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 I'm Charlotte Mloud with investingnews.com and here today with me is Keith Weiner, founder and CEO of Monetary Metals. Thank you so much for being here. Great to have you. >> Thanks for having me, Charlotte. >> Really good to be catching up with you, especially during what I have heard has been a really busy week for you. You've been at the Dubai Precious Metals Conference. So, I thought we could begin there. I've never been to that event. I imagine many of our viewers also have

never had a chance to attend. I wondered if you could share any key takeaways, things that you were hearing on the show floor. >> You know, it's it's a different world here versus uh in the west and I keep saying that. Um you know, here the jewelry market is by and large the investment market. You know, if you read any western analyst of the gold market, they'll talk about electronics demand and investment demand and jewelry demand. And there's a certain amount that goes to Tiffany's

where they'll sell you, you know, 3 12 gram of gold for $17,000. But most of, you know, what's sold for jewelry is sold to Indians and Arabs and Turks and and and in in these cultures, you know, it's sold by weight, right? So you pick up a necklace and there's says right on there this is whatever x number of grams 30 g and it's sold by the the weight times the gold price plus what they call making charge which in Dubai is a very very competitive market that making charge would be you know often 5%

or less so very little markup these guys are working on very tight margins but very high volumes that is investment now um the buzz obviously is is the gold price boy has it has it ripped to higher versus, you know, a year ago. And you would think that's good and everybody's happy. But, um, as so many things in our, you know, government managed, centrally planned world and a fiat currency with a central bank is central planning. Um, I I get into arguments with economists about that. Yes, it's central planning.

Period. Full stop. Um, central planning turns something that could be win-win and and turns it into win- lose. So, the rising gold price is great for people who bought gold who are thinking about selling it because they have a gain. But, uh, on the other side of the equation are uh, you know, the industry and they're getting whacked, you know, one by by what? By the forehand and the backhand. the beforehand is they, you know, typically finance their inventories with a loan. So, you know, you borrow a million dollars, you buy a

million dollars worth of gold, you stick that in your store, and if the gold price drops 10%, now you have a $900,000 asset versus a million dollar liability. You're insolvent. So, you have to hedge. So you borrow a million and a quarter, buy a million worth of gold and put a quarter million into a margin account where you're shorting you usually gold futures. Um so and when the price rises, you get margin calls and uh margin calls are very unpleasant, very unwelcome because essentially you have to come up

with more capital and where are you going to where you going to find all the extra money? So um it causes them a great deal of stress. That's the that's the forehand. The backhand is you know salaries have not kept up with the gold price. It's not you know people think of inflation as this uniform okay well the currency is losing a value and therefore every price as measured in the currency is going up. That's not the case. You know price of gold has gone up massively but salaries have not. And so what it

means is people buy less gold by weight. if they would have bought a 10 gram bracelet, now they're buying a five gram bracelet because they have the same amount of money, same amount of currency anyway. And you buy half as much gold as they did a year ago or or two years ago. So um you know the jewelers are selling or I mean there's other reasons why sales long as it picked up because people are becoming more agitated about the currency but so people are increasing their commitment to gold but the amount

of gold you can get for the same buck is is going down. So the jewelers are getting whacked uh you know both ways. So um there's increasing buzz about silver jewelry which is not you know especially in India but you I think Turkey uh you know the Arab world silver is not the first choice but it's what you can afford when you don't get you know there's an expression I heard people in in hell want ice cream doesn't mean they get it you know the average day laborer wants gold doesn't

mean you can get it so uh you they turn to silver and so the demand for silver has been way up and that perhaps could explain uh the silver price action. Um you know just just one little random rant if I may. Um you know the gold price goes up everybody has to have either conspiracy theory or whatever. Oh it's central banks that have driven it up. Okay. Well silver is going up even more than gold obviously in you know the recent you know goround. That's not central banks. Central banks aren't

buying silver. So, so who is? Well, there's, you know, more investment/jwelry demand, whatever you want to call it, from people who just are priced out of gold or you can't get enough gold to be interesting, but you can get a lot of silver, right? So, suppose you had $200. How much gold can you get for that $200? Well, 28 of an ounce, right? Um, how much silver can you get? Well, heck of a lot more for whole ounces. Um, a bit under, you know, 3 and a half ounces now. So, uh, you know, the

journey to silver and, you know, we've had big big demand in silver, obviously driving the price up. There was a backwardation in silver, the likes of which I've never seen in all the time I've been following the market in October. um spiking the silver lease rate as London measures it causing all kinds of dislocations in the market and so you know conference like Dubai precious metals conference it's not investors saying you know happy happy joy joy because gold and silver beat

