[Music] I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing news.com and here today with me is Chris Temple founder editor and publisher of the national investor thank you so much for joining me great to have you here well Charlotte it's great to be back with you and belated Merry Christmas early happy New Year and we'll we'll see if we can give people a handle on the year ahead yeah really good to be talking with you and I think it's a perfect time to be checking in because we're just almost at the beginning of the new year
it's also a good time since it's so exciting for gold right now and we're going to get into everything that's going on there but before we do I thought we could set the stage a little bit by talking about what's going on with the fed and with inflation I think the last time we talked back in may we talked about about the consistency in Powell's messaging and now it seems like he's coming away from that higher for longer narrative so let's let's begin there maybe tell me what you see coming
from the FED in 2024 and and the implications for inflation well Charlotte I think that the markets have overplayed what seems to be the first part of a so-called fed pivot uh to me how didn't in in this last fomc meeting he didn't back away from the idea of higher for longer I mean they are not going to cut interest rates for a while uh maybe the middle of next year some people say earlier in the year that remains to be seen what was Stark about his changed messaging however was that it was less than a month before the fomc
meeting when he was reiterating in a speech that the economy was likely going to have to undergo a period of well below Trend growth and a bump up in inflation and a drop in employment a a reduction in wage gains that have happened for the last couple of years in order for him to be able to declare Victory against the inflation which he was of course the biggest approximate cause of in the first place for printing all the money that he did and so what was abrupt was was when he backed away from almost all of that and here we have
well above trany r still in the third quarter the last official numbers we have and yet he wanted to point out that the economy is finally decelerating a little bit in Q4 the the employment statistics have stayed fairly strong wage gains are still 4% plus year-over-year and so a lot of people were wondering what did he see or what does he know that he's not telling us now of course that came out on that Wednesday afternoon Friday morning John Williams the New York fed president came out and played bad cop and said okay
well hold the phone folks we we it's not going to be that easy we're not going to reduce rates that quickly no one's really talking about that but that renewed Genie I think you can say was already out of the bottle and so everybody went buying everything they bought the Magnificent 7 again they bought gold again they even helped push oil up which has been beaten up lately all on this idea that any minute now the fed's going to start cutting rates back to zero and we're all going to be in
that happy Zer land again which I don't think we're going to see again in our lifetimes that's a different story so I think as we start the year everything has gotten too far ahead of what actually is going to come out of the Fed so I think that when you've seen this big rally in treasuries pushing long-term yields back below 4% won't be long we'll see him back above 4% I think the stock market though I I'm ambivalent to believe it or not slightly bullish on the broad stock market market for much
of next year I think that temporarily it's out over its skis even the gold price which has benefited from this drop in yields so suddenly and the US dollar Index breaking its uptrend uh I think that has a little bit of risk involved in that but not as much as the other things okay I'm interested to hear a little bit more about what you see for the broader Market you mentioned you're a little bit ambivalent on the stock market so can you see a little bit more about what you see there you know as far
as the bond market is concerned I I wrote a thing recently and I sent you a copy of it that if you want to understand the markets in 2024 you only need to understand three words Supply supply and supply uh and that word is going to operate different ways for different things when it comes to the Virgin volume of us treasury debt and and other debt around the world that needs to be refinanced rolled over added to whatever you know because we're adding to the US federal debt at two plus trillion a year again uh it's going
to be considerably higher rates uh this year for the first time interest cost on the US national debt now exceeds annualized $1 trillion do we're going to be pushing 1.3 or 1.4 trillion by the end of 2024 if interest rates stay where they are right now that's where we're going to be at at end of 2024 so that you just added another 400 billion uh there's going to be increasing crowding out of private sector availability for credit because you've got everybody to one extent or another needing to borrow
more money Andor print cheap currency I mean look at China China's uh having to deal with deflation right now so they're printing money with Reckless abandon uh they've got the highest debt to GDP ratio on the planet and so they're going to be looking to create Andor borrow more money and it just doesn't lend itself when you've got such a a incredible almost exponentially increasing supply of sovereign paper that needs to be covered that doesn't bold well for the rest of the economy so together with
