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Peter Schiff: The Fed Doesn’t Have Another Rabbit In Its Hat

Peter Schiff: The Fed Doesn’t Have Another Rabbit In Its Hat

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Peter Schiff: The Fed Doesn't Have Another Rabbit In Its Hat Tyler Durden Wed, 07/29/2020 - 13:30

Via SchiffGold.com,

Gold has rallied above its previous all-time record high this week. But can it sustain this bull run? Peter Schiff thinks it can and will.

It’s not about the coronavirus, as many mainstream analysts seem to think. It’s the government and central bank response to the pandemic — the borrowing, the spending, and the money printing. Peter believes that ultimately the Fed’s monetary policy is going to collapse the dollar and it will lose its reserve status. In this podcast, he talked about what this portends. He also explained why he doesn’t think the Fed can kick the can down the road again.

Peter has been talking about a looming dollar collapse for years. He admits he was wrong on the timing. He thought it would happen a lot sooner than this. But he doesn’t think he is wrong now just because he was wrong back then.

The problems are so much bigger now than they were a decade ago, and therefore, I think our ability to kick the can down the road again, I think is gone. I mean, yes, I underestimated that ability before, but at this point, it’s impossible. And so I don’t really see how the US government, the Federal Reserve, is going to stop gold from going up.”

Looking back, gold’s first major rally was in the 1970s when the price went from around $35 to over $800. At the time, Fed Chair Paul Volker’s willingness to get out of the way and allow interest rates to rise sharply to wherever the market was going to take them stopped that rally and kicked off a 20-year bear market in gold. “The Fed did what it took,” Peter said. “They did the right thing.”

The second gold rally started after the dot-com bubble popped and ended after gold set its previous record high just over $1,900 back in 2011. What stopped that? What caused gold to pull back from $1,900?

Somehow, they were able to convince the world and everybody who was worried that QE would end in disaster and that zero percent interest rates would be a failure – the Fed was able to convince everybody that the programs worked, and because they worked, they were temporary and would be ended, and that the Fed was going to start normalizing interest rates and shrink the balance sheet back down to pre-2008 crisis levels. And the market actually believed it.”

In effect, the Fed never had to raise rates to stop the gold rally. It just had to convince the world that it would raise rates.

Of course, the Fed never did normalize because it couldn’t normalize. When the central bank finally tried to slowly notch rates up, it broke the stock market in the fall of 2018. That led to the “Powell Pause” followed by three rate cuts in 2019 and the launch of a quantitative easing program that the Fed refused to call quantitative easing.

The other thing that kept the dollar propped up was the rest of the world slashing interest rates and running their own quantitative easing programs. The dollar got a lot of help from bad monetary policy abroad that made US policy look not as bad in comparison. As Peter put it, “We were the cleanest dirty shirt in the hamper.”

So here we are now. We have another big rally in gold that actually started in 2015 at just over $1,000 an ounce. Peter asks the operative question: what rabbit is the Fed going to pull out of its hat to stop the gold rally this time?

I think the hat’s empty. There are no more rabbits in there.”

Peter said that the Fed can’t raise rates like it did in 1980. The country can’t afford it. There is too much debt. There isn’t enough savings. And the Fed can’t pretend it’s going to raise rates like it did in 2008. Nobody will believe it.

So what are they going to do? Nothing. There is nothing they can do. Now, is there something that I haven’t thought of? I don’t know. Maybe. But obviously, since I can’t think of it, I can’t discuss it. So, is it possible that there’s a rabbit in there that I can’t see? Maybe. And so that’s why we’re not going to go all in. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. So, it is possible that there is a way to kick this can down the road again. I just can’t see it. But the bottom line is we don’t have to go all in. There is so much opportunity in the foreign markets, in the emerging markets, that just having an allocation in gold and gold stocks is all you need.”

Peter went on to talk about the mainstream talking points about this gold rally and the fact that people are actually starting to talk about the dollar losing its reserve status.

