December 16, 2025
On Thursday's episode of The Peter Schiff Show, Peter walks through the Federal Reserve's stealthy pivot on monetary policy and explains why that move matters more for inflation and markets than talk of tariffs. He also highlights how precious metals - particularly silver and mining stocks - are leading this leg of the bull market, and he closes by drawing a clear distinction between tokenized gold and Bitcoin.
He begins by noting how fast the Fed moved from ending quantitative tightening to effectively resuming quantitative easing, a shift that was obvious if you read the policy tea leaves:
Well, the Fed didn't waste any time because no sooner did they end quantitative tightening, but they already resumed quantitative easing. Even I didn't expect them to do it that fast. I thought there may be at least one meeting that they skipped between the end of QT and the beginning of QE. Now, of course, the Fed, Powell did not come out and say we're doing quantitative easing, right ? You've got to read between the lines, although they don't make it that difficult to read between these very, very wide lines.
He emphasizes that the Fed's actions weren't just semantics - the central bank actually committed to buying short-term Treasuries, which is functionally QE even if they avoid the label. Peter explains the mechanics and the pretext the Fed uses for this intervention:
But what Powell announced was that in the next month, the Fed is going to buy 40 billion of Treasury bills. And then after that, on an ongoing basis, the Fed will be a buyer of Treasury bills. There's no specific commitment. We don't know exactly how many they're going to buy, but they're going to be buying them. And Powell said, hey, the only reason we're doing this is because we want to maintain ample reserves over time.
He criticizes the Fed's forecasting and framing, reminding listeners that the Fed often pretends its inflation targets are a projection rather than a political goal, and that it assumes success rather than demonstrating it through credible policy:
But of course, you know, the craziest thing of all, and I pointed this out, no one brought this up again at this press conference because nobody even asked a question. But at a prior press conference, and I went on about it on a previous podcast, one of the reporters asked Powell, why should we have any confidence in your 2% forecast ? Because you're now calling for 2% inflation in two years, and two years ago you made the same call and we're not there - we're at 3%. Powell said, well, you know, we forecast 2% because that's our goal, and we just assume that we'll achieve our goal.
Peter also takes aim at the political theater where tariffs get blamed for price rises while the Fed's own policies are the real inflation engine. He warns that central bankers can always point to tariffs or supply shocks as excuses, deflecting attention from the true monetary causes:
Of course, Powell talked a lot about tariffs during his Q&A, trying to say that one of the reasons that we're kind of unsure about inflation is because we're not really sure of the effects that the tariffs are going to have. We think it's a one-off, one-time increase in prices, but we're not sure as if the only reason they're thinking that inflation might be higher is because of the tariffs. When the real reason inflation is higher is because of the Fed and because the Fed is cutting rates and now the Fed is doing quantitative easing, that's the problem, right ? The tariffs create a different problem, but there's going to be inflation without the tariffs.
Finally, Peter ties the conversation back to the difference between financial claims and real assets. He explains why tokenized gold is fundamentally different from Bitcoin: tokenized gold represents ownership of a physical asset, not merely a ledger entry. That distinction matters for anyone focused on sound money rather than speculative tokens:
But the whole point of the debate was tokenized gold. See what he was trying to say is Bitcoin is better than gold because we know it's real. If somebody gives me a Bitcoin, I know it's real. A real Bitcoin versus a fake Bitcoin. It's verified on the blockchain. But we're talking about tokenized gold. If you have a token, then you can instantly verify that it is the same as Bitcoin because it's on the same blockchain. It has the same properties. So whoever tokenizes the gold, they authenticate it, they make sure the gold that they have is legitimate and then they tokenize it, right, so the person who gets the token doesn't have to verify it, it's verified automatically because it's on the blockchain.
This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.