저자: PeterSchiff · 외국인
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트럼프 관세 발 뉴스성 랠리로 기술주 상승, 금은 차익실현 조정 중이나 금의 펀더멘털은 최고. 미국은 소비 중심 버블 경제라 공급망 차질로 침체 불가피, 연준의 금리 인하와 QE 복귀 예상. 실질금리 마이너스가 중앙은행의 금 매입을 촉진. 관세는 무역적자의 원인이 아닌 증상을 건드려 효과 미미하며, 한국과의 무역 협상도 실익이 적은 연막. 유가는 경기둔화로 하락했으나 달러 약세 시 수요 회복으로 재상승 전망.
다듬은 글
Well, it seems to me like a lot of the trading recently is kind of newsdriven headlines, not so much the fundamentals. And so I think the newer headlines are, oh, you know, maybe we're going to get some kind of trade deals. Maybe the trade war is going to be ending soon or the tariffs won't be as high.
Plus, you know, you've got some good earnings now that came out today from Microsoft, from Meta. So, you're getting a big rally in the tech stocks. And over recent months, there's been a pretty strong negative correlation between gold and those tech stocks. It's more of a risk on risk off trade. And since everybody is now buying back the risk assets, many people are selling the riskoff assets that they bought, which was pretty much gold.
It was the only riskoff asset that was kind of left standing. Everything else was going down, including treasuries. So, I think you're getting some profit taking based on those headlines. But you know I think the fundamental story for gold has never been better. I think the momentum is there. I mean no bull market goes in one direction without any corrections and I think the US economy is in recession.
It's been there for a while but I think the labor market is going to roll over and the economy is going to continue to weaken and ultimately we're going to get rate cuts. We're going to get a return to QE I think. And all that is very bullish for gold. Rates are too low. I mean, that's one of the reasons gold is high as it is.
It's because inflation is going to keep growing. The Fed never raised rates high enough to put out the fire. We're in accommodative territory now. I mean, the Fed claims that its monetary policy is restrictive, but credit growth continued and accelerated during the entire time that the Fed claimed it had its foot on the brake, which obviously it didn't do because governments kept going deeper into debt.
Households were going deeper into debt. They never stop the credit expansion, which is the inflation. It's not just a money supply, that's inflation. It's the supply of credit. And the Fed has been an engine for easy credit, and that's helped push up prices, and that's going to continue. And so, the gold market sniffs that out.
The gold market realizes that the interest rates are negative in real terms. The rates are not high enough to compensate for the rate of inflation. And so, that's one of the reasons that central banks are holding gold more than treasuries. And I think that trend is going to continue as the dollarization efforts pick up steam.
You know, as we move forward during the year, you know, the growth's going to be weak. In fact, we're going to be in a recession. I mean, we've already started it because the US economy, it's a big bubble, but it's based on consumer spending, which is fueled by debt and trade deficits. So, in order for consumers to spend, they have to have access to credit and access to goods produced in China and other countries.
Well, we've basically cut off that supply chain. You know, the goods are not going to be coming in to the country. And so, if the goods aren't here, we can't buy them. And so, all that economic activity that is related to that trucking, you know, with transportation to people that work in retail, there's going to be a massive recession in, you know, the consumer spending part of the economy, which is like 70% of our GDP.
This could actually be a bigger supply chain disruption than CO. We'll see. But the goods that Americans buy are just not going to be on the shelves. And if they can't buy them, then we can't sell them, right? So, a lot of jobs are going to disappear. That's going to be, you know, shown up in the numbers and we're going to be in a recession.
I have no idea if they have a game plan. I mean, they may just be winging it. You know, they just react to the headlines because there's no real path to victory here. We've launched a trade war that we can't win. So, the only question is how do we find a graceful way out? you know, how do we contrive some kind of fake victory from the jaws of defeat?
And I don't even know if they realize that we can't win the trade war. I have no clue. I mean, there's a lot of nonsense that comes out of the Trump administration cuz a lot of the guys that are really pushing Trump towards this trade war and protectionism, they're the same guys that are pushing Bitcoin.
I don't know if they're pushing this because they know it's going to hurt the economy and hurt the dollar and they think somehow that's going to benefit their Bitcoin. I don't know. But maybe they're just, you know, foolish and they actually believe it's going to work the way they believe Bitcoin is going to work.
Trade is on balance pretty free globally. I mean, it's not purely free. You know, most countries have some tariffs. Usually it's on certain goods where there is a politically organized faction within the country that has been able to basically bribe the government into implementing those tariffs so that they can benefit at the expense of the rest of the country that isn't politically organized to fight the tariffs.
But a lot of that has to do with agriculture, you know, farming and a few other goods. But by and large, like what are the countries that they're talking about that we're close to a deal with is South Korea. Oh, okay. Well, what can we get out of South Korea? Because if you look at what their tariffs are, the average tariff rate on US goods coming into South Korea is 75%.
Right? Some tariffs are a little higher and some are zero. But in total, I mean, they're less than 1% tariffs. So even if they drop all their tariffs, is that really going to make a difference to our trade relationship with South Korea? And by the way, last year before Trump jacked the tariffs up, our tariffs on goods coming in from South Korea averaged 3.3%.
So we were tariffing South Korean goods four times as much as they were tariffing our goods. So I mean, if we have a deal, are we both going to go to zero? I mean, wouldn't that be a win for them? Cuz you we'd be lowering our rates a lot more than they'd be lowering theirs. So I don't even know like what are we going to gain from South Korea?
