Why Crypto Is A Losing Game w/Economist Peter Schiff EP 1208

This is episode number 1208 with Peter David Schiff.

You can't do anything with Bitcoin that you can do with gold. We are headed for a monetary crisis. That that is a fact.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome back, my friend. Today's guest is Peter Schiff, who is an American stock broker, financial commentator and radio personality. He is the CEO and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, Inc. and host the Peter Schiff Show. And I like to bring in different perspectives on all topics in life. And in this interview, we're bringing Peter to talk about his perspective on crypto cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Now, a lot of people I'm going to bring on that talk about the benefits, and he's going to talk about some of the other signs. So in this episode, we discuss why Peter thinks Bitcoin probably won't take off anymore, why dollars are more valuable than any kind of currency, why the US covered policy is economically harmful, what you can do to prepare yourself for the dollar crash, and so much more. And if you're inspired by this and you're wanting to learn more about financial growth and financial education, then make sure to share this with someone that you think would be inspired by this. as well. And a quick reminder to subscribe to the School of Greatness as well as giving us a rating and review at the end of this episode to let us know the part you enjoyed the most. And you can do that over on Apple Podcast. And I want to give a shout out to the fan of the week. This is Natalia from Belgium who said, Thank you, Lewis, for your wonderful podcast. I started listening to it in 2017 and became a fan. Back then, you addressed the topic of trauma, which I didn't think about so thoroughly before. I was touched by your own trauma story and your journey following it. The podcast helped me go through a journey inside myself, and I wouldn't exaggerate if I say that it was life saving. Wish you lots of further success. So, Natalia, we are so grateful that you were able to go on your own journey and start healing from the trauma that you face as well. Proud of you for taking it on. It takes a lot of courage. And a big thank you for leaving a review over on Apple Podcast. You are the fan of the week. Okay, very excited about this one. In just a moment, the one and only Peter Schiff. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest. Peter is here to talk about all things money, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies. And you're actually, Peter, the first person I've had on to talk about cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and kind of this whole new wave. There's been a lot of people that I've been interested in talking to this about, but I didn't know if it was the right time. And so I wanted to have you on first because everyone is excited about cryptocurrency and the Bitcoin craze, especially where you are. There's a lot of cryptocurrency Bitcoin fanatics in Puerto Rico right now that I've heard are living down there. But you kind of have a different perspective about this. Everyone's saying Bitcoin is gonna go to $100,000 by the end of the year. It's gonna be the future, decentralizing the banks, all these things.

But that's not really your opinion, is that right? Correct. And it's not everybody that's saying that. It's everybody who owns Bitcoin. is saying that, but not everybody. And in fact, once you own Bitcoin, you have a vested interest in saying that because the whole success of Bitcoin rests on more people buying it. So if you own it, you pretty much have to prophesize. You gotta try to convert as many of your friends or colleagues as you can and get them to buy because that's the only way the price of which you already own is gonna go up. Because Bitcoin is not an asset that's like real estate, where you can collect rent, or stocks, where you could collect a dividend, or bonds, where you get paid interest. It's just a token, right? It's like a baseball card, except it's not really that rare and you can't hold it in your hand. It's just a digital string of numbers. I mean, it's not like a commodity where you actually can use it for something. you know, like oil, you could, you know, use it to generate power, drive a car, or you could heat your home, or it's not like weed or soybeans, you know, where you could eat them, or it's not like gold, where you could make jewelry out of it or conduct electricity with it or use it in all sorts of industrial applications like other metals. It doesn't have any of the properties of a commodity or of an investment asset, you know? It's like, you know, kind of like a Beanie Baby, except a Beanie Baby was cute and fuzzy and, you know, you can hold it and, you know, it was, you know, you, it was something at least. But Bitcoin is nothing. But what it does have now is a very high price, right? As we're talking, Bitcoin is almost $50,000 to buy a Bitcoin. Now, you don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin because you can break them down into like 100 million satoshis. But if you bought an entire Bitcoin, It costs you $49,000, $48,000 right now. Whereas if you had bought one 10 years ago, they were less than a dollar or when it started. So there are people that got incredibly wealthy. I mean, I was talking to a guy the other day who put $15,000 in Ether and it's worth over $100 million and he's still holding onto it.

That's crazy.

Just a regular guy. gave me a ride home from San Juan. But didn't seem like he was that substantial a guy, but got $100 million worth of ether. But when you get stories like that, I mean, it's very difficult to turn $15,000 into $100 million, right? I mean, I've never done anything like that, right? I've been in the investment business my entire life. And that's what's generating a lot of excitement because people think that it could happen again. I mean, people are saying that it's still early on. Like you could buy Bitcoin at $50,000 of Bitcoin and it's going to go up to $2 million of Bitcoin. I mean, there's just no way that's going to happen. You know, it's far more likely to collapse, especially since now you have, you know, a lot of people, smaller people getting in. The people who got in early on, they need those new people to come in so they can get out. So they have to pump up the price, they have to generate a lot of hype and a lot of enthusiasm. But all this stuff is pie in the sky nonsense. Everything they say about how this is gonna change the world and it's revolutionary and, you know, Bitcoin fixes everything, it doesn't fix anything. It's all a fantasy. It's not real money. It doesn't have any substance behind it, it doesn't have any real value. It has a price, But price isn't value. They're trying to market Bitcoin as digital gold, except it's nothing like actual gold. You can't do anything with Bitcoin that you can do with gold. Yeah, you can hold onto it, but it's not a store of value. Gold is a store of value because gold is a very valuable metal. And even if you're not going to use the metal yourself, you can store it because somebody else could use it in the future for whatever they want to do with it. But you can't do anything with Bitcoin today, so storing it for the future doesn't make any sense because there won't be anything you can do with it in the future either. The stuff that they're saying about it, I mean, sometimes superficially, if you don't really dig down, I mean, it can make sense until you actually, you know, dig down and realize that it's all nonsense. But there's a lot of enthusiasm among the people because once you get in it, you know, you're just part of the bubble and you start cheerleading it and everybody wants to believe in this fantasy that we can all get rich. And as long as nobody sells and everybody keeps buying, the price can go up. But eventually, some of these people that have hundreds of millions or even hundreds of thousands are going to want to buy actual stuff. Right. Right. Just having a big stack of virtual tokens, you can't live in it, you can't drive it, right? People are going to want a new home, they're gonna want a new car, they're gonna wanna travel, they're gonna wanna spend their Bitcoin profits. Well, that's when it all collapses because if the people who have been holding on decide they wanna cash out, who are they gonna cash out to? If they can sucker in a whole new crowd of people, and that's what they're trying to do. In fact, they're trying to sucker in the institutions. That's the big payday. If they can sucker pension funds, endowments, into buying into it, right? That would allow a lot of people to exit. But I don't know that that many institutions are going to bite on this. I mean, the whole idea is, well, you know, you better buy in or you're going to miss out on this huge gain. And how are you going to explain to your clients how you missed out on, you know, this big, big gain? But, you know, I think more managers will be more worried about what if I put my money into Bitcoin and it goes to zero? How do I explain doing something that dumb? You know, so I think more people are going to stay away from it.

Yeah, and you're speaking, Peter, to someone who's, I would say, pretty uneducated on this topic, except for the fact that I watch a few videos here and there and I hear some people who've made some money and I've got some friends in crypto and NFTs and all that stuff. And I dabbled in investing some five years ago when it kind of felt like, or maybe four years ago, I guess, when it was like Ethereum started to have its a spike and Bitcoin went from, I think, 5, 000 to 12, 000 or something like that. And then it dropped back down. And I was like, what am I doing? You know, it's just so up and down. I don't want to stress about this all day long. So I got out, you know, I only put a little bit in and I kind of forgot about it until last year when the nft world started to come about. And I said, okay, is this another thing that I think about and try to learn with the, the hype machine that's behind this? But one of the things you said is, so I'm going to play, you know, all sides of this just so I can educate myself. I guess so a lot of people, you know, 10 years ago probably thought that Bitcoin would never reach a thousand, let alone 50 to 60,000. So is it possible that it could go to 100 or 500,000 even though it's really just a hype machine?

