Transcript

Precious Metals Start 2026 With Strong Gains

From Peter Schiff · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 59 min · 9,758 words · 67 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Precious Metals Start 2026 With Strong Gains", an episode of Peter Schiff published January 10, 2026 (59 min, about 9,758 words). It mentions 7 people, works and ideas, including Shift Gold, Europe Pacific Asset Management, Larry Cuddlo, T-Gold, Peter Schiff.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Peter Schiff, Shift Gold
  2. – 15:00: Shift Gold
  3. – 20:00: Europe Pacific Asset Management, Europe Pacific Gold Fund
  4. – 50:00: Larry Cuddlo, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy
  5. – 55:00: Shift Gold, T-Gold
  6. – 58:49: Europe Pacific Asset Management, Shift Gold, T-Gold

Notable quotes from "Precious Metals Start 2026 With Strong Gains"

  • Hi, this is Peter Schiff for the Shift Gold Friday market rap. And it has been some time since I last recorded one of these weekly market raps. I've been away on vacation. And while I was away during.
    about Shift Gold · at
  • Gold Fund, EPGIX is the way to buy that or contact the brokers at Europe Pacific Asset Management. We also do separately managed accounts in the mining stocks where we have significant waiting into these junior mining stocks.
    about Europe Pacific Asset Management · at
  • For years, right? The real crash is coming. the one that I wrote about in my 2013 book, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy. It just took a lot longer than I thought. I…
    about The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy · at
  • I think what really makes history rhyme, in fact, it's more like repeating. I was just watching on Larry Cuddlo's show the other day and he's talking about the greatest story…
    about Larry Cuddlo · at
  • Beat the crowd. Buy now. Don't forget about the new program at T- Gold to have some gold and silver that you can use as a medium of exchange. You could use as commerce. Set up a you know debank yourself and use real money.
    about T-Gold · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Larry Cuddlo — Person · 2 mentions · first at
  • Peter Schiff — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Hi, this is Peter Schiff for the Shift Gold Friday market rap. And it has been some time since I last recorded one of these weekly market raps. I've been away on vacation. And while I was away during.

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

Products & tech

  • T-Gold — Product · 2 mentions · first at
  • Europe Pacific Gold Fund — Product · 1 mention · first at
    And the best way to play that move right now is with my gold fund. Europe Pacific Gold Fund, EPGIX is the way to buy that or contact the brokers at Europe Pacific Asset Management. We also do separately.

Full transcript with timestamps

Hi, this is Peter Schiff for the Shift Gold Friday market rap. And it has been some time since I last recorded one of these weekly market raps. I've been away on vacation. And while I was away during the holidays, there was incredible action going on in the precious metals market. I may not have been uh podcasting about it, but I definitely was keeping an eye on it. And you know before I forget, let me remind everybody who is not currently a subscriber to this YouTube channel to subscribe to it right now. And also don't forget to like and comment on this video. And I'm going to be recording quite a few of these now uh that the holidays are over. So looking back on what happened in the precious metals market in 2025, it was a phenomenal year. The price of gold was up 64%.

That was the biggest annual increase in the gold price since 1979. Now as good as gold did last year, it was outshined by all the other precious metals. Gold was the slow mover. 2025 is when all the other metals caught up. And it really wasn't until the back half and maybe even the final quarter where that was the case. I mean, silver was on a rocket ride, especially towards the end of the year. In fact, late last year, silver got as high as $8350 some odds, not quite up to 84. Now, it didn't hold those gains into year end.

It ended 2025 at about $71.50, but that was still about 145% higher than where it began the year. So huge move up for silver, but other precious metals, platinum, too, was up about the same amount. I forget the exact percentage. I think it was around 140, 150%. I mean, it began the year below a,000 uh even though gold was at 3,000. And of course, you know, it's still cheap relative to gold, but not nearly as cheap as it was. And of course, silver uh was well over 100. I think the low was 108 or something like that ounces of silver for 1 ounce of gold.

So, I was pounding the table on these other precious metals earlier in the year knowing that it, you know, they were bound to catch up. And we've seen that move. I don't think the move is over. Uh but to me the movement now in the rest of the precious metals complex, this is not just a gold bull market. This is a precious metals bull market. And one of the knocks on the gold bull market. One of the reasons that a lot of people were skeptical and didn't believe it was because the other precious metals weren't participating. You weren't getting the confirmation of the gold rally in silver. Well, now that's not the case. Silver has certainly confirmed, as has platinum, that this is a precious metals bull. This is not just limited to gold. And precious metals are strong for a reason. This is not random.

Uh this is happening for specific reasons. And those reasons are getting stronger in 2026. In fact, 2026 is already off to a stronger start than 2025. Gold closed this week on a positive note, up just over $30 an ounce. We closed at 45,58. So, above 4500. Silver didn't quite close above 80, although it traded above 80 again this week. It traded above 8250, but it was up almost $3 on the day, closing just below 80. I think it was 79.84. But percentage-wise, gold is already up 4.6% this year. This is only the 10th of the month, 10 days into the year. Of course, most of them weren't even trading days because of the holidays and the weekends, but you're up 4.6% already.

Silver is up about 12 and a half% so far in 2026. So just picking up where last year left off. Uh the precious metals bull market uh continues. Platinum again up about the same amount I think as silver. Also look at what happened with the mining stocks because another knock on the gold bull market was the lack of confirmation in the mining stocks because the mining stocks were lagging. They're supposed to be leading. Mining stocks are supposed to be stronger than the metal in a bull market. That wasn't the case. But of course, that's why I was pounding the table, especially early last year. In fact, I put out a special report, I think in April, the best way to buy gold, and that was buying gold stocks because gold stocks had barely gone up on the year, even though gold was above $3,000 an ounce. Well, the GDX, which is a gold stock index, finished the year up 153%.

