➡ The U.S. government is expected to run a $2 trillion deficit this year, despite claims of fiscal austerity. This is happening during a time of supposed economic growth, raising concerns about what will happen if the economy slows down. The speaker suggests that the math doesn’t add up and that the government’s plans to grow its way out of debt are unrealistic. They believe this situation creates a positive outlook for precious metals like gold and silver, and that the price of gold could triple over the next 10 years if current trends continue.

➡ The text discusses the Federal Reserve’s willingness to buy long-term debt above 3%. It criticizes predictions about the silver market, suggesting they often lead to disappointment and frustration. The text also discusses the size of the silver market, including both above and below ground resources, and criticizes the practice of shorting ETFs. It ends with a discussion about the free float of the LBMA and the role of banks in the precious metals market.

➡ The text discusses the complex dynamics of the silver market, including the role of swap dealers, banks, and ETFs. It explains how banks use ETFs as a source of metal to cover their short positions, and how this can influence the price of silver. The text also predicts that silver will reach $50 per ounce by 2026, and discusses the potential for a bank run in the sector.

➡ The speaker discusses the possibility of the U.S. government revaluing gold and creating a Bitcoin reserve. They suggest that the government might use the increased value of gold to fund the purchase of Bitcoin. The speaker also mentions potential legislation that could enable this process. They believe these actions could have significant implications for the economy in 2026.

➡ The text discusses a conversation about market trends, specifically related to the COMEX. The speaker advises not to be discouraged by market fluctuations and mentions upcoming events like options expiring and the September Silver going off the board. The speaker also mentions a person named Craig Hempke, who provides optimistic insights and can be found at TF metalsreport.com. The conversation ends with a promise to catch up again soon.

This is like a little bit bigger than normal, what we’ve seen this past year and a half here. Yeah. And then. And again till something completely breaks. You know, we get into a different pricing scheme. I mean, this one’s held now for 50 years. How about that? Then we have to deal with the system that we have. And under this, this kind of, we’ll call it a fractional reserve digital derivative pricing scheme, 25 annual gains in gold are pretty rare. Well, hello there, my friends. Chris Marcus here with you for Arcady Economics with, I think the best looking, most popular, sexiest man in the precious metal space.

Who, before we cover the silver stuff, we were talking about if there’s a big, short, big silver short movie one day, who is going to play Craig? So leave in the comment field, I think it has to be De Niro. De Niro from like 1975, maybe. Well, he could play Craig in 2028. Okay, there you go. There you go. I got you on that one. Craig wants Clooney, but more importantly, I just want Craig here on the show because it’s been far too long. And we will talk silver in addition to his, you know, move it, good looks.

You got to know what perks I have to throw in to draw your name into the script. And either case, Craig, it’s quite a pleasure to see you here. And I’ll let people at home know we’ve been covering a range of fun topics for 45 minutes before we hit the record button. We got Dave Kranzler and the Broncos, some big silver forecasts out there, and a whole bunch more. So, Craig, now that I got you warmed up, how are you today, sir? What’s left to cover? Yeah, perhaps that would have been more entertaining for everybody, but we’ll just talk about the medals now, I guess, Chris.

But anyway, I valued your friendship for over a decade, and it’s always good to see it. Well, I happy to have you here. And I’m wondering, can I make a joke now? For over a decade, and now you’ve reached the point where something’s happening around your current age that you get access to now. Right, right. You know, it’s. It’s funny. I would. I’ve done this now long enough. It’s coming up on 15 years that I am now approaching the age of the, like, people that I like, admired and thought, oh, these are like the old mavens of the sector, you know, back in the day.

Now that’s like, I’ve live long enough to see myself become one, I suppose. Yes, I can now officially hit my IRA without a penalty. That’s how old I am. So I got, so I got that going for me. I’m not sure what else. You’re seasoned, as they say, and seasoned like the salt and the pepper. Yeah. And of course, what matters more than anything, I think you were far ahead of the crowd on this one. The stuff is also quite, quite heavy, as you know. So Craig, you’ve been providing great analysis that I can only imagine.

