January 19, 2026
On Monday's episode of the Peter Schiff Show, Peter reacts to a dramatic day in the markets where gold and especially silver steal the headlines, then connects those moves to political and monetary developments that he says make the dollar vulnerable. He ties a sudden surge in precious metals to a new scandal around Fed Chair Jerome Powell, the Fed's warped spending incentives, and a troubling political proposal to cap credit-card interest.
He opens with the market action, where silver is the clear standout today:
Silver today was the superstar; it closed up five dollars and thirty cents above eighty-five dollars-85.14 I think is about where it settled-and intraday we almost got to 86, we were above 85.90, which means that silver was up more than six dollars on the day. That is a huge move; again, when I first started buying silver for myself and for clients, silver was under five dollars an ounce; today's move was greater than the entire value of the commodity when I first started to buy it.
He's surprised the mainstream financial media treats that as a footnote rather than the news of the day:
All that surprised me is that it's taken so long and it is somewhat surprising that so few people see the significance, you know. I was watching on CNBC today and, again, I watched that so you guys don't have to, but I watch it just so I can see what the mainstream media is telling the public, and despite this big move in gold there was very little discussion. There was some discussion of it because it couldn't be avoided, but you know, I was watching this morning and one of the anchors there mentioned gold-it's the first time she mentioned it-and she said, "Oh, gold is up a bit today." Nothing significant, right-up a bit; it was up $115 when she said that-that's not a bit. That's a big move.
He shifts to the Powell story: a subpoena, a grand jury, and the question of what officials might be criminally liable for:
Indict him for what ? I mean, he's certainly incompetent, but then so are all the Fed chairmen. But you can't indict somebody for that; I mean, if you did then everybody would be in jail, right ? The reason they want to indict him is because they said that he testified falsely, so I guess he maybe lied under oath and said something to Congress, and what he lied about apparently was the cost of the renovation of the Federal Reserve headquarters, and, you know, obviously this thing is a complete disaster.
He flags a third development he thinks will be dollar-bearish: Trump's floated credit-card interest cap, which Peter says wrongly invites government to set prices and would backfire economically:
Another thing that happened over the weekend-there are actually three things over the weekend that I think were very dollar bearish and gold and silver bullish-the other was Trump's proposed cap and he floated this horrible trial balloon; he wants a cap on credit card interest rates of 10%. Apart from the fact that that would be unconstitutional, I mean, it's none of the government's business if one person or one company wants to make a loan to another person; it's not up to the federal government to decide what the interest rate should be.
Finally, he ties the policy mix back to politics and investor behavior: a crisis would undercut Trump and be the right moment to exit dollar risk and buy precious metals:
So when Trump is saying this stuff and then when he's asked, "Well, what limits your power?" he doesn't say the Constitution, doesn't mention international law; in Trump's mind the only thing that limits his power is himself-he could do whatever the hell he wants, that's what he's saying-that would scare the hell out of anybody. And so what I would think is we have got to diffuse this situation, and how do you do that ? You dump the dollar, you dump treasuries, you create an economic crisis in the United States.
This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.