And the GDXJ, which has some uh, you know, midcaps, more midcaps, it's called juniors, but they're not really juniors. are just a little bit smaller than the GDX. That index was up 166% uh last year and off to a strong start again this year. The GDX is up 8% so far in 2026 and the GDXJ not that much farther behind up about 7.2% so far on the year. But these stocks are now outperforming the metal itself, which means now everything looks like a bull market. You can't say, well, you're not seeing a confirmation in silver because we are. Oh, we're not seeing it confirmed by the mining stocks. Well, we have. And in fact, one thing about the mining stocks is that even though they've outperformed the metal, they didn't outperform it nearly enough given how much gold and silver prices have risen and how great an impact that's going to have on earnings of these mining companies. Um, stocks are still very cheap and that's

still to me a a positive contrarian indicator in that the investing public still doesn't appreciate how cheap these gold mining stocks are and silver mining stocks are. They still don't get the significance of the bull market. They're still distracted, you know, by the tech bubble or the crypto bubble and they're not really paying attention to this opportunity, which is why investors should still be buying uh not only physical gold and silver at these prices, but especially the mining stocks. And you know, the gold mining stocks, not only are they going to make a lot more money because the price of gold is going up, but look at oil prices. oil prices are below $60 a barrel. They're about $58 a barrel. That is the the the most significant cost in gold mining is energy and that's going down. Now, I don't think oil prices are going to stay down, but they're down now. So this is great uh for the profits

of the gold miners, but also silver going up is going to have a major impact on gold mining companies because pretty much all the gold mining companies mine some silver. It's a byproduct of gold. And the way they report it, it's not earnings from silver mining, but the money they get from their silver, they use that to offset the cost of mining the gold. So that means not only are mining costs going down because of low energy prices, but because they're getting so much from their silver byproduct, that is dramatically reducing the cost of their gold. And it is going to be reflected in their earnings. So all the gold stocks are going to benefit from higher silver prices. Even though people aren't buying them because they're silver miners, they still mine a lot of silver and it makes a big difference on their net costs of mining gold. Then of course there are companies that just mine silver and they were the

star performers of 2025. But again given how cheap they were when the year began, they're still cheap now despite tripling and quadrupling on the year. So even though we've seen this rally, you want to buy gold, you want to buy silver. Gold, I don't think there's very much downside risk at all. I don't think gold's going below 4,300. So if you're buying it now at 4500 I think there's minimal downside in gold at 4500 right silver lot more volatility which to me makes sense given the magnitude of the breakout right you know we blew through 50 I mean we basically paused there for a couple of weeks maybe and I was forecasting on this and on my main podcast that once silver broke above $50 uh it was going to be a moonshot and that 50 would be support. Well, 50 was only support briefly. I believe support is now 70. I don't think we're going down to 50 at all. The opportunity to buy $50 silver is gone. And I hope a lot

of people took advantage of it uh before it it left while it was here. In fact, all last year I told people buy 30, right? 30 is the new 20. Silver's not going below 30. Then I said, buy 40. 50. Now I'm telling people to buy $70 silver if you get the opportunity to buy $70 silver. The low of the pullback after silver got above 83 was just above 70. And ever since silver got above 80, it's never been below 70. Although it's gotten down there. I think the real support zone is 71 to 75ish. So that's probably the best place to buy it. But the problem is, I wouldn't wait for 71 or 72. I just buy it at 79.

Because here is the problem for long-term silver buyers. I'm talking about physical silver. I'm not talking about people who want to trade it on the Comx, you know, doesn't really matter. I'm talking about if you want actual silver delivered to your house like we do at Shift Gold, you just got to buy it now. And that's because I expect the premiums on silver products to sore in 2026. So you've got two things that are going to happen. You got the price of silver is going to go up, but the premium on the products, what you have to pay to actually buy a 1 coin or, you know, a bar is going to go way up because of the supply uh disruption. There's simply not enough physical silver being mined to meet the demand that we're going to see.

China already has an embargo. They're not exporting any silver and they're the world's largest producer. Investors are now starting to wake up to what's happening with silver and there's just not enough of it. So, the premiums are going to go up. Even if you get lucky and you wait for silver to pull back to 71 or 72, by the time it does, the spread or the premium that you have to pay on the products may have widened by so much that it's actually more expensive. So, I think if you're a physical silver buyer, you got to buy it now while the product is available, while we can get it. I mean, I have a feeling that later in the year we're going to be out of stock, right? Is you're going to want to buy physical silver. We're just not going to have it to deliver. That's going to be the problem. Or maybe we can get it to you, but the delivery times are going to be later. Right now, what I can tell you is

we've got the supply. We haven't had to really increase the premiums. So, it's available. Buy it. Buy it while it's available. Now, of course, if you don't need physical delivery, that's not as big an issue. And of course, I still think that everybody should open up an account with T-old. That is the part of Shift Gold that deals with the storage program that we're doing that we're going to build up to an e-commerce platform where you're going to be able to take delivery of tokenized gold and tokenized silver probably too. But right now, you can buy gold and silver and not take delivery and leave it on the T-old platform. So, you can do that too. But when you're buying for your own storage, for your long-term, you know, self-custody, you just got to buy.