The bank of England, I mean, they probably couldn’t afford you because you go a little bit deeper than some of their public comments yet. Let us dig in. I think we did a call earlier this year, but guessing the gold and silver prices are a bit higher and we’re recording on a Tuesday afternoon look at gold. It’s dipping a little bit below that 3400 level which it has hovered around for quite a while. Although as upset as I know, many precious metals investors still manage to find themselves these days. Let’s take a look back at the five year chart here.

Jeez, you can’t even fit on this one. As you know, quite a rally over the last year and a half. We’ll get to silver in a second. But I think you, you phrased it well where this is like a little bit bigger than normal, what we’ve seen this past year and a half here. Yeah. And then, and again until something completely breaks. You know, we get into a different pricing scheme. I mean this one’s held now for 50 years. How about that? Then we have to deal with the system that we have. And under this, this kind of, we’ll call it a fractional reserve digital derivative pricing scheme.

25% annual gains in gold are pretty rare. And you just go back to the year 2000, I think there’s been three. One of them was last year. And so I, it’d be really unusual to have another 25% year on top of that. Even if you go back to 2011. Right. Or 2020 was one. Just even tagging on a 10 gain after a 25 would be remarkable. And so that when I wrote my, you know, I write that forecast every January, that’s kind of what I was thinking. I thought, okay, we’ll probably pop up to 3,000, maybe 3,100 because that would be a great year.

Now we’ve been to 34. That’s a, that’s a hard thing to temper your enthusiasm after, you know, after we came out of the gate so strong. But yeah, if we were just to go sideways the rest of the year. For any historical measure, that would be a fantastic year. So then you got to ask yourself, okay, so why are we up? Why is silver up so much this year? I think a lot of that is just, you know, we have this tremendous decline in the dollar index for the first three or four months of the year.

Metals kind of took off. The dollar index, you know, starts to go sideways as it has, or starts to recover. Then we may continue to go sideways a little while longer. But in the grand scheme of things, Chris, I always like, you know, like to point out to people it’s not the gold that’s changing, it’s not the silver that’s changing. Those metals are just, just the same as they’ve always been. It’s the fact that it took 1100 Federal Reserve notes to buy an ounce 10 years ago, and it took 2200 Federal Reserve notes to buy an ounce five years ago, and it takes 3300 Federal Reserve notes to buy an ounce now.

You can safely assume it’s probably going to take 4400 Federal Reserve notes a couple more years from now. So I try to keep a look at the big, keep an eye on the big picture and not get too caught up in the, you know, day trading, you know, up and down stuff. Yeah, well, I know what you mean. And we’ll just leave aside because it’s likely just a coincidence that the dollar index down about 12%. Ever since the Trump administration where about everyone outside of the desk staplers have said that the dollar is overvalued and we’ll leave aside comments or evidence of them actually influencing that lower.

But yeah, interesting with what you said about gold, especially because at least for me, I. You can tell me. I think this may be the case for you, but certainly a lot of others as well, where at the end of the day, the thing that really hooked me into the precious metals was you see that debt pile growing, you see that there’s not really any attempt to repay it. So we still haven’t had that happen yet. So it’d be one thing if, like the thing had melted down. We’re at 33, 3400, but it’s like the big elephant is still in the room and now is peeing on everyone, but he’s still there.

So this is even before we’ve seen the losses that I believe is safe to say are still inevitable on that bond pile. If, if I’ve gotten anything right this year. I mean, I thought gold would go higher. I didn’t think It’d go this high so far this year. But coming out of the election, there is all this exuberance in this narrative that was being put forth. And the dollar was rallying, what, the dollar index get to 110 or something like that back in January, because Trump was going to balance the budget and Elon was going to cut all this waste and spending.

