March 27, 2026
In Wednesday's episode of The Peter Schiff Show, Peter takes aim at Washington's war spending spree, the markets' strange reactions to developments in the Middle East, and the ways political messaging can move capital. He warns that the real danger to Americans comes from mounting debt and inflation, not foreign actors, and he again emphasizes why sound money and gold matter as hedges in a reckless fiscal environment.
He opens by calling out the administration's sudden escalation in war spending and the evasiveness of officials when asked how they will pay for it:
Now the question was very simple: are you going to consider raising taxes to pay for this war ? I mean that's an honest straightforward question - you want an extra two hundred billion dollars, where are you gonna get the money ? And instead of answering it initially he [Scott Bessent] said that's a ridiculous question. What's ridiculous about it ? What's ridiculous is that he doesn't want to answer it. He says how ridiculous can you even ask me, why would you even ask me how we're gonna pay for this.
He follows by laying out the accounting: without tax increases or spending cuts, the only option left is more borrowing - and that's already a systemic threat to the economy:
If you're not going to raise taxes and you're not going to cut spending, well how are you going to finance the war ? Obviously just pile it on top of the debt - we're just gonna borrow more money. What the hell, we're already borrowing trillions a year, what's a few hundred billion more for the Iran war ? A few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there - pretty soon you're talking about real money, which again proves that the biggest threat to the United States is not coming from Iran; it's coming from Washington, D.C.
Peter then expresses a broader distrust of administration messaging, arguing that repeated falsehoods can be a form of market manipulation when officials use rhetoric to move prices:
I don't believe anything that anybody in the Trump administration says, because I think either that they've got to know that Trump is lying, so if they repeat the lies then they're lying too. And of course he's talking about the war all the time, and I wish I could believe the things that he says - and it's not that I just believe the stuff that the Iranians say, I mean I don't trust them either. I take everything that Trump says with a grain of salt and so should everybody else - so should the media, so should the markets. Just because Trump says something does not mean it's true.
Next he turns to the markets, especially gold, and explains why traders are confusing nominal Fed action with real interest rates - the latter being what truly drives demand for precious metals:
Part of it too is linked to the idea that the longer the war continues the longer we're gonna have to wait for the Fed to cut rates, and that elongated wait for the rate cut is what's weighing on gold - which is irrelevant because the entire time the Fed is going to be on hold inflation is going to be getting worse and so real interest rates are going to keep going down even if the Fed holds nominal interest rates the same. What's important for gold is real interest rates.
He closes the episode by pointing out the irony of the current administration's position on war. War in the Middle East is merely a distraction when political enemies wage it, but this war is different because Trump leads it:
By starting the war now Trump has an excuse, something to blame the higher prices on... it makes sense that Trump would do something like that because this is what he accused Obama of doing - Trump repeatedly said that Obama will start a war with Iran as a distraction from his own failures, from the weakness in the economy. So he already thought that wars with Iran are good distractions for presidents that are dealing with weak economies.
This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.