Global Debt At Tipping Point: Gold, Silver Rally ‘Just Starting’ | Matthew Piepenburg
Summary
Precious Metals Rally: Matthew Piepenburg highlights the ongoing rally in gold and silver, emphasizing that the rise is driven by the debasement of fiat currencies and the historical role of gold as a store of value.
Dollar Debasement: The podcast discusses the weakening of the US dollar due to excessive debt monetization, leading to increased demand for gold as a strategic reserve asset by central banks globally.
Global Debt Crisis: The conversation touches on the US debt crisis, with debt-to-GDP ratios exceeding 120%, highlighting the unsustainable fiscal policies and the potential for financial repression.
Geopolitical Shifts: There is a focus on the geopolitical implications of the US dollar losing its dominance, with countries like China and the BRICS nations moving towards gold and other currencies for trade and reserves.
Investment Strategy: Piepenburg suggests that investors should consider gold and silver as part of their portfolios, given their historical performance and the current economic environment, while also noting the potential for silver to outperform gold.
Market Bubbles: The discussion includes concerns about potential bubbles in various asset classes, including tech stocks and real estate, contrasting them with the strategic value of precious metals.
Central Bank Actions: The podcast highlights the significant gold purchases by central banks, particularly in Eastern countries, as a hedge against the declining trust in the US dollar and other fiat currencies.
Economic Outlook: The overall economic outlook is cautious, with warnings about rising interest rates, inflation, and the potential for a broader economic downturn, making precious metals a safer investment choice.
Transcript
think the US is bringing a knife to a gunfight. I think Bent knows that. He's a smart enough guy to know that. You know, less than 10% of Chinese exports are to the US. They're not suffering in the same way the US is on these on these tariff policies. Things change. This is not the greatest generation anymore. It's not the greatest leadership anymore, red or blue. Again, I'm agnostic. We have a debt crisis that politicians don't want to talk about. And the world's shifting. >> What do you think needs to happen? Matthew Peepberg returns to show. He is a partner of Vonga's AG. He's called this rally in the precious metals. He said that precious metals would outperform equities. We can check out his last interview down below. Matthew, welcome back. Earlier in the year, uh you were a little bit more constructive or less constructive rather on equities than maybe the year before, but you were still positively um constructive in the sense that maybe it wouldn't collapse, but uh the momentum was still going to be there according to what you told me in Vancouver a couple months ago earlier in the year. Now, year to date, the S&P is up uh less than gold. The first question I have for you right now, gold at $4,200. It's up about 50 something, 55% year to date now as of today's price. That changes every day. >> Yeah. >> When will this stop? In other words, not when, nobody knows when, but what hypothetically what would cause this rally to stop? Well, I mean, if you if you understand gold in the context that we look at it in terms of history and the math of debt and the history and the math of credit cycles and the history and the math of unound money, gold will stop making a secular rise when uh sound money returns to the sovereign nations of the G7 and the east and the world in general. And since I don't see that anytime soon, uh gold will continue its secular rise. It never moves in a straight direction. And Frankly, we're all surprised by the speed of the last few months or the certainly last 12 months in general, but we're not surprised by the direction. And I think even at these nominal prices, gold is still very undervalued and so is silver. So to answer your question smuggly and flippantly, but honestly, gold will continue to rise because uh fiat currency debasement will continue to uh continue to rise as well. In other words, fiat money, paper money, debase money to monetize unsound and unsolvable debt crisises will continue to be debased and as a result, gold will continue to rise. Gold's doing nothing but do what it always does, hold its value while paper money loses its value. >> It's interesting you brought up the dollar. Uh the dollar, what do you mean by dollar debasement? Uh exactly. The DXY has declined year-to- date. As you know, it's had a big drop earlier in the year, but it's more or less traded rangebound um ever since May. And as you know, the DXY is the dollar relative to a basket of other currencies. If you overlay this with gold, you can see that perhaps there's been a very strong positive uh sorry, an inverse relationship, at least in the beginning of the year. But throughout the second half of the year, it it it looks like gold's just skyrocketing, moving on its own. >> Yeah. I mean, look, >> how do you explain this? >> You can pick statistical windows. You can look at periods where the dollar is strong and gold is strong or the dollar is weak and gold is strong. I mean, gold is decoupled from the dollar and the world reserve currency money. But look, the dollar is an important theme when you're understanding when you're understanding precious metals and the dollar is world reserve currency. So, it's the most important currency to talk about. Not just because I'm an American or just be, you know, I'm based in Europe. I'm not just focused on the dollar because it's my currency. It's it's a very important global currency. And because the dollar is used to monetize unsustainable debt, it has to be debased. When the M2 money supply is expanded, when central banks like the Fed print money, and when banks extend credit, that increases the money in circulation and that's a deflationary for, excuse me, an inflationary force. It's a debasement force. The dollar is just being diluted like a beautiful glass of wine with lots of, you know, mineral water being tossed into it quarter after quarter. So, the dollar gets diluted, but because it is the world reserve currency, because of the milkshake theory and that big straw sucking sound from the rest of the world, there's still demand for it. It can be ex the inflation can be exported as it's been for decades. But at some point, the jig is up. And again, when you look at the dollar, it's it's only being debased because it's being used to monetize debt that's gone out of control. So the dollar and the debt and precious metals are all kind of in a circular loop. And again, this is just history. David Hume, the Austrian school, Thomas Gresham in the 1500s, Adolf Tears in the 18th century, Robert Triffin in the 1960s, Charles Goodart in the 70s. It's certainly nothing new. This is just a cycle. The current headlines confirm that the dollar is being debased. The bricks, the bricks dalization, the DXY central bank since 2014, net, you know, net stacking gold and net dumping US treasuries, the petro dollar moves outside of the dollar, the comx fanatics and the gymnastics there, the BIS making gold at tier one, the IMF talking about gold in 2021 and three years of central bank gold stack stacking at over a,000 tons peranom. This is the first time since 1996 that central banks hold more gold than than US treasuries. And of course, even Judy Shelton is talking about it. Morgan Stanley has a 602020 now allocation. Mike Wilson, the desperation of the Genius Act. These are all signs of of of a dollar in decline or a dollar being pushed to the side in favor of a better strategic reserve asset, a better store of value globally, central bank wise, and even at at commercial bank levels. The dollar is just slowly but steadily replace being replaced by physical precious metals like gold and and the devaluing of the dollar is nothing new. We did it in 1933 when when you know FDR in an executive order overnight revalue gold from 20 to $35 an ounce. It's a 69% devaluation of the dollar in 1971 when Nixon jumped off the gold standard within you know 5 to 10 years the dollar lost 90%. and it's lost 99% since the measured against gold since 1971 in my lifetime. The Plaza Accords in 1985 we devalued the dollar again. So devaluation debasement to monetized debt isn't a gold bug case. It's an historical confirmation and we see that it's affecting the markets. It's certainly affecting the gold price and the silver price. And it's really chapter two in a long long novel of currency debasement to monetize debt. And I don't think gold's going to going to get any lower. It's going to move in a straight line. Believe me, there can be retracements. I've had this debate with Brent Johnson, Henrik Zeberg not declaiming declaring victory because the DXY is not at 100 yet. And there could be a last dance for the DXY which we can talk about. But the dollar is simply losing purchasing power because it's overs supplied, overextended, and less trusted and less credible. >> If it's true that people are moving, by people I mean other central banks and other governments are moving away from the dollar, why are they flowing their capital into gold? Why not place it in the yen or the euro or any other alternative to uh the dollar? What makes gold such an attractive alternative at a time like this? >> Well, certainly on a relative basis when you talk about the DXY versus other currencies, it's still the strongest horse in the glue factory for so many reasons because of its role in FX reserves because of its role. It's 80% of global trade finance. It's 13 trillion dollars in global debt. Even if it's not due to US banks, is in dollar denomination. And there's a massive Euro dollar demand for the for for the dollar outside of the US and over 90 trillion FX swaps. So the dollar is still king relative to other currencies for now. But what's happening uh is that the dollar and because the dollar and the US Treasury are so linked and because the US Treasury is so overissued and distrusted and weaponized since 2022, that was a turning point. The world is looking for a safer store of value. This term of art that we've been talking about for years is now making the headlines finally. They'd rather save in something that holds its value and spend in local regional currencies or fiat money. And and that's why they're they're choosing gold, not just because the BIS told them to, but because they understand history, too. If you and I can see these trends, believe me, the central banks of the East and certainly in China and the bricks see it as well. And again, we're not seeing the death of the dollar or the end of the dollar. We're just seeing a repricing of the dollar and a and a slow loss of its hedgeimony. Again, this goes from the dalization themes of the last two years to now. the headlines making the gold market so popular all of a sudden. It's been clearly on our mind for a long time, but this is now history coming to its its fourth turning. And uh the dollar will still have a role. It just won't be priced in the same way, traded in the same way, trusted in the same way, stockpiled in the same way as it was for decades before. And uh we're seeing that everywhere in the headlines now. It's not just a gold bug case. >> Gold and silver have reached historic highs amidst this crazy bull rally. More investors are turning to hard assets to protect their savings. But what if instead of just holding your gold as a savings vehicle, you could actually earn income from it, pay it in gold. So now it's not just in savings, it's also an income vehicle. That's what today's sponsor, Monetary Metals, helps you do. They're changing the way people think about investing in precious metals completely. Rather than letting your gold sit idally or paying fees to store it, now you can get paid to own it. Right now through their marketplace, you can earn up to 4% yield on gold paid monthly in gold. Your savings grow in ounces, not dollars, and stack on top of any price appreciation. Thousands of investors are already earning real yield and physical gold and silver through monetary medals. It's time to see how it works for you. Go to monetary-medals.com/lin link down below or scan the QR code here to learn more. Take a look at this title here or this headline from uh the Financial Times. This is from Treasury Secretary Scott Passen. The US warns the world will decouple from China if it imposes new export controls. Now, this comes on the back of Trump's 100% tariff threat, which was announced last Friday, which is set to take effect as of November. Uh so far as we're speaking today, I believe no such no deal has been reached yet. Treasury Secretary Scott warned Beijing that his new sweeping export controls on rare earths and critical minerals would force the US and other countries to decouple from China. He said if China wants to be an unreliable partner to the world, then the world will have to decouple. The world does not want to decouple. We want to derisk, but signals like this are signs of decoupling which we don't believe China wants. Um, two things strike me. Uh, first is that this decoupling has been happening for a while, but clearly it's expediting now. And second, he's speaking on behalf of the world, it seems. Is that true? The entire world is going to decouple. >> Look, I mean, besides a politician and politicians have to do what they have to do is make their case like a like a plaintiff or a defense attorney. It doesn't mean they're making the right case, they're making their case. I'm obviously pro-American. I'm a patriot. I have to always caveat. I don't want to live in Shanghai or Beijing or St. Petersburg or Moscow. But we have a G7 centric view of the world from our media and our financial information. We certainly have a US- ccentric view of the world whether we're in Germany, Switzerland, or New York City or Seattle or Vancouver. But you have to be a critical thinker, a self thinker. It doesn't mean you have to agree with me. Uh I'm not alone in this. You can be pro-American, pro dollar, uh pro the American flag, but you got to you got to call BS when you see it. And I think uh Bent, love him or hate him, Trump, love him or hate him. And I, you know, I'm agnostic now politically, so I'm I'm an equal opportunity cynic when it comes to the Biden administration or the Trump administration. I've said many times that Santa Claus can't solve this problem. But I think for Bent to be blaming all this on China by itself is is a little rich. Uh when I look at the trade policy, the currency war, the trade war, and hopefully not a hot war, when I look at the tariffs right now, which we've talked about before, but really at the end of the day, I think the US is bringing a knife to a gunfight. I think Bent knows that. He's a smart enough guy to know that. You know, less than 10% of Chinese exports are to the US. They're not suffering in the same way the US is on these on these tariff policies. There is a trade deficit, of course, but that's Triffin's law. When you're the world reserve currency, your dollar is going to be in higher demand or your currency is going to be in higher demand. It's going to be higher price because of that. You're going to have a trade deficit. You can't blame the world on that reality. Um, this is something that Jeffrey Sax has kind of joked about when he said when, you know, if your wife goes to the mall and spends too much on the AMX, you can't blame the mall for the MX spending. It's the it's the spending that's the problem. And what we're trying to do is blame blame the mall. As Tiffan warned too, if you have a strong dollar, manufacturing is going to eventually be exported. That's the what happened since 2001 under Clinton with the World Trade Organization. Let China in the story then was that China's going to be a great buyer of American blue jeans, toys, and gigs. What they didn't realize is that China would be a manufacturer of those gigs and blue jeans because American manufacturing was going to offshore its labor to China. That's not the fault of the Chinese. That's the fault of common sense and cheaper labor and US CEOs who sent that labor overseas. Uh but again, we saw on Liberation Day that we can't prosecute a trade war or even a tariff war because the US Treasury market auctions went silent the day after liberation day. So, we had to back off. October 9th, China restricts rare earth rare earth exports. They they 70% of the rare earths are mined there. 