You know, it was $2 trillion of wasteful spending, you know, and all this stuff, I was like, this is the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever heard. Because I’ve heard it before and it never happens and it’s impossible to happen. I don’t mean like it’s not important the things they did do, but the notion somehow that they were going to balance the budget, you know, by eliminating wasteful spend. Shit, I was hearing that 30 frigging years ago, right? And now we’re 37 trillion in debt. Even the most recent, you know, the Department of the treasury puts out in your 20s.

When they started saying that, I was, I, man, I remember it all. I listened to Rush limbaugh back in 1992 hearing about this stuff, right? Newt Gingrich, you know, and then they did try to run what appeared to be a balanced budget for a few years back in the late 90s, you know, and there’s just no stopping the train. I mean, it’s just math. It’s not complicated. But they try to talk certain narratives into existence. And that coming out of last year, that this year was going to be about fiscal austerity, you know, and the deficit was going to get trimmed and all that.

The U.S. treasury, maybe people don’t know this. The Treasury Department puts out what they call their monthly treasury statement. That’s creative. Every month. It’s like the eighth business day of the month or something. It comes out, they we’re now two months away from, from the end of the fiscal year for the U.S. government. It ends September 30th. The new one begins October 1st. So we only got two months left. We’ve got all the reports through July, even July. Okay, we ran a $291 billion deficit in July. And you think, well, okay, that we probably did 350 billion.

No, we did 240 billion last July. So this notion that somehow, you know, they’re really slowing things down, it’s just crap. We’re gonna do a 2 trillion dollar total deficit this year. When the fiscal year is over, it’s going to be 2 trillion or so by the time it’s all said and done ahead of Last year’s pace, there’s no stopping it. And Chris is all allegedly, during a time of robust economic growth. What happens when that. Throw our way out of it, Craig? Yeah, we’re gonna grow our way out. Hell, Bessant was out even again today, saying we’re gonn things so much they’re going to pay down the debt.

And I’m like, who believes this crap? Maybe the Algos, you know, all the machines that scan the headlines and then, you know, trade things. So anyway, if you understand that math, and I’m not, I don’t mean to be like this pessimistic, grumpy old man, but it just is what it is. That’s why I kept buying gold and silver all through 14 and 15 and 16 and 17. Right. You did, too. I mean, the math is the math. And so back to the. My original answer about being up two years in a row, even within this pricing system, that’s telling you something’s, you know.

What’s. What? You know, maybe we’re getting a little close to kind of this terminal phase of everything, and that may set us up for even more interesting months ahead. Well, do you care to perhaps elaborate when you say that’s telling us something? What. What would you say that specifically you think the price is telling us, are we in a spot that’s unfixable? Yeah. You know, again, you get, you mentioned how the. The message has gone. The official message has gone, we’re going to slash and we’re going to tariff, and you hit it. Bessett now says in Trump, too, we’re going to grow our way out of this.

Sure you are. Okay, fine. Now, in the past, if you go back, like after World War II, when we had this extreme debt to GDP ratio and all this kind of stuff, what did they do? They tried yield curve control, and they tried to get negative real interest rates that were so steep, you’re basically paying off yesterday’s debts with the cheaper dollars of tomorrow. Okay. And that’s how they tried to get it down and then grow. You know, he had the Marshall Plan and us had the only real functioning economy at that work, you know, and manufacturing sector in the late 40s and early 50s, they had a lot of things going for them.

Right. So the thing we can emulate that now is folly, though. You know, Trump’s trying to talk industry to come back onshore. This all part of things they’re hoping to do. Problem is the math. Right. The ongoing new issuance of debt, the. The refunding of existing debt that you got to find buyers for. So I think we’re all being told what’s coming. The dots are there to be connected, and it creates an extraordinarily bullish picture for the precious metals. And I’m not talking about, you know, silver going to, you know, whatever by a certain date. He’s talking about, you know, how do we get from 1100 to 3300 in 10 years, go up, you know, 3x in price and gold? Will I go up 3x again over the next 10 years? Well, the math continues to play out the way the math is.

