[Mu sic] I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing.com and here today with me is Chris Temple founder editor and publisher of the national investor thank you so much for being here great to have you once again it's my pleasure it's nice to see you again Charlotte yeah really good to be catching up and our last conversation was almost an entire year ago so there's so much to go over we'll see what directions we go in today I thought we could at least begin with gold because in that last conversation we were
talking about how gold was heading toward a takeoff but of of course that happened were you expecting such a strong price move for the metal in 2024 I wasn't expecting quite the strong move that we did see to be honest you know i' I've been bullish on gold pretty much for a long time gold stocks and especially the Explorers are a different matter because most of them has still failed to keep up but there's a lot of reasons why gold went up you know it's it's the uh some people that are old
enough in our audience will remember that uh years ago the seven up soft drink used to sell itself as the uncola you know well gold is the UNC currency it's not a fiat currency issued is debt it's real money and there's been a lot of demand for it as a lot of our readers I'm sure have seen from foreign central banks foreign governments Etc uh the interesting thing about it all wasn't until about mid year this this past year when you started to actually see the beginnings of net buying of gold
and gold ETFs by Western and chiefly us investors much of this rally that took us up to $2,800 Plus for a while it's backed off a little bit as we're recording this most of that without the help of us investors uh and Western investors generally so you can look at that as a glass half full or half half empty depending on your outlook uh it's you know a glass half full meaning that if the narrative for gold improves further in the coming year and I'm leaning in that direction and it
starts to get more Western investors involved in it we could see an even larger move in a gold price and one that would finally bring some of the equities of the ones that deserve it anyway along with that so you know a lot of bad things going on in the world a lot of trouble spots a lot of worries over debt levels and so forth and the interesting thing on that Charlotte real quick is that it was noteworthy to me that a lot of Gold's move in the last few months before it sold off a bit after the
election down here uh was despite a still strong US dollar and despite long-term interest rates staying higher than people thought they would yeah let's I think that gives us a good look at this past year let's get into some things that are happening a little bit more currently so you mentioned the price fell off after the US election and we've seen a bit of a comeback since then what do you make of that what's what's causing that to happen well look I I said in my newsletter if you remember this or not
three or four weeks before the election that the worst case near term for Gold's rally would be a Republican sweep and it doesn't change Gold's long-term picture necessarily in my view but what it did do obviously was it l even more of a fire under Wall Street and and this Uber bullish attitude that people have had and so if you're a generalist investor and you just saw the Republicans win the White House and Congress and you you're the old goody we're going to have less
regulation less red tape lower taxes uh we hope more growth and less debt to go along with that then you're going to buy stocks instead of gold and that's what people did so that was an excuse for gold to sell off frankly I thought it would have sold off more than we have seen so far so that tells you there's some underlying strengths still with gold um so I think that those things though Charlotte are going to reverse themselves when we get past January 20th which is going to be almost like the
proverbial midnight in the Cinderella story we're all going to turn into pumpkins and after the inauguration and the new Congress will be in session by that time realize that we still have a 36 trillion and Counting national debt we have a$3 trillion annualized addition deficit uh to add to that debt each year uh and the great stag flation is still with us you know inflation is arguably done falling it's ticked back up a little bit lately I don't think we go down to 2% on a sustainable Pace even by
the Federal Reserves SED numbers and that's going to keep interest rates chronically high it's going to keep inflation chronically high and that's going to start to bite a lot more and and I think besides the hopes over the election result I think there's still been this even before that this underlying you know panish kind of attitude that we're going back to 0% interest rates you know the FED starts cutting interest rates a couple of three or four times oh goody we're going back
to one or two per. no we're not not any worse near that and you know the reality when 2025 hits is that the economy is going to start to bog down somewhat there's many many many Global challenges trade and otherwise uh China and the us could not be more diametrically opposed everywhere you look whether it's trade our current market situations and economic situations and whatnot and those things are going to have to be reckoned with in 2025 and Beyond and so I think that once that reality sets in
gold will will get its next big lease on life and the stock market is going to bog down and I think we're going to see a lot of rotation in the market that will start to favor real assets and real value away from you everybody chasing the same relative handful of stocks as we've seen okay I think many directions that we can go in there I I want to go down the path of inflation for a moment here because when we talked a year ago you had told us then all right inflation is not going back to 2% which of course it