90% are processed there. That's leverage they have. October 10th, Trump announces these 100% tariffs on top of everything else. That led to 19 billion in crypto losses. Then there was an ash shucks moment over the weekend. Tried to make kumbaya moment. But again, the the reality is we're we're we're we're really playing chicken with a much stronger chicken right now. And and no one in the west wants to admit that there are lots of problems in China. There are lots of issues in China. I'm not pro-China, but in terms of in terms of the leverage they have um with trade and the leverage they have with manufacturing and the leverage they have now with the rising bricks coalitions, even India moving deeper into that camp, you know, you can't win hearts and minds and expect the world to buy US treasuries when you're throwing tariffs at them. And so we're going to have a tariff problem. We're going to have a treasury problem and a currency problem. You know, and most important, US Treasury yields are rising. The risk premium tells the truth better than politics or better than bescent. You know, the risk premium says we expect more from this US Treasury. We expect more from this declining dollar. And to get that, we want higher costs. That makes it harder for Uncle Sam to pay his debt. So the external revenue service of the tariff system that Trump brags about, with all due respect, again, I'm not pro or anti-Trump. I'm just being simple math, you know, honest math here. That's simply not true at all. And Bent says the auctions are good. That's because he's only he's only looking at the short and short-term debt at the short end of the curve. And uh it's the long end of the curve, the tenure in particular that we have to look at. And Bent knows this. You know, he's a smart guy, but he's a politician, like a central banker, certainly like a Treasury Secretary, he has to pompom his own team, but you're not getting objective advice. My my short response or long response to that short question is bes playing the political, he's not playing the mathematician. >> This is math. Since we're talking about math, >> uh JP Morgan's David Kelly, glo chief global strategist, warned that America is going broke slowly. It's doing so slowly enough that markets aren't panicking yet, as we can clearly see from the S&P and NASDAQ reaching all-time highs. The US national debt now topping $37.8 trillion and interest payments exceeding $1.2 trillion. Kelly said the debt to GDP ratio already at 99.9% will likely keep rising even under moderate growth. You and I have talked about this >> this situation. Um, and I had this discussion with my friend uh just uh just before the interview. I said, >> "Is this going to keep you up at night? Are you gonna wake up in the middle of the night at 2 a.m. in cold sweat and say to yourself, "Oh, gee, the US debt to GDP ratio is at 150%." What am I going to do? Like, how does this impact the regular person? Like, why should we care? How would you answer that? >> I mean, there's so many ways, you know, first of all, it's it's not just a slow realization that America has a debt problem. It's been an obvious realization just ignored for for years. It's now just becoming exponential. You can't ignore it because the citizen on the street feels it and we'll talk about that. But if you just look at the math of debt, actually debt to GDP in the US is much higher than 99%. It's over 120%. And as David Hume said in the 1750s, when when you cross the 100% debt to GDP Rubicon, growth mathematically slows by a third. This is a math reality. You're going to slow growth. You can't grow your way out of this debt crisis. When I was born, debt to GDP in the US was 38%. So this is a massive move and we've seen the cracks in the ice on the debt crisis. This was as clear as day to me in 2019 when I wrote rigged to fail when we had the repo crisis. In March of 2020 we had a massive selloff in US treasuries during the co hysteria and the COVID fall in March. And then in 2022 the UK had the guilt crisis. 2023 we had a banking crisis but that was a US Treasury crisis. That was a credit crisis. In 2025 and April we had a tariff crisis. No it was a bond crisis. So again, the debt reality has been open and obvious for years. The politicians are just starting to see it and the commercial bankers are starting to recognize because their clients see it. And the solutions aren't really good scenarios left. You can't bring debt to GDP down unless you cut entitlements defense. And you can't do that politically and survive. Entitlements defense and interest expense on our debt used to be 65% of our tax receipts in 2016. It's double that today. So what does the US do? Can it default? No. Although it constructively defaults when it has negative returning uh yields, which they do if you if you measure inflation correctly, we're having a negative returning yield across the yield curve. So that is a constructive default, but it's not an open default. So the only real option is to inflate it away. As Larry Leopard says, you can't taper a Ponzi scheme. So we're going to just inflate away our debt, debase our currency, lie about the inflation rate, have negative returning uh yields on our on our entire yield curve. And that's financial repression. when when you're getting a negative return on Uncle Sam's IOU, that is constructively a default. We just don't call it that because we lie about the inflation rate. As far as you're saying, how does that affect the citizen on the street? You know, you and I have had this conversation so many times. I mean, I look, I I think the definition of recession is another thing that we've we've talked about. I think we've been in a recession since 2022. You can look at the SAMS rule. You can look at the yield curve since World War II. You can look at the conference board leading indicators. You can look at the labor department data, year-over-year auto sales. I mean, the list goes on and on. BLS, nonfarm payroll jobs, downward revision, almost a million jobs. That was worse than 2009. 2021 saw 800K up. Now we've lost all that. The delinquency rates are at 13-year highs on private credit. Private credit scores are dropping at historical levels. 53% of US companies are showing negative profit margins. There's they're saying due to tariffs. Manufacturing is flat. Labor participation rate is 62%. That means half the population is paying for another half that isn't working. Uh private sector data because now the BLS is shut down. Whether you love them or hate them, I'm not a big fan of them. Trump fired the head of it for telling bad news. But now we're looking at ISM, Challenger grade, Christmas, ADP, payrolls, etc. These are the private sources of information we can't get from the shutdown government. But we have a net loss of 32,000 jobs in September. And planned hiring is down 58% from last year. And Walmart's predicting a worse Christmas season than than 2009. So again, I'm not making this stuff up. These are signs that Main Street is suffering. Not because they're all unemployed, but because the purchasing power of their dollar is weaker. Their inflation number that is telling them that inflation isn't so bad. Is a lie to what they're feeling in their actual costs. And again, the government is giving you an IOU that is actually losing money to inflation. They just don't give you the actual inflation data. That's a known truth on Wall Street. It's now a felt reality on Main Street. So these are just all facts, David. It's not good when the dollar loses value and wages don't keep up with that that that debasement. >> What's interesting is that the real yield of uh the interest rate uh in the United States has been going up at the same time as gold. You you might have seen this chart. Um historically they might have moved in different directions with a higher real yield. Gold has gone down uh presumably because people were flocking to these higher real yielding products and then vice versa. >> But now they're moving in the same direction. What does that signal to you? Maybe gold has shifted in the way that investors are perceiving its role. >> Well, yeah. Again, gold is decoupling from its standard, you know, the standard correlations. Dollar strong, gold weak, dollar weak, gold strong. Gold is just strong because the dollar across the board is less trusted and less wanted and less loved and it's more and more debased or devalued to monetize our debt. You don't have to be an MBA or a PhD in applied math or a political or an FOMC member and study all the histories and credentials of financial markets to realize that your dollar is just doing less for you. And we can we can get wonky and talk about yield curves and yield spreads and that half listeners understandably have other things to do. Their eyes glaze. They just know. Again, I've joked you cross the GW Bridge in New York, you buy an airplane ticket, you try to pay your kids tuition, whatever your costs are. If you want to buy a Ford 150 pickup, it's like the price of a Range Rover. I mean, we know without having to be economist, if you're a common sense citizen, wealthy or not, top top 10% or bottom 30%. We all feel the purchasing power of our fiat money getting weaker. And so, regardless of even what the yield curve says or what experts like me say, people feel the inflation, which is just the debasement of their purchasing power. And uh that's not a mystery to anyone who just has a pulse. You know, if you can fog a mirror, you can feel your dollar getting weaker. Your Canadian dollar, your Australian dollar, your US dollar, your euro even, or certainly even your Swiss Frank. It just buys less because it's being slowly throboiled into less and less purchasing power. >> What happens going back finishing off on the debt issue, what happens when the deficit continues to ride and when the debt to GDP continues to rise? So, this is from the IMF. is warning that the US debt to GDP will uh be at the largest or the uh yeah the highest um ever by the end of the decade. Uh the US unlike most other rich nations is not expected to make any progress in lowering its deficit from current levels. The current the country's gross debt to GDP ratio expected to be 125% of GDP this year will surpass record highs to hit 143% by the end of the decade. What happens not just to inflation and gold, but also to the geopolitical balance of the world? What happens when the US is no longer the manufacturing hub? Well, I guess it wasn't for a while, but it's now it's now a major detation um even by G7 standards. How does that shift the balance of power globally, Matthew? >> Well, it's it's happening right in front of our eyes. And again, I'm an American. I'm pro-American. America's not disappearing from the stage. It's just lost its supremacy and hedgeimonyy. That's what happens when the world reserve currency and and and is is overextended in wars, proxy wars, expenses, debt, deficits, the big beautiful bill. It's still higher spending than before. We're not cutting our spending. We have a spending problem. We also have an income problem because our our tax receipts and GDP don't even come close to our spending. Again, it's that spouse at the mall going crazy with the black card. At some point, you hit an uh-oh moment. We've we've hit that long ago. We're just starting to see the symptoms and the headlines becoming clear. What does that mean? Well, we're all kind of speculating on that. I was talking to Vilham Middle who wrote the big reset back in 2014. We were talking about what's next with this this massive shifting in the global financial plumbing. The rise of the bricks, the rise of countries moving away from the US dollar. 30 countries repatriating their gold outside in other jurisdictions to keep it within their jurisdictions. 