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Hedging the End of Fiat
Hedging the End of Fiat
It is slowly coming clear that the fiat dollar’s hegemony is drawing to a close. That’s what the BRICS summit in Johannesburg is all about — rats, if you like, deserting the dollar’s ship. With the dollar’s backing being no more than a precarious faith in it, it is bound to be sold down by foreign holders. Being only fiat, it could even become valueless, threatening to take down the other western alliance fiat currencies as well.
How do you protect your paper wealth from this outcome? Some swear by bitcoin and others by gold.
This article looks at what is likely to emerge as a replacement currency system, and concludes that from practical and legal aspects, bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency industry will fail with fiat, while mankind will return to gold, as it has always done in the past when state control over currency fails
Introduction
It is gradually dawning on market participants that the era of fiat currencies is drawing to a close. Monetarists, who first warned us of the inflationary consequences of the expansion of money and credit were also the first to warn us that the slowdown in monetary expansion would lead to recession, and since then we have seen broad money statistics flatline, with bank lending beginning to contract. This is interpreted by macroeconomists as the end of inflation, and the return to lower interest rates to stave off recession.
Unfortunately, this black-and-white interpretation of either inflation or recession but never both has been challenged by bond yields around the world which are rising to new highs. And the charts tell us that they are likely to go considerably higher. Consequently, conviction that inflation of producer and consumer prices will prove to be a temporary phenomenon is infected with doubt.
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The US Banking System Is Sound?
The US Banking System Is Sound?
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen keeps insisting that the banking system is “sound.” Is it though? Because it doesn’t look particularly sound.
In fact, we just witnessed the second-largest US bank failure ever.
Government regulators seized control of First Republic Bank over the weekend and sold the majority of the bank’s operations to JP Morgan Chase. It was the third major bank failure this year and the biggest bank to collapse since the 2008 financial crisis. It was the second-largest bank by assets to fail in US history.
First Republic went under after it revealed $100 billion in deposit losses in the first quarter.
The beleaguered bank has been struggling for a while. It was initially bailed out back in March with $30 billion in deposits from several large banks, including JP Morgan and Wells Fargo. The bank also borrowed heavily from the Federal Reserve’s bank bailout program. First Republic shares tumbled 75% last week before the FDIC stepped in.
While JP Morgan is taking over First Republic’s business, the FDIC will provide “shared-loss agreements.” As the FDIC website explains it, “the FDIC absorbs a portion of the loss on a specified pool of assets sold through the resolution of a failing bank – in effect sharing the loss with the purchaser of the failing bank.”
If we are to believe the mainstream narrative, the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank were isolated events and do not reflect a broader problem in the banking system. But as we have reported, these bank failures are just the tip of the iceberg. A report by the Wall Street Journal cites a study from Stanford and Columbia Universities that found 186 US banks are in distress.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Gold Heist
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Gold Heist
Yesterday (April 5) marked the anniversary 0f the signing of Executive Order 6102 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was touted as a measure to stop gold hoarding, but it was in reality, an attempt to remove gold from public hands.
Many people refer to EO-6102 as a gold confiscation order. But confiscation is probably not the best word for what happened in practice.
The order required private citizens, partnerships, associations and corporations to turn in all but small amounts of gold to the Federal Reserve in exchange for $20.67 per ounce.
The executive order was one of several steps Roosevelt took toward ending the gold standard in the US.
With the dollar tied to gold, the Federal Reserve found it difficult to increase the money supply during the Great Depression. It couldn’t simply fire up the printing press as it can today. The Federal Reserve Act required all notes to have 40% gold backing. But the Fed was low on gold and up against the limit. By enticing the public to give up its gold, the Fed was able to boost its own gold holdings and create more dollars.
EO 6102 followed on the heels of an order Roosevelt issued just weeks before prohibiting banks from paying out or exporting gold. Just two months after the enactment of EO 6102, the US effectively went off the gold standard when Congress enacted a joint resolution erasing the right of creditors to demand payment in gold. Then, in 1934, the government’s fixed price for gold was increased to $35 per ounce. This effectively increased the value of gold on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet by 69%. By increasing its gold stores through the confiscation of private gold holdings, and declaring a higher exchange rate, the Fed could circulate more notes. In effect, the hoarding of gold by the government allowed it to inflate the money supply.
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BRICS Nations Developing “New Currency” as Quest for Global De-Dollarization Accelerates
BRICS Nations Developing “New Currency” as Quest for Global De-Dollarization Accelerates
China and Brazil recently finalized a trade deal in their own currencies completely bypassing the dollar, but that’s not the only bad news for the world’s reserve currency.