hasn't and now that we have Trump coming into office next year there's a lot of talk about whether these policies are going to be inflationary so maybe we can talk a little bit more about your outlook for inflation in this coming environment well we need to go back to where this last big bout of inflation the last few years started and like the late Milton fredman famously said inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon people need to remember remember that from the fall of
2019 when the Fed was starting to add money aggressively back to the system so when they really uh threw caution to the wind in 2020 because of the excuse of covid uh during that time and I think it ended about early 2022 is time frame the Federal Reserve in two two and a half years however you want to measure it created about 30% of all of the US dollars ever brought into being in the entire nearly 250 years of the US OFA so when you create that many new trillions of dollars especially against the
backdrop of an economy for a while that had been put on Ice you're going to have inflation everything goes up in in price the fact is that despite the fed blly and frankly not enough trying to mop up the inflation that it Unleashed you've still got money supply growth right now accelerating again it has been for over a year and if you go and look at a long-term chart and I've used this in my newsletter several times in a recent past we are still way be way above what the long-term Trend growth for the broad
money supply is so that is reason number one why inflation is going to stay with us for a while maybe it won't go back to 9 or 10% again but neither is it going to go down below 2% out and stay there you know there's too many reasons why it's going to stay up secondly you've got the Tariff policy if the president elect Trump and Trump 2.0 is going to follow through with most of this stuff and regardless of what the apologists try and say and regardless of the fact that there are legitimate uses for
tariffs everybody knows that when you add this kind of a tax on imported goods it turns out the same way as any kind of a tax that you add onto manufacturers or wholesalers or Distributors it gets passed on at least to some extent to Consumers so that's going to be the bad part of it Charlotte because that also is a regressive tax it hits people who are consumers more so and by virtue of that will all those being equal Tamp down economic activity somewhat so we'll be back to this great stagflation kind of environment
where prices are rising but it's tougher to make ends meet uh people start spending less and the overall economy suffers as a result of it uh and aside from that you frankly have a lot of things where structurally the world has changed labor and and wages are a lot higher these days than they were for a lot of years that's here to stay nobody is giving back the wage gains that they won in the last two or three years and frankly in order to have the economy move forward in areas where it needs to
where it comes to our energy situation where it comes to Reviving our mining Industries where we need all of these new jobs and new technologies and and you know development stage Minds brought on the moth balls and produced and so forth all of that requires highly skilled and well-paid labor as well and in order for these things to be produced you're going to have to to pay higher costs and higher wages so the math just does not work for anybody and it's not just Donald Trump I mean I I said uh
before the election that no matter who wins they're going to be inheriting what I call the Carter curse you know Jimmy Carter has the worst bum wrap of any president in my lifetime because when he came into office the inflation of the 70s was already Unleashed he didn't start it Richard Nixon and Nixon's fed chairman Arthur Burns were responsible for that Carter happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and so president Trump is going to be unfortunately enjoying and I say
enjoying Loosely uh that same Dynamic that he's already got the math stacked very much against him and he's going to have to think and act outside the box to not be consumed by high debt and the interest costs and and have that pretty much hamper anything he wants to do in a positive way yeah I think I think it's really important to have that historical context to remember to look back into the past to what extent do you think Trump will be able to follow through on the Promises you made or he has made
because you mentioned he's going to need to have to think up time Fox any any thoughts there well let me talk about a couple different things and I've been talking about a lot of things recently we can talk about others but first of all and here again I think that that I heard a commentator who's a Republican analysts say this just in the last couple of days I think Republicans need to start dialing back expectations you know everybody when they run for office Donald Trump included makes promises
they can't keep you know were they sincere when they made them or just blown smoke to try and get votes you know that only they know that for sure but one example and this gets back to the inflation uh subject Charlotte that he promised multiple times during the campaign that in the first 12 to 18 months he's going to lower energy costs by 50% for American households that is another mathematical impossibility it can't physically be done and it can't mathematically be done and for a whole
host the reasons at the least of which if you're looking at trying to increase us oil and gas production by how much it would take all those being equal to lower costs a lot you don't have the labor pool in this country to do that just are not enough people to produce this that's number one number two and there have been several energy industry Executives in the last few weeks who have come out and said exactly this thing don't think that we can go back to a world of 40 or $50 oil because most of the new production
that we would need to bring on is not going to be profitable at that level so you can't compel an industry to overproduce just to fulfill your campaign promise and lose money as part of the deal you know the energy companies learned their lesson from the beginning of the Shale boom when everybody went nuts spiral too much money to frontload production a lot of companies went bust you had an overc capacity you had a glut for a while now we've worked through that and we can absorb what the industry
is producing and still keep you know it's 70 or80 a barrel the industry by and large can make decent money you can't go a whole lot less than that so and these companies learned their lesson and one by one they're all telling the public and the president we are more about Capital discipline our job is not to just produce more for the sake of doing it to drive down costs and run the risk again of having overc capacity and a price crash and causing financial problems they're all about Capital
discipline and so forth so that's that's one of the things that the president's going to have to be honest about you know we can we can have some improvements but nothing great the other thing though this has been a big hobby horse of mine and as I said before we recorded it's one of the reasons I didn't make it unfortunately to see you everybody else in New Orleans recently uh is because I'm staying home working on a few things one of which is some public policy things I would encourage
people to look at the website nib Coalition that stands for National infrastructure Bank okay one of the risks that Donald Trump has right now the biggest risk going in is that he's going to get into a public spat with fed chairman Jerome Powell over the level of interest rates you know and I just put something out again on my social media account you're going to see a lot of this in the coming weeks from me you know Trump conspicuously when he was in the Oval Office in his first term had a
picture of President Andrew Jackson over his shoulder and so I have said in a few different ways in context somebody needs to remind the him what President Andrew Jackson's attitude was towards central banks and he needs to get it through his head that his administration does not have to be Hostage to the Federal Reserve so if he doesn't think outside the box and he can look at things like a national currency outside the FED uh Robert Kennedy who's in his inner circle his uncle did that once upon a time when
he was president he can look at public banking he can look at other forms of Interest Free banking and public sector financing of infrastructure and energy and a whole bunch of things if he does that type of thing he can do basically what I've called an end run around a federal reserve and his administration will be a success don't forget Charlotte that in his first term he made all kinds of promises about what he wanted to do and rightly so to fix and repair and augment our decaying infrastructure in
so many ways which has only gotten worse in a lot of the old industrial States our power grid is a shambles and very vulnerable to cyber attacks and Bad actors and everything else now we've got all all of our energy needs uh for nuclear power for all of the other green needs as well as for just electricity and whatnot generally these things all need to be funded and if he allows himself to be hamstrung by the markets that are run by the Federal Reserve where somebody is going to come and say
to them well we really can't do this it's going to add too much to the debt well who's where is it written in blood that we have to do this in a way that adds to the national debt why can't we have something like a national infrastructure bank and seed that initially with a small amount of public money and then turn Wall Street and the private sector loose at funding and securitizing all kinds of things we need you won't be adding to the federal debt doing that but you will be broadening
the economy broadening the tax base meeting all kinds of public needs that we have providing millions of good paying high higher paying jobs than people have right now doing all kinds of job training like I said before where we don't have the workers for copper mines that need to come on board for more oil production and gas production and so forth all of those things can be done if he's got the wisdom and the and the courage to think outside the box if he doesn't I I'm telling you right now his presidency is
going to be a failure okay that's that's very interesting I'll leave the link to the website you mentioned in the video description so that people can check that out if they would like to so okay so Trump should really be trying to detach himself from what's going on with the FED Jerome Powell not getting any spats there even though it looks like that's already building up I will ask you even though you want to see him get outside of that I will ask you how you see the FED moving forward in this
inflationary stagflationary environment that that you see coming because it seems like so this year we got our 75 basis points worth of cuts so far looks like we'll get another 25 in December but they seem to have shifted their their focus to the employment so so what do you see going along with the fedge well they have you're right Charlotte they have shifted their focus somewhat and assuming they do follow through another 25 basis point cut the week before Christmas which is more likely