45 countries trading outside the US dollar. again the petro dollar losing its force the US Treasury becoming less less powerful its auctions what does this mean we're all guessing and you know the the big worries are will there'll be some type of global reset will there'll be war as a distraction as Hemingway warned uh will we will we cooperate or will we continue to compete these are questions that remain unanswered certainly when when middle coupe wrote the big reset he foresaw this almost 15 years ago 12 15 years ago this this slow breakdown of the old system and the breakdown of the world reserve currency. And I said to him in a question, I interviewed him. I asked him, "What what do you see next?" He said, "Honestly, for years, I was looking for cooperation. I was hoping there would be common sense, kind of the John Nash equilibrium theory. We'd all get together and realize we we do better cooperating than fighting." But he said, "In the last couple years," and this has nothing to do with just Trump. He says, "In the last couple years, I see more conflict rather than cooperation. And that doesn't bode well for international peace, international security, international trade, international currencies, and the world reserve currency. We're all guessing at the most negative level, you could follow Hemiway's warning that when you have a nation in debt, that you'll see temporary prosperity in the in the in the equity markets, but then you'll see the permanent ruin of currency debasement and war. Now, war in the nuclear is is to me unfathomable, but we do see constant proxy wars all over from the Middle East to the east. Hopefully, those things are solved. I don't know the answer. I do know that the world's going to be going from a a bipolar or mult or a single polar world to a much more multip-olar world. Will that be cooperative? Will it be competitive? Will it be uh conflictatory? Right now, certainly with the headlines in China, conflict is the meme. But as I talked to a lot of Americans I know who speak Mandarin, who've been living in China for decades, they say the mood on the street in China is kind of arrogant. They're they're laughing at the West in general, in the US in particular. They say, "Look, we've been a country for 5,000 years. The US has been here for 250. They've had a good run, but they've spent themselves into a corner. They're in a debt trap. The Chinese are playing, as I've said many times, chess, well, the US and the G7 play checkers with their currencies. Trump and the US and guys like Bent still think were the US of 1945, 1944. Bretton Woods, the flag on Euima, the Victors, the world's greatest manufacturers, the world's biggest creditors. Now we're the world's biggest debtor. and and we have a currency that's no longer trusted. Things change. This is not the greatest generation anymore. It's not the greatest leadership anymore, red or blue. Again, I'm agnostic. We have a debt crisis that politicians don't want to talk about. And the world shifting. >> What do you think needs to happen? Let's say you are the president and you were to design a five-year plan or a series of five-year plans, which is what China in the former Soviet Union had. >> What would the next five-year plan be? What were the top what would the top priorities for the next five years be? >> Well, I think the very first priority is honesty. I don't think it's again I've said this so many times whether you're the CEO of a company, whether you're the patriarch of a family or whether you're the leader of a nation. Certainly in any family, any couple can sit down and have remembered a period where they said, "Honey, we have to cut spending. We have to work harder or we have to sell the the third car or we have to keep the kids out of exit because we can't afford this. We have to be honest with ourselves about our balance sheet as a politician, red or blue, that's very hard to do. Uh, and and it's very hard to have the profile and courage, as Kennedy said, to think about your nation first rather than re-election or your legacy. And you have to be honest about the debt and you have to be honest about how we got ourselves into this debt crisis. We can't blame this on the rest of the world. Again, it's like blaming the mall for overspending on your own credit card. So, the first thing I would do is if I could, if I were a politician, is tell the truth. It's very hard for politicians to do that. Again, Trump, love him or hate him, knows a hell of a lot about building, you know, in in in Manhattan and in construction costs and loans and being an entrepreneur. It's a very different thing to lead a nation through a global geopolitical world. You have to be a little bit more conscious of of larger economic theories and and certainly economic history and other national self-interest. So, the first thing I would do would be honest about our crisis. We'd have to make some austerity. As the as the Austrian School of Economics has always said, you need some constructive destruction. You can't give antibiotics. You can't print money every time there's a problem to monetize the problem to debase the currency. You have to allow yourself to get sick sometimes, we have to have a a is as Ed doubt as others have said, if we really want to make America great again, we have to experience a real recession. We have to spend more carefully. We have to have hard conversations about entitlements and military spending. We have to bring the the debt down. That's going to cost some money. We have to bring the GDP up. That means reshoring jobs. That's going to cost some money. I would incentivize companies to get their butts out of China, El Salvador, and Central America and manufacture back in America. And rather put a tariff on those countries. I would simply put a tariff on those CEOs who don't bring their their their workers back to the US. I would make it a m I would make it a national emergency to to actually manufacture in the US. if you're living in the US paying taxes in the US or theoretically paying taxes in the US for some of these CEOs and not just incentivize them but force them to bring production back to the US. I don't blame that on China. I blame that on our CEOs. So, we'd have to have those kind of tough conversations that maybe would be an in maybe fracture the idea of true capitalism, but we've left true capitalism a long time ago. So, you'd have to be honest. You'd have to bring debt down. You'd have to bring GDP up. You'd have to bring manufacturing back to the US. You'd have to do that over a period of time that would involve some austerity and some constructive destruction. You'd have to let the markets actually mean revert to get to fair valuation. These are all things that I think are almost impossible for a politician of any stripe uh to do and stay elected. And you have to have the trust of the people to get you to do that. America is so undivided or so divided rather than united. Uh it's so polarizing. And it's the same thing here in Europe in in in the UK and France and Germany. there's such a patchwork of governments that aren't trusted that the people aren't going to follow that type of honesty even if it was delivered. So, you know, David, again, I'm I'm no fun at the cocktail party, but that's how I I see it. I don't think the politicians can stay in power by doing the right things, but you never know. We hope so, but I don't think we're on that track now. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of uh what the US should do, I think they maybe they should look into buying gold. If I were running the US like a country and I see well the dollar is devaluing uh people are losing trust in my currency maybe I should hedge against my own actions any company would be prudent to do so. This is central bank buying in 2025 according to data from the world gold council and as you can see eastern c easter eastern central banks and middle eastern central banks like Turkey um have been buying Kazakhstan China has been buying Poland as top of the list net sellers you've got Germany Singapore Pakistan I don't see the US on this list and I don't think they're they're not on this list because they're not selling and they're not adding they're just keeping it steady. Why do you think the US is not hedging against themselves? >> Yeah. Well, look, I mean, this was a conversation I had this morning. I I was my adviser at Von Greer as I was interviewing was Alistair Mloud and we were off the record just talking to ourselves. What are the things we can do? In addition to the things about being honest, having austerity, cutting spending, we'd have to have sound money. And to have sound money, you'd have to go back to a gold standard, right? And that is the I don't think that'll ever happen because if you go back to a gold standard in the US, that's a chaperone. That's like when you're a teenager, you don't want your parents home at Friday night at 8 at 9:10 p.m. If you're having a party, you want to keep the party going. You don't want the chaperone. If you bring back a gold standard, well then what does that mean? It means you can't deficit spend. You can't print money anymore at will to to monetize your expenses. It would force you to cut your spending. And I don't think a lot of sovereign nations want to do that. Even China doesn't want to go to a gold standard yet. If the US went to a gold standard, that would be sound money. That would be smart, but that would force massive austerity in the short term because you wouldn't be able to spend for everything you want. So, but what central banks in the east are doing is they're doing that indirectly. They're not going to a gold standard, but they're seeing a new world where gold will be a net settlement currency. And that's what the bricks have already foreshadowed already in the last few years. They're seeing a world where gold's going to play a far more important part than the US Treasury. And if the US went on a gold standard, that'd be fantastic. But then the question is he who has the most gold wins. And look, we haven't had an audit. That's there's been crickets about the audit. That was big in the first year after the election that we were going to audit Fort Knox and just see who has the most gold. I don't think, and I'm not I don't think I'm being uh alone in that. Um you know, the USA I think uh had 22,000 tons of gold in the ' 40s. We had 9,000 tons by 1971. We're supposedly have 8,100 tons today. First thing we'd have to do is audit the actual gold. Do we really have the gold we say we do? Russia probably has at least 12,000 tons. They're not even listed on the on the World Gold Council's report. And China has significantly more than 3,000 tons. And this is what Kissinger warned. He who has the most gold wins. Let's not revalue back to gold until we know who has the most. And I don't think it's the US. So there's a lot of ifs and buts. But going back to a gold standard is unlikely. It would be one more thing I would try to do if I were in charge, but that would be hard to do and get elected and stay elected because you'd have to cut spending dramatically. So we're really in a pickle. But eventually the world's going to not necessarily have a gold back yuan or a gold back ruble tomorrow. That's a red button option they would have. I don't think China wants to push that button because that would really that would crush America at a time when they still need America to some extent. I think they're waiting for America to implode itself and then push that button later. But we don't have the most gold. That's my strong opinion. I would love to see an audit of our actual gold that was promised to us, but like so many things that hasn't happened. Uh but it's it's it's a very hard decision to make and it's got lots of ripple effects. >> Yeah, it's a good point. Why isn't China making any moves on the geopolitical front currently? And I am reminded of a quote by Sunsu. Art of war. Don't interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake. >> Exactly. Going back to what you were saying, they're waiting. This is also from the World Gold Council. This is a chart they put together. Interesting. Gold is only 735 days into this rally. I think this was published a few days ago, so it's more now. Um the previous major rallies on average lasted 162 1,062 days. And the scale and magnitude of this particular rally is quite unprecedented. It hasn't moved up this quickly in such >> this much in such a short amount of time. But according to this chart, you do see that there potentially is more room to climb if we're to take history >> as a guide. Is this time different though? You know, I hate to use that term. It's being thrown around so much in the media, but is time is this time different? >> Well, it's interesting. In a sense, it's not different at all because this is just part of a of a credit cycle and this is part of a debt cycle and a dollar cycle coming to a slow end, which means gold is as a as an anti- fiat asset is is doing what it's always done throughout history. It's certainly moving faster than even myself and Egon and others have thought. Frank Schuster, etc. We're all we're all not surprised to see gold reaching these numbers, but the speed at which has happened this year is pretty remarkable. And even I Egan and I were talking this morning. Be careful what you ask for when gold gets to 4,000, 5,000, 7,000. That's great for us who've had the foresight to understand sound money and uh gold as as an insurance against fiat money, but it's very bad for the rest of the world. But what what we're seeing with gold isn't just another commodity trade. This is a systemic change in global markets. It's more than a commodity trade. It's a monetary metal becoming the new strategic reserve asset beyond the US Treasury. And for that reason, central bank demand is clearly the the key driver behind these gold price. It doesn't even include retail demand, which is barely catching on. I mean, gold is still 5% of global allocations, or excuse me, 05. So, 1/ half of a percent. The the historical average over the many decades has been 2%. It reached 8% in in the n 1980s. So, gold hasn't even begun to hit the retail markets. It certainly has in China. ETF purchases in China gone from 15 billion last year to 60 billion this year. That's just the retail markets, >> but US markets have not caught on. Even the Morgan Stanley recommending 60 2020 20 now instead of 40% bonds is 20% gold. That's remarkable for a whale like Morgan Stanley to finally confess that. But the average man on the street for many reasons can't afford it or hasn't thought about or hasn't been told to that by their wealth adviserss that gold matters. They've been told for 25 years that gold is too volatile where it's outperformed the S&P for 25 years and even the last 5 years. So, there's a lot of catching up to do by the retail side, but um you know, I think the fact of the matter is it's the central banks that are driving that that should be more concerning because we haven't even gotten into the retail trade. And when that happens, gold's only going to go higher. Again, I'm not saying gold goes up only in a straight line, but this is an historical shift, not just a commodity cycle for gold in the next year or two. This is a seismic shift and gold will continue to inch its way up higher and higher to levels that again when you and I first started talking Dave I