Peter Schiff argues that a Middle East war under Trump will trigger severe inflation via engineered energy scarcity and tariffs, which he claims harm American consumers despite political rhetoric. He predicts massive money printing to fund deficits will weaken the U.S. dollar, making gold and silver essential hedges against a "Vietnam 2.0" scenario and a declining service-based economy reliant on foreign financing. Ultimately, Schiff urges investors to move capital from overvalued U.S. assets into precious metals and international markets while preparing for potential supply chain disruptions. [Automatically generated summary]
I think inflation under Trump is going to be an even bigger problem than it was under Biden.
Of course, Trump is going to blame it all on the war.
That's going to be his excuse for everything going forward, that everything was great, but we had to fight this war, which, of course, we didn't actually have to fight.
Trump decided to fight it.
But he'll be able to use it as a scapegoat for problems that would have existed even without the war.
The war will just make them worse.
Welcome to today's interview here on BrightVideos.com.
And as we are all suffering under the fact that President Trump is wrecking the global economy meticulously on a daily basis, we have a guest today who has been personally attacked by Trump because he dared to tell the truth about a number of important subjects like inflation.
It's Peter Schiff from shiftgold.com.
He needs no introduction.
Welcome, Peter Schiff.
It's an honor to have you on the show today.
Oh, thanks for having me on.
Well, thank you for being here.
And I just want to point out that I find your work, your podcasts, and your tweets to be very rational, very thoughtful, and correct, which those are three things that are increasingly rare today.
So congratulations.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so with that as a basis, then tell us where you think this is going, especially if the engineered energy scarcity situation, the war, continues to worsen.
What does this mean for U.S. fuel prices, food prices, and the economy in the long run?
Well, the price of everything is going up.
I think inflation under Trump is going to be an even bigger problem than it was under Biden.
Of course, Trump is going to blame it all on the war.
That's going to be his excuse for everything going forward, that everything was great, but we had to fight this war, which, of course, we didn't actually have to fight.
Trump decided to fight it.
But he'll be able to use it as a scapegoat for problems that would have existed even without the war.
The war will just make them worse.
So because of the war, the government's going to have even bigger deficits.
We're going to print even more money.
And so inflation is going to be even higher than it would have been absent the war.
But inflation was still picking up before the war started.
In fact, if you look at what happened to import-export prices in February, they shot up.
Import prices were up 1.6%, export 1.8%.
You're annualizing at around 18, 19% increases.
This is before the war.
Wow.
And that's how the inflation under Biden, it first showed up in import-export prices before it made its way to the CPI.
So that's a leading indicator of what's going to happen in consumer prices.
So this was going to be a huge increase in consumer prices before the war.
Now it's going to be even bigger.
And certain prices, like energy costs and food costs, they're going to be particularly hard hit.
So you're going to see much bigger increases in those costs as a direct consequence of the war.
And of course, the longer the war continues to wage, the longer the port of Hamuz is closed or semi-closed, the bigger the impact on food and energy you're going to get out of the war.
Yeah, absolutely.
And since we have no clear timetable of whether or when that's going to be resolved, then the outlook is very uncertain right now.
But let me backtrack to last year when Trump was really unleashing these punitive tariffs, often against U.S. allies, such as India, for example, or Taiwan.
The Supreme Court decision pulled back on some of those tariffs, but Trump found alternative means, for example, hitting Taiwan with Section 301 sanctions, blaming them for, quote, overproduction.
Well, again, the terminology, Trump is not hitting Taiwan.
They're not hitting Canada or Mexico.
The tariffs hit Americans.
Right, right.
The tariffs are aimed at Americans who want to buy Canadian goods or Americans who want to buy goods from Taiwan or China or anywhere.
Now, yes, there is an impact on those countries because let's say I've got a business in Canada and I'm selling products to Americans and now Trump taxes Americans if they buy my products, making my products more.
expensive to American consumers.
American consumers who don't have an unlimited amount of money may pull back on their consumption of my goods.
So I'm not going to sell as much to Americans.
And so, yes, that's going to be a loss for me because that was a market.
I had a customer and now my customer can't afford to buy my products.
But the real target is the American customer who now can't afford to buy the products that he would have liked to buy.
Right.
And now it's a nuisance for the Canadian businessman or woman because now they have to find an alternative customer, which they eventually will do.
But yes, it is an inconvenience.
Hey, I had a good relationship with these American customers.
