President Joe Biden recently made history by being the first sitting president to join striking autoworkers on the picket line.

Speaking through a bullhorn outside a General Motors Co. plant in Michigan, Biden voiced his support for the United Auto Workers union strike.

"Wall Street didn't build the country. The middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class. And that's a fact. So, let's keep going," he said. "You deserve what you've earned, and you've earned a hell of a lot more than you're getting paid now."

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While the striking workers responded with resounding applause, not everyone agrees with Biden's viewpoint on unions.

Among the critics is Peter Schiff, CEO and chief global strategist at Euro Pacific Capital.

"The fact is that capitalism built the middle class and racketeers built the unions," he wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter. "The middle class would have been far better off without labor unions."

As part of the UAW strike against Detroit's Big Three, approximately 13,000 autoworkers walked off the job on Sept. 15. The union expanded its strikes on Sept. 22.

While Schiff is a vocal critic of Biden's stance on unions, his concerns for America extend beyond labor issues.

A Crisis ‘Much Worse' Than 2008

In a separate post on X, Schiff wrote, "The financial crisis we are about to experience will be much worse than anything that happened in 2008, yet Wall Street and the Fed are even more clueless now than they were then."

That's a scary outlook — especially coming from a man who successfully predicted the financial crisis of 2008.

According to Schiff, banks' residential mortgage portfolios are in substantially worse financial conditions today than they were in 2008.

"Back then banks only lost money on the small percent of borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages. Now banks are losing money on every borrower who pays their mortgage on time," he said.

Schiff explained that the problem is not with defaults like the last financial crisis — but rather the mortgages themselves. He said banks "would actually be better off with more defaults" because it would allow them to "tear up the 3% mortgages and resell the houses at higher prices with 8% mortgages."

In other words, it's about interest rates.

So where should investors look?

Schiff said that if Wall Street and the Federal Reserve "had any clue as to the magnitude of the impending disaster, gold prices would be soaring."

The renowned financial commentator is putting his money where his mouth is. According to the latest 13F filing from Schiff's Euro Pacific Asset Management, it held 1,813,765 shares of Barrick Gold Corp. (NYSE:GOLD) as of June 30. With the position valued at $30.28 million at the time, Barrick was the largest publicly traded holding in the portfolio.

At the same time, Euro Pacific also held shares of Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. (NYSE:AEM), Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd. (NYSE:OR) and various other companies that can benefit from higher gold prices.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons