if uh apple for instance sees what's coming and decides they're going to get 10 years worth of silver and then panasonic sees what that does to the price what could happen recently the comex has uh added a whole but the the lbma i'm sorry there's been a whole bunch of new hallmarks of bars that have been approved uh do you think that that's because of uh physical shortages happening because they're the the physical demand which is monetary demand now this is investors protecting themselves


against the loss of purchasing power in the of the dollar they see uh all of the problems in the economy they're finally seeing these things uh this pandemic has sort of uh pulled away some of the veil uh that was there and um uh so uh what do you think about uh some of the things that have been changing recently on the commodities exchange the people that are standing for delivery now instead of just settling in cash uh and so on people don't know how tight these markets are we're talking about


silver specifically you know i've had major silver consumers you know in my office face to face i've asked them directly how much silver do you use in a year they won't tell me they're paranoid that you and i are going to find out how tight this market is they're paranoid there to see what happened in the cobalt market or the nickel market or the uranium market or you know any of these markets that all of a sudden you know the hedge funds decide to front run industry you know because uh um you know they do


that and i'll list them the price of that commodity skyrockets in price and it's not in the best interest of samsung or sony or tesla or you know whoever the case may be to have you know one of their key commodities you know go up by five or ten times so they keep this information very very tight and the banks know what the demand is so you know sony's given their order to jp morgan to deliver x amount of silver to whatever ports around the world over the next 12 months period so that supply is in


place jp morgan's got it from a minor they've got contracts in place they know where it's coming from and and then they then they know the margin of error they know okay if we somehow can't get it there we have an alternative to get it there and so on and so forth but it's all the banks control the entire supply chain of the precious metals silver and gold and and they control it very well but if something an anomalous happens like all of a sudden investment demand picks up there's not enough refineries


out there to even meet that demand and the miners can't meet the demand either because they have commitments to to the banks so all of a sudden you've got there's just no so any silver that's out there in any kind of retail form gets gobbled up almost instantly and uh for for us um you know we we sell retail silver and uh you know we we send an order into scottsdale mint for example we'll send with 30 000 ounces it takes them four to six months to turn that around because they have demands from


government who needs the silver they've got demands from industry who needs the silver so the retail guy is the last one in the chain that gets any metal and they're the ones that also pay the most you know somebody just wrote an article about how much uh jewelry you know silver there is in jewelry and in silverware and all of this above ground silver that we're not taking into consideration except you can't buy that stuff through an etf it's it has to go uh and get melted down and


re-refined it's it's sterling silver and investment-grade silver is 999 fine silver uh and so uh in 1980 there was something called the big melt and it's exactly what you're talking about the uh the uh refineries got all backed up uh months and years backed up and so if you were if you didn't have investment grade silver you might be able to get 30 percent of spot because nobody wanted to sit on it for two years waiting for it to get refined and poured into a bar um so um well i think yeah i think by


opening up the a number of refineries that are lbma or comex certified is a good thing but um and it could be even good for first majestic because one of the hindrances in our business in the mining business is actually producing our own refined product uh and uh i would love to be able to do it but but we can't because the refined product that we would produce would not be certified so it couldn't be marketed it could be just as good as an lbm a stamped bar of equal quality but we couldn't sell it so with those


rules loosening up it could be actually good for the mining sector but the risks also increase because that could increase the amount of fraud you know you hear the tungsten bars and things like that so hopefully there's enough checks and balances in place to protect you know the end purchaser yeah the lbma um there were six i'm i'm looking at an article right now so i'm not looking directly at the camera but uh the l as of uh july this last july there were 65 lbma approved refineries


the hallmarks that are acceptable in the exchange vaults and they have just increased that by another 60 so there's 65 i mean have been added i'm sorry there were 75 and they just added another 65 and then there were more so the uh the percentage increase it's it's a 140 increase in the number of uh silver bar brands compared to uh july 27th of this year um so it seems to me that you know you were talking about how tight this market is it doesn't take too many people standing for delivery


to cause the lbma to panic and start adding all of these different hallmarks uh into the uh uh just to be able to conceal the fraud a little bit longer because it basically is a fraud when they're keeping it this tight now years ago dave morgan used to talk about um you know all it'll take is one company like apple saying well you know we can um quite a few years ago when when oil was down at like 10 bucks a barrel southwest airlines bought a whole bunch of futures that went out years and so they had uh


cheap jet fuel uh for years and they had an advantage you know everything started rising after 1999 or whenever it was that it was uh 10 bucks a barrel for crude and that gave southwest a huge advantage as far as their cost and they grew faster and so you were talking about the banks controlling the supply chain uh when they're buying for these companies like panasonic though they're not buying any more than like three months of production are they three three or six months at the most there my understanding is that they do