Bitcoin this year it's the trade saying this is causing us real conernnation in our businesses um you know and yes to the extent they all have gold on balance sheet to the to to the extent they have gold, they're happy that they're, you know, they've made a profit in dollar terms or endurance terms, but it's causing real problems in, you know, in the business. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think you have highlighted a real difference in terms of how Eastern and Western people are looking

at what's going on with the prices right now. And I think that's a topic that we've gone over in the past as well. So, really interesting. And maybe talking a little bit more about those those western attitudes toward what's going on with the precious metals. I think the the questions that I'm seeing a lot of right now when it comes to gold and silver is all right, we went up to these all-time high prices. We've pulled back from there. Although of course levels are historically high still, but people

are looking and they're wondering all right, when is the next leg higher going to be for gold and silver and what is going to drive that? So any comments you could share on that topic? >> You know predicting the timing of these things is essentially impossible. You know monetary metals we publish essentially fundamentals of the market as we measure it and we've written all these papers why these are the fundamentals but you know the fundamental doesn't tell you whether the move is going to be tomorrow morning or

whether it's over the next 18 months. And there can be a correction along the way too. What we can say is that in gold as the price has gone up the fundamentals remain pretty flat which actually is interesting because the historical pattern is historical the long dark period of second half of 2011 through 2018 into 2019 every time the price would go up the fundamentals would get worse. And what was happening was the price was only going up because people, you know, speculators in the futures

market, who by the way, use great leverage from making big leverage bets on the price and driving the price up, trying to frontun what they thought was, you know, the rumor that the Bank of Ireland was going to buy or this central bank or that central bank or whatever. And they end up front running only themselves. And then eventually when everyone's all in, they start to go for the exits and you know, the price comes down. And that happened over and over and over again. price goes up and with

it basis goes up. Okay, that was the pattern for a long time. And every time that happened, the the gold bug community would write, "That's it. This is the moonshot." And they'd have pictures of rockets on their articles and stuff. And I would always put out this little article saying, "This isn't the moonshot you're looking for." Or I would quote Argorn, "The day will come when silver will be $50 and more, but today is not that day." I can't tell you

how many times I overused that until that cliche was completely worn out between 2012 and 2018. And they called me a perma bear. Keith hates gold. Keith wants the central. Keith works for the Fed, wants the Fed to win. And the guys don't get it. So now we see rising price and in gold the fundamentals are not softening. Now they're not firming up either, but they're not softening, which given that the price has now been picking up again is notable. Now, in silver, the fundamentals are actually

getting firmer as the price is going up. And so, now we're not in the territory that we're in in October, uh, you know, by any means, but, um, which is a crazy one once in a lifetime event, but, um, fundamentals are getting getting stronger even as the price has gone up. Now, does that mean that you'll see $60 silver by end of year? That's that's a mug's game that I don't I don't want to play. But there's a generally rising price trend. It's a trend. It's a mega

trend, right? This is global. This is uh a durable trend. And you know, will there be corrections along the way? Yes. Will the price trend higher? Yes. What's going to happen in what order? To what degree? You know, the market's going to unfold. But if you want to make a bet on silver and don't get crazy with leverage, you could argue there's, you know, there are plenty of worse times for doing it than now. And why? Because the monetary system is turning to bleep. >> Well, that's also quite quite

interesting to look at. So going forward, I know I know you don't want to make too many price predictions here, but would silver is silver looking like the better bet versus gold as we are heading into 2026? Yeah, I think I mean silver's always been it's much more volatile than gold. So, you know, when the market's going down, you're going to lose more dollars than silver. When the market's going up, you're going to make more dollars in silver. Right now, yeah, I think a

better uh you know, if you're going to bet on one or the other. And and I don't think you're going to go wrong with either this. It's like it's like picking stocks in a bull market. You know, you're throwing darts at the board. as long as you hit the board, as long as you don't like somehow poke your own eye out, you know, you're going to do okay given enough time. Um, and and I think we're just in that kind of market right now. And I can say that institutional investors, so when we

started monetary medals uh in 2012, we were selling a niche hedge fund to trade the gold silver ratio. But the thing that was unique about it, we kept the books in gold and the compensation to us as the managers of the fund was based on how many ounces we gained, not the dollar price gain. Little did we know that was, you know, hell of a bare market that was going to last for years and years. But maybe one of the indications that we should have should have picked up on was institutional investors of which we spoke to many in