Forget about the fact that it's $79, $80. Just be glad you can get it because silver is going to be very, very scarce very soon. And the price, I think, will be a lot higher. And again, this is not just a precious metals bull market. Copper got above $6 this week for the first time ever. So, it's it's it's all the market. Look at nickel. Look at zinc. Look at lead. I mean, prices are going up. And again, it's not just going to be metals. Agricultural commodities, I think, are going to really boom eventually. You're going to see oil go.

I mean, it's it's held these lower levels longer than I thought. Uh but even with what's happening in Venezuela, and I'm going to mention that later in in this u uh update, but I think that oil is looking strong and is is bottoming. But this is a inflationfueled uh commodity bull market, but also a supply shortage because of decades of underinvestment in capacity, in exploration, in development. So, it is a perfect storm if you're long uh precious metals, but it's a disaster if you need to buy them or if it will be uh for the industries that that need them. But right now, investors need to take advantage of the fact that the prices are still not anywhere near where they're going to be and we still have the supply on the gold and silver mining stocks. I think as good as last year was, it's possible that this year could be even better. That's how cheap these stocks still are.

So, I would buy them. Now, the best way to buy them right now is with my gold fund, the Europeacific Gold Fund. The symbol is EPGIX. That's the no-load symbol. My gold fund was only up, I don't know, it was about 120, I forget how much percent last year. It underperformed the GDX and GDXJ because about a third of my gold fund is in real junior miners, right? Not the big companies uh in the GDXJ, but real juniors, not mid-tier little guys. And they didn't have anywhere near the big move that the big ones did. But I think 2026 is the year they not only catch up, but they surpass the big mo the big stocks. Just like silver caught up and surpass gold in 2025, the juniors, the true juniors are going to catch up and surpass the seniors, I think, in 2026.

And the best way to play that move right now is with my gold fund. Europe Pacific Gold Fund, EPGIX is the way to buy that or contact the brokers at Europe Pacific Asset Management. We also do separately managed accounts in the mining stocks where we have significant waiting into these junior mining stocks. Now, what's going to be powering uh the precious metal bull market in 2026 is going to be ddollarization, inflation, uh and a highly accommodative Fed. We know that uh Trump I think he said he's made his decision on which of his flunkies is going to be installed to run the printing press uh in mid 2026 but they are going to run it uh non-stop. In fact, an indication of what Trump wants to do uh at the Fed uh was shown just this week with Fanny and Freddy uh the GSC's where Donald Trump is now ordering uh the GSC's to purchase 200 billion worth of mortgage back securities. Why does he want that? because he wants to

use government to reduce mortgage rates by buying mortgages, right? It's his own kind of mini QE run through the GSC's. Now, of course, where are the GSC's going to get the $200 billion? Well, I suppose they got to take it out of treasuries because where is that 200 billion? It's just not sitting, you know, in in in in cash. It it's probably in US treasuries. And so they have to sell those treasuries uh to buy um uh mortgage back securities or it's money that the uh GSC's would have given to the US government reducing the overall deficit and the amount of US treasuries that the government has to sell. But if now they're not going to get that money from Fanny and Freddy, they have to go into the market and borrow it. Uh so this is kind of like QE but what it is going to do is it's going to be inflationary and it is going to uh push up um rates on um government debt as it somewhat temporarily reduces uh mortgage rates.

It should do that in the short run. But this is an indication of of what's going to happen. And you know, by the way, you know, Trump's policies on housing are horrible. Not only trying to get more credit by having the government buy mortgages, right, which is of course, you know, one of the main reasons we had the 2008 financial crisis was because Fanny and Freddy were the biggest buyers of subprime mortgages and they helped to fuel that bubble. Um but Trump earlier in the week announced that he was going to ban um institutions, large institutions, and I don't know where they're going to draw the line, but he's banning large institutions from buying single family homes, right?

Because he thinks that they're driving up the prices by buying single family homes. I would agree that those buyers help support the price and without those buyers the prices will come down a bit. That that's probably going to be the case. But apart from the fact that this is completely unconstitutional, right? Trump has no regard whatsoever for the US Constitution. That's clear, right? I mean, the federal government has no constitutional authority to ban certain parts of the economy, certain buyers from buying single family homes if they want to. But what are large institutions doing with the single family homes that they buy? They are renting them out.

They are providing a service to a lot of people because there are a lot of people who want to live in a single family home. They just can't afford to buy one. And it's not just the price of the home, right? Or the mortgage rate. There are a lot of other costs that come with home ownership. I mean, I know I own a few homes. They're very expensive to maintain, right? Apart from your property taxes, the, you know, you got uh maintenance costs, you got insurance, right? Uh there there's a lot of stuff that comes with being a homeowner. A lot of people don't have the spare cash to handle, you know, the sudden expense.

you know, something happens to your roof, you know, you have a major problem with a house that requires 5,10,000, $20,000, and you're living paycheck to paycheck. You just don't have that kind of extra money to deal uh with with those things. You just assume rent. Let your landlord deal with it. The large institutions who are buying up these single family homes, they got plenty of cash for this stuff. In fact, they got plenty of cash to buy the properties. They don't even rely on a mortgage. They pay cash. They're buying the properties.