Now I got to find other customers.
But once they do find other customers, then the American is just SOL because now he's not there.
He can't get the products he needs anymore.
Yeah, yeah.
And I want to explain to the audience that the MAGA Trump explanation for this is that, no, tariffs are not paid by Americans.
They're paid by the other countries.
And that's false.
My own company, you know, in the food manufacturing business, we were about to purchase a $1 million automation machine from Italy.
And the invoice said, you know, a million dollars for the machine plus $300,000 for the tariff from us.
So if you wanted the machine, you got to pay the 300K.
Yeah.
And we said no.
You should send the bill to Trump and say, hey, here's it.
Who's going to pay?
I thought the foreigners were going to pay this.
Why am I?
I mean, that was a lie.
Trump tells lies.
He's actually pathological.
Almost everything he says is a lie.
He lies so regularly, so often, he repeats the same lies over and over again as if maybe if he repeats the lie long enough or often enough, he'll make it true.
And maybe some of the lies in his own mind are true.
But you can't believe anything Trump says.
And now that he's talking about the war, I don't believe anything he says about the war either.
I don't believe anything he says about why we went to war, what started the war, what's going on during the war.
Because if everything he says about the economy is a lie, everything about tariffs, everything about inflation, everything about his record, everything is a lie.
Why should the war be any different?
Well, it's clear.
A few hours ago, Trump even said that Iran was begging him to be their supreme leader.
And I, Peter, I am convinced that Trump is chatting with a chat bot that's pretending to be Iran.
Look, if you remember with the tariffs, Trump was saying that all the leaders were lining up begging.
They were calling him begging to make a deal.
That was a lie.
Nobody was begging him for anything.
Now he's saying the Iranians are begging for a deal.
I doubt it.
I don't think the Iranians are, please, oh, please, please, please, we'll do anything.
Because if that was true, they would have already surrendered.
I mean, if they were really on their hands and knees begging, the war would be over.
The fact that it's not shows they're not begging.
I mean, maybe they're negotiating and they're trying to get a good deal, but that doesn't sound like a beggar to me.
Fed Rate Cuts And Gold Surge00:05:33
Well, exactly.
And I want to ask you then about the medium-term implications of the fact that as long as this strait is constricted or closed selectively, the exports of natural gas out of Qatar, and as you know, two out of the 14 gas production trains have been damaged with a three to five year repair time.
But 12 are still functioning, so we're not in Mad Max yet, right?
But nobody's able to get that energy unless they pay the toll or they happen to be China or Russia.
But this is the energy that's used in countries like South Korea or Taiwan or Japan to power the power grid and manufacturing.
So talk to us about the implications of the loss of natural gas infrastructure or transportation and what that means for consumer prices.
Yeah, look, all of this is going to reduce the supply of energy, which increases the cost of energy and increases the cost of everything that requires energy.
So yes, we're going to feel the consequences of this long after the war is over.
But obviously, the longer it continues, the greater those consequences are going to be because more stuff is going to get destroyed.
And it takes a lot longer to rebuild than it does to destroy.
You just drop a bomb and it's gone.
But, you know, we don't have a bomb that does the opposite.
We don't have a bomb that replaces what's been blown up.
That takes a lot of work, a lot of capital, a lot of material, and it takes a lot of time.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, let's talk about gold because, of course, you're well known for your gold projections, which have been very accurate.
Although right now, gold and silver are down from their high.
I'd like you to explain your view of why that's happening.
But let me give out your website, shiftgold.com, is where people can find you and your company for gold as well as Europac Asset Management, EuroPacific.
It's Europac.com.
I just want to be clear to the audience, this is not a paid appearance.
You know, you and I don't have a financial arrangement.
I just want to be clear.
But talk to us about where gold is now and what are the reasons that there's been a sell-off by some countries, perhaps related to the war and where you think gold is headed.
Well, you know, gold, counterintuitively, really sold off.
It rallied briefly on Sunday night following the outbreak of the war on Saturday morning and gold got to around 5,500 and then it collapsed as low as 4,100 on Monday morning.
It's bounced back a bit.
Now it's around 4,400, 4,500, I think 4,400.
So it's gone down and silver percentage-wise has gone down more.
Silver actually got up to like 120 at one point and now it's back down below 70.
Of course, these prices are much higher than they were a year ago.
So gold and silver are still way up.
