I've Never Seen Anything Like This in SILVER – 'Demand is RELENTLESS': Keith Weiner
Summary
Silver Market: Guest highlights unprecedented silver backwardation, refinery hedging constraints, and persistent physical tightness pointing to likely higher prices ahead.
Monetary Metals: Argues silver and gold are reasserting monetary roles, with high stock-to-flow and global jewelry-as-savings behavior (India, Middle East) underpinning demand.
Gold Outlook: Discusses central bank accumulation as a psychological tailwind and hedge against policy/geopolitical risk, while emphasizing gold’s monetary primacy.
Precious Metals Demand: Notes substitution from gold to silver during festivals and the prevalence of weight-priced jewelry, reinforcing steady, investment-like demand.
Market Dynamics: Warns that broader mainstream adoption could introduce high volatility, with leveraged flows amplifying price swings in precious metals.
Macro & Policy: Frames risks around deteriorating monetary quality, deficits, and politicized economies, advocating free-market, sound-money orientations.
Companies Mentioned: Nvidia (NVDA), Intel (INTC), and Binance were referenced contextually, but no individual equities were pitched as investments.
Overall Perspective: Constructive on silver and supportive of gold as monetary assets, with the view that we remain early in a longer precious metals cycle.
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome into commodity culture where we break down commodities markets, sound money principles and geopolitics all with the goal of making you a better investor in the commodities sector. Today is December 8th, 2025. My name is Jesse Day and I'm excited to welcome Keith Weiner to the program. An economist, sound money advocate, and CEO of Monetary Metals. Keith points out that recent backwardation in the silver market where prices today are higher than silver in the future is an unprecedented event in silver's history that exemplifies tightness in the market that could send prices surging. We also discuss why silver's monetary role is reestablishing itself in a major way and driving what Keith refers to as relentless demand. And you're going to want to stick around to the end of the interview where Keith issues a dire warning for the future of humanity if we don't get our sound monetary house in order. And speaking of getting things in order, how about ordering the latest commodity culture t-shirt design? Stack silver, not fiat. I put a lot of effort into this design. It's a shirt for silver stackers. You have the Commodity Culture logo on the back as well. And if you want to order it by the holidays, put in your order today. The link is in the description below. And now on to the interview. Keith Weiner, great to have you back on Commodity Culture. I want to kick things off by discussing the silver market. With the metal soaring to new all-time highs this year, currently sitting at around $58 an ounce. Inflation adjusted, we're still a long ways from real all-time highs. But what are your thoughts on silver's recent price action and do you think the metal is still undervalued at these levels? Well, undervalued is an interesting question, but um you know, we we heard a lot of discussion from um our you know, Indian friends and Indian jewelers that with the price of gold being what it is um for Dvali in particular, which is the big Indian festival or Hindu festival I guess I should say, um a lot of the buyers who would have been buying gold at lower prices substituted silver and so they just couldn't didn't get enough silver and um something happened in the silver market that I haven't seen uh that I can recall seeing in in uh maybe ever certainly decades which is this huge backwardation in silver. Um, so now that created an interesting the only way to put this is that in its death rows in of of of the monetary system and I think that's what we're witnessing people people t tend to say well how could it be the death rows because GDP's up and the stock market's up and hyperinflation isn't happening but you're looking in all the wrong places. So here here's what happens. So silver becomes scarce to the market. That's what backwardation means. Um, so if you the worst of it on October 10, I believe it was, if you um, you know, bought an ounce of silver and sold it forward to a December contract, you would lose $2.15 cents an ounce. That's massive, right? For just, you know, two months. Um, that's massive. That that worked out to 20% or something annualized. So um you know scarcity to the market because India and obviously a lot of others were buying it not so much here in the west right the premiums and you know the dealers will tell you the premiums on silver eagles way down um you know compared to what it had been during let's say the co you know height at much lower silver prices. So um but anyways the the demand for the metal was relentless. Now, you would think if the demand for metal is relentless, the primary suppliers of that metal to the market would be producing as much as they possibly could. And the producers uh who supply the market are the refiners. The refiners were saying, "No, we don't we don't want to take any raw material. We don't want to take Dory. We don't want to take scraps over." So, a lot of people um you know remember both the 1980 peak and the 2011 peak where silver almost hit $50 but not quite. There were a lot of people that had a limit order essentially at 50 that said if it gets to 50 that's it. I'm turning in all the silverware. I'm turning in all the tea sets and the platters and everything else. We never use that for more than you know Ritz crackers and Velvita anyway at this point. you know, I'm going to turn all that in for $50. And um obviously now we've hit it. And so um the refiners were turning it away. And why would they do that? Because the cost of hedging, I mean, if you're a refiner, you don't buy silver, especially big lots of scrap that's going to probably sit for a couple weeks before you can really process it. You don't buy that unhedged. Um you know, let alone at at $50. You know, the the risk is high that that could be $40. they lose, you know, what is that 20%. So, they have to hedge it. Now, the cost of hedging $2.15 on on the worst of it. Um, means that it's unprofitable to take the silver. It actually costs more to hedge than the refining margin. You know, refiners do not make $2.15 an ounce in silver. So, uh, they're turning it all away. So, the market is in scarcity. It's in shortage, and the primary producers are turning away the raw material to make more. That is very perverse and that is something that is very monetary and it's it's you know one more sign that the monetary system is is crumbling around the edges. There's failure there. You know cracks fissures are forming um and and weird little things like that are happening and people don't pay attention to it. This has greater significance because this is a monetary metal. This is not copper. This is not aluminum. This is not unoptanium. you know rare rare metals that are used in whatever you know chemical reactions. This is one of the two monetary metals silver and um the market demanded more and the suppliers were uh perversely disincentivized from producing it. Now that's that's settled. That was just looking at the silver uh you know forward rate. It is definitely lower than it had been. Silver is definitely scarcer although the immediate crisis uh is gone. Um we'll see where it goes next. um I think more than more likely than not higher silver prices in the future versus lower. >> So do you think silver is you reestablishing its role as a monetary metal if it ever lost it at all? Because in the West I think it's viewed more as an industrial metal. Um if you ask your average person if they think silver is money on the street for example, they're probably not going to realize that. They're going to view it more as a an industrial commodity. In fact, I've spoken to people on this show before who said silver is now strictly an industrial commodity. It no longer has its monetary properties that it used to have. Um, but obviously, as you mentioned in India and many other cultures view it very differently. Do you think this is something the West is starting to wake up to? Do you think the monetary value versus the industrial is what is currently driving demand? >> Yeah, I was going to say the first question is is the West waking up to the monetary metals period. Um, so I have two two amusing thoughts. One, I may have said it on your show before. I know I've said it many times. I travel all over the world and I'm an American and I think I get to say that Americans understand gold least of any culture. Um, and you know less than 1% of Americans own any. So, um, that's just the reality of it. But the amusing anecdote is I've spoken with um, you know, I say both of the leading, you know, data analytics firms. that study the precious metals markets and um they both tend to sort of separate. You know, you have jewelry demand and investment demand. Well, in most of the world those are the same. You ever see that meme that goes around, corporate wants you to tell the difference between these two pictures and the lady's like they're the same. They're the same. You walk into any jewelry store in Dubai, I shouldn't say any, they have the same Tiffany's kind of stuff that you have in the west, but any of the Athnic jewelry stores, you know, Dubai, Istanbul, um, you know, Qatar, Saudi, whatever, or in India, the jewelry is tagged by the weight in grams. And you pay for the weight in grams times the current gold price, and they have a helpful screen right there in the store, so everyone knows what the gold price is in real time. And then they say, you know, 5% making charge or whatever, and the making charge is low. You know, in in the West, you go into a Tiffany's or Christian Dior or whatever, and you buy three and a half grams of of gold for $17,000. That's not investment. You're buying art and the brand, and you know, it's like Louis Vuitton handbags or whatever. But um you know, most of the buyers of gold is of course 1.4 billion Indians are all buying gold. Everybody in Turkey is buying gold. Um most of the of the Arab world is buying gold and has gold as part of the portfolio. Um the jewelry is they don't make a distinction. That's that's what makes it money. So my view of what makes something money, you know, when people say it's demonetized or whatever, usually they mean it's not a medium of exchange. So they kind of have a frozen abstraction where medium of exchange means money and money means medium of exchange. Money can can be a medium of exchange but that's not the concept of money. And so I would say money is the most marketable commodity and silver is the most marketable in the small. So, if you want to save $50 a month in precious metals, it's heck of a lot more practical, not to mention emotionally satisfying to get an ounce of silver in the hand versus a little fleck of gold that you would lose in the lint if you tried to put it in your pocket. Um, so, uh, it's it's it's the commodity of of greatest marketability, which is the term coined by Manganger, the founder of the Ashing school. uh also or or the uh a mirror image of that or the or another facet of that I should say is the uh the commodity with the highest stocks to flows which is gold by far and then silver uh the second one and nothing else is even remotely close to silver. Now if silver is truly in deficit or truly being consumed down then that would be the evidence that it's being demonetized. If silver has stocks no greater than that of copper, crude oil, platinum, whatever, then I would say yeah, it's been totally demonetized. That's not the case at the moment. Will that be the case? It's possible. I think the jury and there's at least an argument for I don't think that's going to happen, but there's an argument for it. So, um, silver has a significant industrial component to it. Uh but uh I was on a stage with uh Philip Newman of Metals Focus and they're they're a firm that does um a lot of analysis and provides a lot of primary data. So I think they provide the data for the silver institute like on total above ground stocks and I know they provide some data to the world gold council for gold and um so that particular time Philip was looking at silver and he said how does silver trade? Does it trade like a commodity? pulled up crude oil. This would trade like a base metal. He pulled up copper