They're maintaining the properties and they are making them available to the public. Who needs a place to live? And also, there are a lot of people who want some flexibility, some mobility. They don't want to be tied down to a house because let's say you buy a house and let's say you need to move. What something happens, you know, you you know, you get a job offer in another state. Well, how you going to move if you own a house? You got to sell it. Try selling a house today. Takes a long time unless you're going to drastically reduce your price. But when you are a renter and you have a yearly lease, you could easily move. Worst case, you just pay out the rest of your lease. You know, that's not that much in many cases. Um or you just wait out the lease and then you pick up and move. Some people, you know, after a year lease, they go monthtomonth, you know, or maybe they have a year lease,

but they have an out, you know, just give your landlord, you know, 90 days notice and you can, you know, leave early or just pay a one month penalty to break the lease. I mean, that's nothing compared to what you pay a realtor to sell your house and how long it takes to actually find a buyer. So, what Trump is going to be doing if he actually gets away with banning institutions from buying homes is there's going to be a drop in the supply of single family rentals. And now what's going to happen to people who want to uh live in a single family home, but they can't afford to buy it. Well, I guess they're so or maybe they can stretch and buy a house that they really can't afford, right? because that's the only way they can get into a house now is to buy it and then they end up defaulting on the mortgage which is going to be government guaranteed. They end up defaulting because they they don't have the money.

They can't they can't pay all the expenses. So, you know, this shows you Trump not only doesn't understand uh the Constitution, doesn't understand economics, right? He knows a lot less about economics than he claims and others uh try to give him credit for. You know, the only solution to the housing affordability problem is not to try to find ways to help people overpay for homes by funneling more government credit into the mortgage market. It's letting home prices go down. That's the solution. But of course, that opens up a whole another can of worms. But it's this kind of hairbrain uh policy, demand, inflationary uh Keynesian type policies that are going to help power uh the gold and silver market uh in 2026.

Also, the weakness in the labor market. We did get the December non-farm uh payroll report. The jobs report came out today weaker than expected. I mean, they expected a weak report and it came out even weaker. Uh, the November report was also weak. Uh, that was 64,000 jobs created. That was revised down to 56,000. The consensus for uh December was 55,000 and that came in at 50,000. Right now, of course, all these numbers are probably too high. They're all probably going to be revised lower in the months ahead, but these are already weak numbers. And private payrolls only rose by 37,000 in December based on a 55,000 expectation. And the number of private sector jobs that were added last month originally reported up 69,000 that was revised down to up just 50,000.

Now of course you all these numbers are guesstimates anyway, right? Because there's no way they're exact, right? They're just guessing. They don't really know and I'm sure they're guessing high. But that's not a lot of jobs. You know, we're still creating a bunch of government jobs, right? Despite all the talk about all the government jobs we're getting rid of, we're still adding these non-productive government jobs. What we're losing are factory jobs. We lost 8,000 uh factory jobs in uh December, which was actually less than the 10,000 they thought we were going to lose. But we still lost jobs. And we lost jobs the month before. You know, Trump is saying, well, these tariffs are going to bring back manufacturing. There's no evidence of that in manufacturing. You know, we're still in a manufacturing recession despite the tariffs. Now, we did see a big drop in the trade deficit that was reported today. I think a lot of that

though had to do with gold, uh not so much uh real goods and services. So, we'll see what happens next month. But yes, imports are down about 3%. And part of that is because of the tariffs. But the reason that the tariffs are lowering imports is because prices are going up. Because foreigners are not eating the tariffs the way Trump promised, Americans are choking on those tariffs. And because tariffs are driving up costs for American consumers, they are naturally buying fewer imported products. Now, they're not necessarily replacing them with US products because we don't make the products. They're just doing without them. Uh that's what's going on. Now, it's also possible that very soon the Supreme Court is going to correctly throw out these tariffs. They are unconstitutional. Whether the Supreme Court rules that way or not, that is the proper ruling. Uh the problem uh is if the tariffs are ruled

unconstitutional, that is a fiscal problem because the government has been collecting tax revenue from these tariffs from the American public either from American businesses or from American consumers. But if they have to stop collecting that money or give it back, that is going to even worsen the current fiscal position of the US which is rapidly deteriorating. The deficits are rising over 3 trillion a year. Uh the national debt is now over 38.5 trillion will probably be over 40 trillion by the end of the first quarter of this year. We'll have a $40 trillion uh national debt. That is why uh the world is moving away from the US dollar into gold. Now what we haven't seen uh in the certainly not in the back half last year was a weak year for the dollar but the last quarter last half of the year the dollar was kind of flat and in fact the dollar index closed today at about a one-mon high uh back above 98.

But if you're looking at the dollar yuan, the Chinese yuan, the dollar is at a 2 and 1/2 year low today. It's back below 7 to1, but it's a 2 and 1/2 year low. This is significant for many reasons. But one of the ways, in fact, the main way that Trump's economic team described how China was going to eat our tariffs, it was going to be their currency was going to go down. And because their currency was going to go down, that was going to bring down the price that Americans would have to pay for Chinese products. So, Chinese were going to have a weaker currency to offset the impact of the tariffs. So even though the tariffs meant higher prices to Americans, a lower yuan meant lower prices because the dollar would go further. Well, the opposite has happened. The opposite of what Trump's economic adviserss said was going to happen has happened. Instead of the Chinese currency going down, right, so

that we got a bargain, it went up. So now, not only do Americans have to pay the tariffs to buy Chinese products, but now they have to pay more dollars to get the yuan to buy Chinese products. So it's a double barrel that the American consumer is getting hit with. But it also shows that China's winning the trade war. Their currency is going up. And even though China's exports to the United States have gone way down since Liberation Day, overall exports have gone up. They're just trading more with the rest of the world. They haven't missed a beat what Americans aren't buying. Europeans are or people in South America or people in other Asian countries. Or maybe more Chinese are buying stuff. Just the way I said. So, China didn't need the United States.

