Peter Schiff谈黄金前景、比特币暴跌与伊朗战争

This man is notably known for calling the 2008 housing crisis, but even more impressively calling the top on Bitcoin and the bottom on gold six months ago on my street.

And so when I tell them, "Hey, Bitcoin's going to crash," they laugh that off, just like they laughed off the coming financial crisis.

Peter's opinions as a political commentator make him an especially important person to listen to as we try to figure out the long-term implications of the Iran war, AI, and the Trump administration.

Yo, yo, yo, Mr. Schiff.

Yeah.

Welcome back to the stream, man. How are you?

I’m okay. I’m okay. I forget your name.

It’s okay, Peter. It’s Thread Guy.

Did I just call you Thread Guy?

You could call me Michael. We’ve been through this before—the “Who are you again?” But we’ll get it for part 3, man. Welcome back.

Yeah, that’s some shirt.

And I wore it for you, by the way.

All right, Michael.

Well, look, welcome back to the stream, Mr. Schiff. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you here. I want to start by giving you some props.

You came on the show in late October, and I have this friend, Frank. Frank built this little product that basically allows you to copy and paste any media, podcast, tweet, or whatever that has some trade idea. You can backdate it and see how the trade played out. So, if you listened to this interview from 3 months ago, how would the trade idea from the interview have played out?

I’ve had a lot of guests on the stream over the last year, probably hundreds of guests. I have to admit that your interview in October, and the trade it came up with—short Bitcoin, long gold—was, I think, on October 20, in fact, the single best-performing trade that has happened on my stream. So, with a heavy heart, I do have to congratulate you on that achievement, Mr. Schiff.

Yeah. Well, in all fairness, I’ve probably made that call before, so it’s probably not the only time I did it. That may be one of the times it worked.

1. Bitcoin’s Best Trade Is Behind It

They tell you a broken clock is right twice a day. But here’s where I want to start.

The real broken clocks, though, are the Bitcoiners, because they’re always bullish on Bitcoin. So, you can’t accuse me of being a broken clock when I criticize Bitcoin, because all you’ve got are broken clocks on both sides, right?

Yeah, it’s only been the best-performing asset of the decade, but a broken clock a couple of times a month.

But, yeah, again, it has been. Most people haven’t owned it for an entire decade, though. So, for the majority of people who owned it, I think the performance has been pretty bad. Over the last 5 years, the performance has been low. I think it’s about 12% over the last 5 years.

I mean, if you go back 5 or 10 years, you get to that trough where Bitcoin was below $10,000. So, from there, it was a big move. But from when it hit $69,000 in 2021, it’s been horrible. In fact, it’s still below $69,000 now. That was 4 and a half years ago.

I think it’s like $69,300. But, to your benefit, I’m going to give your cortisol a break. I actually didn’t write down—

Oh, yeah. You’re right. It did move. It was below $69,000 earlier today.

And then I think the markets are anticipating Taco Tuesday.

Taco Tuesday. Yes, they are.

It’s a rally. Bitcoin is back above $69,000, but it’s still below Michael Saylor’s average cost, which is closer to $76,000.

Yes, which I know you are a big fan of. But luckily for you, I actually didn’t write down the word Bitcoin one time in my notes, because there’s a bunch of other stuff to talk about.

2. War Makes Stockpiling Rational

It’s been, I think, 6 months since you’ve come on the show, give or take. Near the end of the interview, I asked you for advice on what to do, and your advice was to go to your local grocery store and hoard toothpaste because supplies were going to be very scarce really soon.

One way or another, things have escalated. Geopolitical tensions have gotten into a weird spot, and I want to give you a chance to set the stage. You were here 6 months ago. How do you envision where the world is going over the next 6 months?

Yeah. Well, obviously, when I was on before, we weren’t at war. That actually increases the reasons why you would want to start ordering stuff.

Before, I was mainly looking at prices and thinking, look, if you’ve got extra cash, just buy the stuff that you’re going to need in the future and buy it now because it’s going to be more expensive in the future. You might as well buy it.

In fact, I was upset. I was on my boat all week for vacation, and I didn’t realize that the captain hadn’t filled up the tanks with diesel. Each tank was about a quarter full. I was like, “Crap. I wish I had realized that we were so low, because I would have told them to fill it up.”

I knew, as soon as the war started, we’d better buy a bunch of diesel. Now I’m thinking, what do I do? Maybe it’ll pull back a little bit before I pull the trigger. I get very good mileage on my boat because it’s solar-powered, but I run the generators on diesel, so that diesel could last me a year or two. I would have liked to have filled it up before.

How big is your boat? I may have to fill up the tanks now because it’s possible that they could be rationing the stuff. Who knows what might happen in the future if this war continues and the disruption gets bigger?

I think people need to be stocking up if they’ve got the room, obviously. That’s the advice I give a lot of people who don’t even have money to invest. Someone says, “Well, what should I do? I don’t have money to invest.” Well, you have money to stock up on nonperishable items that you’re going to need, and you might as well buy them now as opposed to keeping your cash in the bank and buying them later, when the prices are higher and they may not be around.

They could be in short supply. There could be rationing. There could be price controls. Who the hell knows where this thing is headed? It’s better to have the things.

Do you have a bunker, then, that you need to buy them?

No. I guess my boat might be my bunker. I can hang out there.

How big is your boat?