than not they've given several strong hints that after that they're going to sit on their hands for a while and see how things evolve because they have seen inflation bubble back up again they have been subject to some criticism that they should not have moved as aggressively as they did quite as quickly as they did it really wasn't necessary you know when the US economy is going to grow at roughly 3% GDP in a fourth quarter which is what Trump's incoming treasury secretary says his
goal is so we're already there okay when you've got that when you've got re not only record highs on Wall Street but renewed speculation this is starting to get pretty stupid the the the magnitude of these rallies and whatnot that are just based on the greater fool Theory you know and granted and I've pointed this out to a lot of people the us more than ever right now is the prettiest horse in the glue factory you know we've got a better economy better markets all the rest of it Europe is a basket case
China is in full-blown deflation which is going to be a big problem for president Trump come next year when it comes to trade negotiations and a whole host of things and um you know but but we're opposite of that so the question is look the Federal Reserve still to some extent is the Central Bank of the world because if the dollar is too strong and interest rates are too high Emerging Markets are in trouble because they got a lot of dollar denominated net so the FED does need to look to that but
if you look at just the US in isolation there was no good reason to start lowering interest rates yet the econom is not weakening that much I do think and I have said in agreement with some others that the headline growth numbers overstate how strong the economy is because if you if you talk to the average household in America they feel the pinch they feel a recession they feel that prices are still Rising too much uh even the garden variety retailers a lot of them are reporting that consumer habits are changing
they're buying less the the typical Billet or restaurant is less the amount of PE of money that people buy in a trip even to Walmart is less than it has been so that is happening but but we're in this quandry and again it's one of the FED Zone making we wouldn't be in this mess had they not gone so nuts on money printing from 2019 to 22 in the first place right and I think this is this is starting to come through as we talk about the economy but I I was looking back at many of my conversations from
the beginning of this year and recession in the US was such a common Topic at the beginning of 2024 what happened to that are we still heading toward recession what do you see there the problem Charlotte is that a lot of these economic formulas not only are kind of skewed to begin with but they're not as relevant as they used to be you know if you have a stock portfolio if you're you know maybe in the upper onethird percentile of income earners in America you're getting by just fine the other two-thirds it's a
different story you know one of the one of the things that the Democrats in the US were squawking about continually this year up to and including the election was that with inflation coming down as as much as it has with the economy still growing Wall Street still doing well why are Biden's negatives still so high on the economy and some very well-healed and well-known Democrats at the beginning of the year answered that question themselves led by Larry Summers who is a former Democrat treasury secretary and
he and some other people at Harvard you'd have thought you were listening to John Taylor because they did a study and showed definitively that the inflation rate that the average American is told they're living under the average American looks at this and says I don't know what planet you're from because that isn't my inflation rate okay so yes it technically we've avoided a recession so far but two-thirds of the country is already living in it they're already living in
stagflation you know their their take-home pay is less wages have not kept up for most people with the true cost of living in the last few years because the cost of living just started going up much too fast so you know we we have kind of a It's A Tale of Two Cities frankly kind of thing where again the upper quarter third whatever percentile of income earners uh people that are retired and have got a DEC decent Nest EG they're doing fine everybody else is living paycheck to paycheck I think it
does go back to as you said people looking at those old models that that just don't make sense anymore and and trying to fit this situation that we're in right now into that so that helps a lot to to go into that if we if we Circle back to Gold so all these factors that we've been talking about relate to what's going to happen to the gold price in 2025 any other elements that you are watching and I guess maybe a little bit more on where you see gold going in this coming year well I think Gold's going to
go higher without any question because uh of all of the debt issues and so forth you'll remember me saying to you once or twice in the past that for gold and especially for the gold miners uh and the equities and so forth and precious medals to really take off we're going to have to have a situation similar to the aftermath of the 2008 crash because again like my comments were a few minutes ago of of what's happened with gold and silver correcting post election because of stock market
