Chris Temple: Gold Game Has Changed, Stocks to Load Up on Now
Summary
Conference Sentiment: Attendance quality is up with serious generalist investors focused on hot stories like gold, uranium, and broader energy-related themes.
Gold Outlook: After a parabolic move higher, a corrective pullback is seen as healthy, with long-term support from a new global monetary narrative and central bank gold accumulation.
Gold Explorers Strategy: Preference for near-surface, economic resources with experienced management; avoid “drill-for-PR” stories and accumulate quality explorers 25–35% off recent highs.
Macro & Fed Risks: Persistent inflation, heavy debt service, and renewed Fed liquidity strains suggest risk of a broader market pullback or asset-price deflation.
Critical Minerals Policy: The MP Materials (MP) deal—DoD equity and a floor-price guarantee—signals needed industrial policy; domestic projects require higher, guaranteed prices versus China’s undercutting.
Lithium Case Study: Frontier Lithium (FL) used higher price assumptions in its feasibility study to model realistic North American economics; backed by Mitsubishi, it reflects how multi-tier pricing could enable development.
Uranium Thesis: Uranium is the top pick with expectations for a very tight market and potential $200+/lb spot within a couple of years, aided by rising global electricity needs.
Natural Gas Role: Natural gas is the second “heavy lifter” alongside nuclear energy, with structurally growing power demand even if the latest rally may consolidate.
Transcript
[music] I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and here today with me is Chris Temple, founder, editor and publisher at the National Investor. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> It's great to see you Charlotte. It's good to be in person. >> Yes, we realize in fir in person for the first time. I think that's great. And we're here at the New Orleans Investment Conference and we're we're toward the end of the second day. So, I feel like I can ask if you can give me a sense of sentiment among investors on the show floor. Any key takeaways for you? >> You know, I I've shared these anecdotes with a couple other people here, Charlotte. And what's interesting to me is that not only is the attendance up, but it's quality people. You know, sometimes we joke over the years of most of the people coming to shows like this being the ones that are here looking for the lunch ticket or their drink tickets or their breakfast ticket or, you know, whatever. And I think the the incremental increase this year in the attendees, especially among investors, are very serious people. They're not the typical precious metals conference groupies. They're here, they're generalist investors. are here because there's hot stories in the markets whether it's gold or uranium or the whole energy uh addition story or whatever. So, it's been it's been quite interesting to see just how much um not only the attendance is up but but quality people and and and people who are here rolling up their sleeves. >> Yeah, for me as well it's been interesting to try and track the trends among the audience members here. And let's get into talking about gold. I think that's one of the hot topics of this event for sure. So I think many people are looking at the current pullback in the price as an opportunity. You mentioned there's a lot of savvy people out here, but I know there's also some concern about what's going on with the price after the big move upward. So I wondered if you could talk about where you see gold in the cycle right now. If you could situate us. >> Well, you get my stuff. So you see about a month ago I shared a chart of gold going back you half a century basically since it became a free trading asset or close to it and this latest parabolic rise especially since we had a big breakout. I mean gold went up $1,000 since August to its peak and I don't care what it is gold stocks are kumquats. Nothing goes up parabolic like that without reversing. And so this was inevitable. I told our members to take a fair bit of money off the table, especially uh where ETFs are concerned and some of the larger and more u development stage stories of in precious metals where we had some many multiple gains uh over time. But I agree with the part of what you said that this is an opportunity. I I for one think that we can go I mean worst case I think as low as 33 or $3,400 on gold US which was the breakout level from the beginning of summer. That's probably the worst case scenario. In between there's a chart level 37 to $3,800. But for me rather than than agonizing over that I take away two things. One is and this is what I shared in the chart, you know, the commentary with that. The environment now underguring gold as a theme globally is considerably different than it was even the last time we had a choppy market, you know, like this in 2020, let alone if you go back to prior peaks. The the whole narrative for gold has changed uh for the better. Uh so I still think this is something that's going to play out over a long period of time. Secondly, the opportunity that this uh pullback gives people is to go down the food chain is the way I've kind of put it recently. you know, look at those stories that are superior exploration plays that didn't get the attention as the agos and you know, the pneumont, you know, some of the other stories did in the recent past, which always when you have a big move in the sector, it goes to the larger companies, the more established companies either directly or indirectly by the ETFs, but there's a lot of really good, superior exploration stories out there, not the lifestyle companies of old, but ones with great assets, existing resources or looming resources. Um, and I think this is a great opportunity to be loading up on stuff like that. >> Well, and that was exactly where I was hoping you would go. I was going to ask you, would you be a buyer of gold and gold stocks at these levels and what direction would you move in in terms of the gold stocks? So, anything further you'd say on the types of opportunities that you are maybe looking to pick up right now? >> If you're talking about sectorwide, no. I think we're going to chop around for a while. there is some risk we go lower especially if the macro situation deteriorates and if it does it takes everything with it at least for a while so I wouldn't be a big buyer of ETFs I wouldn't be a big buyer the established names but I would definitely be accumulating some of the better exploration stories out there >> and what are your criteria I think this is a good time to talk about it since we're at a conference where we've got a room full of gold companies over there what are your criteria that you are looking for you don't have to go through everything maybe the top several of them that you like to see. >> Well, I I first off I like my betting on the jockey theme. You find you find jockeyies and