Peter Schiff digs under the surface of the latest economic data. As usual, Wall Street locked onto the headline number last week, which showed the lowest weekly jobless claims in 42 years. Peter asks the question no one else will — is this really the strongest economy America has seen in four decades?
Highlights from the podcast:
“The markets continue to ignore or maybe they’re embracing the bad economic news that keeps coming out, [with] the S&P closing the week at a new record high. The Dow Jones just barely off a record high. While the stock market continues to rise, the dollar continues to fall broadly on the week. In fact, the euro is now about $1.14…”
“The entirety of the dollar rally was based on a fantasy… Even though all this bad economic news is coming out, the currency traders haven’t fully accepted what it means. If they did, the dollar would be a lot lower than it currently is. The trend now seems to be in place for a lower dollar. As more and more bad news comes out, expect the dollar to get hammered…”
“The weekly jobless claims plunged in the prior week, and people were expecting a bit of a rebound from the 265,000 claims submitted in the prior week. The consensus was a bounce back to 276,000. Instead, we went down another 1,000 to 264,000. This is the lowest number of weekly jobless claims in 42 years. So this got everybody excited: ‘We’ve got a great economy, we’ve got a great labor market, because nobody is getting fired.’ …”
“On the surface, maybe that is good news. But I want to try to look beneath the surface and ask the questions that nobody else does. Why is it that so few people are being fired? Is this labor market so strong that it’s stronger than anything in 42 years? Not at all. So why are so few people getting fired? I think the answer is so few people are getting hired. You can’t get fired from a job until you get hired on the job in the first place…”
