Dana Samuelson on understanding the gold and silver markets
Summary
Precious Metals Thesis: The guest strongly advocates holding physical precious metals, emphasizing gold and silver as savings and stores of value outside the fiat system.
Gold Drivers: Central bank buying has surged post-2022, de-dollarization trends are rising, and portfolio allocations are shifting, with even major institutions suggesting higher gold weights.
Silver Fundamentals: A multi-year structural deficit, rising industrial demand (notably solar), and critical metal designations are tightening supply and supporting higher prices.
China & India Demand: Both countries are major buyers, with policy and cultural factors driving sustained accumulation; tariffs and festival seasons have amplified physical demand waves.
Market Structure Shift: Physical markets (Shanghai/SGE, LBMA/COMEX inventories) are increasingly determining price discovery, with recent stress highlighting a potential physical squeeze.
Macro Risks: The US debt trap, higher interest costs, and persistent inflation undermine confidence in paper assets and support precious metals as an inflation hedge.
Portfolio Allocation: Discussion notes a sea change in traditional advice, including examples like a 60/20/20 framework (equities/bonds/gold) and the role of metals as non-correlated, no-counterparty-risk assets.
Transcript
Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only. Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full. This rumor that China could have two or three times the amount of gold that the US [music] already has had for decades, which is, you know, 20,000 to 25,000 tons of gold. We just don't know. They'll tell us when they want us to know. Hello everyone. I have been a buyer of gold and silver since 2001. And I I didn't notice I didn't say investor, right? Because I don't look at precious metals that way. Some do. I don't. Instead, I save my wealth in gold and silver. I I see it as trading one form of money, fiat money, for another form of money. It's just an exchange. That's how I see it. Now, in a world where Washington insiders and central bankers are drowning us in trillions of printed dollars, and we all know this, right? With more certainly on the way, we're left having to cope with that inflation that comes along. And for many, it's punishing. It steals from your paycheck and savings while, you know, the financial insiders get richer. It's just how the system works. One true veteran of this war is with us today, and he's been arming Americans with the ultimate shield, physical gold and silver. And that's Dana Samuelson, founder and president of American Gold Exchange, operating since 1998. Well, he can tell us about what kind of market conditions were existing back then for gold. Be an interesting story. He's a top precious metals dealer specializing both in rare US coins and regular bullion, we would call it. With over 45 years battling in the markets, mentored by industry titans, Dana's become a leading voice at conferences like the New Orleans Investment Conference, which I've been to several times myself, and he was predicting gold surge to $4,000 an ounce and beyond as recent, you know, just will hear about that. Um, so he's been helping folks build real wealth against the fiat fraud. He's here to help you navigate how you go about buying gold and silver. What does it look like? And of course, we want to talk to somebody who's been there, done that, has a lot of experience. By the way, Dana is a friend of mine. So, with that, Dana, welcome to the program. >> Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here with you. >> So, let's let's start at the beginning. Um, what got how did you get involved in like like you just wake up one day, gold's in like for people who don't know, tell us about where gold was in 1998 and what happened? Well, you woke up one day with a crazy idea. >> Well, it actually started a lot earlier than that. It started in 1980 when I got out of college with a German degree because I decided I didn't want to be a psychology major and that was the only way I could get out with my class with my degree. >> And I graduated in summer of 1980 when inflation was 18%, interest rates were 16% and the gold price was, you know, had just peaked at $850 an ounce. My brother had gotten into the business 5 years earlier uh through a side door. He became he was an accountant and he was good with rare coins. He ended up getting a job with a company in Houston, Texas that was buying physical precious metals over the counter handover fist during the 1980s boom or the late79 boom. And they needed someone in the vault to back up the guy that was working in the vault. So I literally got hired because I could be trusted to handle the merchandise. It was like going to work in a restaurant at the kitchen sink washing dishes. That's literally how I started. I spent two years there and we ended up selling a lot of coins to Jim Blanchard's company who was uh the leading proponent for the private relegalization of gold ownership in 1974. Jim had the largest mail order coin company in the country at that point in time. And I got hired to be an expert coin appraiser. So they trained me to grade coins for two years. I sat in a little room and all I did was look at vintage US gold and silver coins. And when the buyer would go out of town, I would go up to the trading desk and substitute for him because I good head for numbers and pretty good with people. And the next thing you know, I was Jim's buyer and I became a senior trader. And by the mid to late 1980s, I was spending 50 million bucks of Jim's money with the industry. So I really had a very organic path higher in my career path. Uh I learned a lot. Uh, I finally had enough gumption to start American Gold Exchange, hang my own shingle out in 1998, which turned out to be about the bottom of the precious metal cycle. Uh, and my my mentality at the time was the internet's going to level the playing field for pricing and the best asset that any company has are their clients. So, we we've always had to be very cognizant of taking great care of our clients and having very competitive pricing and the rest will follow through if you run a straightforward business. And that's how we've built our business over the years. It's just just honest, straightforward, uh competitive pricing, good sound advice, and uh trying to literally help people in this sector. Well, it's uh there's a lot of questions about this and we'll get to those because I know I get approached all the time by people who've never bought gold or silver. And by the way, they got marketed to early on in the United States that it was kind of fringe or maybe it was even associated with people who have bunkers or it got a lot of negative press for a long time and and get I get it that was just Wall Street's marketing arm, right, doing all that. But um just recently, just just to sort of set the stage for this, I think this is relevant here. Um, if anybody needs to know this, um, it's now Morgan Stanley's position that their CIO says, well, they favor a 6020 portfolio strategy. That's 60% bonds. I mean, sorry, 60% equities, 20% bonds, 20% gold. That's them saying that. I'm not giving financial advice, but I just want to sort of point out that um, from your perspective, it it it's really starting to to shift in a very new way, isn't it, here in terms of investor psychology. Yeah, this is a sea change uh from traditional US investment advice. Uh the way I like to say it is we don't have a precious metals culture in our country. Uh most countries around the world do. Uh if you've been in a country that's had your currency collapse or uh you've had war on your shores, you have a precious metals culture. And we're of course insulated by two oceans. And we've had the world's reserve currency, the dollar since 1945. Uh which has insulated us from currency shocks in commodities and helped to establish us as the biggest economy in the world. Uh so we've trained our people over 75 years to trust paper assets more than physical precious metals. You know, I mentioned my brother uh he got his start in 1975 at a Vietnamese relocation camp in Arkansas where he he went there to help people fleeing Vietnam who had literally gold bars sewn into their clothing. Um you know, he would buy the gold from them and give them dollars and that's how they got their start here in the US. And that's what I mean by a precious metals culture, right? So when you've seen a big run in precious metals values this year like we've seen with with silver about doubling and gold about doubling over the last you know 18 months uh without a corresponding economic crisis in the US like we've seen in the three previous big bull markets that tells us that the world is a bit concerned about the dollar and our debt right now. They don't trust it as much as they have in the past and they're buying gold in big enough quantities, silver too, to drive the price substantially higher. And that's really what this whole big run we've been going through really means is the world is shunning the dollar a bit and US treasuries as a safe haven and favoring gold over that. And there's a few fundamental reasons underlying that. uh one is the Russian invasive invasion of the Ukraine and the ddollarization movement. Uh but another is President Trump has you know thrown a monkey wrench into the global trade order with these tariffs and that has lit a fire under citizens around the world to to trust something other than the dollar. Uh we tariffed China 145% in April. Uh they're the only country that stood toe-to-toe with us over tariffs when every other country capitulated because they could stand toe-to-toe with us. Uh but their citizens went on a gold buying spree in May, April and May that drove the price up $500 by themselves in that month and a half. And now we've tariffed India 50% in late August over their buying oil from Russia supporting uh the war on the Ukraine uh against our wishes and we've saw India go on a buying spree in September. Uh so there's been two huge buying sprees of physical precious metals this year driven by the Trump tariffs. uh that has caused the metals prices to just move sharply higher which is making of course mainstream uh investment houses you know look at precious metals differently than they have in the past. Today's markets are more volatile than ever with ongoing economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Navigating such environments requires thoughtful adaptive strategies, not a one-sizefits-all approach. At Peak Financial Investing, [music] our registered investment advisory firm connects clients with experienced [music] wealth managers who focus on active portfolio management. These professionals [music] use evidence-based strategies designed to respond to changing conditions, not outdated formulas, [music] but customized approaches grounded in research, discipline, and risk awareness. We [music] believe in open, informed conversations, including discussing tools [music] like precious metals and diversification as part of a broader financial strategy. Every investor's situation is unique, and our advisers tailor their [music] guidance accordingly. Visit peakfinancialinvesting.com today to schedule your [music] free consultation and explore how proactive management can support your [music] financial goals. I'm Dr. Chris Martinson, proud to work with Peak Financial Investing and my support [music] reflects my professional views. I encourage you to take control of your financial future by making informed [music] decisions. You know, I' I've been tracking gold for a very long time and and for two decades, Dana, all really all you had to know it was the anti-doll. And in fact, you could just look at negative or the inverted yields, real yields of 10-year treasuries and it was tick for tick gold price and and that it was very simple. It just played as a as an anti-money kind of a thing. Um, you know, anti- fiat currency. Boring cuz you know you it it it wasn't it wouldn't operate on its own. But then the Biden Treasury Department sanctioned Russia and froze their sovereign reserves in February of 2022. And very shortly after that, all of those relationships that had held for decades broke. Like never like they just decoupled and the 10 the the negative 10-year Treasury rate is no longer um useful. The real Treasury rate, right? It it just doesn't track. It's doing something else. So something else really happened there. That's why I wanted to call this a C change. I you know, for most people that that's pretty quick. It's only 2, three years into the story, but it's behaving completely differently internationally from anything I gotten accustomed to over the prior two decades. I'm wondering if that's a similar experience for you. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, gold typically is inversely correlated to the value of the dollar internationally and to treasury yields. um because most of the gold around the world is priced in dollars but it's bought in other currencies in yen or euros or Swiss franks and as the dollar becomes stronger it makes gold more expensive in those currencies uh so there's less bought and vice versa and if uh you're having you know a positive return on investment meaning the yield or uh return you get on a treasury or another interestbearing investment is positive above the rate of inflation You know, gold is just a rock. It doesn't pay any dividend or yield. So, when there's a positive yield, gold tends to perform weekly in price value. And when there's a negative yield, it tends to do better uh because uh it offers an inflation hedge uh when your money is not going quite as far as it used to. So, what you've seen is entirely correct. And what really happened um a couple big things uh uh to paint this picture a little bit more broadly. You know, central bankers since the dollar became the world's reserve currency in 1945. Between 1950 and n and 2010, central bankers who had big hordes of gold for decades and even centuries discorded gold. Following the great financial crisis and the global debt explosion, they became net buyers of gold in earnest for the first time uh in that entire period buying on average about 500 tons a year, which is equal to about 17th of annual mine production, which is about 3,500 tons a year. Following the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, central bankers doubled their gold buying. So for the last three years, 2022, 23, and 24, they've been buying over a,000 tons of gold a year as a hedge against currency uh problems with trading partners or treasuries that they hold from other uh countries. And this has now become material in the supply demand equation because now they're buying about a quarter or a third of annual mine production on an annual basis. And that's really what helped to build a a rising base under the gold price and a and a breakout in 2024 that's now been a bit turbocharged this year by the uh uh the trade wars that we're in globally. >> Well, it feels like you know um very important point you made Vietnamese right they I think they just opened their market back up to gold purchases and you know I saw the pictures of people just flooding in because they have a a culture of it saving not investing saving in gold. It's just how they say and Indians might have more of a a saving in silver as a also gold but but a little bit maybe more tilted to silver >> but China has got that same thing and so notice what happened here. So the Chinese government said wink wink you know it's okay citizens maybe you should buy some which is almost like a mandate go out and buy gold right and second of all they had just given an experiment of trying to save in real estate and that's fallen apart so they're they're not really big on the stock market gambling a little bit they're not really big on real estate anymore so that's just an enormous flood of Chinese wealth that's now where where else are you gonna invest right they don't allow Bitcoin right so there aren't that many mechanisms I think gold is is astonishing So, I was talking with a refiner a long time ago and he said, "Yeah, we've been we have a a a bounty for anybody at the loading dock who can detect a Chinese mint like they mine lots of gold. If is anything leaving China?" And the answer has been no. They are a one-way trap. Gold enters the country and it doesn't seem to come out again. Is that does that seem like a fair way to look at that? >> Yes. the the Chinese government and the Chinese public have been buying gold uh at record levels for years now. In fact, you you're right. China encouraged their citizens to buy gold I think it was 2020 2021. >> Yep. >> Right. And um if you're a Chinese citizen, you only have really three ways to invest and you mentioned them. Stock market, real estate, both have done badly since co or precious metals which have actually done well. And the Chinese government's been stockpiling gold and the public has been buying gold at record levels and now silver and platinum too. Um I'm not so sure about palladium but um they are one of the fundamental drivers of this rally uh on a base case uh and have been for decades now. We don't know how much gold China actually owns. Uh everything that's mined in the country stays in the country. It is a one-way uh um transit for gold into the country and not out. Uh the US has supposed to have 8,000 tons of gold in Fort Knox and in the Federal Reserve in New York. Um we're not sure if that's really there. I tend to think that it probably is, but who you know, who knows because we've never had a proper audit. But it's rumored that China could have two or three times the amount of gold that the US already has had for decades, which is, you know, 20,000 to 25,000 tons of gold. We just don't know. They'll tell us when they want us to know. >> Yeah. I don't believe anything at face value out of China. So, they said, "Oh, our central bank bought five tons." And I was like, "Is that 50 tons? Is that 500? Or is it five? We don't know. I I just don't know. We we'll know at some point." But um so so you've been at this a long time. Have have you noticed any change in who's showing up to buy or sell gold or silver at this point in time? Has there been any notable shift? Because I presume used to just be guys that look like me, right? There was like Yeah. [laughter] Well, our clientele tends our clientele tends to be older men, you know, who have accumulated some wealth, you know, business leaders, seauite executives, small business owners, uh, independent thinkers, uh, people that don't trust the government. Uh, we trained a lot of people who never bought gold in their life to buy gold during the great financial crisis over a three-year period. uh when COVID hit in 2020 and and thank you for all the great work that you did on CO reporting by the way and I've said this to you before um but when CO hit in uh 2020 a lot of those buyers um came rushing back into the market very quickly um so that has helped a lot that we have a big pool of US buyers but the US buyer typically only buys precious metals when they're scared right and that's that's really the thing that's unusual about the rally that we've just gone through with gold moving from about 2500 to over $4,000 an ounce in the last 15 18 months is we've had three previous major bull markets in the 70s again between 2008 and 2011 and again 2020 to 2019 2020 when co hit uh all of those were driven by a lack of uh confidence in the US or fear in the US markets and now we had a huge run and There has been no fear in the US. So, a lot of US investors in precious metals have actually been selling into this rally between $2,400 gold and $3,700 gold. We've seen a lot more sellers than buyers in our industry because people have been moving into stocks, which have been moving higher and higher, which, you know, I think it's a bit of a Ponzi scheme. um passive investing just flows going into stocks over and over without really uh a relationship to actual values of companies. But anyway, once we got over $3700 gold and silver over about $40 an ounce, the US buyers started to realize, oh, this is really a trend and we need to follow suit. And now you've got, like you said, Morgan Stanley changing their shift in what a fundamental portfolio portfolio should be consist of, which is adding 20% precious metals. And even the bond king, Jeffrey Gundlock, he said in June, if you're looking for safe haven flows, you won't find them in the US Treasury market. And uh I just recently heard an interview with him where he's describing in depth the US debt trap that we're in right now that we don't see any signs of us getting out of any way well except for you know much higher inflation or perhaps hyperinflation in the dollar if it comes to that. >> A debt trap meaning I just heard that it's our current run rate for interest payments on outstanding government debt is 1.2 trillion. >> Right. >> We're going to have to borrow that. So [laughter] when you're borrowing to pay the interest on it's just it goes that it's a trap, right? It's a spiral, >> right? Yeah. We've we've we've kind of crossed the Rubicon and this year part of that sea change that you were describing earlier is that a lot of stories earlier in the year were talking about how the US debt suddenly seems to matter where as we've accumulated accumulated record debt over the last 20 years, no one ever seemed to worry about it too much. This year is kind of a tipping point for that where oh maybe debt really does matter >> because of the way the math works for you know how much we taken in taxes which is 5 trillion a year how much we spend 7 trillion and now with interest rates higher uh you know our interest payment is over a trillion dollars and it's only going to continue to go higher as we continue to accumulate more debt and what happens if the market decides uh to to want higher rates rates than the Fed thinks the markets rates should be worth [snorts] and interest payments continue to escalate because yields go in the in the Treasury market to four or five or 6%. That could really blow up our debt. Well, we'll get into maybe the Japanese situation right now as we're recording this. Japan's yen is weakening pretty pretty stiffly, but also their 20, 30, 40year debt is blowing out with yields to the upside. So, if their central bank wants to control that, they would have to print yen and buy them. So then the yen weakens even more. So it you get caught where it's like darned if you do, darned if you don't, you know. Um and I think that what you're saying is that we're not that far behind Japan. It will get there eventually and the Fed's operating lane is getting narrower and narrower to really control the price of money, >> right? With a Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of about 230% which is historically off the chart. The US is about 120%. If you go back uh I think if you look at 52 countries going back 100 years where the debt to GDP ratio extended over 100% for 5 years or more. All of those currency fails. We're number 53 right now. [laughter] >> Right. So we haven't failed yet. >> But that's just debt. Can we Dana? Can we add the IUs in there? Because once you put in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, that number shoots up to 5 600 700% of GDP. Right. >> Right. Right. Unfunded liabilities, you know, make our debt go from about 38 trillion to about 138 trillion. I don't have my numbers correct, but it's substantially higher, which means what we've all thought we might receive from the government as we grow older will probably not be quite as much in reality as they have promised. >> Well, as I say, Dana, when you get to this level of of unfunded, underfunded debt, all that, there's only one question to resolve, which is who's going to eat the losses? And we already know that Wall Street and Washington DC are going to conspire to say, well, it should be the little people. we'll give them $3,000 a month in social security and fine. But eventually $3,000 pays your property taxes for a couple months, right? You know, that's where we're headed in this story. And so that's why I, you know, that system is broken. We can we can math. It's just a math problem and a political problem, but it's mostly just math, which is why I like Gold and Silver because it's kind of like that's just a way of stepping out of that system, you know? It's like that. Remember War Games with Matthew Broadick? I may be dating myself here, but that movie and he the computer plays tic-tac-toe till it finally comes to the conclusion the only way to win is not to play. Yeah. [laughter] Right. Right. And if you have precious metals, you take some of your hard-earned wealth and you you take it out of the game that exists and you put it off to the side and and get your savings, your nest egg out of a depreciating fiat currency into something that'll hold its purchasing power much better and that the world trusts. You know, one of the reasons gold is in such favor these days is because it has no counterparty risk. It's one of the only assets that isn't simultaneously someone else's liability. And that's why, you know, gold is the go-to asset uh around the world. And it's also a neutral asset, meaning we don't need it. It's really not necessary in daily use like oil is or soybeans or corn or other commodities that we need. Gold is perfect for what's been happening in the world with debt because it's a neutral asset and primarily because it has no counterparty risk, >> right? Well, you know, my model for a lot of this, so gold, a lot of times people say gold and silver like it's one word. There are two words to me. I hold gold because of its monetary role and I see it being remonetized. And I actually think Dana, just to focus on gold for a second, a lot of people say, "Oh, oh, it's overbought." Looking at technical charts, you look at that Morgan Stanley 20% number and gold is badly underowned right now because it represents about 2% of financial wealth in the United States. So I ran some numbers. You know, there's $138 trillion of financial wealth just in the top 10% of families. So let's say they decide to move 5% into gold from 2%. Great. That's another $5 trillion of US money trying to find some gold. How big is the US total gold market excluding the wall? You know, I'm not going to include the Fort Knox gold that may or may not be there. Just the stuff in the market. It's a fraction of that. It's maybe a trillion. So, how does 5 trillion move into 1 trillion just to get a 5% exposure? I think what happens at some point is that people say, "I should have 5, 10, 12, 15% exposure, 20, whatever the number is, and they say, I'd like to do that." I don't think we have a market that can support that right now without much higher prices. >> No, that's that's the only way to make that happen is to see much higher prices. And that's the leverage that gold offers in the current market. You know, we've gotten I've called it just recently kind of a hair trigger market where the world's, you know, pushed the gold price up substantially. The US isn't participating because we don't have fear in our markets. What happens if we get fear in our markets? if he's got a stock market breakdown or a true recession, uh, you know, what happens if President Trump loses the midterms and then everything he's trying to accomplish gets caught up in gridlock. Uh, that's kind of the worst of of all worlds because we'll be halfway through the process of trying to reshore manufacturing and and bring jobs back to the country and then we'll just go into political gridlock uh, if that happens. And and that's where I think the rubber can really meet the road. And if we get fear, I mean that means that gives precious metals prices explo explosive potential for exactly the reason you said it's completely underowned as a an asset class in this country. And if we get a situation that drives buying into precious metals in this country, that's when gold can go up 5,000 6,000 $7,000 an ounce or even higher. Now, Dana, um I I know for a fact there's somebody listening to this right now who's thinking, you know, I've been thinking about buying some gold or