meaning CEOs and others who have done this before who have built successful companies, sold them, and then they find something else to get on to. You want to look for good resources. You want to look for easy ones. Uh I did a interview with a company just the other day that I recommend and he and I had a conversation about companies that drill for press releases. Okay, you want to drill for resources and more important for economic resources. So, some of the better stories these days are not those that have got the real deep intercepts, you know, of uh 2.1 m. It's 20 g gold, but it's half a mile underground. You want the ones a gram, gram and a half, two grams, but over tens of meters at or near surface, easy to mill, a lot of it's free gold. You know, there's a lot of stories out there like that that, you know, that haven't been picked over in the last several months and and I think that there's some great opportunities to accumulate. And those kind of stories, Charlotte, I'm not concerned about whether I think gold has bottomed in this correction or not. I'd be buying them now because a lot of these good exploration stories are 25, 30, 35% off from their peak of just a month ago. >> Yeah, I think that's good context for investors. So that gives us some idea of what's going on in gold right now. If we look at the the broader conversation, we last talked in June and you drew a number of parallels between today and the 1970s. You're talking in particular about poor performance of treasuries during that decade and the high US debt level. So I thought that was a good one to bring up today. Talk about how that is developing currently. Well, part of the narrative going forward that I alluded to a moment ago, Charlotte, that means to me suggests that gold's narrative is different and it's improved compared to past periods where it had to correct. And a lot of people, I'm sure, have seen this chart. For the first time ever, or at least since in modern times, the central bank holdings of gold exceed central bank holdings of US Treasury securities globally. All right? So gold has a renewed relevance as a monetary asset and that's that's a gamecher. It didn't come out about all at once of course this has been building for a while. So I think in that respect it's similar to the 70s. Uh back in the 70s there was unique aspersions being cast against just the US dollar and US debt. Now it's everybody. The question is who's you know who's le least bad of all of the stories out there. you know, if you add up the entire US debt to GDP ratio, um, but look at public and private debt and everything like that, we're approaching 300% of GDP. Uh, China, which has been, uh, you know, taking us to the cleaners on rare earth elements and on other things and other manufactured products, theirs is 360% debt to to, you know, total debt to GDP. So worldwide we have this dynamic right now of debt that is not only unpayable. I mean it's a mathematical and physical impossibility for anybody to ever pay off these debts. And increasingly they become accounting fictions that nevertheless are real enough that they're crimp crimping economic activity everywhere. Now we're to the point where that debt can't be serviced easily. You know, look at the US. Um, the US we're going to pay a trillion and a quarter give or take this year in interest on the debt. Um, a lot of people are saying, well, if we revalue gold market to market, uh, that'll help with the debt. It'll pay half. It'll cover half of this year's expected deficit. If you, if you were to revalue all the gold the US claims it has, okay, uh, you're roughly a trillion dollars. this year's deficit will be more like two. So that's that's not going to answer the question. We need to really start everybody rethinking the entire debate over how we have monetary reform. It can't include the Federal Reserve. We need to look at the ideas of national currencies. We need to look at major spending initiatives but with an offthebooks bank. Uh I've been carrying water for cause of a national infrastructure bank for a while for that reason because especially you know another thing that animates people here at this conference Charlotte the whole idea of the president and all of his executive orders and moves and you know various investments and loans here and there to different types of mineral companies and so forth. That's all great but it's nothing compared to the scale of what we truly do need going forward. that's not going to come out of the federal budget, you know, and so we have to have a debate on the future of money because otherwise we're at a point right now where the main street economy is gasping for air and the markets are in trouble. The Federal Reserve just a few days ago and overnight repo lending just shattered its prior record of how much money it had to stick into the markets overnight just to keep everything from imploding. And in that respect, we're back to where a point we were at with the Fed in 2019. And I've been talking a lot about that because this is going to affect every subject talked about at this conference. If the Fed is so far out over its skis that whatever it does on interest rates, the the problem is just so large and the debt bubbles they've blown and asset bubbles along with it are just so large. There's only one way they can go. So, we are very overdue for a market pullback, if not an outright deflation for a while in asset prices. >> Well, and I did want to check in on the Fed as well because that was another point where in our last interview you were drawing parallels with the 1970s where there was that premature declaration of victory over inflation, which I think that people are probably feeling that even more right now after the last rate cut. We're not at that 2% target. So any further thoughts on what you're seeing there? >> Well, look, the Fed Rome Powell to make things look at least half uh respectable did admit that uh you know, we're not at 2% if you take away the tariff part of it. Maybe we're closer than the markets think, but that's laughable. I mean, the the se this Fed's favored measure of inflation bottomed back in the spring at 2.3%. And a couple of weeks ago, people on Wall Street were popping champagne courts because instead of going to 3.1, it only went to three. But that's 2.3 to 3%. And the Fed is cutting rates in that environment. They're cutting rates in an environment where we've had record highs on Wall Street. They're cutting rates in an environment where we've got the tightest credit spreads uh ever or close to it. So what happens and this is something that is not discussed nearly enough Charlotte when you have a credit cycle as opposed to a business cycle. All right these waves that go on at at time aren't based on real economic activities are based on Fed tinkering with the money supply. And what we all need to keep in the back of our mind is that I alluded to 2019 a minute ago when the Fed had a similar