And if, if the, the monetary policy is going the direction I think it is, Chris probably will. And I, and I say that without, you know, the idea that it’s got to be by, you know, some outrageous price by a certain date, like, you know, some people like to say. I just think you’re saying the headline is Craig Hamke guarantees $500 silver by November. Right? No, actually, let’s do the math. We’ve gone 3x in 10 years. So, all right, the headline should be Craig Hemke guarantees $10,000 gold by 2035. Well, I think that’s actually a pretty darn good over under there.

Why? Why? Why? Yeah, so, all right, so, all right, here, here. I’m monopolizing your time. No, no, rest of honor. They’re here to hear you. All right, so what’s coming? Look, I think it’s great that we’ve had this great year and it’s telling us, you know, between the central bank demand, relative scarcity, I guess, in a sense of physical metal in certain areas, you know, and all the tariff stuff and all the other stuff that’s happened so far this year, now this great year so far in gold, great year in silver, we could go sideways the rest of the year.

When I, when I wrote the thing first week of January, end of December, I said, well, maybe we’ll get to 3, 100 in gold, pull back a little bit, figure, you know, Finish we’d up 10, 12%. Silver might blast. I thought it would get to 41 or 2 and then pull back and finish the year round. 37. We might be. That might end up 37 might be where we end up. But it’s next year that has me most intrigued because. Chris, do you think Jerome Powell is getting renominated? Well, that, that was what I was going to say to your point earlier, where, you know, it looks like we’re, I mean, if we’re in a situation where Trump is picking the next guy Then we’re getting lower interest rates.

Is he, is he picking a hawkish dude? Is he going to run? You know who is Some Hawk that would always like Bullard. Some retired old Fed goon. Right. That was. You’d have to get someone who’s retired. There, there, there aren’t any hawks to pick. Yeah, right. So, I mean, he’s telling you what’s going to happen. In fact, all this stuff if you fall, if you watch the headlines close enough, they’re building a case of fraud and excess in this renovation of the Eccles building. The Eccles building is the Fed headquarters. Right. And I. There’s. They’ve spent like $3 billion on it.

The renovation. I mean, Chris, what, what’s a good NFL football stadium cost? Like 1 1/2 billion from the ground up with a dome and everything else. So the reason why they’re doing that is legally the only way he can fire Powell is for cause. So they’re behind the scenes poking and prodding, trying to come up with a way that they can fire him ahead of time. Even if they can’t do that. Even if they don’t. I think it’s pretty clear that regardless of his economic circumstances, Trump’s going to nominate some, you know, guy that wants to play ball and they’re going to cut the Fed funds rate by a couple hundred basis points.

I mean, have we established that he’s probably not looking for Paul Volcker’s son right now, right? Jimmy Volcker is not taken over. Okay, so we’ve established. They’ve told us that that’s coming. They’ve also told us, the Secretary of the treasury has told us that we need to totally reimagine the relationship between the Fed and the treasury stat. That we need kind of a different, more hand in glove approach if we’re going to manage all this debt. Right. They’ve told us that that’s coming. So I would imagine. I mentioned yield curve control earlier. If you’re going to cut this Fed funds rate to 2%, and you remember the last time when The Fed cut 50 basis points last September.

Remember the bond market sold off, get kind of a buyer strike and the federal government can’t, I mean, we’re going to be $1.1 trillion in net interest expense by the time we reach the end of this fiscal year. $1.1 trillion, that’s going up. Even if you hold interest rates the same, just the amount of, you know, debt that you’re charging that 3% on is going higher. So if that goes to 6. Now what are we, $2.2 trillion. The line item just gets out of control, right? It becomes greater than even Social Security just simply servicing the debt.

So if you’re going to amalgamate men to meld together treasury and Fed, they’re telling you yield curve control is coming. And people could say, well that didn’t work in Japan. What worked for a while. And what, and what do I mean by that? The Fed will say in this new Fed treasury model where the treasury has to do all the actual issuance and refunding and all that stuff, the Fed will say, come to me, we are buyers of everything above 3%. Three and a half, four, I don’t know, it ain’t gonna be six. We are buyers of all long term debt above 3%.