It's the United States that needs China. We need China for their products, and we need them to loan us the money that we need them to buy our treasuries. And that is the other big problem that you're going to have. Look at the yield on the 10-year Japanese government bond, over 2.1%. I predicted last year that the yields on the 10-year uh Japanese uh government bond would rise above 2%. They were less than a half a percent when I made the prediction. But rising yields in Japan is going to put a lot of pressure on the Japanese government to sell US treasuries. They are the largest holder of US treasuries right now. They're going to be selling. They're not buying.

And of course, the rest of the world is not buying treasuries. They're selling. They're buying gold. They're going to buy more gold. I think central banks will buy more gold in 2026 than they bought in 2025. Not just the central banks that have already been buying, but other central banks who stood by and didn't buy while other central banks did, they're going to buy, right? They're going to be fomoing into the gold because they're going to need gold as part of their reserves. I mean, gold last year replaced the um the treasuries as the largest reserve asset of central banks.

That is going to continue. That trend is a massive and important trend uh that is going to be going on and on for many many years. And that is also going to fuel demand for gold. But now you're also going to have um individual investors really stepping up their demand. They were pretty much absent last year. They're not going to be absent this year. This is going to be the year that Wall Street wakes up and discovers precious metals and the precious metals mining companies. Uh so everything is bullish and I think you know Donald Trump's foreign policy is also going to backfire just like the uh tariffs are backfiring alienate alienating our friends alienating the countries that we rely on to supply us with goods that we don't produce to loan us money that we don't save. Look, I I you know, I I have no love for Nicholas Maduro. He's a horrible guy, you know, uh you know, and and so the fact that

he's out of there, I guess is a good thing. But what's not a good thing is that Deli Rodriguez, who was his, you know, vice president, who was also very close with Chavez and his administration, she's now in charge. She's just as much a socialist as he was. I mean, are the Venezuelan people going to be any better off? Uh because it's the same government. It's not like, you know, the opposition is now in control or that there's been some kind of rebellion against socialism. Maybe they've rearranged the deck chairs, but the ship's still sinking. So, we'll see what happens. I don't like the fact that Donald Trump comes out and says that he's going to be running Venezuela or he and his team. I mean, his team isn't competent to run anything. I mean, the these guys don't understand uh, you know, economics. I mean, they're they're just trying to make money for themselves and their friends, as far as I can tell,

and they seem to be pretty good at that. Um, because he did uh bring a lot of people into his administration that have made a lot of money, so they know how to make money, but that doesn't mean they know how to run Venezuela. You know, it doesn't mean that they know how to run America. I mean, nobody should be running America or Venezuela or any country. the free market should be running the country. Those are the countries that succeed, where the politicians don't try to run them, where the politicians stay out. The reason that Venezuela is such a mess is because it was run by the government. And so, I don't know if our government's going to run it any better. Right? That is the problem. Governments can't run anything.

Look at how they run the post office. Do you think they do a good job with that simple thing? No. Anything that you task government to do, it's not going to do it well. It's going to cost way more than it should and the quality is going to be a lot lower than it should be. That's why you want the government to do as little as possible and you want the free market to do as much as possible. So, I would have much rather had Trump talk about liberating Venezuela from government, not changing the the the who who in government runs the country, but trying to return it to uh a free market.

But again, that's not even us. It's not even up to us. It's up to the Venezuelan people to do that. I mean, unfortunately, right, they voted themselves into this mess. They voted in socialism just like the idiots in New York voted for Maldani, right? And just like Americans have been voting for socialist programs for decades now, right? We do this to ourselves, right? We are our own worst enemy. That is the problem. But the adventurous foreign policy is going to backfire because it is going to lower uh credibility of America. And I think it is going to make other countries again question why they want to um embolden and empower the United States by using the dollar as the reserve currency by handing the United States this weapon which it then turns and uses against them. Because if it wasn't for the world supporting our currency, we couldn't afford this big military. Donald Trump is making a big

deal about how might makes right and how we've got the biggest, you know, stick on the block and, you know, it's our way or the highway, right? That's what he's saying. That's what he's talking about when he's talking about Greenland, right? Donald Trump, hey, we want Greenland. the US is going to acquire acquire Greenland, but he's saying that well, he'd like to buy it, but if the Danes don't cooperate and sell it to us or, you know, the the people of Greenland don't decide they want to join the United States, he's saying that military option is not ruled out.

Meaning, if we can't do a deal, we're going to invade you. We're going to occupy Greenland. we're going to send our troops into Greenland. Cuz that's basically what he's saying when he said, "Look, we're going to get Greenland. We'd like to buy it, but if we can't make a deal, I'm not going to rule out taking it by military force." What is he saying? And he's also basically trying to tell the people of Greenland or, you know, Denmark, I'm making you an offer you can't refuse. Right? because it's not a real negotiation if one party says, "Look, if we can't make a deal, I'm just going to take it by force and there's nothing you could do about it because we're the United States." That's what Trump is saying. He keeps talking about how powerful our military is. We could do whatever we want. Nobody could withstand us. Nobody could stand up to us, right? Because look, look at what we just did in Nicaragua. We could do this

