Peter Schiff: The Uber IPO Fiasco and the Writing On the Wall
Uber launched its IPO on Friday. It was less than ideal.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is talking about how it wants to tweak its quantitative easing program when the next recession rolls around.
Peter Schiff talked about how these things relate — and the “writing on the wall” for the economy in his latest podcast.
Instead of buying some fixed amount of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities, the central bankers have floated the idea of pegging a yield during the next economic downturn. For example, it would try to hold the interest rate on a one-year bond at, say, 1%. As Peter pointed out, this is essentially price-fixing.
They’re saying, ‘We don’t want the interest rate that is being determined in the market. We want to interfere in the market so that the interest rate is lower than the market would set.’”
The central bankers are basically admitting that this is not capitalism. They don’t want the free market discovering a rate because they don’t like the rate the market would choose. When you interfere with the market-clearing price – and an interest rate is simply the price of money – then you create surpluses or shortages. This is a basic supply and demand function.
As Peter said, this constant Federal Reserve suppression of rates is the source of our problems.
The reason the Fed constantly feels that it has to artificially suppress interest rates is because we have so much debt as a result of the artificial suppression of interest rates in the past.”
That’s the irony of the Fed suddenly running around warning about high levels of corporate debt. It’s a problem it created!
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