and showed there was really no good correlation between the silver price and the prices of those two things. Then he pulled up gold and lo and behold, silver trades like gold. So you want evidence that it's a monetary metal. Now I have one other bit of evidence and if I was an academic and I had the time and the energy which I'm not and I don't I think I would write this um as a as a paper for a peer-reviewed journal uh which is so we do gold leases and silver leases uh that's what monary metals does and um when we do a gold lease you know so we and and it's it's depositors who deposit the metal um so when we do a gold lease we pay the interest in gold and we do a silver lease to pay interest in silver. We had a good customer who wanted a platinum lease. So we went to our uh you know depositor side and which we didn't have any deposits of platinum we didn't didn't deal with it said okay we got a platinum opportunity how many people would be interested in it and you know it was like five times overs subscribed okay we'll do the platinum lease right so we impact everybody here's the following question um we said okay in a silver lease we pay interest in silver and a gold lease to pay interest in gold and a platinum lease would you like interest in gold or would you like it in platinum? Now, before I reveal the answer to that, I will just point out that number one, the um the answer was unanimous. Every last one said the same answer. And they don't know each other. And unless somebody introduced a friend or a brother to open an account, they wouldn't know each other and have no way of talking with each other. Maybe a few one or two people here and there, but they didn't, you know, they didn't coordinate their answer. And they all agreed on the answer. Now that answer was gold. So the silver people absolutely of course wanted the interest in silver. The platinum people wanted the interest in gold unanimously. So I think we proved platinum is not money. Right? People do not want to be paid the rental on platinum which is property or something else in in the form of platinum. They want it in the form of money which is gold. But the silver people are happy to take interest in the form of silver. And so that would be an interesting paper to submit to a peer-reviewed journal in monetary science if such a thing existed and make that argument. And so I would say yeah, silver still behaves this money. It's not a medium exchange um other than in certain circles. Actually I have one other story about medium exchange. I've been meaning to talk about this. So, I visited a jewelry wholesaler uh in Dubai and u they're taking me a little tour of the office and we go into the room and this is the room where they the buyers or the jewelry retailers, you know, everything is counted and measured and weighed and whatever. And they have a giant pair of bolt cutters. I mean, this thing was like longer than a meter. I mean, I I pick it up. This must have been 20 kilos. I mean, it's pretty heavy. So they had I had them take a picture of of of me holding this thing and I said, "Man, you must have some seriously high security padlocks. You have to cut with this thing." He said, "Oh, no, no. We use that to cut bars." What? Well, yeah, we cut kilo bars with that. Now, I've been writing about this, Jesse, for you know, 15 years about inconvenience of large bars, the tragedy of when the UK went back on the so-called gold standard after World War I. and they said it's all 400 ounce bars, which is still the standard today. That was chosen to be highly inconvenient. And I've always said, look, gold is really soft. I mean, you could take a pocket knife out and cut a corner of a gold bar off. That's not hard. But then the bar loses all of its integrity. You don't really know what it weighs anymore. And then the little sliver you hacked off. What is that worth, right? So, nobody would do that. This is insane. So, sure enough, these guys are cutting kilobars with a giant bolt cutter, which I held in my hands. Now, why would you be cutting kilo bars? Because the the the jewelry retailers, that's how they pay for the jewelry. They pay in kilo bars and they have to make change. So, I said, "How accurate is that?" I mean, you know, where where exactly on the bar do you cut? Well, you know, we got it pretty close. We're going to be pretty accurate. And then any any uh uh difference will hold as a credit or a debit and, you know, the next time they do an order, we'll settle up. So yeah, like so they cut kilo bars and gold is a medium exchange at least in limited uh you know circumstances. >> The sponsor of today's episode is Arc Silver Gold Osmium. Owner Ian Everard is praised even by his competitors as one of the most honest and level-headed bullion dealers in the United States. They have some great prices. You can see some of them displayed right now on screen. Take advantage of these specials today by reaching out to Ian at 3072649441 or by email at ianarchcsggo.com. Make sure to tell them of course that commodity culture sent you. And now back to the interview. Yeah, some great observations there. One statistic that does get thrown around a lot, including with a lot of guests I talk on this show is the gold silver ratio. Currently around 70, meaning 70 ounces of silver worth 1 oz of gold. I've heard people say it comes out of the ground at 7:1 and so should eventually head much lower. Would you agree with that? And is the gold to silver ratio something you even consider when evaluating precious metals or is it more noise than signal in your view? >> Definitely important to look at. Um anyone anyone who bets that it's going to go to seven good luck to you, man. Uh you know, I mean I suppose anything's possible, but uh wow. Um, it's interesting to me that the gold silver ratio, you know, with big swings still remains kind of in a range. It's not unbounded like oil to gold or anything else. Um, but um, you know, it's so tempting, it's so convenient to think in terms of quantity, right? So people think the gold price should be take whatever your favorite measure of the money supply is M2 or something like that divide by the number of gold ounces either in the market total or that the Fed has on behalf of the Treasury which is 8,000 tons. You know to me this is numerology. This is like the size of my left foot in millimeters divided by the amount of horsepower that my car has you know times the number of stars that were visible on the night when my son was born. It's like, yeah, okay, you can do these arithmetics of these numbers, but it doesn't, what does it really mean? So, a monetary metal has enormous stocks. Now, think about that. So, I I had a debate I was invited to debate um Pierre Roshard about Bitcoin versus gold at the Soho forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, and they were the ones who published the video with a little bit of voiceover about it. And um you know the bitcoiners are very much quantity served money and they keep touting 21 million like that proves anything. Now the tw the quantity is capped until the incentives change but what does that have to do with the value? And I I said there's one observation that we can make that is um well two observations that that that lead to you know the proof positive that the quantity theory is bunk. The first is that gold is not really consumed. It's too expensive to just throw away. And even like, you know, your iPhone when you're done with it, you know, that thing is recycled. I mean, lithium has value, the glass has value, and the circuit board has value because there's a few micrograms of gold on it. And it's and gold has always been that way. It's not thrown away. If it's cast into something people don't want anymore, I don't know, candalabra, that's melted down and it becomes something else. And so gold is not really consumed. Virtually all of the gold mined in in 6,500 years of human history is still in in human hands. And then number two, we keep producing more of it. Which means if the value of the marginal unit is diminishing, if it's diminishing at all, it's not diminishing very much. After 6,500 years of everinccreasing accumulation of stocks, we haven't found any apparent limit where you know marginal utility is less than marginal cost and mining would stop. There's no such thing as a glut and gold as there is in any other commodity including all the important ones oil etc. all had glut markets from time to time. The concept of glut is inapplicable to gold and to silver. Um and so I think that that shows okay you can't figure out the value of the thing by figuring out its quantity. And same thing by the way with the US dollar. If the value of the currency unit was one over n where n is the number of units the dollar would be not only the least valuable currency it would be by far by country mile the least valuable. And that's certainly I mean certainly not the case. It may not be the highest, you know, value, you know, price of currencies out there, but it's definitely um the most valued currency as as an overall thing by again by country mile. And so, no, even if the ratio that silver comes out of the ground, and I don't I I mean, I don't I I can't say yes to that number or no to that number. I just don't study that. Um, but even if that were true, that wouldn't necessarily mean this 7 to1 ratio because the value on the on the market has nothing to do with the abundance of I always joke and say, you know, Keith Weiner paintings uh are very are very very rare. I mean, I must have done a few fingerprinting fingerprint paintings when I was in kindergarten, but I'm not an artist. I haven't done paintings. I haven't produced any paintings. And therefore, if you found one of those old kindergarten fingerprints, uh, you know, that my mom would have had on the refrigerator with a magnet way back in the day, it's okay. This thing is super super rare. Therefore, it should sell for billions of dollars. I guarantee you there's no market for that. It's not going to sell for anything at all, right? And so, uh, that's not how value is set uh, in markets. So 7 to1 I I don't think we're likely to see 15 to1 which is close to the historic ratio let alone you know half that. No I don't think so. >> I want to discuss >> Oh go ahead. >> I said I'll get some gut for that as I did talking one and I said we're not going to see it. >> Yeah that there there's some great examples that you provided there though. Um so I think that's a different way people can think about it. Central bank gold buying. Obviously, this is another thing that's taken up headlines a lot when it comes to discussing the gold market. How significant of a factor do you think central bank buying has been to the gold price in your view? And what are the reasons you believe they've been accumulating? Obviously, the theories out there are of course removal of counterparty risk. That's the big one. Since the US with its allies froze Russia's FX reserves when they went into Ukraine, that woke a lot of people up. A lot of countries realized we need an asset free of counterparty risk. Others perhaps more conspiratorial-minded would say they're aware that there's some sort of monetary reset coming involving gold and so that's why they're stacking gold at such a rapid pace. I wonder what your thoughts are. So um you know the US and its allies seized Russian real estate planes, boats, cars, artwork, stocks, bonds, and yes, treasury bonds. Oh, therefore that means the US is is on war path and it's going to take everybody to treasury bonds. The world is not ddollarizing in that sense. Um, but I I think that it's it certainly made people aware of a risk that they hadn't thought about before. In this case, the risk is, you know, if you invade a neighboring country, um, you know, that the world might might treat you as a pariah and the US might actually take your treasury bonds away. Uh, but I do think that and and I've said this many times, you can't retroactively declare a an irredeemable currency to be goldbacked. Um, you know, in in a in a proper goldbacked monetary system, the people have the gold and they deposit the gold and get a piece of paper because the paper has utility that the gold doesn't. One thing is small denominations and then there's a lot of others. So, you know, for convenience, people, you know, they may hold physical gold in a certain amount and and they're certainly free to do that, but the monetary stuff is mostly in the banking system and they get paper for it. So, every bank