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 thank you I'm Charlotte McLeod with the investing News Network and here today with me is Gregor Gregerson founder of silver bullion thank you so much for joining me online today it's great to have you here thank you for having me really nice to be speaking with you and you know since it is our first time talking I thought we could start out with a little bit on your background I'm curious about how you started silver bullion I was reading a little bit on your website it sounds like you made a move into precious

Meadows after the 2008 financial crisis so what can you tell me about that well so I mean my background I started off in finance and economics and I went into software development by 2008 I was working as a senior data architect for ComEd spank that's a big German Bank and I was in the trading room and I saw the consequences of you know set bankruptcy and um essentially I saw the financial system I was coming to a halt um it was a big realization that really a lot of what we do is based on trust

and if that trust is not there and that's what happened post Lehman uh essentially since come to a halt and we are really moments away from things going really downhill and it made me realize how fragile the financial system is and you know some quicker people went out and bought physical silver and gold and by the time I scratched my head and thought maybe that makes sense I couldn't find any physical metal anymore in 2008 and that got me very interested in the subject and so the idea was physical metals that

you don't have counterparty risk and civilizations that we're going to have a much bigger financial crisis uh coming into the future currency crisis not systemic risk like I said uh sort of hit me like a sledgehammer and it just made so much sense to buy some physical metals and at first I didn't think to really go into the business but when I moved back to Singapore where I had been living at that point uh there wasn't anybody selling silver so I figured out how to get some metal

into Singapore I essentially put it under my bed uh I built a website because it was my background with live pricing live inventory and I would meet people literally at the train station uh selling three bars of silver getting six thousand dollars and it was a kind of Market test I mean you know see if anybody was really as interested as I was incremental um and after about eight hundred thousand dollars in sales actually realize that serious demand it's time to get an office it's time to get somebody

to help uh and so I was about 14 years ago uh since then we sold about 1.6 billion dollars worth of precious metals uh we're storing about one billion dollars worth of medals uh at our vaults we ran out of space at the Vault and we now are building a much bigger world uh and so it was pretty much a journey which to me seemed to be doing something which just seemed to be common sense but somehow ended up from Set uh selling some bars meeting people at the train station to where we are now um and yeah it was quite quite a

surprising Journey how it all came together yeah very interesting and we'll come back to that much bigger Vault that you're building but before we go there you know just given that story I have to ask what you think about the banking crisis that we're seeing right now you know I think a lot of people are wondering what's next is it over is there more to come what are your thoughts and there's a lot more to come I mean see when you open the banking crisis I assume you mean Signature Bank and

um Silicon Valley Bank and so on uh credits with essentially you know c-spanx were expecting to be in a recession and in a recession it sort of makes sense to buy long-term bonds which is what they did um and I guess they didn't expect inflation to about going up and so what's inflation for that going up and interest rates went from one percent to say five percent the value of six long-term bonds ended up falling very very quickly and we have to remember that in during croats the United States had something like three

trillion dollars worth of deficits which means they shoot a lot of these uh long-term bonds and Banks like Central Bank Bots and thinking says if I mean it's a governmental bonds what can go wrong right well all it takes to go wrong is for interest rates to be going up because of inflation and then the value of these forms are starting to go down and you know we always need to remember bank usually only has about 10 percent uh of deposited money that they keep in money so as a 90 is going to be used in

some other way through fraction on itself banking it's going to be increased multiple times uh to make out loans and so once depositor starts taking some of that money out uh suddenly there's that realization oh my God my bonds are actually much lower uh values than they are and the bank will have to start selling someone's response taking off the huge losses that they have so that's essentially what happened and as the possibly got nervous I started with throwing These funds now

the issue is that this isn't just an issue for Signature Bank and insurances other Banks I mean everybody bought these sort of loans because they were used by over a decade of very low interest rates they didn't expect things to be going up and maybe they didn't quite understand the risk of what they bought but this is a very widespread sort of problem and so we it just reflects the increasing credibility of a financial system and it does seem said to avoid Financial Caucasian say government will just keep

on bailing out these things the question is if they keep on bailing out banks at what point are we going to start questioning what's the value of the US dollar reviews and that's another subject thank me that you know that is a big topic right now and it's one that I've been hearing more and more about this trend toward dedolarization and I think that you know definitely people are talking and talking about it but it is really hard to picture how that might actually play out so I wonder if you have any thoughts