But I think the reason that they went down is I think the markets really got off, caught off guard with how quickly the narrative on rate cuts shifted so that now it's not really expected that the Fed is going to cut rates maybe at all for the rest of the year.
And now there's talk that the Fed might actually hike rates.
And the market was pricing in several cuts.
And I think a lot of people believed that it was those rate cuts that were the reason that the gold price was going up.
And if we're not going to get those rate cuts, then gold should go down.
And I think the market is wrong because I don't think the rate cuts are what's important.
What's important is the real rate of interest, not nominal rates.
And if you look at what's happening to inflation, it is exploding faster than anybody thought, maybe other than me.
But so inflation is going to rise dramatically over the course of 2026.
Let's say at a minimum, we end up with 6% inflation this year.
I think it'll be quite a bit higher than that.
But going into the year, people were looking for maybe 2.5%, 3%.
So even if the Fed doesn't cut nominal rates, Real rates are going to be negative.
They're going to be far lower than anybody thought.
And this is very bullish for gold.
It's very bullish for silver.
The war is going to add significantly to the U.S. national debt, to our annual budget deficits.
It's going to weaken the U.S. economy.
It's going to ultimately lead the Fed to print a lot more money than it would have printed had there not been a war.
That is bullish for gold.
Surging deficits, massive money printing, dollar debasement.
All this is what you buy gold for.
That's why you buy gold as a hedge against all that.
So I think the short-term trade is wrong on thinking that the war is bearish for gold and that the Fed being on hold is bearish for gold.
It's not.
While the Fed is on hold, inflation is going to be running away.
The Fed should be hiking and not just a little bit.
The Fed needs to hike 300 basis points, maybe more.
They're not even, there's no way they're going to do that.
They're not even going to hike 50.
Why War Is Bullish For Gold00:15:42
Well, right.
I mean, I see this week also as a gold buying opportunity.
And I bought more gold this week, by the way, just because I routinely do so.
I've done so for decades, just stacking and vaulting it.
But what I see is, you know, Trump has gone out of his way to push so-called good news.
Oh, they're negotiating with us, even though Iran denies it.
And oh, they're very close.
They've agreed to almost everything, even though Iran denies it.
But it seems to me, you know, this start of Monday morning seems like an attempt to manipulate the markets, keep oil prices low, and keep the stock market high.
But what happens, Peter, if this weekend, as many people suspect, many military experts suspect that a land invasion will occur of U.S. troops, you know, landing or parachuting into Iran, how does that change the psychology of gold demand or pricing?
Well, obviously that complicates the situation.
I mean, number one, Trump promised that there would be no troops on the ground.
But there's no way to win this war without that.
We actually have to put our soldiers on the ground in Iran to take over, to take control of the territory.
We can't do that just by dropping bombs and launching missiles.
And if we actually want regime change, which Trump said he wants, you're not going to get that unless you actually take over the country.
And you can't do that, again, from airplanes.
You didn't do that on the ground.
And of course, that's going to involve a lot more casualties, assuming the Iranians don't just give up.
If they put up a fight, there's going to be a lot of Americans who are going to come home in body bags.
And obviously, that's going to be a negative, certainly for the families and the individuals involved, right?
But, you know, it's not going to look well, look good here to have Americans dying in Iran for what are we ultimately trying to achieve there.
And then, of course, if we send our troops into Iran, they've got to stay in Iran.
We've got to leave them there.
Now we've created another kragmire.
It's another Iraq or Afghanistan.
All right, we're there.
How the hell do we get out?
So look, this is the forever war that Trump said he didn't, he was against.
He was against nation building.
Well, now he's saying, well, I'm going to rebuild Iran.
Our job now is to build up Iran.
Why?
So, you know, I think it would be a mistake to send ground troops into Iran, but that's the only way to actually win the war.
Now, of course, Trump could just declare victory and leave.
He could say, we've completely demolished them.
Yes, they've still got the same regime, but they got no navy.
They got no air force.
They got nothing.
They got no nuclear program.
They're a shadow of their former selves.
They can't harm anybody because, you know, we've completely destroyed their military capabilities.
And so, you know, mission accomplished.
This is the greatest victory in the history of war.
I'm the greatest military strategist that's ever existed.
And, you know, whatever, whatever Trump likes to say.
Right, right.
But it strikes me that, you know, the Strait of Hormuz was fully open before Trump launched this war, you know.
Well, yes, there's that.