Well, you know, anything is possible, right? But the question is how probable is it? And is it worth the gamble? Right. But, you know, the way Bitcoin is marketed, it's not marketed as a high-risk gamble. They say it's a store of value. It's a safe haven, it's a digital gold, but it's nothing of the sort. I mean, it is extremely risky. And I think ultimately, wherever it goes on the upside, it's going to zero on the downside. So, if you're in Bitcoin, you have to get out of it at some point before it collapses, except the mantra is never sell. Total, right? You need diamond hands. That's part of the con because the people who want to get out, have to convince everybody else not to get out, so that they don't have the competition. 80% of the people who own Bitcoin have never sold any. So even though the price has gone way up, they haven't actually reaped any of those gains. Now, some people have actually borrowed against their Bitcoin, and now they're spending that, but that's an accident waiting to happen when the market crashes and there's all this forced liquidation of Bitcoin collateral. And of course, the collateral is collapsing in value. and may be insufficient to make the lenders whole. And so there's a little bit of a financial crisis coming in that ecosystem when the bottom drops out of that market. But what's happening is the guys that got in a long time ago, they're just trying to quietly unload as much Bitcoin as they can before the music stops. And they do that by trying to get more and more people entice them in based on the promise of, you know, easy riches, right? You're gonna get rich, you know, revolutionize the world, you know, own this Bitcoin and you don't even need a job, just buy this Bitcoin and never sell it and you're gonna be really, really rich. And, you know, the whole argument is the dollar, the Euro, the Yen, I mean, they're nothing, right? They're just pieces of paper, there's no substance behind them. And so if people can, you know, use dollars and use Euros, well, why can't they just use Bitcoin? If the dollar can have value despite being intrinsically worthless, why can't Bitcoin? But the problem is it doesn't work that way because the dollar, of course, wasn't always intrinsically worthless. It was gold. It was actually defined as a weight of gold or weight of silver. And then the government issued notes, Federal Reserve notes, that were redeemable in the real dollars, which were made of gold, gold or silver. And it was a gradual process where we took the real money away from the currency But when you have a fiat currency in a country that's legal tender, it's one currency everybody uses. The government says, this is how you pay your taxes. So you don't want to go to jail, you got to have these dollars and every year you got to send them into us. And so the fact that you need dollars to stay out of jail, that in and of itself gives dollars a lot of value. And then of course, the dollar is the unit of account. Everything is priced in dollars. Your landlord is, he wants dollars, so I need to earn dollars because my rent's in dollars. I go to the grocery store, everything that's for sale is in dollars. So you have this world that is based on the dollar already, even though it's intrinsically worthless, it's still functioning. And the dollar loses value slowly. Every year inflation, it loses a little value. If we still had real money like gold, it wouldn't be losing any value.

It'd be stable. I guess the thing that I keep hearing about Bitcoin is, well, it's like gold because there's a limited quantity and they're never going to make any more of it, right? Is that what you hear, too?

Well, that's part of the pitch that it's scarce, but gold is scarce because there's only so much of it here on the earth, and it's hard to find it. You have to mine it out of the ground, and it's a very difficult process. Bitcoin is scarce because it was programmed to be scarce. It's an artificial scarcity. It's not a natural scarcity. And the idea is that, well, that's never going to change, right? The miners are never going to vote to authorize additional Bitcoin, right? I mean, in theory, it could happen. But let's accept, you know, for argument's sake, the Bitcoin proponents theory that it will never be more than 21 million, right? It's fixed at 21 million, and let's give them that. Well, So what? Because gold is scarce and it has value that is very unique and specific to gold, right? Gold can do things that other metals can't or it can do things much more efficiently than other metals. So it's unique and it's scarce. Bitcoin is not unique at all. It doesn't have any real value. There are 15,500 or so alternative digital currencies, tokens, assets, whatever you want to call them. The main difference between them and Bitcoin is it's the name. It's got a different name. Some of the names are almost identical like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold or whatever. All kinds of things and some of them have crazy names. But practically speaking, there's not that much difference between any of these other tokens. And in fact, you can make another token that is exactly like Bitcoin in every way, identical to it, Just a different name, Bitcoin 2, Bitcoin 3, Bitcoin 4. You can't make another gold. That's just like gold. It's not on the periodic table. So being scarce in and of itself doesn't give you value. Anybody can come up with an original work of art and say, hey, this is my only drawing. It's very scarce. I've only made one. But does anybody actually want to buy it? Just because you scribbled something on a napkin and you said, Hey, this is an original, right? And it's my old, so it has to have value. And Bitcoin, maybe it's scarce in a sense, but it's not really scarce if there's 15,000 other cryptocurrencies that I could buy. And it doesn't have any value. So people will always want gold, right? Gold is not just about an investment. Gold is an actual commodity that's used. I mean, the biggest use is jewelry. And they've been making gold jewelry for thousands of years. I don't see any indication from the people I know that they're gonna stop wearing gold jewelry. A gold is as popular as it's ever been. In fact, probably more so now than when I was younger. Men wear a lot more gold, especially certain cultures. So gold is a valuable metal for the jewelry industry. And that's not gonna change. But it's also very valuable in consumer electronics. And consumer electronics is getting bigger and bigger. So I think the industrial demand for gold is going to continue to rise. So it's there. The only demand for Bitcoin comes from speculators. There's no real user of Bitcoin. You only buy Bitcoin if you think the price is going to go up. So what happens if people stop thinking the price is going to go up? Well, then nobody wants to buy it. Well, then what happens to the price? It collapses. The price of gold isn't going to collapse because even if Investors don't want it. You know, the real world does. And as the price comes down, the real buyers step up who need gold, then they buy the gold. And if the price is too low, no new gold is gonna get made because, you know, it costs right now would be $1,200, $1,400 to mine an ounce of gold. That sells for about 1750. There's not a lot of margin in there. There's some depending on the mine.

Sure.

But if the price of gold went to 1000 and stayed there, nobody would mine anymore. Well, then there would be no new supply for the industry that needs it and the price would go up. But Bitcoin doesn't have any of that. I mean, if people stop wanting to gamble on it, then there's no buyers. Yeah, you create Bitcoin by solving math problems, they call it mining and they won't mine as many if the price crashes, I guess. But it won't matter because there'll be no more demand because there is no end user for Bitcoin? I mean, the main use case for Bitcoin is I'm going to get rich by buying it.

What if it does crash? Let's say it goes to $1,000. Do you think actually people would invest more money then and try to go because I think it would go back up or would it just stay there?

I don't think so. I mean, Bitcoin has had a lot of big drops, right? And that's what gives people confidence that, well, if it drops big again, it'll come back. You know, like it went to 100 and then it went back down to $1 or something. And then, then it went to 1,000 and it went down to 2,300. Then it went to 20,000 and it went down to 3,000. Then it went to 50,000 or 60,000. It went down to 30,000. So people keep thinking, oh, if it crashes again. But I think at this point, if it had that kind of drop from this level with all the money that has come in, I think About half the people that own Bitcoin bought it this year. And so most of them are probably underwater. The Bitcoin is probably worth less than they paid. And if they bought Bitcoin at 50, 60,000 and it goes down to 5,000 or 1,000, I don't think they're gonna be waiting it out. I mean, a lot of them are gonna be forced out if they're on margin. They're gonna get wiped out. But I think the enthusiasm will go away. I think the institutions, anybody who is thinking about buying it will certainly not do it. I mean, once they see that kind of drop, because they're trying to really say, well, you know, it's not going to have that kind of drop again because, you know, now it's mainstream. Now, you know, we have futures contracts, we maybe have ETFs, we have these institutions.

What about the cryptocurrencies where people are saying, again, I'm uneducated here, so I'm asking from an honest point of view. What about the cryptocurrencies that people are saying, well, these have utility. It's different than Bitcoin. There's something based on it. There's some actual value more than just a name and the hype of it and the limited quantity. What about those cryptocurrencies?

Now, I don't think that you actually need any of these cryptocurrencies. I think to the extent that you can use blockchain to do a lot of these things, you don't need the cryptocurrency to do it. That's just a gimmick to get people to buy into it because the idea is, oh, this one has use, so I'll buy it and it's gonna go way up. That, you know, people are just using it to get rich. That's what they're using it for. And they're trying to, you know, validate this story with this new coin because it really doesn't cost a lot of money to create a new coin, right? Because they don't really have any value, just create them. But if you can convince other people to buy what you just created, you make a lot of money minting these coins and getting people to pay something for what really amounts to nothing. But the problem is there is actually a serious problem with the fiat monetary system we have now. And we are headed for a monetary crisis. That is a fact. We've been headed for this crisis for quite some time now. you know, it's long overdue. And I think that this, what we're seeing now with this explosion of consumer price increases, to me, is a good indication that we started the process. And, you know, I don't, this is not transitory. I think this is the tip of an inflationary iceberg. And it's really what I've been saying for, you know, more than 10 years now, maybe 20. It's what I've been talking about. It's now happening. It's just. I didn't realize that it would take this long for the whole thing to play out because we really kicked the can down the road for many, many years. But in the process, all the problems have gotten so much worse than they were. And so the crisis now has to be much worse because we're unwinding a bigger problem. It's a much bigger bubble. And so as the air comes out, it's going to be a lot more disruptive to the economy. But a lot of the people in crypto and Bitcoin in particular, they've got that part right. The dollar is gonna lose a lot of value. The Fed's gonna keep printing them. The government's borrowed all this money. We have so much debt. The Fed can't raise rates to fight inflation. They have to keep printing more money to monetize deficits, to prop up asset bubbles. And so the dollar is gonna lose a lot of value over time. In fact, I think it's gonna lose a lot of value in a very short period of time. Really? A lot of people, you talk to your grandfather and they could tell you what things used to cost when they were young. Oh, you know, penny candy, I used to get all this candy for a penny.

25 cents for milk and yeah, yeah, hold it.

Look, my father used to go to the movies, it was 10 cents to the. So the stuff was cheap, right? But over time, the money has lost value. It's not that movie tickets have actually gotten more expensive. It's just that the money that we use to buy the ticket has gotten less valuable. So you need to give the theater more of those depreciated pieces of paper to buy a ticket. And that's the same thing for everything. Well, I think we're really going to experience kind of 50 years worth of currency depreciation in maybe five years. Five years from now, you'll be able to tell people, God, I remember five years ago, this was only five bucks. Now it's $50 or whatever. I think prices are really gonna go up. The dollar is gonna take a huge hit, I think, in its purchasing power.

In the next five years.

Yeah, so people need to do something to protect themselves. So the Bitcoiners got that right. But buying Bitcoin isn't the answer to that problem. Because there's no guarantee that the price of Bitcoin is going to go up with inflation because it's not tied to anything else. It doesn't have any actual value and nobody actually needs it. See, the reason that gold is an inflation hedge is because people need gold and they're going to buy the gold. And people also need weed or oil or cotton, but you can't store millions of dollars worth of cotton in your house. But you can store millions of dollars worth of gold in a shoebox. And you can use that gold, you can exchange that gold for cotton or any other commodity you need. So if money is losing value and then all commodity prices are rising, if you can barter one commodity for another, well, that's how you can save your purchasing power. That's why gold, though, can be money because people can have gold even though they don't need it, because they can use the gold and exchange that for the things they do need.

Sure.

But Bitcoin, as I said, nobody needs Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't have any real price relationship with any other commodity or asset. So we can have lots of inflation and the price of Bitcoin could collapse. It's not an inflation hedge, it's not a store of value. What people who are buying Bitcoin should be doing is they should be buying gold instead of Bitcoin, or they could buy other real assets. They could buy real estate, they could buy stocks, they could get out of paper and get into something tangible, something real, but they're not. They're buying into something fake. They're buying into this pipe dream that Bitcoin is going to go up more than everything else because everybody is going to run into Bitcoin to get out of the dollar, to get out of the euro, when they're more likely to run out of Bitcoin to get into dollars or some other Currency.

I'll just put out a hypothetical for a second. Let's say that 10 years ago you saw Bitcoin when it came out and you said, you know what, this is a silly little thing. But I'm going to throw in 5-10 grand just to let it ride when it's at whatever, $0.50 or something or a dollar or whatever. And all of a sudden it's a thousand, it's 5,000, it's 10,000. Let's just say you had a massive position in Bitcoin out of luck. You know, maybe you threw something in.

And then you just held it and.

Wow, you open your account and look at this now. Let's just say you had to give three to five reasons for a case for Bitcoin or cryptocurrency and you had to really go there. What would you say would be those main reasons to invest, to hold, to put more in?

Well, you're talking about, look, I told that guy that had paid 15 grand for his $100 million with Ether. You gotta sell half of that. I mean, you know, now obviously if I'd have run into him, When it was worth 50 million, I'd have given him the same advice, right? You got to sell. So the fact that it's gone up so much and he hasn't sold any. But of course, that's what gives these people the confidence that, well, I can't sell because I don't want to miss the move to 200 million. The game, the game. A billion, right? People get greedy. There's an old Wall Street adage, bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered. You got to take some profits off the table, right? Don't worry about it if it keeps going up. That's okay. You still own some. You sell some, you keep some, you got to take some of your chips off the table. You just can't leave all your winnings at risk all the time because then you could lose all your winnings. And imagine watching your $15,000 go to $100 million and then watch it go to $5,000. I mean, it was all up in smoke and you didn't sell anything. So, if you happen to be somebody who was very fortunate or lucky and you bought some Bitcoin or any other crypto with a very small amount of money and you held it all the way through and now you have a large amount of money, you got to sell some. You got to sell a significant chunk because otherwise you risk losing all those profits. But of course, I feel bad telling people to sell their Bitcoin because somebody else is going to buy it and that person is going to get stuck. So I'm kind of like helping to facilitate a crime. I'm encouraging one person to unload his Bitcoin on somebody else and that somebody else is going to lose because now they're going to buy. But there's no way you can get out without somebody else getting in. That's the nature of this game, right? It's a pyramid, a Ponzi, whatever it is. I mean, at the end of the day, when Bitcoin completely collapses, the money that some people made will equal the money that other people lost, right? You're just transferring money from the people who bought Bitcoin to the people who sold it. So the only winners are going to be the people who cash out. Everybody else is going to be a bag holder.

What happens if Bitcoin lasts another 10, 20, 30, 50 years?

God, I hope it doesn't last that long because that means a lot more people are going to lose money. Because the only way it could last that long is if more and more people pile into it, which just means the bubble gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then there's a lot more losses when it pops. I mean, there's no way it's going to succeed as money. It can't do that.

What's the difference between investing in Bitcoin and investing in a stock that could go down and go down to zero or down to a penny stocks as well?

Yeah, and a lot of people think, hey, I say people, the reason people are buying Bitcoin is because they think it's going to go up. And they say, well, people do that with stocks too. And I agree, they do. But in many cases, they're wrong for doing that. I mean, that's part of the speculative mania that the Fed has created, where people are just buying symbols without any regard to the underlying company or its prospects as a business. That speculative fever was lit by the Fed, and the epitome of that is cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. But you have to look at what a stock is. A stock is a operating business. And why are you supposed to buy a stock? Well, because you wanna own a piece of that business. Why do you wanna own a business? Well, because the business makes a profit and the owner gets the profits. When you buy a stock, when you buy shares of a stock, you're not buying the entire company, you're just buying a small piece of it, but you also get a small piece of those profits, which could be huge. If you're talking about a, you know, Fortune 500 company, the profits are really big and you're entitled to a share of those profits. So if the company pays a dividend, you get some of that money as a stockholder. Or if they don't pay a dividend, if they just use their income to buy back shares, that causes the price of the shares to go up and you own some of those shares. So you have a vested interest in the success of an operating company. And you invest in stocks where you think the company is fairly valued or undervalued, and you're making a bit of a bet on the future prospects of that business. Are they going to keep on earning money? Are they going to earn more money? Are they going to raise their dividend? But you know, you're buying an actual thing. So it's not just about going up, right? I can buy stock in a company and it never has to go up. If they pay me a dividend every year, the dividend is a good return. Maybe a stock pays a 7-8% dividend. That's a nice return on your investment every year to get that cash flow. So Bitcoin, on the other hand, you're not buying into anything. You're just buying that digital token. That token doesn't generate earnings that it can share with you. It just sits there on the blockchain and we pass it around, but it doesn't do anything. So the only way you can make money on a Bitcoin is if somebody else buys it from you at a higher price. That's not the case with stocks. And of course, nobody has to buy the stock because the company can buy back its own shares with the income that it has. Now, let's say you buy a stock in a company that doesn't have any income. Well, that company may go to zero. It's very speculative. Now, maybe you're buying a stock that's early on, you know, they've been around for a little bit and they're losing money now, but you think that in the future they'll start making money, that it's just going to take a little time. Well, maybe that bet will pay off. But if it never makes any money and eventually goes bankrupt and you didn't sell, you've lost all your money, right? The same way you can lose all your money in Bitcoin. But the difference is with Bitcoin, you're sure you're guaranteed to lose all your money if you don't get out. But when you buy the stock, you may not because you may be right. The company may in fact succeed, generate profits, pay dividends, and be around. But it's very different. than Bitcoin. Or people say, well, real estate. People buy real estate because they think it's going to go up, right? But they also collect rent. You have a piece of real estate, you rent it out. It doesn't have to go up. You just collect your rent. It cash flows. You make money, you know, or you buy real estate for your personal use. You own a piece of property. Now you don't have to pay somebody else rent. I own this property. It's mine. I could develop it. I could, you know, do, I could farm it. I could mine it, whatever I want to, you know, use it for, I can, you know, it's a property that has utility and has value, right? I mean, you need shelter, everybody needs a place to live. But again, I said, nobody needs Bitcoin.

For anything except for to try to make more money if that's what they're trying to do.

Well, yeah, I mean, but you can do that with anything.