You want to talk about Q. I mean but this way it has to go. I mean this is, and they’re telling, in my experience, me reading the tea leaves, they’re telling you this is coming if you’re willing to connect and then be patient. That’s why I get so frustrated with this, you know these forecasts that are like outrageous for where silver is going to be by Halloween or something because all that’s going to do is piss people off and when it’s not whatever dollar amount by whatever date later this year, people are going to throw up their hands and ah, this is what did I want to make sure.

Because you said 200 silver by Halloween. Yeah, exactly. Translated there. Exactly. I remember the old joke when I was a stockbroker 35 years ago, wow, the guy, I had a guy tell me, he goes, here’s the thing, you never want to use date and price in a sentence. You can say I think Walmart’s going to 50. Okay? You can say I, I think some, you know, it’s going to go higher over time. But you do not say Walmart’s going to 50 by Christmas. Don’t do it. Okay? You might be right occasionally. And I think there’s a lot of people that put this crap out there and it is crap of all these numbers and dates because they’re going to bookmark their own personal tweet.

They’re going to assume everybody forgot the other 50 things that they said that were dead ass wrong. And they say, look, I’m the guy that said it was going to be like I again, I don’t mean to be the cranky old get off my lawn guy, but I’ve been doing this a long time. No, it’s beautiful. It actually Sounds like you’re describing someone I know. When we look at the silver market, one thing to keep in mind, it is a lot larger than these equity markets. You know, you put the total amount of open interest of silver, including both above ground and below ground.

Craig, did you hear that, that last part there that he seems to be calculating the below ground open interest. Do you put that in your numbers? Do you have him where he continues and he says the biggest shorts are the ETFs? Come on Craig, you have that clip. This is Jeff, that, that guy. If people don’t know, that’s Jeff Curry, he was a long time head of commodities for Goldman. Clip of him saying, you would think if anybody would know the inside baseball of how the silver market works and not be just in the dark, it would be the longtime head of commodities at Goldman.

Well Craig, in case anyone’s confused, this is exactly how it works, which I’ll preface with it with is also explicitly prohibited in the SLV prospectus. Yet nonetheless, in terms of thinking about how are you going to create a squeeze? The shorts are the ETFs. The ETFs buy the physical, they turn around and they sell on the comex so they can push the price down when SLV needs to acquire. As you explained earlier. How about that fat tub of shit that was interviewing him and he just sits there. He should have got. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Timeout Jeff.

Wait a second, hold on. Now that would seem to be, that would be unique to your metal ets because as far as I know, you know, the big SPY ETF are the authorized participants of that etf. Are they actively shorting the S P? Because you would think that would be counterintuitive to matching the gains to the index. You, you know, if you, if the, if the underlying parts of the, of the stocks in the SPY were going up, you. They have to go up at the same pace as the index or no, that’s not going to work.

So that’s not how those, that’s not how an equity ETF works. Not a fixed income ETFs work. But apparently according to Jeff Curry, former head of press of commodity trading for Goldman Sachs, this is just an accepted practice. What, what. That’s. Anyway, I just, that. That was from what, 20, 21, right? That was after the silver squeeze thing. Memory serves me right. So anyway, it just, it’s just maddening. So again there will be probably having a hard time filling the demand with the below ground open interest because the difficult transfer. Yeah, it’s like it’s like the stories that every six months or so there’s there’s a hundred thousand tons in Zaire or Congo or something like that.

The one, my favorite one is the friggin asteroid. I was gonna say I’ve heard there’s a couple high grade asteroids rapidly projecting towards towards 2080 so you got to count that that musk is going to build a friggin rocket with a mill on it mining equipment and they’re going to go land on that thing and they’re going to dig it out and they’re milling. And then you got to remember these metals are really freaking heavy as you have that clip too. Gold’s really heavy. Gold. Everything you mill out of that thing you’re then gonna have enough fuel on your rocket to fly that back.