think it was at 1,600 and people were saying it was too expensive or maybe at 1,800 it was too expensive or at 2500 it was too expensive at 4200 is it too expensive and I could tell you many stories about why that's wrong thinking but I understand why it is. Um but it's uh it's again you could say I'm just selling my book. I'm a gold executive, of course, I'm saying this, but all of us who understand precious metals know that this is not the end of the gold price. This is just the beginning. And uh I only wish more retail investors understood that because it is hard for them to pay $4,200 for an ounce. Certainly, there could be a pullback. I was talking to Henrik Zeberg back in February in South Africa and his big thing was markets are going to top. There'll be a 30% pullback in gold. At that time, gold was at 2,900. So, no one was buying. Well, even think about that. There was no pullback. Now we're at 4,200. If there was a 30% pullback, which I don't see, but even if there was, gold would still be higher than it was in February. So, if you're waiting for that pullback to buy in, you're you're moving. You're playing with moving gold posts if you're buying gold as long-term preservation against dying fiat money as life insurance for a dying fiat currency system. It doesn't matter whether you buy at 25 or 4500 because if you're holding it for 10, 15 years, I'm quite confident that gold's going to be more valuable in 15 years than it is today versus your fiat money. And that's just always been our case. I've never looked at the gold price. I'm very happy to see the price appreciation. Egon bought it at 300. Of course, he's happy. But he's never asked about the gold price. And that's because we don't lose sleep over that because we know what's going up because fiat money is going down. Is a seismic shift for other commodities as well, including silver. Silver, we have to end on silver. Matthew, this is a historic week for silver. First time over $52. Now it's at 53. First time in history. Gold has breached new all-time highs for a year and a half straight. But this is the first time in history silver has made new alltime highs. I'm seeing all sorts of memes like uh boomers from the 80s finally breaking even and you see these people dancing. Anyway, I I'm not saying I'm not saying silver has no has had no value since the 80s. I am saying it's had a monumental rally in the last year and in the last 5 years it's moved up >> 150%. Far beating many stocks in the S&P 500. And if you just take a look what happened this year, it's interesting because uh of what you said earlier, gold um is kind of lifting all tides here. This is gold and silver moving in tandem together in in uh in 2025. Silver has started outperforming gold dramatically only in the last 6 months. I wonder going back to what you were saying earlier, um gold being expensive for 40 at 4200 uh $4,200 for a lot of people. I wonder people if people have noticed gold being too expensive early in the summer and said, "Gee, I can't afford an ounce of gold. Let's just buy silver and push the silver price up." >> Look, there's a lot of answers to that question. The first thing is people say, you know, silver is the poor man's gold. I've always said, "No, it's the smart man's silver." Um, yes, it's it is I do understand for many people an ounce of gold is out of reach and that's frustrating and I and I and I'm very aware of that and sensitive to that. But $52, $60, even $100 silver is not out of reach for most. And I do think uh as Rick Rule said, silver rewards infrequently but extravagantly. And we're now just seeing silver do what it does best when there's a gold bull market. I think the gold bull market is just starting. That's why silver is starting to do what it does best. That little speedboat that races past the juggernaut of gold when gold's in a in a secular bull market. And it and that's what we're seeing. And there's a lot of reasons why and again I was talking about this with Alistair this morning. And gold is mass excuse me silver is massively undervalued as all commodities are really even pork bellies wheat and oil is undervalued and measured against gold I don't we don't see right now at 80 gold silver ratio the kind of compressed gold silver ratios we saw in 1980 or 2011 was at 15 or 32 but I do believe that that silver is going to be when you look at it at its all-time high at 50 prior to these current highs if you were to inflation adjust those prior $50 highs gold should be at least at 150, which I definitely see it going to that. So, if you're patient and you're buying silver for the right reasons, not as a day trade to see what it does in the next 6 weeks. If you hold it, uh, it will give you that extravagant, though infrequent reward. And I think a lot of investors who feel like they're missing out on protecting their paper money dying by having precious metals. They still can afford silver. We have a lot of clients right now who have the means to buy both gold and silver, who are buying silver because they see a massive price appreciation in it. I think for for retail investors that's a huge huge play for them. There are clear supply deficits in silver. The entire silver market is half in Nvidia's market cap. So it doesn't take a lot of new demand to push the silver price up. And the ability to manipulate silver on the comx or LBMA markets just isn't what it used to be 5 years ago when there was legalized price fixing in the ComX or London exchanges. You know, look, there was 80,000 silver contracts short on the ComX recently. That was a massive short position and still silver was able to peak through and the comics is running out of silver to continue to make those price manipulations. The London float of available ounces is only about 155 million ounces and that's that's a day's worth of trading. So the paper manipulation, the cartel in London and New York is breaking. That's very good for silver as well. In the past there was the manipulation on the on the futures contracts on the LBMA and comics markets but and then there was a huge dumping. the first the shorts, then the dumping that happened in ' 81 when Gordon Brown was was selling gold at 270 for his country, which is a disaster. But again, you've got a 45-year cup and handle, you know, on the technical side for silver. You've got a clear uh supply side deficit on it. You've got a clear momentum trade in its favor, and you've got it massively undervalued in terms of gold. So, I think silver is an incredible fat pitch for people who want to get in the precious metal space who can't afford $4,200 gold right now. >> Let me end on this final question. Back in 2008, there was a localized bubble in the real estate market which contributed to the downfall of Lehman Brothers and a bunch of other uh banks. Right now, people are talking about the everything bubble where everything seems expensive, tech stocks, >> what what were previously seen as value stocks. Now, people are talking about a precious metals bubble potentially at $4,200 gold. This doesn't make any sense. $52 silver. What happened, >> right? Is this worse than 2008 >> in terms of is is is the is the market worse than 2008 or is gold just another spiking >> ass is is the global market in a worse position in terms of valuations and the bubble situation that people are talking about than what we saw in 2008. Um that's what some people were concerned of. I don't know if that's concerning for you. Oh, >> absolutely. Look, I was I was a risk asset manager, hedge fund guy long before I figured out gold like a lot of other portfolio managers that I knew. And you know, I could have just done a 2 and 20 fund on gold 20 years ago and making 2 and 20 on the gold price. It would have been better than any risk asset. I wish I had. >> Yeah. >> But look in terms of the markets, you know, of course I look at the markets. I can't help myself. The fundamentals of Charlie Mccay and Graham and Frell, they're still very true to me. But bubbles, as a great mentor of mine, Jeremy Grantham said, bubbles are very easy to to measure and to identify. They're very hard to time. Uh history tells us whenever we see high multiples, they typically precede very very bad times. We saw that in 1929,72, 2000, the dotcom bubble, certainly 2007 before the great financial crisis, these big peaks. And clearly the NK89 at 65 times earnings. People forget that again because the markets keep being monetized by a Pavlovian Fed. As long as rates are low and the Fed is printing, there's risk on and and and that creates massive distortion and and and distortion of free price discovery. And and I'm not here to tell you that this market couldn't go higher. I see a blowoff top. I see it going higher. But investors forget troughs. We've had 22 bare markets since 1925. And when we had a crash in 29, it didn't recover till 58. 72 didn't recover until the mid9s. The tech bubble that I was very very lucky in uh didn't recover until 2011. And for the Nikkay it took 30 years. We have to remember that these lessons of history still matter. It's hard to see that as Graham said, no one wants to see that when markets are ripping and they could continue to rip, but I wouldn't want to buy into a topping S&P at the top when you've got a commodity super cycle. And certainly in precious metals, it's just the beginning of a trade. So this is the beginning for precious metals. It's a top for risk assets and we are in a very dangerous market. It's too concentrated. 10 10 tech names hold 40 50% of the market cap of the S&P. That is not a safe market. We have a subprime market that's a real hidden risk. 20% of Americans are basically in a subprime category. Bankruptcies are up 11% almost 12% year-over-year. Auto defaults, tririccolors, bankruptcy, etc. So the subprime market is a dangerous market. Private credit I've written about adnauseium. This is from PE, you know, venture capital, hedge funds doing private credit, private credit pools, private equity. We don't know. It's an un unknown class of borrowers. And there's a pick trend in in the in in private credit, which means payment in kind. That means a lot of these borrowers can't even make back their interest payments. They're giving back in securities. They're giving back stock positions because they can't make their debt obligations. So, that private credit bubble, like the subprime market bubble, is on my mind. And look, we don't have time here, but the AI bubble and the circular financing going on in the AI bubble and what's happening with anthropic and and open AI and what the big the big mag 7 are doing in circular financing, there is another massive bubble I wish we had an hour to talk about. But between AI bubbles, private credit and subprime markets, these are in addition to a market highly overvalued by the Buffett indicator, by price to book, price to sales, there's just so many reasons to be nervous. That doesn't mean I'm calling the end of the bubble. That's harder to do. Uh for those who are traders, I look at income margins. When they start to trend south, that's when you can truly know it's ending. But right now, you're definitely at a top, not the top. It's a dangerous place to pretend you're going to, you know, base your retirement years on this S&P. That'd be a very dangerous assumption, I think. >> And I'll just end on this one final note. Uh Matthew, for assets that don't generate income on their own, like gold and silver and Bitcoin, how do we know those assets are in a bubble? You can't use a traditional discounted cash flow method to discuss or look at look at it this way, right? >> Yep. No. Again, the only way to really understand gold, I think, without listening to guys like me selling their book and worrying that you were all just selling our book. And I and I do get that. I I look, I was a buyer, not just on the sell side. So, I get that. I was highly skeptical as a on the buy side. But again, to understand gold is different than a dividend stock. It is a yieldless asset, just like Bitcoin. That's a whole other separate rabbit hole. Bitcoin versus gold, store of value, standard deviation, all that stuff. But in terms of gold, no, it doesn't give you a yield. But either does your US 10ear, either does your US two-year, either is your US Treasury bill, it doesn't give you a yield because it's not beating inflation. It's simply not. Because you've interviewed John Williams, I think more than once, we know that real inflation as measured by the same scale that Vulkar used in the 80s puts us at 10 to 11%. That means all of our bond returns are yield returns. Even on the dividend stocks, they're giving you five or 6% or the or the 10 year or the 30 year giving you four and a half or 4.7. You're actually not beating inflation. That's a negative returning yieldless yield returning bond. So, gold is not giving you yield, but either is anything on the US Treasury and most corporate, even junk bonds aren't giving you yield that beats actual inflation, honest inflation. So, yes, gold does not give you yield. How is it not another risk asset bubble? Why is it not just another bubble? Again, the only way to really answer that is to understand the history of precious metals versus fiat money. And then you'll have more confidence. Again, we could spend hours on that. And and I invite people to get informed, not just take my word for it. But gold, as I said, is not just another commodity bubble asset right now. It is part of a seismic shift in the global monetary system. It is a strategic tier one store of value reserve asset for central banks around the world. Retail investors, I hate to say it, have to actually follow the central banks. I'm no fan of the BIS. I'm no fan of central banks, but they they they're the insiders who created this mess, and they're going to gold to fix this mess, and I don't know why retail investors can't do the same. >> Let's see if they will fix this mess in the next couple months or in a couple weeks. >> Yeah, >> I'll speak with you before the end of the year, which is why I mentioned that time frame. So, let's let's let's find out if they uh fix anything before we speak next time. Matthew, where can we find you in the meantime? >> Always at voner.gold gold or gold switzelland.com. Myself, uh, Egon of course, our founding chairman, our articles and interviews. We have great adviserss like Grant Williams, Ronnie Sturfl, and now Alistister Mloud as advisers. So, they're contributing their articles, their insights. I'm surrounded by brilliant guys. Egon and uh, and Alistair were literally trading stocks when I was still in diapers. So, I've got the best mentors around me. We've got some fantastic uh, interviews and articles. And really, not just why why to own gold, but how to own gold. That's all part of it. It's all free information. You don't have to be a client and uh welcome to get your information there and challenge our thoughts, but I always want people to challenge our thoughts. That's the key. >> Okay, we'll put the link down below. So, uh do check out Von Greers and Matthew there. And uh I know Matthew posts a lot on social media and uh um and uh I think it's a great resource. Don't be modest about that, Matthew. I learned a lot just uh following you, so I'll put the link to X down below as well. Thank you very much. We'll speak soon. Bye. >> My pleasure, David. Take care. And uh thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Global Debt At Tipping Point: Gold, Silver Rally ‘Just Starting’ | Matthew Piepenburg