Right, exactly. It's a hype machine based on your perspective. I'm curious, you know, you talked about gold and I know You said, listen, the people that are talking about Bitcoin all the time have an invested interest in it because they have a lot of their money in it and they want it to keep going up. I know you've got a lot invested in gold and so it's something you talk about a lot. But what do you think the future is for cryptocurrencies in the next, I guess, five to 10 years then? Do you think, again, the last 10 years it keeps kind of growing, it seems to be with a lot of ups and downs, but where do you think the next five to 10 years are? With the economy and the dollar really losing its value, I'm hearing you say in the next five years.

Yeah, look, obviously more money could be suckered into this bubble. Who am I to say that they can't succeed in growing the bubble bigger? I mean, look how big the overall bubble has grown and how many years they've kicked the can down the road. I don't know. There's a good chance that we're nearing the end of it now, that it's already so crazy with excitement that there's already so many people in it, that the trade is already so crowded that there's little upside left. In fact, Bitcoin is lower today than it was in, I think, in April of this year. So, why hasn't it gone up with all this hype, all this advertising? You watch a network like CNBC, almost every other ad is a Bitcoin crypto ad. I mean, that's nonstop.

Really?

The network, in order to go on the network, you pretty much have to profess your love of Bitcoin. loves Bitcoin, all the anchors, everybody loves it. Even though they also love the Fed, they love Bitcoin too, because they're advertisers. They want to appease the advertisers. They won't even let you on unless you are positive on Bitcoin. And then they keep bringing on these shills that are working in crypto current companies and own all this Bitcoin, and they'll say, well, what do you think of Bitcoin today? Should people sell it? Of course not, everything is great. They bring these guys on like they're objective, but they have a huge vested interest in propping up Bitcoin because their entire livelihood is dependent on Bitcoin rising. And so they need people to keep buying it, so they're never going to be objective. It's always like, yeah, it's going to go up. Don't worry about it. It's great. Bye, bye. Now, some people say, well, Peter, you say the same thing about gold, right? You need people to buy gold. No, I don't. I mean, gold is going to go up whether I convince people to buy it or not. I mean, the gold market is so big, I have absolutely no ability to influence it. Whereas in crypto, crypto is small enough-.

One person tweets it who's influential.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're not going to have an effect on gold by tweeting about it, like Bitcoin. But, and I don't, gold is a small part of what I advocate that people do. I think gold's a good store of value. It's a good place to keep your savings if you don't have a better use for it, but it's not an investment. Now, I think right now gold is underpriced. So I think in a way, it's got features of an investment now because I think it's really cheap. Because the market, and this is ironic when it comes to gold, because we're getting all this inflation, or at least people are seeing all the inflation. We're all talking about inflation because groceries are getting more expensive, energy, everything is going way up. And people are saying, but look at gold. Gold is going down. We're having all this inflation and gold is going down. It must not be an inflation hedge anymore. And what people don't get is that gold 20 years ago was under $300 an ounce. So it's gone up a lot when supposedly we had no inflation. We actually had inflation. It's just that we weren't talking about it. But what's hurting gold now is that traders are making a bad bet. highly leveraged traders who control a lot of money, they're convinced that when the Fed tightens monetary policy, when it ends QE and starts raising rates to fight inflation, this is going to hurt gold. Because historically, when the Fed is raising rates, it could be bad for gold. Except the Fed is not going to raise rates nearly enough to hurt gold. In fact, it's not going to raise them enough to bend the inflation curve. They're not really going to fight inflation. They're just pretending they're going to fight inflation. They may never even get into the ring, right? They may just concede the fight without even getting involved. But if they do get into the ring, they're going to get knocked out by inflation because inflation is already double digit if you measure it honestly. But even with the government's doctored up CPI, you know, 7% inflation. You can't fight 7% inflation with 1% interest rates if we even get that high. You need much higher interest rates than that to make a difference. And the Fed just can't go there because of its monetary mistakes of the past. It's got the whole nation so levered up on debt. You know, the federal governments, the national debt's almost 30 trillion. We just passed 29 trillion.

I think I remember back in like the 80s or 90s hearing like, Oh, it's at a trillion or 2 trillion or something like back then. I can't remember.

Yeah, well, it first broke a trillion around 1980 when we elected Ronald Reagan. So it's 30 times greater than that. But right now, the cost to the government of the interest expense on the national debt is really about 1%. That's it, the average cost. Well, what if the Fed had to raise interest rates to 5%? The national debt, you know, The cost would explode because we have to refinance all that because it's all short-term paper. Something like a third of the debt's gonna mature in the next year. And a lot of that debt that's maturing is at 25 basis points, like a quarter of 1%. What if it matured and then they had to roll it over at 5%? I mean, the cost of the government is astronomical, it doesn't have the money. But also corporations have tremendous amount of debt. They issued debt to buy back stock. Individuals have debt, they borrowed money to buy homes, to buy cars, to buy all kinds of crap on their credit cards. What happens when interest rates go up? So nobody can afford the type of interest rates that would be necessary to actually rein in this kind of inflation. That's what people just haven't connected those dots yet. They just assume that the Fed could raise interest rates a little bit and that's going to solve the problem. It won't solve the problem. It'll actually unleash an even bigger problem, which is why the Fed's really not gonna do anything and inflation is just gonna keep getting worse. Because if the Fed could fight inflation, they would have already done it. They wouldn't have been lying and pretending it didn't exist or claiming it was transitory. They would have taken some preemptive action before it got this bad. The reason they didn't is because they were afraid of the collateral damage to the economy. Well, if they didn't wanna fight inflation, earlier when it was smaller because they were afraid it would hurt the economy, they're not going to fight it in the future when it's even bigger and fighting it then would do even more damage to the economy. So they're all talk, right? They're all barking no bite when it comes to inflation fighting. And when the markets figure that out, then gold is going to go ballistic because people are going to realize that the dollar is a bottomless pit.

Yeah, I mean, what are the three other, would you say, wise investments other than gold? that people should be making in the next one to three years. And not crypto and not gold. What would you say are those three otherwise investments?

