"By and large, there are low tariffs around the world," so the global trade war that the President Trump has unleashed is unnecessary, investment manager Peter Schiff said on Newsmax's "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE" on Monday.

The U.S. trade deficit charts that Trump presented on "Liberation Day" at the White House on April 2 "were a complete fiction," asserted Schiff, aka "Dr. Doom."

Trump "made them up. There is no tariff reciprocity here," asserted Schiff, co-founder of Echelon Wealth Partners and a longtime critic of U.S. banking and credit policies.

"The tariffs are not the problem," Schiff said. "If we were to go to completely free trade today, which I am in favor of, our trade deficit would not go down because, as a nation, we don't save enough. You have to understand that the world has been subsidizing us, supplying us with goods that we can't produce because we don't have the capacity.

"If the trade deficits went away, our economy would implode because there would be nothing to buy," Schiff said.

Higbie countered that Trump's tariffs show the world that "America is serious, and we want fair trade. We literally just beat the world in a head-to-head matchup. We didn't blink, and we won. This morning, it was the world's entire economies versus the United States.

"Who buckled?" Higbie continued. "Most of the world, not us. We're back. This is a win, folks."

Furthermore, Higbie added, as a direct result of the tariffs, President Trump has prompted U.S. and foreign corporations to commit to $5 trillion in new U.S. manufacturing investments.

The U.S. does not have the capacity to replace international supply chains, Schiff argued, adding that it is the American consumer who will inevitably bear the brunt of the tariffs, not China or any of our other trading partners.

If Trump does not scrap his tariffs, Schiff said, they will send the U.S. stock market and corporate earnings down further.

Schiff maintained: "One of the reasons we have trade deficits is interest rates are too low. We need more savings in this country, so we actually need higher interest rates. If we keep artificially low interest rates, we are going to destroy the dollar and have hyperinflation, and then you will see a real economic disaster."

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