Gold bug Peter Schiff's problem is that gold represented at best only about 18% of the value of total global international reserves, and that was yesterday before gold started this price plunge

"The dollar is going to collapse", he said.

"The dollar is going to be replaced by gold", he said.

Central banks "are getting rid of dollars", he said.

"They're getting rid of treasuries", he said.

None of that is true.

The nominal broad dollar index remains relatively strong. 

Even foreign official ownership of treasuries is up slightly year over year, shifting slightly from long dated securities to short, while total foreign ownership is up solidly. 

Meanwhile fiat currencies represented about 78% of the value of total global international reserves yesterday. The U.S. Dollar alone represented about 55% of the value, followed by the Euro close to 20%.

Gold is not going to replace the dollar.

But Peter will be happy to sell you some, especially today lol. 

 

Uh Oh. Peter Schiff Is SELLING $3 Million In .5 Ounce Gold Maple Leaf Coins

As he promotes OWNERSHIP.

Wily devil.

Story here.

Peter Schiff Reminds Us That The Debt Ceiling Isn't Original To The Country

For RealClearMarkets, here:

The debt ceiling itself is both an ill-conceived compromise and a relic of past governmental integrity. For its first 128 years as a republic, the United States was able to function without a debt ceiling. This was possible for the simple reason that U.S. government had no central bank and could not borrow beyond its ability to repay through taxation. And since the ability to tax is always limited by taxpayers' assets (and their extreme hostility to those who want to take them), legal gimmicks were not needed to prevent Congress from spending too freely. But the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 gave the Federal Government a potential means to borrow indefinitely by having the new bank buy its debt. Sensing this danger, the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913 prohibited the Fed from buying or holding government debt.

But just four years later the United States needed a means to raise money quickly to pay for its efforts in the First World War. The government passed an amendment to the charter to allow the Fed to purchase Treasury Bonds. Fearing (correctly) that this would create a mechanism for perpetual debt expansion, conservative lawmakers insisted that the amendment include a "debt ceiling" provision that would cap the amount that the government could borrow.

Peter Schiff Warns About Rising Interest Rates But Avoids The Sorry Truth

Peter Schiff, here:

The current national debt is about $16 trillion (this is just the funded portion...the unfunded liabilities of the Treasury are much, much larger). The only reason the United States is able to service this staggering level of debt is that the currently low interest rate on government debt (now below 2 per cent) keeps debt service payments to a relatively manageable $300 billion per year.

First of all, interest payments on the debt haven't been close to $300 billion a year since 1994. They've been above that level ever since 1994, and frequently way above that level.

In fact, interest payments on the debt have been above $400 billion each year from 2006 inclusive, except for 2009. This is important in the context of a Republican House which congratulates itself endlessly for a one-time spending cut of $38 billion.

Secondly, if we were really paying an effective 2 percent interest rate to service the debt, say in 2011, our interest payment that year would have been closer to $296 billion.

But the total US public debt at the end of the 2011 fiscal year reached almost $14.8 trillion, and interest payments on that debt were actually $454 billion, implying an interest rate in excess of 3 percent, half again as high.

That's the real lesson of rising interest rates. A 50 percent rise in interest rates from 2 percent to 3 on a pile of debt that size means an increased interest expense of $158 billion. People who think rates can't rise that much very quickly haven't been paying attention to the recent experiences of Greece, Spain and Italy. For example in Spain interest rates paid on 10yr paper lept 50 percent in six months' time this year.

In Italy they lept over 35 percent in five months' time.

Third, while Peter Schiff is surely right when he warns that rising interest rates threaten to consume government revenues, leaving nothing for essential services, the sorry truth is that our interest payments on the public debt are really more like the interest-only payments on loans people took out during the housing bubble. Those loans were DESIGNED never to require principal payments, and so the buyers of those homes never built any real equity and never were on a path to retiring those debts. That's our federal government. We NEVER make principal payments on the money we borrow, and we effectively borrow the money we need to make the interest payments, and then some.

Instead of paying $454 billion a year in interest-only payments on the national debt, we should be on a path to retiring that debt. At 3.5 percent interest for 30 years, that would mean interest AND principal payments together totaling $864 billion a year, not $454 billion. And it would also mean: NO MORE BORROWING.

Can you imagine such an America? Of $2.8 trillion in current revenues, that would leave just $1.9 trillion for the feds to spend, 50 percent less than the $3.8 trillion and climbing which they spend now.

If there were any real conservatives in America, let alone in the Republican Party, that's what they'd be telling the American people. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just a pretender.

Another Voice Saying Rep. Paul Ryan Isn't Serious About Cutting Spending

Peter Schiff:

So what was the Ryan Budget's radical departure from the status quo that has caused such uproar? If enacted today, the Ryan budget would so drastically upend the fiscal picture that the U.S. federal budget would come into balance in just... wait for it.... 27 years! This is because the Ryan budget doesn't actually cut anything. At no point in Ryan's decades long budget timeline does he ever suggest that the government spend less than it had the year before. He doesn't touch a penny in current Social Security or Medicare outlays, nor in the bloated defense budget. His apocalypse inducing departure comes from trying to limit the rate of increase in federal spending to "just" 3.1% annually. This is below the 4.3% rate of increase that is currently baked into the budget, and farther below what we would likely see if Obama's priorities were adopted.

Read the whole thing here.