Well, what I think is really going to be happening over the next several years as this plays out is the US dollar, which is now the primary reserve currency for the world. The US dollar is going to be phased out of that role. And you have to understand how vital that role is to the American way of life. today, because once upon a time in America, we manufactured pretty much everything we consumed. In fact, we manufactured so much that we had extra, and we were the world's biggest exporter of manufactured goods, all sorts of goods, consumer electronics, like all the stuff that's now made in Japan or made in Germany or made in China, we made all that stuff here ourselves. We don't do that anymore. We don't make much relative to what we consume. And how do we do that? How do we get to buy all this stuff that we didn't make? Well, we get to print money, which is easy to do, right? Just crank it off a printing press. In fact, the Fed doesn't even have to print it. It just conjures it into existence just on a computer, just makes up some dollars. And then we use those to buy all the stuff we didn't make. And that enables Americans to really live a standard of living that is unrelated to our actual productivity. We're living way beyond our means. And obviously, that's fun. You know, we get to consume a lot of stuff that we didn't have to make. Making stuff requires resources, land, labor, capital. We get the stuff without the resources. So we get to do other stuff. Like a lot of people are involved in services, instead of having to work in a factory making stuff, we do services and things like that because other people are making this stuff for us. We don't have to deal with the factories, we don't have to deal with the pollution. We just get all the good stuff, we don't have any of the bad stuff. We leave all that to the Chinese. Well, the Chinese are willing to work really hard to produce goods for Americans to consume because they have confidence in the dollars that they're receiving in exchange. In the future, they'll be able to take these dollars and buy stuff that they need. And in the meantime, they'll invest them in our treasuries or, you know, other assets. But when they really lose confidence in the future value of the dollar, because we're just printing too many of them, the dollar is going to collapse. And then the price of all this stuff is going to skyrocket. What's going to happen is the American standard of living is going to drop precipitously. Because we're not going to be able to live beyond our means anymore. We're going to now be restricted to living within our means or maybe even beneath our means because we have to pay off a lot of debt. So Americans are going to be able to consume only what we can produce, right? We're not going to be able to run $80 billion a month trade deficits. We're going to have to balance the books and produce so we can consume. Also, we've been able to borrow a lot of money from foreigners. That's not going to happen anymore. So, Americans are going to have to go from a nation of spenders to a nation of savers, right? But when you do that, an economy built on profligate spending is going to collapse, right? 70% of our GDP, we're all spending money. But what if we stop spending and start saving again, which is what we need to do? Well, that whole phony economy comes collapsing down. So, there's going to be this big transition. But when the dollar goes down, that means that other currencies, by definition, are going up against the dollar, right? And so as Americans are losing purchasing power, other people are gaining the purchasing power that we lost. So the world is still going to continue to produce goods. It's just that instead of Americans consuming those goods, non-Americans will consume them because for them, the prices will be going down. For Americans, the prices will be going up. And the same thing with assets. Assets in America stocks, real estate will be marked down. But assets in other countries in relation to our assets will be marked up, right? America is gonna become poorer as a nation. Other countries are gonna become richer. And in fact, America has been a major burden that the global economy has had to bear because we're 300 plus million Americans, we're not pulling our weight, right? The world has had to carry our water. They've had to produce the stuff that we consume and save the money that we borrow. That means they've had less to consume themselves and they've had less savings to invest in their own economies because they've been investing in ours or loaning to us. So when the dollar crashes and people are no longer hoarding dollars in treasuries, the global economy could really improve. Certain countries will really benefit from that burden being lifted from its shoulders. So in answer to your question, What I'm doing myself and what I'm encouraging my clients to do is I want to invest in countries that have the most to gain from America's loss. I want to own currencies that have the most upside potential against the dollar. I want to own assets and businesses that are going to benefit from wealthier non-American customers having increased purchasing power. Just like at one point, America was a young country and a relatively poor country, And over the course of the 19th century and early 20th century, we became very rich. If you invested in America, 1860, 1870, you made a lot of money as we rose to become this major power. I want to invest in countries that are going to see a large increase in their relative wealth. So if any of your listeners, if you want to construct a portfolio that will do well in if what I'm saying comes to pass, right, we have stagflation in the US, weak dollar, dollar loses its reserve status, we go through this, my portfolios will do extremely well. If you look at the last decade, that was similar to what we're going to experience, but this is going to be worse. It was the 1970s. And when the 1970s started, an ounce of gold was $35. By the time it ended, it was $850, right? Oil was $3 a barrel. It went to 30. In 1970, you could buy four German marks for the dollar. By the end of the decade, maybe one and a half. The Swiss franc was about 23 cents, beginning of the 70s. It got up to 80 cents by the end. So all these currencies went up. The Japanese yen used to get 360 yen to the dollar in 1970. Now you don't even get 100, but I think it got to maybe 130, 140, 150 in 1980. Huge drop. If people invested in commodities, in foreign stocks during the decade of the '70s, they made a lot of money. If they stayed in US stocks, they lost money. If they stayed in US bonds, they lost even more money. So I think what we're going to experience in this decade is going to be far worse financially than the 1970s for Americans who remain invested in dollar-denominated assets. But if you get out of the dollar, and invest internationally like what I'm doing, get into foreign stocks, get into commodities, I think you'll make even more money in this decade than the Americans made who did that in the '70s. Because if you understood the '60s, the problems in the 1970s had their roots in all the money we printed in the 1960s to fund big government, to fund deficits, the war on poverty, great society programs, the Vietnam War, going to the moon. The government started spending a lot of money, started running deficits. The Fed printed money and then the '70s, and then we kept printing it. It wasn't until Volcker came in in the '80s that we actually tightened up monetary policy. The problem is we can't do that now because we have so much more debt now than we had then, and it's financed with short-term paper. We don't have the ability to swallow the bitter-tasting medicine that we swallow then Because this time it would kill us. We'd actually die from the medicine. It would be like a toxin. So there's nothing we could do. So if you understand that the inflation that's been created in the prior decade and that we're still creating is worse than anything from the '60s or '70s. And what happened was in 1971, we went off the gold standard and that's what really accelerated it. Well, this time the world's gonna go off the dollar standard. And that's going to be even worse for the dollar than going off the gold standard was. And so people need to act now, because you can't be too late. I mean, you're going to have to be early. And obviously, I've been very early because I've been prepared for a long time. But it's better to be 10 years early than one day late. If you're a day late, then you're done. Now, I don't think you'd be 10 years early if you started now, because I think it's very unlikely that we can get away with 10 more years of can kicking. You can already see the signs that everything is imploding. Right.

And how do you manage the investors or the big believers in Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies who are telling you, you know what, Peter, the sell sounds great, but you're wrong because I'm seeing this growth over here and I'm making a lot of money or it looks like a lot of money on paper. How do you manage those conversations?

Well, I don't really manage them. Most of them are just a lost cause. I mean, they're just gonna learn the hard way. A lot of these crypto people are very young. And because they're very young, they don't really have a lot of money at risk because they didn't have time to earn a lot of money. Right. You know, the best time to lose a lot of money is when you're young. Because you have a lifetime to earn it back. And the experience in and of itself has a lot of value.

Sure.

Because it may help you avoid making a bigger mistake in the future with even more money. Right? So it's a life lesson. It's a growing pain, learning experience. You know, that's where wisdom comes from. Like all these young people that have Bitcoin, they make fun of me, they call me boomer, right? I'm old, I don't get it, I'm not with it. You know, they don't realize that, yeah, I used to be in my 20s too. I understand, you know, how you think you know everything when you're a kid, and you think your parents, your grandparents are fools because they don't know the new stuff. But as you get older, you appreciate just how much your parents knew and your grandparents knew. I mean, this is natural. This has been going on probably for thousands of years. I mean, I'm sure there was a 20-something caveman that thought his old man didn't understand the new clubs and how they worked or whatever. So they're gonna learn the lesson. There are some people who are older who have put a considerable amount of their retirement savings into Bitcoin or other assets and that's going to be a real unfortunate situation because they're losing a lot more money and they don't have a lifetime ahead of them to make it back. They already spent a lifetime earning it and now they blew it. So that's going to be the biggest problem that the older people who went in over their head Now, if they only gambled with a small amount, if they took 2%, 5%, okay, blow that, keep the rest. But the concern is that people just took too big a position, never took any profits off the table. Some of them even leveraged their positions and took on debt. So they're going to walk away with nothing. But I can't manage it. It is frustrating sometimes. I've lost some clients along the way, fortunately not that many, where they're like, no, I'm going to put it all in Bitcoin. I'm like, I try to talk them out of it. It's like a public service. I'm trying to do the right thing and keep people from making a mistake. And I said, look, if you want to buy a little bit of it, look, I say if you're right, if it's really going to go up this much, you don't need to have that much money in it. A little bit will go a long way. Sure. But no, they get too greedy.

They want more. They want more. Do you have any money in any cryptocurrencies or did you invest early on a little bit?

No, I've never bought any. I mean, it's not like, you know, I'm bragging about it. I mean, obviously I wish I bought some because I could have sold it and made money. But, you know, that's the other thing. You never know. It's very easy for me to say, because when I first heard about Bitcoin, you know, it was really cheap. I mean, in relative to where it is now, right? I mean, not cheap in absolute terms. I mean, even if it was 10 bucks, when I heard about it, I mean, it was 10 bucks for nothing. At least that's how I looked at it back then. But yeah, I mean, let's say I had a bot, let's say I threw 10 grand in, or maybe I even did 50 grand or 100 grand. I mean, I don't know if I'd have done something that crazy. I certainly could have thrown five or 10 grand at it, like, you know, no problem. I mean, I had the 100 grand, but I would have thought, you know, I want to put 100 grand in that. I mean, but look, I put 100 grand in other things that went to zero. I mean, I've done speculative things. so I could have done that. I mean, the only Bitcoin I ever got was given to me and I lost that. Maybe if I had a lot of it, I would have taken better care of it. It wasn't that much. I had like a third of a Bitcoin. But I had it in a wallet that someone set up for me, and the only thing they gave me was a pin. I had this four-letter pin, but I didn't know what the actual seed frayed was or the password. And so, and the guy that set it up for me didn't remember it either. Nobody wrote it down. And so what happened is my wallet one day said, oh, you know, we did some kind of refresh. Your PIN doesn't work anymore, so we need your password. What? Password? All I know is a PIN. So yeah, my big, everything I own is gone. Fortunately, it wasn't that much.

You've been around for a while. You've got a lot of wisdom around money and around investing. You've made a lot. You've lost some from speculations, it sounds like. And you've been around a lot of wealthy people. You've been around wealthy people who have sustained their wealth decade after decade. You've been around wealthy people who've probably lost their wealth, I'm assuming as well, from decisions.

Some people have made their wealth, lost their wealth, then made it back.

And I'm curious, what are the key differences in your mind between a rich mindset and a poor mindset?