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International

Watch Yield Curve For When Stocks Begin To Price Recession Risk

Watch Yield Curve For When Stocks Begin To Price Recession Risk

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

US large-cap indices…

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May 31, 2023

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Watch Yield Curve For When Stocks Begin To Price Recession Risk

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

US large-cap indices are currently diverging from recessionary leading economic data. However, a decisive steepening in the yield curve leaves growth stocks and therefore the overall index facing lower prices.

Leading economic data has been signalling a recession for several months. Typically stocks closely follow the ratio between leading and coincident economic data.

As the chart below shows, equities have recently emphatically diverged from the ratio, indicating they are supremely indifferent to very high US recession risk.

What gives? Much of the recent outperformance of the S&P has been driven by a tiny number of tech stocks. The top five S&P stocks’ mean return this year is over 60% versus 0% for the average return of the remaining 498 stocks.

The belief that generative AI is imminently about to radically change the economy and that Nvidia especially is positioned to benefit from this has been behind much of this narrow leadership.

Regardless on your views whether this is overdone or not, it has re-established growth’s dominance over value. Energy had been spearheading the value trade up until around March, but since then tech –- the vessel for many of the largest growth stocks –- has been leading the S&P higher.

The yield curve’s behaviour will be key to watch for a reversion of this trend, and therefore a heightened risk of S&P 500 underperformance. Growth stocks tend to outperform value stocks when the curve flattens. This is because growth companies often have a relative advantage over typically smaller value firms by being able to borrow for longer terms. And vice-versa when the curve steepens, growth firms lose this relative advantage and tend to underperform.

The chart below shows the relationship, which was disrupted through the pandemic. Nonetheless, if it re-establishes itself then the curve beginning to durably re-steepen would be a sign growth stocks will start to underperform again, taking the index lower in the process.

Equivalently, a re-acceleration in US inflation (whose timing depends on China’s halting recovery) is more likely to put steepening pressure on the curve as the Fed has to balance economic growth more with inflation risks. Given the growth segment’s outperformance is an indication of the market’s intensely relaxed attitude to inflation, its resurgence would be a high risk for sending growth stocks lower.

Tyler Durden Wed, 05/31/2023 - 13:20

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COVID-19 lockdowns linked to less accurate recollection of event timing

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing…

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May 31, 2023

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Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing new insights into how COVID-19 lockdowns impacted perception of time. Daria Pawlak and Arash Sahraie of the University of Aberdeen, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 31, 2023.

Credit: Arianna Sahraie Photography, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing new insights into how COVID-19 lockdowns impacted perception of time. Daria Pawlak and Arash Sahraie of the University of Aberdeen, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 31, 2023.

Remembering when past events occurred becomes more difficult as more time passes. In addition, people’s activities and emotions can influence their perception of the passage of time. The social isolation resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns significantly impacted people’s activities and emotions, and prior research has shown that the pandemic triggered distortions in people’s perception of time.

Inspired by that earlier research and clinical reports that patients have become less able to report accurate timelines of their medical conditions, Pawlak and Sahraie set out to deepen understanding of the pandemic’s impact on time perception.

In May 2022, the researchers conducted an online survey in which they asked 277 participants to give the year in which several notable recent events occurred, such as when Brexit was finalized or when Meghan Markle joined the British royal family. Participants also completed standard evaluations for factors related to mental health, including levels of boredom, depression, and resilience.

As expected, participants’ recollection of events that occurred further in the past was less accurate. However, their perception of the timing of events that occurred in 2021—one year prior to the survey—was just an inaccurate as for events that occurred three to four years earlier. In other words, many participants had difficulty recalling the timing of events coinciding with COVID-19 lockdowns.

Additionally, participants who made more errors in event timing were also more likely to show greater levels of depression, anxiety, and physical mental demands during the pandemic, but had less resilience. Boredom was not significantly associated with timeline accuracy.

These findings are similar to those previously reported for prison inmates. The authors suggest that accurate recollection of event timing requires “anchoring” life events, such as birthday celebrations and vacations, which were lacking during COVID-19 lockdowns.

The authors add: “Our paper reports on altered timescapes during the pandemic. In a landscape, if features are not clearly discernible, it is harder to place objects/yourself in relation to other features. Restrictions imposed during the pandemic have impoverished our timescape, affecting the perception of event timelines. We can recall that events happened, we just don’t remember when.