problem what they seem to have now. People forgot this several months before CO was, you know, an issue and that became the excuse for the Fed to really go nutso on money printing. Several months prior to that, in the fall of 2019, all of a sudden the Fed was having to shovel money into the banking system. And at the time, Powell had this euphemistic comment. He said, "We've discovered a plumbing problem in this banking system." Right? Well, the plumbing problem, I think things are backed up again, you know, colloally, both speaking. And um so after that, when the Fed had co as an excuse, you add it all together and all the money they printed before they, you know, belatedly POW turned from an arsonist into a firefighter, but after he had already created something like 30% of all the US dollars ever brought into existence in the entire history of this country. And so when you have such a massive credit creation like that that is fed into asset prices that has caused businesses and individuals alike as much as they could do it for a while to borrow and spend beyond their means again because they had all of this free money all these trillions of dollars to stay home during co etc. There is nothing more that the Fed can do itself to enhance economic activity because that's already been done. And so the question now is with all of these bubbles in credit and asset prices and everything, what form does a retrenchment or blowoff take? Is it going to be spectacular? Do we just plot along if they can keep things levitated enough? And that's why there's all of this activity over AI and cryptocurrencies and stuff because they got to come up, everybody's got to come up with every goofy scheme they can think of to blow more bubbles and keep more artificial wealth out there cuz without it, you know, we're wy coyote off the cliff and the acne rocket booster is sputtering like it's out of fuel. >> I think this is all really important to talk about and thanks for surfacing some things that we don't get to hear about often. I want to go back to the point that you were making about the money that's being directed by the Trump administration toward the mining sector. And I actually had a note after our last interview because we touched on it a little bit, but not very much. And I think that was another point where you saw people being maybe too excited too soon. So, can you talk about the consequences of what's happening there? Why that might not be as good as it seems? Well, look, first off, I want to be fair to the president and to the people around him who in their hearts to varying extents really do want to, as the president puts it, make America great again or to get back control of our own destiny over energy and especially over uranium and rare earths and all these other various things. These things, these industries in the US were gutted over several decades. And so, it's not going to be an easy fix. It's not going to be an overnight fix or anything like that. So, look, anything that is done is a step in the right direction. Permitting reform is desperately needed. But, you know, just over a month ago, I MCED a conference uh of a group I'm very involved with better in our backyard. It was in the Twin Cities up in Minnesota. We had members of Congress. We had one US senator who actually at the last minute asked to come and speak. We had regulators, policy makers, all different kinds of people. And uh besides MCing the event, I chaired a panel. Uh and one of the people we had on the panel is a guy who thinks like I do that industry in this country and mining companies and all the different companies along the food chain need to be sober about what's going on right now because we don't have, as I alluded to a minute ago, Charlotte, talking about what we need monetary reform-wise to be able to have the kind of money to go forward and rebuild these things. You're talking in a scope of many trillions of dollars that are needed right now to be able to fund infrastructure growth and repair to fund all of the different things we need to to have to get mines in operation. I will say this that and I said it at the time when it came out that the MP materials deal where the defense department actually became a shareholder in a company but more so guaranteed a a minimum price which at the time they said they signed this deal was double the global market price. Okay, that's huge because one of the things that people don't realize and I think even a lot of policy makers don't realize and this is what I was saying before about people being a little overly optimistic early on just because of a few executive orders. You know, the president's early executive order permitting reform, okay? Uh get rid of all the red tape and stuff like that, but there's not enough money as the executive order itself said. You know, this is all subject to the appropriations process. We have a market crash and a recession. You can kiss all of these investments goodbye. All of them for the most part, at least for a while. But in in this whole mix, Charlotte, I was pointing out that those executive orders are nice, but they did not make a single development stage copper nickel project in North America any more economic than they were before those executive orders. So, that part needs to be addressed. China, we all know, has been beggaring thy neighbor world over when it comes to the costs to do these things. They deliberately for years have lost money in some cases on lithium, uh, on rare earth, on other things like that just to squeeze everybody out. When they don't have any competition or raise the price, when competition comes back, they put the price back down. We cannot shoulder that if we're talking about first world economies in both the US and Canada. We have to make a decision policy-wise and even morally. Okay? If we really believe in our own rhetoric that we need to have these homegrown industries within our own four walls, pay good wages, protect the environment, all these different kind of things. Then we can't have copper at $5 a pound. We can't have nickel at eight or $9 a pound. You know, we've got to recognize that we have to guarantee higher prices. How you do that is a matter of some debate. I mean, with some of the things that the Trump administration has done, if you haven't been following this, there's a hot debate among traditional libertarian economists and others, you know, like since when did the US government become a private equity fund? You know, buying stakes and companies. Now, some of the people complaining about that didn't complain when the Biden administration loaned a bunch of money, which it may never get back to its pet green projects, but now that President Trump is a businessman and more of a capitalist, wants to buy stock in them. Now, people are complaining about that. I can't say that these are exactly the kinds of things that the framers of the Constitution in this country envision the federal government doing, but it's necessary and we have to have a national debate. And I think in you know your country as well over what kind of an industrial policy are we going to put together because it can't be this slaphazard a deal here and a deal there like we've seen recently you know again even though those things are steps in the right direction. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. They are steps in the right direction but I see what you mean. It is kind of one by one not all together. I I wonder so would you see in terms of the pricing and needing to have higher prices in order to support all the things you mentioned would you see a divergence in price maybe between what we have in North America versus elsewhere in the world or or how are you thinking >> I think there would be as a matter of fact that there there are precedents for that in the recent past uh I love to use the example to help to start a conversation like your question and gender Charlotte you saw the movie Blood Diamonds with Leonardo DiCaprio That was a realworld issue over is it morally right to buy diamonds that are produced under conditions that that lead to conflict where literally the sale of diamonds finances butchering among competing peoples in Africa and whatever. All right. So what happened uh up in your province that the Kimberly process was created to where you can have this microscopic laser tattoo for lack of a better term on a diamond and they found at the time that people customers were willing to pay higher prices for the same diamond if it had that tattoo because now you know that it didn't come from a conflict region. benchmark mineral intelligence which most of pe our listeners have probably at least heard of that's a global consultancy that follows the base metals battery metals and things like that they started back when you know before the busts came with lithium and nickel prices after a while they had already started putting the pricing infrastructure in place to have this multi-tiered pricing you know an Asian price for lithium carbonate and maybe a North American price for lithium carbonate that kind of got sidetracked or delayed a little bit because the prices fell off so much that it for the time being at least became largely irrelevant. But I believe that the recognition is there by some people by some in the industry and I think maybe by you know some people even in the mining industry itself. I mean I was interested and I'll mention this company because they're not a covered company of mine anymore. One of my great recommendations for years was a company called Frontier Lithium. All right, which in Ontario was just the first company in that province tapped for one of their programs to fasttrack mining operations. Okay, the share price is off 70% or whatever from what it was at high where fortunately we sold most of what we had. But still a great project. I love it. Maybe I'll re-recommend it again one of these days when I've got a better attitude about lithium which I still don't. But my point is if you go back a few months to when they came out with a bankable feasibility study, they used the lithium price that was like half again or more higher than the current spaine price, maybe closer to double the the the market at that time for spamine. And so a lot of people looked at it and why would they come out with a number like this for a for a bankable feasibility study? Well, when I talked to the company afterward, I got a very interesting answer, and it's because, look, we know that this thing's not going to be developed tomorrow. Mitsubishi, by the way, is their big brother. They've they've got a big investment in the company, but they said this is we wanted to set the model out for what we think was going to be realistic pricing by the time we build this thing, but more important to show in Canada and by extension in North America what pricing is needed and how it works to make everything from from the mine to the end customer work for everybody. And I I understood it. I must confess I was a little skeptical still but it was within I forget not weeks of that that the federal government in this country came out with the MP materials deal where they guaranteed a certain floor price for and I thought wow maybe this is going to catch on because it needs to for all of this to work. >> Yeah that'll be really interesting to follow. So thank you for going into that. We'll keep checking back with you on that. And I I will let you go almost. I've got one hopefully fun question before I let you go. I'm trying to ask everybody this one. If we look forward to 2026, what would your pick be for top performing asset next year and can be a commodity, but it doesn't have to. >> Uranium. >> Okay. All right. It's easy. >> That's an easy one. >> Okay. >> And that's for a whole host of reasons. Whether we have a big drop in the overall markets or not, I think uranium even today when we've had a bit of a bounce, we're 80ish or so on the spot price. Uh I have said it before and I'll say it again. Within a couple of years, I'm looking for $200 plus a pound on the uranium spot price. Contract prices of course will be different. The spot price will probably by then exceed the uh contract prices because it's the market's going to stay very very tight. But apart from the added demand that's expected uh for energy and and by extension this is one of the things that's helped the the uranium and nuclear fuel and related stocks of course all of the AI stuff and whatnot which I think is half real and half of a scam. Okay, the whole AI thing. But but aside from that, even before everybody in the recent past was all gaga over AI, we still have a globe where every year demand and and requirements for energy are going up. And so the uranium story was better already. It we don't need to have AI. That'll only make it more dynamic down the road. But I think just when you look very simply, Charlotte, at a globe that has an insatiable, ever growing need for electricity, the two best stories really are uranium and natural gas. You know, natural gas is already up by about a third since uh summertime. And I don't know if this particular rally is going to hold, but long term, I probably like it second. And not coincidentally, Chris Wright, our energy secretary, has said that, you know, our energy policy is a country going forward. And I think this will be true in Canada somewhat as well. The two heavy lifters are going to be nuclear energy and natural gas. You know, the demand for other things will flatline, but they're they're going to be the two big winners going forward. You got to like both of them. >> All right. Well, perfect place to end it. Thank you so much for coming on to go through all these topics. Great to have you in person. >> My privilege. Good to see you. >> Amazing. And once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investing.com and this is Chris Temple.