Well, it’s not that big. It’s a catamaran.

Okay.

It’s 60 feet long and about a 35-foot beam, so it’s wide for its size. It feels pretty roomy.

I got the smallest one because I feel it’s a little bit more nimble. If I had to take control myself, it’s easier for me to handle. I’ve got the crew, but if I didn’t have the crew, it’s easier to handle a 60-foot boat than a bigger one.

I mean, that’s a sizable boat. But, okay, here’s where I want to start with you, Mr. Schiff. Most of my time on this stream, we’ve talked about crypto, a little bit of equities, and a little bit of stocks. Over the last 2 months, we’ve been forced to really pivot everything that we’re doing and talk about the Middle East, the Iran conflict, and oil. I’ve got the barrel in the background, and we’re talking about this U.S.-Iran conflict.

3. Truth Gets Lost in War

The most jarring thing to me so far has been how difficult it is to navigate truthful and honest information. You sort of have both sides. You have news outlets that are owned by select parties, and you have leaders on both sides who have incentives to lie and fabricate information, manipulate markets, help prices, and everything in between.

It’s jarring how difficult it is to decipher what is real and actually happening versus what is not. How do you do this?

Well, pretty much most of the information coming from the government, I think, is inaccurate or outright lies. Certainly, most of what Donald Trump says is a lie. He used to lie mainly about the economy, but now he seems to be lying about the war.

I kind of just tune it out. I listen to it so I can comment on it, but I don’t put any stock in it. I look at what’s actually happening, not what people are saying is happening.

What are you paying the most attention to, especially right now?

I look at the markets, obviously. I look at the price of gold, the bond market, and the U.S. dollar as indicators of whether investors are figuring this out and to what extent they’re recognizing these problems.

I do look at the economic data, knowing that a lot of it is unreliable and manipulated. But some of it, like the popularity polls and Trump’s record-low popularity, is a good indication that the economy is not doing well.

When the public is asked to rate the president and whether or not they approve or disapprove of the way he’s handling the economy, it’s generally a referendum on their personal circumstances, because that’s really all they know. If you just ask Joe Sixpack, “How’s the economy doing?” all he knows is how he’s doing. He doesn’t know how the whole country is doing.

If he's doing better than he was, then he's going to give the president higher marks and say, "Yes, I approve." If his circumstances are worse, he's going to say, "I don't approve." The fact that you have a record-low approval rating is a pretty good sign that things are getting worse. They're not getting better.

I know you've been very vocally critical of Trump recently. At the same time, I think, maybe not to everyone's surprise but definitely to mine, this situation in the Middle East has spiraled out of control a little bit. But it seems like, all things considered, Trump has been able to maintain significant control over the stock market, right? Even on a day like today, after one of his craziest posts of all time—posting on Truth Social about how he's going to send Iran back to the Stone Age—we closed green on the S&P. How has he been able to maintain control over the stock market and not let this thing spiral out of control?

Well, I don't know how much he's controlling it, but I think the stock market, at this point, sees Trump as the boy who cried wolf. The posts over the weekend were so extreme and over the top, especially the most recent one, where the deadline was 8:00 p.m. tonight and that was going to be the death of Iranian civilization, never to return.

What the hell does that mean? You're destroying their entire civilization. It goes back thousands of years. What does that even mean? Are you talking about killing off the people? They're part of the civilization. I don't know. Before that, he was just going to bomb them back to the Stone Age. I guess the Stone Age was still some kind of civilization, as opposed to killing the entire civilization.

But I think the markets are saying, "This is just Trump." They don't believe it. If investors don't believe it, why would the Iranians believe it? The thing is, I saw videos of the Iranians. They have thousands of people lined up on the bridges.

And these are the bridges Trump said, "I'm going to bomb."

Instead of going away from the bridges, there are thousands of people—women and children—on the bridges. They're chanting. So how are we supposed to bomb those bridges? Could you imagine if you're a pilot and a bomber and you're supposed to drop a bomb on a bridge full of women and children? Who the hell's going to drop that bomb?

The whole thing is ridiculous at this point. I think the markets rallied into the close and didn't sell off that much because everybody's trying to anticipate the extension. "Okay, you've got 2 more weeks before I destroy you completely." I don't even like that. I don't know why Trump is even negotiating on Truth Social. Why can't he just communicate privately with the Iranian leadership? Why does this all have to be out in the open? It doesn't even make any sense.

The markets, I think, are now realizing that this isn't going to happen. If investors thought there was even a realistic probability that we were going to carpet-bomb Iran tonight and wipe out their civilization, I think the stock market would have been down a lot more than 400 points, which was the low. That's nothing for the Dow to be down.

I think oil prices would have moved considerably higher because we would really be upping the stakes in this war if we did that. Remember, Trump claims that part of the reason he's doing this is to liberate the Iranian people from their oppressive regime.

Well, if you're doing it for the people, how do you threaten to destroy their civilization and bomb them back to the Stone Age? How does that help the people? That kind of rhetoric is not only inflammatory, but it doesn't even fit what he claims the objective is.

I don't know if this is part of this larger trend of unveiling the curtain and doing everything in public. It didn't used to be this way, but something that's been pretty jarring about following this war is how blatant the manipulation of good news right before market close and bad news right after close feels. Even the strikes happened on February 28th, right after Friday's close, and escalated right before futures opened. Good headline, market closes; bad headline. It feels like there's some pretty blatant manipulation.

