Market analyst and financial guru Peter Schiff says that the United States economy is headed for a disaster.  In a recent interview, Schiff said that when the dollar goes away as a reserve currency, so will the American standard of living.

Schiff says the U.S. is flexing more muscle than it has.  After the arrest of Huawei chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese businessman who is accused of violating U.S. sanction laws, the Chinese are already planning economically destructive ways to reduce the dollar’s influence and power.

“The dollar, having the reserve currency, that status is in jeopardy. And I don’t think the world likes giving America this kind of power that we can impose our own rules and demand that the entire world live by it. So, I think this has a much bigger and broader ramifications other than what’s going on in the stock market today. I think long-term, this is going to undermine the dollar and its role as a reserve currency. And when that goes, so does the American standard of living because it’s going to collapse.” –Peter Schiff

Schiff added that he thinks China is in a much better position than many are willing to admit.

“People think we have the upper hand because we have this huge trade deficit with China. But I think it’s the other way. I think the fact that they supply us with all this merchandise that our economy needs, and the fact that they hold a lot of our bonds and continue to lend us a lot of money so we can live beyond our means, they’re the ones, I think, that call the tunes and we have to dance to it.” –Peter Schiff

 

There is a growing movement around the world to create alternatives to the global dollar system. The Russians have developed a money transfer system that could one day compete with SWIFT, and even the Europeans have announced plans to develop a special payment channel to circumvent U.S. economic sanctions and facilitate trade with Iran.

When RT‘s host told Schiff that China was “wobbly” right now, Schiff said that the U.S. economy isn’t exactly rock solid, despite the media’s talking heads declaring it as such.

“I was listening to the broadcast before I came in and you talked about how the U.S. economy was sailing along. It wasn’t sailing anywhere. It was blowing up like a gigantic bubble. That’s what was happening. And now the air is coming out. We are headed for a much worse financial crisis than the one we experienced in ’08, and we are headed for a much greater recession than the one we lived through following that crisis – the one we call the ‘Great Recession.’ And what’s going to make it so much worse is it’s going to be inflationary. Consumer prices are going to be going up as the economy is going down.” –Peter Schiff

But that’s not even the worst news. Because of all of the problems being underscored by so many, the collapse of the dollar and the American standard of living that will follow aren’t even a concern for most. But the bubble is bursting, according to Schiff, and the market will go so much lower.

“This is a bear market. That’s why the market went down. If it wasn’t that, they would have found another excuse. If we were in a bull market, I think the market would have shrugged it off. So, we’re going lower.”