Chris Temple: Gold Game Has Changed, Stocks to Load Up on Now
Summary
Transcript
[music] I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and here today with me is Chris Temple, founder, editor and publisher at the National Investor. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> It's great to see you Charlotte. It's good to be in person. >> Yes, we realize in fir in person for the first time. I think that's great. And we're here at the New Orleans Investment Conference and we're we're toward the end of the second day. So, I feel like I can ask if you can give me a sense of sentiment among investors on the show floor. Any key takeaways for you? >> You know, I I've shared these anecdotes with a couple other people here, Charlotte. And what's interesting to me is that not only is the attendance up, but it's quality people. You know, sometimes we joke over the years of most of the people coming to shows like this being the ones that are here looking for the lunch ticket or their drink tickets or their breakfast ticket or, you know, whatever. And I think the the incremental increase this year in the attendees, especially among investors, are very serious people. They're not the typical precious metals conference groupies. They're here, they're generalist investors. are here because there's hot stories in the markets whether it's gold or uranium or the whole energy uh addition story or whatever. So, it's been it's been quite interesting to see just how much um not only the attendance is up but but quality people and and and people who are here rolling up their sleeves. >> Yeah, for me as well it's been interesting to try and track the trends among the audience members here. And let's get into talking about gold. I think that's one of the hot topics of this event for sure. So I think many people are looking at the current pullback in the price as an opportunity. You mentioned there's a lot of savvy people out here, but I know there's also some concern about what's going on with the price after the big move upward. So I wondered if you could talk about where you see gold in the cycle right now. If you could situate us. >> Well, you get my stuff. So you see about a month ago I shared a chart of gold going back you half a century basically since it became a free trading asset or close to it and this latest parabolic rise especially since we had a big breakout. I mean gold went up $1,000 since August to its peak and I don't care what it is gold stocks are kumquats. Nothing goes up parabolic like that without reversing. And so this was inevitable. I told our members to take a fair bit of money off the table, especially uh where ETFs are concerned and some of the larger and more u development stage stories of in precious metals where we had some many multiple gains uh over time. But I agree with the part of what you said that this is an opportunity. I I for one think that we can go I mean worst case I think as low as 33 or $3,400 on gold US which was the breakout level from the beginning of summer. That's probably the worst case scenario. In between there's a chart level 37 to $3,800. But for me rather than than agonizing over that I take away two things. One is and this is what I shared in the chart, you know, the commentary with that. The environment now underguring gold as a theme globally is considerably different than it was even the last time we had a choppy market, you know, like this in 2020, let alone if you go back to prior peaks. The the whole narrative for gold has changed uh for the better. Uh so I still think this is something that's going to play out over a long period of time. Secondly, the opportunity that this uh pullback gives people is to go down the food chain is the way I've kind of put it recently. you know, look at those stories that are superior exploration plays that didn't get the attention as the agos and you know, the pneumont, you know, some of the other stories did in the recent past, which always when you have a big move in the sector, it goes to the larger companies, the more established companies either directly or indirectly by the ETFs, but there's a lot of really good, superior exploration stories out there, not the lifestyle companies of old, but ones with great assets, existing resources or looming resources. Um, and I think this is a great opportunity to be loading up on stuff like that. >> Well, and that was exactly where I was hoping you would go. I was going to ask you, would you be a buyer of gold and gold stocks at these levels and what direction would you move in in terms of the gold stocks? So, anything further you'd say on the types of opportunities that you are maybe looking to pick up right now? >> If you're talking about sectorwide, no. I think we're going to chop around for a while. there is some risk we go lower especially if the macro situation deteriorates and if it does it takes everything with it at least for a while so I wouldn't be a big buyer of ETFs I wouldn't be a big buyer the established names but I would definitely be accumulating some of the better exploration stories out there >> and what are your criteria I think this is a good time to talk about it since we're at a conference where we've got a room full of gold companies over there what are your criteria that you are looking for you don't have to go through everything maybe the top several of them that you like to see. >> Well, I I first off I like my betting on the jockey theme. You find you find jockeyies and meaning CEOs and others who have done this before who have built successful companies, sold them, and then they find something else to get on to. You want to look for good resources. You want to look for easy ones. Uh I did a interview with a company just the other day that I recommend and he and I had a conversation about companies that drill for press releases. Okay, you want to drill for resources and more important for economic resources. So, some of the better stories these days are not those that have got the real deep intercepts, you know, of uh 2.1 m. It's 20 g gold, but it's half a mile underground. You want the ones a gram, gram and a half, two grams, but over tens of meters at or near surface, easy to mill, a lot of it's free gold. You know, there's a lot of stories out there like that that, you know, that haven't been picked over in the last several months and and I think that there's some great opportunities to accumulate. And those kind of stories, Charlotte, I'm not concerned about whether I think gold has bottomed in this correction or not. I'd be buying them now because a