12 12-month contracts so when you know they they you know panasonic or sony they'll do their 2021 budget so they'll be in discussions today you know with jp morgan hsbc or whomever to try to put that order together and they'll fix a price you know for the entire year and they're you know there are formulas they use so that you know the banks are protected to some degree but uh it's as fixed as you can get yeah but if if uh apple for instance sees what's coming and decides they're


going to get 10 years worth of silver and then panasonic sees what that does to the price what could happen in this i i made a crazy uh prediction a couple years ago and i and because this is when you know 2014 2015 when things were pretty ugly in the mining sector and then uh i i said you know makes perfect sense that the um it sector might as well just buy the mining sector there's really no reason for the mining sector to stand as a as as a loan industry um the gold and silver the copper it


mostly gets consumed into commercial electronic products and uh and you know they're at the mercy of the supply and then copper's supplies dropping silver supplies dropping and these are two very important metals and then of course zinc is is a challenge as well i think lead is the only metal out there that there's abundance of but leads being used less and less now um because there's quite a dirty metal so so nevertheless these key components it wouldn't make sense for apple just to own their entire


supply of all their metals that they need i would and they could pick the entire silver industry up for about 16 billion dollars yep and they would have a competitive advantage against everybody else that's using so by the way um i've had a 2010 tesla roadster 2011 a 2012 model s and i've got a dual motor performance right now so when you mention tesla and the use of silver and i just bought 50 silver panels solar panels and three tesla power walls because i'm uh getting a ranch shortly


you got the tiny silver you're driving on yes tesla won't tell you how much but we we estimate that there's at least one kilo of silver could be up to upwards of three kilos of silver in one of those cars wow i had no idea wow there's 6 000 connections like there's 6 000 batteries and each one of those connections is silver ah later today is battery day and i have a feeling they're announcing a new battery and it's going to reduce the number of cells in the pack so okay well number of connections is


probably going to be cut down fairly dramatically but lately uh some large funds like pension funds and things like that are starting to announce they're going to uh go into gold have any large funds uh started coming towards silver yet silver is kind of this weird metal because you know i i talked to these fund managers and they're all you know half my age in most cases and uh um you know they they look at uh silver as the poor man's gold and and uh so they tend to gravitate towards gold


and you know i try to educate them that they're you know they're totally different metals um you know i i look at gold as money and then i look at silver as a strategic metal and uh uh you know being a strategic battle it's something we need is the human race can i interest in just one second sure it's a strategic medal that becomes money once in a while when people rush into gold and it becomes too expensive they rush into silver for monetary demand not for and by the way i always differentiate between fiat


currencies and real money and the only i i never call the dollar uh if i can help it i never call it money it's currency gold and silver are money those are the only things that are funny i'm sorry i interrupted you uh go ahead uh no and then look just to and i agree with you but just just to finish my point um gold the image world inventories of gold are increasing every year you know world inventories of silver are decreasing every year you know the above ground supplies of silver are dropping like a rock


um and that doesn't that doesn't seem to end any and it's not going to end and the only thing that could change that is price because there are you know places around the world that you know have you know very very low-grade silver mines that um you know are 20 grams 30 grams you know you got an ounce of silver in in the rock but it's going to cost you probably two or three hundred dollars a ton to mine it because it's so low grade and so deep into the earth's crust you need you know triple digit silver just


to make those low-grade silver mines ever economic uh to mine and you know how far are we away from that i don't know but um at current metal prices we can't mine any more silver period um when these funds do start uh rushing into this see i think that a lot of these funds don't understand the opportunity when a few of them start rushing into such a minuscule market when i wrote my book the size of the silver market was 1 300th that of the gold market i don't know what it is today


but it can't absorb a lot of funds without the prices skyrocketing well look you know it's it's going to happen it's hard to look at magnitudes right and then we none of us have a crystal ball i can measure what happened in my previous career at a copper company so the copper company i formed a company called first quantum minerals um it was pure copper some african-based and then today very large copper company i think it's got a 12 billion dollar market cap or something along those lines i've been


gone for a long time left in 2000 but um i put together a very pure portfolio based on my same theories of putting together a pure portfolio of silver in mexico for first majestic silver and and purity is key to me because i believe that one day the institutional industrial wake up to the silver story and say what can i buy what i need to own silver as they did in copper copper went from 60 cents to four dollars from the year 2000 to 2008 and there was two or three copper companies that were pure enough


to meet the pure purity criteria that the institutions wanted that stock went from three bucks to 140 a share over that period of time yeah because there was nothing to buy and uh so in my opinion i think a very similar type of thing is going to happen for first majestic you know we are the purest overcoming the world yes there's others there's others competitions of course but you know when the money flows into such a small industry it's going to have enormous impact on price of the metal itself


and of course the companies that produce it okay can you tell us the name of your website and your youtube channel sure um the youtube channel we do have one mike i actually don't know what it is but uh firstmajestic.com website uh my twitter address uh keith underscore newmeier on twitter i do fair amount of tweeting um i'm not on any other social media but um the youtube channel is fairly new we only set it up a couple of months ago but to have a look at that i do you know a fair amount of interviews


one or two a month and we try to get them all there okay i want to thank you so much this has been a great interview and it was great finally meeting you uh somebody that i see eye to eye with especially when it comes to triple digit silver thanks a lot keith well i've been listening to you for many years and i watch your videos at least once or twice a week and uh it's a pleasure of mine to have have a chance to speak face to face thanks and we'll see everybody next time thanks for


watching