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think the US is bringing a knife to a gunfight. I think Bent knows that. He's a smart enough guy to know that. You know, less than 10% of Chinese exports are to the US. They're not suffering in the same way the US is on these on these tariff policies. Things change. This is not the greatest generation anymore. It's not the greatest leadership anymore, red or blue. Again, I'm agnostic. We have a debt crisis that politicians don't want to talk about. And the world's shifting. >> What do you think needs to happen? Matthew Peepberg returns to show. He is a partner of Vonga's AG. He's called this rally in the precious metals. He said that precious metals would outperform equities. We can check out his last interview down below. Matthew, welcome back. Earlier in the year, uh you were a little bit more constructive or less constructive rather on equities than maybe the year before, but you were still positively um constructive in the sense that maybe it wouldn't collapse, but uh the momentum was still going to be there according to what you told me in Vancouver a couple months ago earlier in the year. Now, year to date, the S&P is up uh less than gold. The first question I have for you right now, gold at $4,200. It's up about 50 something, 55% year to date now as of today's price. That changes every day. >> Yeah. >> When will this stop? In other words, not when, nobody knows when, but what hypothetically what would cause this rally to stop? Well, I mean, if you if you understand gold in the context that we look at it in terms of history and the math of debt and the history and the math of credit cycles and the history and the math of unound money, gold will stop making a secular rise when uh sound money returns to the sovereign nations of the G7 and the east and the world in general. And since I don't see that anytime soon, uh gold will continue its secular rise. It never moves in a straight direction. And Frankly, we're all surprised by the speed of the last few months or the certainly last 12 months in general, but we're not surprised by the direction. And I think even at these nominal prices, gold is still very undervalued and so is silver. So to answer your question smuggly and flippantly, but honestly, gold will continue to rise because uh fiat currency debasement will continue to uh continue to rise as well. In other words, fiat money, paper money, debase money to monetize unsound and unsolvable debt crisises will continue to be debased and as a result, gold will continue to rise. Gold's doing nothing but do what it always does, hold its value while paper money loses its value. >> It's interesting you brought up the dollar. Uh the dollar, what do you mean by dollar debasement? Uh exactly. The DXY has declined year-to- date. As you know, it's had a big drop earlier in the year, but it's more or less traded rangebound um ever since May. And as you know, the DXY is the dollar relative to a basket of other currencies. If you overlay this with gold, you can see that perhaps there's been a very strong positive uh sorry, an inverse relationship, at least in the beginning of the year. But throughout the second half of the year, it it it looks like gold's just skyrocketing, moving on its own. >> Yeah. I mean, look, >> how do you explain this? >> You can pick statistical windows. You can look at periods where the dollar is strong and gold is strong or the dollar is weak and gold is strong. I mean, gold is decoupled from the dollar and the world reserve currency money. But look, the dollar is an important theme when you're understanding when you're understanding precious metals and the dollar is world reserve currency. So, it's the most important currency to talk about. Not just because I'm an American or just be, you know, I'm based in Europe. I'm not just focused on the dollar because it's my currency. It's it's a very important global currency. And because the dollar is used to monetize unsustainable debt, it has to be debased. When the M2 money supply is expanded, when central banks like the Fed print money, and when banks extend credit, that increases the money in circulation and that's a deflationary for, excuse me, an inflationary force. It's a debasement force. The dollar is just being diluted like a beautiful glass of wine with lots of, you know, mineral water being tossed into it quarter after quarter. So, the dollar gets diluted, but because it is the world reserve currency, because of the milkshake theory and that big straw sucking sound from the rest of the world, there's still demand for it. It can be ex the inflation can be exported as it's been for decades. But at some point, the jig is up. And again, when you look at the dollar, it's it's only being debased because it's being used to monetize debt that's gone out of control. So the dollar and the debt and precious metals are all kind of in a circular loop. And again, this is just history. David Hume, the Austrian school, Thomas Gresham in the 1500s, Adolf Tears in the 18th century, Robert Triffin in the 1960s, Charles Goodart in the 70s. It's certainly nothing new. This is just a cycle. The current headlines confirm that the dollar is being debased. The bricks, the bricks dalization, the DXY central bank since 2014, net, you know, net stacking gold and net dumping US treasuries, the petro dollar moves outside of the dollar, the comx fanatics and the gymnastics there, the BIS making gold at tier one, the IMF talking about gold in 2021 and three years of central bank gold stack stacking at over a,000 tons peranom. This is the first time since 1996 that central banks hold more gold than than US treasuries. And of course, even Judy Shelton is talking about it. Morgan Stanley has a 602020 now allocation. Mike Wilson, the desperation of the Genius Act. These are all signs of of of a dollar in decline or a dollar being pushed to the side in favor of a better strategic reserve asset, a better store of value globally, central bank wise, and even at at commercial bank levels. The dollar is just slowly but steadily replace being replaced by physical precious metals like gold and and the devaluing of the dollar is nothing new. We did it in 1933 when when you know FDR in an executive order overnight revalue gold from 20 to $35 an ounce. It's a 69% devaluation of the dollar in 1971 when Nixon jumped off the gold standard within you know 5 to 10 years the dollar lost 90%. and it's lost 99% since the measured against gold since 1971 in my lifetime. The Plaza Accords in 1985 we devalued the dollar again. So devaluation debasement to monetized debt isn't a gold bug case. It's an historical confirmation and we see that it's affecting the markets. It's certainly affecting the gold price and the silver price. And it's really chapter two in a long long novel of currency debasement to monetize debt. And I don't think gold's going to going to get any lower. It's going to move in a straight line. Believe me, there can be retracements. I've had this debate with Brent Johnson, Henrik Zeberg not declaiming declaring victory because the DXY is not at 100 yet. And there could be a last dance for the DXY which we can talk about. But the dollar is simply losing purchasing power because it's overs supplied, overextended, and less trusted and less credible. >> If it's true that people are moving, by people I mean other central banks and other governments are moving away from the dollar, why are they flowing their capital into gold? Why not place it in the yen or the euro or any other alternative to uh the dollar? What makes gold such an attractive alternative at a time like this? >> Well, certainly on a relative basis when you talk about the DXY versus other currencies, it's still the strongest horse in the glue factory for so many reasons because of its role in FX reserves because of its role. It's 80% of global trade finance. It's 13 trillion dollars in global debt. Even if it's not due to US banks, is in dollar denomination. And there's a massive Euro dollar demand for the for for the dollar outside of the US and over 90 trillion FX swaps. So the dollar is still king relative to other currencies for now. But what's happening uh is that the dollar and because the dollar and the US Treasury are so linked and because the US Treasury is so overissued and distrusted and weaponized since 2022, that was a turning point. The world is looking for a safer store of value. This term of art that we've been talking about for years is now making the headlines finally. They'd rather save in something that holds its value and spend in local regional currencies or fiat money. And and that's why they're they're choosing gold, not just because the BIS told them to, but because they understand history, too. If you and I can see these trends, believe me, the central banks of the East and certainly in China and the bricks see it as well. And again, we're not seeing the death of the dollar or the end of the dollar. We're just seeing a repricing of the dollar and a and a slow loss of its hedgeimony. Again, this goes from the dalization themes of the last two years to now. the headlines making the gold market so popular all of a sudden. It's been clearly on our mind for a long time, but this is now history coming to its its fourth turning. And uh the dollar will still have a role. It just won't be priced in the same way, traded in the same way, trusted in the same way, stockpiled in the same way as it was for decades before. And uh we're seeing that everywhere in the headlines now. It's not just a gold bug case. >> Gold and silver have reached historic highs amidst this crazy bull rally. More investors are turning to hard assets to protect their savings. But what if instead of just holding your gold as a savings vehicle, you could actually earn income from it, pay it in gold. So now it's not just in savings, it's also an income vehicle. That's what today's sponsor, Monetary Metals, helps you do. They're changing the way people think about investing in precious metals completely. Rather than letting your gold sit idally or paying fees to store it, now you can get paid to own it. Right now through their marketplace, you can earn up to 4% yield on gold paid monthly in gold. Your savings grow in ounces, not dollars, and stack on top of any price appreciation. Thousands of investors are already earning real yield and physical gold and silver through monetary medals. It's time to see how it works for you. Go to monetary-medals.com/lin link down below or scan the QR code here to learn more. Take a look at this title here or this headline from uh the Financial Times. This is from Treasury Secretary Scott Passen. The US warns the world will decouple from China if it imposes new export controls. Now, this comes on the back of Trump's 100% tariff threat, which was announced last Friday, which is set to take effect as of November. Uh so far as we're speaking today, I believe no such no deal has been reached yet. Treasury Secretary Scott warned Beijing that his new sweeping export controls on rare earths and critical minerals would force the US and other countries to decouple from China. He said if China wants to be an unreliable partner to the world, then the world will have to decouple. The world does not want to decouple. We want to derisk, but signals like this are signs of decoupling which we don't believe China wants. Um, two things strike me. Uh, first is that this decoupling has been happening for a while, but clearly it's expediting now. And second, he's speaking on behalf of the world, it seems. Is that true? The entire world is going to decouple. >> Look, I mean, besides a politician and politicians have to do what they have to do is make their case like a like a plaintiff or a defense attorney. It doesn't mean they're making the right case, they're making their case. I'm obviously pro-American. I'm a patriot. I have to always caveat. I don't want to live in Shanghai or Beijing or St. Petersburg or Moscow. But we have a G7 centric view of the world from our media and our financial information. We certainly have a US- ccentric view of the world whether we're in Germany, Switzerland, or New York City or Seattle or Vancouver. But you have to be a critical thinker, a self thinker. It doesn't mean you have to agree with me. Uh I'm not alone in this. You can be pro-American, pro dollar, uh pro the American flag, but you got to you got to call BS when you see it. And I think uh Bent, love him or hate him, Trump, love him or hate him. And I, you know, I'm agnostic now politically, so I'm I'm an equal opportunity cynic when it comes to the Biden administration or the Trump administration. I've said many times that Santa Claus can't solve this problem. But I think for Bent to be blaming all this on China by itself is is a little rich. Uh when I look at the trade policy, the currency war, the trade war, and hopefully not a hot war, when I look at the tariffs right now, which we've talked about before, but really at the end of the day, I think the US is bringing a knife to a gunfight. I think Bent knows that. He's a smart enough guy to know that. You know, less than 10% of Chinese exports are to the US. They're not suffering in the same way the US is on these on these tariff policies. There is a trade deficit, of course, but that's Triffin's law. When you're the world reserve currency, your dollar is going to be in higher demand or your currency is going to be in higher demand. It's going to be higher price because of that. You're going to have a trade deficit. You can't blame the world on that reality. Um, this is something that Jeffrey Sax has kind of joked about when he said when, you know, if your wife goes to the mall and spends too much on the AMX, you can't blame the mall for the MX spending. It's the it's the spending that's the problem. And what we're trying to do is blame blame the mall. As Tiffan warned too, if you have a strong dollar, manufacturing is going to eventually be exported. That's the what happened since 2001 under Clinton with the World Trade Organization. Let China in the story then was that China's going to be a great buyer of American blue jeans, toys, and gigs. What they didn't realize is that China would be a manufacturer of those gigs and blue jeans because American manufacturing was going to offshore its labor to China. That's not the fault of the Chinese. That's the fault of common sense and cheaper labor and US CEOs who sent that labor overseas. Uh but again, we saw on Liberation Day that we can't prosecute a trade war or even a tariff war because the US Treasury market auctions went silent the day after liberation day. So, we had to back off. October 9th, China restricts rare earth rare earth exports. They they 70% of the rare earths are mined there. 