silver, has never done it, doesn't know what the process is. Um and it's not like if you go to the to the market in in China, I mean, it's just it's glorious. It's glistening. There's all sorts of different ways. There's people everywhere. It's just a Here in the United States, my nearest coin shop is a pawn shop, too. It's kind of a It's not exactly a upscale experience. And I'm that's being kind, right? So it still feels like it's so there might How did So somebody calls you and says, "Dana, I haven't bought gold before." What's the process? Like how does that actually work? >> Well, it's really quite simple. The only real complication I think throws people off is that the price changes all the time, like a stock changes. So it's like you're buying shoes at Amazon, only the price is moving all the time. So that's really where the complication lies. Otherwise, you're just buying products. And we think you should stick on the main road with the most widely traded, competitively priced, modern bullion products minted by sovereign mints or the most popular and uh prestigious refineries in the world. Uh so we we recommend US products first, American 1 gold and silver eagles. Second, Canadian 1 gold and silver maple leaves. Or third, Austrian 1oz gold and silver philarmonics. These are the most widely traded, competitively priced, and most importantly, internationally recognized modern gold bullion coins. We call them coins. They're really just round bars made by a government as opposed to square bars made by a refinery. Uh if they were ice cream, I would call them vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. the three most popular flavors. Now, there's a bit of friction to buying and selling precious metals, physical products, because the mint has to make them. The specifications are very exacting. Uh there's cost to the minting process. Um there's also insurance, shipping, and a tiny profit to a dealer like me. We we literally make 1 to 2% on an ounce of gold. So, the buy sell spread on an ounce of gold is about 4%. So that's why these are not trading vehicles. This is something if you're going to put money into physical precious metals. This is money you want to set aside and not touch unless you absolutely need to. But if you stick with the main sovereign minted products, you're going to avoid 99% of the problems you could encounter in the marketplace. We have a modest problem with Chinese counterfeits and all the mints around the world have added intricate design elements to the picture that's stamped on the coin to make it harder for the Chinese to knock them off uh and the marketplace to accept them. That's why professional dealers like myself, we're experienced. We understand what a real one looks like and what a fake one looks like where a novice on the street may not understand that. Now I'm a member of the professional numismatists guild which is the leading organization of rare coin dealers in the country. I've been on their board of directors and I've was a president of the organization in 2016 and 2017 when this Chinese counterfeit issue uh started to rear its ugly head in the US marketplace and I conceived of and helped to establish the industry anti-counterfeiting task force which today works with homeland security and secret service to interdict spurious shipments of precious metals items coming in primarily from China and you have to be careful who you deal with which is why pawn shops that aren't professional precious metals dealers may not know the difference between a fake coin and a real coin. Number one, online platforms may not know the difference either. That's why it's important that you find a a reputable longstanding dealer in the community who this is their business. And we do have opportunists in our marketplace as well who come and go in especially in a kind of a hot market like we're in right now. Uh so you have to be wary of those. >> So when somebody sells you gold or silver back, I assume you put it on one of those machines, right? To make sure it's real. >> Yeah. We have testing devices that we use. If we suspect an item is not good. Now most of the time we can tell just by looking at an item whether it's good or bad because we have that experience. But refiner-made bars of gold in particular are a bit more problematic than the sovereign minted 1oz coins because the design on the bars is planer and they tend to come in blister packs where the bar sealed inside, you know, a cardboard card with plastic holding it inside. So, you can't really take the bar out. And when these coins hit each other, they make a certain pitch. Like I know that you're a musician right on the side. You like to play guitar. Yep. And u gold coins make a certain pitch when they're right because they have a little bit of alloy in them. Not all of them are pure gold because pure gold is very soft and it can dent or scratch easily. So US gold eagles are 90% pure gold by weight. There's 10% other added to them that make them more durable. They have an ounce of gold in them. They just weigh an ounce and 9/10 or 900s uh uh to accommodate the alloy that's in them as well. But uh we have testing devices and if we think something is sp uh spurious we either don't buy it or we'll send it to a refinery to be melted and assay before we'll issue settlement payment on it. Right? And I do think that that's going to be a problem in the future for bars much more than it would be for sovereign minted products that have anti-counterfeiting design elements struck into them already. Um, and that's, you know, the US Mint changed the design on the gold eagles in 2021 for this specific reason, uh, to, uh, make them more, uh, resistant of counterfeiting. The Chinese uh, excuse me, the Canadian Royal Mint's been doing it since 2016. Uh, the Austrian Mint's been doing it for for years now. So, these products are widely recognized and understood among the professional dealer community. And that's why I said easily sellable for clients. So, if you want to buy physical precious metals, you know, it's best to find a dealer that you have a relationship with uh that's longstanding. Uh you can competitively shop pretty easily. Um we never wanted to be the lowest price dealer because, you know, price, service, quality, you get pick any two. You can't always give all three. And the dealers that have always been the littlest, cheapest dealer have tended to get into problems because of lack of profits in the past. And that leads to sometimes spectacular failures. That doesn't mean we're not competitive, but you know, when people shop around, they're always looking what's the absolute best price? Well, is really that the best opportunity for you? And we're talking about a few dollars an ounce. It's not a big deal, right? But we're very competitively priced. And because the price is always moving, it's best to do a transaction over the telephone. Now, we're consultative in nature. We help people. We'll answer any questions people have. Uh if there are anomalies in the marketplace, we can explain them to you. And by that, I mean, you know, sometimes the US Mint can't keep up with demand. And the premiums on gold eagles might be a little higher than they should be. where you can buy a Canadian maple leaf that doesn't have that premium inequality, but you probably won't get back at the point in time that you want to sell it. So, that's where we help people find the best value in the marketplace. And sometimes we just have deals, but what happens is just like buying a stock, you buy it over the phone with us. We lock in the transaction at the point of sale. Subsequent price movements are irrelevant. If the price goes higher, we're not going to call you back and ask you for more money. If the price goes down, we expect you to honor your commitment. Uh then you pay us and then we ship you the merchandise fully insured on private insurance policy. Uh and then you have to sign for the package and then when you get it, open it and make sure you got exactly what you're supposed to. We have rigid uh internal controls for inventory, for shipping to make sure you know that we every package is exactly what it's supposed to be on the way out. And in the unusual occurrence that you know the package doesn't arrive on your end, we replace it. Uh that's on our insurance policy. It doesn't happen very often. Uh but it on occasion it does. So uh you know that's how the industry works. That's how we operate. Uh it's just that the price changes a lot in the in you know every moment of the day because it's a live commodity that trades and all day every day. >> Mhm. >> Great. I mean that that's how it worked for me when I first bought some and and I I remember I remember I bought for me it was a lot of money but the gold showed up in a box this big. It was very heavy. Right. And I I I was shocked because I was imagining I was going to have like a suitcase or something. I just didn't know the density of wealth that that gold represents, you know. >> Yeah. 100 ounces of gold weighs about eight pounds and it's it's smaller than a paperback novel. Uh, so it's it's a lot heavier than you think it is when you, you know, hold a couple hundred ounces in your pockets, which you can literally walk around with, >> but the density is there. That's And gold is very compact. It doesn't take much space to store a lot of true value. >> Well, this isn't a tube of gold, but if it was, I could wrap my hand around a tube of 20, right? >> And 20 times 4,000, >> $80,000, right? >> You could wrap your hand around 80 grand with gold right now. So, so for anybody buying it, don't prepare to be shocked at how compact it is. [laughter] >> It's true. It's true. >> Yeah. Um, well, I think that's it's really important. I just want to demystify that for people because I've been doing it for a long time, but I kind of forget, you know, that I've been doing it a long time. I also I'm I'm just like China. I mostly just buy um I I I give it out to kids at Christmas and and to people who I think need to hold their hold some gold and silver for the first time. I I I give it out as tips every so of silver to tips for people. I just gave one to an Uber driver. I had this incredible conversation with this woman in in Memphis, Tennessee. And it was uh um it was just a phenomenal conversation. I happened to have my my pocket piece with me and I thought, you know what? She might when I put it in her hands, this is the one thing I love. Sometimes when you put a piece of gold or silver in somebody's hand, it's almost like ancient DNA gets activated. you know, they're whatever fragment of Viking they have in them or wherever, you know, you can just their pupils widen a little like, you know, because it's it's real and tangible and it gets to that other thing because you can trust it immediately. It's got this density. Money should be you should be able to trust your money. You and we have money that's so untrustworthy right now. The Fed has told us flat out, don't trust our money. We're going to ruin it at they say 2% a year, but really they've settled into 3 to 4% a year and probably will go higher. They've said, "You can trust that we're going to take whatever cash you have, fiat money, and we're going to make it worth less, if not worthless, at some point in the future." >> Exactly. That's exactly what's happening. And how it sounds when you drop it from a couple of inches onto a a table, it it rings a little bit. And you know, the the money we have or the currency we have in our pocket right now, the quarters and nickels, dimes, even the pennies, they they go thunkk. They don't have any real true ring to them. So, uh, I can imagine the eyes on the Uber driver in Memphis when you put that ounce of silver in her hand. >> Yep. Yep. And and by the way, I said, you know, good tip. That's about 50 bucks if you take it somewhere. But anyway, I I I think it's worth it to um start the start the education process. So, that's the only time I ever get rid of or get get rid of any of that stuff. So, I said it's two words, gold and silver. gold monetary asset as you said most important characteristic and why it's it's part of this is wonky but it's now a tier one asset >> in the Basel 3 Accord so banks can use it as a tier one asset meaning you stuff it on your balance sheet and it operates the same as cash treasuries gold it's got that tier one aspect to it fine that that that adds has something to it monetary asset but I I really like silver even though it's just been monetized within the sovereign boundary of the money system in in um India because it's now useful as collateral for loans. That's a whole separate conversation. But silver is fundamentally an industrial metal still on the world stage. And this has caught me, you know, this um data I think ultimately comes from the silver institute. Dana, I take it with a grain of salt. Um I sort of squint at the data. I don't take it as gospel, but I think it's true that silver has been running a severe supply deficit for six years in a row, and we'll go on to seven years now. And that means that mine output is completely consumed by both industry and investment, and I'll include jewelry and investment demand. And it's been officially added now to the US critical mineral. It's not a mineral, it's a metal, but picking at hairs here. China's also said, "Well, we're going to consider it a a critical something too in their system." So, you can't just like sell it without like going through some permitting process to have it leave the shores. India has said sort of the same things. Russia has said that they it's it's they're going to create a strategic reserve. 