#####

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278250

Citation: Pawlak DA, Sahraie A (2023) Lost time: Perception of events timeline affected by the COVID pandemic. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0278250. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278250

Author Countries: UK

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Journal

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0278250

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Lost time: Perception of events timeline affected by the COVID pandemic

Article Publication Date

31-May-2023

COI Statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare…

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May 31, 2023

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Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare sector. Specifically, they sought to automate the routine messages and calls that often lead to administrative burnout, like calls about scheduling, prescription refills and searching through physician directories.

Several years after graduating, Krush and Cohen productized their ideas with Hyro, which uses AI to facilitate text and voice conversations across the web, call centers and apps between healthcare organizations and their clients. Hyro today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Liberty Mutual, Macquarie Capital and Black Opal, bringing the startup’s total raised to $35 million.

Krush says that the new cash will be put toward expanding Hyro’s go-to-market teams and R&D.

“When we searched for a domain that would benefit from transforming these technologies most, we discovered and validated that healthcare, with staffing shortages and antiquated processes, had the greatest need and pain points, and have continued to focus on this particular vertical,” Krush told TechCrunch in an email interview.

To Krush’s point, the healthcare industry faces a major staffing shortfall, exacerbated by the logistical complications that arose during the pandemic. In a recent interview with Keona Health, Halee Fischer-Wright, CEO of Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), said that MGMA’s heard that 88% of medical practices have had difficulties recruiting front-of-office staff over the last year. By another estimates, the healthcare field has lost 20% of its workforce.

Hyro doesn’t attempt to replace staffers. But it does inject automation into the equation. The platform is essentially a drop-in replacement for traditional IVR systems, handling calls and texts automatically using conversational AI.

Hyro can answer common questions and handle tasks like booking or rescheduling an appointment, providing engagement and conversion metrics on the backend as it does so.

Plenty of platforms do — or at least claim to. See RedRoute, a voice-based conversational AI startup that delivers an “Alexa-like” customer service experience over the phone. Elsewhere, there’s Omilia, which provides a conversational solution that works on all platforms (e.g. phone, web chat, social networks, SMS and more) and integrates with existing customer support systems.

But Krush claims that Hyro is differentiated. For one, he says, it offers an AI-powered search feature that scrapes up-to-date information from a customer’s website — ostensibly preventing wrong answers to questions (a notorious problem with text-generating AI). Hyro also boasts “smart routing,” which enables it to “intelligently” decide whether to complete a task automatically, send a link to self-serve via SMS or route a request to the right department.

A bot created using Hyro’s development tools. Image Credits: Hyro

“Our AI assistants have been used by tens of millions of patients, automating conversations on various channels,” Krush said. “Hyro creates a feedback loop by identifying missing knowledge gaps, basically mimicking the operations of a call center agent. It also shows within a conversation exactly how the AI assistant deduced the correct response to a patient or customer query, meaning that if incorrect answers were given, an enterprise can understand exactly which piece of content or dataset is labeled incorrectly and fix accordingly.”

Of course, no technology’s perfect, and Hyro’s likely isn’t an exception to the rule. But the startup’s sales pitch was enough to win over dozens of healthcare networks, providers and hospitals as clients, including Weill Cornell Medicine. Annual recurring revenue has doubled since Hyro went to market in 2019, Krush claims.

Hyro’s future plans entail expanding to industries adjacent to healthcare, including real estate and the public sector, as well as rounding out the platform with more customization options, business optimization recommendations and “variety” in the AI skills that Hyro supports.

“The pandemic expedited digital transformation for healthcare and made the problems we’re solving very clear and obvious (e.g. the spike in calls surrounding information, access to testing, etc.),” Krush said. “We were one of the first to offer a COVID-19 virtual assistant that deployed in under 48 hours based on trusted information from the health system and trusted resources such as the CDC and World Health Organization …. Hyro is well funded, with good growth and momentum, and we’ve always managed a responsible budget, so we’re actually looking to expand and gather more market share while competitors are slowing down.”

Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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