Well, I think the people, I mean, forget about crypto rich. I mean, there are people that just got lucky, right? They didn't really do a lot of work. They took a flyer and even though they bought something that it's ultimately going to go to zero, other people made the same mistake they did. And so they've got all this money on paper. But as far as people that are getting rich, the old-fashioned way, where you earn it, I mean, those people are hard workers. They persevere. They are not afraid to fail and learn from their mistakes and keep on trying and overcome adversity. Success in general doesn't come easy. I mean, it takes a lot of work. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe in what you're doing. You have to be committed to what you're doing. You have to be tenacious and you got to have a positive attitude about what you're doing. If you put your mind to it and you work hard, you could succeed. It's certainly harder, I think, to succeed today given the obstacles that exist for most people, you know, because of government regulations and taxation. We don't have as vibrant an economy that is as easy to succeed in. But in some ways, in certain areas, if you're in the right sector, it's easier than ever. I mean, look at all these millionaires and billionaires in the tech space. or social media, whatever crypto, they've come up with ideas that don't even work. They've got businesses that have never even made a profit, but they've been able to get rich, suckering people into giving them money to buy their stocks. So for certain people, success has never been easier because you could succeed even though you don't really deserve it, even though you haven't produced anything of value. But the majority of people, there's only so much room at that table. for that. Sure. But the vast majority of people, you know, really have a much more difficult time succeeding than, you know, my generation did. And even, you know, better, like my father, my grandfather's generation in this country, where it really was a lot more economic freedom, the government was just not in your way, right? You just, you had a clearer path to success without the government, you know, micromanaging everything you did. and layering on all these additional levels of cost that you would need to overcome before you could succeed, right? You didn't have all these government imposed barriers. But for the people that can get a seat at that table, the rewards are phenomenal. I mean, you get so much reward with so little effort. I mean, people are starting businesses and within a few years of starting them, they've got billion dollar valuations. They haven't even made any money yet, but somehow, yes, this business that you just started is worth $2 billion. It's like, you didn't do anything.

Sure.

But this is all part of the bubble, right? And this is gonna end. Just like the dot-com bubble. How many people got rich in the late 1990s starting companies that went bankrupt? They never made a profit, but they made a hell of a lot of money for themselves where they make money. If you start a business, and you never made a profit, yet you made a ton of money off that business, how did you make the money if you didn't make a profit? Well, you made money because you cashed out. You got people to buy into your business despite the fact that it was losing money. So the people who made money on these dot-com companies that went bankrupt, it's because they convinced the public to buy into their cockamamie idea. And why did the public buy into these companies that didn't make any money because they thought the stock price would keep going up? They were gambling, right? They were doing just what the people buying the crypto are doing now. The people who are going to make money off of this are the ones who are selling all the crap. The ones that are creating the coins and dumping them. The ones that are making the NFTs and selling them. The people who are buying these NFTs, they're not going to make any money. They're going to lose a bunch of money. If you want to make money in NFTs, you create them and then you sell them because it doesn't take a lot of effort to create one. and you can get a lot of value because some fool thinks that he can sell it in the future to an even greater fool who'll pay an even higher price.

What are three things you wish people understood more about money in general?

Well, number one, they need to understand what it is. I mean, what is money? Because money is not just a piece of paper. That's not money. I mean, money has its roots in barter. So, before man invented money, and money is an invention, right? is just not a natural thing. So before we invented money, we traded with one another. And the reason you trade it, obviously, is people specialize in certain things. Let's say a basket weaver. And I just weave baskets all day. And it's because I do nothing but weaving baskets, I'm pretty damn good at it. I make really nice baskets, right?

Sure.

But I don't know how to make shoes. But there's another guy who's a shoemaker and he just makes shoes and he makes really nice shoes. Well, what I can do is I can take my baskets and trade them for a pair of shoes, which is great unless what if he doesn't need a basket? How am I going to get his shoes? All I got is baskets, right? If he doesn't want my baskets, I got to find a shoemaker who wants my baskets. So, it's not that efficient. But what happened was people just found out that, hey, there are some commodities that everybody will take, right? And that commodity could be money. So instead of trading my baskets for shoes, I sell my baskets for money. But money has to be another commodity. So let's say money, a good money is gold, right? Because people use gold. There could be a miner who's mining some gold, right? But that gold, even though the shoemaker doesn't need the gold, he knows that he could trade it Right. For somebody else. An even better example is cigarettes being used as money. The GIs were using cigarettes as money in Europe after the Second World War, but in prisons, the prisoners use cigarettes for money. Now, why are cigarettes money? Well, because people smoke, and if you smoke, you need a cigarette. And the cigarettes, they're all pretty much the same, one cigarette, you can exchange them, right? But not everybody smokes, right? What if I'm in prison and I don't smoke? What good are cigarettes to me? I don't smoke. But there are some people that do smoke. And since some people smoke, I know, well, I don't need the cigarettes myself, but somebody else will. So I can still take those cigarettes because I can trade them, you know, and somebody else will take them even if they don't need them. But the only reason that anybody will take them is because somebody smokes. If you're in a prison without a single smoker, the cigarettes are worthless. Somebody's got to want to smoke. At least enough people have to be smokers. So there's people that are going to use gold in jewelry and electronics. So what money is, is the most liquid commodity. It's the commodity that's the easiest to trade because other things have been money besides gold. But what happens is if I give you a basket for a pair of shoes, you gave me a pair of shoes, I gave you a basket, We exchanged value for value. And it took time for me to produce my baskets. It took you time to make the shoes. And, you know, we swapped. Well, if I give you gold for your shoes, I've given you a real commodity. Somebody had to mine that gold, get it out of the ground, make it into a coin. And now I'm giving you something of value and you're giving me something of value. So that's money. It's a commodity. that's the most liquid and the most readily exchanged for another commodity. Because when you're bartering, you have to want the thing that the other person has to trade. The beauty of money is you don't have to want it. You just know you're gonna be able to exchange it with somebody else. Got it. And so then we got currency. Here's where currency came along. I took my gold, my money, and I went to a blacksmith. And the blacksmith kept my gold in a vault. And he gave me a piece of paper that said, I owe Peter Schiff an ounce of gold. And I got it for you in my safe. I have this piece of paper that entitles the bearer to go to that blacksmith and get the ounce of gold. So now, if this is a reputable blacksmith, I'm in town and everybody knows his notes, they know what they look like, they know who he is, they recognize his signature. Right? I could say, hey, I wanna buy something, I don't actually have my gold, it's down at the blacksmiths, but here's the IOU for the gold, you know, will you take that? Right, well, okay, yeah. So now that piece of paper starts to circulate as a substitute for money. It's not the actual money, it's a piece of paper, but it represents that money because whoever bears that piece of paper can go to that blacksmith and get the gold, except no one feels like going down there. It's, you know, maybe it's a long horse ride, to get over there, you know, I don't want screw it, I'll just leave it there and I'll just use this piece of paper because we trust this guy. He's a reputable, you know. And so that's currency, right? Because currency is a money substitute that derives its value from the money that backs it up. Now, governments eventually did the same thing. Governments said, hey, we've got gold here and what we're going to do is issue currency backed by gold. If you get early Federal Reserve notes, they say pay to the bearer on demand, $10 in gold, $20 in gold, right? They were IOUs for gold. They were Federal Reserve notes. They would say this note is redeemable in lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank. And even though it would say $10 on it, it said payable on demand, $10 in gold. So, the note wasn't $10. It was a note that entitled you. to $10. What was $10? It was gold. It was a specific amount of gold that the government held on deposit. So the currency was a substitute for money. Now, eventually what happened is we defaulted. First, gradually, first with Roosevelt and then with Nixon, but we gradually took the real money away from the currency. And so now we have currency that's not backed by any real money. That's called fiat currency. Fiat is just by decree, right? What gave real currency value was the money that backed it up, the gold. But what gives fiat money value? Just confidence. Now, part of what gives it value is, as I said earlier, the government makes it legal tender, says you have to accept it, and demands it in payment of taxes.

Sure.