deposit and every currency slip uh begins begins life as a deposit where people give up their gold and and get this piece of paper in return. Um, today there are no currencies that began life as a gold deposit. I mean the dollar was once gold deposits but all the dollars that are circulating today were all irreumable. So if you wanted to say now it's dollar is goldbacked at you know pick some magic price $5,000 $50,000 whatever you know for ounce uh you know you'd have two problems. One is that would be the biggest lobbying orgy ever as all the creditors would line up on one side. The creditors would want a low gold price because that means they get more gold for the same amount of dollars of debt. And all the debtors would want a very high gold price because that means they can get out of debt, you know, cheaply. And how could you resolve that? I have no idea. That seems intractable other than political, you know, caprice. I guess that's the first problem. The second problem is that none of these dollars began life as a gold deposit. And therefore, if you now say, "Well, they're backed um you you you're sooner or later, and obviously depending on the price you set, sooner or later, you'll have a run on the bank and all the gold will be pulled. It's a price fixing scheme. Just ask any Banana Republic or uh Thomas Jordan of the Swiss National Bank uh what happens when the market moves against you in a big way and you're trying to fix the price. You get overrun. It's a zombie apocalypse, man. I mean, you know, there's one of you and there's 20,000 of them and they will push that door down and you're going to go under the door as the horde, you know, rolls over you. Um, so you know, you can't you can't mechanically do that. Now, what are they doing? I think number one, they see the price going up like everybody else. Um, and number two, they it's not that they dislike Americans. I I feel very welcome in India, in Turkey, in you know Arab Arab countries. Uh but they don't love American certain foreign policies that we have and they don't love monetary policy right now, our monetary policy right now. And so they're they're buying gold as a bit of a hedge against these things. There's uncertainty um and they're reminded of of gold's role in an uncertain, you know, environment. Now, how much impact does that have on the price? The buying itself by the central banks, not so much. People try to think of the supply of gold as whatever is coming out of the mines. No, no, no. That's incremental. All of that gold mined in 6,500 years of human history is still in somebody's hands. All of that gold is potential supply at the right price under the right conditions. What comes out of the mines every year is a very small fraction of that total and then changes in that small fraction uh you know don't matter. and then changes that the marginal okay you know central bank is buying yeah but if the if the central bank of Ireland bought seven tons of gold and I remember that was a headline I think in 2024 well that meant that 70,000 people sold some gold and so I call that the famous buyer fallacy how do we know the central bank of Ireland is right and the 70,000 sellers are wrong and obviously in retrospect the price went up so I guess you could say they were right in that sense but half the time they're wrong, the price goes down after they do it. Um, so I don't think it it it has a direct effect. However, it has an effect psychologically. Uh, first of all, on the gold market globally, if they see central banks are buying, it tends to get them excited. And then secondly, the people in that country when their own central bank is buying, maybe it gives them either license or encouragement to uh say, well, you know, I should do that, too. And then they put in their orders. And of course, if millions of people are putting on a buy order, that will have an effect that, you know, the central bank buying some tons, you know, doesn't. >> So, this year, gold has soared to new all-time highs, over $4,000 announcements as we speak, but it feels like it's getting barely any attention, let alone respect from the mainstream press. Interestingly, not too long ago, Steph Palmboy went on a Fox News investing show and they were talking about investment ideas. And she brought up gold and said, "Not only is the metal outperforming the broad market, the gold miners are absolutely smashing the broad market." And the response of the host was to go, "Yeah, but when it comes to Nvidia and the Mag 7, I don't want to get in front of that train as if it's an eitheror." And basically she pushed the conversation back to discussing what she wanted to discuss which was the latest AI craze or tech stocks etc. Um this is kind of insane. What is it going to take for gold to get that mainstream attention? And as stackers and investors in the gold space are we happy to see this? Um because it could indicate that we're still very early in this trade. Yeah, I think I think it is early and I think you know what's the old saying about uh Joe Kennedy you knew the stock market was going to crash in 1929 because the shoe shine boy was giving him stock tips supposedly that was the the quip. Um, yeah. So, in that sense, I think we're early. And I also think be careful what you wish for, right? So, if you bought gold because you think the dollar is going to do you really want to turn around and sell the gold just because the dollar went to even faster than you thought? I.e. the gold price went up. So, a higher price is good only for sellers, right? So, if you plan on holding for the long term, what does the higher price do for you? Nothing. uh if you want to buy more if you're accumulating then obviously a higher price means you accumulate less so you know people cheer the higher gold price but is that really you know good and then secondly when the mainstream discovers it and every Wall Street hedge fund is jumping into gold with leverage then you will see wicked volatility you're going to see uh you know a day that goes plus 400 and then another day that's minus 450 and you're going to say, "Oh, that's it. It proves that dark cabal is suppressing and manipulating." No. So, when the price goes down, somebody hits their stop order and if they had a big size with leverage, then their stop their selling generates um you know more selling and and other people are hitting their stops and so on and then you'll have this this wicked volatility. Um so, be careful what you wish for, but yeah, I do think that's ahead of us. Certainly not here yet. I got to get your thoughts on mom Donnie becoming the mayor of New York because we had a pretty in-depth discussion on socialism at one point on this show in the past. You had some interesting observations to share. Interestingly, Trump went from hating him to loving him somehow inviting him into the Oval Office and they're good buddies and the reporters are questioning Mom Donnie. You called Trump a fascist. And he starts defending himself and Trump says, "No, no, no. That's fine. That's fine that he called me a fascist. Just tell him it's fine." And mom's like, "Okay, yeah, yeah, call him a fascist." I mean, this is it's completely nuts. Now, a lot of people when it comes to the capitalism versus socialism debate that's out there would point to the Trump administration as being very far from capitalist and being more of a crony capitalism or perhaps even oligarchy from some perspectives with Trump getting ultra chummy with all of these various tech company CEOs at the White House. obviously that the US has taken a stake the government's taken a stake in Intel and has uh said that they potentially want to get involved in other tech stocks as well moving forward other tech companies. I mean the the list goes on and on. Trump pardons CZ, the the CEO of Binance, who was charged with fraud and uh and and oh, it just so happens that Saudi Arabia is going to be investing in a Trumpbacked stable coin through the Binance exchange shortly thereafter. I mean, it seems kind of insane this out in the open corruption. So, I'd love your thoughts. I know it's a big rambling question, but Mom Donnie, winning this winning the mayoral election in New York, what does it mean? And could you contrast that with what some are calling the crony capitalist system that's coming out of the Trump administration? >> You know, I saw a recent magazine article um recently about the horseshoe theory that, you know, so so a lot of people think, okay, the left and the right are, you know, opposite ends of like a straight line. And the horseshoe theory says, well, they're opposite on a horseshoe, but of course, the horseshoe curves in the two the two points aren't actually that far apart. And uh so you know we have a choice of the government owning you know the chipmakers and the steel makers versus the government owning the grocery stores. Um so that's you know one form of communism versus another form of communism. Um you know I don't really like to get political. You know my view is pro- free markets and from a free markets perspective I think we need a whole new political spectrum. We need a whole new Overton window and we need whole new parties because neither of them really stand for free markets. Everything they want, whether it's social security, whether it's universal basic income, whether it's government ownership of this or that, the other thing. Um, you health care for everybody who's needy, etc., etc., etc. Um, we've lost the the free market thing. And then with it, we've lost the vibrancy of the economy. We've lost so many things that um you know anyways I I don't want to get political about it but I wish we had more free market uh policies and more free market politicians. You know for every um you know Javier Malay and in Argentina for every Thomas Massie you know there's a thousand um you know guys that are just openly saying why do we even have billionaires? Why don't we just tax them out of out of their billions? And I I think that's the direction that the west is going in. And with it, you know, Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in South America and before that it was Argentina and both of them went socialist. Now Venezuela went international socialist a aka communist and Argentina went national socialist in the form of Coron which he got from Mussolini who's the one who coined the term fascism. So those countries went socialist of one flavor or another and then they became desperately poor third world you know places and it could happen to the US as well. I mean I think we got a long way to go. There's a lot of resiliency in the US but you know the trend line is clear anyway. >> Yeah I think my home country of Canada might be a little bit farther along that path than the United States at this point in time. Um well let's end on the debt and deficit situation in the United States specifically and perhaps some if you could shed some light on how the Austrian school of economics could address this issue. I had Dr. Mark Thornton from the Mises Institute on recently. He had some interesting things to say about Austrian econ economics and how it could potentially apply to our current situation. But the the problem of course you know you don't want to get political but the problem is the politicians. They are going to fight tooth and nail to protect that which helps them consolidate their own power and wealth and that of their inner circle which of course is the fiat currency system which is of course expansion of the debt. Um so what what is the solution here? Does the system have to collapse before it can be rebuilt? >> Oh boy that's a huge question itself. First thing I would say, the politicians keep on voting for more spending because that's what gets them reelected. Which actually means it's the voters. I mean, anybody who who seriously expects the politicians to do what is unpopular just doesn't understand how politics works because there's a word for anybody any politician who does what the voters hate and that's called out of office. You lose the next election if you do that. So, it's really the voters. Why are the voters voting for bread and circuses? Well, you know, can we can debate that, but that's that's the fact. Now, the problem with collapse, you know, people use that word, but I think most people, they really envision kind of a market correction, you know, maybe 2008. That's not collapse. That's like, okay, the stock market crashed, but you know, the economy pretty much went on as it had. Um, you