lot of these good exploration stories are 25, 30, 35% off from their peak of just a month ago. >> Yeah, I think that's good context for investors. So that gives us some idea of what's going on in gold right now. If we look at the the broader conversation, we last talked in June and you drew a number of parallels between today and the 1970s. You're talking in particular about poor performance of treasuries during that decade and the high US debt level. So I thought that was a good one to bring up today. Talk about how that is developing currently. Well, part of the narrative going forward that I alluded to a moment ago, Charlotte, that means to me suggests that gold's narrative is different and it's improved compared to past periods where it had to correct. And a lot of people, I'm sure, have seen this chart. For the first time ever, or at least since in modern times, the central bank holdings of gold exceed central bank holdings of US Treasury securities globally. All right? So gold has a renewed relevance as a monetary asset and that's that's a gamecher. It didn't come out about all at once of course this has been building for a while. So I think in that respect it's similar to the 70s. Uh back in the 70s there was unique aspersions being cast against just the US dollar and US debt. Now it's everybody. The question is who's you know who's le least bad of all of the stories out there. you know, if you add up the entire US debt to GDP ratio, um, but look at public and private debt and everything like that, we're approaching 300% of GDP. Uh, China, which has been, uh, you know, taking us to the cleaners on rare earth elements and on other things and other manufactured products, theirs is 360% debt to to, you know, total debt to GDP. So worldwide we have this dynamic right now of debt that is not only unpayable. I mean it's a mathematical and physical impossibility for anybody to ever pay off these debts. And increasingly they become accounting fictions that nevertheless are real enough that they're crimp crimping economic activity everywhere. Now we're to the point where that debt can't be serviced easily. You know, look at the US. Um, the US we're going to pay a trillion and a quarter give or take this year in interest on the debt. Um, a lot of people are saying, well, if we revalue gold market to market, uh, that'll help with the debt. It'll pay half. It'll cover half of this year's expected deficit. If you, if you were to revalue all the gold the US claims it has, okay, uh, you're roughly a trillion dollars. this year's deficit will be more like two. So that's that's not going to answer the question. We need to really start everybody rethinking the entire debate over how we have monetary reform. It can't include the Federal Reserve. We need to look at the ideas of national currencies. We need to look at major spending initiatives but with an offthebooks bank. Uh I've been carrying water for cause of a national infrastructure bank for a while for that reason because especially you know another thing that animates people here at this conference Charlotte the whole idea of the president and all of his executive orders and moves and you know various investments and loans here and there to different types of mineral companies and so forth. That's all great but it's nothing compared to the scale of what we truly do need going forward. that's not going to come out of the federal budget, you know, and so we have to have a debate on the future of money because otherwise we're at a point right now where the main street economy is gasping for air and the markets are in trouble. The Federal Reserve just a few days ago and overnight repo lending just shattered its prior record of how much money it had to stick into the markets overnight just to keep everything from imploding. And in that respect, we're back to where a point we were at with the Fed in 2019. And I've been talking a lot about that because this is going to affect every subject talked about at this conference. If the Fed is so far out over its skis that whatever it does on interest rates, the the problem is just so large and the debt bubbles they've blown and asset bubbles along with it are just so large. There's only one way they can go. So, we are very overdue for a market pullback, if not an outright deflation for a while in asset prices. >> Well, and I did want to check in on the Fed as well because that was another point where in our last interview you were drawing parallels with the 1970s where there was that premature declaration of victory over inflation, which I think that people are probably feeling that even more right now after the last rate cut. We're not at that 2% target. So any further thoughts on what you're seeing there? >> Well, look, the Fed Rome Powell to make things look at least half uh respectable did admit that uh you know, we're not at 2% if you take away the tariff part of it. Maybe we're closer than the markets think, but that's laughable. I mean, the the se this Fed's favored measure of inflation bottomed back in the spring at 2.3%. And a couple of weeks ago, people on Wall Street were popping champagne courts because instead of going to 3.1, it only went to three. But that's 2.3 to 3%. And the Fed is cutting rates in that environment. They're cutting rates in an environment where we've had record highs on Wall Street. They're cutting rates in an environment where we've got the tightest credit spreads uh ever or close to it. So what happens and this is something that is not discussed nearly enough Charlotte when you have a credit cycle as opposed to a business cycle. All right these waves that go on at at time aren't based on real economic activities are based on Fed tinkering with the money supply. And what we all need to keep in the back of our mind is that I alluded to 2019 a minute ago when the Fed had a similar problem what they seem to have now. People forgot this several months before CO was, you know, an issue and that became the excuse for the Fed to really go nutso on money printing. Several months prior to that, in the fall of 2019, all of a sudden the Fed was having to shovel money into the banking system. And at the time, Powell had this euphemistic comment. He said, "We've discovered a plumbing problem in this banking system." Right? Well, the plumbing problem, I think things are backed up again, you know, colloally, both speaking. And um so after that, when the Fed had co as an excuse, you add it all together and all the money they printed before they, you know, belatedly POW turned from an arsonist into a firefighter, but