Obamacare is Blowing Apart, As Predicted

In his latest blog post, the frequent critic of the Federal Reserve seized on the negative Obamacare headlines — Aetna shuttering exchanges, surging costs, reported layoffs due to the national health plan. He said they're to be expected when the government ignores market realities and overreaches.

"After only four years of operation, there is now wholesale defection by insurance companies to abandon the Obamacare marketplace because they are hemorrhaging money faster than just about anyone predicted," said Schiff, who pointed to this post four years ago in which he said there would be trouble. "To believe that any other outcome was possible would have been the equivalent of believing in the Tooth Fairy."

The founder of Euro Pacific Capital has long been predicting doom for Fed stimulus as well. In seeking to pull the economy out of the 2008 financial crisis and accompanying recession, the central bank has kept interest rates anchored and instituted three rounds of quantitative easing, a monthly bond-buying program that ended in October 2014 but not before it expanded the Fed's balance sheet by about $3.7 trillion.

While the stock market is up about 225 percent since the March 2009 lows, the economy has struggled. Inflation has remained low and gross domestic product has never grown more than 2.5 percent for a full calendar year.

Throughout the recovery Schiff has been predicting it will end badly, and he has been a strong proponent of gold. He believes his warnings will prove prescient. Asset prices, he has said repeatedly, are in a bubble that soon will pop.

- Source, CNBC

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