that I think that a lot of issues are now baked into the cake that are going to keep inflation chronically higher for quite a while than what we've all become accustomed to until the last couple of years I don't think it's barring a massive depression that we see overall inflation go back to 2% now if you want to buy a car car prices are going to drop if you want to buy the a new set of clothes those prices are going to drop Electronics they're going to drop food shelter fuel utilities Health Care
housing all the rest of this stuff is going to continue to raise to go up it rates well in excess of that 2% fed target so I think that we're going to bog down in this coming year into this great stag inflation that I've been talking about for a while now uh the inflation part of it is going to stay intractable or we we're going to continue to have three to 5% inflation it's going to go up and down and the headline number of course has got a lot of help recently from what I think is
going to be a short live drop in the crude oil price um so I I I think it's going to be kind of a blly year and it's going to in in a good sense Charlotte I think it's going to force investors to behave like investors again we saw the beginnings of this in 2022 when the broad markets dropped a fair bit uh energy started doing well uranium lithium some other themes were doing well 2023 reversed all that the Magnificent 7 and the big cap tech stocks went nutso again and a lot of value stocks fell by the wayside 2024
the pendulum swings back in the other direction so I think the net result is especially if you're in the right sectors a little on the right stocks you can still do well in the stock market in 2024 even though I think that recession is going to be a a word uttered a lot more as the year goes on really interesting and we're going to go into some of those sectors that we might see doing well in the headlines in 2024 one more followup just on the FED before we go there so in the scenario does the FED abandon that 2% inflation
Target do they eventually come out and say okay that's not going to happen they are loathed to do that Jerome Paul would rather have each tooth pulled out of his head one by one then it overtly admit to that but I still believe that there are so many things globalization for 40 years brought down overall wage levels globally that's done uh you look at commodity pricing you've got resource nationalism that has emerged so you're going to see constraints on supplies of all manner of metals and commodities the
world over companies or countries rather that have disproportionate wealth in Commodities want a greater share of it you know in in this country Joe Biden our president uh has been very stingy about mining operation in the US being permitted and whatnot yet it's fine to get cobalt from the Congo and it's fine to get nickel from Indonesia he's even getting pushed back from his own party on that now but beyond that push back we're seeing even in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
and elsewhere people getting tired of the you know quote imperialists coming in this foreign Capital taking their resources leaving crumbs behind and so there's a lot of reasons why the world over we're going to see a substantially higher price threshold as time goes on if you want a pound of copper if you want a pound of nickel if you want a pound of uranium if you want pretty much anything and nobody for the most part on this whole inflation deflation debate that's reemerging um nobody wants to
admit or acknowledge even that this is a dynamic going forward that we haven't had for decades that there's going to be a chronically higher threshold of pricing for these things so you know that is something that the FED really can't do much about it can decide to accommodate it by not raising interest rates or it can decide to try and fight it and throw the whole world into a depression so the right answer which is a story in a conversation for another day is that policy makers need to be
part of the solution and not part of the problem there needs to be a Marshall Plan like serious given in our country in your country in Canada and elsewhere and you get glimmers of it here and there okay but still there needs to be a very serious game plan put together for where is our oil natural gas uranium nickel copper lithium all of these things coming from 10 2050 years from now because policy has been dictated especially on the energy transition subject by people with stari Notions who have done virtually nothing engineering
wise economically and otherwise to make sure these things actually can happen very true I think that's a much bigger conversation for a different day so for now I'm sorry Char so the FED will dance around reasons why it's going to not raise rates even if inflation picks back up and they'll blame it on something else it'll you know it'll be like in the movie The Blues Brothers John Belushi Scott carry Fisher Point machine gun an he's got every reason why he stood her up at the altar you know
the feder will give us every reason Under the Sun as to why they're going to have to stop raising rates even as inflation picks back up uh and that'll be really I think when the whole secular story for Commodities will really start to get a broadening constituency that it still doesn't have yeah and I think this ties into what's going on with gold so let's look over to Gold so as we talked about at the beginning exciting time for gold but you're mentioning the market as many
have has maybe gotten a little bit out of itself so if we look back to that last conversation we had you gave us three factors that we really need to see for a real gold price rise so I wanted to check in and have you r view those factors and let us know where we're at with them right now well the first factor is that we need to have a Fed that is in an expansionary mode uh monetary policy-wise uh it is not yet at that place it's taken a step arguably in that direction if uh Powell and the rest