after he had already created something like 30% of all the US dollars ever brought into existence in the entire history of this country. And so when you have such a massive credit creation like that that is fed into asset prices that has caused businesses and individuals alike as much as they could do it for a while to borrow and spend beyond their means again because they had all of this free money all these trillions of dollars to stay home during co etc. There is nothing more that the Fed can do itself to enhance economic activity because that's already been done. And so the question now is with all of these bubbles in credit and asset prices and everything, what form does a retrenchment or blowoff take? Is it going to be spectacular? Do we just plot along if they can keep things levitated enough? And that's why there's all of this activity over AI and cryptocurrencies and stuff because they got to come up, everybody's got to come up with every goofy scheme they can think of to blow more bubbles and keep more artificial wealth out there cuz without it, you know, we're wy coyote off the cliff and the acne rocket booster is sputtering like it's out of fuel. >> I think this is all really important to talk about and thanks for surfacing some things that we don't get to hear about often. I want to go back to the point that you were making about the money that's being directed by the Trump administration toward the mining sector. And I actually had a note after our last interview because we touched on it a little bit, but not very much. And I think that was another point where you saw people being maybe too excited too soon. So, can you talk about the consequences of what's happening there? Why that might not be as good as it seems? Well, look, first off, I want to be fair to the president and to the people around him who in their hearts to varying extents really do want to, as the president puts it, make America great again or to get back control of our own destiny over energy and especially over uranium and rare earths and all these other various things. These things, these industries in the US were gutted over several decades. And so, it's not going to be an easy fix. It's not going to be an overnight fix or anything like that. So, look, anything that is done is a step in the right direction. Permitting reform is desperately needed. But, you know, just over a month ago, I MCED a conference uh of a group I'm very involved with better in our backyard. It was in the Twin Cities up in Minnesota. We had members of Congress. We had one US senator who actually at the last minute asked to come and speak. We had regulators, policy makers, all different kinds of people. And uh besides MCing the event, I chaired a panel. Uh and one of the people we had on the panel is a guy who thinks like I do that industry in this country and mining companies and all the different companies along the food chain need to be sober about what's going on right now because we don't have, as I alluded to a minute ago, Charlotte, talking about what we need monetary reform-wise to be able to have the kind of money to go forward and rebuild these things. You're talking in a scope of many trillions of dollars that are needed right now to be able to fund infrastructure growth and repair to fund all of the different things we need to to have to get mines in operation. I will say this that and I said it at the time when it came out that the MP materials deal where the defense department actually became a shareholder in a company but more so guaranteed a a minimum price which at the time they said they signed this deal was double the global market price. Okay, that's huge because one of the things that people don't realize and I think even a lot of policy makers don't realize and this is what I was saying before about people being a little overly optimistic early on just because of a few executive orders. You know, the president's early executive order permitting reform, okay? Uh get rid of all the red tape and stuff like that, but there's not enough money as the executive order itself said. You know, this is all subject to the appropriations process. We have a market crash and a recession. You can kiss all of these investments goodbye. All of them for the most part, at least for a while. But in in this whole mix, Charlotte, I was pointing out that those executive orders are nice, but they did not make a single development stage copper nickel project in North America any more economic than they were before those executive orders. So, that part needs to be addressed. China, we all know, has been beggaring thy neighbor world over when it comes to the costs to do these things. They deliberately for years have lost money in some cases on lithium, uh, on rare earth, on other things like that just to squeeze everybody out. When they don't have any competition or raise the price, when competition comes back, they put the price back down. We cannot shoulder that if we're talking about first world economies in both the US and Canada. We have to make a decision policy-wise and even morally. Okay? If we really believe in our own rhetoric that we need to have these homegrown industries within our own four walls, pay good wages, protect the environment, all these different kind of things. Then we can't have copper at $5 a pound. We can't have nickel at eight or $9 a pound. You know, we've got to recognize that we have to guarantee higher prices. How you do that is a matter of some debate. I mean, with some of the things that the Trump administration has done, if you haven't been following this, there's a hot debate among traditional libertarian economists and others, you know, like since when did the US government become a private equity fund? You know, buying stakes and companies. Now, some of the people complaining about that didn't complain when the Biden administration loaned a bunch of money, which it may never get back to its pet green projects, but now that President Trump is a businessman and more of a capitalist, wants to buy stock in them. Now, people are complaining about that. I can't say that these are exactly the kinds of things that the framers of the Constitution in this country envision the federal government doing, but it's necessary and we have to have a national debate. And I think in you know your country as well over what kind of an industrial policy are we going to put together because it can't be this slaphazard a deal here and a deal there like we've seen recently you know again even though those things are steps in the right direction. