:33:43 You know, and in most countries, even, you know, not paying taxes is not a criminal offense. It is a civil offense. You can pay penalties. You can have interest payments, but they can’t put you in jail for something like that. Uh, and you know, I think my father is more of a political prisoner.

1:34:03 He was sent to jail for his political beliefs, and he was sent to jail as an example to get people not to follow in his footsteps, by putting him in jail and holding him out as an example. In fact, you know, when he was in jail, every April 15th, you know, the IRS would send around, uh, you know, talking points to the media so they can mention that he was in jail, just to remind people, hey, it’s April 15th, you don’t want to go to jail like Irwin Schiff. You better, you better pay your taxes.

1:34:32 Wow, wow. It’s interesting you bring that up, because while we were just talking about potentially buying bread, you know, at a non-government price, and that being illegal, and then you look back to 2020, and they say you had a business that stayed open during lockdown with a customer that wanted to buy something, and that was illegal. So, oh yeah, look, they were shutting down, you know, churches or synagogues. I mean, talk about violation of freedom of religion.

1:35:00 The governor was saying you can’t have these religious services, but yeah, there were a lot of people who wanted to keep their businesses open. Were they criminals because they wanted to keep a business open? I mean, if people wanted to voluntarily risk COVID by going to those businesses, why can’t they? You know, people should be able to choose. You want to stay at home and quarantine, stay at home.

1:35:24 You want to go out, you have a freedom to travel, you could do business. You want a vaccine, vaccinate yourself. You don’t want it, you know, don’t take it. I mean, I can’t force my neighbor to get a vaccine because I claim it’s going to protect me. You can’t do that.

1:35:39 You can’t force other people to do things because you think that will benefit you. That’s not freedom. That’s not you, because if you take that principle, I mean, like, you know, what about all of, you know, people that are overweight? I mean, what we should, doesn’t that drive up my health insurance? Maybe we should force people to exercise.

1:35:57 Maybe we should eliminate junk food. You know, I need to mold people’s behavior, you know, because they may make a choice that somehow might impact me. You know, tough. People get to make their own choices. Uh, I can’t force my will on other people just because I claim that your behavior negatively impacts me, so I have a right to regulate it.

1:36:22 No, it doesn’t. I, I can’t, I, I, I’m in charge of my own behavior, and other people make decisions. Now, if I want to limit my risks, if I think there’s a bunch of unvaccinated people out there, well, okay, well, I could wear a mask. I can vaccinate myself, or I can go to only businesses that check vaccination statuses. You know, businesses can make a choice.

1:36:47 Here’s a restaurant. We only have people with vaccines as customers. So if you’re afraid of the unvaxxed and you want to eat in a restaurant where everybody’s triple vaxxed, I’m your restaurant. We, we check everybody at the door. We do all that.

1:37:00 If you don’t give a damn if you’re not vaccinated and you don’t care if the people at the restaurant aren’t vaccinated, then go to that restaurant. Right? You know, so let the market decide. That’s freedom. When the government makes a decision and it’s one size fits all, it’s not freedom.

1:37:15 It’s the opposite of freedom. It’s tyranny. Yeah, and that’s what happened. Just to be clear, yes, and not just in America. That happened all over the world.

1:37:24 Yeah, I mean, you know, you take, except for maybe like Sweden, you know, how many countries maintained freedom uh, during COVID? You know, there’s that old saying about never let a crisis go to waste. Well, they sure didn’t let COVID go to waste. Right? They usurped all sorts of power.

1:37:41 They’ll never surrender that power. Now that they’ve got it, they’re going to use it over and over again. Yeah, you’re starting to sound like, you know, when it’s not a pandemic, starting to sound like some of my conspiracy theory guests. Now, Peter, talking like that. Well, this isn’t a conspiracy theory.

1:37:57 This is fact. Yeah, I know it. I know. Uh, and it was just hard to see that happen in America, that was founded on freedom, and there was just clearly violations of freedom. But like you said, it seems to be now that the state is, well, certain individuals, also maybe the younger generation, now looks to the state as, like you said, the protector, the parent, the Santa Claus.

1:38:18 Oh, how are they going to help me through this time? How are they going to protect me through this time? Do I need their permission to get me through this time? Whereas back in the day it was, no, I got to do this myself. The government’s here to help out with a few things, but it’s not here to save me.

1:38:32 It’s not here to print money through the recession. It’s not here to, to do all these other things. It’s just there to do a small number of things. Um, but that’s right. I mean, I mean, government is supposed to be there just to protect our liberties, to protect our property.