of them with their winks and nods really have raised the short-term interest rates for the last time keep in mind that at least on the surface they're still reducing their balance sheet by a fair bit but it's been pointed out that even you know in and out the back door through their Bank lending facility and their other open market operations that they're still having to payer over a lot of trouble in the banking system so number one is that once it's much clearer to the markets that the FED is
has ended any further monetary policy tightening let alone flips in the other direction that's the first ingredient the second ingredient is that you're going to need to see a situation where despite the coming and it will come probably in 2024 the coming fed capitulation where whatever the reasoning it just cannot tighten and may have to start to ease it again somewhat that can't be seen as helping the broad economy because look at what happened just recently you had a situation where everybody scrambled
tripped over one another when Powell gave his surprisingly dubish commentary whether you believe it or not doesn't matter people did okay and they're they're buying what are they buying they did they buy just gold no gold responded positively to the idea that the fed's done iing as it should have but what responded a whole lot more was the US dollar going down treasury Bonds on a blistering rally higher you know 20% gains in treasury bond prices in in in a couple of weeks okay uh you had the
stocks flying higher we've got a new high all-time high for the Dow for the NASDAQ 100 maybe by the time was supposed even for the standard Force 500 so when the FED reverses course and is easing but the economic and fundamental statistics are deteriorating and people are realizing oh oh maybe we are going to go into recession no matter what the FED does and all of a sudden what sound like the easy trades of buying more of the Magnificent 7 buying more high-tech growth than what that's all of a sudden
not looking good and you know I think that the earnings are going to be a lot less going forward Than People realize you look at the news out recently from everybody from Walmart to Target to FedEx consumers are already rolling over and spending less if you if you adjust it for inflation consumer spending it dropped 4% from last Christmas um that's one gold is also going to get more attention because monetary easing that helps all sectors gold does okay but it's more of a Wallflower but when things are
deteriorating for the economy and earnings and the FED is still printing money by process of elimination it's going to benefit gold even more and that's what we had you know in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008 um so I think I actually morphed reasons two and three into one so I was talking about the markets and the economy both but as you see the economy deteriorate and and the gross stocks start to to uh do worse yet you've got the monetary tightening or the monetary easing rather that's
when gold really takes off and we're getting glimmers of that but but it's not you know I I I'm saying word a caution light about to turn green rather than back to Red okay and you know thanks for going through that I think the other thing that you highlighted before we turn the cameras on that I thought was worth mentioning is you know maybe we're not quite there on gold but the downside you had mentioned is is limited at this moment I think it is especially for the gold price I mean gold stocks too have
been so beaten up I've seen in recent days a lot of gold stocks have started early to recover from their long beating from the tax selling and so forth um you know good names and some that I think are just average uh so I think that if you're in the best names I would not try at this point in time to try and time the gold price you know maybe early in the year uh we get a couple of hotter inflation numbers the market gives back some of what it's done recently and gold drops to 1900 so what that won't mean much
ultimately in the grand scheme of things and I think even if that happens you're still going to be doing well for yourself right now to be buying some good companies when the the prices are you know everybody that follows gold knows this that there's never been such a disconnect between the equity valuations and the price of gold and it's not just gold where that's the case but it's especially gold where that's been a case and that'll change as time goes on but again I think all of these
factors need to come together and the generalist investors that are out there will ultimately wake up to the fact of this the supply theme that I as I've articulated it and others and realize that going forward um gold is still the UNC currency it's not a fiat currency um and it's I think you know we're we're months not years away from the next major secular upleg you know it took us a long time to get to $1,000 uh which gold touched in 2007 dropped to under 700 briefly in the wake
of the financial crisis in 2008 then it tripled almost 2000 you know in just a few years and we've been bouncing up and down and up and down since then give or take a little bit you know nominal new highs recently but inflation adjusted really not and so I I think that you know what I'm looking for in the next year or two with the great stag inflation becoming a more entrenched theme with the massive amounts of debt that needs to be issued and refinanced with the inevitability that the fed and everybody else just keeps