know, what does true collapse look like? So I wrote what I think is probably my single most important essay and it is called when gold backwardation becomes permanent and you can Google that. I mean every site picked it up. Um that that went around uh you know all the alternative finance gold sites you know probably hundreds of sites carried it and it's pretty dire and and it it you know it's going to look like a hyperinflation although it will have nothing to do with the quantity of dollars. It's a repudiation of the quality of the credit and is a move to distrust the counterparty and u when gold withdraws its bid on the dollar which is hard for people to grasp because most people think of prices in dollar terms. So people will say well everything else you know the dollar withdraws the bid but in the case of gold it'll be you know there's the withdrawal of the offer to sell gold and dollars. Okay, you're complicating it. But um when gold withdraws then the whole system collapses and that is going to be a collapse of our ability to produce energy at large scale which also means the ability to produce food at large scale. You stop producing food and energy. That's what collapses. Now that is dire because the North American continent can probably support 30 million people in pre-industrial. So think no diesel power, no insecticides, no fertilizers. What does that look like? Subsistence, you know, hard labor, subsistence farming, and uh you can't produce the bountiful harvest that we have today. Um it's going to be much less efficient, much lower crop crop yields. Um and so the population of North America is what is it 400 and something, you know, million going down to 30 million. And that's going to be a calamity and there'll be a lot of killing because nobody wants to be the marginal guy who dies. They'll kill somebody else if they think he has food. So that's going to make Karacas Venezuela today look like you know paradise you know by comparison. Um so you know if we look if we look at the the historical precedent for this it's Rome in 476 AD. So before a collapse it was about 1.1 million population in Rome and after the collapse it was 6,000 or 8,000. So you know 94 95 you know 96% 98% collapse um of the population and um you know was there recover so Rome had debauchery of the currency and everything else too people have written about this the coins have less and less silver in them you know so what went on and so it is true that after Rome collapsed it didn't have you know they weren't clipped you know physically but diluted I guess coins That's true. And you didn't have the corruption of the Roman Senate anymore. That's true. You also didn't really have civilization anymore uh for a while. And um when civilization recovered, it was about a thousand years uh before civilization was back to anything near comparable to Rome. And um I think about 1,400 years before certain technologies like cement were rediscovered in the 19th century. Um and then some of the some of the works of Roman engineering probably not really replicated until the 20th century until the modern era. So it was a pretty big setback and so yes we did recover and we we did wash away all the corruption of Rome but um that was quite a calamity and nobody who lived through it or lived into it I should say um appreciated the fact that eventually there was a reset and things got better because they didn't live long enough for that. And um I hope that's not what's coming. But uh I I believe that if we don't change monetary courses, it is what's coming. And so that's why that's why I'm doing what I'm doing with monetary medals is to try to offer the world an alternative while there's still time. Because if you wait until the day of collapse, it's too late. You know, this idea that oh well, you know, us little elite group will have all the money and the rest of the world will have to desperately bid it off of us. You know, it's kind of a Bitcoin fantasy, but that's not how it works that way. If that if that mob gets that desperate, they will kill you for it and kill each other as well. And then, you know, once the killing starts, you know, who started it and the wise and wherefors, you know, fade and you just have groups that are struggling to stay alive and struggling to kill for revenge and, you know, it's it's endless. Um, so anyways, I I hope to not end on such a bleak note, but man, that That is uh yeah, that idea of a reset is is horrific. >> Absolutely. Well, I'm going to put a link in the description to that essay. Uh and that's a good segue into discussing monetary metals as well. I know you offer a yield as you mentioned on gold and silver. So, tell us about that. >> You know, I mentioned the why, which I think is the most important thing if you want and I'm writing a chapter for an academic textbook right now on the monetary system of the future. And and in that chapter I'm taking a more open view that you know whether it's Bitcoin or gold or sea shells or whatever if you want something to circulate as money you have to uh you have to make it so that anybody who wants to can deposit and earn interest that's what will bring it into the market otherwise it will go under people's uh mattresses and uh which is exactly what we see with Bitcoin exactly what we see with gold. If you want to draw it into the market, pay interest. Okay. How do you do that? You have to put it to work. Financing something productive. So, you could look at monetary medals as a niche. Okay. We're doing gold leasing to jewelers. Okay. Great. And you know, that's interesting, right? Because you're getting 4% interest on your gold versus paying 3/4 of a percent for storage. And as the price of gold goes up, storage cost goes up. Or you could say, "Wait a minute. Why are they doing this? We're trying to bring the use of gold back into, you know, society, into civilization where gold is viable and you can have a gold deposit and get interest on it. And if that happens, then gold becomes a real alternative, right? So, so FDR, President Roosevelt in 1933 did something that I I assume everybody watching your show would realize is evil, but they may not realize it was genius or evil genius. I mean, I'm not in any way praising it other than saying, you know, that enemy was wily and crafty and smart and he did something that that that uh smoked a great blow upon our civilization in that by by banning people from owning gold. It wasn't really about the grabbing of the loot. I mean, I'm sure that pleased FDR no end, but that wasn't the primary purpose of it. Um and he wanted to get control of the banking system and the interest rate. But along the way he just he did something else which is you know the conservative saver couldn't hold gold and it was illegal. I mean it was like possessing that you know some funny white powder today. If they catch you they sent you to prison. That's no joke. So um you couldn't hold gold which meant the conservative savers had to own government paper. Now think about that. savers are now feeding the the mo of the government welfare state and calling it savings. I mean c can you imagine a greater inver conceptual inversion to call that savings? You're giving the government the wherewithal to run this welfare state and you're calling that savings. Okay. So now fast forward from 1933 to 1975, 42 years they relegalized gold. Why? Because they didn't care anymore. Because after Nixon in 1971, gold had no monetary role anymore. It wasn't in the banking system anymore. Nobody cared. So they see relegalize it. It'll be a joke. It'll go to $7 an ounce. Let it trade on a futures exchange next to frozen orange juice and pork bellies. They were pretty derisive about now. They were wrong about the $7 an ounce. They were right about trading on the futures exchange and then it would become a joke. And no serious person after that, you know, serious main mainstream would think about gold anymore in any serious way. Now, the reason why I bring this up is that to hold gold is a risk. You have all of your debts denominated in dollars. You have your major expenses, whether that be rent, car payment, you know, etc., etc., all dollars holding gold. Now gold is volatile. Goes up and down um against your debts and against your you know monthly expenses. So there's now a volatility risk or price risk to holding gold that there shouldn't be. If gold was the monetary system then holding gold is is the unit. It doesn't go up or down the same way that holding dollars today except gold isn't subject to uh to basement or debauchery or inflation. So you know by by trying to bring back the use of gold for finance that means that producing you know productive enterprises will have their debts denominated in gold rather than in dollars and therefore holding gold will be the zero risk proposition versus holding dollars as it is today. So we're trying to change the world by changing the incentives. You know Kanes is very famous. I imagine most viewers of the show would be familiar with the first part of this quote when he says Lenin is said to have said that um there's no sure way of overthrowing the capitalist order which means civilization because if you completely overthrow capitalism as in North Korea you have no civilization and what you're reduced to is starvation and if it wasn't from a little bit of charity from the Chinese and the Russians North Korea would have starved itself into oblivion by now. um there's no shorter way of overthrowing the capitalist order by debrain money. Now most people think he means inflation but if you go on he goes on and on and on and at the end he says and it it it generally impoverishes everybody and whatever but it does it in a way of engaging the hidden forces of economics you know to destroy the world and in a way that not one in a million can understand how the world is being destroyed. Now, if he meant inflation, then he was an idiot. I'm old enough to remember I was 12 years old in 1979. I'm old enough to remember that era. And you know, just as you know, in recent years, everybody talked about inflation every day. It was on the nightly news 5 days a week. They had something called the misery index, which is inflation plus unemployment. Uh so if he thought that nobody would notice inflation, he was an idiot. Now, I don't think Kanes was an idiot. I think he was gen again genius but evil. And so what he was talking about was driving interest rates to zero and therefore asset prices were driving to infinity. And the reason why nobody would see the world being destroyed is everybody loves a bull market. And so there, you know, I just read a short essay on Twitter trying to remember the guy's name. Um but he he coined a term or at least he used a term I hadn't seen before the gamblification of the financial markets and the economy where everything becomes a gamble and you know he was talking about crypto but the same thing applies to everything else. go into the casino with your favorite chip, whether it's properties, whether it's equities, whether it's silver, whether it's Bitcoin, right? And and you know, you spin the dice, you know, spin the wheel, roll the dice, whatever. And then, uh, as long as the interest rate is falling, then asset prices are rising and you can't lose. So, um, everything becomes a gamble. And we've replaced investment with speculation. And what we're trying to do is is restore the concept of uh you know productive enterprise financing productive enterprise and bringing gold and silver back. So yeah we pay interest on gold we pay interest on silver everybody can open an account but I I I feel it's important to talk about the why otherwise this is just a niche you know little thing. >> Yeah I love the mission and I'm going to put a link in the description to monetary medals so people can check it out. Keith, as always, fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you for joining us today. Our sponsor, Ark Silver Gold Opium, has some great prices on gold and silver bullion products. They are on your screen right now. These are well supplies, last, and subject to change. So, reach out to owner Ian Everard today at 307264-9441 or by email at ianarchsg.com and make sure to tell him that Commodity Culture sent you. and pick up your stack silver not fiat exclusive commodity culture t-shirt using the link in the description below and I'll see you guys in the next episode. Commodity culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you're always up tod date with the latest episodes.
