Peter Schiff: Stock Market Rally ‘An Illusion’

Marc Faber. Jim Rogers. Peter Schiff.

Three “crash prophets” who correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis in the United States.

I’ve already blogged today about what Faber and Rogers think of rising U.S. stock prices- and what they suspect is behind it.

How about Schiff, the CEO/Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital and CEO of Euro Pacific Precious Metals, LLC?

From his February 1 entry on the The Schiff Report YouTube video blog:

Well the Dow Jones closed above 14,000 today. That’s something it hasn’t done since November 2007. Of course, the media is going to make a big deal about Dow 14,000, the economy is coming back, the markets are coming back.

But, of course, all of this is an illusion created by inflation.

When you debase your currency- when you have inflated dollars that you use to measure stock prices- of course stock prices are going to go up. The price of everything is going up. The government denies there’s inflation. But prices prove it. As if we even need that. The money supply going up is the sheer definition of inflation. And we’re creating a lot of money. And prices are responding by rising, and stock prices are no exception.

But remember, the last time the Dow Jones was at 14,000 back in ’07, gold was about $700 an ounce. Today, gold’s about $1,600 an ounce. So the Dow would have to double from here, and it still wouldn’t be where it was in terms of real money five-and-a-half years ago.

So this rally is an illusion.

But the people on Wall Street don’t even want to acknowledge that.

And going forward? Schiff pointed out:

We’re already at 0 percent interest rates, we’re already at 8 percent unemployment- 14 percent if you use the U-6 number. And that’s as good as it gets during a recovery. And now we’re already trending down.

And I think if the Federal Reserve wants to slow down the rise in interest rates- which we know it does- it’s going to have to accelerate the QE. I don’t think $85 billion of money printing is enough to keep interest rates from rising. And so they’re going to have to print even more. That means the dollar is going lower. Commodity prices going higher. Looks what’s happened to oil prices- they’re almost at $98 a barrel. Look at Brent- Brent Crude is really up. It’s almost at a $20 premium now over North Sea. Gold prices have been stable, but I think gold’s about to take off. I think on Wall Street they’re rationalizing. They’re selling gold and selling gold stocks because they claim that the crisis is over, there’s nothing to worry about anymore, Europe isn’t falling apart, the U.S. economy is getting better, so there’s no reason to own gold. And so you sell gold and you sell your gold stocks. But they don’t understand. People weren’t buying gold because of the European crisis or because of even the U.S. financial crisis. They were buying gold long before those crises began. Look at how gold was doing from 2000 to 2007, 2008. It did better before the crisis than it did during the crisis because the real crisis that worries the gold buyer is a currency crisis. People aren’t buying gold because they’re worried about political uncertainty. They’re buying gold because the politicians are printing too much money. Well, the cheap money policies that were in place prior to the 2008 financial crisis are still here, only, it’s worse. It’s more excessive. The monetary policy is easier. Rates are lower. Central banks are printing money even faster. So, instead of there being no more reasons to buy gold, the reasons have never been better. There have never been more reasons to buy gold, it’s just that Wall Street doesn’t understand this yet. But they will.

“Dow 14,000, GDP, Jobs, Fed, inflation, treasuries, & gold.”
YouTube Video

By Christopher E. Hill, Editor
Survival And Prosperity (www.survivalandprosperity.com)

(Editor’s notes: Info added to “Crash Prophets” page; I am not responsible for any personal liability, loss, or risk incurred as a consequence of the use and application, either directly or indirectly, of any information presented herein.)