on that note so I know it's a big topic but let's see what we can do yes so my background I'm quite International I originally German I grew up in Italy spent 12 years in Key West um most of my location is from you know San Diego State area um then I moved back to Germany and sent Singapore so I got to see different parts of the world and um you know it's a U.S policy for many many decades very successful politics has been to carry a big stick and talkso and the big stake was the

military but it was also say controls the United States has always a worldwide banking system the reality is that if the US says jump to any Bank the bank is going to jump because essentially um go bankrupt so whatever the US says has to go it's a problem so is what was the last I would say maybe decade or so the US has increasingly used that power it's no longer talking softly sometimes it's playing out yelling um and taking over a lot of things which people don't feel they ought to be doing uh I give an

example in Germany for example um in general felt that the Iranian nuclear treaty with Iran was actually something that ought to be continued the Trump Administration thoughts that shouldn't be and once they put sections on Iran uh all German and other European Banks had to follow U.S sanctions and so basically the foreign policy decisions of Europe didn't matter anymore the U.S decision was going to go and so you know Europeans sort of felt like don't we have a a Mastery of our own

decisions and what we should be doing in foreign relations and the answer is no you don't um uh because you don't control the banks the U.S steps ultimately um another example of set is you know in Hong Kong Kerry lamb is essentially is equivalent of the president of Hong Kong and unless you agree to it not I mean we we had sanctions placed against the U.S dude HSBC which by the way stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai banking corporation um had to close a bank account of Perry land it's like telling Bank of America

to the President of the U.S you can only have a bank account sorry and so um she had to do everything in cash because uh HSBC was at risk of losing that connectivity to say to those places so as a country you feel you no longer have control it feels like an invasion of the sovereign um and so because of these reasons you know there's an increasing um wants to sort of move to alternatives to the US dollar and so that's been going for a while but it's accelerating now for individuals as well you know if

you're a Russian and you were vacationing in Turkey for example and you had a Mastercard or a visa when The Invasion happened you will find that your MasterCard doesn't work anymore and but if you had a union pay which is a Chinese equivalent it would work so the lesson suddenly is you you want to diversify you want to have a MasterCard but you also want to have a union bank because the financial system is getting more and more political and so that's a big driver towards this idea is that people want to have choices uh

and not be completely reliant on that the U.S uh so that's that's you know what what I think dolorization is about quite a lot but it's been going on for decades um I think it's just the media so picking up on it more now and they become more of a hot potatoes debate uh but it's been going some something that's been going on for at least 15 years or so right and so all of these are factors that people are seeing they're seeing them in the media they're hearing them

talked about more often are you seeing these topics translate into more buying a precious amount of us at silver bullion are you seeing people becoming more interested in having that diversification or do you think that's still to come what trends are you seeing there uh oh it definitely increases I mean when Signature Bank and so on bankrupt I mean in our salesman that three four hundred percent um and after that increase you'll be usually so bigger bigger average sales as well uh going on after that covet was

another event you know which really pushed up sales and average sales opposite also stayed stayed higher so precious metals you know that is the intrinsically valuable it's a non-political store of value so as people get more worried about what tomorrow might bring uh it just makes sense to buy something like gold or silver and you know of course you want to keep some for yourself you know at home but there's also a point to be made that storing Somerset outside your jurisdiction in a safe place

does have a value and that's essentially where we are coming in a lot of clients that we have are from the United States a lot of clients are worried about a nationalization of old uh has happened back in 1933 and the thinking is you know if if a country uh you know it's very reliant on the currency if people don't trust that currency account we will need to create a new currency in set currency will have to be backed by something people can trust uh and gold and silver will always play a role you know in insert new

currency and so the fear of a repeat of the 1933 nationalization you know is is quite a real one yeah okay so there's a few things that we can probably pull on there why don't we talk about that gold confiscation angle a little bit because I know I see in our comments section on our YouTube channel and people do worry about that so can you say a little bit more about whether you think that's that's a real concern that we should have right now um it is a concern and this time around

it's you know for different reasons only 1933 I mean in 1933 it's a problem for the US government was at the dollar was backed buy gold and citizens were able to redeem the dollar for goals so if the government will start printing large amounts of money people could just say well keep the dollar give me bags of gold and it really created a constraint for the government on just uh issuing currency um Sosa said well why don't we just make it illegal for people to own currency and uh we can send print as much as we want

in you know say say nationalize the gold I believe for 25 pounds since then we valued at around 33 dollars um and uh since they kept it like said no they started printing more more currency counties like uh France uh we're still able to read the English said hey you spent a lot you create a lot more dollars and you have gold why don't you take back your dollars uh and give me the gold and that went basically mix and close the gold window and said okay we're not back by gold so that's