Last week, a Russian official announced that the BRICS nations are working to develop a “new currency,” yet another sign that dollar dominance is waning.
State Duma (the Russian legislative assembly) deputy chairman Alexander Babakov said the transition to settlements in national currencies is the first step. We’ve already seen this occur with recent oil deals between India and Russia being settled in currencies other than dollars.
The next one is to provide the circulation of digital or any other form of a fundamentally new currency in the nearest future. I think that at the BRICS [leaders’ summit], the readiness to realize this project will be announced, such works are underway.”
That summit is scheduled for August.
Babakov said the BRICS nations are developing a strategy that “does not defend the dollar or euro” and that “a single currency” would likely emerge within BRICS, pegged to gold or “other groups of products, rare-earth elements, or soil.”
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa make up the BRICS block. It accounts for about 40% of the global population and a quarter of the global GDP.
Last year, Iran officially applied to join BRICS, and according to a report by The Cradle, several nations have expressed interest in joining the bloc, including Saudi Arabia, Algeria, UAE, Egypt, Argentina, Mexico, and Nigeria.
Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill coined the BRIC acronym. In a recent paper published by Global Policy Journal, he urged the expansion of BRICS.
“The US dollar plays a far too dominant role in global finance,” he wrote. “Whenever the Federal Reserve Board has embarked on periods of monetary tightening, or the opposite, loosening, the consequences on the value of the dollar and the knock-on effects have been dramatic.”
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Peter Schiff: Bank Bailouts Will Devalue the Dollar
Peter Schiff: Bank Bailouts Will Devalue the Dollar
Peter Schiff appeared on NTD News to talk about the bank bailout and the March Federal Reserve meeting. During the conversation, Peter explained that everybody is going to pay for these bailouts because they will ultimately devalue the dollar as inflation skyrockets.
During his press conference after the March FOMC meeting, Jerome Powell said the banking system is “sound and resilient.” Peter said it’s not sound at all.
It’s a house of cards that is starting to collapse.”
Peter explained how the banking system became so unsound.
First, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates at zero for over a decade. During that time, banks loaded up on low-yielding, long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. With interest rates so low, they had to go out further on the yield curve. And the reason they were able to take so much risk is because the government guarantees bank accounts. That created a moral hazard. Customers didn’t care what the banks did with their money because they knew the government would bail them out.
Thanks to the mistakes the Fed has made since the 2008 crisis, we have a much bigger bubble now. The Fed caused the bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008, and then they inflated a bigger bubble to try to paper over those mistakes and kick the can down the road so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the full consequences of resolving all those mistakes. And of course, we just compounded the problem with bigger mistakes and now the US economy is poised on the biggest economic disaster in its history.”
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If You Can’t Hold It, It’s Not Really Yours
If You Can’t Hold It, It’s Not Really Yours
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank reminds us of a very important truth — if you can’t hold it in your hand, you don’t really own it.
That’s why it’s wise to hold at least some of your wealth in hard assets like gold and silver that are in your direct possession or at least stored in a secure, allocated, segregated, and insured storage facility.
The FDIC insures bank deposits up to $250,000. If you have more than that in a financial institution, you could lose everything above that limit if a bank fails.
Depositors at SVB and Signature Bank lucked out. The government has made provisions to cover uninsured deposits. But there’s no guarantee that will happen when the next bank goes under.
And even if you don’t have more than $250,000 in the bank, you could easily find yourself locked out of your account. Just last week, a computer glitch caused money in some Wells Fargo accounts to disappear.
There are also more nefarious reasons you could lose access to funds. The Nigerian central bank recently limited bank withdrawals in order to incentivize people to use its new central bank digital currency. In 2017, India faced cash shortages when the government declared that 1,000 and 500 rupee notes would no longer be valid with just a four-hour notice. And during its crisis, the Greek government shuttered banks and seized some bank deposits.
Most people assume “that can’t happen here” in the US. But as we saw over last week, the US banking system is vulnerable to collapse.
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War on Cash: India Rolling Out Retail Pilot Program for Digital Rupee
War on Cash: India Rolling Out Retail Pilot Program for Digital Rupee
We recently reported that the Federal Reserve plans to launch a 12-week pilot program in partnership with several large commercial banks to test the feasibility of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The US isn’t alone in experimenting with digital currency. India is working on developing a digital rupee and recently announced the second phase of testing.