Printing and printing and printing more they put on a brave face trying to you know normalize or tighten for as long as they can get away with it but that's about done um you know the next major leg I mean I don't like putting price Targets on things I like to look at conditions but I don't think when gold does finally break out we only go up A1 or $200 okay I think that gives a really good idea where you see gold being right now and a ways into the future so that's great I also of course want to talk
about uranium with you and the market is looking really interesting I feel like in 2023 the positive catalysts have just kept building and building we've seen the price up substantially and now looking forward to 2024 I'm curious what you think investors should be paying the most attention to because everything really seems to be lining up very well I'll tell you what's interesting about this and if you go back a couple of years Charlotte as you know the price for Uranium bottom that about7 or $188 a
pound that was a spot price we're now above $90 a pound in the next year or two we're going to be at $200 a pound or perhaps higher than that and really if I was you know a year ago and less you know you and I have talked I said that the single most bullish setup of any commodity anywhere was uranium and I will tell you the same thing as we're going into 2024 it is still the single most bullish setup for any commodity anywhere even at $90 that we're starting from because we have not yet begun to
make up the shortfall for what the rapidly growing need is from utilities and other end users we're starting to see a little bit of panic set in among some of the utilities that played this game at chicken with with uranium companies for so long and all of a sudden they waking up and saying holy cow we don't had that much uranium left and we're going to have to pay up for it you're seeing a lot of companies that are reemerging in the marketplace to be sellers you know the uranium energy
corporations and the Energy Fuels of the world here in the US and they're going to they're going to be printing money for the next couple of years as they're the first ones in line to start making up for this shortfall I think that the risks and and the reason Charlotte I say that that it's still the best supply and demand setup among other reasons it's the least susceptible to an economic shock the the world is still using roughly the same amount of electricity and electrical grids whether we're in a
recession or not and so that means that you know uranium power plant nuclear power plants they still need uranium and to them you know it's not if if uranium doubles from here which I would take that to the bank in my view or better if uranium doubles from here you have not blown out the finances of a nuclear power plant because when you add all of the costs together the cost of the uranium itself is relatively slight this is not like the price of coal doubling or the price of natural gas doubling so there is
still because it has now become completely a sellers market for those people who have got uranium in production right now or that can be taken out of moth balls quickly right now which some of them are starting to do it's totally a sellers market and they're going to be in a driver's seat for a while wow not to mention when you go down the road you know another maybe five years give or take a little bit and you've got the first two or free companies with the best small modular reactor reactor Technologies come out
and they need uranium you know one of the things that uh my friend and I know you know Scott Melby of ueec has pointed out that when you look at all of the long-term charts that are out there from the world nuclear Association everybody else about what the supply shortfall is for Uranium going forward 5 10 20 years none of that takes into account what the the the added demand that is likely to come from these small modular reactors which you're going to see lots of in coming years that are going to do
everything from running a steel mill to a a large scale mine to all manner of things so again this there there's not even after this move from $18 to $90 a pound there's still not a single better and relatively less risky setup for any commodity out there as as there still is with uranium okay thank you for breaking that down and the other point that I wanted to look at when it comes to uranium is okay so I think many investors they've gotten on board they've established their positions but it's it's kind of an
interesting setup where we've had this big move and there's still quite a bit more to go so where are you seeing the biggest opportunities right now because there's a lot of different directions that people could go and of course it depends on the person but but what are you seeing well you want the most unleveraged sellers of uranium I think you know uh for example a while back uh I I recommended selling chamical uh it had already had a big run we got in a few years ago at the bottom we made five
times our money whatever it was because I think that there's more leverage with the likes of an Energy Fuels in the ueec um I think you've still got to be careful of some of the exploration uh plays the Green Field plays in your uranium there there'll be more of them emerging and reemerging as the sector gets hotter uh just like we saw when everybody all of a sudden decided they had lithium you know in the recent past because it was a hot story but a lot of them are still going to be
