Schiff on The Land Development Podcast: Inflation Is the Threat | SchiffGold

Peter recently appeared on the Land Development Podcast to lay out a simple case: inflation is the central problem for the economy, and the market is already signaling that through the surge in precious metals and commodity prices. He ties that trend to current policy choices — tariffs, deficit spending and energy misallocation — and warns those choices will raise costs for ordinary buyers and borrowers.

He starts by noting how the market has rewarded holders of foreign stocks and commodities this year, including precious metals, and how that strength is showing up in client portfolios:

Of course, gold and silver stocks, a lot of silver stocks have tripled, quadrupled this year. Gold stocks have more than doubled. So it’s probably the best year that I’ve had as far as returns for my clients. Even my non-gold stocks, you know, my standard portfolios are up over 40% on the year. So it’s a great year to be invested in foreign stocks, in precious metals, commodities in general, I think.

Peter reads those moves in the precious metals complex as a direct signal about inflation — not as a speculative fad but as the market’s way of pricing in currency debasement. He points the finger at Washington’s policies, arguing that political promises to “get rid of inflation” collide with actions that create it:

I mean, gold is not almost $3,800 an ounce, because there’s not an inflation problem. Silver is not over 46, because we don’t have to worry about inflation. The precious metals are telling us that the thing that we should be worried most about is inflation. And that’s because that’s basically Donald Trump’s economic policy is to create inflation. Even though he campaigned on getting rid of inflation, his entire presidency is about making more inflation.

He explains why politicians tend to avoid the medicine that would actually cure inflation — the short, painful adjustments that markets require — and how that avoidance locks in worse long-term outcomes:

The reason he doesn’t want to actually solve the problems is because doing that brings about a severe recession that nobody can deny. It’s going to mean higher interest rates. It’s going to mean lower stock prices, lower real estate prices. A lot of companies are going to fail because they won’t be able to pay their debt. The government’s going to have to cut spending, including on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and that’s going to anger a lot of voters.

Those policy choices have concrete effects for everyday purchases, not only for retirees or investors. Peter points to tariffs as a clear, immediate driver of higher costs in housing and construction materials, compounding inflation rather than solving anything:

If you buy a new home and you want some furniture, now there’s 30% extra tariffs on any of it that’s upholstered. So Trump keeps on slapping tariffs. We got them already on steel, on aluminum, and lumber. All the stuff that you need to build homes are not only more expensive because of the tariffs, but they’re going to be more expensive because of inflation, which is going to drive the cost of everything. So you’re not going to have a lot of new supply.

That makes the government’s recent tilt toward promoting cryptocurrencies even more baffling to Peter. He sees a political push to encourage retail buying of Bitcoin and other tokens as a kind of national-scale pump-and-dump that distracts from real investment in productivity, while wasting scarce energy resources that could serve AI development and data centers:

Now they’ve taken the Bitcoin pump and dump scheme and they’ve basically gone national with it where the government is doing the pumping. So the government is trying to help sucker people into buying Bitcoin or Ethereum or all these other you know alt coins … But it is very unfortunate that Trump is encouraging all this, because first of all I talked earlier about where’s the energy going to come from for AI. Well, we’re wasting a lot of energy mining all these tokens. So that’s one thing that we could give up.

For more of Peter’s analysis, check out his latest podcast!

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