저자: PeterSchiff · 외국인
요약 보기
이란 전쟁과 유가 상승으로 스태그플레이션 압력이 커지고, 결국 연준의 금리 인하와 재정 확대가 인플레이션을 키울 것이라고 주장. 증시는 과열·안일하며, 금은 전쟁과 재정적자로 강세, 원자재 전반도 상승 추세라고 봄. 최악은 달러 신뢰 붕괴와 미국채 수요 소멸이며, 이는 미국의 전쟁 수행 능력도 약화시킨다는 견해.
다듬은 글
I agree with you that it's probably not over. In fact, if you look at, you know, the stock market making new highs, investors are obviously assuming that the war is going to end and the oil price is going to come crashing back down. And I don't think either of those is going to happen. I think that they can certainly try to dial back the hostilities, but I don't think we're going to achieve the objectives that we set out to achieve.
And the trend in oil prices is higher. I think oil prices were going to go up even if we didn't start a war, but I think now that we have, that just puts more upward pressure on prices. And to me, this is not about inflation. I mean, we have inflation, it's going to get worse, but it's not because oil prices are going up.
Oil prices going up is more of a recessionary problem than an inflation problem. But what happens is when people have to spend more money on energy, and then they have less money to spend on other things. And now you have a big drop in discretionary spending, and you have weakness in the economy, and maybe you pick up in unemployment.
And now the Fed comes in and prints a lot of money and cuts interest rates, which I think is coming. That's where the inflation comes from. And then the price of everything goes up, not just oil. Well, I don't think that, you know, we've achieved the objectives. I don't think that we're bringing home all the troops and that there's no more hostilities, and the Strait of Hormuz is going to be open for business just like it was before the war started.
I mean, I think it's still there. And who knows what's going to happen? There obviously there's geopolitical risk that's heightened. We don't really know. I mean, the war can be on again, off again. I mean, look at all the volatility. Look at all the posts that Trump comes out with, you know, one day he's about to waste, you know, level the entire country, rain down hell, and bomb them into the Stone Age.
And then the next thing, everything is great. We've got a great deal, and everything is good. So, you don't know what's going on. Well, the S&P and the Nasdaq made new highs, so it hasn't been that damaging. And, you know, I think the markets are too complacent about I mean, and a lot of other things, too, not just the war.
I think the market is expensive and should be lower, but it's been going up, you know, mainly on hopes of Fed rate cuts and stuff like that. But it's possible that a lot of what Trump is doing is deliberately trying to manipulate the market. Now, I don't know that, but it may be that a lot of people close to Trump are making a lot of money trading the markets with advanced knowledge of what he's going to post.
I don't know. There's a lot of speculation that that might be the case. Look, I think there's a lot of corruption in the administration. I think, you know, there's a lot of self-dealing. I think a lot of people are getting rich off of their connections to the president, including the president's family and the president himself.
So, yeah, I mean, I was very critical when I thought the Bidens were abusing the presidency for personal gain. And the Republicans went after Biden and Hunter Biden and all of the shell companies and all the money laundering. But, the Republicans seem to not give a damn about it when it looks like the Trump family is doing the same thing just on a bigger scale.
They're making billions instead of millions. I think the war is bullish for gold. What's happened in the short run is that leading up to the war, gold had a spectacular gain in January and February. And then it had the biggest one-month drop in March since the '80s. But, a good part of that huge run in the price of gold was the anticipation of the war with Iran, which didn't really just come out of left field.
There was a lot of maneuvering around and speculation in the weeks leading up to the war that we were going to have one. And so, by the time the war actually started, people were ready to sell the news. You had a lot of, you know, gains built up, you know, a huge move, overbought condition, and you got to sell off in also was some news that came out on inflation and stuff like that, that inflation was picking up.
What's been driving everything has been the Fed and interest rates and oil. And oil's kind of driving the interest rates. When oil goes up, everybody thinks that puts the Fed on hold because they think about higher inflation. And when the Fed's on hold, they sell stocks, they sell bonds, they sell crypto, and, you know, they sell gold.
Everything's kind of going the same way. But, I think the markets are wrong. I think this short-term trading is an aberration. I don't think it's going to continue. At some point, I think gold is going to rally even as the war escalates because the war means that we have bigger deficits. We have to borrow more money to pay for the war.
We have to print more money to monetize the borrowing to pay for the war. And the war, of course, does undermine the economy. It does result in higher energy prices, higher food prices, which puts more downward pressure on the economy, which creates bigger budget deficits, further incentive for the Fed to print money and cut rates.
So, all of this is inflationary. Wars are always inflationary. And that's good for gold. Silver went on an even bigger run earlier this year. It went really from 30 to $120 an ounce. I mean, just crazy run. But we're going to be moving to new highs, I think, in all the precious metals. And not just the precious metals.
Look at copper over $6 a pound. I mean, industrial metals are going up. And a lot of commodity prices. You can see what's happening. Beef prices or coffee prices. I mean, you can look at some of these prices. I mean, I think we're early still, but in a major boom in resources, in commodities. And a lot of this is being driven by inflation, but there are other factors beyond inflation that are going to cause these prices to rise.
Obviously, you know, if the war continues, oil prices are headed quite a bit higher sooner. If the war comes to an end and we actually reopen the strait, then oil prices will be lower. But they're not going to be as low as people hope. That's my point. I think if you're holding out hope that we're going back $50, oil, I don't think that's going to happen.
I think we've kind of, you know, raised the risk premium, the geopolitical premium. And I think that this has, you know, been a warning that nations that don't have enough of a strategic petroleum reserve need to start building it up, including the United States. You know, we depleted ours pretty substantially under Biden.