Quite heavy as you know it is. Although maybe they could get Jeff Curry to head the excavation team which would be fun. Although Jeff. All right, I can’t remember who. I’ve got Jeff Curry on my mind. Chris. Yeah, that’ll be the next thing. I just let it happen. There’s metal to be hedged above ground, below ground and extraterrestrial. Well I know this because I’m Jeff Curry. Craig. Here’s my question though, okay. Because maybe this is counting on the below ground open interest but I’m pretty sure you’ve heard, you saw that trying to find it. But that report from Daniel Galley of TD securities where he talked about.

Now we’re walking towards a short squeeze. They also mentioned I think the daily turnover in the LBMA is about 250 million ounces. So free float goes below there. That that’s really a danger Z. Now here’s the thing though is that he calculated the free float as you look at the LBMA holdings but a bunch of that’s in the ETFs. So your free float is the other which 7851 tons. I got 279 million ounces. But as Craig, I know you’ve heard this from a bankster too in your day they always talk about in defending the COMEX short position saying well all right we’re short 43,000 contracts here but that’s an ops.

That’s the hedge for the London holding. So if that is the case on a one to one basis which I’m not sure that I would fully subscribe to 41, 43,000 contracts, that’s 217. So that means a true free float at this point would be 61 million ounces. Now I’ve seen it in the Past couple months there’s one point, I think it was down to like 8 million ounces. What. How would you look at those calculations? Is that a reasonable. I mean I think the, the other case is that it’s not hedge one to one. So but at least based on what they’re saying, wouldn’t you have to subtract that out? This is a lot of math.

Math is so hard to do verbally. Right. It’s write it down and kind of lead people along. But what, what you’re saying is that if there’s the banks that operate as bully. This is the, this is what apologists for the system I call them a manipulation denier tries to say oh no, that’s a free market, it’s a fair one. The banks, they’re just like live masters. That old clip. Oh, we’re positioned. We’re position neutral. We don’t take any net positioning one way or the other. Craig, right? Live master’s voice like that camera Y. Save that one, bookmark that one, sell it that there’s an NFT for you.

So, all right, so say they’re sitting on this float of 150 million ounces and they’re just sitting there because they got a flywheel metal. They got to have it readily available, you know, for physical distribution in London, the center. So they have this, this store of metal in London and they’re, they’re responsible for the physical distribution and they run a precious metals desk in New York that helps them to hedge that metal so they can minimize their losses because they’re banks after all. Right. That’s why. What’s his bucket? Michael? Oh God, I’m having a senior moment.

Who is the prick from JP Morgan that’s actually in jail? Noak. Yeah. Right. He might be out by now, wasn’t it? Might be. Yeah, he might be. Noak was the head of JP Morgan Precious Metals Trading but he’s also on the board of the lbma. Okay. So think of a hand in glove kind of thing. Okay, so if your free floats 150 million, that’s what? 30,000 contracts, right. You’d be short if that was the case. Right. Collectively as a group, 30,000. I don’t know what the current. I don’t have it. I’ve got the commercial category as a whole.108,000 contracts.

I’m not sure what the swap dealer position is at present but I know they are net short 43000 as of last week. I don’t look anybody that thinks that that’s actually what it is. It’s not a profit center. It’s not. We’re going to spoof everybody into these positions off of our New York desk or what we’ve seen today. Suddenly 10 million ounces were demanded to be put into the SLV last night in new share creation. I saw that this morning. Okay. Off of action. So where’s that 10 million come from, Chris? Got to be borrowed out of the whatever.

Right? Okay. Somebody’s got to loan it in London to stick it now under the auspices and the green category on your chart. Well now somebody is one of those banks is short. Got to get it back. And so it’s not coincident that very next day. Today price rises. All night long everything’s doing this. And as soon as the COMEX opens it goes. Okay, I’ve seen this down for over a decade. So how this works. You know your history. Very good. Back to your chart. The green and the silver. You pull that up? Yes. Was the free float, the silver.