Yeah, that's also a possibility: that Donald Trump puts out those posts knowing that he is going to back away, giving people who have the information a sure thing. A lot of us can guess—we've seen this movie before, and we know how it ends—but there's no guarantee.

If you are a real insider and Donald Trump has told you, "I am going to put out this post to scare the hell out of everybody, but don't worry, I am going to call it off. It's a lock. I'm going to do it for sure," once you know that, you can really go into the markets and size with a lot of confidence. You can buy S&P futures. First of all, you could get short before the post, and then you can reverse long. You can really get loaded up to make a killing if you know for a fact what is going to happen.

The people in the Trump administration are savvy when it comes to the market because most of these people have come from Wall Street and the markets. They know how to trade, and they know how markets work. So I think you have a lot of people who are certainly in a position to profit from this type of insider information. If the only one who could prosecute it is Trump himself, because he's in charge of the SEC, then you pretty much know that you're in the clear.

4. Presidents Now Move Markets

Has it always been the case that markets are a direct proxy for the success of government? I wasn't paying that much attention during Trump's first term, maybe until 2019 or 2020, when I really started paying attention to markets.

I would imagine everyone saw that Pam Bondi clip, where she's at the Epstein hearing and says, "Why are you asking me questions about Jeffrey Epstein? The Dow is over 50,000." She's now out as attorney general. There was also this leak of Pete Hegseth trying to slam this leveraged defense ETF in early February, right before we struck Iran. I don't think he got his bids through, but it feels so blatant that market price is the only metric for success in government. What are the implications of that?

I can't recall any point in time where a president—any president, including Trump 45—had so much of an impact on financial markets on a day-to-day basis. There was always an impact from major news announcements that came out of the government. The government comes out with the jobs numbers, and the markets would move.

But I can't recall markets moving the way they move based on the president saying anything. Other than, yes, starting a war, Trump just influences the markets. People now look at Truth Social. Probably traders have Truth Social up on their screens.

You have to—

—follow Trump. In fact, the only reason people go to Truth Social is to see what Trump says, because if you're not on Truth Social, by the time you know about it, it's too late to trade. Traders are probably stuck. There may be some algorithms that are specifically coded to immediately input trades based on what Trump posts.

I don't like the fact that the president has so much sway over the markets on a day-to-day basis, which opens up the opportunity to trade on that information. You're not even trading on insider information about the company. It's not like I got advanced information on a buyout or know what the earnings are.

This doesn't necessarily move individual stocks. It moves the entire market. You're just making directional bets: stocks up, stocks down; Bitcoin up, Bitcoin down; oil up, oil down. You can just make these bets because you know exactly how the markets are going to react to whatever the president says, because you've seen how they've reacted before. There are a lot of opportunities to trade on this stuff, and I think that's a problem.

Do you think there's time decay there? As market-moving events happen off Trump's tweets, does his ability to move the market in either direction decay? We had the Liberation Day TACO recovery, but as he influences, influences, influences, do you lose your ability to do that?

In crypto, they call it "shill decay." You shill one coin and can pump it a ton; the second coin a little bit less; the third coin a little bit less. As time goes on, you're a complete nobody and have to make a new account.

Yeah, because people get wise to the con. They're not going to keep falling for it if you keep rugging them every time you come up with a new token. The president is going to lose eventually. People will stop reacting to his posts if they're always going to be neutralized later on. Then the market should move less and less, and therefore the profit opportunity should decline.

I would like to see the markets move on a post and then, when he walks it back, have them go the other direction.

Yeah. To get some of these insiders to lose because now there’s not the reaction that they expect, and the market moves against them. They end up with these sizable positions and get clobbered because the markets may eventually react in a way that the people who have inside information on the post do not expect.

I actually do have a crypto question for you. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Hyperliquid 24/7 perps on basically everything at this point, but over the last couple of months, first with the gold and silver mania, having access to trading that over the weekend caught these crazy gains that otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to catch. Secondly, with oil, Trump—the U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28th, like Friday night, when the markets were closed—by Monday’s open, or futures open, there was this crazy $20 gap in crude. If you were trading Hyperliquid perps on oil, you could have realized those gains. Have you followed this at all?

Perps? You know, I don’t know about that, but I do remember there was a move up in oil futures over the weekend because the war started on a Saturday.

But early that week, crude had come back down, and it really wasn’t up that much. You had all of these Trump shills in the financial media saying, “You see, this is because of drill, baby, drill. We’re no longer dependent on the rest of the world. You see, it doesn’t matter.”

And here we are around, you know, $15. So, we’ve doubled. I was saying at the time, “Just give it some time.” That’s why I wish I’d realized that my tanks were low. I would have run in and filled them up.

I’m going to get killed. I have to fly to North Carolina tomorrow. I’m speaking at an event for a gold company.

Is that a private flight?

It is private. Yeah, I’m flying. I’m going to end up spending a lot more on the flight than I thought when I agreed to go there because the fuel costs are so much higher.

Are you exclusively private?

Not exclusively, but mostly.

Mostly? Like eight. What percent?

I don’t know. I commit to a certain amount of time every year. I don’t own the plane outright; I have hours that I fly. So, I mostly fly private, but it depends. If I’m flying to Europe, I don’t fly private to get across the Atlantic. I’ll take a commercial flight. But then, if I fly there, I’ll usually fly private. I might not fly; I might take a train or something.