2013 were all trying to exit whatever gold positions they had and most of them were the ones that we spoke to at least had a gold position. They were all basically saying, "Oh yeah, we're exiting our position. You know, we're getting quarterly liquidity and you know, next January is the last trance we'll be able to paid out and cashed out and close our position and move on. So everyone's exiting now everyone is entering and I don't think they've largely I mean some of them have entered

of course but I think many of them have not entered yet and they're trying to pick their positions and we see institutional investors who largely have avoided gold. They have an allergy to it um trying to figure out their you know gold strategy as well as family offices and others. And so with that uptick, you can see, okay, there's going to be relentless buying, which of course will be a self-fulfilling prophecy and drive the price up. So I I think we're in that mode at the moment. Throw some darts at

the board. Yes. Um don't get crazy with leverage because, you know, if you're using leverage and the price moves against you, you get wiped out and then the price will turn around and go even higher, but you're out because, you know, your position was was zeroed out. So don't let that happen to you. Well, and speaking about these institutions coming into the gold market, they they want to be involved. I've been seeing a lot of headlines this past week or so about Tether, the stable coin issuer,

being the biggest buyer of gold in the third quarter ahead of even the central banks that were buying in Q3. So, I'm wondering if you've been hearing about that, if that's on your radar, and what it could tell us about the gold market right now. Well, first of all, isn't it interesting that native sons of the crypto world are buying massive amounts of gold? Analog Bitcoin, if you want to call it that. Um, they're not loading up on more crypto or more Bitcoin, loading up on gold. Isn't that interesting? Um, you

know, and and they're pretty open to talking about it, why they believe in gold and all these things. And I'm like, you know, it has these these characteristics. Um, Tether is also, um, I don't know if we talked about this the last time I was on your show. I know I've talked about this with somebody. They're trying to do more interesting things, right? It's not just buy gold, you know, that's the retail play. If you think gold's going to go up, you buy gold and you stick it under the pillow,

right? So, in Turkey, they actually have a term that translates as pillow gold. Um in India they have a different term for it obviously in the in you know North America would say under the mattress. Um that's a retail you know or stick it in a brink that's kind of a retail you know mindset institutional investors are like how do I get this working for me and it could be okay we buy all this gold we stick it at a bank like HSBC or JP Morgan and we get credit against the gold uh which what we call a

bombard loan. You pledge your gold as collateral, you get dollars, and then you can invest those dollars in whatever you want, whether it be Nvidia stock, whether it be, you know, old whisies that are aging, whether it be real estate, antique Ferraris, Picassos, whatever you want. And if your thesis pays off, the price of gold goes up and the thing that you bought goes up and the interest you pay is a small cost relative to the two big capital gains you've had. And so there's a lot of uh

um you know family offices and others that would take that approach. Um Tether is building or has built not exactly sure what stage of the process they are. Uh you know a gold desk similar to what either a bank would have or what a commodities trading firm would have. Um and they're doing investments in streaming royalty companies. They're buying pieces of mining companies. doing all kinds. They're buying equity, they're buying the streams, they're doing all kinds of stuff to, you know,

and and I think they're doing arbitrage, right? So, it's buy spot, sell forward, you know, they're doing all the all the all the things to play in the gold market and generate returns. Um, which is, you know, it's more of an institutional approach versus retail approach and you're getting more out of the gold. So, you know, I I have to cheer that on and say that's great. people are becoming more sophisticated. They're questing for that word healed. You know that that monetary metals talks

about evangelizes all the time. Um and that's what everybody is, you know, sort of questing for blindly is yeah, we need yield, right? You know, if this is money, if gold is money, that's the thesis, right? Then money should generate a yield. You should be able to find something to put it into that generates a yield. And um we'll see if they're you know where they go. I I can't speak to any particular company and what they may or may not do but um in general I think the market at the