a decade or more away from actually selling anything there's a couple exceptions to that of companies that I have on my list that have got unique and already pretty much guaranteed customers so they'll be moved to the head of the line but right now with uranium you want to focus on those that can sell it now and are going to be exponentially increasing their production like a ueec like an Energy Fuels um there are a couple of ancillary plays and some of the nuclear technology I think are interesting but also keep in
mind that as more generalist investors wake up to this because most of them still haven't uh what is the fallback position for them or their financial advisors they don't want to shop for companies they're going to buy you rnm they buy you Ur they'll buy the Sprout physical uranium trust okay and those may not be the very best bang for your bucket and you pick the best individual company but that's where the masses will go and and just to add the exclamation point to that Charlotte it it still astonishes me in a
way I guess that you've had this almost fivefold now jump in the uranium price to where now once or twice a week There's a segment for example on CNBC about it and yet out of a 100 people who just bought Nvidia stock how many of them you think are buying anything to do with uranium maybe one so this is something that the broad investing masses and their advisors still are totally oblivious to and that's another reason why I think that $18 to $90 is one thing but we got a lot more to go because when everybody does
get into this and maybe I I think I shared this a little quip with you before in the past one I've talked about from time to time generalist investors getting into gold and gold stocks I've said it's like a 300 PB man jumping into a kitty siiz waiting pool when generalist investors finally wake up to what's going on with uranium and they start to get this going to be an elephant jumping into a kitty size waiting pool so I I truly believe you are going to see and there's been some
nice gains from investors that got in early in the last couple years of UR that's nothing compared to what's coming yeah I think I think the visual there really helps to kind of show how that could play out so you know talking about uranium this is all coming to a head for uranium a lot of it is connected to supply and going back to your supply Supply Supply there's other Commodities out there that are going to face Supply shortfalls and I guess maybe I would like to take a look at you know
your thoughts on what could be the next story that's similar to what we're seeing develop now in uranium the next story Charlotte I think should be copper uh there's been some information out there recently I know Robert friedin gave a speech recently and said that if you want to see any hope at all of uh the copper Supply deficit being reduced in the coming years you're going to have to effectively double the price from where it is right now so roughly 8,000 or whatever 8,000 in change right now to
15 ,000 or more a ton um one analyst I heard recently said that for two reasons one is the supposed energy transition and all the additional copper that's going to be needed for that for electrification for electric vehicles etc etc and and don't forget this element of it with copper as a lot of the developing world still is being brought into the 21st century and they're building at least something close to Modern civilizations modern utilities modern infrastructure and stuff like that you need in in between
now and I believe it was 2035 you need the equivalent of 10 escanda mines that's bhp's big copper mine in Chile to come online as of now there's not one that you can say unequivocally when you get done with permitting and finance and everything else is going to come online so The Big burgeoning Short ball of Supply is as acute going forward with copper as it is with just about anything else you can name aside from uranium um the downside risk unlike with uranium however near term and I'm saying only
near term is that if we do see that the central banks led by the FED have miscalculated and they've already tightened so much that the lag effects are going to throw us into a serious Global recession or something else causes that you know Financial Market blow up or whatever then just as a knee-jerk reaction people will be sellers of copper because they'll say well we're going to recession so Dr copper is going to get sick for a while won't have anything to do with Supply now that won't last forever but I think
that is a near-term risk but I but I would say probably you know my number two uh choice of any material outside of you know gold space uh would be uh would be copper and and probably silver would be number three okay really interesting and just because you mentioned silver anything you would share on Silver heading into 2024 because I know people are really hoping to see a breakout above 25 or even 30 if we can get there well you know there's a reason why gold has been in tagging and then retagging and then
retagging and maybe making a new nominal all-time high for a while now you're going back to 2020 really while silver is not quite half of its all-time high um first of all it shows you that the action in Gold has been even more relegated to Central Bank buying and some of the more extreme risk averse money that just wants to buy physical gold those people don't buy silver for those reasons they buy gold especially the central banks the industrial case for silver I think is completely misunderstood we're going to
be going into the fourth successive year in 2024 of a silver Supply deficit okay so but as I so I my long-term prognosis for silver is great you know the the increased demand for solar panels uh a lot of technological reasons and so forth and again when you've had such underdevelopment of other base metals and keep in mind that it's something like 70% of all of the new silver production comes as a byproduct if it's going to take a long time for new lead and zinc and copper gold and other mines