2025, I I read this from Mark 4x on Twitter and he said 2025 could be history's first year first year in history where 100% of mine output goes to industry for silver. like that can't be right. But Steve St. Angelo at SRS Rockco report, yeah, sure enough, if you use the Silver Institutees data last year was 86% of mine output went just to industrial demand. And a lot of that, of course, is going into solar panels and it's just like more and more and more and more is just going into solar and and that's just astonishing. So for me to have a critical industrial commodity that has been in a structural shortfall for seven out of seven years that is used in a way where if it doubled, tripled, or went up 10fold in price, it would still be used, right? So if there's 40 cents worth of silver in a cell phone, if that went to four bucks, a 10-fold increase, would that really stop them from making iPhones? Not probably not. Right? So this is one of the most outrageous supply demand shortfalls I've ever seen. And I call that reality is some something us old-timers call fundamentals. I actually think we're going to see fundamentals coming back into vogue after we've come off of all this Ponzi bubbly AI kind of stuff and people once again are going to go, well, we need food, gas, oil, metals. I think we're going to get back to that that time. What What do you think? Oh, I agree with you completely. Uh, you know, gold is about 90% monetary metal and 10% commodity. Silver's about 50/50. And I've looked at the silver institutes um spreadsheets that you can get from them that show the all the different categories of supply and demand uh going back 20 years. And the one category that just keeps growing every year is industrial demand for all the different uses. And that's not going to change anytime soon. Silver is one of the most conductive metals there is on the planet. Uh I've got a 1oz silver coin on my desk here. It's a Canadian maple leaf. Now, it's in this um plastic envelope, and I'm not going to hold it the way I would hold it, but you can take this ounce of silver and take an ice cube and hold it in your hand and literally cut through that ice cube like a knife just because the heat in your fingers heats up the silver and will cut that ice cube. Now, it's it's not going to go like a knife through butter, but in the course of about 20 seconds, you'll go right through it. And that shows how conductive silver is and why it's needed. And the uses for silver just continue to grow in industrial demand. So you're right, the supply and demand uh equation, which is the most fundamental equation for any commodity for higher prices when there's an imbalance where there's more demand than there is supply uh is the best for any metal there is I think for silver right now. uh be because of these reasons and silver tends to be a byproduct of other mining uh you know where you mining for copper or gold or nickel you'll find silver and I do think we have had peak silver mining you know all the easy deposits have been found until we can get under the seafloor which may happen in our lifetimes you don't know but until we can actually mine underneath the ocean uh I don't think there'll be any you know way we can more easily [snorts] and that that's not that easy. Um, so I do think the fundamentals for silver are tremendous. And the fact that gold is twice its previous all-time high of just a few years ago, where silver is just now reaching its two all-time previous highs from 1980 and 2011 means it potentially has a long way to go in price appreciation before uh the supply and demand imbalance is equaled in its actual value in the marketplace. >> Yeah, I agree. It's just one of the most astonishing fundamental stories. So, I keep talking about those fundamentals and again I wish we had better data. Um, maybe you can shed some light on this, but I I you know, I'm a little bit of a nut, a wonk, a geek. I I read everything I can, and I still find myself sort of like peering dimly into the LBMA. Nobody really quite seems to know what they have, what they don't have, who it belongs to, how much is already spoken for, what's hypothecated. To me, Dana, this should be the simplest thing ever. Thousand ounce bars have numbers on them. Can you just show me the bar list and who owns it? It's like it's a two column spreadsheet, you know? It should be very simple and it's so hard to find out who owns what. I think that's on purpose. And and you know, what did you make of all that recent shenanigans where it looked like the LBMA got tapped out and there was emergency stuff and there were shipments and we heard about plane flights and our refiners got backed up. There was a bit of a bit of a hiccup in the supply demand chain for silver there recently. >> It was more than a hiccup, Chris. The LBMA literally broke on October 9th when demand for physical silver driven primarily out of India and part of it was tariff driven as I mentioned earlier and part of it was due to the Diwali festival season. Uh they've got ETFs over there that were buying exchange traded funds buying silver like crazy and the LVMA is like the world's warehouse for gold and silver. Central banks store gold there. So there's a big cushion of gold that's available to borrow or lease, but they don't store central banks don't warehouse silver. So the available silver supplies are a lot uh less compared to gold. And we've also seen a huge migration of physical precious metals into the ComX exchange earlier this year due to uh fears over tariffs on precious metals uh creating a higher premium in New York than there was in London. So literally the the Comx warehouses for gold and silver have swelled to record highs to the detriment of what was available as a cushion in the LBMA. And when the rubber uh met the road in October, uh the LBMA actually went into dysfunction uh with not enough silver being available to be bought. Um premiums spiked, lease rates spiked, and the whole thing came to a a screeching halt because literally the market was overbought relative to what was there. And you're right, we don't know the actual spec specifications. some of that premium metal that came into New York has gone back into London to help alleviate how much uh that was was oversold. You know, it's been said that there needs to be a 100 million more ounces in London in the LBMA than are there now to get this back to a normal flowing market. But it shows you how sensitive the physical supplies for silver are in the world, especially relative to the amount of wealth in the world, right? And that's really where the equation comes to bear. And that's why we have $50 silver today instead of $25 silver because the world's starting to realize how scarce these metals are uh compared to true uh well, not true wealth, fake wealth in paper money, right? We've we've we've multiplied our wealth many times since we've had computers to do trading. But you can't just print this stuff this metal out of the ground easily, right? like you can arbitrage different assets and create more paper wealth and that's really part of what this whole, you know, run in precious metals this year has been about. But yeah, it broke the system. It literally broke the system and uh the LBMA has lost a lot of credibility as a result. Well, they deserve to especially um the LME component of that where that nickel fiasco a few years ago. But um bird in the hand, right? I mean that that's why I think like if you're if you are one of these industrial users and by the way China by bar none is at the top of that list right because they make more solar panels than anybody's one of the top uses so >> yeah so if you are China you just like burden the hand I'm not going to trust that the LBMA is going to be my Johnny on the spot just in time delivery system I'm going to want that stuff inside my borders um you know to whatever extent to create a an inventory buffer now but you said a 100red million an ounces. Doing math in my head, that's $5 billion at $50 an ounce. >> Change is it? I mean, couldn't couldn't Elon could pick up a phone call and and buy $5 billion worth of silver if he ever wanted to. I mean, it would be like a rounding error in his portfolio. >> Well, he he'll need some for the Teslas. And who knows what SpaceX might require, right? But yes, that's exactly what I mean by relative wealth. There are billionaires that could literally buy the market out if they wanted to. And if they decide to, we'll see substantially higher prices. >> Well, if a 100% of mine output ends up going towards industry, >> that means all the rest of us are scrambling around the edge for for whatever is left. And we know India of course is just accumulating. They're they're net accumulators. They they just buy silver. They tend to just buy it. And I was shocked. Maybe you could shed some light on this. I think it was in Jan July January of this year 25. I open up this article that says, and it's just this little article, and it's in the Hindustan Times or Business Times or something, and they said, "Oh, India just took delivery of 2,600 some odd tons of silver from the UAE." And that caught me because I've been following this really closely. I didn't even know the UAE was a player. Where did they come up with 2600 tons? Um, which is onetenth of that that's like basically onetenth of world mine output is, >> right? I I was unaware of that. So, uh, that's that's you being a wonk and that's why we love you [laughter] >> because you the UAE I didn't even know they were a player. Now they're a major player. That it caught me. >> Well, Dubai, uh, you know, it's become a big precious metals hub, too. So, the Middle East, you know, they've got all that wealth. What are they going to do with it? And they realize that we're in a fiat moneybased system that is potentially a disaster. So, I'm not surprised to hear that. you know, as an oil producer too, one of the biggest oil producers, where would you want to put that hard-earned, you know, money that you earned pulling that oil out of the ground? You want to put it into something tangible that can't be destroyed through the printing presses, right? So, I'm it's surprising to hear that, but it's not surprising at the same time. >> Right. Well, point is I I think that New York and London controlled pricing and the physical market for a very long time. you just described in October, maybe there's a little Vaseline on that football. Maybe they started to fumble it a little bit. And it feels to me looking at like I I look at this stuff all the time now. I follow this guy um Xiao Bay and he is reporting daily on what's happening at the SGE and and SHF vaults in China. And it's just been this constant oneway like every day. These are red numbers over here. More and more and more silver and gold are leaving the vault every single day. This is from a few days ago. Gold and silver are priced. Silver is usually priced$1 to $2 higher in China than it is here in the US. So that of course creates pressure, buying pressure for it to head east in this story. Um and and it feels to me kind of like we're about to lose control. Like I think Shanghai is making a strong play. China making a strong play to become the next physical pricing market or at least a dominant player. They're already there. What are your thoughts? Well, you're right. Uh, in the bigger picture, you know, London has been where most of the metals have lived physically, and New York is where they're hedged. Uh, and the paper market is traded. Um, and the paper market has dominated the price discovery mechanism since the '9s with the advent of computers. This year, we're starting to see the physical market overtake the paper market for true price discovery. And when you have these big ripe migrations of physical metal uh into the COMX earlier this year or the amount of metal that moved into China in April when they bought gold like crazy or Indian silver and gold in October, I'm sorry, September. This is a true run on the bank of physical metals. That's what this year is all about. Where price discovery is going to translate more into physical than the ability of the leveraged market where you can go 10 to1 on paper in New York has dominated the price discovery for the last you know 30 years. This this is what this year is all about and it is a sea change and I'm calling it a run on the bank of gold and silver uh physically and there's just not enough of it potentially to go around if the run continues. Now it's debated right now. That's why we're seeing the prices go sideways a bit after a big run higher. But what's going to be the next catalyst that drives it? And it's going to be the physical market that drives it more than anything else. And that's the world we're returning to and that's what this year is all about. and the sea change that you mentioned earlier. That's really what this is. >> Excellent. Well, Dana, we're going to leave it there. We're going to pick it up again. So, for anybody who wants to talk to Dana and or his his amazing staff, go to ammergold.com. Is that correct? >> Yes. >> Ambergold.com peakrossperity. And uh they already treat people great. You'll be treated great with an asterisk extra great. Um so, uh please uh take take advantage if you don't own gold and silver. have that conversation. Of course, talk to your financial advisor, see what makes sense in your specific condition, but um when you've made your decision, strongly recommend you give Dana a call and get that process started. So, Dana, thanks for your time today. Thanks for having me, Chris. We're happy to help anyone we can. No question is too great or too small. No, no purchase or sale is too great or too small. We'll help anyone however we can. And uh really appreciate you having me. It's great to see you again. and uh we'll look forward to talking to you again in the future. >> Likewise and thanks and everybody it I hope we impressed upon you the importance of talking with somebody who has the experience is well grounded in the market. Um you there's a lot of people who come and go in this business. Dana's [music] not one of them. He's here and he's been here the whole time. So I strongly recommend whoever you work with, you find somebody equivalent to Dana. Um and just make sure you're working with somebody who really knows what they're doing cuz it's important. [music] With that, Dana, we'll see you soon. We're going to carry on this conversation. I'm sure there's going to be something wild to talk about before the year is up. >> Thank you, Chris. Yeah, we always seem to have some fun in our markets. >> All right, bye for now, everyone.