what happened in in the past now the US Dollars no longer backed by gold uh but the amount of money printing some of that creation is at record levels multiple times over and I I think we could argue that it's not sustainable and so the question is uh is there going to become a point where people start questioning the value to US dollar uh it's so many trillions are being created we keep on bailing out these things uh what is 20 worth isn't really worth one hour of my time working should I be paid thirty dollars maybe or

forty dollars and you know once people start asking these questions if that's the beginning of potential hyperinflation that's usually how it started all it has something to do with how much money you spend it but ultimately it really comes down to the profit and people have into currency and so if we go down that route um and and if if the value were to start falling very quickly because people uh start having doubts about it uh since the US government will have to do something and you know if we look back

at the Weimar Republic um there was Germany essentially between 1918 after World War One to 1923 uh we had hyperinflation and the way we ended up getting out of it is that the government made a new currency used all of the governmental assets to sort of use that as collateral as well as gold and eventually went back to a gold pack currency and that's what restored confidence in it so if we look at history uh you know there's there's a chance of that happening again and if your government you know most likely you will

want to get your hands on as much longer as possible and remember it's a 1933 nationalization service and executive order that was that did not go through Congress uh it was a president who signs this and within two weeks everybody had to turn into gold uh or face a ten thousand dollar fine which was a lot of money back in 1932 uh or up to 10 years ago so these things can happen with me um and I think there's a little chance that could happen again okay and I think that makes a lot of sense that will help

people understand because you're right people do tend to hear okay you buy your physical precious metals you want to keep it relatively close to you but there are cases when maybe you don't want to do that so let's talk a little bit more about your setup in Singapore so right now I believe you're in the midst of renovating a new Vault I believe it's going to be the largest silver vault in the world by capacity once you're done with it so I'm curious to hear about that project the logistics

behind it and what features so you have connected to it for security and things like that yeah I mean that's a it's a long subject I can talk hours about it um is 180 000 square foot facility uh it is a very special sort of layout because it was hosting a big logistic machine about a hundred feet in height uh 20 000 square feet sort of uh room and this main vaulting area uh which is going to become a main bolting area has a 90 kilo Newton floor loading now the reason why that is significant if you're going to

store large amounts of the gold or silver now gold is easy to store because it's so valuable uh but with silver you need about 80 400 times more physical space and you have about 85 times more weight than you need to carry with an amount of value so if you want to install Azure model silver you need to have a really strong floor so as this building is unique inside we have a 90 Union floor which uh your average car park is 2 kilo Newton on average which means this floor is 45 times stronger than a car park

construction and that means we can put nine tons of silver Stacks one on top of NASA which makes it about 12 meters which is close to 40 feet high and that gives us a very very high efficiency of storage which uh enables us to store 10 000 tons in this room alone uh to give an idea 10 000 tons um let's say around 300 when the million authors of silver uh that's two and a half JP Morgan uh said moss and uh all the silver in comics I believe so um we we are doing something quite unique which is basically taking

um high efficiency Logistics systems as well as multi Technologies putting it together and creating this box storage and capability in addition to Silver we are planning to store metals like indium and germanium these are metals valued around 500 per kilo so I'm not silver it's a very high value Industrial Metals and uh in a place like Singapore as there aren't really many storage facilities I can store it because Insurance wouldn't allow it to be in a unsecured Warehouse so we're planning to

fill uh this capacity with not just silver but Indian monuments gold on South hand would usually be stored in what's called UL Class 2 bolts so essentially um 20 centimeters thick you know pocket steel walls with each wall to weighing about 30 tons or so and uh it's equivalent to about three meters almost 10 feet of concrete uh concrete from a security point of view and we are setting up this mean of course um we are using one larger ones uh 10 are essentially up for Rand Paul to either

Banks as a Boolean dealers or ETFs institutions like I said and four are specifically for art so um we have been licensed to have auctions so it's a bonded facility so it takes three we are looking to hopefully be able to work with species of solar bees or Phillips you know some also auction companies uh at the second and third floor facility will be hosting at as well so it's this combination of capabilities luxury goods gold and silver as well as art creating a type of energy where some people for example in

