Peter Schiff, the President and CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, and one of the few who predicted the 2008 Great Recession before it happened has said that what we are experiencing now is “the beginning of the end.” Schiff made his comments during his keynote speech at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference.
The economic guru says that the Federal Reserve has made the decision to halt interest rate hikes in order to attempt to save the flailing stock market – the key indicator for far too many of how “healthy” the economy is at current. According to Seeking Alpha, the markets responded to the Fed’s decision in a positive manner, leading many to think we are “out of the woods” and no longer in danger of a recession.
However, Peter traces the moves of the Federal Reserve all the way back to the first rate hike of December 2015 and shows how the central bank has put the United States on a path toward a financial crisis that will be bigger than 2008. Peter insists he’s been right about what would happen all along, it’s just taken us a little longer to get to the actual financial disaster than he expected.
“The reason that I originally said that I did not expect the Fed to raise rates again was because I knew that raising rates was the first step in a journey that they could not finish, that in their attempt to normalize rates, the stock market bubble would burst and the economy would reenter recession.
Normalizing interest rates when you’ve created an abnormal amount of debt is impossible.
I knew all along that at some point, that would be it, you know, the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I didn’t know how many rate hikes the bubble economy could take, but I knew there was a limit. And I still knew that there’s no way they were ever going to get back up to normal or neutral. Whatever that number is, it ain’t 2%.” –Peter Schiff
Schiff also cautioned against more quantitative easing (money printing.)
We’ve just created a massive amount of inflation. Quantitative easing is just a euphemism for inflation. That’s what inflation is – expanding the money supply. Printing up money and buying government bonds is the definition of inflation. The Fed has been inflating like crazy. –Peter Schiff
Unfortunately, people will look for the central bank to save them from this disaster the central bank has created. But there’s nothing the Fed can do to help anyone once the debt based economy implodes and the sooner people realize that, the better off they will be and the more likely they are to prepare themselves and their families for what the Central Bank has planned.
People are going to realize that we checked into the monetary roach motel that I talked about from the beginning and that there’s no way out, and then the dollar is going to fall like a stone.
When they find out that it’s never over and it didn’t work, then there’s going to be nothing propping up the dollar and it’s going to drop like a stone, the price of gold is going to take off, and the recession that we’re entering into, which is going to be an inflationary recession, is going to be worse than what we now call the Great Recession.
Maybe it’s taken longer than we might have thought to play out, but this is the beginning of the end.” Peter Schiff