I don't know if we're going to do anything under Trump to build it back up. And then I also think that as we get closer to the midterm elections and the president's popularity remains extremely low and the economy continues to weaken, which it has been, and inflation continues to strengthen, which it has been, there's going to be a lot of pressure in Congress to do something, to pass some kind of stimulus plan, some kind of tax cuts or dividend, you know, the stimmy checks or whatever they're going to do.
So, they're going to do something and that's going to weaken the dollar and that's going to push oil prices higher. It's pretty obvious. I mean, if a lot of these threats are carried out and a lot of this infrastructure is destroyed, and of course, you can destroy it in a matter of minutes, but it could take years to rebuild it.
But, if we lose a lot of capacity, you know, refining capacity, then the supply goes up and the demand is still there and so that means that prices have to keep rising and obviously some countries are going to be more impacted than others, depending on how important oil is or imported oil from that part of the world.
But, even if you're talking about the United States, I mean, oil is fungible. I mean, so oil that's pulled out of the ground in the US could be exported. We don't It doesn't have to stay here. And so if prices go way up because the Japanese can't get oil or China can't get oil, you know, they buy ours and they just pay a higher price and so we Americans have to compete with everybody for these scarce resources.
The real risk, and I said this from the beginning, is that Iran wins the war. And what I'm talking about winning, it's not like, you know, they inflict more casualties than we do or they blow up more of our stuff. Iran wins the war just by surviving, just by not getting wiped out. If the regime is in power at the end of the war, they've won.
But, I think now a lot of our allies in the Middle East who have been drawn into this conflict, who have, you know, been bombed with missiles because our bases are there, maybe they want our bases to get out of there. I mean, Iran could come out better off than they went in, even if, you know, they lost a lot of military.
Meanwhile, we're spending a lot of money, we're dropping a lot of bombs. These are very expensive bombs. In some cases, the bombs are more expensive than what we blow up. But now, we got to go and replace all that stuff. Where's that money going to come from? I mean, Trump has said we need to increase the defense budget by 50%.
You know, and when somebody asked the Secretary of the Treasury, "How you going to pay for that? Are you going to raise taxes?" He laughed. He just said, "Why would we do that? Yeah, we're just going to borrow the money and create more inflation." So, generally, when the US gets involved in a war, there's blowback and there's negative consequences.
And Trump was right to criticize our involvement in Iraq. He was right to criticize our involvement in Afghanistan. Yet now, he's brought us into war with Iran. And in the past, he was even critical of Obama because he thought maybe he would start a war with Iran simply as a political, you know, distraction from other things.
And I remember they talked about, "Well, don't vote for Kamala Harris because we might go to war with Iran." Yet here we are at a war with Iran. And Donald Trump, you know, even though he ran as a peace candidate, you know, stay out of wars, and he's claiming this war has been going on for 50 years, "I didn't start it, you know, Iran had this coming, it's long overdue." Well, if that's the case, why didn't he campaign on that?
That, "Hey, vote for me and I'm going to get revenge from the hostages from the Jimmy Carter days." He didn't say that. So, this whole thing came out of left field. And, you know, I've been critical of Trump's economic policies. I'm critical of the big, beautiful bill, which really jacked up deficit spending.
I don't like the tariffs at all, especially lying about who pays them. But at least, you know, foreign policy was fine until he started a war. Now, he lost that. If the Middle East wants to move away from the US, and they want to move closer to a China, the obvious thing that they could do is move away from the dollar.
Stop trading oil in dollars and trade in Chinese RMB or trade in gold or trade in their own currency, something else. But don't use dollars. And the The thing they can do is not hold US Treasuries or any debt instruments that are obligations in US dollars because that's the way you win a war against the United States right now.
You don't win a war really on the battlefield. We got all these fancy weapons that we spent all this money on. The way you beat us is financially. You drive down the dollar and you drive up consumer prices and interest rates and you create a financial crisis. You know, the former Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, Bush's guy, said that we need a emergency break the glass plan to deal with what happens when the demand for Treasuries dries up.
And he said it's going to be vicious and we have to have a plan, you know, a contingency plan. Which to me, if you concede that this is going to happen, why just have a contingency plan to deal with the crisis? Why not head it off? Like, wait a minute, we can't allow a collapse in demand for Treasuries.
So, let's cut government spending now. Let's try to reinstall some confidence that we're going to get our economic house in order. Let's shrink the deficits so we don't have to have an emergency break the glass plan because it won't work. Once we have a crisis, once demand for Treasuries is gone, it ain't coming back.
And the repercussions are dramatic because our economy depends on it. We need that dollar because that's the source of our whole service sector borrow and spend bubble economy. We consume what we don't produce. We borrow what we don't save. And the world makes that possible by accepting our dollars for the stuff they produce.
But when they move away from that, we're done. And if we have a real dollar crisis and a sovereign debt crisis, the war is over. We can't afford the war, we can't pay for the war, and there's no more political support for the war at home because it's a complete basket case of an economy with runaway inflation.
And so, if the world wants to take us down because we've now become a threat. And that's what I've been saying, you know, Trump has been throwing our weight around. Not just, you know, we're going to invade and take over Greenland, but you know, now we might go in Cuba or here or there and you know, we take what we want because we're the baddest, you know, bully on the block.
All of a sudden the world starts to look at the US military in a different way. Not like, "Hey, it's a good thing the US has this big military cuz it could protect us." to holy crap, "The US has this big military, it might use it against us if they decide we've got something they want." If that becomes a threat, the world starts questioning why they are financing it.
Why they are supporting it. We could not have this big military. We could not spend a trillion dollars a year on national defense if the world didn't loan us the money.
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