Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, got into a shouting match with a trader who was a little bit hot under the collar over Schiff’s remarks about the Federal Reserve not raising interest rates and perhaps introducing another round of quantitative easing.
Speaking during CNBC‘s “Futures Now,” Scott Nations accused Schiff of living off of one prediction he made eight years ago, and has since been wrong. Here is his exact comment:
“Peter, you do a great job of making these outlandish predictions and 1,000 of them come out of your mouth, 999 of them are wrong and then you live forever on one of them. It sounds like you are trying to do that now. What about now?”
Many people do expect Fed Chair Janet Yellen to raise rates sometime this year, perhaps in September. Members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), like William Dudley and Stanley Fischer, have repeatedly said that an increase in interest rates is going to happen. Moreover, even if the Fed does raise rates then it’ll probably be insignificant: 25 basis points.
The author of “Crash Proof” suggests otherwise. Schiff doesn’t believe the United States central bank can raise rates because of all of the massive debt that the government and the private sector have accumulated since the economic collapse. This is what seems to have irked the stock market trader.
Indeed, Schiff has made several predictions since the height of the financial crisis that haven’t come to fruition, like gold hitting $5,000 in 2012 or hyperinflation in 2013. However, this should be a lesson for contrarian investors: never make timeline predictions because when you do then your sound logic flies by the heads of investors. There’s no doubt high levels of inflation are coming; we’re already witnessing shrinkflation and soaring price inflation. Gold will inch higher. But these are long-term bets as opposed to one-year projections.
Jim Rogers masters this art. He never really provides specific times as to when you should buy in or sell. Rogers tells interviewers “I’m a terrible market timer.” This is the best strategy to incorporate in your investment advice. If you’re giving precise dates for a specific event or market crash then you’re probably just throwing darts at a board. No one can truly predict market events.
Anyway, the video is below, and the interview heats up at the 6:00 mark.
Enough of Peter Schiff. I don’t need him to tell me that gold will go higher in years to come. Problem is he is putting in a time frame of months and many who do not have the stamina have stumbled because of his outlandish predictions.