90% are processed there. That's leverage they have. October 10th, Trump announces these 100% tariffs on top of everything else. That led to 19 billion in crypto losses. Then there was an ash shucks moment over the weekend. Tried to make kumbaya moment. But again, the the reality is we're we're we're we're really playing chicken with a much stronger chicken right now. And and no one in the west wants to admit that there are lots of problems in China. There are lots of issues in China. I'm not pro-China, but in terms of in terms of the leverage they have um with trade and the leverage they have with manufacturing and the leverage they have now with the rising bricks coalitions, even India moving deeper into that camp, you know, you can't win hearts and minds and expect the world to buy US treasuries when you're throwing tariffs at them. And so we're going to have a tariff problem. We're going to have a treasury problem and a currency problem. You know, and most important, US Treasury yields are rising. The risk premium tells the truth better than politics or better than bescent. You know, the risk premium says we expect more from this US Treasury. We expect more from this declining dollar. And to get that, we want higher costs. That makes it harder for Uncle Sam to pay his debt. So the external revenue service of the tariff system that Trump brags about, with all due respect, again, I'm not pro or anti-Trump. I'm just being simple math, you know, honest math here. That's simply not true at all. And Bent says the auctions are good. That's because he's only he's only looking at the short and short-term debt at the short end of the curve. And uh it's the long end of the curve, the tenure in particular that we have to look at. And Bent knows this. You know, he's a smart guy, but he's a politician, like a central banker, certainly like a Treasury Secretary, he has to pompom his own team, but you're not getting objective advice. My my short response or long response to that short question is bes playing the political, he's not playing the mathematician. >> This is math. Since we're talking about math, >> uh JP Morgan's David Kelly, glo chief global strategist, warned that America is going broke slowly. It's doing so slowly enough that markets aren't panicking yet, as we can clearly see from the S&P and NASDAQ reaching all-time highs. The US national debt now topping $37.8 trillion and interest payments exceeding $1.2 trillion. Kelly said the debt to GDP ratio already at 99.9% will likely keep rising even under moderate growth. You and I have talked about this >> this situation. Um, and I had this discussion with my friend uh just uh just before the interview. I said, >> "Is this going to keep you up at night? Are you gonna wake up in the middle of the night at 2 a.m. in cold sweat and say to yourself, "Oh, gee, the US debt to GDP ratio is at 150%." What am I going to do? Like, how does this impact the regular person? Like, why should we care? How would you answer that? >> I mean, there's so many ways, you know, first of all, it's it's not just a slow realization that America has a debt problem. It's been an obvious realization just ignored for for years. It's now just becoming exponential. You can't ignore it because the citizen on the street feels it and we'll talk about that. But if you just look at the math of debt, actually debt to GDP in the US is much higher than 99%. It's over 120%. And as David Hume said in the 1750s, when when you cross the 100% debt to GDP Rubicon, growth mathematically slows by a third. This is a math reality. You're going to slow growth. You can't grow your way out of this debt crisis. When I was born, debt to GDP in the US was 38%. So this is a massive move and we've seen the cracks in the ice on the debt crisis. This was as clear as day to me in 2019 when I wrote rigged to fail when we had the repo crisis. In March of 2020 we had a massive selloff in US treasuries during the co hysteria and the COVID fall in March. And then in 2022 the UK had the guilt crisis. 2023 we had a banking crisis but that was a US Treasury crisis. That was a credit crisis. In 2025 and April we had a tariff crisis. No it was a bond crisis. So again, the debt reality has been open and obvious for years. The politicians are just starting to see it and the commercial bankers are starting to recognize because their clients see it. And the solutions aren't really good scenarios left. You can't bring debt to GDP down unless you cut entitlements defense. And you can't do that politically and survive. Entitlements defense and interest expense on our debt used to be 65% of our tax receipts in 2016. It's double that today. So what does the US do? Can it default? No. Although it constructively defaults when it has negative returning uh yields, which they do if you if you measure inflation correctly, we're having a negative returning yield across the yield curve. So that is a constructive default, but it's not an open default. So the only real option is to inflate it away. As Larry Leopard says, you can't taper a Ponzi scheme. So we're going to just inflate away our debt, debase our currency, lie about the inflation rate, have negative returning uh yields on our on our entire yield curve. And that's financial repression. when when you're getting a negative return on Uncle Sam's IOU, that is constructively a default. We just don't call it that because we lie about the inflation rate. As far as you're saying, how does that affect the citizen on the street? You know, you and I have had this conversation so many times. I mean, I look, I I think the definition of recession is another thing that we've we've talked about. I think we've been in a recession since 2022. You can look at the SAMS rule. You can look at the yield curve since World War II. You can look at the conference board leading indicators. You can look at the labor department data, year-over-year auto sales. I mean, the list goes on and on. BLS, nonfarm payroll jobs, downward revision, almost a million jobs. That was worse than 2009. 2021 saw 800K up. Now we've lost all that. The delinquency rates are at 13-year highs on private credit. Private credit scores are dropping at historical levels. 53% of US companies are showing negative profit margins. There's they're saying due to tariffs. Manufacturing is flat. Labor participation rate is 62%. That means half the population is paying for another half that isn't working. Uh private sector data because now the BLS is shut down. Whether you love them or hate them, I'm not a big fan of them. Trump fired the head of it for telling bad news. But now we're looking at ISM, Challenger grade, Christmas, ADP, payrolls, etc. These are the private sources of information we can't get from the shutdown government. But we have a net loss of 32,000 jobs in September. And planned hiring is down 58% from last year. And Walmart's predicting a worse Christmas season than than 2009. So again, I'm not making this stuff up. These are signs that Main Street is suffering. Not because they're all unemployed, but because the purchasing power of their dollar is weaker. Their inflation number that is telling them that inflation isn't so bad. Is a lie to what they're feeling in their actual costs. And again, the government is giving you an IOU that is actually losing money to inflation. They just don't give you the actual inflation data. That's a known truth on Wall Street. It's now a felt reality on Main Street. So these are just all facts, David. It's not good when the dollar loses value and wages don't keep up with that that that debasement. >> What's interesting is that the real yield of uh the interest rate uh in the United States has been going up at the same time as gold. You you might have seen this chart. Um historically they might have moved in different directions with a higher real yield. Gold has gone down uh presumably because people were flocking to these higher real yielding products and then vice versa. >> But now they're moving in the same direction. What does that signal to you? Maybe gold has shifted in the way that investors are perceiving its role. >> Well, yeah. Again, gold is decoupling from its standard, you know, the standard correlations. Dollar strong, gold weak, dollar weak, gold strong. Gold is just strong because the dollar across the board is less trusted and less wanted and less loved and it's more and more debased or devalued to monetize our debt. You don't have to be an MBA or a PhD in applied math or a political or an FOMC member and study all the histories and credentials of financial markets to realize that your dollar is just doing less for you. And we can we can get wonky and talk about yield curves and yield spreads and that half listeners understandably have other things to do. Their eyes glaze. They just know. Again, I've joked you cross the GW Bridge in New York, you buy an airplane ticket, you try to pay your kids tuition, whatever your costs are. If you want to buy a Ford 150 pickup, it's like the price of a Range Rover. I mean, we know without having to be economist, if you're a common sense citizen, wealthy or not, top top 10% or bottom 30%. We all feel the purchasing power of our fiat money getting weaker. And so, regardless of even what the yield curve says or what experts like me say, people feel the inflation, which is just the debasement of their purchasing power. And uh that's not a mystery to anyone who just has a pulse. You know, if you can fog a mirror, you can feel your dollar getting weaker. Your Canadian dollar, your Australian dollar, your US dollar, your euro even, or certainly even your Swiss Frank. It just buys less because it's being slowly throboiled into less and less purchasing power. >> What happens going back finishing off on the debt issue, what happens when the deficit continues to ride and when the debt to GDP continues to rise? So, this is from the IMF. is warning that the US debt to GDP will uh be at the largest or the uh yeah the highest um ever by the end of the decade. Uh the US unlike most other rich nations is not expected to make any progress in lowering its deficit from current levels. The current the country's gross debt to GDP ratio expected to be 125% of GDP this year will surpass record highs to hit 143% by the end of the decade. What happens not just to inflation and gold, but also to the geopolitical balance of the world? What happens when the US is no longer the manufacturing hub? Well, I guess it wasn't for a while, but it's now it's now a major detation um even by G7 standards. How does that shift the balance of power globally, Matthew? >> Well, it's it's happening right in front of our eyes. And again, I'm an American. I'm pro-American. America's not disappearing from the stage. It's just lost its supremacy and hedgeimonyy. That's what happens when the world reserve currency and and and is is overextended in wars, proxy wars, expenses, debt, deficits, the big beautiful bill. It's still higher spending than before. We're not cutting our spending. We have a spending problem. We also have an income problem because our our tax receipts and GDP don't even come close to our spending. Again, it's that spouse at the mall going crazy with the black card. At some point, you hit an uh-oh moment. We've we've hit that long ago. We're just starting to see the symptoms and the headlines becoming clear. What does that mean? Well, we're all kind of speculating on that. I was talking to Vilham Middle who wrote the big reset back in 2014. We were talking about what's next with this this massive shifting in the global financial plumbing. The rise of the bricks, the rise of countries moving away from the US dollar. 30 countries repatriating their gold outside in other jurisdictions to keep it within their jurisdictions. 