Right.
And the only way now, apparently, based on what Iran seems to be saying through official and unofficial channels, is that Iran will not allow the U.S. to occupy and take over Iran that they are going to fight.
And, you know, it's a country of 90 million people, rugged, mountainous terrain with really, you know, religiously dedicated people who are willing to die for their country, perhaps to even more of a degree than U.S. soldiers are willing to die overseas for their country.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, and we assume that all the Iranians are just real happy about this war and they think that this is great, that America is there to liberate them.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
But that may not be the case.
And I think that there could be more hatred for America in Iran now than there was a month ago before the war.
Oh, clearly that's the case.
Clearly, you know.
And not just in Iran, kind of throughout the entire region.
But what does this mean for us?
What's going on in the Middle East now?
But talk to us about if this becomes a drawn-out Vietnam 2.0 in the Middle East and this war goes on for years, which it, you know, involving hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, if not more, maybe a U.S. military draft on top of that.
Yeah.
I mean, remember, when America fought Vietnam, right, Vietnam was a tiny country.
I think Iran is bigger than Vietnam.
But we fought Vietnam and we lost that war.
We didn't win.
I mean, we actually lost.
We didn't achieve any of the objectives that we had, but we lost a lot of Americans and the war became extremely unpopular.
You know, we got a lot of good music that came out of that war.
And I like a lot of that music from the 60s, early 70s that was related to the war.
But other than that, I mean, it was a complete disaster.
And people would have thought, you know, America, we were a more powerful nation then than we are now, yet we couldn't even beat them.
You know, we were the world's biggest creditor nation.
We had trade surpluses.
We were basically still on the gold standard.
We had the kingdom.
I mean, you know, we didn't have all this debt.
The national debt was well under a trillion back in the 60s and 70s, just a few hundred billion.
Right.
Right.
So, you know, we weren't dependent on the rest of the world.
We were a more powerful nation and we still couldn't beat Vietnam.
Well, I'm glad you're bringing up that history because I want to ask you about the historical.
I mean, North Vietnam, rather.
Yeah, we were fighting North.
It wasn't even the whole Vietnam.
We were fighting half of Vietnam.
Yeah, right.
No, we understand.
But the projection of the strength of the dollar and the strength of the U.S. military and its ability to project power versus the strength of gold and silver.
If you go back to the 1960s or 70s, if you had just traded dollars for gold relentlessly month after month, you would be way ahead of the game today.
And I want to show you, since we're talking about history, you'll get a chuckle out of this.
I've got a collection of Lotus 123 on five and a quarter floppy disk.
Does that bring back some memory?
You threw all mine away.
How do you still have yours?
I found it.
I found it.
Yeah, this is.
You're a real pack rat.
I'm telling you, this is from the 1980s and it's in mint condition.
I should eBay this sucker.
But what are you going to do with it?
You don't have a player that can even do anything with that.
No, no, it's just a prop on my desk.
But it's fun.
You know, it's fun to think about where all this came from.
But talk to us about the projection of the dollar.
And also remember that Iran is saying to countries that if you pay for your oil in the Chinese yuan currency, then you can pass, but not if you pay in the dollar.
Yeah, they know how to hit us where it hurts.
I mean, ultimately, the best weapon that Iran has is not their missiles, but financial leverage.
It's the oil price.
It's the dollar.
It's Trump's opinion polls.
It's the level of the stock market.
They want to inflict economic pain.
That's the best way to end this war.
Because if the Americans get tired of high gas prices, high food prices, a crashing stock market, that's going to put a lot of political pressure on Trump.
And I think Iran knows that that's their best weapon.
That's their best defense is financial.
Couldn't, well, I agree with you.
And part of that, the leverage that Iran has is the restriction of energy flows that we just previously talked about.
But some of that energy, a lot of it is going into industry.
I'm talking about natural gas.
It goes into industry.
And some of those industries use silver as an input into their manufacturing, whether it's solar panels or what have you or electronics.
Could it be that the energy scarcity that is a result of this war will suppress silver prices in the short term for that reason?
Well, I mean, silver prices already pulled back.
So, you know, I think that you're just going to have more investment demand and more stockpiling of silver.
People need silver.
People need to stock up on it.
Yeah.
I think the pullback is more liquidity driven.
It's more short-term trading algorithms.
And also, you know, there were big profits in gold and silver.
You didn't have big profits in a lot of other things, but gold and silver had big profits.