I've Never Seen Anything Like This in SILVER – 'Demand is RELENTLESS': Keith Weiner
Summary
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome into commodity culture where we break down commodities markets, sound money principles and geopolitics all with the goal of making you a better investor in the commodities sector. Today is December 8th, 2025. My name is Jesse Day and I'm excited to welcome Keith Weiner to the program. An economist, sound money advocate, and CEO of Monetary Metals. Keith points out that recent backwardation in the silver market where prices today are higher than silver in the future is an unprecedented event in silver's history that exemplifies tightness in the market that could send prices surging. We also discuss why silver's monetary role is reestablishing itself in a major way and driving what Keith refers to as relentless demand. And you're going to want to stick around to the end of the interview where Keith issues a dire warning for the future of humanity if we don't get our sound monetary house in order. And speaking of getting things in order, how about ordering the latest commodity culture t-shirt design? Stack silver, not fiat. I put a lot of effort into this design. It's a shirt for silver stackers. You have the Commodity Culture logo on the back as well. And if you want to order it by the holidays, put in your order today. The link is in the description below. And now on to the interview. Keith Weiner, great to have you back on Commodity Culture. I want to kick things off by discussing the silver market. With the metal soaring to new all-time highs this year, currently sitting at around $58 an ounce. Inflation adjusted, we're still a long ways from real all-time highs. But what are your thoughts on silver's recent price action and do you think the metal is still undervalued at these levels? Well, undervalued is an interesting question, but um you know, we we heard a lot of discussion from um our you know, Indian friends and Indian jewelers that with the price of gold being what it is um for Dvali in particular, which is the big Indian festival or Hindu festival I guess I should say, um a lot of the buyers who would have been buying gold at lower prices substituted silver and so they just couldn't didn't get enough silver and um something happened in the silver market that I haven't seen uh that I can recall seeing in in uh maybe ever certainly decades which is this huge backwardation in silver. Um, so now that created an interesting the only way to put this is that in its death rows in of of of the monetary system and I think that's what we're witnessing people people t tend to say well how could it be the death rows because GDP's up and the stock market's up and hyperinflation isn't happening but you're looking in all the wrong places. So here here's what happens. So silver becomes scarce to the market. That's what backwardation means. Um, so if you the worst of it on October 10, I believe it was, if you um, you know, bought an ounce of silver and sold it forward to a December contract, you would lose $2.15 cents an ounce. That's massive, right? For just, you know, two months. Um, that's massive. That that worked out to 20% or something annualized. So um you know scarcity to the market because India and obviously a lot of others were buying it not so much here in the west right the premiums and you know the dealers will tell you the premiums on silver eagles way down um you know compared to what it had been during let's say the co you know height at much lower silver prices. So um but anyways the the demand for the metal was relentless. Now, you would think if the demand for metal is relentless, the primary suppliers of that metal to the market would be producing as much as they possibly could. And the producers uh who supply the market are the refiners. The refiners were saying, "No, we don't we don't want to take any raw material. We don't want to take Dory. We don't want to take scraps over." So, a lot of people um you know remember both the 1980 peak and the 2011 peak where silver almost hit $50 but not quite. There were a lot of people that had a limit order essentially at 50 that said if it gets to 50 that's it. I'm turning in all the silverware. I'm turning in all the tea sets and the platters and everything else. We never use that for more than you know Ritz crackers and Velvita anyway at this point. you know, I'm going to turn all that in for $50. And um obviously now we've hit it. And so um the refiners were turning it away. And why would they do that? Because the cost of hedging, I mean, if you're a refiner, you don't buy silver, especially big lots of scrap that's going to probably sit for a couple weeks before you can really process it. You don't buy that unhedged. Um you know, let alone at at $50. You know, the the risk is high that that could be $40. they lose, you know, what is that 20%. So, they have to hedge it. Now, the cost of hedging $2.15 on on the worst of it. Um, means that it's unprofitable to take the silver. It actually costs more to hedge than the refining margin. You know, refiners do not make $2.15 an ounce in silver. So, uh, they're turning it all away. So, the market is in scarcity. It's in shortage, and the primary producers are turning away the raw material to make more. That is very perverse and that is something that is very monetary and it's it's you know one more sign that the monetary system is is crumbling around the edges. There's failure there. You know cracks fissures are forming um and and weird little things like that are happening and people don't pay attention to it. This has greater significance because this is a monetary metal. This is not copper. This is not aluminum. This is not unoptanium. you know rare rare metals that are used in whatever you know chemical reactions. This is one of the two monetary metals silver and um the market demanded more and the suppliers were uh perversely disincentivized from producing it. Now that's that's settled. That was just looking at the silver uh you know forward rate. It is definitely lower than it had been. Silver is definitely scarcer although the immediate crisis uh is gone. Um we'll see where it goes next. um I think more than more likely than not higher silver prices in the future versus lower. >> So do you think silver is you reestablishing its role as a monetary metal if it ever lost it at all? Because in the West I think it's viewed more as an industrial metal. Um if you ask your average person if they think silver is money on the street for example, they're probably not going to realize that. They're going to view it more as a an industrial commodity. In fact, I've spoken to people on this show before who said silver is now strictly an industrial commodity. It no longer has its monetary properties that it used to have. Um, but obviously, as you mentioned in India and many other cultures view it very differently. Do you think this is something the West is starting to wake up to? Do you think the monetary value versus the industrial is what is currently driving demand? >> Yeah, I was going to say the first question is is the West waking up to the monetary metals period. Um, so I have two two amusing thoughts. One, I may have said it on your show before. I know I've said it many times. I travel all over the world and I'm an American and I think I get to say that Americans understand gold least of any culture. Um, and you know less than 1% of Americans own any. So, um, that's just the reality of it. But the amusing anecdote is I've spoken with um, you know, I say both of the leading, you know, data analytics firms. that study the precious metals markets and um they both tend to sort of separate. You know, you have jewelry demand and investment demand. Well, in most of the world those are the same. You ever see that meme that goes around, corporate wants you to tell the difference between these two pictures and the lady's like they're the same. They're the same. You walk into any jewelry store in Dubai, I shouldn't say any, they have the same Tiffany's kind of stuff that you have in the west, but any of the Athnic jewelry stores, you know, Dubai, Istanbul, um, you know, Qatar, Saudi, whatever, or in India, the jewelry is tagged by the weight in grams. And you pay for the weight in grams times the current gold price, and they have a helpful screen right there in the store, so everyone knows what the gold price is in real time. And then they say, you know, 5% making charge or whatever, and the making charge is low. You know, in in the West, you go into a Tiffany's or Christian Dior or whatever, and you buy three and a half grams of of gold for $17,000. That's not investment. You're buying art and the brand, and you know, it's like Louis Vuitton handbags or whatever. But um you know, most of the buyers of gold is of course 1.4 billion Indians are all buying gold. Everybody in Turkey is buying gold. Um most of the of the Arab world is buying gold and has gold as part of the portfolio. Um the jewelry is they don't make a distinction. That's that's what makes it money. So my view of what makes something money, you know, when people say it's demonetized or whatever, usually they mean it's not a medium of exchange. So they kind of have a frozen abstraction where medium of exchange means money and money means medium of exchange. Money can can be a medium of exchange but that's not the concept of money. And so I would say money is the most marketable commodity and silver is the most marketable in the small. So, if you want to save $50 a month in precious metals, it's heck of a lot more practical, not to mention emotionally satisfying to get an ounce of silver in the hand versus a little fleck of gold that you would lose in the lint if you tried to put it in your pocket. Um, so, uh, it's it's it's the commodity of of greatest marketability, which is the term coined by Manganger, the founder of the Ashing school. uh also or or the uh a mirror image of that or the or another facet of that I should say is the uh the commodity with the highest stocks to flows which is gold by far and then silver uh the second one and nothing else is even remotely close to silver. Now if silver is truly in deficit or truly being consumed down then that would be the evidence that it's being demonetized. If silver has stocks no greater than that of copper, crude oil, platinum, whatever, then I would say yeah, it's been totally demonetized. That's not the case at the moment. Will that be the case? It's possible. I think the jury and there's at least an argument for I don't think that's going to happen, but there's an argument for it. So, um, silver has a significant industrial component to it. Uh but uh I was on a stage with uh Philip Newman of Metals Focus and they're they're a firm that does um a lot of analysis and provides a lot of primary data. So I think they provide the data for the silver institute like on total above ground stocks and I know they provide some data to the world gold council for gold and um so that particular time Philip was looking at silver and he said how does silver trade? Does it trade like a commodity? pulled up crude oil. This would trade like a base metal. He pulled up copper and showed there was really no good correlation between the silver price and the prices of those two things. Then he pulled up gold and lo and behold, silver trades like gold. So you want evidence that it's a monetary metal. Now I have one other bit of evidence and if I was an academic and I had the time and the energy which I'm not and I don't I think I would write this um as a as a paper for a peer-reviewed journal uh which is so we do gold leases and silver leases uh that's what monary metals does and um when we do a gold lease you know so we and and it's it's depositors who deposit the metal um so when we do a gold lease we pay the interest in gold and we do a silver lease to pay interest in silver. We had a good customer who wanted a platinum lease. So we went to our uh you know depositor side and which we didn't have any deposits of platinum we didn't didn't deal