institutional end that's what they're you know that's what and it can be blind and and sort of groping but that's what the market is is is is seeking. I think I think that makes a lot of sense how you explain it and there is a lot more going on there with tether than just the buying of gold. And I also think it it's worth noting so we're seeing this this ongoing interest in gold growing interest in gold and currently right now we are seeing the Bitcoin price really take a hit. So I wondered if you could

share any insight on what you see going on there and and how that could continue to play out. So, you know, the Bitcoin I love there's a term that the Australians use which is spruer or spruers. And a spruer is like kind of a cheap promoter, you know, carnival barker that will say anything to get you to buy or whatever the behaviors they want out of you. So, the Bitcoin spookers make a bunch of promises and and it sort of goes around in circles. They make a promise and then you sort of explore that turns out not

to really be true and then they just move on and they move on and and it comes in a circle and one of their their big ones is digital gold. Well, first of all, that's one promise they make about it. No, it's not anything like gold. It's more like digital NASDAQ, you know, with extra juice. It's like a beta high beta version of NASDAQ. Um, and then they talk about store value. I don't really think store of value is a legitimate way. It's a legitimate concept. But for a lay audience, people

sort of get like, okay, if I hold this thing, I hold my value and I come back to market 20 years later, leave it to my grandkids, you know, by the, you know, I want them to be 35 years old before they're eligible to inherit so they don't turn into, you know, playboys and and, you know, waste all their money. They have to get a real job and a real career and then they inherit it, you know, when they're 35 or 40. So decades hence they're going to get to gold. You know the regardless of whether that

concept is really a right concept or not, everyone kind of understands that gold 50 years from now will still be highly valuable. And you know the price can be plus or minus whatever but it certainly if there's money to basement the gold price more than adjusts for it. If consumer prices go up, not necessarily so because consumer prices may go up for other nonmonetary reasons. But if the money is going down then the price of gold you know goes up as the inverse of that. So um the bitcoiners

try to capitalize on this understanding and say but bitcoin does this too. And so when you see a massive draw down of 30 what was it 36% I think so far we'll see if it's over. They were very highly confident it's over. We're back to the races again. Uh but then they were highly confident when we hit 126,000 it was on its way to a million. None of them predicted you know 80,000. So um you know we'll see. But anyways people kind of get discouraged and they start to think well Bitcoin isn't a

store of value. Look at the gigantic draw down that just occurred. And so some of them exit never to return. And even the ones who you know want to return they start to see it more as a trade. It's volatile. And if you can catch the timing, right, boy, can you make a lot of money? Um, so, okay, trading vehicle, wonderful. Where do you turn when you want to take out some of your winnings and and hold them in something stable? It ain't Bitcoin. And if it ain't Bitcoin, ain't any of the other crypto coins. What is

it? They don't like fiat currency, and I don't blame them. That only leaves one four-letter word that begins with G and ends in D. And so, there they are. Maybe they buy some silver, too. I don't know, but basically gold. >> Yeah. Yeah, I can see how that transition could start to play out. And just continuing on a little bit further into what's going on in gold and silver right now. I find that you're always really good at pointing out misconceptions in the market, things

that people might be missing. So, I wanted to ask, I know it's a little bit of a broad question, but is there anything you're seeing on that note right now that you think investors could be missing that they should be aware of? Maybe the biggest thing is when people talk about dollar weakness and what they mean is the dollar index. Now the dollar index is heavily weighted to the euro. So it's a measure of um the euro well it's a measure of the dollar in euro terms but with some yes there's a

pound and a yen and a yan in there but it's you know majority euro so they say the dollar is is going down or whatever first of all it's not really true the dollar index I checked a couple of days ago I don't follow it every day was was basically 100 so you know it's a cycle that goes up and down anyway and dd dollarization is not a thing. Um, every once in a while I like to actually So, there's two things. One is dd dollararization. Boy, is that a giant mistake. And every time, you know,

people are talking about this. My headlines, you know, just scroll, whether I'm looking at Yahoo Finance or wherever I'm looking and, you know, there was some here in UAE, uh, I don't remember if it was a sovereign fund or a big private developer just issued some $50 billion bond. Now the dollar is not the currency in UAE. The currency in the UAE is Durham and they're issuing $50 billion bond. It's not the dollarizing, not in the remotest, you know, sense. And then once you borrow that $50 billion, then you

have to surface the debt. So the demand for dollars is ferocious and relentless. So that's one misconception. Um, another misconception is the dollar is going down against the other currencies. The dollar index 100. That's definitely not the case. Um, and then third is trying to measure saying the dollar is going down because the euro is going up. You can't measure the dollar in euros. The the euro is a dollar derivative. So I like to use the analogy of if if the fundamental if the underlying thing is