They had a big move.
But, you know, we had a big move in the 1970s.
Gold went up to $200 an ounce and then pulled back to 100 and then went to 850.
In 2008, gold hit 1,000 for the first time in summer of 2008.
Then over a four-month period of time, it went back down below 700, 600 and change.
And then in three years, it tripled to 1,900.
So gold has a history of having a sharp pullback after making a big move, only to have an even bigger move to follow that pullback.
And so I think that's likely where we are.
Makes perfect sense.
But I would still like to pursue the silver question a little bit more.
Let me add a little bit more context to that because, see, I think this is a great buying opportunity for silver as well, but that's just my opinion.
But India in particular, for example, India uses a lot of silver in manufacturing.
There's a big solar factory industry in India, not just China.
A lot of people forget that.
But India is having energy problems, serious energy problems because of their dependence of energy out of the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps more so than China.
So given that silver is both a monetary and an industrial metal, isn't it likely that silver is currently more impacted than gold because of its industrial component?
Or am I a little bit more, although gold has an industrial component too, maybe silver a little bit more so than gold, but gold's also used in industry.
But silver has just been a lot more volatile.
Silver is swinging three, four, $5 a day now.
You know, I remember when 50 cents was a big move in the price of silver.
Now I see it.
Sometimes it moved 50 cents in a couple of minutes.
Granted, the price is higher now than it used to be, but there's a lot more volatility.
So this is just, you know, the war has unleashed a lot of this volatility.
And, you know, some of it is created by Trump himself with his social media posts.
You know, every time he says, he puts out a post on Truth Social, hey, everything is looking great.
We're close to a deal.
The markets move.
And then he says, forget a deal.
We're going to bomb the hell out of them.
That's it.
No prisoners.
I mean, he keeps switching rapidly and the markets react to his every post.
I mean, I've never seen a president affect the markets more than Trump.
Yeah, that is.
Normally, what they do is irrelevant.
But I mean, the main value from Truth Social now is to get the posts because that has the biggest impact on the markets is whatever Trump happens to say, even if what he's saying is a lie, because most of the time it is a lie.
Probably all the time it's a lie.
Yeah, but it's also a very highly leveraged means of market manipulation for insiders who have knowledge.
But let me shift gears slightly.
For those people watching this who feel like this is a good time to buy either gold or silver or invest in it, tell us about Euro-Pacific Asset Management that you founded.
And how can people use your expertise if they want to leverage investments in these metals?
Well, I mean, we don't use a lot of leverage, but I think that if you own the precious metals mining stocks, you inherently are levered to the price of gold.
Historically, that's been the case.
In recent years, we haven't seen that significant an outperformance of the miners over the metal.
And I think that's because investors have been too bearish on the metal.
And so they haven't been willing to increase the valuations assigned to the mining companies.
And that just creates an even better buying opportunity.
So we have a lot of strategies, including specific gold mining stock strategies at Europe Pacific Asset Management, which is my SEC registered investment advisory company.
So we can manage portfolios in mining stocks, but we also have a lot of other strategies that invest abroad in foreign dividend paying and value stocks and in emerging markets.
And I think this is where the returns are going to be over the next decade.
Look at last year.
My international dividend payer strategy returned over 60% last year.
Wow.
That's more than four times the S ⁇ P 500.
And I think that the outperformance is going to continue because for 10 years, 11 years, the U.S. outperformed.
The S ⁇ P way outperformed that dividend payer strategy.
It wasn't until last year that we started to recover the underperformance.
And of course, we made up for several years in one year, but I think there's a long way to go as a lot of money gets sucked out of the U.S. market, which remains very overvalued and goes back to overseas markets, which are still relative bargains.
So I think you're going to see a lot more money moving out of the dollar, out of U.S. stocks, out of U.S. bonds, going back into foreign markets.
And so my portfolios are specifically designed to allow you to profit from that trend, from that rotation away from U.S. assets.
And I think everything Trump has done is pushing people out of the United States.
You know, he keeps talking about how all this money is flowing into the U.S.
It's actually doing the opposite.
The money is leaking out of the U.S. and more is going to come.
And the war is going to accelerate that process.
You know, they say, oh, look, the dollar strengthened because of the war.
It did, but only slightly.
You know, years ago, it would have strengthened a lot more.
That just shows you how weak it is in that there was a tiny bounce in the dollar.
