Author: Peter Schiff

Janet Yellen should send a note of congratulations to Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the British politicians most responsible for pushing the Brexit campaign to a successful conclusion. While she’s at it she should also send them some fruit baskets, flowers, Christmas cards, and a heartfelt “thank you.“ That’s because the successful Brexit vote, and the uncertainty and volatility it has introduced into the global markets, will provide the Federal Reserve with all the cover it could possibly want to hold off on rate increases in the United States without having to make the painful admission that domestic economic weakness … Continue reading →

The post What the World Needs Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A Fed official walks into a bar and says the economy is improving and rate hikes are appropriate. The patrons order another round to celebrate. Then disappointing data comes out, the high fives stop, and the Fed official ducks out the back…only to come back the next day saying the same thing. Anyone who pays even the smallest attention to the financial media has experienced versions of this joke dozens of times. Yet every time the gag gets underway, we raise our glasses and expect the punch line to be different. But it … Continue reading →

The post Put the Fed in a Washing Machine appeared first on LewRockwell.

During a lengthy interview on CNBC the week before last, Donald Trump, fresh from becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, came as close as any major presidential contender ever has to saying that America is not capable of repaying her debts in full, and that our path to economic recovery might involve some pain for our creditors. This moment of candor earned Trump almost as much condemnation as his earlier suggestions to ban Muslims from entering the United States. To many, the idea that U.S. debt obligations involved even the slightest risks to investors was both the height of financial naiveté and the epitome of … Continue reading →

The post Trump, Debt, and Money Printing appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump’s critics have heaped scorn on his calls for protective tariffs to deal with America’s widening trade imbalance and the resulting loss of higher–paying blue color jobs. Some have accused him of trying to turn back the clock in pursuit of a cheap populist ploy and have said that he simply refuses to acknowledge that America is now an information and service economy for which large trade deficits are the new normal. But voters are sensing that The Donald is right to sound alarm bells and that something radical needs to be done to revive manufacturing to make America … Continue reading →

The post Make America Great Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Winter of 2015-2016, which came to an end a few weeks ago, has been officially designated as the mildest in the U.S. in 121 years according to NOAA. While this fact will certainly add a major talking point in the global warming debate, it should also be front and center in the current economic discussion. The fact that it isn’t is testament to the blatantly self-serving manner in which economic cheerleaders blame the weather when it’s convenient, but ignore it when it’s not. If economists were consistent (and that’s a colossal “if”), the good weather would be taken as a reason … Continue reading →

The post The Winter of Our Discontent appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Federal Reserve’s years-long campaign to sheepishly back away from its own policy forecasts continued in earnest last week when it officially reduced the four expected 2016 quarter point hikes, suggested back in December, to just two. Given the deteriorating economic outlook, I believe there can be little doubt that the Fed will soon complete the capitulation process and remove all expectations for additional hikes this year. Even before that happens, savvy observers should have already concluded that the Federal Reserve is stuck in the monetary mud just as firmly now as it has been since the dawn of the financial crisis … Continue reading →

The post Stuck in the Monetary Mud appeared first on LewRockwell.

In his seventh, and final, State of the Union address this January, President Obama, clearly looking to bolster his legacy as the president who vanquished the Great Recession, boldly asserted that “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”  Unfortunately for the President, more and more Americans seem to believe (with an adequate basis for proof) that the fiction is emanating from the White House. It’s hard to imagine how anyone can really assert with a straight face that the economy is currently “strong.” The most recent Gross Domestic Product (GDP), from 4th Quarter 2015, shows us barely inching along at a 1% annualized … Continue reading →

The post Looming Pre-Election Disaster appeared first on LewRockwell.

Making their annual pilgrimage to the exclusive Swiss ski sanctuary of Davos last week, the world’s political and financial elite once again gathered without having had the slightest idea of what was going on in the outside world. It  appears that few of the attendees, if any, had any advance warning that 2016 would dawn with a global financial meltdown. The Dow Jones Industrials posted the worst 10-day start to a calendar year ever, and as of the market close of January 25, the Index is down almost 9% year-to-date, putting it squarely on track for the worst January ever. But … Continue reading →

The post The International Power Posse appeared first on LewRockwell.

On May 1, 2003 on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln then President George W. Bush, after becoming the first U.S. president to land on an aircraft carrier in a fixed wing aircraft (in a dashing olive drab flight suit), declared underneath an enormous “Mission Accomplished” banner that “major combat operations” in Iraq had been concluded, that regime change had been effected, and that America had prevailed in its mission to transform the Middle East. 13 years later, after years of additional combat operations in Iraq, and a Middle East that is spiraling out of control and increasingly disdainful of … Continue reading →

The post Mission Accomplished appeared first on LewRockwell.

Nearly 92% of economists surveyed this week by the Wall Street Journal expect that our eight-year experiment with unprecedented monetary easing from the Federal Reserve will come to an end at the next Fed meeting in December. Since we have had the monetary wind at our back for so many years, at least a few have begun to question our ability to make economic and financial gains against actual headwinds. But in reality, the tightening cycle that the forecasters are waiting for actually started last year. Sadly, the markets and the economy are already showing an inability to handle it. … Continue reading →

The post How Low Is the Fed Prepared To Go? appeared first on LewRockwell.

My father Irwin A. Schiff was born Feb. 23rd 1928, the 8th child and only son of Jewish immigrants, who had crossed the Atlantic twenty years earlier in search of freedom. As a result of their hope and courage my father was fortunate to have been born into the freest nation in the history of the world.  But when he passed away on Oct. 16th, 2015 at the age of 87, a political prisoner of that same nation, legally blind and shackled to a hospital bed in a guarded room in intensive care, the free nation he was born into … Continue reading →

Every dictator knows that a continuous state of emergency is the best means to justify tyrannical policies. The trick is to keep the fictitious emergency from breeding so much paranoia that routine activities come to a halt. Many have discovered that its best to make the threat external, intangible and ultimately, unverifiable. In Orwell’s 1984 the preferred mantra was “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia,” even though everyone knew it wasn’t true. In its rate decision this week the Federal Reserve, adopted a similar approach and conjured up an external threat to maintain a policy that is becoming increasingly absurd. In … Continue reading →

Once again the Fed’s bite has failed to live up to its bark. Despite months of expectations that it would finally raise rates for the first time since 2006, the Fed continued to sit on its hands while pointing to some unspecified date in the future when all the economic and financial stars will align in a way that makes a 25 basis point increase appropriate. Am I the only one getting bored by the repetition? Just like it has in prior statements, the Fed’s Open Market Committee painted a picture of a stable and growing economy that was just about … Continue reading →

There is a growing sense across the financial spectrum that the world is about to turn some type of economic page. Unfortunately no one in the mainstream is too sure what the last chapter was about, and fewer still have any clue as to what the next chapter will bring. There is some agreement however, that the age of ever easing monetary policy in the U.S. will be ending at the same time that the Chinese economy (that had powered the commodity and emerging market booms) will be finally running out of gas. While I believe this theory gets both … Continue reading →

While the world can count dozens of important currencies, when it comes to top line financial and investment discussions, the currency marketplace really comes down to a one-on-one cage match between the two top contenders: the U.S. Dollar and the Euro. In recent years the contest has become a blowout, with the Dollar pummeling the Euro into apparent submission. Based on the turmoil created by the European Debt Crisis and the continuing problems in Greece and other overly indebted southern tier European economies, many investors may have come to assume that Euro boosters will be forced to ultimately throw in … Continue reading →