was still doing so well the key factor is going to be when we get to the place I don't think we're far from it we're going to see see this in some fashion next year when all of a sudden people realize that yes the lingering High inflation the lingering High interest rates the challenges for president Trump to get through the agenda that he wants uh the the trade issues we're going to have with China which I don't think anybody fully comprehends where China is at right now all of these things are
going to cause even our economy to finally start bogging down somewhat I'm not saying we're going to have a depression I'm not saying the stock market's going to crash either one but at the least the easy money for investors has been made in the stock market and we may see a situation where next year we get 10 or 20% correction in the the stock market indices but within the market stuff that is cheap will do well maybe even go up in price then that's the environment that's going to
help gold the question in my mind and I'll go even be you know over the next couple of three years Charlotte is that there's never been any doubt and I said before the election that we were going to have renewed inflation and higher interest rates whether Trump or camela Harris won the election the difference would be that the benefit of that environment theoretically at least under President Trump would be that broader economic growth would still be part of the equation so the yes prices would be higher but at
least there'd still be decent Prosperity I thought that a haris Administration on the other hand inflation would be higher but there would be business limiting measures that would disproportionately have impacted gold so if you're bullish on Commodities generally you're happy with President Trump gold might not do as well but we will still see decent returns from energy from uranium from base metals and so forth uh a Harris Administration we would have seen gold dis do disproportionately better in my
view so I see everything going up in time near term I like gold the best followed by natural gas and uranium but I'm still a little skittish about big uh allocations to base metals and Battery metals because there are more reasons than not that they're going to stay contained for a while okay let's go over then and talk about those Commodities that you are most bullish on and I'll I'll start with uranium because it's one that we've spoken about before I remember last year you're telling us
this is the commodity with the most bullish setup at that moment so I was going to ask you if you felt the same right now because we had of course a very successful start to the year for uranium and now we've kind of leveled off at least in terms of the price so what do you see coming there and how are you getting exposure right now well look the uranium price bottomed a few years back at well under $20 a pound we went up to about $120 a pound briefly and now we've been back around 80ish or
so bouncing back and forth around that level for most of this last year you know after as you said a good start to the year uh what's surprising to me right now is that despite the Uranian price itself the spot price having dropped a lot most of the good equities and the ETFs are still near their highs where uranium and and nuclear energy are concerned because it shows you that strong hands realize that this is going to be a generational bullish move for uranium and nuclear energy frankly especially after this latest Russian
Embargo of enriched Uranium on the US which came out the news just in the recent past I would have thought that the spot price would have reacted more than it did I believe it still will because when you look at the price PR for enriched uranium they are at new highs even though the spot price is not kept up so my view very much Charlotte is that in a couple of years from now we're going to be looking at a uranium price of $150 to $200 a pound and there's not going to be enough still to
go around because now we're adding a lot more demand down the road everybody and their brother in the world and properly so is understood that uranium and nuclear energy are the best means to achieve lower carbon emission goals from energy we have an insatiable appetite on this power for electricity that only is increasing as time goes on and it's simply the best Avenue to take and it's not going to hurt the uranium price necessarily because when you compare nuclear power plants to Cal fired or gas
fired ones the cost of the uranium fuel itself is a much smaller part of the overall cost of running a nuclear power plant so the the market will bear a much higher uranium price to accelerate production which is necessary so I I still love the setup I mean I was to me the the bullish setup for Uranium now at 80 bucks is the strong as it was at 20 right and I think I think I remember before you were looking at companies not necessarily the cicos but more of the later stage development early producer
type of companies is that still your focus I think it is you know uh you know in the US of course the two big fish as I see it at least are uranium energy corporation and Energy Fuels you've got a couple other ones Encore and NextGen coming on and you know in our part of the world um there is still some production capacity that needs to ramp back up with all of the above including even camoo for that matter and that'll happen over the next few years and then you start to look farther down
to food chain I've got eyes on a couple of companies right now that I'll probably be adding next uh to my recommendations where they're not in production now but they're nearing development stage and they'll be the ones after Cho and ueec and Energy Fuels and arrest are producing at capacity and it's still not enough these will be the next ones so I I am looking down you it's not going to be imminent and in the meantime I've got pretty heavy allocations built back up again uh to