1:38:48 Right? That’s it. They’re supposed to leave us alone. Uh, you know, after they’ve fulfilled that one function, especially in America, the federal government is not supposed to be involved at all in domestic affairs. It’s supposed to be concentrated on national defense, just to protect us from invasion.

1:39:05 Right. We have local governments to protect, you know, me from, you know, burglars, sub-burglars, you know, stealing my stuff, you know, from my house, or stealing my car, or, you know, protect my life from somebody who might take it. But that should be local government. Uh, but the US government has usurped all sorts of powers not, uh, granted to it by the US Constitution. Uh, and so we don’t live in the type of, uh, republic that the Framers envisioned, where You had this limited government, and you had this, you know, maximum amount of individual freedom and liberty, because that’s the country that gave birth to the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.

1:39:44 We had those freedoms in the 18th and 19th century, uh, and look what we created. I mean, look where America came from. I mean, we were centuries behind Europe, but by 1950 we were light years ahead of them. I mean, Americans enjoyed a living standard unparalleled anywhere else in the world. I mean, we created the middle class.

1:40:03 That was because we were freer than everybody. Why did so many people come here? All four of my grandparents came here from Europe, uh, around 1900. They didn’t come here for government. There was no welfare.

1:40:15 There were no food stamps. There was no minimum wage. There was nothing. What did America have that they didn’t have in Europe? Freedom.

1:40:21 They were escaping government. They weren’t running towards government. They just wanted an opportunity to be all they could be. They wanted a place where the government wasn’t going to interfere with their, uh, with their rights, uh, to create their own prosperity, and that’s what they did, and that’s what everybody did who came here at that time, and, and, and we built this, uh, you know, a standard of living that was unprecedented. Of course, we no longer enjoy that.

1:40:47 I mean, Americans live better than some people, but we don’t live as well as others. I mean, we’re not even that highly ranked on the index of economic freedom, uh, and you know, there are people in other countries that have higher standards of living than Americans, that have higher real incomes. I mean, we were so far ahead of everybody, you know, even before the Second World War, but certainly by the end of it, uh, I mean, people thought nobody would ever catch up, uh, but we blew our lead, because we blew our comparative advantage in freedom.

1:41:15 We started to grow the government, and by growing the government, we shrank, uh, the, the economy. Yeah, it’s a shame. It’s a damn shame. Hopefully President Schiff can reverse that. Um, Peter, what’s next for you, and then, uh, for the next five years, what are your plans and goals for you?

1:41:32 Well, you know, I’m basically continuing with my asset management company. That’s my primary uh, business focus. You know, obviously I still, you know, deal with Schiff Gold, you mentioned, and selling precious metals. And by the way, you know, I’ve always said minimum five to ten percent in precious metals, although people can have more. That’s kind of like the minimum, uh, but I have a lot of money personally in mining stocks.

1:41:56 In fact, I have a lot more money right now in the mining stocks than I have in the physical metal, because I do think that these stocks are going to just explode, uh, as big if not bigger than they did in the 1970s. And you know, those were the biggest winners in the ’70s. These mining stocks, you know, made a lot of people rich, and, you know, and I hope a lot of my clients, uh, you know, end up with a similar, uh, return. But, you know, I’m investing in other sectors as well.

1:42:22 Uh, gold mining is just a portion of how we allocate portfolios. We invest in equities all around the world. Value is our focus. Good dividends. So we don’t chase momentum.

1:42:34 We don’t buy hype. I think that what our clients own, uh, will end up being excellent inflation hedges, especially for Americans, but also people all around the world who need hedges, because central banks all around the world are basically operating from the same bad playbook. They’re all printing too much money. They’ve all got interest rates too low, and so all currencies will lose value in terms of real money. Prices will continue to go up.

1:43:02 Our yields will continue to be negative, and so people need alternatives, and that is good dividend-paying stocks, low multiples, uh, good earnings, precious metals, commodities. I think emerging markets ultimately are going to be a major beneficiary of the dollar’s demise. So we are positioning our clients for that, and I’m sure that, you know, in my mind, over the next five years pretty much all of my predictions will play out and will ultimately come true in that time horizon.

1:43:31 Uh, could it take longer? Look, I’ve underestimated this before. You know, I was on your show in 2014, and, you know, I probably then didn’t think we’d get to 2022 without a bigger crisis, but we managed to kick the can down the road, uh, for this many years. I don’t think we can do it for another five. I think the problems are much too big at this point, and, and we don’t have that much time, so people really have to be prepared.