Okay. Nice.

But if I fly, and then here, usually I do the private. It’s not a wise financial decision.

Okay, okay. I was going to ask you how much—

You know, I’m normally a very prudent person.

And so it’s one of the extravagances that you just figured, “All right, I’ll just spend it.”

Yeah. I’m going to this conference, and I’m flying directly to the airport right near it. It’s a 3½-hour flight, and I’m 10 minutes from the hotel when I land. But if I had gone commercial, the only flight that was anywhere close was a 6 a.m. flight on JetBlue.

6 a.m. leaving. JetBlue is cool.

Yeah, but you can’t—you know, it’s coach, it’s JetBlue, 6 a.m. Then I would have to drive for an hour and a half to get there after I landed. If I didn’t want to do that, every other flight had a connection, and it was eight hours to get there. Then I’d still have the hour-and-a-half drive. I couldn’t get to the little airport that I’m flying into.

It is a hell of a lot more convenient. In fact, if I had to fly commercial, I probably wouldn’t have gone. That’s how much I don’t like it. It’s such a hassle going to the airport, going through security, the lines. I—

Wait, let me ask you this. How much money do you need to comfortably fly private?

I don’t know. It depends. There are a lot of people who are way more extravagant with their money than I am, so I think you could have a lot less and still afford to do it.

Like, if you weren’t being an idiot—

I mean, you’re talking about spending at least half a million dollars a year on private jet travel. If I was doing all those flights commercially, maybe it would be, I don’t know, 50 to 100. I don’t know. It’s a lot less, especially if I’m traveling with a family and I’ve got to buy four tickets. If you’re going to buy four business-class or first-class tickets, it starts to add up.

This flight I’m taking is by myself, but I’m taking the smallest plane possible, so I can save a little money.

Okay.

Because it’s just me.

Okay. Before I ask you about gold, I want to ask you one more Trump administration question. I feel like I’m ragging on the Trump administration, but my friend based16z, a popular Twitter commentator, wrote this article called “Loot and Rob.”

The basic premise was that we’ve reached late-stage empire, late-stage America, and the goal of all of the elite and powerful in America is to take as much money as humanly possible and run. Some examples of this are, respectfully, Donald Trump launching a memecoin on his first day in office; how many founders have not gone public, raised private rounds up to, you know, $1.5 trillion—what SpaceX is going to do, IPO on the public markets—and, you know, the stock goes down only. Donald Trump Jr. buys this drone company right before we go to war in Iran.

It feels like there’s this trend of people in power taking as much as possible and then picking the ladder up behind them. Is this something that you felt was happening when you were young, back in the day? Have you seen this before? How do you feel about this?

No. This is unprecedented—the graft in this administration, the amount of money that they’re making off of the presidency. Now, you could say, “Well, Trump’s just a savvier businessman than his predecessors, and he’s exploiting the office and using it to his advantage,” but he didn’t do that in his first term. Nothing like this.

I don’t like it at all. I don’t like any of this. The money that he made off crypto, off of Trumpcoin and Melania Coin, his crypto business that his sons are involved in, crypto mining, all these deals, and then going around the Middle East and cutting deals that benefit his companies—it dwarfs anything that Hunter Biden did with his dad.

I was critical of the Bidens, and so were a lot of Republicans. I supported their criticism of the Bidens, but those same Republicans are not saying a word about what the Trumps are doing, which is way worse than what the Bidens were doing. I don’t like hypocrisy at all on this.

Certainly, there are a lot of ways to influence the president—to bribe the president. Not just by handing him bars of gold, but by buying his tokens or making donations to his ballroom, which I’ve been against from the beginning. I don’t like turning the White House into a palace.

It’s supposed to be more modest. It’s a house. It’s not the White Castle or the White Palace; it’s the White House. The president is not royalty. I don’t want big balls at the White House. I thought the whole idea of it—

But Trump wants to make it more of a palace, and that’s not what the whole idea of America is supposed to be about. He’s there for a short period of time, but he’s not a king. I don’t like any of this stuff.

You can look at the other ways that Trump seems to be making money. Look at the club that his kids set up in Washington, D.C., called like the Capital Club. It’s the second-most-expensive members’ club in the country after Mar-a-Lago, and it’s $500,000 to join. What does that get you? It means you can go in and have lunch with Trump’s Cabinet members, who hang out there. So it’s almost like that’s what you have to pay.

Are you a member?

No, I’m not a member. But I’m sure that a lot of people who want to get to the president or want a favor from the president buy into his club, hand over the $500,000, and schedule a meeting at the Executive Branch—or whatever it is, the Executive Branch. I forget the name of it.

The whole family is making a fortune off of Trump being president and the influence and power that he has by virtue of holding this office. None of this should be allowed. It’s all a horrible precedent for the future, because if Trump gets away with it, then everybody’s going to get away with it.

Okay. On another note, since you last came on the stream, gold is up—I don’t know—100-plus percent, something insane. Well, a hundred bucks wouldn’t be upsetting. It’s probably up a lot. Maybe it’s up 1,000%.

Oh, yeah.

5. Central Banks Drive Gold Higher

Yeah, yeah—percent. Where did this bid come from? Who was the marginal bidder on gold on this? It’s crazy.