Dana Samuelson on understanding the gold and silver markets
Summary
Transcript
Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only. Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full. This rumor that China could have two or three times the amount of gold that the US [music] already has had for decades, which is, you know, 20,000 to 25,000 tons of gold. We just don't know. They'll tell us when they want us to know. Hello everyone. I have been a buyer of gold and silver since 2001. And I I didn't notice I didn't say investor, right? Because I don't look at precious metals that way. Some do. I don't. Instead, I save my wealth in gold and silver. I I see it as trading one form of money, fiat money, for another form of money. It's just an exchange. That's how I see it. Now, in a world where Washington insiders and central bankers are drowning us in trillions of printed dollars, and we all know this, right? With more certainly on the way, we're left having to cope with that inflation that comes along. And for many, it's punishing. It steals from your paycheck and savings while, you know, the financial insiders get richer. It's just how the system works. One true veteran of this war is with us today, and he's been arming Americans with the ultimate shield, physical gold and silver. And that's Dana Samuelson, founder and president of American Gold Exchange, operating since 1998. Well, he can tell us about what kind of market conditions were existing back then for gold. Be an interesting story. He's a top precious metals dealer specializing both in rare US coins and regular bullion, we would call it. With over 45 years battling in the markets, mentored by industry titans, Dana's become a leading voice at conferences like the New Orleans Investment Conference, which I've been to several times myself, and he was predicting gold surge to $4,000 an ounce and beyond as recent, you know, just will hear about that. Um, so he's been helping folks build real wealth against the fiat fraud. He's here to help you navigate how you go about buying gold and silver. What does it look like? And of course, we want to talk to somebody who's been there, done that, has a lot of experience. By the way, Dana is a friend of mine. So, with that, Dana, welcome to the program. >> Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here with you. >> So, let's let's start at the beginning. Um, what got how did you get involved in like like you just wake up one day, gold's in like for people who don't know, tell us about where gold was in 1998 and what happened? Well, you woke up one day with a crazy idea. >> Well, it actually started a lot earlier than that. It started in 1980 when I got out of college with a German degree because I decided I didn't want to be a psychology major and that was the only way I could get out with my class with my degree. >> And I graduated in summer of 1980 when inflation was 18%, interest rates were 16% and the gold price was, you know, had just peaked at $850 an ounce. My brother had gotten into the business 5 years earlier uh through a side door. He became he was an accountant and he was good with rare coins. He ended up getting a job with a company in Houston, Texas that was buying physical precious metals over the counter handover fist during the 1980s boom or the late79 boom. And they needed someone in the vault to back up the guy that was working in the vault. So I literally got hired because I could be trusted to handle the merchandise. It was like going to work in a restaurant at the kitchen sink washing dishes. That's literally how I started. I spent two years there and we ended up selling a lot of coins to Jim Blanchard's company who was uh the leading proponent for the private relegalization of gold ownership in 1974. Jim had the largest mail order coin company in the country at that point in time. And I got hired to be an expert coin appraiser. So they trained me to grade coins for two years. I sat in a little room and all I did was look at vintage US gold and silver coins. And when the buyer would go out of town, I would go up to the trading desk and substitute for him because I good head for numbers and pretty good with people. And the next thing you know, I was Jim's buyer and I became a senior trader. And by the mid to late 1980s, I was spending 50 million bucks of Jim's money with the industry. So I really had a very organic path higher in my career path. Uh I learned a lot. Uh, I finally had enough gumption to start American Gold Exchange, hang my own shingle out in 1998, which turned out to be about the bottom of the precious metal cycle. Uh, and my my mentality at the time was the internet's going to level the playing field for pricing and the best asset that any company has are their clients. So, we we've always had to be very cognizant of taking great care of our clients and having very competitive pricing and the rest will follow through if you run a straightforward business. And that's how we've built our business over the years. It's just just honest, straightforward, uh competitive pricing, good sound advice, and uh trying to literally help people in this sector. Well, it's uh there's a lot of questions about this and we'll get to those because I know I get approached all the time by people who've never bought gold or silver. And by the way, they got marketed to early on in the United States that it was kind of fringe or maybe it was even associated with people who have bunkers or it got a lot of negative press for a long time and and get I get it that was just Wall Street's marketing arm, right, doing all that. But um just recently, just just to sort of set the stage for this, I think this is relevant here. Um, if anybody needs to know this, um, it's now Morgan Stanley's position that their CIO says, well, they favor a 6020 portfolio strategy. That's 60% bonds. I mean, sorry, 60% equities, 20% bonds, 20% gold. That's them saying that. I'm not giving financial advice, but I just want to sort of point out that um, from your perspective, it it it's really starting to to shift in a very new way, isn't it, here in terms of investor psychology. Yeah, this is a sea change uh from traditional US investment advice. Uh the way I like to say it is we don't have a precious metals culture in our country. Uh most countries around the world do. Uh if you've been in a country that's had your currency collapse or uh you've had war on your shores, you have a precious metals culture. And we're of course insulated by two oceans. And we've had the world's reserve currency, the dollar since 1945. Uh which has insulated us from currency shocks in commodities and helped to establish us as the biggest economy in the world. Uh so we've trained our people over 75 years to trust paper assets more than physical precious metals. You know, I mentioned my brother uh he got his start in 1975 at a Vietnamese relocation camp in Arkansas where he he went there to help people fleeing Vietnam who had literally gold bars sewn into their clothing. Um you know, he would buy the gold from them and give them dollars and that's how they got their start here in the US. And that's what I mean by a precious metals culture, right? So when you've seen a big run in precious metals values this year like we've seen with with silver about doubling and gold about doubling over the last you know 18 months uh without a corresponding economic crisis in the US like we've seen in the three previous big bull markets that tells us that the world is a bit concerned about the dollar and our debt right now. They don't trust it as much as they have in the past and they're buying gold in big enough quantities, silver too, to drive the price substantially higher. And that's really what this whole big run we've been going through really means is the world is shunning the dollar a bit and US treasuries as a safe haven and favoring gold over that. And there's a few fundamental reasons underlying that. uh one is the Russian invasive invasion of the Ukraine and the ddollarization movement. Uh but another is President Trump has you know thrown a monkey wrench into the global trade order with these tariffs and that has lit a fire under citizens around the world to to trust something other than the dollar. Uh we tariffed China 145% in April. Uh they're the only country that stood toe-to-toe with us over tariffs when every other country capitulated because they could stand toe-to-toe with us. Uh but their citizens went on a gold buying spree in May, April and May that drove the price up $500 by themselves in that month and a half. And now we've tariffed India 50% in late August over their buying oil from Russia supporting uh the war on the Ukraine uh against our wishes and we've saw India go on a buying spree in September. Uh so there's been two huge buying sprees of physical precious metals this year driven by the Trump tariffs. uh that has caused the metals prices to just move sharply higher which is making of course mainstream uh investment houses you know look at precious metals differently than they have in the past. Today's markets are more volatile than ever with ongoing economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Navigating such environments requires thoughtful adaptive strategies, not a one-sizefits-all approach. At Peak Financial Investing, [music] our registered investment advisory firm connects clients with experienced [music] wealth managers who focus on active portfolio management. These professionals [music] use evidence-based strategies designed to respond to changing conditions, not outdated formulas, [music] but customized approaches grounded in research, discipline, and risk awareness. We [music] believe in open, informed conversations, including discussing tools [music] like precious metals and diversification as part of a broader financial strategy. Every investor's situation is unique, and our advisers tailor their [music] guidance accordingly. Visit peakfinancialinvesting.com today to schedule your [music] free consultation and explore how proactive management can support your [music] financial goals. I'm Dr. Chris Martinson, proud to work with Peak Financial Investing and my support [music] reflects my professional views. I encourage you to take control of your financial future by making informed [music] decisions. You know, I' I've been tracking gold for a very long time and and for two decades, Dana, all really all you had to know it was the anti-doll. And in fact, you could just look at negative or the inverted yields, real yields of 10-year treasuries and it was tick for tick gold price and and that it was very simple. It just played as a as an anti-money kind of a thing. Um, you know, anti- fiat currency. Boring cuz you know you it it it wasn't it wouldn't operate on its own. But then the Biden Treasury Department sanctioned Russia and froze their sovereign reserves in February of 2022. And very shortly after that, all of those relationships that had held for decades broke. Like never like they just decoupled and the 10 the the negative 10-year Treasury rate is no longer um useful. The real Treasury rate, right? It it just doesn't track. It's doing something else. So something else really happened there. That's why I wanted to call this a C change. I you know, for most people that that's pretty quick. It's only 2, three years into the story, but it's behaving completely differently internationally from anything I gotten accustomed to over the prior two decades. I'm wondering if that's a similar experience for you. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, gold typically is inversely correlated to the value of the dollar internationally and to treasury yields. um because most of the gold around the world is priced in dollars but it's bought in other currencies in yen or euros or Swiss franks and as the dollar becomes stronger it makes gold more expensive in those currencies uh so there's less bought and vice versa and if uh you're having you know a positive return on investment meaning the yield or uh return you get on a treasury or another interestbearing investment is positive above the rate of inflation You know, gold is just a rock. It doesn't pay any dividend or yield. So, when there's a positive yield, gold tends to perform weekly in price value. And when there's a negative yield, it tends to do better uh because uh it offers an inflation hedge uh when your money is not going quite as far as it used to. So, what you've seen is entirely correct. And what really happened um a couple big things uh uh to paint this picture a little bit more broadly. You know, central bankers since the dollar became the world's reserve currency in 1945. Between 1950 and n and 2010, central bankers who had big hordes of gold for decades and even centuries discorded gold. Following the great financial crisis and the global debt explosion, they became net buyers of gold in earnest for the first time uh in that entire period buying on average about 500 tons a year, which is equal to about 17th of annual mine production, which is about 3,500 tons a year. Following the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, central bankers doubled their gold buying. So for the last three years, 2022, 23, and 24, they've been buying over a,000 tons of gold a year as a hedge against currency uh problems with trading partners or treasuries that they hold from other uh countries. And this has now become material in the supply demand equation because now they're buying about a quarter or a third of annual mine production on an annual basis. And that's really what helped to build a a rising base under the gold price and a and a breakout in 2024 that's now been a bit turbocharged this year by the uh uh the trade wars that we're in globally. >> Well, it feels like you know um very