the ETFs to kind of cover everybody you not only have urm now uh you know Sprout uranium miners but now you've got one that's for juniors and there's some overlap there but the UR NJ ETF and both of them are good for investors that don't want to have to worry about looking at individual companies and just want sector exposure I don't think you can go wrong long term with either one of those okay I think that's really helpful and just just one more question on the price because I know that people
are wondering when we're going to break out of this current range were in of course you said you see it going much higher is there a specific trigger that you're looking for that would kick it off or is this going to be more of a a gradual increase over time I'm not ashamed to say it beats the hell out of me Charlotte I me when that Russian news hit uh I would have thought sure that that that would have done it and the crazy thing was if you we're looking at the prices of all these different things
the stocks of you know the ueec and the cicos and the Energy Fuels they all had big pops the uranium price went up a few bucks and then gave it right back so I don't get it and and especially with uh enrichment prices hitting new cycle highs uh you know because again you don't take raw uranium and put it in a in a reactor you've got to have it enriched and that's where you know one of several areas in which the US is kind of slow getting back into the game is that we haven't had enrichment y
capacity in this country for a lot of years but we're trying to scramble to get it back quickly and uh I'm you know one topic we could talk about all day is is uh that the one that President Trump has selected who's going to be running pretty much all of this stuff and he's going to see to that yeah okay I think I think that helps me to know that you're also looking at this and wondering okay what on Earth is going on here anything anything you would add on Trump's Energy
Secretary appointment or recommendation we have Chris Wright coming in we know that he's an oil and gas executive that seems like it would B well for the sector but I'm also hearing that he knows about uranium as well he seems to be a fan of nuclear power any any investment considerations with that development well Chris Wright is a great pick you know uh but I'll tell you what far more important in the grand scheme of things for all of America's energy needs and our national security and so
forth is a selection of Doug bergham uh Doug beram uh was nominated to be the interior secretary so right out of the gates the agency being interior that deals with permitting and all these kind of things you can't have a bigger change from the outgoing Administration and their attitude to keep things bottled up and so forth it's going to be a very different attitude under berham but here's the the punchline Charlotte and most of the press still does not understand the significance of this
because little of it has been reported not only only is bergham going to run the Interior Department he is going to be an super Zar if you will who will oversee energy and the EPA and the Interior Department and the agencies all of whom have got anything to do whatever with permitting with environmental issues with all of these different things not just for energy but for Metals for Mining and all of that last but most important is that berham will be on the president's National Security Security
Council uh wasn't a mistake the other day or or just some some uh Steward or or or waitress's seating arrangement when you saw your prime minister down here at maral Lago sitting next to Trump and who was at the table the three most important cabinet positions to deal with trade and SEC mineral security and energy and so forth Doug Bergen being one of them at the table along with Trump's likely National Security adviser and his Commerce Secretary who is also Trump's Co you know transition share so
bergham is going to have a much much much larger role in all of this than has been reported and it's going to be great I mean he will he will pick up where Rick Perry uh the energy secretary in Trump's first term left off with an aggressive all of the above energy strategy nothing ruled out so we will still have electric vehicles but without the $7,500 consumer um you know sweetener to try and get people to buy them when they won't otherwise uh and I think we're going to be surprised by some of the things that
are going to come as a first matter to make sure that we've got the kind of incentives to get the materials out of the ground and through the food chain of processing and so forth before they become an electric vehicle or a power plant or another kind of vehicle or whatever so um these realized that it's very much a national security issue as much as an economic one to have a guy like bergam overseeing all of these different things okay you you went in a different direction than I expected so that's
really helpful to me I think that's probably under the radar for other people as well yeah yeah okay so all of the above energy that's something that I'm really hearing a lot more about lately and I want to go back to natural gas because you said that's one of your your favorites right now that's a market that I'm less familiar with I'm I'm pretty okay on the mining side when we get into oil and gas a little bit less familiar so the case for natural gas if you could
tell me what you're looking at there and what you're doing to get involved well look the the demand side for natural gas has really killed the price I mean we had a period uh in several months back where we had the lowest natural gas price the so-called Henry Hub price in something like 30 years uh for a short time again up there in Canada again through the summertime producers were getting almost nothing for natural gas you know they were multi-decade lows for what they were getting uh and a lot of that is