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. They are steps in the right direction but I see what you mean. It is kind of one by one not all together. I I wonder so would you see in terms of the pricing and needing to have higher prices in order to support all the things you mentioned would you see a divergence in price maybe between what we have in North America versus elsewhere in the world or or how are you thinking >> I think there would be as a matter of fact that there there are precedents for that in the recent past uh I love to use the example to help to start a conversation like your question and gender Charlotte you saw the movie Blood Diamonds with Leonardo DiCaprio That was a realworld issue over is it morally right to buy diamonds that are produced under conditions that that lead to conflict where literally the sale of diamonds finances butchering among competing peoples in Africa and whatever. All right. So what happened uh up in your province that the Kimberly process was created to where you can have this microscopic laser tattoo for lack of a better term on a diamond and they found at the time that people customers were willing to pay higher prices for the same diamond if it had that tattoo because now you know that it didn't come from a conflict region. benchmark mineral intelligence which most of pe our listeners have probably at least heard of that's a global consultancy that follows the base metals battery metals and things like that they started back when you know before the busts came with lithium and nickel prices after a while they had already started putting the pricing infrastructure in place to have this multi-tiered pricing you know an Asian price for lithium carbonate and maybe a North American price for lithium carbonate that kind of got sidetracked or delayed a little bit because the prices fell off so much that it for the time being at least became largely irrelevant. But I believe that the recognition is there by some people by some in the industry and I think maybe by you know some people even in the mining industry itself. I mean I was interested and I'll mention this company because they're not a covered company of mine anymore. One of my great recommendations for years was a company called Frontier Lithium. All right, which in Ontario was just the first company in that province tapped for one of their programs to fasttrack mining operations. Okay, the share price is off 70% or whatever from what it was at high where fortunately we sold most of what we had. But still a great project. I love it. Maybe I'll re-recommend it again one of these days when I've got a better attitude about lithium which I still don't. But my point is if you go back a few months to when they came out with a bankable feasibility study, they used the lithium price that was like half again or more higher than the current spaine price, maybe closer to double the the the market at that time for spamine. And so a lot of people looked at it and why would they come out with a number like this for a for a bankable feasibility study? Well, when I talked to the company afterward, I got a very interesting answer, and it's because, look, we know that this thing's not going to be developed tomorrow. Mitsubishi, by the way, is their big brother. They've they've got a big investment in the company, but they said this is we wanted to set the model out for what we think was going to be realistic pricing by the time we build this thing, but more important to show in Canada and by extension in North America what pricing is needed and how it works to make everything from from the mine to the end customer work for everybody. And I I understood it. I must confess I was a little skeptical still but it was within I forget not weeks of that that the federal government in this country came out with the MP materials deal where they guaranteed a certain floor price for and I thought wow maybe this is going to catch on because it needs to for all of this to work. >> Yeah that'll be really interesting to follow. So thank you for going into that. We'll keep checking back with you on that. And I I will let you go almost. I've got one hopefully fun question before I let you go. I'm trying to ask everybody this one. If we look forward to 2026, what would your pick be for top performing asset next year and can be a commodity, but it doesn't have to. >> Uranium. >> Okay. All right. It's easy. >> That's an easy one. >> Okay. >> And that's for a whole host of reasons. Whether we have a big drop in the overall markets or not, I think uranium even today when we've had a bit of a bounce, we're 80ish or so on the spot price. Uh I have said it before and I'll say it again. Within a couple of years, I'm looking for $200 plus a pound on the uranium spot price. Contract prices of course will be different. The spot price will probably by then exceed the uh contract prices because it's the market's going to stay very very tight. But apart from the added demand that's expected uh for energy and and by extension this is one of the things that's helped the the uranium and nuclear fuel and related stocks of course all of the AI stuff and whatnot which I think is half real and half of a scam. Okay, the whole AI thing. But but aside from that, even before everybody in the recent past was all gaga over AI, we still have a globe where every year demand and and requirements for energy are going up. And so the uranium story was better already. It we don't need to have AI. That'll only make it more dynamic down the road. But I think just when you look very simply, Charlotte, at a globe that has an insatiable, ever growing need for electricity, the two best stories really are uranium and natural gas. You know, natural gas is already up by about a third since uh summertime. And I don't know if this particular rally is going to hold, but long term, I probably like it second. And not coincidentally, Chris Wright, our energy secretary, has said that, you know, our energy policy is a country going forward. And I think this will be true in Canada somewhat as well. The two heavy lifters are going to be nuclear energy and natural gas. You know, the demand for other things will flatline, but they're they're going to be the two big winners going forward. You got to like both of them. >> All right. Well, perfect place to end it. Thank you so much for coming on to go through all these topics. Great to have you in person. >> My privilege. Good to see you. >> Amazing. And once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investing.com and this is Chris Temple.