with it said okay we got a platinum opportunity how many people would be interested in it and you know it was like five times overs subscribed okay we'll do the platinum lease right so we impact everybody here's the following question um we said okay in a silver lease we pay interest in silver and a gold lease to pay interest in gold and a platinum lease would you like interest in gold or would you like it in platinum? Now, before I reveal the answer to that, I will just point out that number one, the um the answer was unanimous. Every last one said the same answer. And they don't know each other. And unless somebody introduced a friend or a brother to open an account, they wouldn't know each other and have no way of talking with each other. Maybe a few one or two people here and there, but they didn't, you know, they didn't coordinate their answer. And they all agreed on the answer. Now that answer was gold. So the silver people absolutely of course wanted the interest in silver. The platinum people wanted the interest in gold unanimously. So I think we proved platinum is not money. Right? People do not want to be paid the rental on platinum which is property or something else in in the form of platinum. They want it in the form of money which is gold. But the silver people are happy to take interest in the form of silver. And so that would be an interesting paper to submit to a peer-reviewed journal in monetary science if such a thing existed and make that argument. And so I would say yeah, silver still behaves this money. It's not a medium exchange um other than in certain circles. Actually I have one other story about medium exchange. I've been meaning to talk about this. So, I visited a jewelry wholesaler uh in Dubai and u they're taking me a little tour of the office and we go into the room and this is the room where they the buyers or the jewelry retailers, you know, everything is counted and measured and weighed and whatever. And they have a giant pair of bolt cutters. I mean, this thing was like longer than a meter. I mean, I I pick it up. This must have been 20 kilos. I mean, it's pretty heavy. So they had I had them take a picture of of of me holding this thing and I said, "Man, you must have some seriously high security padlocks. You have to cut with this thing." He said, "Oh, no, no. We use that to cut bars." What? Well, yeah, we cut kilo bars with that. Now, I've been writing about this, Jesse, for you know, 15 years about inconvenience of large bars, the tragedy of when the UK went back on the so-called gold standard after World War I. and they said it's all 400 ounce bars, which is still the standard today. That was chosen to be highly inconvenient. And I've always said, look, gold is really soft. I mean, you could take a pocket knife out and cut a corner of a gold bar off. That's not hard. But then the bar loses all of its integrity. You don't really know what it weighs anymore. And then the little sliver you hacked off. What is that worth, right? So, nobody would do that. This is insane. So, sure enough, these guys are cutting kilobars with a giant bolt cutter, which I held in my hands. Now, why would you be cutting kilo bars? Because the the the jewelry retailers, that's how they pay for the jewelry. They pay in kilo bars and they have to make change. So, I said, "How accurate is that?" I mean, you know, where where exactly on the bar do you cut? Well, you know, we got it pretty close. We're going to be pretty accurate. And then any any uh uh difference will hold as a credit or a debit and, you know, the next time they do an order, we'll settle up. So yeah, like so they cut kilo bars and gold is a medium exchange at least in limited uh you know circumstances. >> The sponsor of today's episode is Arc Silver Gold Osmium. Owner Ian Everard is praised even by his competitors as one of the most honest and level-headed bullion dealers in the United States. They have some great prices. You can see some of them displayed right now on screen. Take advantage of these specials today by reaching out to Ian at 3072649441 or by email at ianarchcsggo.com. Make sure to tell them of course that commodity culture sent you. And now back to the interview. Yeah, some great observations there. One statistic that does get thrown around a lot, including with a lot of guests I talk on this show is the gold silver ratio. Currently around 70, meaning 70 ounces of silver worth 1 oz of gold. I've heard people say it comes out of the ground at 7:1 and so should eventually head much lower. Would you agree with that? And is the gold to silver ratio something you even consider when evaluating precious metals or is it more noise than signal in your view? >> Definitely important to look at. Um anyone anyone who bets that it's going to go to seven good luck to you, man. Uh you know, I mean I suppose anything's possible, but uh wow. Um, it's interesting to me that the gold silver ratio, you know, with big swings still remains kind of in a range. It's not unbounded like oil to gold or anything else. Um, but um, you know, it's so tempting, it's so convenient to think in terms of quantity, right? So people think the gold price should be take whatever your favorite measure of the money supply is M2 or something like that divide by the number of gold ounces either in the market total or that the Fed has on behalf of the Treasury which is 8,000 tons. You know to me this is numerology. This is like the size of my left foot in millimeters divided by the amount of horsepower that my car has you know times the number of stars that were visible on the night when my son was born. It's like, yeah, okay, you can do these arithmetics of these numbers, but it doesn't, what does it really mean? So, a monetary metal has enormous stocks. Now, think about that. So, I I had a debate I was invited to debate um Pierre Roshard about Bitcoin versus gold at the Soho forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, and they were the ones who published the video with a little bit of voiceover about it. And um you know the bitcoiners are very much quantity served money and they keep touting 21 million like that proves anything. Now the tw the quantity is capped until the incentives change but what does that have to do with the value? And I I said there's one observation that we can make that is um well two observations that that that lead to you know the proof positive that the quantity theory is bunk. The first is that gold is not really consumed. It's too expensive to just throw away. And even like, you know, your iPhone when you're done with it, you know, that thing is recycled. I mean, lithium has value, the glass has value, and the circuit board has value because there's a few micrograms of gold on it. And it's and gold has always been that way. It's not thrown away. If it's cast into something people don't want anymore, I don't know, candalabra, that's melted down and it becomes something else. And so gold is not really consumed. Virtually all of the gold mined in in 6,500 years of human history is still in in human hands. And then number two, we keep producing more of it. Which means if the value of the marginal unit is diminishing, if it's diminishing at all, it's not diminishing very much. After 6,500 years of everinccreasing accumulation of stocks, we haven't found any apparent limit where you know marginal utility is less than marginal cost and mining would stop. There's no such thing as a glut and gold as there is in any other commodity including all the important ones oil etc. all had glut markets from time to time. The concept of glut is inapplicable to gold and to silver. Um and so I think that that shows okay you can't figure out the value of the thing by figuring out its quantity. And same thing by the way with the US dollar. If the value of the currency unit was one over n where n is the number of units the dollar would be not only the least valuable currency it would be by far by country mile the least valuable. And that's certainly I mean certainly not the case. It may not be the highest, you know, value, you know, price of currencies out there, but it's definitely um the most valued currency as as an overall thing by again by country mile. And so, no, even if the ratio that silver comes out of the ground, and I don't I I mean, I don't I I can't say yes to that number or no to that number. I just don't study that. Um, but even if that were true, that wouldn't necessarily mean this 7 to1 ratio because the value on the on the market has nothing to do with the abundance of I always joke and say, you know, Keith Weiner paintings uh are very are very very rare. I mean, I must have done a few fingerprinting fingerprint paintings when I was in kindergarten, but I'm not an artist. I haven't done paintings. I haven't produced any paintings. And therefore, if you found one of those old kindergarten fingerprints, uh, you know, that my mom would have had on the refrigerator with a magnet way back in the day, it's okay. This thing is super super rare. Therefore, it should sell for billions of dollars. I guarantee you there's no market for that. It's not going to sell for anything at all, right? And so, uh, that's not how value is set uh, in markets. So 7 to1 I I don't think we're likely to see 15 to1 which is close to the historic ratio let alone you know half that. No I don't think so. >> I want to discuss >> Oh go ahead. >> I said I'll get some gut for that as I did talking one and I said we're not going to see it. >> Yeah that there there's some great examples that you provided there though. Um so I think that's a different way people can think about it. Central bank gold buying. Obviously, this is another thing that's taken up headlines a lot when it comes to discussing the gold market. How significant of a factor do you think central bank buying has been to the gold price in your view? And what are the reasons you believe they've been accumulating? Obviously, the theories out there are of course removal of counterparty risk. That's the big one. Since the US with its allies froze Russia's FX reserves when they went into Ukraine, that woke a lot of people up. A lot of countries realized we need an asset free of counterparty risk. Others perhaps more conspiratorial-minded would say they're aware that there's some sort of monetary reset coming involving gold and so that's why they're stacking gold at such a rapid pace. I wonder what your thoughts are. So um you know the US and its allies seized Russian real estate planes, boats, cars, artwork, stocks, bonds, and yes, treasury bonds. Oh, therefore that means the US is is on war path and it's going to take everybody to treasury bonds. The world is not ddollarizing in that sense. Um, but I I think that it's it certainly made people aware of a risk that they hadn't thought about before. In this case, the risk is, you know, if you invade a neighboring country, um, you know, that the world might might treat you as a pariah and the US might actually take your treasury bonds away. Uh, but I do think that and and I've said this many times, you can't retroactively declare a an irredeemable currency to be goldbacked. Um, you know, in in a in a proper goldbacked monetary system, the people have the gold and they deposit the gold and get a piece of paper because the paper has utility that the gold doesn't. One thing is small denominations and then there's a lot of others. So, you know, for convenience, people, you know, they may hold physical gold in a certain amount and and they're certainly free to do that, but the monetary stuff is mostly in the banking system and they get paper for it. So, every bank deposit and every currency slip uh begins begins life as a deposit where people give up their gold and and get this piece of paper in return. Um, today there are no currencies that began life as a gold deposit. I mean the dollar was once gold deposits but all the dollars that are circulating today were all irreumable. So if you wanted to say now it's dollar is goldbacked at you know pick some magic price $5,000 $50,000 whatever you know for ounce uh you know