Schiff - The US Will Be On A Gold Standard In 12 To 24 Months

Today Peter Schiff stunned King World News when he said the US will be back on a gold standard “... in a year or two.” Schiff also said, “I would have expected a (financial) collapse to have already happened.”  Schiff went on to warn, “... at this point I’m going to assume there is no more stay of execution and we are going to have our crisis coming up right after Europe.”

But first, Schiff had this to say regarding Bernanke and his Jackson Hole speech: “QE3 is coming.  He’s got that card up his sleeve.  It’s been hidden up there for a long time.  He’s reluctant to admit it, but he will play it eventually.  He’s going to be coy about it because he doesn’t want to actually come out and reveal his hand.”

Peter Schiff continues: 

“You know we’ve got a phony recovery, so it’s going to fail.  So we are going to get more QE.  It’s not that we need it, but if we don’t have QE3, then we are back in recession.  The Fed is going to try to stop that, even though the recession is part of the cure.

We have a lot of problems, and if we cure them it’s going to mean a short-term recession as we repair the damage.  Until the Fed lets us have a real recession, as painful as that may be, we are never going to have a recovery.  We’re just going to have these artificial, stimulus induced highs that are going to result in relapse to recession as the stimulus wears off.

We’ve got massive economic imbalances, structural malinvestments around the world because the dollar is the reserve currency.  It’s too weak.  We print too many.  So other central banks have to print up more money to buy up all of the unwanted dollars.

All of this money printing and central planning by the central banks trying to manipulate the economies is resulting in all of these problems.  Until we put an end to this, the problems keep getting worse.  Who is more reckless, Europe or the US?  I think we’re still in the lead.  So I think we’ll win the race to the bottom when it comes to debasing the currency.”

 

 

Peter Schiff was attending the Republican Convention, but when KWN asked about it he unloaded: “It’s disappointing to me.  First of all I don’t like the fact that everything had to conform.  It’s all Romney, Romeny, Romney.  I mean I know Romney is the nominee, but there were other people that ran for President and I think it would be nice to see some of those signs out there.

There are a lot of Ron Paul supporters here.  I think it would have been nice if the convention acknowledged Ron a little bit more and let the people show their support for other candidates, in addition to Romney.  The Ron Paul camp felt strong-armed, and I think that was a mistake.

You’ve got a lot of energetic, motivated people that would join in with this party, and were enthusiastic about Ron Paul.  They should have tried to cultivate that and bring them into the fold, into the tent and acknowledge their efforts.  Instead they basically slapped them in the face and turned them off.

This can have the effect of getting them so discouraged that they look to a third party candidate or don’t even bother to participate or vote.  The bottom line is there are a lot of people who are frustrated about the way they were treated.

This convention has ben a lot of sound bites so far, but not a lot of substance.  To me it’s not really a convention, it was more like a coronation, and an infomercial for the Republican Party.  The Democrats are going to do the same thing.  I think we’ve really lost the meaning of these conventions because they are now all about the TV and the sound bites.

Probably the most frustrating thing was to have to listen to Republican candidates talk about how much they love Medicare, and how they don’t want to cut it, and how they always want to make sure it’s here.  They want to protect it and stop the Democrats from cutting it.

Worse than the candidates saying it were the people in the convention applauding it.  The only boos were when they talked about Obama cutting Medicare.  They booed.  We can’t be booing spending cuts.  We need spending cuts.  That’s what the Republicans should be about, less government, not more government.”

When asked about talk in the Republican Party discussing a move to the gold standard, Schiff responded, “Well, discussing and doing are two different things.  But eventually we will be back on a gold standard, not because politicians want it, but because the public demands it and the situation requires it.

We are headed for a currency crisis, and the only way we’re going to stop it is by putting real value back into the paper dollar.  So we have to tie it to gold.  In fact, if you are listening to the Republican Convention and realizing that, despite the talk, they are committed not to cut anything of substance.

They want to keep growing the government, growing the deficits.  That eventually means we will have a currency crisis, and a sovereign debt crisis, which will lay the foundation for a return to the gold standard.”

When asked when he sees the US returning to the gold standard, Schiff replied, “The sooner we do it the better because the sooner we start to repair the problems the easier it is.  The longer we wait, the bigger the problems get.  But I think it’s happening soon (a return to the gold standard), in a year or two. 

I would have expected a (financial) collapse to have already happened.  I thought it was going to happen in Obama’s first term.  The miscalculation I made was not seeing Europe’s problems coming and preempting it.  I knew there were problems with the euro, I just assumed the problems with America and the dollar would surface first. 

But the US is not using the reprieve to get our act together.  We are just using it to get deeper into debt.  Will something else happen to delay our day of reckoning?  I don’t know what that might be.  So at this point I’m going to assume there is no more stay of execution and we are going to have our crisis coming up right after Europe.”