Peter Schiff: The Fed is Making Empty Promises

In Tuesday’s episode of his podcast, Peter breaks down why copper looks like a bargain relative to gold, even as prices for the industrial metal move higher. He then pivots to the war in Iran, calling out what he sees as a pattern of dishonesty from the Trump administration, before circling back to economics with a look at how tariffs are reshaping global trade and why even a handful of nickels might be a smarter hold than most people realize. He wraps up by explaining why the Federal Reserve’s tough talk on inflation rarely translates into tough action.

Peter opens with a look at the gold-copper ratio, a metric that some investors use to gauge relative value between the two metals. He pushes back on the popular assumption:

But you know, despite this move, copper prices are actually cheap when you price them in real money. A lot of people look at the gold copper ratio. I look at it. And there’ve been a lot of people who thought that, well, gold is going to fall in order to bring the ratio into balance because copper has been very low relative to gold. Some people thought, well, gold is going to come down to meet copper. I think it’s the other way around.

From metals, Peter turns to the war in Iran and what he views as a consistent stream of dishonesty coming out of Washington. He doesn’t hold back:

This guy just lies. I mean that that’s what everybody in the Trump administration does. I guess they’re told a lie and that’s what they do because the whole administration is based on a lie. It’s one lie after another. One of the lies is that, you know, this war is going to end. There’s no end in sight.

He continues on the topic of Iran, arguing that the country’s survival itself, despite facing overwhelming American firepower, amounts to a kind of victory:

I said they win by surviving. They win by standing up to the great Satan, which they did. They took our best. We dropped all our bombs. We dropped all our missiles and they’re still there. They’re still standing. And now we’ve already switched from a military war, even though some of the military stuff escalated over the weekend.

Shifting back to economics, Peter connects the dots between a weakening dollar, tariffs, and America’s diminished purchasing power on the world stage. He explains why China is thriving despite reduced trade with the US:

Now, the reason Americans were consuming is because we were outbidding everybody with our strong dollar. But by imposing tariffs, it made it harder for Americans to outbid because we now had to bid even more because of the tariff and we couldn’t afford it. And so I said, well, that China is just going to trade with other countries. And that’s what it’s doing. That’s why China has a record trade surplus now, even though it’s trading less with the United States.

Sticking with the theme of value and hard assets, Peter makes a case for something most people overlook entirely: the humble nickel. He explains why holding onto them is essentially a free option on rising metal prices:

That is a can’t lose investment because you paid two dollars for over three dollars worth of copper and nickel. It’ll never be worth less than two dollars. So you can’t lose. Even if copper and nickel prices crash, they crash 90 percent. You still got two dollars face value of nickels. Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But even if it did, you can’t lose.

Finally, Peter turns his attention to the Federal Reserve, drawing a parallel between its rhetoric and the kind of bluster he just criticized in foreign policy. He argues the Fed talks tough on inflation but rarely follows through:

Talk like you’re going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age and then come up with a reason not to do it. So the Fed is always going to have a reason why they didn’t hike rates this time. There was some number or something that gave them hope that it looks like inflation is trending down to 2 percent. But don’t worry. Don’t worry. If it comes in too hot, we’re ready. We’re ready to raise rates. Trust us, we will.