After successfully running a pilot program to test its digital currency at the wholesale level, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced it will test the digital rupee in a retail setting.
According to the RBI, the central bank digital currency “is a legal tender issued by a central bank in a digital form. It is the same as a fiat currency and is exchangeable one-to-one with the fiat currency. Only its form is different.”
Digital currencies are similar to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They exist as virtual banknotes or coins held in a digital wallet on your computer or smartphone. The difference between a government digital currency and bitcoin is the value of the digital currency is backed and controlled by the state, just like traditional fiat currency.
As the RBI put it, “Unlike cryptocurrencies, a CBDC isn’t a commodity or claims on commodities or digital assets. Cryptocurrencies have no issuer. They are not money (certainly not currency) as the word has come to be understood historically.”
According to a report in the Economic Times of India, the National Payments Corporation of India will host the platform for the digital rupee payment system during the testing phase. The Reserve Bank of India wants each commercial bank in the pilot to test retail use of the digital rupee with 10,000 to 50,000 users.
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Peter Schiff: Very Scary Admissions from the Fed
Peter Schiff: Very Scary Admissions from the Fed
Last week, the Federal Reserve delivered a 75-basis point rate hike, but Fed Chair Jerome Powell failed to deliver the more doveish rhetoric that many expected. The messaging did not indicate much softening in the stance on the future trajectory of rate hikes, despite an apparent “soft pivot” the week before.
In his podcast, Peter broke down Powell’s messaging and pointed out a number of very scary admissions that came out of the Fed meeting.
Peter said the Fed did do a soft pivot but was able to back off when the bond market stabilized.
I believe the Fed was forced into making that pivot because it stood on the precipice of a bond market crash, which was in the process of happening. And I think the only way the Fed was able to stop that slow-motion crash from playing out accelerating was by throwing a bone to the markets and indicating through the Wall Street Journal that there was going to be some type of statement that was going to go along with the rate hike that would indicate that maybe there was going to be a pause in the pace, a slowdown in the pace, that the Fed was going to take a step back and reflect and assess, and maybe acknowledge the progress that had been made without indicating complete victory, but at least acknowledging that victory was at least in sight and that the Fed could take a more cautious approach going forward. … Something to that effect was expected.”
However, the Fed didn’t deliver anything close to that.
Initially, the markets thought the Fed was going more doveish. The statement released by the FOMC left some wiggle room for a slowdown in hiking or even a pause with language about monetary policy “lags” and “cumulative” effects.
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Peter Schiff: A Massive Fiscal Time Bomb
Peter Schiff: A Massive Fiscal Time Bomb
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell knew fighting inflation would cause big problems in a bubble economy loaded up with debt. He put it off as long as he could, calling inflation “transitory.” But once inflation became a huge problem, the central bank had no choice but to get into the fight and start tightening monetary policy. The problem is, the Fed’s plan won’t work. And one reason it won’t work is the massive national debt.
Peter Schiff talked about it in this clip from his podcast.
The federal government already spends about $500 billion per year on interest payments on the $31 trillion debt. Peter noted a CNBC discussion where they speculated that in 10 years, the US government could be paying $1 trillion per year on interest alone.
Ten years? We could be paying $1 trillion in interest in one year! How are these guys getting 10 years?”
Four percent of the $31 trillion debt is $1.25 trillion. The average maturity on the debt is under five years. A third of the debt will mature in the next year. Meanwhile, the debt continues to skyrocket. The national debt grew by $1 trillion in just eight months even with pandemic spending programs winding down.
Five years from now, the national debt will be over $40 trillion, and we’re going to have to pay an interest rate probably more than 5% on that. So, a $1 trillion tab for interest on the national debt isn’t a decade away. It’s a year, maybe two away. That’s how close this crisis is.”
That raises an important question: where is the government going to get the money to pay for this? It will cost something like 30% of all tax revenue just to pay the interest on the debt. Huge interest payments will mean even more borrowing.
This is a massive fiscal time bomb.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fed Paper Admits the Central Bank Can’t Control Inflation; Finger-Points at Federal Government
Fed Paper Admits the Central Bank Can’t Control Inflation; Finger-Points at Federal Government
It appears somebody at the Federal Reserve has figured out that the central bank can’t tame inflation, so it’s setting up a scapegoat – Uncle Sam.
A paper co-authored by Leonardo Melosi of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and John Hopkins University economist Francesco Bianchi and published by the Kansas City Federal Reserve argues that central bank monetary policy alone can’t control inflation.