because you've got very strong production and of course you know as the US has added oil production you've got Associated gas production with that as well or Natural Gas Liquids but between the US and Canada both our export Industries are about to take another big leap forward to meet the demand for natural gas in other parts of the world Europe and Asia chiefly and I just think that you know when you consider too that more so than with oil you know what what's the old saying the news of n of
fossil fuels death has been greatly exaggerated um it's going to take many many years to have nuclear energy and what legitimately there is of solar and wind power they're going to move the needle enough in meeting demand so that we can actually see a reduction in the need for natural gas until then we still have net gains and net demand increasing for natural gas year toe lots of Supply in the recent past which has kept the price down but part of that was courtesy of two abnormal normally mild
Winters in a row both in Europe and in the West in in you know the the Western Hemisphere here and and is that going to continue are we going to get a third year of that if we do then the price is going to stay low but I think that long term the stars are aligning for a much higher threshold price for natural gas because demand is so unsatiable so you know I think you see instead of $2 to3 do we were a little over $3 recently with this cold snap that we had you know in recent days here in North America uh
natural gas ran up to 350 or something like that sold off to three bucks it'll run again ahead of the next cold snap and with a lot of volatility in between I think we you know I've seen a lot of things and I'll be talking about this in the National investor shortly where I think that by next summer or certainly be ahead of next we all else being equal without any surprises good or bad we're going to be at a four to five dollar threshold price going forward uh don't forget about India uh India is going to
be a huge consumer of natural gas that's the new China when it comes to growth it's going to be a different animal than China was because India is not going to be the manufacturing and Export Center like China was but they are going to be a big consumer of a lot of things that they need just for daily life and natural gas is going to be near the top of the list and with natural gas is this one where right now you can kind of buy the larger players and that's a good place to be or would you look further
down the food chain uh look even a lot of the majors and diversified companies when you look at them fundamentally based on their earnings and dividends you got some really cheap stuff out there I mean I've been I've been a big advocate of the infrastructure and pipeline companies for a while I'll give you one stock that has amazed me but it's emblematic of the whole sector in North America you look at an Energy Transfer Partners ET is their symbol on a New York Stock Exchange I think it was
about three years ago the stock was eight or n dollar and I said this pound-for-pound is the best of the bunch of all of these master limited Partnerships and and and pipeline type of companies now it's not nine anymore it's 19 and something like that last I looked and they've raised their dividend once or twice a year even going from 9 to 19 the dividend is still 7% and they're just they're they're mining money and they just they just brought in some creative transactions or Acquisitions as
well Canada uh I'm F I've got a couple companies on my recommended list in Canada that suffered temporarily in the market with the you know the dip down in the natural gas price uh this summer but I mean you've got some solid companies and and as cheap as the big and even midsize and smaller producers are in the US they're cheaper still fundamentally in Canada because Canada you know when when there were bad times in the oil patch and and energy suffered a lot worse in relative terms than the US did
so I I I love the theme going forward of positive cash flowing High dividend paying Canadian companies I've got a couple of them on my list now I'm going to be adding more because one of these days despite the strong US dollar right now the whole world is going to realize that we need a lot more energy A lot more copper a lot more nickel a lot more uranium Canada will benefit disproportionately from that and especially when you get better leadership in your country and the potential of Canada's economy is
met I'm telling my us investor friends right now look you're you're buying Canadian energy companies fundamentally and currency wise both for a third off three years from now or so or four years from now when a Canadian dollar is a parody again with the US dollar you're a US investor you just made 40% besides what your dividends have been and everything like that by buying a Canadian stock right now with US dollars so any us investor who's bullish on energy they should be doubly bullish
on Canadian energy okay okay that helps me a lot to get a handle on this sector just starting to learn more about it so thank you for that I think we've gone through a lot today and I think we've touched on all of your main sectors that you like right now so I I would let you go but before I do any final thoughts that you would share with investors I think we're wrapping up a very interesting year heading toward yet another very interesting year so any any last thought as I alluded to a few minutes ago