important point you made Vietnamese right they I think they just opened their market back up to gold purchases and you know I saw the pictures of people just flooding in because they have a a culture of it saving not investing saving in gold. It's just how they say and Indians might have more of a a saving in silver as a also gold but but a little bit maybe more tilted to silver >> but China has got that same thing and so notice what happened here. So the Chinese government said wink wink you know it's okay citizens maybe you should buy some which is almost like a mandate go out and buy gold right and second of all they had just given an experiment of trying to save in real estate and that's fallen apart so they're they're not really big on the stock market gambling a little bit they're not really big on real estate anymore so that's just an enormous flood of Chinese wealth that's now where where else are you gonna invest right they don't allow Bitcoin right so there aren't that many mechanisms I think gold is is astonishing So, I was talking with a refiner a long time ago and he said, "Yeah, we've been we have a a a bounty for anybody at the loading dock who can detect a Chinese mint like they mine lots of gold. If is anything leaving China?" And the answer has been no. They are a one-way trap. Gold enters the country and it doesn't seem to come out again. Is that does that seem like a fair way to look at that? >> Yes. the the Chinese government and the Chinese public have been buying gold uh at record levels for years now. In fact, you you're right. China encouraged their citizens to buy gold I think it was 2020 2021. >> Yep. >> Right. And um if you're a Chinese citizen, you only have really three ways to invest and you mentioned them. Stock market, real estate, both have done badly since co or precious metals which have actually done well. And the Chinese government's been stockpiling gold and the public has been buying gold at record levels and now silver and platinum too. Um I'm not so sure about palladium but um they are one of the fundamental drivers of this rally uh on a base case uh and have been for decades now. We don't know how much gold China actually owns. Uh everything that's mined in the country stays in the country. It is a one-way uh um transit for gold into the country and not out. Uh the US has supposed to have 8,000 tons of gold in Fort Knox and in the Federal Reserve in New York. Um we're not sure if that's really there. I tend to think that it probably is, but who you know, who knows because we've never had a proper audit. But it's rumored that China could have two or three times the amount of gold that the US already has had for decades, which is, you know, 20,000 to 25,000 tons of gold. We just don't know. They'll tell us when they want us to know. >> Yeah. I don't believe anything at face value out of China. So, they said, "Oh, our central bank bought five tons." And I was like, "Is that 50 tons? Is that 500? Or is it five? We don't know. I I just don't know. We we'll know at some point." But um so so you've been at this a long time. Have have you noticed any change in who's showing up to buy or sell gold or silver at this point in time? Has there been any notable shift? Because I presume used to just be guys that look like me, right? There was like Yeah. [laughter] Well, our clientele tends our clientele tends to be older men, you know, who have accumulated some wealth, you know, business leaders, seauite executives, small business owners, uh, independent thinkers, uh, people that don't trust the government. Uh, we trained a lot of people who never bought gold in their life to buy gold during the great financial crisis over a three-year period. uh when COVID hit in 2020 and and thank you for all the great work that you did on CO reporting by the way and I've said this to you before um but when CO hit in uh 2020 a lot of those buyers um came rushing back into the market very quickly um so that has helped a lot that we have a big pool of US buyers but the US buyer typically only buys precious metals when they're scared right and that's that's really the thing that's unusual about the rally that we've just gone through with gold moving from about 2500 to over $4,000 an ounce in the last 15 18 months is we've had three previous major bull markets in the 70s again between 2008 and 2011 and again 2020 to 2019 2020 when co hit uh all of those were driven by a lack of uh confidence in the US or fear in the US markets and now we had a huge run and There has been no fear in the US. So, a lot of US investors in precious metals have actually been selling into this rally between $2,400 gold and $3,700 gold. We've seen a lot more sellers than buyers in our industry because people have been moving into stocks, which have been moving higher and higher, which, you know, I think it's a bit of a Ponzi scheme. um passive investing just flows going into stocks over and over without really uh a relationship to actual values of companies. But anyway, once we got over $3700 gold and silver over about $40 an ounce, the US buyers started to realize, oh, this is really a trend and we need to follow suit. And now you've got, like you said, Morgan Stanley changing their shift in what a fundamental portfolio portfolio should be consist of, which is adding 20% precious metals. And even the bond king, Jeffrey Gundlock, he said in June, if you're looking for safe haven flows, you won't find them in the US Treasury market. And uh I just recently heard an interview with him where he's describing in depth the US debt trap that we're in right now that we don't see any signs of us getting out of any way well except for you know much higher inflation or perhaps hyperinflation in the dollar if it comes to that. >> A debt trap meaning I just heard that it's our current run rate for interest payments on outstanding government debt is 1.2 trillion. >> Right. >> We're going to have to borrow that. So [laughter] when you're borrowing to pay the interest on it's just it goes that it's a trap, right? It's a spiral, >> right? Yeah. We've we've we've kind of crossed the Rubicon and this year part of that sea change that you were describing earlier is that a lot of stories earlier in the year were talking about how the US debt suddenly seems to matter where as we've accumulated accumulated record debt over the last 20 years, no one ever seemed to worry about it too much. This year is kind of a tipping point for that where oh maybe debt really does matter >> because of the way the math works for you know how much we taken in taxes which is 5 trillion a year how much we spend 7 trillion and now with interest rates higher uh you know our interest payment is over a trillion dollars and it's only going to continue to go higher as we continue to accumulate more debt and what happens if the market decides uh to to want higher rates rates than the Fed thinks the markets rates should be worth [snorts] and interest payments continue to escalate because yields go in the in the Treasury market to four or five or 6%. That could really blow up our debt. Well, we'll get into maybe the Japanese situation right now as we're recording this. Japan's yen is weakening pretty pretty stiffly, but also their 20, 30, 40year debt is blowing out with yields to the upside. So, if their central bank wants to control that, they would have to print yen and buy them. So then the yen weakens even more. So it you get caught where it's like darned if you do, darned if you don't, you know. Um and I think that what you're saying is that we're not that far behind Japan. It will get there eventually and the Fed's operating lane is getting narrower and narrower to really control the price of money, >> right? With a Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of about 230% which is historically off the chart. The US is about 120%. If you go back uh I think if you look at 52 countries going back 100 years where the debt to GDP ratio extended over 100% for 5 years or more. All of those currency fails. We're number 53 right now. [laughter] >> Right. So we haven't failed yet. >> But that's just debt. Can we Dana? Can we add the IUs in there? Because once you put in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, that number shoots up to 5 600 700% of GDP. Right. >> Right. Right. Unfunded liabilities, you know, make our debt go from about 38 trillion to about 138 trillion. I don't have my numbers correct, but it's substantially higher, which means what we've all thought we might receive from the government as we grow older will probably not be quite as much in reality as they have promised. >> Well, as I say, Dana, when you get to this level of of unfunded, underfunded debt, all that, there's only one question to resolve, which is who's going to eat the losses? And we already know that Wall Street and Washington DC are going to conspire to say, well, it should be the little people. we'll give them $3,000 a month in social security and fine. But eventually $3,000 pays your property taxes for a couple months, right? You know, that's where we're headed in this story. And so that's why I, you know, that system is broken. We can we can math. It's just a math problem and a political problem, but it's mostly just math, which is why I like Gold and Silver because it's kind of like that's just a way of stepping out of that system, you know? It's like that. Remember War Games with Matthew Broadick? I may be dating myself here, but that movie and he the computer plays tic-tac-toe till it finally comes to the conclusion the only way to win is not to play. Yeah. [laughter] Right. Right. And if you have precious metals, you take some of your hard-earned wealth and you you take it out of the game that exists and you put it off to the side and and get your savings, your nest egg out of a depreciating fiat currency into something that'll hold its purchasing power much better and that the world trusts. You know, one of the reasons gold is in such favor these days is because it has no counterparty risk. It's one of the only assets that isn't simultaneously someone else's liability. And that's why, you know, gold is the go-to asset uh around the world. And it's also a neutral asset, meaning we don't need it. It's really not necessary in daily use like oil is or soybeans or corn or other commodities that we need. Gold is perfect for what's been happening in the world with debt because it's a neutral asset and primarily because it has no counterparty risk, >> right? Well, you know, my model for a lot of this, so gold, a lot of times people say gold and silver like it's one word. There are two words to me. I hold gold because of its monetary role and I see it being remonetized. And I actually think Dana, just to focus on gold for a second, a lot of people say, "Oh, oh, it's overbought." Looking at technical charts, you look at that Morgan Stanley 20% number and gold is badly underowned right now because it represents about 2% of financial wealth in the United States. So I ran some numbers. You know, there's $138 trillion of financial wealth just in the top 10% of families. So let's say they decide to move 5% into gold from 2%. Great. That's another $5 trillion of US money trying to find some gold. How big is the US total gold market excluding the wall? You know, I'm not going to include the Fort Knox gold that may or may not be there. Just the stuff in the market. It's a fraction of that. It's maybe a trillion. So, how does 5 trillion move into 1 trillion just to get a 5% exposure? I think what happens at some point is that people say, "I should have 5, 10, 12, 15% exposure, 20, whatever the number is, and they say, I'd like to do that." I don't think we have a market that can support that right now without much higher prices. >> No, that's that's the only way to make that happen is to see much higher prices. And that's the leverage that gold offers in the current market. You know, we've gotten I've called it just recently kind of a hair trigger market where the world's, you know, pushed the gold price up substantially. The US isn't participating because we don't have fear in our markets. What happens if we get fear in our markets? if he's got a stock market breakdown or a true recession, uh, you know, what happens if President Trump loses the midterms and then everything he's trying to accomplish gets caught up in gridlock. Uh, that's kind of the worst of of all worlds because we'll be halfway through the process of trying to reshore manufacturing and and bring jobs back to the country and then we'll just go into political gridlock uh, if that happens. And and that's where I think the rubber can really meet the road. And if we get fear, I mean that means that gives precious metals prices explo explosive potential for exactly the reason you said it's completely underowned as a an asset class in this country. And if we get a situation that drives buying into precious metals in this country, that's when gold can go up 5,000 6,000 $7,000 an ounce or even higher. Now, Dana, um I I know for a fact there's somebody listening to this right now who's thinking, you know, I've been thinking about buying some gold or silver, has never done it, doesn't know what the process is. Um and it's not like if you go to the to the market in in China, I mean, it's just it's glorious. It's glistening. There's all sorts of different ways. There's people everywhere. It's just a Here in the United States, my nearest coin shop is a pawn shop, too. It's kind of a It's not exactly a upscale experience. And I'm that's being kind, right? So it still feels like it's so there might How did So somebody calls you and says, "Dana, I haven't bought gold before." What's the process? Like how does that actually work? >> Well, it's really quite simple. The only real complication I think