The paper’s abstract asserts, “This increase in inflation could not have been averted by simply tightening monetary policy.”
In a nutshell, Melosi and Bianchi argue that the Fed can’t control inflation alone. US government fiscal policy contributes to inflationary pressure and makes it impossible for the Fed to do its job.
Trend inflation is fully controlled by the monetary authority only when public debt can be successfully stabilized by credible future fiscal plans. When the fiscal authority is not perceived as fully responsible for covering the existing fiscal imbalances, the private sector expects that inflation will rise to ensure sustainability of national debt. As a result, a large fiscal imbalance combined with a weakening fiscal credibility may lead trend inflation to drift away from the long-run target chosen by the monetary authority.”
There are a couple of startling admissions in this single paragraph.
First, the authors acknowledge that the federal government uses inflation as a tool to handle its debt. In other words, it acknowledges that we’re all paying an inflation tax.
Peter Schiff talked about this inflation tax in an interview on Rob Schmitt Tonight.
Inflation is a tax. It’s the way government finances deficit spending. Government spends money. It doesn’t collect enough taxes, so it has to run deficits. The Federal Reserve monetizes those deficits – prints money. They call it quantitative easing, but that’s inflation…
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Buckle Up for a Crashing Economy and More Inflation
Buckle Up for a Crashing Economy and More Inflation
Jerome Powell began hinting that inflation might be a problem last August. In November, Powell retired the word “transitory.” But here we are in May and the Federal Reserve still hasn’t done anything substantive to address the inflation problem.
And now it may be too late. It’s probably time to buckle up for more inflation – and perhaps a crashing economy.
Powell and Company have been talking tough for months, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of action. In March, the central bank raised interest rates a paltry 25 basis points. At the May meeting, the FOMC followed up with a more aggressive 1/2% rate hike but took a 75 basis point rate hike off the table.
Meanwhile, the Fed didn’t even start tapering quantitative easing until January. In mid-April, the balance sheet was still expanding, hitting an all-time high of $8.97 trillion.
At the May FOMC meeting, the Fed unveiled its balance sheet reduction scheme. It was hardly impressive. If the Fed shrinks its balance sheet at the proposed rate, it will be back to pre-pandemic levels in about eight years.
The Fed has targeted a 2.5% interest rate by the end of the year. With GDP already going negative in Q1, it’s questionable that the Fed can get there without completely tanking the economy. There are already signs that the Fed has pricked the housing bubble.
And as Mises Institute senior editor Ryan McMaken pointed out in a recent article, the Fed really needs to push rates much higher than 3%.
One percent may seem high to some market observers of recent rate cycles, but we’re now in a high-inflation environment with price inflation above 8 percent. The Fed is going to have to do more than a mild hike here and there to make a dent in 8 percent CPI (Consumer Price Index) inflation…
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The Inflation Blame Game
The Inflation Blame Game
Now inflation is Russia’s fault. Or is it greedy businesses pushing up prices? Maybe a combination of the two.
It seems that government officials and central bankers are looking everywhere for a place to pin the blame for inflation except the one place they need to look — in the mirror.
I’m already seeing headlines about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is causing inflation. CBS broadcast this storyline on the first day of the invasion. As Peter Schiff put it in a recent podcast, Russia is the latest “excuse variant” for inflation.
It is true that the Russian invasion and economic sanctions have caused some prices to spike. Oil was over $130 a barrel over the weekend. Copper hit record highs. The price of wheat surged. But this is not necessarily inflationary. Inflation causes a general rise in prices across the board. In this situation, some prices will rise while others fall. As consumers spend more on food and energy, they will cut spending on other goods and services. Ostensibly, those prices will drop.
Inflation — an increase in the money supply — causes prices to rise more generally. It’s the result of more dollars chasing the same number of (or fewer) goods and services. As Peter explained, the culprit is the central bank.
What makes the prices go up is when the central bank responds to rising energy prices or rising food prices by printing more money, which is what they are going to do. Because as consumers have to tighten their belts because food is so expensive, because home heating oil and gasoline are so expensive, and they cut back spending on everything else, that causes a recession. And that results in the Fed printing more money, and that’s what’s inflationary.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peter Schiff: The Inflation Freight Train
Peter Schiff: The Inflation Freight Train
December Consumer Price Index data came out on Wednesday (Jan. 12). Month-on-month, it was again even hotter than expected. Peter called it an inflationary freight train that the Fed’s “field of dreams” monetary policy will not stop.