Charlotte was going to impact all of these different markets and I think a public policy and trade an economic issue a market issue that's going to Bear watching that has not been discussed in a in a sensible way nearly enough yet is going to be a relationship between the US and China um we have two economies going in completely opposite directions you know uh even President Biden not only continued a lot of the Trump tariffs from Trump 1.0 on China but added some other ones look the whole tariff thing I
think is a sledgehammer president Trump's going to have to get into office and figure out that he cannot use a sledgehammer he's going to make a bad situation worse he needs to use a scout R and use tariffs where they should appropriately be used he loves to make you know comparisons between himself and President William McKinley Once Upon a Time in the US at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution who used tariffs and a good and judicial and targeted way to protect us industries that were emerging in
those days now let me point something out this is one of many examples we could talk all day about just this we've got China because of cheap labor because of cheap raw materials and now because of dramatic over Supply I mean you've got in parts of the world these byd electric vehicles that are sold for cheaper than anybody else on the planet pretty much can sell EVS for sitting on docks they're not being bought by consumers okay so if you're the US and you want to have your own or Canada you
want to have your own from from the ground to the showroom floor EV industry and and and and you build your own EVs and the batteries that required to run them and so forth you cannot mathematically compete with China so what do you do you do you tell consumers all right for the next five years until we get our act together and cost down and and and whatnot and we can sell an affordable EV you can't buy any period okay and I'm I'm oversimplifying this to make the point or do we say okay
we'll we'll let some in from China but in return for exports of things that we do produce right now to China do we do that I mean you know in the last year he was in office in Trump 1.0 the president was bragging about this what he called at the time phase one trade deal with China where among other things China agreed to buy $200 billion dollar more of us Goods that we do produce back then you know how many that they've bought to this day none none China with the rest of the world has A1
trillion Trade Surplus you do not fix that overnight or next month or frankly in the next 10 years you might start putting a dent in it and so what the president's going to have to do because he's going to lose any trade War he gets in with China and frankly the American people are going to lose he needs to again and this goes back is thinking outside the box he needs to have smart people around him figure out okay what do we need to do to have a crash emergency course to build the industries and restart or start the
mines that we need to do in this country to replace what we're not getting from China because we need this stuff one way or the other saying okay we're not going to have it at all if we're not going to import from China doesn't work and China knows this and China's already getting in front of a trade War you know know just like Russia before Trump is even in office is embargoing enris uranium uh China just announced tighter controls on the export of things like animony and some Rare Earth elements that we need
for defense applications for High-Tech applications for E you know magnets and things like that so you know we we got ourselves in this mess because years ago some people made the decision that we're not just going to Outsource sneakers and electronics to China we're going to Outsource everything to other countries now there's here's where we're kind of starting from and um you know if if the president thinks he's just going to fix all this by punishing China and therefore us consumers by slapping
tariffs on things he he's it's not going to work so that's going to impact everything because China don't forget Charlotte even though we've still got despite our huge debt levels we've still got a lot of liquidity us markets China has been valiantly fighting off a more epic implosion of its debt structure its markets and its economy than the slow motion one that they've got right now and if that all of a sudden speeds up or if Trump by thinking is going to punish China pushes them off the cliff
they take everybody with them for a while including us so the way that this whole thing with China pardon me for being too long longwinded on this but this is the most important thing that consumers and investors and policy makers need to watch in 2025 is is Trump smart on how he deals with all of this and rebuilds our own Industries to compensate for years down the road or is he going to be hamfisted about it and cause more problems than he solves okay I think and and no problem at all it's
it's very good to get that out there for everybody and we'll keep an eye on it sounds like there's so many just find lines to be walked here so we'll we'll hope that there can be some success and and certainly we'll check in with you in the new year to see how how these themes are playing out but for now thank you so much for coming on to wrap up the year and look forward to the new year that's my pleasure as always Charlotte it's nice to see you again really nice to see you and once
again I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing news.com and this is Chris temple with the national investor thank you for watching if you like this video make sure you hit the like button and subscribe to our Channel we'd also love to hear your thoughts so leave us a comment [Music] below for
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