throws people off is that the price changes all the time, like a stock changes. So it's like you're buying shoes at Amazon, only the price is moving all the time. So that's really where the complication lies. Otherwise, you're just buying products. And we think you should stick on the main road with the most widely traded, competitively priced, modern bullion products minted by sovereign mints or the most popular and uh prestigious refineries in the world. Uh so we we recommend US products first, American 1 gold and silver eagles. Second, Canadian 1 gold and silver maple leaves. Or third, Austrian 1oz gold and silver philarmonics. These are the most widely traded, competitively priced, and most importantly, internationally recognized modern gold bullion coins. We call them coins. They're really just round bars made by a government as opposed to square bars made by a refinery. Uh if they were ice cream, I would call them vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. the three most popular flavors. Now, there's a bit of friction to buying and selling precious metals, physical products, because the mint has to make them. The specifications are very exacting. Uh there's cost to the minting process. Um there's also insurance, shipping, and a tiny profit to a dealer like me. We we literally make 1 to 2% on an ounce of gold. So, the buy sell spread on an ounce of gold is about 4%. So that's why these are not trading vehicles. This is something if you're going to put money into physical precious metals. This is money you want to set aside and not touch unless you absolutely need to. But if you stick with the main sovereign minted products, you're going to avoid 99% of the problems you could encounter in the marketplace. We have a modest problem with Chinese counterfeits and all the mints around the world have added intricate design elements to the picture that's stamped on the coin to make it harder for the Chinese to knock them off uh and the marketplace to accept them. That's why professional dealers like myself, we're experienced. We understand what a real one looks like and what a fake one looks like where a novice on the street may not understand that. Now I'm a member of the professional numismatists guild which is the leading organization of rare coin dealers in the country. I've been on their board of directors and I've was a president of the organization in 2016 and 2017 when this Chinese counterfeit issue uh started to rear its ugly head in the US marketplace and I conceived of and helped to establish the industry anti-counterfeiting task force which today works with homeland security and secret service to interdict spurious shipments of precious metals items coming in primarily from China and you have to be careful who you deal with which is why pawn shops that aren't professional precious metals dealers may not know the difference between a fake coin and a real coin. Number one, online platforms may not know the difference either. That's why it's important that you find a a reputable longstanding dealer in the community who this is their business. And we do have opportunists in our marketplace as well who come and go in especially in a kind of a hot market like we're in right now. Uh so you have to be wary of those. >> So when somebody sells you gold or silver back, I assume you put it on one of those machines, right? To make sure it's real. >> Yeah. We have testing devices that we use. If we suspect an item is not good. Now most of the time we can tell just by looking at an item whether it's good or bad because we have that experience. But refiner-made bars of gold in particular are a bit more problematic than the sovereign minted 1oz coins because the design on the bars is planer and they tend to come in blister packs where the bar sealed inside, you know, a cardboard card with plastic holding it inside. So, you can't really take the bar out. And when these coins hit each other, they make a certain pitch. Like I know that you're a musician right on the side. You like to play guitar. Yep. And u gold coins make a certain pitch when they're right because they have a little bit of alloy in them. Not all of them are pure gold because pure gold is very soft and it can dent or scratch easily. So US gold eagles are 90% pure gold by weight. There's 10% other added to them that make them more durable. They have an ounce of gold in them. They just weigh an ounce and 9/10 or 900s uh uh to accommodate the alloy that's in them as well. But uh we have testing devices and if we think something is sp uh spurious we either don't buy it or we'll send it to a refinery to be melted and assay before we'll issue settlement payment on it. Right? And I do think that that's going to be a problem in the future for bars much more than it would be for sovereign minted products that have anti-counterfeiting design elements struck into them already. Um, and that's, you know, the US Mint changed the design on the gold eagles in 2021 for this specific reason, uh, to, uh, make them more, uh, resistant of counterfeiting. The Chinese uh, excuse me, the Canadian Royal Mint's been doing it since 2016. Uh, the Austrian Mint's been doing it for for years now. So, these products are widely recognized and understood among the professional dealer community. And that's why I said easily sellable for clients. So, if you want to buy physical precious metals, you know, it's best to find a dealer that you have a relationship with uh that's longstanding. Uh you can competitively shop pretty easily. Um we never wanted to be the lowest price dealer because, you know, price, service, quality, you get pick any two. You can't always give all three. And the dealers that have always been the littlest, cheapest dealer have tended to get into problems because of lack of profits in the past. And that leads to sometimes spectacular failures. That doesn't mean we're not competitive, but you know, when people shop around, they're always looking what's the absolute best price? Well, is really that the best opportunity for you? And we're talking about a few dollars an ounce. It's not a big deal, right? But we're very competitively priced. And because the price is always moving, it's best to do a transaction over the telephone. Now, we're consultative in nature. We help people. We'll answer any questions people have. Uh if there are anomalies in the marketplace, we can explain them to you. And by that, I mean, you know, sometimes the US Mint can't keep up with demand. And the premiums on gold eagles might be a little higher than they should be. where you can buy a Canadian maple leaf that doesn't have that premium inequality, but you probably won't get back at the point in time that you want to sell it. So, that's where we help people find the best value in the marketplace. And sometimes we just have deals, but what happens is just like buying a stock, you buy it over the phone with us. We lock in the transaction at the point of sale. Subsequent price movements are irrelevant. If the price goes higher, we're not going to call you back and ask you for more money. If the price goes down, we expect you to honor your commitment. Uh then you pay us and then we ship you the merchandise fully insured on private insurance policy. Uh and then you have to sign for the package and then when you get it, open it and make sure you got exactly what you're supposed to. We have rigid uh internal controls for inventory, for shipping to make sure you know that we every package is exactly what it's supposed to be on the way out. And in the unusual occurrence that you know the package doesn't arrive on your end, we replace it. Uh that's on our insurance policy. It doesn't happen very often. Uh but it on occasion it does. So uh you know that's how the industry works. That's how we operate. Uh it's just that the price changes a lot in the in you know every moment of the day because it's a live commodity that trades and all day every day. >> Mhm. >> Great. I mean that that's how it worked for me when I first bought some and and I I remember I remember I bought for me it was a lot of money but the gold showed up in a box this big. It was very heavy. Right. And I I I was shocked because I was imagining I was going to have like a suitcase or something. I just didn't know the density of wealth that that gold represents, you know. >> Yeah. 100 ounces of gold weighs about eight pounds and it's it's smaller than a paperback novel. Uh, so it's it's a lot heavier than you think it is when you, you know, hold a couple hundred ounces in your pockets, which you can literally walk around with, >> but the density is there. That's And gold is very compact. It doesn't take much space to store a lot of true value. >> Well, this isn't a tube of gold, but if it was, I could wrap my hand around a tube of 20, right? >> And 20 times 4,000, >> $80,000, right? >> You could wrap your hand around 80 grand with gold right now. So, so for anybody buying it, don't prepare to be shocked at how compact it is. [laughter] >> It's true. It's true. >> Yeah. Um, well, I think that's it's really important. I just want to demystify that for people because I've been doing it for a long time, but I kind of forget, you know, that I've been doing it a long time. I also I'm I'm just like China. I mostly just buy um I I I give it out to kids at Christmas and and to people who I think need to hold their hold some gold and silver for the first time. I I I give it out as tips every so of silver to tips for people. I just gave one to an Uber driver. I had this incredible conversation with this woman in in Memphis, Tennessee. And it was uh um it was just a phenomenal conversation. I happened to have my my pocket piece with me and I thought, you know what? She might when I put it in her hands, this is the one thing I love. Sometimes when you put a piece of gold or silver in somebody's hand, it's almost like ancient DNA gets activated. you know, they're whatever fragment of Viking they have in them or wherever, you know, you can just their pupils widen a little like, you know, because it's it's real and tangible and it gets to that other thing because you can trust it immediately. It's got this density. Money should be you should be able to trust your money. You and we have money that's so untrustworthy right now. The Fed has told us flat out, don't trust our money. We're going to ruin it at they say 2% a year, but really they've settled into 3 to 4% a year and probably will go higher. They've said, "You can trust that we're going to take whatever cash you have, fiat money, and we're going to make it worth less, if not worthless, at some point in the future." >> Exactly. That's exactly what's happening. And how it sounds when you drop it from a couple of inches onto a a table, it it rings a little bit. And you know, the the money we have or the currency we have in our pocket right now, the quarters and nickels, dimes, even the pennies, they they go thunkk. They don't have any real true ring to them. So, uh, I can imagine the eyes on the Uber driver in Memphis when you put that ounce of silver in her hand. >> Yep. Yep. And and by the way, I said, you know, good tip. That's about 50 bucks if you take it somewhere. But anyway, I I I think it's worth it to um start the start the education process. So, that's the only time I ever get rid of or get get rid of any of that stuff. So, I said it's two words, gold and silver. gold monetary asset as you said most important characteristic and why it's it's part of this is wonky but it's now a tier one asset >> in the Basel 3 Accord so banks can use it as a tier one asset meaning you stuff it on your balance sheet and it operates the same as cash treasuries gold it's got that tier one aspect to it fine that that that adds has something to it monetary asset but I I really like silver even though it's just been monetized within the sovereign boundary of the money system in in um India because it's now useful as collateral for loans. That's a whole separate conversation. But silver is fundamentally an industrial metal still on the world stage. And this has caught me, you know, this um data I think ultimately comes from the silver institute. Dana, I take it with a grain of salt. Um I sort of squint at the data. I don't take it as gospel, but I think it's true that silver has been running a severe supply deficit for six years in a row, and we'll go on to seven years now. And that means that mine output is completely consumed by both industry and investment, and I'll include jewelry and investment demand. And it's been officially added now to the US critical mineral. It's not a mineral, it's a metal, but picking at hairs here. China's also said, "Well, we're going to consider it a a critical something too in their system." So, you can't just like sell it without like going through some permitting process to have it leave the shores. India has said sort of the same things. Russia has said that they it's it's they're going to create a strategic reserve. 