And since we all need money to pay taxes, it has value. My father used to give me this example of how to describe that. He said, you know, what if there's a bully? You know, whenever he sees you, he beats you up, right? But then he says, you know what? If you give me $5, I'll give you this piece of paper that says, you know, I won't beat you up, right? And so when I see you, you just better have that piece of paper, show it to me, and if you got my note, you know, I'll leave you alone, right? Well, all of a sudden, that piece of paper has value because if you have that piece of paper, this bully's not going to kick the crap out of you. so that now, you know, maybe you could circulate, you could sell that. Someone else is going to be going, hey, I'll sell you this piece of paper because if you don't have this piece of paper, this guy's going to kick your ass. All right, I need that piece of paper, right? And now that piece of paper has value because I avoid an ass kicking, right? Because I've got the paper. So that's basically the government. Hey, you know, you don't want to go to jail. You better have these Federal Reserve pieces of paper. And every year, you know, you're going to have to pay these taxes. This is what we want. We don't accept anything else, right? So, you know, that gives it value. But again, what also gives it value is that everybody is using it. Every place I go, I mean, if I want something, I can buy it with dollars. Now, that doesn't mean I'm always gonna be able to buy things with dollars. I mean, paper currencies collapse all the time. They go to zero. I mean, there hasn't been a fiat currency that survived. I mean, we've, you know, governments started issuing these, hundreds of years ago. I mean, as soon as they developed a printing press, right, you had governments coming up with this crap, right? But before they did that, you know, they had to, you know, find other ways to debase the money. In fact, that's where the word debasement comes from because, like, go back to Rome, right? In Rome, they used gold as money, right? The denarius was gold, right? Well, what happened? When Rome expanded, right, they built up the welfare state, with the circuses, bread and circus and all that, and they expanded their military empire, they didn't have the money to pay for it. So what do they do? They made their gold coins, but they stuck like copper in the middle. So they debased the currency by putting base metals in with the precious metal, and so they created too many coins. So they had a lot of inflation in Rome, even though they didn't have a printing press, because they expanded the money supply. That's where the word inflate comes from, expand the money supply, they did that by making coins out of base metals instead of gold. But they tried to fool people because they put the gold on the outside. But once paper came along, oh, it was so much easier to counterfeit that, right? Just come up with some paper. But history is littered with examples of paper currencies that have gone to zero. I mean, they've all gone to zero, right? Now, the world is on this fiat standard that really began in earnest in 1971. We've got this global experiment in fiat currencies. But I don't even think it's an experiment because in an experiment, you don't know how it's going to end. We know this is how this is going to end. It's going to end in disaster. We just don't know when, but we know it's going to happen because it's always happened. We haven't reinvented the laws of economics. You keep printing paper and eventually it has no value. The problem is when you give a government a printing press, it's going to use it. I mean, we know that, I mean, especially in a democracy, right? The government wants to be Santa Claus. They want to give people something for nothing. Like look at what the government is promising now in the new, the Build Back Better bill. What's in there? Free preschool. Everybody gets to send their kids to preschool, doesn't cost anything. It's all gonna be free. Oh, that's great. What else? Everybody can have paid leave. You get a month off, with 90% pay. All you got to do is say that you're taking care of a sick buddy, whatever, and you get a month off at 90% of pay. That's great. Hey, who doesn't want to take a month off every summer? All of it's free. Well, where's the money going to come from to pay for all this? Because the government doesn't have any money. The government only has what it takes. So before the government can give one person money, it has to take it away from somebody else. They're not raising taxes. I mean, they're talking about raising taxes on the billionaires, but at the end of the day, there's not that many billionaires and they're not going to pay a lot of tax. They're going to avoid the taxes and they're not even raising them that substantially compared to the spending. There's a huge gap there. So where's the government going to get the money? The Fed's going to print it. And just because the government prints money and gives it to you doesn't mean it's free, because what it does is destroys the value of the money that you already have. So, you're basically getting your own money. You just don't realize it because the government is destroying the value. So, let's say I have $100 and the government prints up $10 and gives me that $10. Well, the $100 I had before is only worth 90 now. So, I'm just right back where I started. But generally, in the process, they destroy some value. So, maybe they give me $10, but my $100 is worth 80. And so, now I got the equivalent of 90. Even though I have 110, it spends like 90. I'm actually getting poorer as the government is taking credit for making me richer.

Because of inflation, you mean?

Yes, yeah, inflation is the government's silent partner. I mean, inflation is always a function of government. Government creates inflation. Now, they try to blame other people. Greedy businessmen are raising their prices, right? They're gouging. No, they're not. In fact, we got the The Producer Price Index came out today and year over year, it's up 9.6%. That's a record. I mean, since they've been keeping track.

What is this?

Producer Price Index, what does that mean? Yeah, that's wholesale prices. That's the prices that businesses pay, right? Gotcha. Their costs, that is the biggest year over year increase since they've been keeping track. I'm not really sure when they started, but it's the biggest one. But the Consumer Price Index over the same time period is up 6.8%. Well, that means that businesses aren't gouging their customers. The customers are gouging the businesses. The businesses are absorbing a good chunk of the inflation themselves. They haven't passed it on yet. I think they're going to, but government always wants to blame the public for inflation. You're greedy, you're spending too much, or supply shortages. Oh, you know, there's not enough supply. Yeah, when you print too much money, there's never enough supply. Because the government can print all the money it wants. So think about the lunacy of our COVID policy. And forgetting about the efficacy of the lockdowns and whether or not the threat of COVID as a health threat was as big as it was made out to be. Just forget about that. I'm gonna talk about just the economics of it, right? So the government's response to COVID was, okay, we need to shut the economy down. We need to lockdown. People need to stay at home. Don't go to work because we don't want you to risk getting sick or infecting everybody. So everybody stay home, stop working, right? Just kind of vacation at home. All right, well, if we're gonna do that, what do we need to do? Well, we need to stop spending money because, you know, we're not earning, we're not working. So we gotta like really, you know, cut back on stuff. We gotta economize, right? But the government said, no, no, no, we want you to go home, stop working. But don't stop spending. Keep on spending as if you still had a job. And in fact, we're gonna send you the money that you used to earn. And in fact, we're gonna send you more money. So you go home and don't go to work and we're gonna send you twice as much money as we were sending you when you had a job. Oh, and by the way, you don't have to pay your rent either while you're on lockdown because that would be unfair. So you can spend that money too. Oh, and by the way, you don't have to make payments on your student loans. no interest, no principal, so you got all. So just go shopping. Just stay at home, go on Amazon and buy a bunch of, right? That's what we told people to do. But we're not making anything. People aren't working. See, when you go to work, you earn money because you're contributing to society. You are helping to produce goods and services. And as a result of your effort, you get paid money so that now you can buy some of the goods and services that you helped produce. But if you just sit at home on your couch and shop online and you didn't go to work and do anything, you're getting money to buy stuff, but you did nothing to make the stuff. So there's no stuff there. You can't buy what hasn't been made. So these geniuses are now shocked that there's a supply shortage. Oh, nobody could have predicted this. Oh, of course I predicted it on my podcast. I said it in March of 2020. This is an inflationary event. People talking deflation don't know what we're talking about. We are flooding the economy with money as we're stopping the production of stuff. We have less stuff and more money to buy stuff. So prices are going to go up. That's why our trade deficits are exploding because we're buying stuff that people are making in other countries. So we have these record trade deficits. Look at the ships. We can't even process the stuff. We don't even have the capacity to unload it. There's so much stuff coming in. So prices are going up, shipping. This is a disaster, but this was obvious. I mean, anyone who listened to my podcast knew exactly that this was going to happen. It wasn't a surprise. But now the Fed is trying to claim it's these shortages that are the reason the prices are going up. No, it's because everybody has all this extra money. If the Fed did the right thing during COVID Nobody would have gotten extra money to spend. So, yes, we would have had less stuff, but we would have had less demand for the stuff. So the reason that prices are going up with the supply shortages is because the government did the wrong thing. They created more money. Actually, what the Fed should have done was shrunk the money supply. The Fed should have said, oh, there's less economic activity, less production, we need less money. We need the supply of money to go down with the supply of stuff. That's what a rational policy would be. They did the exact opposite. And in fact, if you go back to the origins of the Federal Reserve, 1913, when it came about, the reason we have a Federal Reserve, the main rationale, they said we need the Fed so that we'll have an elastic money supply. And what they meant by that was a money supply that grew when the economy expanded, and then contracted when the economy contracted. We had a record contraction after COVID. We should have had a huge contraction of money supply. But of course, the Fed didn't want to do that because they have all these asset bubbles they have to prop up. The whole economy is so screwed up that the Fed can't afford to do the right thing. So it keeps doing the wrong thing, but that really accelerated this explosion of prices. But you can't just blame a supply shortage because stuff has to be produced. I mean, let's say the government just printed up $1,000,000 and gave everybody $1,000,000, right? And let's say all these newfound millionaires decided they wanted to buy a Ferrari with their money or Maserati, right? Or Lamborghini, whatever. And now the Lamborghini factory in Italy gets an order from every American that wants a Lamborghini. And it's like, well, what are you going to do? Well, I'm going to jack the price way up because I can only make-- what? I don't know how many make a year, 100? I mean, there's only-- there's a limit. They make them by hand. They just can't mass produce them. So what's going to have to happen? The price is going to skyrocket. Then is the president going to say, oh, this is terrible. There's a shortage of Lamborghinis. Everybody can't have one. Of course, everybody can't have one. That's the point. That's what pricing is trying to do. So if you print a lot of money, you're just going to make Lamborghinis more expensive. Right, but then you can't blame the increase in the price and say, well, there's a shortage of Lamborghinis. Of course, no, there's a surplus of money. That's the problem. So the price has to go up. And so that's what's happening. I mean, we're printing all this money and we're trying to blame it on supply. It's the demand that is the problem.

The demand is coming from excess money printing. You've written a number of books on the market crashes and what's happening in history and what-- predictions you've made with crashes and things like that. When there's this much inflation, well, I think it's 7% or close to 7%, does that mean a crash is coming or what does that actually mean? And how should we be thinking about inflation and preparing for something potentially future in the happening?

