Peter Schiff: America’s Economy Is a House of Cards

In a recent podcast appearance with Glenn Diesen, Peter makes a compelling case regarding the fragile state of the American economy, highlighting the unsustainable reliance on monetary inflation, trade deficits, and artificially low interest rates. He contrasts the challenging road ahead for America against the comparatively smoother transition other parts of the world might experience by turning their productive capacities inward. 

Peter starts by revealing the fundamental imbalance driving the U.S. economy—its dependence on consuming goods it doesn’t produce, paid for by printing dollars:

We’re able to consume what we don’t produce, and we pay for it by printing money. And so the world gets our inflation and we get their stuff. So we’ve got the better end of the bargain. Now they use our paper to buy our financial assets, our stocks, our bonds, our real estate. So they are accumulating assets and they’re getting the income from those assets. So what we’re doing is we’re indulging our present and we’re sacrificing our future.