1:43:55 So I would encourage your listeners to reach out, uh, to me through my asset management company, also Euro Pacific Capital, uh, but you can see the website above my shoulder. But, you know, talk to some of my representatives. Uh, we work with clients all around the world. I also have five mutual funds that I manage, and so people who have discount brokerage accounts, uh, can pretty much buy those funds. There’s five different funds in the family, uh, the, uh, Pacific Value Fund, your Pacific Dividend Payers Fund, the Emerging Market Fund, the Gold Fund, and a Foreign Bond Fund, so you can buy those on your own.

1:44:25 You can contact my representatives to help you figure out, you know, which one is the best. We actually do wrap accounts where I manage portfolios of my funds, and the larger accounts we manage in individual stocks. Nice. Um, final thoughts, Peter, on the situation with inflation, the dollar, recession. Just, you know, a lot of people might be hearing a lot of this stuff for the first time.

1:44:50 Maybe they don’t really understand, or feel a little strange about this environment, because they’re not comfortable with what the ramifications are. Just final thoughts. Well, you know, we’re in a recession, but by the time it’s over, it’ll, you know, feel like a depression. In fact, we may even refer to it as a depression. Now, the Great Recession never got that moniker.

1:45:11 We just called it the Great Recession. This one will be greater than that, so we’ll see, you know, what they end up naming it. Uh, inflation is here to stay, and it’s going to get worse even as the recession gets worse. So that’s a combination that people don’t expect, but that’s what’s going to happen, and that’s a game changer. I think the aberration was the 10 years that we experienced where we had inflation below 2%, officially.

1:45:37 Uh, we had these asset bubbles, uh, you know, so if you’re investing like it’s still, uh, you know, you know, 2010 to 2020, if you’re, if you’re looking at that decade and you’re investing like that, and you’re expecting to repeat the success that you enjoyed, then you are in for a world of hurt. You have to recognize that that was the aberration. We’re now back to reality, and so you’ve got to completely readjust your portfolio to reflect that. Go and look at what worked in the 1970s.

1:46:12 That’s what’s going to work now, only even bigger, because the US economy is in much worse shape now than it was back then, and we don’t have a Paul Volcker. We don’t have a Ronald Reagan on the horizon that’s going to help you, you know, fix things. Uh, everything that’s looming out there is just gonna break stuff even more, and, you know, in addition to investing with me, definitely listen to what I’ve got to say. I do my podcasts. ShiftRadio.com is the website, also on my YouTube channel, uh, The Shift Report, so you can, uh, you know, listen to my podcasts, uh, you know, weekly.

1:46:48 I do usually a couple of weeks, sometimes three, sometimes one, depending on how much news comes out or how busy I happen to be. Uh, but you know, the audience is building. I’ve got, you know, over half a million subscribers to the YouTube channel, and, you know, a lot more people also listen to the podcasts. Again, you know, on Shift Radio, or, you know, iTunes or places like that. In fact, my Twitter following is picked up.

1:47:15 I just yesterday got over 800,000, uh, Twitter followers, so not quite a million yet, but I, I happen to tweet out quite a bit. I mean, I’m on other social media. You can Instagram or even, I got some stuff on TikTok, you know, so you can go to everywhere I’m on social media and follow me, but Twitter is the platform I tend to use the most. I mean, I tweet myself. It’s not other people.

1:47:36 I mean, yeah, Shift Gold does some tweets, but I mean, almost all the tweets that you see out there, they’re coming from me. I tweet them personally, so it’s kind of a way for me to comment in real time on news events, and I think if you just make a habit of reading my comments, I think you’ll be a lot more informed than if you’re just getting that information from the mainstream media. Yeah, amen to that. Well, Peter Schiff has been here since 2014. Uh, follow him on Twitter.

1:48:04 And, Peter, always appreciate your perspective. Always, uh, it’s always really grounding, and I love how you put it together, and, uh, keep us posted on the presidential run as well. All right, well, if I, if I decide to announce my candidacy, I’ll let you know. Yeah, do it on the show. So, and, uh, get over to London.

1:48:19 Can be the first Puerto Rican and the first Jew to be, uh, to be president. There you go. There you go. It’s gonna happen sooner or later. Like Juan Epstein, do you remember him?

1:48:28 I don’t actually. Thanks. He was a sweat. Oh yeah, yeah, of course, of course. He was a Puerto Rican Jew.

1:48:35 There you go. There you go. There you go. Um, Peter, let’s do this in London sometime, or do it next time you’re here. Yeah, yeah.

1:48:42 You know, my wife is getting her, uh, her passport back. She was born in the UK, so maybe when she gets it, we’ll take another trip out there. Fantastic. Let’s do it. All right, thank you, Peter.

1:48:52 Follow this man, check out his funds, follow him on Twitter, and appreciate you. We’ll see everybody next time on London Real. Take care. Bye.