Yeah, well, it's a crash of the value of money. I mean, my first book, and obviously the word crash has kind of made its way into a lot of my books, but my first book was called Crash Proof. how to profit from the coming economic collapse. And I wrote that book in 2005, 2006. It came out in early 2007.

That's when- Right before the crash.

Yeah. Right. And in fact, when I started the book, I almost wrote specifically about the housing bubble. I was gonna write, 'cause the housing bubble was so big. And I actually, I wrote about the housing bubble a lot. I helped set up a hedge fund to short the subprime market. I was trying to get my clients to short subprime. You can see one of my early talks, I went to this Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Conference. You can see the YouTube video. It's got about half a million views now. That was from 2006. And the main reason I even went to that conference, although I had gone the year before, But the main reason I came back was because they gave me a room where I could explain the hedge fund, the short subprime, because I thought some of these mortgage bankers, because I basically was telling them that within a year or two, they'd all be out of work, that they might want to hedge their occupation by putting a little money on the don't pass line. And I was explaining how subprime was going to collapse and here's how you can make money on it. And that later became the topic of a book and then a movie, right? The Big Short. But I was out there talking about that trade long before the movie. I was trying to encourage people to get short in that. But when I wrote the book, Crash Proof, I decided to basically make real estate one chapter of the book. I wanted to write a broader book on the problems in the economy, not just the problems in the real estate market. But the premise that I had laid out in my first book, and then I had to reiterate that in my later book, the Real Crash, what I wrote back then in 2005 or '06, I said, okay, the Fed has inflated this housing bubble. The entire economy rests on the foundation of this bubble. The housing bubble was a function of artificially low interest rates, government guaranteed mortgages, The moral hazard are Fannie and Freddie. The Fed has kept interest rates artificially low. That's fueled this bubble. And as a result, the appraisals are bad. The rating agencies, I mean, everybody's asleep at the switch. They're all drunk on government Kool-Aid. And when real estate prices fall, it's gonna be a disaster, right? I said banks are gonna fail, Fannie and Freddie are gonna go bankrupt. I mean, pretty much everything that happened in 2008, I laid that out, right, in the years preceding it both on repeated appearances on news networks, in my book, I knew this crisis was coming. Then what I wrote in my book and what I said was that after the real estate bubble popped, real estate prices were going to crash 30 to 50%. I wrote we'd have 10% unemployment, trillion dollar deficits, the worst recession since the Great Depression, you know, check, check, check. All that's happened. Then I wrote, that in response to that, the Fed was going to slash interest rates and print a bunch of money. Now, that's what they did. They just called it QE. I didn't know what they were going to call it, but I knew what they were going to do before they did it. And I said, okay, so after this bubble pops, they're going to try to reflate the bubble. They're going to print all this money. And because of that, we're going to have a dollar crash. That is the only part that I got wrong. I don't think I got it wrong. I think I was just way early because I thought that they were gonna try to reflate the bubble in real estate and reflate the bubble in stocks. I just didn't think they would succeed. I assumed that they would fail. I was wrong. They actually blew up an even bigger bubble than the one that popped in 2008. But I don't think there's any way that they can inflate a bigger bubble than the one we got now. And when this one pops, they're done bubble blowing. And so we're gonna get the dollar crash that I've been saying was the ultimate end game all along. And I just don't think there's any more room on the road to kick this can, right, that we're gonna have to deal with it. Because now you're talking about a $30 trillion debt that will be 35, 40 trillion. When I wrote the Real Crash, I don't know, Crash, what was it, $5 trillion or something? I mean, it's gotten so much bigger. And the bubble is not just in real, it's in everything, stocks, real estate, bonds, cryptocurrencies, there's bubbles all over the place thanks to the Fed. So there's no new bubble that they can inflate because they're all inflated simultaneously.

Got it. So what can we do to prepare for the dollar crash then, I guess?

Yeah, we'll get out of dollars, right? Don't own dollars and don't own dollar-denominated assets. don't own real estate that pays dollar rents, don't own stocks with dollar dividends, try to invest internationally. The worst thing you can own is bonds, whether it's US treasuries, corporate bonds, muni bonds, because that's just dollars and you're going to get paid in the future. In the meantime, the interest is very low and eventually inflation is going to destroy the value of the interest, but all your principal. which is an even bigger factor. But what I'm doing, again, and what I'm helping my clients do, I have a family of mutual funds, Euro Pacific Funds, I have separately managed accounts that I run. I'm investing in non-US dollar assets. I'm investing in stocks companies. I'm owning companies outside the United States that will throw off income in these currencies that are going up, where these companies are earning their revenues in currencies that are going to be going up. Their assets will be appreciating in dollar terms. I want to get out of harm's way. I want to get out of Dodge. Just like at one point, people might have taken refuge in the United States if they were worried about their own local currency collapsing and their local economy, they would seek out the US as a safe haven. Well, now Americans need a safe haven because we're the epicenter of the problem. And in fact, when I was talking about and writing about the 2008 financial crisis, at that time, I assumed that when the crisis blew up, people would be smart enough to run away from the US. Instead, they ran towards the US. People, the dollar went up. I thought it was going to go down. Now, of course, by the time the crisis happened, the dollar was at a record low. So I wrote my book, the dollar was collapsing between the time I wrote my book and My book came out in January of 2007. By the summer of 2008, the dollar was at an all-time record low. I told people the dollar was going to fall and it fell substantially before the crisis. Same thing with gold. When the crisis hit in August of 2008, gold was around $1,000 an ounce. When I wrote my book, it was under $400. So I was telling people to buy gold for the crisis. It went up before the crisis. So by the time the crisis hit, it actually came down. But I don't think the world is going to make the same mistake again, especially when the crisis is in the dollar. If we have a dollar crisis, if we have a US Treasury bond sovereign debt crisis, there's no way that you can run towards the thing that's in crisis. So the people can't take refuge from the dollar in the dollar. If they want to get out of US Treasuries, they can't buy Treasuries as a hedge. from treasuries. They're gonna have to sell. So I think this time my game plan is gonna work out perfectly. So people just need to be positioned ahead of this. And the other thing is the valuations, just even if I'm wrong, right? Even if the US doesn't collapse, that doesn't mean the rest of the world is gonna, I mean, if you invest abroad, that doesn't mean you're gonna lose money. And in fact, the valuations are much better. Emerging markets are historically cheap compared to the US. A lot more growth potential there than the US. So even if the US doesn't implode, that doesn't mean you can't make money investing outside the US. In fact, you made a lot more money investing outside the US in the first decade of this century. From 2001 to 2011 timeframe, the US stock market was down. You didn't make money in US stocks. You had a lost decade in America. But you made a ton of money in emerging markets, you made a ton of money in commodities and gold. So all we have to do is have another one of those decades. But I think it's going to be even better. I think the gains in this decade for those asset classes will be even bigger in relation to what the US market does. Meaning even if the US market goes up, I think these foreign markets will go up much more, especially because they'll have the tailwind of a weakening dollar. Because if the dollar goes down by 50%, your foreign stocks double just on that basis alone. Even if they haven't appreciated, they still double just on the foreign exchange.

It's been a wealth of information. And I know you've got a lot more great content on YouTube and on the Peter Schiff Show on your podcast. You've got some incredible books as well. What's the main place we should be checking out your information we can send people to for you?

Certainly on my own podcast at I try to do at least two podcasts a week. Sometimes I do three or on a rare occasion four, but I try to do at least two. I mean, I mean, there's once in a while I only get one in, you know, I mean, I have other things that I'm doing.

For sure. That's ChipRadio.com, is that right?

ChipRadio.com is the website where I host the podcast. You can also, anybody that's, you know, on, you know, iTunes or Stitcher or these various, places where they house podcasts. I'm up on a lot of these platforms. A lot of people still listen to me on my YouTube channel. I really got started on YouTube even before it was a podcast. I was just doing some YouTube videos. And so, that's where I started to cultivate an audience. And even though most of my content now is just audio, although I'm building a studio again right here in my house in Puerto Rico. And when I finish it and get new equipment in there, I'm probably gonna start doing the podcasts with video again. I did it for a while, people liked it, but it was a little bit more effort and so doing them just audio made it easier. But I will go back to that. But my YouTube channel is just the Schiff Report or you just go to YouTube and Peter Schiff and you'll see again it's about 470,000 subscribers.

Very cool. We'll make sure to link all this stuff up. Peter, I want to acknowledge you for you know, sharing your wisdom. You got a lot of wisdom, a lot of experience and educating us on the principles of kind of like how money works and, you know, what happens with inflation and all these different things that are happening to make it simplified for someone like myself that may not understand where we've been in history, where we're at now and where we could be going. So I really appreciate you. Thanks for the wisdom. Thanks for the information and excited to share this with the world. We appreciate you.

Okay. My pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.