Well, I think the main buyers for the run from $2,000 to $5,500 were central banks. I think the last move from maybe $5,000 to $5,500—

I think we finally got private investors and speculators getting in, jumping on the bandwagon. Then we had a pullback, but the majority of the demand came from central banks, and I think that’s going to continue.

In fact, I think what’s going on right now with Iran is just going to fuel that trend. The United States has created even greater incentives to diversify out of the dollar and move more of your reserves into gold. I think that trend is going to continue and accelerate, and I think more private investors are going to be moving into gold in the years ahead.

I think they’re starting to recognize the importance of gold and are looking at the 25-year track record since 2000 or 1999, and how the U.S. stock market is down by better than 75% measured in gold. Gold is preserving value a lot better than stocks.

I also think a lot of the money that sidetracked into Bitcoin in 2021 and 2022, up through 2025, is going to start moving into gold. I mean, the investors—not necessarily the money coming out of Bitcoin, because a lot of the money can’t get out of Bitcoin. Bitcoin will just implode. But the investors who were allocating money into Bitcoin instead of gold, going forward, to the extent that they’re going to allocate more money to an inflation hedge or an alternative asset, they’ll favor gold. They’ll be putting new money into gold instead of putting it into Bitcoin.

Someone in the chat has a question along the lines of, “Do you think these hedge funds and trading firms are manipulating gold, like what JPMorgan was doing in 2008 and 2009?”

I don’t know. Usually, the people who say they’re manipulating gold mean the manipulation is designed to suppress the price. Clearly, it’s not working. The price of gold has gone way up.

Now, you could say maybe it would have gone up even more had they not been able to manipulate it. So, I don’t know. But I think gold is going to go up regardless of attempts to manipulate it.

From my perspective, that helps out. I’m trying to get more people to buy gold, and if manipulation keeps the price lower, that’s good for the people who are buying it because they get to buy it cheaper than at a higher price. If you’re trying to buy gold, they’re doing you a favor if they’re suppressing the price.

I guess if you’re a gold mining company, your profits could be greater. I own a lot of gold mining companies.

Why do you own so many gold mining companies instead of just gold?

The Bitcoin miners haven’t really been that good of a trade, especially recently.

The same comparison, though. You know what I mean?

It’s not really the same because gold mining companies have reserves of gold, right? You can look at a gold mining company and how many ounces they own in the ground. Bitcoin mining companies don’t own any reserves of Bitcoin. All they can do is go out and solve the math problems to create them, but they don’t have any proprietary stash of Bitcoin that they own.

All they do is go out there and solve problems like everybody else. Bitcoin could just collapse at any moment, and there goes their business. I wouldn’t be interested in buying Bitcoin miners. In fact, if I were going to be in Bitcoin at all, I would just as soon buy the Bitcoin rather than the mining companies.

That’s what I’m asking. Why do you buy the mining companies for gold?

I do think that over time the leverage is going to be substantial in these mining companies. But if you look at the history of Bitcoin and the miners, you’re much better off just owning Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin existed, if you just bought Bitcoin and didn’t put any money into these mining companies, you’re way better off.

There are periods of time when mining stocks did a lot better than the metal, and I think the miners are undervalued. I don’t know how to value the Bitcoin miners because I don’t think they’re worth anything, but I think there’s a lot of value in the gold mining stocks. That’s why I have so much of my own money invested in them, and it’s why I encourage my clients to invest in them.

Who are your clients? Is that stream viewers, or what? Who are your clients?

I’m sure some of the people watching this are my clients.

I just need to know if they’re paid clients or how that works.

Hopefully, some of the people watching this become clients. That’s one of the reasons I go on these things, so people can go to Euro Pacific Asset Management and contact my representatives. We manage portfolios for people. Some of them are gold-focused and gold-mining portfolios. Some are broader, income-oriented portfolios with foreign stocks and bonds.

I also manage a family of mutual funds that people can buy no-load at any of the big discount brokers. We have a gold fund, an emerging-market fund, a foreign-value fund, a foreign-dividend-payers fund, and a foreign-bond fund. You can get information on those mutual funds at my website at your.com.

My clients are retail, by and large. They’re individual investors, more on the higher-net-worth side, but not exclusively. My mutual funds have a $2,500 minimum, so there are a lot of people who own my mutual funds who are middle class. They’re not very wealthy, but they have money in my mutual funds, so they’re clients of mine.

At SchiffGold, we have a $5,000 minimum. People buying $5,000 worth of gold or silver don’t have to be rich. In fact, now I’ve got a new platform, taggold.com. You can go to taggold.com and tokenize $100 worth of gold. We store it for you. We don’t deliver it, but anybody can go on there and set it up to have an automatic investment from their bank account. You can buy $50 or $100 a week of gold. So, you can start stacking something real instead of stacking sats, where you’re stacking nothing. You should stack gold or silver, where you’re stacking something.

As flights don’t pay for themselves, you know. What I wanted to ask you about, especially when the gold mania was happening—it’s slowed down a little bit here—but you’ve been predicting $5,000 gold for a very long time. Why did you have that view? I respect the show. Why is it happening right now? Why did this not happen 15 years ago, 10 years ago, or 5 years ago? What’s significant about right now, where all of a sudden it feels like there’s this shift to, “Holy, I need to own gold”?