And most of the countries that they're talking about a deal with have very low tariffs to begin with. So this is all a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It's not really unfair. I mean to the extent that any country subsidizes a particular business, it's at the expense of another business. And the losers are the residents of that country.
So if China decides to subsidize a business, China's losing, not America. If the result of those subsidies means that we get to buy something on the cheap, we win. China loses because they're providing us with that subsidy. But, you know, we have subsidies, too. I mean, there are industries that we subsidize.
Our tax code subsidizes certain industries. We shouldn't do that either. That's bad for us. And the Chinese subsidies are bad for America. But the huge trade deficit we have with China is not because of Chinese subsidies. because there are a lot of other countries that have trade surpluses with China and they face the same subsidies that we do.
So the problems are in America. China makes a lot of stuff but it doesn't make our problems. Now one of the non-tariff barriers that they talk about is exchange rates. They say that the rest of the world their currencies are too low and that gives them an edge and so they want those currencies to go up.
But at the same time they say that we have a strong dollar policy and we want a strong dollar. But now we're blaming other countries for helping to keep the dollar strong. They're saying, "You're cheating by strengthening our dollar. You need to weaken our dollar." Well, okay. Well, but then we have a weak dollar policy, right?
If we want everybody to weaken the dollar, how is that consistent with the strong dollar policy? So, you know, they're speaking out of both sides of their mouth. But I do think that one of the reasons that we have these big deficits is because the dollar is so overvalued. And that's been a consequence of the dollar's role as a reserve currency.
But we have taken advantage of that overvaluation. We have exploited it. We use the overvalued dollar to buy goods that we don't produce to live beyond our means. So we are the ones benefiting from global trade. The rest of the world is subsidizing our profleacy. China can't subsidize all of its industries because the money has to come from somewhere.
Right? If you subsidize one industry, you're handicapping another one because the government just has to move the money around. Right? So somebody is going to lose in China in order for a particular company to benefit. But you know again we do the same thing with our tax code and our government corporate welfare plan.
So we do you know we say this company gets a special tax break this one doesn't. So we do the same thing. So it's the pot calling the kettle black when the US says oh China you know you're subsidizing company. But our goal should be to eliminate these trade deficits by going after the root cause of the deficits, which is our excess consumption, our lack of savings, our lack of capital investment.
All of this is a byproduct of artificially low interest rates and huge government budget deficits and a tax code that encourages a debt. And so what we should do is dramatically cut government spending, including on entitlements. we should allow the Fed to raise interest rates substantially so that people start saving again and stop buying stuff using credit cards and you know we need to reinvest because if we're going to have factories where is the money going to come from to build them right foreigners are not going to build factories for us see that's what Trump is saying if we impose tariffs the rest of the world is just going to rush over here and build factories they're not going to build factories over here so we need to build our own factories over here but we don't have the money to do that and so we have to free up our resources by cutting government spending and raising interest rates so that Americans will stop spending money and they'll save money instead.
See, the reason that the Chinese have all the factories is because the Chinese people save their money. They don't spend like America and their savings are invested in factories and and the supply chains and the infrastructure. So, we need to do that. We haven't had to do that because China's been doing it for us.
You know, if we did the right thing, you know, the cost of manufacturing in the US would come down. So that would be part of it. I mean, if we did the right thing, the dollar would actually fall because the world has been supporting the dollar so Americans could keep buying their products. But if Americans aren't buying their products as much, then they don't have to prop up our currency.
So they no longer have to lend us money so they can sell us stuff. But I mean, this whole vendor financing scheme was going to collapse eventually, right? So you could argue that well let's prick our own bubble which I would prefer to do but the tariffs are not the best way to prick it because see the tariffs are not going to bring industry back to America.
What the tariffs will do is reduce our trade deficits because we will import less but we may export less too. So it may not because the problem is a lot of American companies that still export rely on foreign components that they have to import. And if the cost of those imports goes way up, then their own products become less competitive when they're exported.
So tariffs just go after the symptom. The trade deficits are bad, but they're a symptom of the underlying problem that is leading to the trade deficits. So you can't just say, "Oh, let's attack the trade deficits with tariffs." That's not going to make American industry more competitive. In fact, if anything, it will make American industry less competitive.
So, our problems are just going to get worse despite the tariffs. Oil prices have come down all over the world. In fact, they're coming down more in Europe because of the weakness in the dollar. But oil prices have come down because the markets are factoring in a massive global recession or at a minimum a significant slowdown and a lot less transatlantic, trans-Pacific trade.
And so that means that there's going to be less demand for oil. We're not going to be, you know, moving as much merchandise around. You know, the economy is going to be a lot weaker. And so that's what's caused the price of oil to come down. Now, sure, yes, that is a bit of a benefit to somebody who just needs to buy oil to drive their car, but they may not need to drive as much if they're unemployed.
So, it might not be as big a benefit if they're just sitting at home. But yeah, I mean, this is what's happened. But I think this is temporary because I do think that in this recession we're going to get a bigger drop in the dollar which will push oil prices up. And I don't think this is going to be a global recession.
I think it's going to be a mainly a US recession. But I think the rest of the world, especially the emerging markets, are going to benefit from a weaker dollar. And so I think that will lead to significant increases in energy consumption in those countries. And so I think the net effect will be to push oil prices higher.
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