Apple shares and then you have Apple call options. So you have a December call option with a strike 5% above the market. That's the derivative. You would never say that Apple shares went down in terms of Apple call options. You would say the Apple call options went up. But in the case of the dollar, we do that. We say the dollar went down when the euro went up. Okay, the euro went up. That's nice. And there's a million uh you know monetary system reasons why the euro can go up or down. You can't think

of the dollar in terms of the euro. So to say the dollar is going down, therefore gold is going up. It's just a non sequator, right? So measure the dollar in gold, measure the euro in dollars. And if you do that, things are so it's so much simpler, so much cleaner. It's like before Capernicus, I thought they were trying to figure out where everything was moving around the Earth. And you get the retrograde motion, which is too complicated to even describe mathematically, let alone explain the cause of that. When you

realize everything's going around the sun, it's so much simpler. And it's the same thing here. Think of the dollar as being valued in gold. And the price of the dollar is, you know, whatever it is, eight, you know, less than 8 milligrams of gold. And then think of the euro is priced in dollars. The euro is $114 or whatever. And and it's so much easier rather than thinking of the dollar index. So no, we're not dollarizing. No, the dollar is not going up or down when the euro goes down or up. And no, the

euro going up does not mean the gold has to go up necessarily. Maybe sometimes, but sometimes the opposite. And you know, the dollar is going down because the system is going off the rails. The system Oh, that was that was the euphemism, floating currencies. So, Milton Friedman said, "Oh, the currencies are floating. It sounds wonderful, right?" No, they're all sinking in the same way that if you if you had a uh cargo jet and you open the the uh cargo door and you have a brick going down, you have a rock, maybe you

have a bottle full of beer, maybe you have a bomb with, you know, fins on it, you know, you have 2x4, you have all these things falling out of the plane. And then, you know, if you put GoPro cameras on each one of them, if you had a if you had a camera on the brick, you know, the 2x4 and the bottle of beer would look like they're going up, at least in the period of time that it takes for them all to fall. Eventually, they'll crash into the earth and they all all destroyed, right? Maybe the bomb

blows up and, you know, spreads the glass shards everywhere, whatever. But, um, it's not it's not really going up, is it? that bottle that's in freef fall out of the airplane. It's it's that it's well, it's not it's not quite free fall. It has more air friction relative to its mass than the brick. So, the brick is falling faster. And so, from the brick's perspective, the bottle is going up. But if you had a camera on the bottle, the brick is going down. Meanwhile, if you

had a camera on the ground, they're all going down at different rates. And Milton Friedman used the term floating, but actually they're sinking or even freef falling or even rocket propelled down. Um, so what a terrible analogy and you know euphemism like and that's why I use airbag. It's a euphemism. >> Yeah. Yeah. You can see how you really need to reframe your thinking around the dollar, gold, other currencies in order to understand that. So thank you for going into that. And I want to pick up

on some topics that we covered in our last conversation which was back during August. I believe we're talking about the the Fed at that time and you had said interest rates were going to start coming down probably sooner rather than later and we've seen that start to unfold. Of course, inflation remains above the Fed's 2% target and looking forward to the December meeting. I know there's some questions about whether we'll get another cut there. So, I wanted to get your take, see what you're

seeing from the Fed looking forward into next month and also into next year. I mean, my my view is the same. They have to cut rates. The trend the trend is down. And um now I my I have a little rant. I don't know if I've made this rant uh in conversation with you on on uh on your show yet. I I know I've done it elsewhere, but the rant is that if all you cared about was consumer prices, what we call inflation, the consumer price index, if that was your only concern and you were willing to