45 countries trading outside the US dollar. again the petro dollar losing its force the US Treasury becoming less less powerful its auctions what does this mean we're all guessing and you know the the big worries are will there'll be some type of global reset will there'll be war as a distraction as Hemingway warned uh will we will we cooperate or will we continue to compete these are questions that remain unanswered certainly when when middle coupe wrote the big reset he foresaw this almost 15 years ago 12 15 years ago this this slow breakdown of the old system and the breakdown of the world reserve currency. And I said to him in a question, I interviewed him. I asked him, "What what do you see next?" He said, "Honestly, for years, I was looking for cooperation. I was hoping there would be common sense, kind of the John Nash equilibrium theory. We'd all get together and realize we we do better cooperating than fighting." But he said, "In the last couple years," and this has nothing to do with just Trump. He says, "In the last couple years, I see more conflict rather than cooperation. And that doesn't bode well for international peace, international security, international trade, international currencies, and the world reserve currency. We're all guessing at the most negative level, you could follow Hemiway's warning that when you have a nation in debt, that you'll see temporary prosperity in the in the in the equity markets, but then you'll see the permanent ruin of currency debasement and war. Now, war in the nuclear is is to me unfathomable, but we do see constant proxy wars all over from the Middle East to the east. Hopefully, those things are solved. I don't know the answer. I do know that the world's going to be going from a a bipolar or mult or a single polar world to a much more multip-olar world. Will that be cooperative? Will it be competitive? Will it be uh conflictatory? Right now, certainly with the headlines in China, conflict is the meme. But as I talked to a lot of Americans I know who speak Mandarin, who've been living in China for decades, they say the mood on the street in China is kind of arrogant. They're they're laughing at the West in general, in the US in particular. They say, "Look, we've been a country for 5,000 years. The US has been here for 250. They've had a good run, but they've spent themselves into a corner. They're in a debt trap. The Chinese are playing, as I've said many times, chess, well, the US and the G7 play checkers with their currencies. Trump and the US and guys like Bent still think were the US of 1945, 1944. Bretton Woods, the flag on Euima, the Victors, the world's greatest manufacturers, the world's biggest creditors. Now we're the world's biggest debtor. and and we have a currency that's no longer trusted. Things change. This is not the greatest generation anymore. It's not the greatest leadership anymore, red or blue. Again, I'm agnostic. We have a debt crisis that politicians don't want to talk about. And the world shifting. >> What do you think needs to happen? Let's say you are the president and you were to design a five-year plan or a series of five-year plans, which is what China in the former Soviet Union had. >> What would the next five-year plan be? What were the top what would the top priorities for the next five years be? >> Well, I think the very first priority is honesty. I don't think it's again I've said this so many times whether you're the CEO of a company, whether you're the patriarch of a family or whether you're the leader of a nation. Certainly in any family, any couple can sit down and have remembered a period where they said, "Honey, we have to cut spending. We have to work harder or we have to sell the the third car or we have to keep the kids out of exit because we can't afford this. We have to be honest with ourselves about our balance sheet as a politician, red or blue, that's very hard to do. Uh, and and it's very hard to have the profile and courage, as Kennedy said, to think about your nation first rather than re-election or your legacy. And you have to be honest about the debt and you have to be honest about how we got ourselves into this debt crisis. We can't blame this on the rest of the world. Again, it's like blaming the mall for overspending on your own credit card. So, the first thing I would do is if I could, if I were a politician, is tell the truth. It's very hard for politicians to do that. Again, Trump, love him or hate him, knows a hell of a lot about building, you know, in in in Manhattan and in construction costs and loans and being an entrepreneur. It's a very different thing to lead a nation through a global geopolitical world. You have to be a little bit more conscious of of larger economic theories and and certainly economic history and other national self-interest. So, the first thing I would do would be honest about our crisis. We'd have to make some austerity. As the as the Austrian School of Economics has always said, you need some constructive destruction. You can't give antibiotics. You can't print money every time there's a problem to monetize the problem to debase the currency. You have to allow yourself to get sick sometimes, we have to have a a is as Ed doubt as others have said, if we really want to make America great again, we have to experience a real recession. We have to spend more carefully. We have to have hard conversations about entitlements and military spending. We have to bring the the debt down. That's going to cost some money. We have to bring the GDP up. That means reshoring jobs. That's going to cost some money. I would incentivize companies to get their butts out of China, El Salvador, and Central America and manufacture back in America. And rather put a tariff on those countries. I would simply put a tariff on those CEOs who don't bring their their their workers back to the US. I would make it a m I would make it a national emergency to to actually manufacture in the US. if you're living in the US paying taxes in the US or theoretically paying taxes in the US for some of these CEOs and not just incentivize them but force them to bring production back to the US. I don't blame that on China. I blame that on our CEOs. So, we'd have to have those kind of tough conversations that maybe would be an in maybe fracture the idea of true capitalism, but we've left true capitalism a long time ago. So, you'd have to be honest. You'd have to bring debt down. You'd have to bring GDP up. You'd have to bring manufacturing back to the US. You'd have to do that over a period of time that would involve some austerity and some constructive destruction. You'd have to let the markets actually mean revert to get to fair valuation. These are all things that I think are almost impossible for a politician of any stripe uh to do and stay elected. And you have to have the trust of the people to get you to do that. America is so undivided or so divided rather than united. Uh it's so polarizing. And it's the same thing here in Europe in in in the UK and France and Germany. there's such a patchwork of governments that aren't trusted that the people aren't going to follow that type of honesty even if it was delivered. So, you know, David, again, I'm I'm no fun at the cocktail party, but that's how I I see it. I don't think the politicians can stay in power by doing the right things, but you never know. We hope so, but I don't think we're on that track now. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of uh what the US should do, I think they maybe they should look into buying gold. If I were running the US like a country and I see well the dollar is devaluing uh people are losing trust in my currency maybe I should hedge against my own actions any company would be prudent to do so. This is central bank buying in 2025 according to data from the world gold council and as you can see eastern c easter eastern central banks and middle eastern central banks like Turkey um have been buying Kazakhstan China has been buying Poland as top of the list net sellers you've got Germany Singapore Pakistan I don't see the US on this list and I don't think they're they're not on this list because they're not selling and they're not adding they're just keeping it steady. Why do you think the US is not hedging against themselves? >> Yeah. Well, look, I mean, this was a conversation I had this morning. I I was my adviser at Von Greer as I was interviewing was Alistair Mloud and we were off the record just talking to ourselves. What are the things we can do? In addition to the things about being honest, having austerity, cutting spending, we'd have to have sound money. And to have sound money, you'd have to go back to a gold standard, right? And that is the I don't think that'll ever happen because if you go back to a gold standard in the US, that's a chaperone. That's like when you're a teenager, you don't want your parents home at Friday night at 8 at 9:10 p.m. If you're having a party, you want to keep the party going. You don't want the chaperone. If you bring back a gold standard, well then what does that mean? It means you can't deficit spend. You can't print money anymore at will to to monetize your expenses. It would force you to cut your spending. And I don't think a lot of sovereign nations want to do that. Even China doesn't want to go to a gold standard yet. If the US went to a gold standard, that would be sound money. That would be smart, but that would force massive austerity in the short term because you wouldn't be able to spend for everything you want. So, but what central banks in the east are doing is they're doing that indirectly. They're not going to a gold standard, but they're seeing a new world where gold will be a net settlement currency. And that's what the bricks have already foreshadowed already in the last few years. They're seeing a world where gold's going to play a far more important part than the US Treasury. And if the US went on a gold standard, that'd be fantastic. But then the question is he who has the most gold wins. And look, we haven't had an audit. That's there's been crickets about the audit. That was big in the first year after the election that we were going to audit Fort Knox and just see who has the most gold. I don't think, and I'm not I don't think I'm being uh alone in that. Um you know, the USA I think uh had 22,000 tons of gold in the ' 40s. We had 9,000 tons by 1971. We're supposedly have 8,100 tons today. First thing we'd have to do is audit the actual gold. Do we really have the gold we say we do? Russia probably has at least 12,000 tons. They're not even listed on the on the World Gold Council's report. And China has significantly more than 3,000 tons. And this is what Kissinger warned. He who has the most gold wins. Let's not revalue back to gold until we know who has the most. And I don't think it's the US. So there's a lot of ifs and buts. But going back to a gold standard is unlikely. It would be one more thing I would try to do if I were in charge, but that would be hard to do and get elected and stay elected because you'd have to cut spending dramatically. So we're really in a pickle. But eventually the world's going to not necessarily have a gold back yuan or a gold back ruble tomorrow. That's a red button option they would have. I don't think China wants to push that button because that would really that would crush America at a time when they still need America to some extent. I think they're waiting for America to implode itself and then push that button later. But we don't have the most gold. That's my strong opinion. I would love to see an audit of our actual gold that was promised to us, but like so many things that hasn't happened. Uh but it's it's it's a very hard decision to make and it's got lots of ripple effects. >> Yeah, it's a good point. Why isn't China making any moves on the geopolitical front currently? And I am reminded of a quote by Sunsu. Art of war. Don't interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake. >> Exactly. Going back to what you were saying, they're waiting. This is also from the World Gold Council. This is a chart they put together. Interesting. Gold is only 735 days into this rally. I think this was published a few days ago, so it's more now. Um the previous major rallies on average lasted 162 1,062 days. And the scale and magnitude of this particular rally is quite unprecedented. It hasn't moved up this quickly in such >> this much in such a short amount of time. But according to this chart, you do see that there potentially is more room to climb if we're to take history >> as a guide. Is this time different though? You know, I hate to use that term. It's being thrown around so much in the media, but is time is this time different? >> Well, it's interesting. In a sense, it's not different at all because this is just part of a of a credit cycle and this is part of a debt cycle and a dollar cycle coming to a slow end, which means gold is as a as an anti- fiat asset is is doing what it's always done throughout history. It's certainly moving faster than even myself and Egon and others have thought. Frank Schuster, etc. We're all we're all not surprised to see gold reaching these numbers, but the speed at which has happened this year is pretty remarkable. And even I Egan and I were talking this morning. Be careful what you ask for when gold gets to 4,000, 5,000, 7,000. That's great for us who've had the foresight to understand sound money and uh gold as as an insurance against fiat money, but it's very bad for the rest of the world. But what what we're seeing with gold isn't just another commodity trade. This is a systemic change in global markets. It's more than a commodity trade. It's a monetary metal becoming the new strategic reserve asset beyond the US Treasury. And for that reason, central bank demand is clearly the the key driver behind these gold price. It doesn't even include retail demand, which is barely catching on. I mean, gold is still 5% of global allocations, or excuse me, 05. So, 1/ half of a percent. The the historical average over the many decades has been 2%. It reached 8% in in the n 1980s. So, gold hasn't even begun to hit the retail markets. It certainly has in China. ETF purchases in China gone from 15 billion last year to 60 billion this year. That's just the retail markets, >> but US markets have not caught on. Even the Morgan Stanley recommending 60 2020 20 now instead of 40% bonds is 20% gold. That's remarkable for a whale like Morgan Stanley to finally confess that. But the average man on the street for many reasons can't afford it or hasn't thought about or hasn't been told to that by their wealth adviserss that gold matters. They've been told for 25 years that gold is too volatile where it's outperformed the S&P for 25 years and even the last 5 years. So, there's a lot of catching up to do by the retail side, but um you know, I think the fact of the matter is it's the central banks that are driving that that should be more concerning because we haven't even gotten into the retail trade. And when that happens, gold's only going to go higher. Again, I'm not saying gold goes up only in a straight line, but this is an historical shift, not just a commodity cycle for gold in the next year or two. This is a seismic shift and gold will continue to inch its way up higher and higher to levels that again when you and I first started talking Dave I think it was at 1,600 and people were saying it was too expensive or maybe at 1,800 it was too expensive or at 2500 it was too expensive at 4200 is it too expensive and I could tell you many stories about why that's wrong thinking but I understand why it is. Um but it's uh it's again you could say I'm just selling my book. I'm a gold executive, of course, I'm saying this, but all of us who understand precious metals know that this is not the end of the gold price. This is just the beginning. And uh I only wish more retail investors understood that because it is hard for them to pay $4,200 for an ounce. Certainly, there could be a pullback. I was talking to Henrik Zeberg back in February in South Africa and his big thing was markets are going to top. There'll be a 30% pullback in gold. At that time, gold was at 2,900. So, no one was