you'd have two problems. One is that would be the biggest lobbying orgy ever as all the creditors would line up on one side. The creditors would want a low gold price because that means they get more gold for the same amount of dollars of debt. And all the debtors would want a very high gold price because that means they can get out of debt, you know, cheaply. And how could you resolve that? I have no idea. That seems intractable other than political, you know, caprice. I guess that's the first problem. The second problem is that none of these dollars began life as a gold deposit. And therefore, if you now say, "Well, they're backed um you you you're sooner or later, and obviously depending on the price you set, sooner or later, you'll have a run on the bank and all the gold will be pulled. It's a price fixing scheme. Just ask any Banana Republic or uh Thomas Jordan of the Swiss National Bank uh what happens when the market moves against you in a big way and you're trying to fix the price. You get overrun. It's a zombie apocalypse, man. I mean, you know, there's one of you and there's 20,000 of them and they will push that door down and you're going to go under the door as the horde, you know, rolls over you. Um, so you know, you can't you can't mechanically do that. Now, what are they doing? I think number one, they see the price going up like everybody else. Um, and number two, they it's not that they dislike Americans. I I feel very welcome in India, in Turkey, in you know Arab Arab countries. Uh but they don't love American certain foreign policies that we have and they don't love monetary policy right now, our monetary policy right now. And so they're they're buying gold as a bit of a hedge against these things. There's uncertainty um and they're reminded of of gold's role in an uncertain, you know, environment. Now, how much impact does that have on the price? The buying itself by the central banks, not so much. People try to think of the supply of gold as whatever is coming out of the mines. No, no, no. That's incremental. All of that gold mined in 6,500 years of human history is still in somebody's hands. All of that gold is potential supply at the right price under the right conditions. What comes out of the mines every year is a very small fraction of that total and then changes in that small fraction uh you know don't matter. and then changes that the marginal okay you know central bank is buying yeah but if the if the central bank of Ireland bought seven tons of gold and I remember that was a headline I think in 2024 well that meant that 70,000 people sold some gold and so I call that the famous buyer fallacy how do we know the central bank of Ireland is right and the 70,000 sellers are wrong and obviously in retrospect the price went up so I guess you could say they were right in that sense but half the time they're wrong, the price goes down after they do it. Um, so I don't think it it it has a direct effect. However, it has an effect psychologically. Uh, first of all, on the gold market globally, if they see central banks are buying, it tends to get them excited. And then secondly, the people in that country when their own central bank is buying, maybe it gives them either license or encouragement to uh say, well, you know, I should do that, too. And then they put in their orders. And of course, if millions of people are putting on a buy order, that will have an effect that, you know, the central bank buying some tons, you know, doesn't. >> So, this year, gold has soared to new all-time highs, over $4,000 announcements as we speak, but it feels like it's getting barely any attention, let alone respect from the mainstream press. Interestingly, not too long ago, Steph Palmboy went on a Fox News investing show and they were talking about investment ideas. And she brought up gold and said, "Not only is the metal outperforming the broad market, the gold miners are absolutely smashing the broad market." And the response of the host was to go, "Yeah, but when it comes to Nvidia and the Mag 7, I don't want to get in front of that train as if it's an eitheror." And basically she pushed the conversation back to discussing what she wanted to discuss which was the latest AI craze or tech stocks etc. Um this is kind of insane. What is it going to take for gold to get that mainstream attention? And as stackers and investors in the gold space are we happy to see this? Um because it could indicate that we're still very early in this trade. Yeah, I think I think it is early and I think you know what's the old saying about uh Joe Kennedy you knew the stock market was going to crash in 1929 because the shoe shine boy was giving him stock tips supposedly that was the the quip. Um, yeah. So, in that sense, I think we're early. And I also think be careful what you wish for, right? So, if you bought gold because you think the dollar is going to do you really want to turn around and sell the gold just because the dollar went to even faster than you thought? I.e. the gold price went up. So, a higher price is good only for sellers, right? So, if you plan on holding for the long term, what does the higher price do for you? Nothing. uh if you want to buy more if you're accumulating then obviously a higher price means you accumulate less so you know people cheer the higher gold price but is that really you know good and then secondly when the mainstream discovers it and every Wall Street hedge fund is jumping into gold with leverage then you will see wicked volatility you're going to see uh you know a day that goes plus 400 and then another day that's minus 450 and you're going to say, "Oh, that's it. It proves that dark cabal is suppressing and manipulating." No. So, when the price goes down, somebody hits their stop order and if they had a big size with leverage, then their stop their selling generates um you know more selling and and other people are hitting their stops and so on and then you'll have this this wicked volatility. Um so, be careful what you wish for, but yeah, I do think that's ahead of us. Certainly not here yet. I got to get your thoughts on mom Donnie becoming the mayor of New York because we had a pretty in-depth discussion on socialism at one point on this show in the past. You had some interesting observations to share. Interestingly, Trump went from hating him to loving him somehow inviting him into the Oval Office and they're good buddies and the reporters are questioning Mom Donnie. You called Trump a fascist. And he starts defending himself and Trump says, "No, no, no. That's fine. That's fine that he called me a fascist. Just tell him it's fine." And mom's like, "Okay, yeah, yeah, call him a fascist." I mean, this is it's completely nuts. Now, a lot of people when it comes to the capitalism versus socialism debate that's out there would point to the Trump administration as being very far from capitalist and being more of a crony capitalism or perhaps even oligarchy from some perspectives with Trump getting ultra chummy with all of these various tech company CEOs at the White House. obviously that the US has taken a stake the government's taken a stake in Intel and has uh said that they potentially want to get involved in other tech stocks as well moving forward other tech companies. I mean the the list goes on and on. Trump pardons CZ, the the CEO of Binance, who was charged with fraud and uh and and oh, it just so happens that Saudi Arabia is going to be investing in a Trumpbacked stable coin through the Binance exchange shortly thereafter. I mean, it seems kind of insane this out in the open corruption. So, I'd love your thoughts. I know it's a big rambling question, but Mom Donnie, winning this winning the mayoral election in New York, what does it mean? And could you contrast that with what some are calling the crony capitalist system that's coming out of the Trump administration? >> You know, I saw a recent magazine article um recently about the horseshoe theory that, you know, so so a lot of people think, okay, the left and the right are, you know, opposite ends of like a straight line. And the horseshoe theory says, well, they're opposite on a horseshoe, but of course, the horseshoe curves in the two the two points aren't actually that far apart. And uh so you know we have a choice of the government owning you know the chipmakers and the steel makers versus the government owning the grocery stores. Um so that's you know one form of communism versus another form of communism. Um you know I don't really like to get political. You know my view is pro- free markets and from a free markets perspective I think we need a whole new political spectrum. We need a whole new Overton window and we need whole new parties because neither of them really stand for free markets. Everything they want, whether it's social security, whether it's universal basic income, whether it's government ownership of this or that, the other thing. Um, you health care for everybody who's needy, etc., etc., etc. Um, we've lost the the free market thing. And then with it, we've lost the vibrancy of the economy. We've lost so many things that um you know anyways I I don't want to get political about it but I wish we had more free market uh policies and more free market politicians. You know for every um you know Javier Malay and in Argentina for every Thomas Massie you know there's a thousand um you know guys that are just openly saying why do we even have billionaires? Why don't we just tax them out of out of their billions? And I I think that's the direction that the west is going in. And with it, you know, Venezuela was once the wealthiest country in South America and before that it was Argentina and both of them went socialist. Now Venezuela went international socialist a aka communist and Argentina went national socialist in the form of Coron which he got from Mussolini who's the one who coined the term fascism. So those countries went socialist of one flavor or another and then they became desperately poor third world you know places and it could happen to the US as well. I mean I think we got a long way to go. There's a lot of resiliency in the US but you know the trend line is clear anyway. >> Yeah I think my home country of Canada might be a little bit farther along that path than the United States at this point in time. Um well let's end on the debt and deficit situation in the United States specifically and perhaps some if you could shed some light on how the Austrian school of economics could address this issue. I had Dr. Mark Thornton from the Mises Institute on recently. He had some interesting things to say about Austrian econ economics and how it could potentially apply to our current situation. But the the problem of course you know you don't want to get political but the problem is the politicians. They are going to fight tooth and nail to protect that which helps them consolidate their own power and wealth and that of their inner circle which of course is the fiat currency system which is of course expansion of the debt. Um so what what is the solution here? Does the system have to collapse before it can be rebuilt? >> Oh boy that's a huge question itself. First thing I would say, the politicians keep on voting for more spending because that's what gets them reelected. Which actually means it's the voters. I mean, anybody who who seriously expects the politicians to do what is unpopular just doesn't understand how politics works because there's a word for anybody any politician who does what the voters hate and that's called out of office. You lose the next election if you do that. So, it's really the voters. Why are the voters voting for bread and circuses? Well, you know, can we can debate that, but that's that's the fact. Now, the problem with collapse, you know, people use that word, but I think most people, they really envision kind of a market correction, you know, maybe 2008. That's not collapse. That's like, okay, the stock market crashed, but you know, the economy pretty much went on as it had. Um, you know, what does true collapse look like? So I wrote