First of all, you have to look at where gold started. In 2001, gold was at $300, less than $300. So it had a big move from $300 to $2,000. It took some time for the market to digest that gain and work off a lot of the selling from it. That time helped build a really big base and clear out all the selling, which enabled the next big leg.

Part of the reason it also didn’t start sooner was that the dollar held up a lot better than I expected as a result of QE1, QE2, and QE3. I thought the dollar would have been a lot weaker, and that would have caused the price of gold to move up sooner, but it didn’t happen that way.

There was a lot of misplaced confidence in the dollar and in the Fed, and I think that delayed the move. It happened a lot later than I would have thought. But my target is not $5,000 anymore. At this point, $5,000 is not that big a deal. Now I have to talk about $10,000 or $20,000 because we’ve printed so much money since my original $5,000 call that $5,000 now is not the same thing as $5,000 in 2008.

6. The Fed Returns to QE

Speaking of printing and QE, how do you think the Fed is going to react to the Iran war?

It’s not so much the war that they’ll react to. It will be the impact that the war has on the overall economy, the employment situation, and prices.

Overall, I expect the Fed to be cutting rates and going back to QE because of the underlying weakness in the economy. That will in part be attributed to the war, but not in whole.

I expect the Fed to look through the increase in prices. Even though the official measures of inflation will be a lot higher than 2%—it could be 5% or 6%—I think the Fed will look through that anyway and still ease policy. It will be a mistake, but they’re going to make it.

What is QE going to look like this time?

It always looks the same. They just do more of it. They buy a bunch of bonds and print money.

How big do you predict it to be compared to the last time we had QE?

QE took the balance sheet up to about $9 billion from around $3 billion, so it kind of tripled. Now it’s $6 billion and change. They’ve managed to shrink it somewhat, but it’s already going back up again. It stopped shrinking; the balance sheet is expanding.

I think this next one could easily take it up to a $20 trillion balance sheet. We’ll see.

Whoa. But that would be, if they triple it from here—if they triple $6 trillion or $7 trillion—you’re at $20 trillion.

That's insane. That's a big number.

Well, look, the national debt is almost $40 trillion. It'll be $40 trillion in a month or two. In fact, Trump just asked for a 50% increase in the military budget.

Yeah, he did.

From $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. There's $500 billion right there—extra money that we have to borrow.

One of the things I think about when looking forward at markets is that, before February 28th, when we struck Iran, stocks were sort of in turmoil. Everyone was in panic mode over this potentially deflationary AI, with white-collar workers losing their jobs. Nvidia was sort of flat. Everything was kind of flat.

We've technically been in a range for over a year, post-Liberation Day, and then we've gotten distracted—I don't know if that's the right word, but it's the word I'll use—by what's happening in Iran. It feels like there's going to be this moment where, say, we get the TACO Supreme, Trump goes for a full-blown pullout or ceasefire, and we assume that happens. There will be a rally in the market, but at least in my head, there will be this rally for a couple of weeks and everyone will think to themselves, “Okay, now what?”

“Okay, now what?” doesn't solve the underlying problems that we went into this thing with. In your head, how long would this hypothetical rally last, and then what comes next?

Which rally?

The “we're done in Iran” rally.

I don't know. To the extent that we end the war, there will be some kind of relief rally in the markets that the war is over. But the stock market in particular didn't go down that much because of the war, so I don't expect the recovery to be that big, given how shallow the decline was.

I do think that, however the war ends—if it ends, because it could just drag on indefinitely, even if we don't escalate it—the situation in the Middle East is going to be worse, not better. I don't think that we will have achieved any of our objectives. I don't think we're going to change the regime. In fact, Donald Trump now claims that it is a new regime, even though it's the same regime. Yes, they're different people, but it's the same regime.

Yeah.

Right. Life in Iran is going to be worse. What we have done, I think, is create a lot more animosity within Iran toward America, and probably toward Israel, too. The Iranians hate us more than they hated us before, which is not good. I think there may be some sympathy that we created for Iran that may not have existed before.

I think the U.S. looks worse, especially if we go in and start this war and end up really not achieving anything. Now, Trump will just claim it's the greatest victory in the history of war.

Of course.

And it's the most brilliant battle ever, directed by the most brilliant commander in chief to ever live. He's better than anybody else.

I think we're going to create a bigger problem than what we tried to solve. I think the oil price is going to be much higher after the war than it would have been had we never fought the war.

Yeah, I agree.

I think the idea that we're going to see a crash in the oil price as a result of the war, that we're going to have all this cheap oil once the war is over, is just a fantasy. Maybe oil prices will be lower than they are today, but they're not going back to below $60 a barrel. Maybe oil goes from $110 to $80 or $90.

But then again, it's not even going to stay there, because once the dollar really starts to fall—which hasn't happened—oil prices are headed a lot higher.

You don't have a lot of cash right now, and I've seen you tweeting a lot that you hate cash, especially right now, and that you like gold and foreign stocks.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of cash because I think inflation is going to destroy its value.

What percentage of cash are you in?

Personally, for clients, we don't keep much cash for clients—a few percent. No, I don't have much cash personally. I have cash in my checking accounts because I have ongoing bills that I need to pay, but for my investment accounts, I'm largely, almost fully, invested.

I could keep a few percent in cash just in case things go down and I want to buy more, but in general, as I have more money, I invest it. I don't just let it sit in U.S. dollars. I do something with it.