Singapore there's a lot of interest for watches high-end watches and always say for every person with interesting goals they're probably 30 people interested in launches and by having someone said we can essentially get some lots of pictonado into the facility and hopefully get them into the world really well uh because uh I think they're gold and silver especially underappreciated uh you know um in general so these are always sort of getting people uh to see or get interested in in the

wires of precious metals especially at that time when it comes to security factors you know when you build a vault what you would normally do if you go speak with species inspectors for example we have a 800 million dollar annual loss policy so Lloyds of London and cease policies um if you build a vault you would normally want to go back to Central company the insurance company sends you a species inspector which basically is an expert in security which is also specific to Country for example in Singapore being a

very safe place requirements are a bit different from say Colombia so they will basically do an analysis they kind of tell you what they expect what they wish and where's the major concerns and we've been dealing with these speech inspectors for about over 10 years now in a place like Singapore you know the primary concern is in internal processes so for example how do you make sure when bypass Worldcom said everything is sort of procedurally done correctly without the big mistakes without the strength of

inside jobs um and one and that's where we spend a lot of effort into creating a world management system which splits the staff inside three different functional meticulogistics which are people who interact with clients we have World operations which only deal with the fiscal items inside say well which is effectively handled by armed auxiliary policing signal and these three groups when the deposit happens that deposits split into 10 tickets which are being bounced back and forth between the

different groups and only if you fulfill one side you get in this process it eventually provides a very high level of reliability needs a lot of comfort and speak better which send allowed us to get you know an insurance which cover their inside jobs as well mysterious disappearance because usually it's not covered so that's you know a key part of it and then the other part which I think a lot of people think about when to talk about work it's about the physical security from some point of view I can tell you

so the key aspect of security is not to rely on any one system so that's a building security uh since there's a separate volts security which are completely separate systems installed by different people around by different people and uh you have the usual sort of type of sensors which will be motion centers you have vibration Center you have uh lasers you have contact sentence these are typical ones and sensor wired together in a way so you click down then the Alarm Systems going to different parties especially at

night but the thing is we speak about down and then you have a response time and the response time you know is let's say well says basically is 24 24 7 arms security on location uh but San Jose police response will be somewhere around five to six minutes and when it comes to Silver you know silver is not so easy to steal remotely explore one thousand ounce a good delivery bar except 30 kilos very hard to run away with um and you really cannot get some out from you know 12 meter high racks so really

it's more about the goals than you have to worry about in the gold is in sister who wall which I mentioned earlier which essentially rated uh for a one hour you know period of time for somebody to get in unless they haven't I think what happens okay still be very loud um so these are the sort of features that are coming in uh when it comes to access security you know when you want to go to a call from the time you're down in the streets of the time you're going inside to work with all this you have about

nine different dwarfs you have to go through and uh you have to go through two main traps and man traps essentially uh setups where one door opens you go in the other door doesn't open and if we don't like you we don't reopen the door so oftentimes you know this is so say the type of real world Securities that you have out there because you know yeah I've had um people but usually in a place like signal will very hard but you know gunfighters one and very very impressive and if you have

um you know these Manchester setups essentially if that's where a lot of security so uh these are some of the things are coming to mind you know when when you're asking about security but if you're more specific person let me know no that was great you know clearly this is a massive undertaking and I think people should be feeling very safe about any metal that they might have there one thing that did come to mind as you were talking through how the fault looks is you know the sheer volume of silver compared to the

gold and I wondered if you might have any comments to make on people when they're building their portfolios of physical pressure precious metals how they might want to divide them between gold and silver and things like that because that could be useful for everyone to hear about as well yeah so I almost all my personal wealth besides the business where of course I'm spending most of my time uh it's in so long not so much in gold and there's a couple of reasons behind that one key reason is the gold silver ratio

if you've never heard about it I really encourage you to look into it but essentially the principle is pretty easy you you look at how many ounces of silver you need to buy one alcohol and you will find that over the last 50 years that ratio has sort of bounced back and forth between say 50 and 80. so when you're at 80 it still was very cheap I think a lot of silver to buy one ounce of gold when it goes down to 50. it means silver is relatively expensive from Death to Gold so right now we are

around 83 which means silver is very cheap so for people who want to buy gold I kind of tend to tell some well buy still a curved weight losses ratio to sort of be go back to its mean around 60 or 50 and switch back into gold and you'll end up 50 more gold uh it's it's a very simple rule if you were to follow it over the last 40 years you would have a triple terminal called the silver you're holding uh you would have probably made one trade every four or five years and you're essentially buying

