November 20, 2025
On Wednesday's episode of The Peter Schiff Show, Peter lays out why recent market headlines-everything from the government shutdown to the wobble in crypto-point back to one theme: more easy money and bad policy. He connects the dots between Washington's spending, tariff-driven price pressure, and risky mortgage fixes.
He starts by flipping the common narrative about the government shutdown and gold, and explains why reopening the government actually tends to be bullish for bullion because business-as-usual in Washington means more spending and money creation, not less:
Now a lot of people might have thought intuitively, well wouldn't that be bad for gold? I mean, wasn't gold going up because the government shutdown was bad for the economy, it was creating uncertainty and that was benefiting gold, and so that once that uncertainty was behind us, once the government reopened and that was good for the economy, that would hurt gold. That's what a lot of people might have thought, but the opposite happened because the government reopening isn't bad for gold; it's the government staying open that's bad for gold, because when the government is open it's doing bad stuff.
From there he contrasts gold's stability with the volatility in crypto, warning that the country leading in crypto exposure stands to suffer the most when that bubble deflates-and that those losses will be another tailwind for gold as malinvestment unwinds:
I also want to juxtapose what's happening in gold and silver right now to what's happening in crypto and Bitcoin and the whole crypto industry.... Soon we're gonna be the laughing stock of the world; the last thing you want to be is number one in crypto because the crypto bubble is deflating and there's a lot more air that's gonna come out of this thing. The country that leads in crypto is the country that's got the most to lose when the bubble pops, so because we're the leader in crypto we're gonna be the leader in economic damage done from the bursting of this bubble.
Peter then shifts to housing policy and the push to rework Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, warning of the legal and economic contradictions in promising an implicit government guarantee while trying to privatize these government-sponsored entities:
Another of the Trump trades was the GSEs Fannie and Freddie, and a lot of people loaded up on shares.... The problem with the plan to privatize Fannie and Freddie was you couldn't do it with a government guarantee because before they went bankrupt there was no government guarantee; the government went out of its way to warn everybody who bought Fannie and Freddie guaranteed debt that there was no government guarantee. Now Donald Trump stated that he wants to bring them public but revive the implicit guarantee; he says I want to bring them public with an implicit guarantee, but you can't do that-the government can't state yes we have an implicit guarantee because then that's explicit.
He argues the obvious market-friendly fix-make homes cheaper by increasing supply-gets ignored while tariffs on lumber and on steel make building materials more expensive, an example of policies that contradict their own stated goals of affordability:
One thing the federal government could do is get rid of the tariffs on lumber and on steel-these are things that you need to build houses and Trump has made those things more expensive-so you can't complain about the high cost of homes when you are pursuing policies that increase the cost of building homes.... If Donald Trump understands that he can lower coffee prices by lowering coffee tariffs, that means he knows that his tariffs are raising prices, and so obviously if tariffs are raising coffee prices then tariffs are raising home prices because you need steel and you need lumber to build these houses.
Finally, Peter warns that making mortgages fully portable or assumable-the policy some politicians endorse to help homeowners-would lock in low rates, discourage turnover, and force banks into a squeeze that looks like more easy credit and ultimately more inflation, again a setup that benefits gold and silver as the currency weakens:
If the Trump administration does this and transforms all these mortgages and makes them assumable and portable, they may never get repaid; all of them are gonna be there until maturity.... All of this is great for gold and silver because what is all this? Easy money, lower lax lending standards-this is all gonna be more inflation, it's gonna lead to more quantitative easing, money printing, a weaker dollar; all of this is bullish for gold and silver.
This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.