Fortunately, I added a lot to my energy positions well before the war started, so those have worked out. But I also added to my emerging-market positions, which have gone against me, and I put more money there.

I look at it this way: if I get an opportunity—if stocks that I like go down and I have more money to invest—I deploy it at better prices. I don't have to get the absolute bottom. If I'm getting good values, I'll keep putting money into investments that I like, because I don't want to leave money in cash.

I have a lot of expenses. I've got my boat, my plane, and people I have to pay salaries to—not in my business, but people in my personal life, at the house and at the boat. I've got a wife and kids. They're all spending my money, so I've got to keep it. I have to have money to pay all these bills because I don't have any debt.

That's one thing: I don't have any credit-card debt. I don't have any real leverage on my portfolio. I don't have leverage on my properties, really. I have 4 properties, and only 1 has a mortgage. The only reason I have that mortgage is that it's at 3.38%.

Yeah.

I hate to pay it off. I'm not going to let the bank out of jail by paying off that mortgage. They'd have to offer me some sweet incentive in order to get me to do that.

One more side-note gold question: do you think the thesis for gold as an asset changes in a world where the economy is dominated by AI? Five or 10 years from now, if there's exponential AI growth, does that change the value proposition or the thesis for gold?

That is a wild card that can have a significant impact on my thesis, depending on how productive AI can be and how quickly that productivity can be materialized. There is the potential that we can have a huge increase in supply that would counteract all the money printing.

I don't know how to handicap that. I have a son who thinks the whole world is going to be changing in a couple of years. Of course, he thought that a couple of years ago. There's a group of people who really look at AI as this huge thing, and it may be, but it may not play out as quickly as some people think. A lot of people probably don't even think about it at all.

I'm sure the truth is in there somewhere. So, you think it could be a black swan for gold?

I think it would be a black swan for everything, not just gold.

Yeah.

It would be, but not a black swan in a negative sense. Let's say AI makes such a massive difference in productivity that everything I want to buy and everything that I need is very abundant and a lot less expensive. I don't need as much money to buy it. Nobody does.

If it turns out that everything I need is going to be practically free, then fine. That's okay with me. But the reason I save and invest is because it probably won't be free. It's probably going to cost money, and I want to make sure I have it.

If we have a society where no one needs money because everything is free, because everything was created instantly out of thin air by AI, I'm not against that kind of progress.

Fair. One of the last things I want to ask you is about this little bubble we live in on Twitter, especially on the finance side. There are a lot of young people who watch my stream, and there's this narrative that people love to push around—the doomer narrative of the permanent underclass.

You have a finite, single-digit number of years to make it, hit some arbitrary number, or you're going to be stuck in the permanent underclass because of AI doom, hyperinflation, or whatever myriad of reasons that the future will be harder than the present. What do you think, especially for the young people who watch this stream, about this permanent-underclass narrative?

The people who would benefit most from AI would be the masses—the lower class and the middle class. Their lives would have the most significant change from AI. If you're already rich and you can afford a lot of things, the fact that AI makes stuff cheaper doesn't really change your life as much.

But if you’re broke and all of a sudden you can afford all sorts of things that you had to do without because AI has made them so much cheaper, you’re better off. To the extent that you don’t have to work, a lot of the jobs that AI could eliminate are very mundane jobs. They may be physically demanding, boring types of jobs, and if people don’t have to work those jobs anymore, that’s a good thing for the people who don’t have to have those jobs.

But then you don’t have a job.

Well, again, they won’t need one. Look, if the government gets out of the way, if you need a job, you’ll get a job. And if you don’t need one, then you won’t have to have one. But I don’t want the government there providing the jobs or providing benefits. I want the free market to provide them, and it will.

I mean, there’s always going to be opportunity. As AI makes me more efficient, I have more leftover money to hire people if I need them. Now, obviously, if I don’t need to hire anybody—if I can just hire AI, I don’t need anybody—then the people I’m not hiring, to the extent that they could get their own AI to do the stuff that they need done, won’t need jobs.

I mean, if everybody had their own little robot, why would you need a job? Just let your robot do all the work, right? You don’t have to do anything. If the robots are cheap enough and there are enough of them that everybody can afford one, then the robot does everything.

Or, if you look at *Star Trek* or something, they have replicators. You want food? You tell the computer what you want and it materializes. If we don’t have to grow food, we don’t need farmers. If I don’t have to go to the grocery store and buy food, if food could just be conjured out of the atmosphere, people don’t need money to afford it. Just have whatever you want.

Fair.

So, I don’t know when AI is going to progress to that point, though.

7. Schiff Floats a Presidential Run

Okay. The last thing I want to ask you before I let you go is, Mr. Schiff, I’ve heard a rumor that there is a presidential run in your future.

Yeah. Well, I just posted something on X because I was reading about how JD Vance—there was a rumor that he doesn’t want to run in 2028 because he’ll just lose, which I agree he will, because the economy is going to be really bad and the voters are going to blame the Republicans. They’re going to blame the incumbents. They’re going to blame Vance. He’s part of the administration.

The idea is that Vance’s chances will be better four years later, when he’s running to clean up the mess. It used to be that being the incumbent was the advantage. But when you just pass the baton from a weak economy to a weaker economy and every election is about throwing the bums out, the advantage is not to be the incumbent, because then you’re blamed. The incumbent has to lie to the voters about how great everything is, and the voters know that’s a lie.

