Euro Pacific Capital's Peter Schiff sat down with Alex Jones last week to discuss the state of the economy, and where he sees everything going from here.
Here are some notable moments from the interview.
Regarding how bad things are, and what's really going on in the economy, Schiff lays out all of the horrible economic data that has come out recently, as well as making sure to take away the crutch everyone uses to explain any and all data misses, which is weather.
"It's no way to know exactly the timetable, but obviously this economy is already back in recession, and if it's not in a recession it's certainly on the cusp of one"
"We could be in a negative GDP quarter right now, and I think that if the first quarter is bad the second quarter is going to be worse"
"The last couple years we had a rebound in the second quarter because we've had very cold winters. Well this winter was the warmest in 120 years so there is nothing to rebound from."
On the Fed, and current policies, he very bluntly points out that nothing is working, nor has it worked, but of course the central planners will try it all anyway. He also takes a moment to agree with Donald Trump regarding the fact that the U.S. is flat out, undeniably broke.
"The problem for the fed is how do they launch a new round of stimulus and still pretend the economy is in good shape."
"Negative interest rates are a disaster. It's not working in Japan, it's not working in Europe, it's not going to work here. Just because it doesn't work doesn't mean we're not going to do it, because everything we do doesn't work and we do it anyway. It shows desperation, that you've had all these central bankers lowering interest rates and expecting it to revive the economy. And then when they get down to zero, rather than admit that it didn't work, because clearly if you go to zero and you still haven't achieved your objective, maybe it doesn't work. Instead of admitting that they were wrong, they're now going negative."
"The United States, no matter how high inflation gets, we'll do our best to pretend it doesn't exist or rationalize it away because we have a lot more debt. America is broke, if you look at Europe and Japan even though there is some debt there, overall those are still creditor nations. The world still owes Europe money, the world still owes Japan money, but America owes more money than all of the other debtor nations combined. Trump is right about that, we are broke, we're flat broke, and we're living off this credit bubble and we can't prick it. Other central banks may be able to raise their rates, but the Fed can't."
On how he sees everything unfolding from this point, Peter again points out that the economy is weak and it's only a matter of time before this entire centrally planned manipulation is exposed for what it is, and becomes a disaster for the Federal Reserve. He likens how investors are behaving today to the dot-com bubble, and the beginning of the global financial crisis.
"The trigger that's going to really send us into a higher gear is going to be the admission by the Fed that the economy is weak or the markets figure it out on their own. There's not a lot of stimulus left, all they've got is potentially negative rates and a huge round of quantitative easing, and this thing is going to blow up in the Fed's face."
"Investors still just don't get what's going on. For the past several years everybody has been positioned as if this recovery were real, that it was sustainable, and that the Fed could normalize interest rates and everything was going to be fine. The first quarter of this year investment returns, it was the worst quarter in eighteen years for actively managed funds."
"The federal reserve has not solved our problems, but exacerbated them."
"You've got big banks like Goldman Sachs shorting gold, telling their clients to short gold. A lot of people unfortunately listen to Goldman Sachs, and they're doing the wrong thing. A lot of times the markets are just mis-priced, because so many people don't get it. Just like all the people who were buying the subprime mortgages before the bottom dropped out of the market, or all the people who were buying thos dot-com stocks for several years before they collapsed. The same thing is going to happen now."
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Full Interview Here