“Transitory” inflation has now been running hot for a full year.
The year-on-year CPI was 7%. It was the biggest annual CPI increase since 1982.
Month-on-month, the CPI spiked another 0.5%. This was hotter than the consensus 0.4% projection.
Core CPI (stripping out food and energy — as if you don’t have to eat or put gas in your car) was up 5.5%.
Goods prices were up a staggering 10.7% That was the biggest 1-year increase since 1975.
Keep in mind, this is using the cooked government CPI formula that understates inflation. If the government was still using the formula that it used in 1982, inflation would be higher in 2021 than it was then. In fact, we’d have the highest level of inflation in history. According to ShadowStats, it would be just over 15%.
Based on the methodology the government uses to calculate housing prices (owners’ equivalent rent), housing prices were up 3.8% in 2021. Meanwhile, the actual home prices rose about 16.5%. If you take owners’ equivalent rent out and put home prices in the calculation, 2021 CPI suddenly becomes 10%.
Some people have recently claimed we shouldn’t worry about inflation. They say that wages go up along with prices, so it’s basically a wash. But wages are not going up as fast as prices. Real wages (nominal wage increases minus CPI) were down 2.4% in 2021. That means even with your raise, you have lost purchasing power. And you’ve lost even more than the official numbers reveal. If you use an honest inflation measure, real wages were down somewhere in the neighborhood of 10.4%.
As Peter Schiff said, “Consumers are going to have to live in the real world, not in the government’s fantasy world.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peter Schiff: The Fed Can’t Do What It’s Saying It Will Do
Peter Schiff: The Fed Can’t Do What It’s Saying It Will Do
The Fed FOMC minutes came out last week, signaling tighter monetary policy. Peter Schiff talked about the minutes in his podcast, arguing that the Fed can’t do what it says it’s going to do. If it does, it will crash the markets and the economy. And it won’t lower inflation.
The Fed minutes were widely viewed as even more hawkish than the messaging coming out of the December meeting. Peter said the minutes even surprised him a bit. But he reminded us that when he’s talking about a “hawkish” Fed, he’s not really talking about hawks.
They’re extinct. They may as well be the dodo bird at the Federal Reserve. Everybody is a dove. We’re just talking about degrees of dovishness. And so, the Fed was less dovish than the markets had expected.”
The minutes indicated we could now see four interest rate hikes this year. Three hikes were widely anticipated after the meeting. That would push rates up to about 1% by the end of the year. In the big scheme of things, and against the backdrop of the current economic data, that’s not a lot.
You cannot describe those itsy-bitsy moves in any way ‘hawkish.’”
But comments regarding quantitative tightening – shrinking the balance sheet – really roiled the markets.
In other words, they’re going to go from being a massive buyer in US Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities to a seller of those securities. And that’s what really spooked the markets. Because that sent the bond markets tanking.”
Yields on the 10-year Treasury hit a 52-week high and briefly pushed above 1.8%.
If the Fed is going to shift from buying bonds to selling, clearly, that will put heavy pressure on the bond market. But Peter said there is one thing that the markets don’t seem to comprehend.
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Peter Schiff: There Is No Ceiling on Inflation
Peter Schiff: There Is No Ceiling on Inflation
Gold closed out the week before Christmas above $1,800 an ounce, despite rising bond yields. The $1,800 level has been viewed as a ceiling for the price of gold. In his podcast, Peter Schiff said people need to start thinking of $1,800 as a floor. And he said they will once they realize there is no ceiling on inflation.
We got the personal income and spending data for November last week. Incomes grew at a slower pace than projected — 0.4%. Meanwhile, spending was up 0.6%. Obviously, if spending is outpacing income, the difference has to come from somewhere. It appears Americans are dipping into their savings to cope with rising prices. The savings rate declined to 6.9%. That is the lowest level since December 2017.
We also know that consumers are turning to debt to make ends meet, with credit card balances growing at a fast pace.
The savings rate shot up and Americans paid down their credit cards when the government showered them with stimulus. Peter said it appears the stimulus has run out.
Obviously, Americans have now exhausted that windfall. They’ve depleted that savings war-chest that was built up with stimulus money, and now it’s gone. And so, they’re having to go into debt.”
Consumers have a double problem. They’ve run out of savings and consumer prices keep going up. That is robbing people of their purchasing power.
That robber is the government, because it’s the government that’s creating the inflation that is causing the cost of living to go up. But the cost of living is going up, yet consumers have even less savings to afford that increase in the cost of living.”
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