anywhere, right? We we we we we you know they say yes you know he has been um indicted for crimes right but you're talking about a head of state I mean not a head of state that I you know like as I said but obviously if you go into a country and you basically kidnap their president even if you've convicted that president of some crimes that's an act of war right I mean because I mean any I mean what would We we think what if some Chinese court convicted Trump of something, right? And then they sent troops in here and they grabbed our president and they said, "Well, we're just here to arrest Donald Trump, right? It's just a legitimate arrest. He he was he was charged with a crime in China and so we came here to of course we would we wouldn't stand for that, right? So it is, you know, an act of war. And if you know if we can go there and grab the president of Venezuela, well then every president is

up for grabs, right? I mean, we could take whoever we want. So why are other countries going to enable this, right? If we're going to be the big bully. Yes. When the United States was just saying, "Hey, we're going to protect everybody. We're the good guy and we're just going to protect everybody." Uh maybe that was a reason to keep our military strong because we were just going to use it to protect everybody. But if we're going to take our military and use it offensively, if we're saying, "Hey, we're going to do what we want." You know, Greenland, you don't want to sell us Greenland, we're just going to take it, right? This is not a a good thing for the US government to project that this is how we're going to use this weapon, right? That the world has basically been paying for, right? And and so this is again going to provide more impetus for the world to move away from this system that has so empowered

the United States, created this monster now that is threatening to turn on on its on its creators. Uh and of course what is the message that we send to China about Taiwan? Like we make a big deal, hey, you know, you better not go into Taiwan, right? Well, we just went into Venezuela. We're running Venezuela. If that's the case, why can't China run Taiwan? I mean, you know, I mean, obviously they can say that, right? I mean, we have a one China policy. As far as we're concerned, China and Taiwan are one country, right? That that's that's China's uh position, too. So, I think to the extent we were worried about China doing something with Taiwan, the risk of that happening is now greater given that we've we've set a precedent and we're now threatening to go into into Greenland. I mean, what the hell is our right to claim that we can invade Greenland? I mean, we can't even pretend that it's about drugs and about drugs

coming into the country. Obviously, we're going into Venezuela for the oil. I mean, pretty much the only thing Trump's got to claim that inflation is down is gas prices. That's all he talks about. He wants to keep the price of oil down. So, he thinks that, you know, getting access to Venezuela's oil. I don't think it's going to do much because the infrastructure down there is a mess. I mean, why do you think Venezuela isn't already pumping more oil? Because they can't. They may have it, but it's not that accessible yet.

It's going to take years and years and a lot of money. Uh now yes the oil has been sanctioned so some of that oil is going to come on the market. Uh but I think it's going to be overwhelmed uh by a weak dollar and demand. But what is the justification for going into Greenland? We want it. We think it's in our strategic advantage. Well, China can say the same thing about Taiwan. Yeah, strategically we need Taiwan. We it's it's in our to our advantage. We have to have Taiwan back, right? I mean once you can claim that you get to do what's good for your people just because you can might makes right. Well then why can't China say the same thing? So all this is happening and by the way look America's drug problem is not the fault of Venezuela. It's not the fault of um uh Mexico or China or anybody. It's our own fault. We demand the drugs. the market is here, right? The the suppliers are just trying to satisfy demand that's

coming from the United States. You know, why are all the all the other countries of the world not having this problem? Why is it just America? They they just want to screw us over, but they don't care about screwing over anybody else. No, it's our fault and it's our ridiculous war on drugs, right? If drugs weren't illegal, then they wouldn't have to be smuggled in by a bunch of criminals. If drugs weren't illegal, they wouldn't be laced with fentanyl, right? You wouldn't have all these fentanyl overdoses if we decriminalized narcotics in the United States, right? They don't have this problem in countries where these drugs are legal. Right? Look, we learned from prohibition. What happened with prohibition? You know, we amended the constitution to make it illegal uh to uh consume alcohol and to distribute alcohol. At least back then, we understood that you needed a constitutional amendment to prohibit

alcohol. The same would be true for narcotics, right? The government has no more authority, the federal government, to make cocaine or marijuana or heroin illegal than it does to make liquor illegal. So that they should have had a constitutional amendment. But we don't. But when we passed that constitutional amendment, alcohol use went up. There were more speak easys in New York after prohibition than there were bars before prohibition. So even if it was well intended, even if the tea totallers, right, and all the people that supported the Volstead Act, if their motivation was drinking is bad and we want less drinking, so let's make it illegal. They actually accomplished the opposite. More people drank. They made it cool. They made it something that, hey, look at me.

I'm drinking, right? They more people drank. And they have all the evidence to show, you know, from other products that alcohol production went up during Prohibition. Now, the quality alcohol went down, right? You got shittier alcohol, right? Because it was made by criminals instead of legitimate companies. But there was more of it. But the other thing that happened during prohibition was organized crime. Crime went through the roof. Why? Because now there was a market for illegal alcohol. Who was going to fill that market?

Criminals. So you had all this crime that happened uh because of prohibition, which is one of the main reasons they got rid of it to get rid of the crime. That's the problem we have now. Why do we have all these drug crimes? Because we have drug laws. That's why we have the crimes. And what Trump is doing is going to make the problem worse. Cracking down on the criminals just makes the street price of the drugs even higher. And you create an even greater incentive for more criminals to smuggle it in to meet the demand and make the profit. And of course, the higher the price of of of drugs, the more cheap drugs you're going to get, the the more fentanyl that you're going to have, the more drug overdoses you're going to have. And of course, as you drive the illegal street price of drugs up, what happens to the drug addict? They need more money now to support their habit.