to come online then it's going to take that much longer for more silver to come to Market all else being equal and close that Supply shortfall so I I think that silver is I don't want to get into it I don't want to say un naturally low and feed some of the conspiracy theorists who every time they make a bad call it's also the short sell's fault okay or JP Morgan's fault or whatever um I I hear all those arguments all the time I think that ultimately the fundamentals will
win back out and I do think that the near-term opportunity with silver is less about the energy transition and so forth than it is when gold really starts to take off because inevitably in every cycle where you see gold make a new secular move it takes the lead early and then silver catches up and overtakes it and there's no reason to believe that that won't be the same this time around aside from any of the industrial and green energy applications for silver okay very helpful for me sometimes I do sit there wondering
what's going on with silver when we have gold so so high and that helps make a little bit of sense out of it all right so we've gone through gold uranium little bit of silver this is really helpful Before I Let You Go are there any final thoughts you'd share with investors heading into 2024 I think another thing to watch we haven't really talked about it a great deal is the price of old energy uh crude oil and natural gas and even coal to some extent you know at the recent cop 28 meeting in the Middle East uh it was
widely covered that there if you look at this from an environmentalist or Ultra greeny type of perspective uh the cop 28 Gathering took get another step backward uh whatever they said or didn't say at that thing the facts on the ground and I've got several uh special reports coming out about this in the coming days if anybody wants them just go to my website make sure you're on my free mailing list um we're going to see a rolling energy crisis of with different manif stations going forward for years to come and one
of the reasons Charlotte is because all of these star ey dreamers that yes I I I agree with some of the uh philosophies and the science behind mankind has put too big a footprint on this planet we need to be more efficient we need to be cleaner we need to do things better I've never quibbled with that but you don't get there just with words and with you know passing the laws saying well here we've got uh what did what did the Prime Minister just you know do you got to have X number by was
it 2035 got to be all electric vehicles might as well pass an e it without wi the common cold it's going to have as much impact in the real world that's not how things get done so because there has been no sound planning to figure out where to get all of these things and to build a food chains to provide all of these electric vehicles and make them cost effective and have the infrastructures the places to repair them and all that kind of stuff we're going to use oil and gas for a long time
going forward yet there are Supply constraints that are going to reemerge there as well now here in the US we've tagged recently the all-time uh high for production for oil but there's several reasons I'm writing about in the near term why that's going to go back into reverse in the coming year policy reasons and economic ones alike uh natural gas uh I think is artificially or abnormally low right now yes the weather being mild and so much of the the North America has played a part in
that but you're now going to start to add substantially more to the demand equation because of ever more l& uh exports that business is booming it's going to benefit the us it's going to benefit Canada even more you know in the next I think 18 months you'll be selling LNG out of Kat through the LNG Canada project so I think that both of those are brainer because the work has not been done to replace those nearly as fast as some people say and yet there are Supply constraints present and
proposed here in the US for example new methane rules that are going to curtail or at the at the least add to the costs of ongoing oil and gas production so I would not rule out they're a lot more volatile and and and there's a lot more moving Parts than with the other things we talked about but from their present levels I would want to be a buyer of old energy right now also and I think also Charlotte to wrap up that is one of the many reasons why I think that there's a roote Awakening coming for people that
think inflation is going to continue to go down because a rebound to 80 or $90 for crude oil uh a rebound to $4 an mcf for natural gas both of which I think are almost done deals in this next year they're going to bump headline inflation back up and inject some renewed reality into again what I've called the Great stagflation I completely agree I think there's a lot of words and not a lot of clear plans when it comes to these clean energy goals and I think you wrapped it all the way back up to where we started
with the inflation connection so thank you so much for for sitting down to go through all of these things with us I hope to catch up with you again in in 2024 and to see where we're at when we get into the new year sounds great always a pleasure Cheryl you take care you as well 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 subscribe to our Channel we'd also love to hear
your thoughts so leave us a comment below we'll see you next time
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