December 23, 2025
On Thursday's episode of the Peter Schiff Show, Peter lays out why precious metals are taking center stage while fiat currency policy unravels. He walks through surging silver prices, rising unemployment and shrinking manufacturing, a return to quantitative easing, the political choice for the next Fed chair, and an imminent crypto crash - all reasons he gives for moving into gold, silver, and international assets.
He opens by flagging silver as the breakout story and explains why he expects more volatility and upside in the near term:
But you know the big story, I think, this week is silver, and we'll see what happens tomorrow. Tomorrow could be another big day. I think we've got an option expiration coming up, but silver prices hit sixty-six dollars and I think 77 cents, almost sixty-eight dollars.... We just broke through fifty. Now, if you recall from what I was saying on my podcasts, I said that I expected silver to take out fifty because that was the big double top, and that once it did I thought we would have a quick move up to a hundred.
He contrasts the flashy political rhetoric about the labor market with what he sees in recent data, noting the rising unemployment rate and contracting factory payrolls:
[Unemployment] ticked up to 4.6 percent, which is a four-year high, so this is the highest the unemployment rate has been since Trump's been president. And of course this doesn't capture all of the people who are unemployed. In fact, when Trump ran for president the first time he was honest about how dishonest these numbers were; he said the unemployment rate was fake when it was 5% ish. Under Biden he said it was really 20%. Well the same applies now. Donald Trump said all the numbers were fake until he was elected and then they were real, then he touted the numbers that he claimed were fake when Biden was president to show how great the economy was when he was president. I mean the numbers are either fake or they're real - they're not fake under Biden and real under Trump.
He says the Fed has quietly reversed course and that the new phase looks a lot like quantitative easing; he warns that denying the label won't change the reality of monetary expansion:
The Fed cut rates again and returned to quantitative easing. Now, of course, the Fed and everybody has been doing damage control trying to reassure everybody that what they're doing is not QE. Why don't they want to admit that ? Because that's admitting that there's a big problem. We did QE in the financial crisis and during COVID - when we had a great recession and we had this pandemic and a shutdown of the economy - those are the times we did QE. If we're doing QE again, well that must indicate that there's a real big problem.
He adds a political layer, arguing that a Fed chair chosen for loyalty rather than for defending the dollar will accelerate the dollar's decline and lift gold:
The other thing that's going to be driving the dollar lower and gold higher is the new Fed chairman, yet to be announced. I think Trump has said he's supposed to announce his pick before the end of the year, but Trump talked about his pick last night and what Trump said was that he is going to appoint a Fed chairman who wants lower interest rates. Now that should scare the hell out of anybody that has US dollars.
Peter turns to crypto, warning that leverage and loans collateralized by Bitcoin will amplify a fall and produce rapid liquidations - and he sees the safe upside in precious metals:
I think that we are very, very close to a meltdown, a big crash in Bitcoin, and I say that mainly looking at MicroStrategy stock, because look at that chart - it's hard to find a worse-looking chart than MicroStrategy. I mean, closed at 158 today; the 52-week low is about 155 - we'll probably take that out tomorrow - but I think at a minimum, in the very short run it's gonna get cut in half, maybe around 80. There's no way that MicroStrategy stock is gonna go down by 50% and Bitcoin not go down.
He closes by reminding listeners that precious metals are practical, portable hedges and by urging a reallocation away from dollar risk into international names and physical metal:
You know, in the 2008 financial crisis everybody fled to the dollar; this crisis is gonna be because everybody is fleeing from the dollar, and it's a whole different ballgame in how you need to be invested. Gold and silver will do much better than they did in '08, but so will foreign stocks and emerging markets, so you need to load up on these things now before the new year.
This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.