whichever metal that is cheaper compared to the other one uh so it works very well and so right now said ratio is beaming uh towards silver Earth of some gold it's the other thing I really need to point out about silver I was just actually talking to Bloomberg about this yesterday um there is a lot of industrial demand coming from Silver especially football products uh polar panels so once the last decade we had had a huge run up of solar panels installations but at the same time see solar panels have built less and less

zone so over the last decades there was a reduction of 80 percent of the amount of silver used for each panel so even though we had a big increase in solar panels the amount of silver used didn't increase nearly as much because it became more and more efficient but we know if the point where you really cannot decrease the amount of silver in each panel Much Anymore uh that have been trying to use copper that's the problem with copper is that it doesn't think very well it comes in the case that they need

to do it and so the lifetime of the panel ends up being four or five years instead of 25 years and the companies which mental drought like some cakes everything so really you cannot lift away from Silver you cannot make say panels more efficient and if anything it's also new technology is coming out 30 to 80 percent more silver so the amount of silver panel is likely going to increase instead of keep on beating and the amount of panels that are going to produce sits near and next year is going to be going up greatly uh

it's also study stating sets there will be more money spent on for the world hikes sand oil production so uh and it's the it's a production lab it was reduced because of the sort of dog especially in China this is one of the key materials you need but they call you so much quality silicon now that they actually have too much of this stuff and so that polar panel production is going to go way up and that's going to create a lot of man so having said that without magnitude we look at full Institute we

had a deficit of silver 254 million ounces that is huge uh yearly production was around 1 000 million ounces and when we say Productions that includes Recycling and everything else and demand was over 1250 million ounces so we are around 22 or 23 percent deficit in silver and if you look at about the amount of silvers that you have in stock uh in three years if he keeps us up there running out of physical silver so uh it's a very very foolish science coming from industrial production I feel

like it's a lot on the gold silver racial basis on a historical basis and in nature the ratio between gold and silhouette into one yet it's being traded at 83. so uh so so many things going from Silver so you really can't do much foreign yeah you know that's exactly what I was going to ask you if people hear these projections for demand and deficits in the silver market and they want to know what's going on with the price but I know that that's that's can be very tricky to predict there's one important

thing to understand about price uh surprise or silver has very little to do with physical supply and demand supplies of silver is determined in future markets such as comics and so in a future Market you know if I'm a bullion dealer and I'm selling one million dollars worth of silver I'm going to buy one million dollars worth of new metal uh coming in and so probably is going to be locked in by somebody in the future markets but somebody else might come and put one million dollars in shorts leverage it

ten to one and you basically create 10 million dollars in um selling demand of silver which doesn't exist so the price of silver realist determined into financial markets and it it doesn't really reflect the amount of supply and demands that there is and as long as I can pick up the phone to a mint and say I want to buy still uh at 23 an ounce that is indeed the price of silver but if at any point in time I pick up the phone and cannot buy it I don't know that trust that price if industrial

users like Intel or all these other ones cannot get some metal uh Suddenly It's all health so I think one way or another uh silver prices are going to have to increase as the amount of physical is going to increase and you know prices are going to have to to go up a short term very hard to tell silver and it does its own thing and defines sort of Supply demand expectations but you know longer term uh you will see to find them and sort of assert itself in in the European higher that's a little offenses

all right well we've covered quite a lot of ground today but before I let you go I wondered if there's any final thoughts that you would share on silver gold precious metals in general with our audience so I think it's very important for you to put a little bit of your wealth in assets with our apolitical which are not dependent on some countries on what they do on Signal too that are intrinsically valuable ones that you can own outright which are not dependent on a bank or some other

entities that you have it's very important that you understand the difference between paper silver and physical soup because most people will buy some contract or savings account or something else and say things are silver behind it because they didn't read the small print and I mean who doesn't you won't believe it about things but um oftentimes that you're buying a promise and they've said company goes bankrupt is that bank goes bankrupt so it won't be anything sir if it's backed by

Commerce contracts comex contracts again you know you're making a lot of risk so I really urge people to make sure to buy physical uh because when that crisis comes uh it's it will be obviously worth something uh it will probably go up in value by a lot and I do believe that where when we're heading so we will have a crisis and it's very important that you have a base amount of wealth that's going to be so no matter what um and and such okay I think that's strong advice to end

on thank you so much for coming on today to talk about gold and silver and everything that's going on at silver bullion as well this was really interesting you're welcome great and once again I'm Charlotte McLeod with the investing News Network and this is Gregor Gregerson with silver bullion [Music]