ignore the many, many grievous harms that would be caused by this policy or the strategy, you should want lower interest rates, not higher interest rates. Yes, I am saying the entire world of mainstream economics and alternative economics which they all agree that if you want to kill inflation, have higher interest rates. I'm saying yes, they're all wrong. If you want lower consumer prices, you should have falling interest rates, which will, by the way, inflict grievous harm in a number of ways on the

economy. I'm not recommending this as a policy, but if your focus was this narrow thing of consumer price index inflation, you should want lower interest rates. So, I'm not saying well that they're going to have lower interest rates despite the inflation that's too high and that somehow they're going to juggle the goal of lower interest rates and neglect the goal of of consumer prices. They're actually tied. And this has been understood since N. Wixel studied this in the 1890s. Now,

he was a monitorist and he studied the quantity of money and the and the price level expecting to find they were correlated. That was that was the expected result, but he was honest enough to record what he actually found. And what he found was they're not correlated. Instead, what he found is interest rates correlated to the price level. Later, an economist named Gibson was talking about this and this was dubbed Gibson's paradox. It's only a paradox if you expect the mainstream theory to be right, which it

isn't. And so this Gibson's paradox has been understood since I think the 1920 about 100 years ago. It's not new. And then monetary theory has discarded this. They pretend it's not there. It's an anomaly that doesn't fit. So they just bury it under the lump under the rock and you know move on. But anyway, this was understood. Now they didn't understand why, but they understood it. They at least recognized it. And the answer why is very simple. A falling interest rate is an increased subsidy to

producers to borrow more to produce more. Right? So if you are manufacturing burgers, you're a burger restaurant and the interest rate ticks down, that is your incentive to open up another store and unless the appetite for burgers increases or unless the population increases, that is going to push the price of burgers as price of burgers will at least be soft if not falling. And conversely, if you raise the interest rate, then any number of burger restaurants are rendered sub marginal that they can no longer surface the debt

and have to be closed and go out of business. When they are closed and go out of business, the remaining, which is a fewer number of burger places, there's a reduced supply. What happens when the supply goes down? Well, the price goes up. And so, this is not that complicated. And the mainstream theory has it backwards. So if you want lower prices, you should have should want falling interest rates. And I think we're getting them because the business business can't afford the interest rates

that it's paying. The whole thing is unsustainable. We we're on a falling trend for many decades for reasons go way out of the scope of this interview. But uh I think that's going to continue. And also Trump wants lower interest rates and he has apparently has the power to force it. So Powell is going to retire soon or his term is up and Trump is going to replace him with somebody who absolutely will go for lower rates and will have lower rates and um there you have it. Now meanwhile consumer

prices are are rising and high because of a number of non-monetary forces including tariffs. So I'm told that in Canada you can't buy American wine, beer or whiskey anymore. Right? So the remaining brands which either European or Canadian have, you know, have the leeway to raise their prices, that's not monetary, right? That's a result of fiscal policy attacks. In the US, you slap a 20% tariff on, I don't know, imported cars and then you find the price of cars goes up 20%. And the

domestic manufacturers can take shelter underneath that. Then maybe they don't raise their prices 20%. They raise them 19%, 18%. But you know, prices go up and then people say, "Well, we have inflation. We need to have higher interest rates." Higher interest rate would mean a higher cost of capital for anybody wanting to finance the construction of domestic capacity. If you're a domestic automaker and you say, "Well, they've taxed Mercedes and Jaguar and everybody out of the market. I want

to open a plant to manufacture more cars." Well, they've just jacked up your finance cost. And so the the business case is retreating out of sight. even though the price of cars is going up. Very perverse. >> Well, I appreciate the rant and I wonder so if we put all of this together, I know people looking into the new year have a lot of questions about how the US economy is going to be shaping up. What do you see coming? What would your outlook be there? >> You know, try to summarize this in one

thing. It's almost irresistible force, immovable object. Um, the world is not only not ddollarizing but dollarizing ferociously. So more capital coming into the dollar, more desire to invest in the US because if you invest in other countries, even if your thesis turns out to be correct and the economy is doing okay in that country, which by the way, stronger dollars hurts a lot of other countries economies in in a myriad of ways. But even if you're right and the currency goes down in in absolute terms

may actually be going down. So investment wants to come into the US. Businesses that are forced not to be able to be in business in their local places. Suppose you have an energyintensive manufacturing business in in Germany. And they have this policy that I'm going to botch the German pronunciation, but I'll try energy vend transition to get rid of all the energy sources that work and replace them with all the energy sources that are unreliable or don't work. So get rid of, you know, coal, natural gas, nuclear,