The challenger gets to be honest with the voters.

And feel their pain and say, “I know how bad the economy is.” The only lie he or she has to tell is that they’re going to make it better.

“I’ll fix it.”

But that’s what people believe. So then I said something. I said, “Look, things could be so bad by 2032 that maybe I’ll have to run,” because I don’t even know if the voters would buy Vance. We’re going to have to have a real game changer—somebody different. Maybe Rand Paul, but I don’t know. I mean, there’s somebody that we don’t even know about. I’d rather not have to do the job myself. I’d rather—

Do you think you could win if you really went for it and locked in and said, “Fuck it. America needs me. I’m going to run”? Do you think you could win?

Well, I don’t think I would run if I didn’t think I could win. I ran for the Senate once. I thought I had a shot. But I don’t think I would be able to win unless things were really, really bad and I was really, really rich.

Aren’t you pretty rich?

Hey, how high does it have to go?

No, no. Well, to fund a presidential campaign, that’s a lot of money.

What price gold?

Huh?

What price of gold would you need to fund a campaign?

Well, I assume that gold would be a lot higher. If things get as bad as I think and gold is as high as I think, then I may be able to fund the campaign. But the question is, would I be better off running myself or funding somebody else’s campaign who might have an even better shot than me?

I mean, I’m obviously very—I can’t lie. I have a huge record of very politically controversial stances. But I think that if things are bad enough—look, Milei won an election in Argentina—

So my candidacy would be very similar to his. The things that I would be advocating would make for a very similar campaign. He was able to win. The question is, would something like that play in the U.S., given the situation we have politically in this country? Could a Milei win in the U.S.? I don’t know.

It was just a post that I threw out there, not as a serious thing. I don’t have an exploratory committee set up.

I don’t think you’re that controversial politically, by the way. I don’t think it’s insane.

Well, I am very controversial.

What’s your most controversial political take?

I want to eliminate almost all of government, including the most popular programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. I want to get rid of all these things. I have ideas on how to phase them out, but I want to shrink the government dramatically.

I want to get rid of most government departments and agencies. Most of what the federal government does shouldn’t be done by government at all, or if it’s done at all, it should be done at the state or local level.

I want to recreate the freedom that we had in the 19th century, but overlay that with 21st-century technology and infrastructure. I want the rugged individual. I don’t want the nanny state or the welfare state.

I don’t like anything about what America has become. What I like is what America once was. I would like to restore those principles—the principles that the framers risked their lives for when they declared American independence 250 years ago.

Trump is going to be making a big deal now about the 250th anniversary of the United States. But the principles that we fought for, we’ve given them up.

What do you think was the moment? Was there a specific moment when America started going south in your eyes?

It wasn’t any one moment. It was a progression of ideas that really started in earnest with the populist movement in the latter part of the 19th century, and then continued into the early 20th century with the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and then the New Deal, with all of the intrusions into the economy that we didn’t have before.

When they first introduced welfare, they called it relief. A lot of Americans were embarrassed to take it. They didn’t want it.

And some of them paid it back when they—

That was the mentality of Americans. But now we have a society where people feel entitled to get things for free from the government. People don’t feel bad about getting free stuff from the government. They want even more. They feel they’re getting ripped off if they’re not getting enough from the government.

I want to live in a country where people don’t ask the government for anything. The government is supposed to be there to protect our rights. That’s it. To prevent people from stealing our stuff, not to steal our stuff, which is what most people want the government to do today.

They want the government to steal stuff from other people and give it to them. That’s not the country that we’re supposed to be.

Look, I’m not saying I would vote for you, but I think you could run a pretty compelling campaign.

Peter, as a sign-off question, it’s been a pleasure to run back part 2. Especially for all the young people, young traders, and aspiring traders who watch the stream, follow my content, and are paying attention to the markets right now and thinking to themselves, “Holy shit, this is a shitshow. This is difficult. I don’t know how to navigate this.” What is your advice for how to navigate the trading environment, specifically 2026 and on?

Well, obviously, whenever gold goes down, just buy it, right? You’re getting an opportunity. When silver goes down, buy it. Go to SchiffGold and buy some gold and silver, because I think any pullback is a buying opportunity.

I think rallies in the dollar should be sold, and people should be moving more assets abroad. I think that is going to be the theme that dominates the landscape for the next decade or more: the flow out of U.S. assets, out of U.S. stocks and bonds, and back into global stocks that are at much better valuations.

I think central banks continue to move out of dollars into gold, and investors keep moving out of the United States into other markets. The money has been flowing into the United States for 20 years now. I think it’s going the other way. I’d encourage your listeners to check out my websites at SchiffGold.com and Euro Pacific Asset Management.com and listen to my podcast. I’m probably going to do a live podcast in a couple of hours on my YouTube channel, and Shift Radio is where they can listen to it besides my YouTube channel.

Peter, I’ll tell you what, man. We’re different ages, and we hold some different assets, but you have a fan in me, Mr. Schiff.

Thank you.

I appreciate you coming back on. Is there anything else you want to say or shout out? We’ll definitely check you out later today.

Yeah, I think I got enough out there.

Sick, man. Thanks for coming back on. Hopefully, part three—maybe $10K gold—we’ll run it back. I’m looking forward to any updates on the presidential campaign. It’s always a pleasure, man. Thanks for your time, ace.