And that's going to be reversed because I think the safe haven money is going to go back into gold, not the dollar.
And you can tell that by looking at the U.S. Treasury market.
Yields right now are the highest they've been on U.S. Treasuries since July.
We're at 4.4% now in a 10-year and almost 5% in a 30-year.
And we could be above 4.5% by next week in the 10-year.
And now we're in the same area where Trump tacoed out on the Liberation Day tariffs because the bond market was getting yippy.
Well, it's about to get yippy yappy.
So we'll see FETACOS on the war the same way.
But the U.S. bond market's in a lot of trouble, which means the U.S. is in a lot of trouble because that means that rates are going up.
Midterm Hits From High Prices00:06:31
That means it costs us more to borrow.
Yeah, I would also add, I mean, everything you said makes perfect sense.
But on top of that, many of these investment deals that Trump announced with, for example, Gulf State billionaire investors for data centers, for example, these deals are going to get force majeured away.
Well, the deals were never really deals.
I mean, nothing was inked.
There was no actual legally enforceable commitment.
It was kind of like just tell Trump whatever he wants to hear so he can go back and brag about it.
You know, these guys, and now, of course, look, even if somebody was thinking about doing a deal, I think the war has got them thinking, you know what, circumstances are different.
We ain't doing this.
Well, clearly that's the case.
And also, you know, you think about Qatar, you know, they thought, well, the U.S. military base in our country will protect us from Iran's missiles.
And it turns out, nope, you have no protection.
In fact, the base makes you a target, and you just lost $20 billion a year in gas revenue as of right now.
That's been admitted by Qatar Energy.
And that's just one company in one country in the Persian Gulf region.
Yeah, they may be looking for the U.S. to reimburse them for that.
Yeah, right.
Where's our reparation?
You want to keep your base in our country?
You better pay us this money, you know, because otherwise get the hell out.
Well, remember, they're offline.
I mean, those two trains are offline for three to five years, and that's $20 billion a year.
So we're talking $60 to $100 billion in losses that they've officially admitted to in press releases.
Wow, that's a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
So Trump is going to be in scramble mode, it seems to me.
But like you said, every time he says something, it's either a lie or it's a contradiction of something he said 30 minutes earlier.
How do we make sense of what Trump is doing?
Is there any way to make sense at all?
Well, that's the problem when you lie.
It's easy to contradict yourself because you tell one lie and then you tell another lie.
See, if you always tell the truth, then you never contradict yourself because it would be impossible to contradict yourself if you're being honest.
It's when you're lying and you can't remember your last lie or you can't keep them straight, then a lot of times you're going to contradict a lie with another lie.
But look, Trump, as far as I can tell, it's all a big game to him, you know, and anything goes.
Like when you're playing poker, you don't have to tell the truth.
You could bluff, you know, or you could, you could pretend you got a great hand when you have a lousy hand, or you could pretend you have a lousy hand.
That's part of the game, right?
You don't believe if you're playing poker, you don't believe anything anybody tells you sitting at that table.
You just, you know, you try to figure out, you know, what they got, but you're not going to accept on face value what they say or what they pretend.
And so I think he looks at this as a game.
The way he wins the game is to be popular.
You know, I don't know, maybe to have the Republicans do well in the midterms.
But I also think he's looking at his family's wealth and net worth.
And I think he's trying to accumulate as much wealth as he can during the balance of his term.
You mentioned the midterms.
It seems like the GOP will take a lot of hits in the midterms if the American people are suffering with higher gas prices and food prices.
Well, they were going to suffer higher gas and food prices even if there was no war.
So I think Trump was already going to take a hit.
The Republicans were already going to take a hit.
Now they're going to be suffering even more, but Trump could say, well, it's because of the war.
Like everything would have been great.
We had the greatest economy in the history of the world, and then we had this war.
And as soon as the war is over, well, we'll be boom time again.
And it's going to be over soon.
So, you know, the war is going to be the scapegoat.
But it's the first thing that's going to happen.
And you initially thought the scapegoat would be the tariffs, you know, the Supreme Court or the Fed.
The Fed was too tight.
But now the best scapegoat Trump's going to have is going to be this war.
Well, either way, I mean, the elections, the special elections that have taken place right now have all gone Democrat.
The Democrats are going to, look, the Democrats are going to take the House.
There's no question about that.
I mean, that would be normal.
They have a razor-thin majority now.