and replace it with wind and solar. Solar, by the way, in a place so far north, I can't imagine that the sun is particularly strong in Germany. It's pretty far north, but yet they're doing that. So if you're an energy intensive industry, you want to open up plants in the US when the energy is a hell of a lot cheaper. Um, but at the same time, you have trends where, you know, if if Immigrations and Customs Enforcement isn't arresting your your trainers that are trying to train the American

workforce as they did to Hyundai, um, if you're not getting um, you know, your raw materials tariffed, you know, out of reach, um, then your workforce, you you know, the workforce you'd be hiring or being deported, where are all the workers going to come from? It's It's not like there's 50 million American workers that want relatively low wage, you know, assembly jobs. The workforce isn't there, you know. Uh I think it was Tim Cook at Apple, the was it the first Trump administration

who's talking about, you know, can you make iPhones in the US? And he said there's whole industries where you have um you know, engineers that are like manufacturing engineers. So, these are engineers that have figured out where to put the screws and what size threads to use and how to fit the the circuit board into the enclosure. There's like all this engineering that goes around all this stuff. It's like that skill doesn't exist in the US and in China they have like 10 million people that are experts

at that. And then how many people do they have that are willing to sit at a table for 8 or 10 hours a day and screw little circuit boards into you know little mobile phones and you know they have 50 million people that are willing to do that and and America doesn't Americans don't want those jobs any certainly not at those wages but probably not at any price and um so on the one hand it wants to come into the US because they're screwed even more in in Europe. On the other hand, the US is

doing all these things to, you know, push them out. And um you know, what's going to win, I don't know. Obviously, if you're a company that makes manufacturing automation tools, you're probably in pretty good position. I guess that's an investment thesis. Anything that can reduce the labor is is is as a good bet. Um whether we technically hit recession or not, I don't have a strong, you know, call on that. Um, you know, I can say that the economy will continue to grind harder

for working people. None of this is good for working people. We're driving up costs. We're driving down returns. We're doing everything to drive down you employment. Um, you know, none of this is good. But, um, you know, that's the policies that are, you know, populist, right? >> Yeah. And I think we've talked before about that kind of bifurcation in the economy. And I saw I saw a stat this week that really got me. It was something like the top 10% of earners in the US are now responsible for half of

the spending. I don't know if I'm getting that exactly right, but something like that. And that's a historic high. So, anything further you'd add there? Is that just going to for for the working population like you're talking about? Does that just continue to to worsen for them essentially? >> Yeah, I think so. And then of course with that is social tensions. You know, real anger comes out of this and people talk about inequality. Every every hot political issue to me seems like a

false alternative. The one side is saying let's use the government to unjustly and unfairly advantage a tiny little group and the other side of saying let's use the government to forcibly equalize everybody. So imagine you have a bunch of people that want to play basketball from me to uh LeBron James. Well, there's only one way to equalize me and LeBron James. I'm not going to be a great basketball player, but you could cause enough injuries to him, load him down with 100 pounds of

cement to make him play no better than me. Tie one of his hands behind his back, blindfold one of his eyes with no death perception, weigh him down, break his legs, whatever you do, right? And now we're equal. Um, so on the one hand, it's like forced equalization and on the other hand, um, you know, in sapian fascism. Um so the Dubai precious metals conference was held you know people may know that Dubai has these artificial islands and um you know making these artificial islands is a real art you know here in

Dubai. So they have this, it's not really one island. I I think it's actually m technically multiple islands called the palm. And so it sticks off the mainland and there's the trunk of the palm and there's the fronds and then at the very outer tip of it uh you know it's a very high valued real estate and there's an Atlantis um hotel resort which is the same people who do the Atlantis in Nassau Bahamas except this one is bigger more high-end and I think an even bigger aquarium that

you can get under the kids can get underneath it look at the fish above them and all that. and the I think the biggest water park in the world with the slides and the you know the endless looping pools with you know there's a current that goes around you get in your floating mattress and you know inner tubes and whatever. Um and it's a very expensive I don't know why the conference went there. I mean it was $600 700 a room you know per night. I mean it's a very expensive place and