buying. Well, even think about that. There was no pullback. Now we're at 4,200. If there was a 30% pullback, which I don't see, but even if there was, gold would still be higher than it was in February. So, if you're waiting for that pullback to buy in, you're you're moving. You're playing with moving gold posts if you're buying gold as long-term preservation against dying fiat money as life insurance for a dying fiat currency system. It doesn't matter whether you buy at 25 or 4500 because if you're holding it for 10, 15 years, I'm quite confident that gold's going to be more valuable in 15 years than it is today versus your fiat money. And that's just always been our case. I've never looked at the gold price. I'm very happy to see the price appreciation. Egon bought it at 300. Of course, he's happy. But he's never asked about the gold price. And that's because we don't lose sleep over that because we know what's going up because fiat money is going down. Is a seismic shift for other commodities as well, including silver. Silver, we have to end on silver. Matthew, this is a historic week for silver. First time over $52. Now it's at 53. First time in history. Gold has breached new all-time highs for a year and a half straight. But this is the first time in history silver has made new alltime highs. I'm seeing all sorts of memes like uh boomers from the 80s finally breaking even and you see these people dancing. Anyway, I I'm not saying I'm not saying silver has no has had no value since the 80s. I am saying it's had a monumental rally in the last year and in the last 5 years it's moved up >> 150%. Far beating many stocks in the S&P 500. And if you just take a look what happened this year, it's interesting because uh of what you said earlier, gold um is kind of lifting all tides here. This is gold and silver moving in tandem together in in uh in 2025. Silver has started outperforming gold dramatically only in the last 6 months. I wonder going back to what you were saying earlier, um gold being expensive for 40 at 4200 uh $4,200 for a lot of people. I wonder people if people have noticed gold being too expensive early in the summer and said, "Gee, I can't afford an ounce of gold. Let's just buy silver and push the silver price up." >> Look, there's a lot of answers to that question. The first thing is people say, you know, silver is the poor man's gold. I've always said, "No, it's the smart man's silver." Um, yes, it's it is I do understand for many people an ounce of gold is out of reach and that's frustrating and I and I and I'm very aware of that and sensitive to that. But $52, $60, even $100 silver is not out of reach for most. And I do think uh as Rick Rule said, silver rewards infrequently but extravagantly. And we're now just seeing silver do what it does best when there's a gold bull market. I think the gold bull market is just starting. That's why silver is starting to do what it does best. That little speedboat that races past the juggernaut of gold when gold's in a in a secular bull market. And it and that's what we're seeing. And there's a lot of reasons why and again I was talking about this with Alistair this morning. And gold is mass excuse me silver is massively undervalued as all commodities are really even pork bellies wheat and oil is undervalued and measured against gold I don't we don't see right now at 80 gold silver ratio the kind of compressed gold silver ratios we saw in 1980 or 2011 was at 15 or 32 but I do believe that that silver is going to be when you look at it at its all-time high at 50 prior to these current highs if you were to inflation adjust those prior $50 highs gold should be at least at 150, which I definitely see it going to that. So, if you're patient and you're buying silver for the right reasons, not as a day trade to see what it does in the next 6 weeks. If you hold it, uh, it will give you that extravagant, though infrequent reward. And I think a lot of investors who feel like they're missing out on protecting their paper money dying by having precious metals. They still can afford silver. We have a lot of clients right now who have the means to buy both gold and silver, who are buying silver because they see a massive price appreciation in it. I think for for retail investors that's a huge huge play for them. There are clear supply deficits in silver. The entire silver market is half in Nvidia's market cap. So it doesn't take a lot of new demand to push the silver price up. And the ability to manipulate silver on the comx or LBMA markets just isn't what it used to be 5 years ago when there was legalized price fixing in the ComX or London exchanges. You know, look, there was 80,000 silver contracts short on the ComX recently. That was a massive short position and still silver was able to peak through and the comics is running out of silver to continue to make those price manipulations. The London float of available ounces is only about 155 million ounces and that's that's a day's worth of trading. So the paper manipulation, the cartel in London and New York is breaking. That's very good for silver as well. In the past there was the manipulation on the on the futures contracts on the LBMA and comics markets but and then there was a huge dumping. the first the shorts, then the dumping that happened in ' 81 when Gordon Brown was was selling gold at 270 for his country, which is a disaster. But again, you've got a 45-year cup and handle, you know, on the technical side for silver. You've got a clear uh supply side deficit on it. You've got a clear momentum trade in its favor, and you've got it massively undervalued in terms of gold. So, I think silver is an incredible fat pitch for people who want to get in the precious metal space who can't afford $4,200 gold right now. >> Let me end on this final question. Back in 2008, there was a localized bubble in the real estate market which contributed to the downfall of Lehman Brothers and a bunch of other uh banks. Right now, people are talking about the everything bubble where everything seems expensive, tech stocks, >> what what were previously seen as value stocks. Now, people are talking about a precious metals bubble potentially at $4,200 gold. This doesn't make any sense. $52 silver. What happened, >> right? Is this worse than 2008 >> in terms of is is is the is the market worse than 2008 or is gold just another spiking >> ass is is the global market in a worse position in terms of valuations and the bubble situation that people are talking about than what we saw in 2008. Um that's what some people were concerned of. I don't know if that's concerning for you. Oh, >> absolutely. Look, I was I was a risk asset manager, hedge fund guy long before I figured out gold like a lot of other portfolio managers that I knew. And you know, I could have just done a 2 and 20 fund on gold 20 years ago and making 2 and 20 on the gold price. It would have been better than any risk asset. I wish I had. >> Yeah. >> But look in terms of the markets, you know, of course I look at the markets. I can't help myself. The fundamentals of Charlie Mccay and Graham and Frell, they're still very true to me. But bubbles, as a great mentor of mine, Jeremy Grantham said, bubbles are very easy to to measure and to identify. They're very hard to time. Uh history tells us whenever we see high multiples, they typically precede very very bad times. We saw that in 1929,72, 2000, the dotcom bubble, certainly 2007 before the great financial crisis, these big peaks. And clearly the NK89 at 65 times earnings. People forget that again because the markets keep being monetized by a Pavlovian Fed. As long as rates are low and the Fed is printing, there's risk on and and and that creates massive distortion and and and distortion of free price discovery. And and I'm not here to tell you that this market couldn't go higher. I see a blowoff top. I see it going higher. But investors forget troughs. We've had 22 bare markets since 1925. And when we had a crash in 29, it didn't recover till 58. 72 didn't recover until the mid9s. The tech bubble that I was very very lucky in uh didn't recover until 2011. And for the Nikkay it took 30 years. We have to remember that these lessons of history still matter. It's hard to see that as Graham said, no one wants to see that when markets are ripping and they could continue to rip, but I wouldn't want to buy into a topping S&P at the top when you've got a commodity super cycle. And certainly in precious metals, it's just the beginning of a trade. So this is the beginning for precious metals. It's a top for risk assets and we are in a very dangerous market. It's too concentrated. 10 10 tech names hold 40 50% of the market cap of the S&P. That is not a safe market. We have a subprime market that's a real hidden risk. 20% of Americans are basically in a subprime category. Bankruptcies are up 11% almost 12% year-over-year. Auto defaults, tririccolors, bankruptcy, etc. So the subprime market is a dangerous market. Private credit I've written about adnauseium. This is from PE, you know, venture capital, hedge funds doing private credit, private credit pools, private equity. We don't know. It's an un unknown class of borrowers. And there's a pick trend in in the in in private credit, which means payment in kind. That means a lot of these borrowers can't even make back their interest payments. They're giving back in securities. They're giving back stock positions because they can't make their debt obligations. So, that private credit bubble, like the subprime market bubble, is on my mind. And look, we don't have time here, but the AI bubble and the circular financing going on in the AI bubble and what's happening with anthropic and and open AI and what the big the big mag 7 are doing in circular financing, there is another massive bubble I wish we had an hour to talk about. But between AI bubbles, private credit and subprime markets, these are in addition to a market highly overvalued by the Buffett indicator, by price to book, price to sales, there's just so many reasons to be nervous. That doesn't mean I'm calling the end of the bubble. That's harder to do. Uh for those who are traders, I look at income margins. When they start to trend south, that's when you can truly know it's ending. But right now, you're definitely at a top, not the top. It's a dangerous place to pretend you're going to, you know, base your retirement years on this S&P. That'd be a very dangerous assumption, I think. >> And I'll just end on this one final note. Uh Matthew, for assets that don't generate income on their own, like gold and silver and Bitcoin, how do we know those assets are in a bubble? You can't use a traditional discounted cash flow method to discuss or look at look at it this way, right? >> Yep. No. Again, the only way to really understand gold, I think, without listening to guys like me selling their book and worrying that you were all just selling our book. And I and I do get that. I I look, I was a buyer, not just on the sell side. So, I get that. I was highly skeptical as a on the buy side. But again, to understand gold is different than a dividend stock. It is a yieldless asset, just like Bitcoin. That's a whole other separate rabbit hole. Bitcoin versus gold, store of value, standard deviation, all that stuff. But in terms of gold, no, it doesn't give you a yield. But either does your US 10ear, either does your US two-year, either is your US Treasury bill, it doesn't give you a yield because it's not beating inflation. It's simply not. Because you've interviewed John Williams, I think more than once, we know that real inflation as measured by the same scale that Vulkar used in the 80s puts us at 10 to 11%. That means all of our bond returns are yield returns. Even on the dividend stocks, they're giving you five or 6% or the or the 10 year or the 30 year giving you four and a half or 4.7. You're actually not beating inflation. That's a negative returning yieldless yield returning bond. So, gold is not giving you yield, but either is anything on the US Treasury and most corporate, even junk bonds aren't giving you yield that beats actual inflation, honest inflation. So, yes, gold does not give you yield. How is it not another risk asset bubble? Why is it not just another bubble? Again, the only way to really answer that is to understand the history of precious metals versus fiat money. And then you'll have more confidence. Again, we could spend hours on that. And and I invite people to get informed, not just take my word for it. But gold, as I said, is not just another commodity bubble asset right now. It is part of a seismic shift in the global monetary system. It is a strategic tier one store of value reserve asset for central banks around the world. Retail investors, I hate to say it, have to actually follow the central banks. I'm no fan of the BIS. I'm no fan of central banks, but they they they're the insiders who created this mess, and they're going to gold to fix this mess, and I don't know why retail investors can't do the same. >> Let's see if they will fix this mess in the next couple months or in a couple weeks. >> Yeah, >> I'll speak with you before the end of the year, which is why I mentioned that time frame. So, let's let's let's find out if they uh fix anything before we speak next time. Matthew, where can we find you in the meantime? >> Always at voner.gold gold or gold switzelland.com. Myself, uh, Egon of course, our founding chairman, our articles and interviews. We have great adviserss like Grant Williams, Ronnie Sturfl, and now Alistister Mloud as advisers. So, they're contributing their articles, their insights. I'm surrounded by brilliant guys. Egon and uh, and Alistair were literally trading stocks when I was still in diapers. So, I've got the best mentors around me. We've got some fantastic uh, interviews and articles. And really, not just why why to own gold, but how to own gold. That's all part of it. It's all free information. You don't have to be a client and uh welcome to get your information there and challenge our thoughts, but I always want people to challenge our thoughts. That's the key. >> Okay, we'll put the link down below. So, uh do check out Von Greers and Matthew there. And uh I know Matthew posts a lot on social media and uh um and uh I think it's a great resource. Don't be modest about that, Matthew. I learned a lot just uh following you, so I'll put the link to X down below as well. Thank you very much. We'll speak soon. Bye. >> My pleasure, David. Take care. And uh thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.