And the party in power typically loses seats in the House.
So that was already going to happen.
But what was probably not necessarily going to happen, but what I think will happen is the Democrats also get the Senate.
So the Democrats are going to control the House and the Senate.
The first thing the House is going to do is impeach Trump.
Now, he has to get tried in the Senate.
They're not going to have 60 votes.
I don't think they'll get 60.
I don't think that the Republicans could possibly lose that badly because only a third of the senators even come up for reelection every two years.
So there would be no way that the Democrats could actually do it unless you get some Republicans that want to impeach Trump, which would be very dangerous politically.
I don't even know if Rand Paul would want to do that.
He's one of the only few people that's willing to stand up to Trump in the U.S. Senate.
The guy who stands up in the House, Thomas Massey, I mean, Trump has vilified this guy.
I mean, he's made it his main objective is to get Thomas Massey out of the House.
And he's the best Republican we have.
He's the only Republican who even cares about the debt, who even pushes back against deficit spending.
And Trump wants to get rid of him.
Right.
And already got rid of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned, but under pressure from Trump also for a very similar reason.
But Peter, as we're wrapping up this interview, and thank you for your time today.
What's the most important takeaway from this that our viewers need to understand about, especially about medals?
And I think the U.S. is a declining power.
We're declining power economically.
This war may show that we're also a declining power militarily if we end up not beating Iran.
Declining Power And Treasury Risks00:03:05
But I think the rug is going to be pulled out from under the dollar.
And the dollar's reserve status and its overvaluation is the cornerstone of our economy.
We have a service sector economy that only functions if the world supplies us with the goods that we don't produce and loans us the money that we don't save.
And when the world stops financing us, supplying us with goods and lending us money, our whole bubble economy deflates.
And our standard of living is going to take a huge hit.
And investors need to recognize that this is going to happen and do something before it does.
Pull their money out of overpriced U.S. dollar assets and invest abroad.
Buy gold and silver instead of holding U.S. currency.
Own foreign stocks instead of holding domestic stocks.
Own foreign bonds, not just randomly, not just any foreign stocks and bonds, but work with somebody like Euro Pacific that can help you pick the right stocks and the right bonds because we've got a lot of expert portfolio managers who are looking for the best values internationally.
I mean, you can try to do it yourself, but it's a lot easier just to hire me and my team to do it for you.
We don't charge that much.
And I think we do a really good job.
But the key is to do it quickly because you never know when you're going to run out of time.
Real quick, one last question.
Japan, is Japan going to be forced into a situation where they have to dump a lot of their treasury holdings?
I mean, they've been dumping quite a lot, but will that accelerate in your view?
Yeah, look, Japan has a big problem.
They have a lot of debt, and interest rates have been rising to levels they haven't seen in 20 years or so or 30 years in Japan.
And they're going to keep rising.
And that's going to be a big burden on the Japanese government.
So they're going to either have to really raise taxes to cover higher debt costs, cut back on government services, or print a lot of money to monetize the debt.
But that's self-defeating because that will send the inflation rate even higher and ultimately interest rates even higher.
The best thing they can do to mitigate some of this problem is to unload their treasuries.
Because if they sell treasuries, then they can take the proceeds and buy back their own debt and reduce the amount of Japanese bonds that are out there.
And so they no longer have to pay interest on those because they're no longer held outside of Japan.
For a while, holding dollars gave them a positive carry because they were earning more interest on their dollars than they were paying out on their yen.
But as interest rates in Japan rise, that's not the case.
And right now, the yen is very low, almost $160 to the yen.
It makes a lot of sense for the Japanese to cash out their dollars now at this exchange rate and buy back yen.
So I think there is a real risk that Japan becomes a major seller of treasuries.
Survival Gear For Nuclear Scenarios00:03:51
Yeah.
Okay.
That makes sense.
Thank you for the analysis.
And thank you for your time today, Peter.
Let me give you out your websites.
EuroPacific Asset Management is at Europac.com.
That's P-A-C, Europack.com.
And then Peter's main gold website is shiftgold.com.
And check out both of those sites.
And thank you for your time today, Peter.
It's always a pleasure to be here.
Oh, great.
Really appreciate it.
You too.
Keep up with the great tweets, too.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right, everybody.
That was Peter Schiff.
And you can also follow him on X and other social media.
And of course, you can follow more of my interviews at brightvideos.com.
And thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams.
Take care.
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