So, they have to commit more crime. So, now people who don't do drugs, right, never did drugs, they suffer more because now they get robbed more, right? And even if they don't get robbed, their insurance rates go up because their neighbor got robbed or whatever. So all this is bad. So Trump's policies, his drug policies are wrong. They're going to backfire and they're going to make the drug problem worse. More people will die, not fewer. He thinks he's saving lives uh by blowing up these boats. The drugs are going to keep coming in, right? You know where drug use is the most uh rampant percentage-wise in America? In prisons. prisons. Government can't keep drugs out of a prison, right?

If you can't keep drugs out of a prison where, you know, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, yet drugs are still making their way into a prison, how you going to keep it out of the United States with our vast borders, oceans, right? All this this it's an impossible task. The only smart move is to go in the other direction. The way you win the war on drugs is you surrender, right? You legalize the stuff, decriminalize it, take the power and the money away from the criminals and turn it into a health problem, not a law enforcement problem. And now it won't be as big a health problem because at least the drugs uh will be pure and uh and and you won't have all these overdoses associated uh with the way these drugs are produced because they are illegal. But anyway, so but the point I was making before I digressed into that into that talk is that this stuff is going to backfire. The Trump

foreign policy, the tariffs, the economic policy, the deficit skyrocketing. What's happening now is what I've been forecasting would happen for years, right? The real crash is coming. the one that I wrote about in my 2013 book, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy. It just took a lot longer than I thought. I expected the dollar crisis to happen much sooner after we launched QE following the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, it's going to happen now or after this coming crisis. This is the dollar crisis. This is the sovereign debt crisis. We're really in 2007.

We are around the corner from another major economic crisis. This one is going to lead to the dollar destruction and a collapse of the bond market. It should have happened over a decade ago. The fact that it didn't happen then means it's going to happen even worse now. And I think what really makes history rhyme, in fact, it's more like repeating. I was just watching on Larry Cuddlo's show the other day and he's talking about the greatest story never told about the booming Trump economy. That is exactly the way he described the George W. Bush economy in 2007. It was the greatest story never told. Yes. The story that wasn't being told except by me was how it was a major bubble and how we were headed for a financial crisis. Well, Larry Cuddlo and all of his Republican guests that were on, other than me, of course, I'm not a guest anymore, but everybody else, uh, was talking about how great the Bush economy was, and I

was talking about how it was a bubble and how we were about to collapse. Uh, and the same thing is going to happen again, right? It's the same Republicans who think everything is great because there's a Republican in the White House. Although he's kind of a rhino, Republican in name only because I'm not really sure what's so Republican about about Trump. Uh but Republicans voted for him. He's a Republican by party affiliation. You know, that's how he got into the White House. Uh but the economy is actually in worse shape now than it was under Bush. And the mistakes that we're making are probably even bigger than the mistakes that were being made back then. And we're going to make even bigger mistakes this year uh at the Fed and with our fiscal policy when we officially enter recession. You know, Donald Trump keeps talking about the fact that we have the booming economy, the hottest economy in the world, the

strongest economy in history. Meanwhile, the statistics don't bear that out at all. And of course, if the economy was so strong, the dollar wouldn't be this weak. Gold wouldn't be this strong. All the things that are happening would not be happening. The deficits wouldn't be exploding. If we had a strong economy, we'd have smaller deficits, right? The strong economy would be flooding the government with revenue, right? People would be in better shape. People confidence wouldn't be at record lows. Trump's approval rating on the economy wouldn't be near all-time record lows if the economy was really booming. Right?

The media wants to think that, well, there's a disconnect. You know, the voters just don't understand how great the economy is. No, they understand how lousy the economy is. The disconnect is the financial media. The disconnect is these BS government numbers that don't tell the real story. And you know, Trump understood that. That's why he got elected the first time by agreeing that government numbers were BS, right? Well, he was right as a candidate. He's wrong as president. he now hides behind and uses those same numbers he called BS to justify how great he claims the economy is. And of course, one of the things he constantly points to is the stock market. Yes, we're at record highs. Yes, the the S&P, the Dow Jones, and the Russell 2000 all hit new record highs this week. In fact, the S&P and the Russell 2000 hit new record highs today.

Only the Nasdaq didn't make a new record high on the week. The Dow is almost 50,000. And people think, "Oh, that's such a big number because, you know, it was 10,000 uh 25 20 26 years ago." Yes, it was. And gold was under 300 and now it's over 4,000. Silver was under five bucks and now it's $80. So yes, in terms of dollars, the Dow has gone up, but in terms of real money, in terms of gold and silver, the Dow has gone way down. See, that's one of the reasons that politicians love inflation because they can claim that we're getting richer even as we're getting poorer because it's easy to make the stock market go up if you're measuring it in currency where you destroy the value. So if you debase the dollar, oh look look at look at how expensive uh the the the Dow is. Yes, but look at how much more expensive gold is and how much more expensive silver is. Those trends are not only going to continue where US stocks continue to

fall priced in gold and silver, but they're going to fall even more. It's going to be an even bigger decline uh this year, I think, than last year. And maybe because instead of an up year in stocks, 2026 is a down year. Would not be surprised at all, especially in the NASDAQ to see the US stock market go down in a year where gold and silver continue to go up and where gold and silver stocks uh are are are up even more. Anyway, just want to wrap up uh today's uh podcast. You know, I'm doing this instead of doing the podcast that I would normally do uh on my regular channel. If you're not a subscriber to the Peter Shift Show uh regular YouTube channel or Shift Radio, make sure and subscribe to that uh as well. Um and don't forget, it's a long weekend again.

