The Federal Reserve made its much-anticipated move on Wednesday, nudging up the key interest rate by a quarter point.

Peter Schiff did an interview with The Hard Line on Newsmax TV a short time later, reiterating what he was saying before the Fed’s announcement – the rate hike does not indicate confidence in the US economy.

In fact, Peter argued the economy is about to enter into another recession, and may in fact already be in the early stages of a downturn:

The only reason the Fed is raising rates is to try to show that they have confidence in the economy, but the reality is they have no confidence in the economy and they’re trying to cover up those fears with this symbolic rate hike. But they’re going to have to figure out how to reverse course, unfortunately. They’re going to be doing QE4 next year. They’re not going to be raising rates again.”

Last week, Peter explained how the Fed had backed itself into a corner and left itself with little choice but to raise the rate as a symbolic gesture. But economic data simply doesn’t support a rate hike. There is no improving economy. Peter noted last week that the Fed was already walking back its rhetoric and downplaying the prospect of increasing rates over the long-term. Pundits have called this first rate increase “the liftoff,” but Peter likens it to a hoverboard. He reemphasized this point to Newsmax:

I don’t think this is the beginning of the hiking cycle. This is the end of it. See, normally when the Federal Reserve begins to raise interest rates, they do it early in the recovery. The economy still has a lot of upward momentum, but the Fed has waited so long, this recovery is almost over. I mean we’re still practically at zero and that shows you how little confidence the Fed has in the economy that after supposedly seven years of recovery, that’s all we get. And again, we’re going to go back to zero very quickly.”