2025, I I read this from Mark 4x on Twitter and he said 2025 could be history's first year first year in history where 100% of mine output goes to industry for silver. like that can't be right. But Steve St. Angelo at SRS Rockco report, yeah, sure enough, if you use the Silver Institutees data last year was 86% of mine output went just to industrial demand. And a lot of that, of course, is going into solar panels and it's just like more and more and more and more is just going into solar and and that's just astonishing. So for me to have a critical industrial commodity that has been in a structural shortfall for seven out of seven years that is used in a way where if it doubled, tripled, or went up 10fold in price, it would still be used, right? So if there's 40 cents worth of silver in a cell phone, if that went to four bucks, a 10-fold increase, would that really stop them from making iPhones? Not probably not. Right? So this is one of the most outrageous supply demand shortfalls I've ever seen. And I call that reality is some something us old-timers call fundamentals. I actually think we're going to see fundamentals coming back into vogue after we've come off of all this Ponzi bubbly AI kind of stuff and people once again are going to go, well, we need food, gas, oil, metals. I think we're going to get back to that that time. What What do you think? Oh, I agree with you completely. Uh, you know, gold is about 90% monetary metal and 10% commodity. Silver's about 50/50. And I've looked at the silver institutes um spreadsheets that you can get from them that show the all the different categories of supply and demand uh going back 20 years. And the one category that just keeps growing every year is industrial demand for all the different uses. And that's not going to change anytime soon. Silver is one of the most conductive metals there is on the planet. Uh I've got a 1oz silver coin on my desk here. It's a Canadian maple leaf. Now, it's in this um plastic envelope, and I'm not going to hold it the way I would hold it, but you can take this ounce of silver and take an ice cube and hold it in your hand and literally cut through that ice cube like a knife just because the heat in your fingers heats up the silver and will cut that ice cube. Now, it's it's not going to go like a knife through butter, but in the course of about 20 seconds, you'll go right through it. And that shows how conductive silver is and why it's needed. And the uses for silver just continue to grow in industrial demand. So you're right, the supply and demand uh equation, which is the most fundamental equation for any commodity for higher prices when there's an imbalance where there's more demand than there is supply uh is the best for any metal there is I think for silver right now. uh be because of these reasons and silver tends to be a byproduct of other mining uh you know where you mining for copper or gold or nickel you'll find silver and I do think we have had peak silver mining you know all the easy deposits have been found until we can get under the seafloor which may happen in our lifetimes you don't know but until we can actually mine underneath the ocean uh I don't think there'll be any you know way we can more easily [snorts] and that that's not that easy. Um, so I do think the fundamentals for silver are tremendous. And the fact that gold is twice its previous all-time high of just a few years ago, where silver is just now reaching its two all-time previous highs from 1980 and 2011 means it potentially has a long way to go in price appreciation before uh the supply and demand imbalance is equaled in its actual value in the marketplace. >> Yeah, I agree. It's just one of the most astonishing fundamental stories. So, I keep talking about those fundamentals and again I wish we had better data. Um, maybe you can shed some light on this, but I I you know, I'm a little bit of a nut, a wonk, a geek. I I read everything I can, and I still find myself sort of like peering dimly into the LBMA. Nobody really quite seems to know what they have, what they don't have, who it belongs to, how much is already spoken for, what's hypothecated. To me, Dana, this should be the simplest thing ever. Thousand ounce bars have numbers on them. Can you just show me the bar list and who owns it? It's like it's a two column spreadsheet, you know? It should be very simple and it's so hard to find out who owns what. I think that's on purpose. And and you know, what did you make of all that recent shenanigans where it looked like the LBMA got tapped out and there was emergency stuff and there were shipments and we heard about plane flights and our refiners got backed up. There was a bit of a bit of a hiccup in the supply demand chain for silver there recently. >> It was more than a hiccup, Chris. The LBMA literally broke on October 9th when demand for physical silver driven primarily out of India and part of it was tariff driven as I mentioned earlier and part of it was due to the Diwali festival season. Uh they've got ETFs over there that were buying exchange traded funds buying silver like crazy and the LVMA is like the world's warehouse for gold and silver. Central banks store gold there. So there's a big cushion of gold that's available to borrow or lease, but they don't store central banks don't warehouse silver. So the available silver supplies are a lot uh less compared to gold. And we've also seen a huge migration of physical precious metals into the ComX exchange earlier this year due to uh fears over tariffs on precious metals uh creating a higher premium in New York than there was in London. So literally the the Comx warehouses for gold and silver have swelled to record highs to the detriment of what was available as a cushion in the LBMA. And when the rubber uh met the road in October, uh the LBMA actually went into dysfunction uh with not enough silver being available to be bought. Um premiums spiked, lease rates spiked, and the whole thing came to a a screeching halt because literally the market was overbought relative to what was there. And you're right, we don't know the actual spec specifications. some of that premium metal that came into New York has gone back into London to help alleviate how much uh that was was oversold. You know, it's been said that there needs to be a 100 million more ounces in London in the LBMA than are there now to get this back to a normal flowing market. But it shows you how sensitive the physical supplies for silver are in the world, especially relative to the amount of wealth in the world, right? And that's really where the equation comes to bear. And that's why we have $50 silver today instead of $25 silver because the world's starting to realize how scarce these metals are uh compared to true uh well, not true wealth, fake wealth in paper money, right? We've we've we've multiplied our wealth many times since we've had computers to do trading. But you can't just print this stuff this metal out of the ground easily, right? like you can arbitrage different assets and create more paper wealth and that's really part of what this whole, you know, run in precious metals this year has been about. But yeah, it broke the system. It literally broke the system and uh the LBMA has lost a lot of credibility as a result. Well, they deserve to especially um the LME component of that where that nickel fiasco a few years ago. But um bird in the hand, right? I mean that that's why I think like if you're if you are one of these industrial users and by the way China by bar none is at the top of that list right because they make more solar panels than anybody's one of the top uses so >> yeah so if you are China you just like burden the hand I'm not going to trust that the LBMA is going to be my Johnny on the spot just in time delivery system I'm going to want that stuff inside my borders um you know to whatever extent to create a an inventory buffer now but you said a 100red million an ounces. Doing math in my head, that's $5 billion at $50 an ounce. >> Change is it? I mean, couldn't couldn't Elon could pick up a phone call and and buy $5 billion worth of silver if he ever wanted to. I mean, it would be like a rounding error in his portfolio. >> Well, he he'll need some for the Teslas. And who knows what SpaceX might require, right? But yes, that's exactly what I mean by relative wealth. There are billionaires that could literally buy the market out if they wanted to. And if they decide to, we'll see substantially higher prices. >> Well, if a 100% of mine output ends up going towards industry, >> that means all the rest of us are scrambling around the edge for for whatever is left. And we know India of course is just accumulating. They're they're net accumulators. They they just buy silver. They tend to just buy it. And I was shocked. Maybe you could shed some light on this. I think it was in Jan July January of this year 25. I open up this article that says, and it's just this little article, and it's in the Hindustan Times or Business Times or something, and they said, "Oh, India just took delivery of 2,600 some odd tons of silver from the UAE." And that caught me because I've been following this really closely. I didn't even know the UAE was a player. Where did they come up with 2600 tons? Um, which is onetenth of that that's like basically onetenth of world mine output is, >> right? I I was unaware of that. So, uh, that's that's you being a wonk and that's why we love you [laughter] >> because you the UAE I didn't even know they were a player. Now they're a major player. That it caught me. >> Well, Dubai, uh, you know, it's become a big precious metals hub, too. So, the Middle East, you know, they've got all that wealth. What are they going to do with it? And they realize that we're in a fiat moneybased system that is potentially a disaster. So, I'm not surprised to hear that. you know, as an oil producer too, one of the biggest oil producers, where would you want to put that hard-earned, you know, money that you earned pulling that oil out of the ground? You want to put it into something tangible that can't be destroyed through the printing presses, right? So, I'm it's surprising to hear that, but it's not surprising at the same time. >> Right. Well, point is I I think that New York and London controlled pricing and the physical market for a very long time. you just described in October, maybe there's a little Vaseline on that football. Maybe they started to fumble it a little bit. And it feels to me looking at like I I look at this stuff all the time now. I follow this guy um Xiao Bay and he is reporting daily on what's happening at the SGE and and SHF vaults in China. And it's just been this constant oneway like every day. These are red numbers over here. More and more and more silver and gold are leaving the vault every single day. This is from a few days ago. Gold and silver are priced. Silver is usually priced$1 to $2 higher in China than it is here in the US. So that of course creates pressure, buying pressure for it to head east in this story. Um and and it feels to me kind of like we're about to lose control. Like I think Shanghai is making a strong play. China making a strong play to become the next physical pricing market or at least a dominant player. They're already there. What are your thoughts? Well, you're right. Uh, in the bigger picture, you know, London has been where most of the metals have lived physically, and New York is where they're hedged. Uh, and the paper market is traded. Um, and the paper market has dominated the price discovery mechanism since the '9s with the advent of computers. This year, we're starting to see the physical market overtake the paper market for true price discovery. And when you have these big ripe migrations of physical metal uh into the COMX earlier this year or the amount of metal that moved into China in April when they bought gold like crazy or Indian silver and gold in October, I'm sorry, September. This is a true run on the bank of physical metals. That's what this year is all about. Where price discovery is going to translate more into physical than the ability of the leveraged market where you can go 10 to1 on paper in New York has dominated the price discovery for the last you know 30 years. This this is what this year is all about and it is a sea change and I'm calling it a run on the bank of gold and silver uh physically and there's just not enough of it potentially to go around if the run continues. Now it's debated right now. That's why we're seeing the prices go sideways a bit after a big run higher. But what's going to be the next catalyst that drives it? And it's going to be the physical market that drives it more than anything else. And that's the world we're returning to and that's what this year is all about. and the sea change that you mentioned earlier. That's really what this is. >> Excellent. Well, Dana, we're going to leave it there. We're going to pick it up again. So, for anybody who wants to talk to Dana and or his his amazing staff, go to ammergold.com. Is that correct? >> Yes. >> Ambergold.com peakrossperity. And uh they already treat people great. You'll be treated great with an asterisk extra great. Um so, uh please uh take take advantage if you don't own gold and silver. have that conversation. Of course, talk to your financial advisor, see what makes sense in your specific condition, but um when you've made your decision, strongly recommend you give Dana a call and get that process started. So, Dana, thanks for your time today. Thanks for having me, Chris. We're happy to help anyone we can. No question is too great or too small. No, no purchase or sale is too great or too small. We'll help anyone however we can. And uh really appreciate you having me. It's great to see you again. and uh we'll look forward to talking to you again in the future. >> Likewise and thanks and everybody it I hope we impressed upon you the importance of talking with somebody who has the experience is well grounded in the market. Um you there's a lot of people who come and go in this business. Dana's [music] not one of them. He's here and he's been here the whole time. So I strongly recommend whoever you work with, you find somebody equivalent to Dana. Um and just make sure you're working with somebody who really knows what they're doing cuz it's important. [music] With that, Dana, we'll see you soon. We're going to carry on this conversation. I'm sure there's going to be something wild to talk about before the year is up. >> Thank you, Chris. Yeah, we always seem to have some fun in our markets. >> All right, bye for now, everyone.