there's you know it's a huge huge hotel. The conference did not fail half of it. So, there's all these tourists that are there and everybody's walking, all the ladies are walking around with Louis Vuitton or Gucci, you know, bags that probably cost $1,000 or more and they're sipping drinks that are $25 and um you know, and they're and some of them are sweets and whatever that are $1,200 a night and and there's so there's a certain class that's spending like there's no tomorrow. A lot of this

is spending on credit cards, all credit. Um, but a lot of it is, yeah, these are the people that are trading whether it's crypto, whether it's Nvidia, you know, and and and they're taking down millions and spending it. Um, but this is what Kanes talked about when he said if you debot the money, you destroy all sacred bonds between creditor and debtor and and generally impoverish most people, but arbitrarily and capricciously enrich a few. And you know th those bajgeois that are arbitrally

enriched will be presented by their fellow bourgeoa. This is all in in Kane's uh you know parliament. Um, so yeah, we're we're seeing that. Um, and when the interest rate really begins falling again, that's going to drive asset prices up to a whole another level and the asset owning class, especially those that are privileged to have access to credit to buy assets on on leverage or margin, will see, you know, huge leaps in their in their net worth. And they'll be driving around in Bugattis and and

Rolls-Royces and all these things and everyone else is simmering with more and more anger demanding equality in the sense of now, you know, struggle sessions, right? Tear everybody down, kill them, make everybody the same. You're not even allowed to wear different clothing. Everybody has to wear the same peasant smok, right? Or or or in Russia where, you know, you send 20 million people to die in the goolag. And and that's anyway we're headed towards a dark I'm gonna hate to be pessimistic about it but

we're headed towards a dark place with all this because it's unjust and it's unsustainable and it's going to break somehow and um you know if we don't come to our senses and reverse these these policies. >> I think I think you encapsulated it very well there and it it does seem like it's going to be heading toward tough times and I've got to get you out of here. I know you've been working really hard all week, but before I do, let's maybe we can end on your your best advice for

investors heading into 2026 given all that we are dealing with right now. >> I'm not normally sort of the stock picker recommend this or recommend that. You know, I I think interest rates are coming down. So, if you want to buy long-term treasuries, as ironic it is for me to say that, the gold guy saying bet on treasuries and as perverse as it is, right? There's nothing good or healthy about treasury bonds as an asset class going up. Um, but that's a theme. Um, if you want to bet against on the

dollar against, you know, peripheral currencies, I think that's likely to be a good bet. not necessarily the euro, not necessarily a big move in the dollar index, but certain peripheral currencies, if you can find a way to bet on that thesis. Um, I think the price of gold and silver continues to go higher. Um, ironically, at the beginning of the year, and I always joke about this cuz I write the um all the price prediction stuff for our annual gold market outlook report. I do I do the writing basically

in January and then there's a bunch of other things that come together in terms of content and then there's all the graphic production that goes into it and then it comes out in like late February, early March. So by the time it comes out either my my call is either completely rendered moot and people he didn't stick his neck out at all that you know that's already happened or it goes against me and I look like an idiot. But um you know rather than a prediction I'll just look I'm wrong. But um you know this

year I said uh the prices of the metals will continue to trend higher and we could see 3600 in gold and if that happens $37 in silver. Obviously we saw them. They're in the rearview mirror now. And uh so somebody could argue Keith you're wrong. Well I said it was going to go up and I said this is an imprecise art. They went up more than uh than I, you know, predicted, but you know, I have to do the analysis for the upcoming 2026 one. But uh I see all the trends are still intact. All the drivers are still

intact, I should say. And therefore, the trends are likely to continue. Higher prices for the metals. So, if you're inclined, um you can buy metals. Again, don't get crazy with leverage. It's leverage that'll kill you. If you own it unleveraged, you're not going to get hurt. with 500 you can be zeroed out. >> I think that's that's good advice for us to end on and hopefully next time we talk we'll be able to look at the the 2026 predictions and hopefully hopefully

you're looking right by the time we're seeing them. Thank you so much for coming on now to go over what's happening in gold and silver markets. This was great as always. >> Thank you, Charlotte. >> Of course. And once again, I'm Charlotte Mloud with investing.com and this is Keith Weiner with Monetary Metalist. 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 below.