I'm going to say the same thing this weekend. I said almost every weekend last year, don't wait to Monday to buy your gold and silver from Shift Gold. Buy it Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday, Sunday morning. just anytime before Asia opens for trading Sunday night because I think uh we could see another huge move up in gold and silver on Monday. So don't wait for the crowd. Beat the crowd. Buy now. Don't forget about the new program uh at T- Gold to have some gold and silver that you can use as a medium of exchange. You could use as commerce. Set up a you know debank yourself and use real money instead of fiat money. Oh, and I totally forgot to mention I forgot to mention Bitcoin. I can't believe I was going to mention it. I'll mention it now because Bitcoin was down last year. Was down about 8%. Uh last year was the year that gold reclaimed uh the center stage. It had been upstaged by Bitcoin. No more. Uh Bitcoin

was down. And in fact, gold and silver are outshining Bitcoin again already in 2026. The big loser in 2025 was Micro Strategy down about 48%. It's barely recovered anything so far this year, a few percent. I think that stock's getting killed this year. I think it'll have a bigger decline in 2026 than it had in 2025 because Bitcoin, I think, could do a lot worse. And that's going to be why a lot of institutional money gets into gold and silver because they're no longer going to be distracted by Bitcoin. It's not so much that they're going to sell their Bitcoin because they don't really own it. But it was clouding the whole gold story.

People were thinking, why buy gold if Bitcoin is going to replace it? If Bitcoin is a new gold. So that kind of, you know, tainted the whole gold narrative. And yes, some people who did buy Bitcoin through Bitcoin ETFs, they're going to sell to buy some gold ETFs and to buy some gold stocks. The problem is only a few can get out because once I think a significant number of people try to sell, the market's going to implode. The bottom's going to drop out and so that money is just going to evaporate. But now gold is going to have the safe haven store of value uh story to itself. It's not going to be upstaged uh by Bitcoin. Last year uh was proof that Bitcoin is not digital gold or digital silver, but the market didn't react to it.

2026 is going to be the year where the Bitcoin is digital gold narrative falls apart. It was proven false last year and then investors are going to react to that proof this year. And I think those of you who are still holding and hoping uh aka the holders get out of your Bitcoin. In fact, you could use uh Shift Gold to do it. We do work with Bit Pay and we make it very easy to get rid of your fool's gold and buy real gold and silver or buy through T- Gold on the shift gold website. Also, it's going to be a great year I think for international stocks, foreign stocks.

You know, my dividend payer strategy and I have a fund at Europe Pacific Asset Management was the number one fund in its category last year up better than 62%. This is my basic dividend payer strategy, international dividend stocks. I think the years of US stocks outperforming foreign stocks are over. Uh this was a huge sea change in 2025. Massive shift. This is the beginning of something, not the end of something. So I think we have many many more years where foreign stocks will vastly outperform domestic stocks. If you're not currently a client of Europeacific Asset Management, if you don't have a managed account with me, if you don't own my funds, you really should do something about that. You should get an account set up. Go to our website at europac.com uh europ.com.

You can get all the information on all five of my mutual funds. You can call up the representatives at Europe Pacific Asset Management. Talk about our separately managed accounts. Talk about our RAP accounts. All of my mutual funds are also available no load at every major discount broker. So if you have a Schwab account, Fidelity, any of these companies, you can go in yourself and buy my funds. We manage them for you. I think we're perfectly positioned uh for the way the markets are going to trade in 2026. I think my sleeper fund is going to be my emerging market fund. The developed markets did do better than the emerging markets last year. That's probably not going to be the case this year. Uh so I think my emerging market fund uh could really end up being a big big uh gainer uh much more in 2026 than it was in in 2025. So again, you can get all the information there at europac.com.

And again, don't forget if you have not subscribed to our free newsletter at shiftsvereign, uh make sure and do that. Um we're probably going to be putting out a lot of excellent, excellent content, uh because there's going to be no shortage of economic, political, and financial news that is going to be coming out in 2026. The mainstream, of course, is going to get it completely wrong. They're not going to appreciate or understand the significance of anything. but we will lay it out cold in our free newsletters that are coming from ships sovereign. So all you got to do is go to shipsverign.com and sign up and you'll start getting multiple emails per week directly in your inbox. Anyway, uh bye for now and I am looking forward to a very profitable 2026 and I hope uh that everybody continues to not only watch these updates but share them with your friends. It's important that you help me spread the word. I need to reach as many

people as possible. I am fighting an army uh of of of of misinformation out there from the mainstream media. Uh so many people are are telling lies, it makes it difficult for the truth to get out there. And so with your help, I could reach a much wider audience. Bye for now.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Precious Metals Start 2026 With Strong Gains"?

In order: 0:00 Peter Schiff, Shift Gold; 10:00 Shift Gold; 15:00 Europe Pacific Asset Management, Europe Pacific Gold Fund; 45:00 Larry Cuddlo, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy; 50:00 Shift Gold, T-Gold; 55:00 Europe Pacific Asset Management, Shift Gold, T-Gold.

What is mentioned in this Peter Schiff episode?

7 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Shift Gold, Europe Pacific Asset Management, Larry Cuddlo, T-Gold, Peter Schiff, Europe Pacific Gold Fund. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Precious Metals Start 2026 With Strong Gains"?

The episode runs 59 min; the transcript is about 9,758 words in 67 timestamped sections.

More from Peter Schiff

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.