what I think is probably my single most important essay and it is called when gold backwardation becomes permanent and you can Google that. I mean every site picked it up. Um that that went around uh you know all the alternative finance gold sites you know probably hundreds of sites carried it and it's pretty dire and and it it you know it's going to look like a hyperinflation although it will have nothing to do with the quantity of dollars. It's a repudiation of the quality of the credit and is a move to distrust the counterparty and u when gold withdraws its bid on the dollar which is hard for people to grasp because most people think of prices in dollar terms. So people will say well everything else you know the dollar withdraws the bid but in the case of gold it'll be you know there's the withdrawal of the offer to sell gold and dollars. Okay, you're complicating it. But um when gold withdraws then the whole system collapses and that is going to be a collapse of our ability to produce energy at large scale which also means the ability to produce food at large scale. You stop producing food and energy. That's what collapses. Now that is dire because the North American continent can probably support 30 million people in pre-industrial. So think no diesel power, no insecticides, no fertilizers. What does that look like? Subsistence, you know, hard labor, subsistence farming, and uh you can't produce the bountiful harvest that we have today. Um it's going to be much less efficient, much lower crop crop yields. Um and so the population of North America is what is it 400 and something, you know, million going down to 30 million. And that's going to be a calamity and there'll be a lot of killing because nobody wants to be the marginal guy who dies. They'll kill somebody else if they think he has food. So that's going to make Karacas Venezuela today look like you know paradise you know by comparison. Um so you know if we look if we look at the the historical precedent for this it's Rome in 476 AD. So before a collapse it was about 1.1 million population in Rome and after the collapse it was 6,000 or 8,000. So you know 94 95 you know 96% 98% collapse um of the population and um you know was there recover so Rome had debauchery of the currency and everything else too people have written about this the coins have less and less silver in them you know so what went on and so it is true that after Rome collapsed it didn't have you know they weren't clipped you know physically but diluted I guess coins That's true. And you didn't have the corruption of the Roman Senate anymore. That's true. You also didn't really have civilization anymore uh for a while. And um when civilization recovered, it was about a thousand years uh before civilization was back to anything near comparable to Rome. And um I think about 1,400 years before certain technologies like cement were rediscovered in the 19th century. Um and then some of the some of the works of Roman engineering probably not really replicated until the 20th century until the modern era. So it was a pretty big setback and so yes we did recover and we we did wash away all the corruption of Rome but um that was quite a calamity and nobody who lived through it or lived into it I should say um appreciated the fact that eventually there was a reset and things got better because they didn't live long enough for that. And um I hope that's not what's coming. But uh I I believe that if we don't change monetary courses, it is what's coming. And so that's why that's why I'm doing what I'm doing with monetary medals is to try to offer the world an alternative while there's still time. Because if you wait until the day of collapse, it's too late. You know, this idea that oh well, you know, us little elite group will have all the money and the rest of the world will have to desperately bid it off of us. You know, it's kind of a Bitcoin fantasy, but that's not how it works that way. If that if that mob gets that desperate, they will kill you for it and kill each other as well. And then, you know, once the killing starts, you know, who started it and the wise and wherefors, you know, fade and you just have groups that are struggling to stay alive and struggling to kill for revenge and, you know, it's it's endless. Um, so anyways, I I hope to not end on such a bleak note, but man, that That is uh yeah, that idea of a reset is is horrific. >> Absolutely. Well, I'm going to put a link in the description to that essay. Uh and that's a good segue into discussing monetary metals as well. I know you offer a yield as you mentioned on gold and silver. So, tell us about that. >> You know, I mentioned the why, which I think is the most important thing if you want and I'm writing a chapter for an academic textbook right now on the monetary system of the future. And and in that chapter I'm taking a more open view that you know whether it's Bitcoin or gold or sea shells or whatever if you want something to circulate as money you have to uh you have to make it so that anybody who wants to can deposit and earn interest that's what will bring it into the market otherwise it will go under people's uh mattresses and uh which is exactly what we see with Bitcoin exactly what we see with gold. If you want to draw it into the market, pay interest. Okay. How do you do that? You have to put it to work. Financing something productive. So, you could look at monetary medals as a niche. Okay. We're doing gold leasing to jewelers. Okay. Great. And you know, that's interesting, right? Because you're getting 4% interest on your gold versus paying 3/4 of a percent for storage. And as the price of gold goes up, storage cost goes up. Or you could say, "Wait a minute. Why are they doing this? We're trying to bring the use of gold back into, you know, society, into civilization where gold is viable and you can have a gold deposit and get interest on it. And if that happens, then gold becomes a real alternative, right? So, so FDR, President Roosevelt in 1933 did something that I I assume everybody watching your show would realize is evil, but they may not realize it was genius or evil genius. I mean, I'm not in any way praising it other than saying, you know, that enemy was wily and crafty and smart and he did something that that that uh smoked a great blow upon our civilization in that by by banning people from owning gold. It wasn't really about the grabbing of the loot. I mean, I'm sure that pleased FDR no end, but that wasn't the primary purpose of it. Um and he wanted to get control of the banking system and the interest rate. But along the way he just he did something else which is you know the conservative saver couldn't hold gold and it was illegal. I mean it was like possessing that you know some funny white powder today. If they catch you they sent you to prison. That's no joke. So um you couldn't hold gold which meant the conservative savers had to own government paper. Now think about that. savers are now feeding the the mo of the government welfare state and calling it savings. I mean c can you imagine a greater inver conceptual inversion to call that savings? You're giving the government the wherewithal to run this welfare state and you're calling that savings. Okay. So now fast forward from 1933 to 1975, 42 years they relegalized gold. Why? Because they didn't care anymore. Because after Nixon in 1971, gold had no monetary role anymore. It wasn't in the banking system anymore. Nobody cared. So they see relegalize it. It'll be a joke. It'll go to $7 an ounce. Let it trade on a futures exchange next to frozen orange juice and pork bellies. They were pretty derisive about now. They were wrong about the $7 an ounce. They were right about trading on the futures exchange and then it would become a joke. And no serious person after that, you know, serious main mainstream would think about gold anymore in any serious way. Now, the reason why I bring this up is that to hold gold is a risk. You have all of your debts denominated in dollars. You have your major expenses, whether that be rent, car payment, you know, etc., etc., all dollars holding gold. Now gold is volatile. Goes up and down um against your debts and against your you know monthly expenses. So there's now a volatility risk or price risk to holding gold that there shouldn't be. If gold was the monetary system then holding gold is is the unit. It doesn't go up or down the same way that holding dollars today except gold isn't subject to uh to basement or debauchery or inflation. So you know by by trying to bring back the use of gold for finance that means that producing you know productive enterprises will have their debts denominated in gold rather than in dollars and therefore holding gold will be the zero risk proposition versus holding dollars as it is today. So we're trying to change the world by changing the incentives. You know Kanes is very famous. I imagine most viewers of the show would be familiar with the first part of this quote when he says Lenin is said to have said that um there's no sure way of overthrowing the capitalist order which means civilization because if you completely overthrow capitalism as in North Korea you have no civilization and what you're reduced to is starvation and if it wasn't from a little bit of charity from the Chinese and the Russians North Korea would have starved itself into oblivion by now. um there's no shorter way of overthrowing the capitalist order by debrain money. Now most people think he means inflation but if you go on he goes on and on and on and at the end he says and it it it generally impoverishes everybody and whatever but it does it in a way of engaging the hidden forces of economics you know to destroy the world and in a way that not one in a million can understand how the world is being destroyed. Now, if he meant inflation, then he was an idiot. I'm old enough to remember I was 12 years old in 1979. I'm old enough to remember that era. And you know, just as you know, in recent years, everybody talked about inflation every day. It was on the nightly news 5 days a week. They had something called the misery index, which is inflation plus unemployment. Uh so if he thought that nobody would notice inflation, he was an idiot. Now, I don't think Kanes was an idiot. I think he was gen again genius but evil. And so what he was talking about was driving interest rates to zero and therefore asset prices were driving to infinity. And the reason why nobody would see the world being destroyed is everybody loves a bull market. And so there, you know, I just read a short essay on Twitter trying to remember the guy's name. Um but he he coined a term or at least he used a term I hadn't seen before the gamblification of the financial markets and the economy where everything becomes a gamble and you know he was talking about crypto but the same thing applies to everything else. go into the casino with your favorite chip, whether it's properties, whether it's equities, whether it's silver, whether it's Bitcoin, right? And and you know, you spin the dice, you know, spin the wheel, roll the dice, whatever. And then, uh, as long as the interest rate is falling, then asset prices are rising and you can't lose. So, um, everything becomes a gamble. And we've replaced investment with speculation. And what we're trying to do is is restore the concept of uh you know productive enterprise financing productive enterprise and bringing gold and silver back. So yeah we pay interest on gold we pay interest on silver everybody can open an account but I I I feel it's important to talk about the why otherwise this is just a niche you know little thing. >> Yeah I love the mission and I'm going to put a link in the description to monetary medals so people can check it out. Keith, as always, fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you for joining us today. Our sponsor, Ark Silver Gold Opium, has some great prices on gold and silver bullion products. They are on your screen right now. These are well supplies, last, and subject to change. 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