December 25, 2025
Glenn Diesen recently interviewed Peter to discuss the latest political happenings and President Trump's public criticism of Peter on Truth Social. Peter lays out why Trumponomics, as practiced today, looks a lot like the very policies that caused trouble under the prior administration: big deficits, easy money, and a reliance on the Fed to inflate asset prices.
He begins by describing the reaction he gets when he calls out political rhetoric and says the president is wrong about what's happening to prices. He points to Fox News viewers and the sensitivity around upsetting an allied audience:
Well, obviously I think I struck a nerve. Maybe he [Trump] realizes that what I said was true. And I guess he doesn't like the Fox News audience to be told the truth because a lot of his supporters watch Fox News. But you know, it's pretty obvious that the president is wrong about what's happening to prices. It's true that oil prices are down a bit. But that's just one price.
Peter then puts Trump's record in perspective, reminding listeners that the recent term follows four prior years in which fiscal policy and pandemic responses did real damage. He frames it as a pattern rather than a one-off failure:
As far as Trump fixing the economy, he hasn't fixed anything. I mean, if anything, he helped break it because he was president for four years prior to his recent term. During that term, he ran up the debt. The deficits got bigger. The COVID policy was horrible, the things that they implemented there.
He argues Trumponomics and Bidenomics are not fundamentally different when you strip away rhetoric, and he warns that playing the same game-spend, then push for easier money-just seeds later pain. He also flags tariffs as a distinct policy problem that compounds the damage:
And so far, Trumponomics, if you want to call it that, is not much different from Bidenomics. It's run huge deficits and spend a lot of money and then get the Fed to cut interest rates and print money and to try to inflate asset bubbles. I mean, that's pretty much what happened under Biden and that's what's happening under Trump. I mean, the only difference is Trump has tariffs and those create their own problems.
Peter doesn't mince words about the advice the president is getting. He wants a wholesale change of economic counsel and major spending cuts, and he provocatively invokes Elon Musk as an example of bringing business acumen into the conversation-while making clear he favors structural reforms like entitlement reform over gimmicks:
But the advice that I would give him is pretty much almost fire just about all your current economic advisors because they're giving you really bad advice. What we need is to have massive reductions in government spending. He needs to bring Elon Musk back. But not just Doge, but we need to have cuts to entitlements, Social Security, Medicare.
He steps back to explain the mechanics of inflation in plain terms, calling it a tax that governments levy through money creation when direct taxation would be politically costly. This is a classic Austrian framing: inflation transfers wealth without explicit ballot-box accountability:
Inflation is a tax because it's enacted by the government and the government has a couple of ways they can take money from us to cover their expenditures. One way is to legitimately impose a tax where my money goes to the government. So the government just takes my money and then the government spends it. If they don't want to do that, because I may not vote for them if I see them taking my money, if instead they just print new money and spend that, well, I still have all my old money.... Prices go up and now my money doesn't buy as much.
He warns listeners that the real failure will not necessarily be banks collapsing but the erosion of the dollar itself. Even if deposit accounts remain intact nominally, their purchasing power will be destroyed by persistent inflation-so preparation matters more than faith in institutions:
What will fail is the value of your deposits. Even if your bank doesn't fail, the money will. You won't be able to buy very much of the money. The issue is going to be a dramatic loss of purchasing power of the dollar. You're going to see prices rising dramatically, much more so than we saw during the Biden years.
This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.