And then if you add in the ETFs the green. I’m looking for it but I have all these Jeff Curry windows popped up. Anybody. The total available supply is not. You just blend it all into one color, brother. Okay? That’s how much metal the banks have their access to. Andy McGuire taught me that over a decade ago. Those things are set up as a physical flywheel. Okay? So when the banks are. That’s just a readily available store of metal that they can. That’s why the banks are the bullion banks are the authorized participants. And nobody else can get metal out of those things.

Okay? Anybody that owns them, even you know these hedge fund managers, Ray Dalio and Stan Druckenmiller, and they own the GLD because they have price exposure. They don’t own. They own price exposure. That’s it. Okay? They’re not. They’re not getting metal out of there. It’s the. Read the prospectus. The only entities that can take metal out of those big ETFs are the authorized participants. And who’s an authorized participant? All these bullion banks. And so a bank gets on the hook. They have sold forward. In London. Somebody shows up, some central bank needs demands immediate metal. Their book is mismatched.

They’ll go in, they’ll cobble some shares together, they’ll sell and they’ll extract the metal out of the etf. And then they’ll have to wait and hope that the price goes down so they can cover and put it back. That’s. That’s what Those things are there for. So your float on this chart, you’re seeing there is the total holdings there. There’s no segregation, as Jeff Curry just told you. The ETFs, they’re in there, they’re shorting it. Okay. There’s no segregation, there’s no segregation of this. So maybe a more important thing, a lesson from that chart. What year is that it peaked out? 2020 year.

2021 squeeze too. 1.1 billion ounces. Yeah. What is it now? 8,700 million. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s a more important trend. Okay. Can it. Does that have to go to zero for the system to change? No, no. You forget about the leverage. You forget about all the unallocated accounts and all the BS games that are played within this sector. A bank run will come where somebody will get demanded delivery. I mean we almost saw this with the. Mr. Gold is heavy from the LBMA back in March. Sorry, I keep swearing but I figured we can swear and if you’ve been watching Silver for 20 years, if anyway bent away, we got close.

That was, you know, when the LBMA and the Financial Times reported back in February that we’re talking four to eight week queues for physical gold in London that told you how close we were to a bank run. Now they’ve played games and they say, well it’s all about the tariffs and it’s this, that and the other thing. Okay, well whatever you want to say. All I know is there was an eight week delay and then that, that cat second in charge of the bank of England had to say well you know, we can only put so much in a glory and it’s heavy and we don’t have the people to carry it around.

Very heavy. It’s very heavy. I, I did hear at one point, I think he said that they were counting on supply from an interplanetary galaxy that’s a few trillion light years away but would be passing through and. Right. They got their numbers from Jeff. So the mine in Uganda with a hundred thousand metric tons was flooded or whatever it is canyon. The, the, the, the mine in. Or the cave in the Philippines where Yamashita’s gold is stored. You know, I do think that what is there for what that. But there was a rock slide though. Chris.

You can’t get at it. Jeff can still count it. Look, Jeff can still count it. Here’s, here’s, let’s, here’s the deal. I always show people this thing, right? This is not a bar of gold. It’s A piggy bank for God’s sake. Okay, so don’t come breaking windows in my house thinking you’re gonna walk out with a London bar. This, this. But this is what a London bar looks like, right? People have seen gold in this form, right? You see it, the picture used all the time. It took about $14,000. When Nixon called the, closed the gold window 54 years ago, it took $14,000 to buy one.

He suspended it temporarily. Let’s get our language correct here. All right, I misspeak. He gets a bad rap. It was only temporary. They didn’t have any choice actually. I mean, U. S has allegedly eight 133 metric tons. Only because he closed it. I mean if he’d have kept, if he kept going, we’d have zero. But anyway, that’s a whole other story. Anyway, it took 14, 000 to buy one of these. 25 years later, it took up about 120,000 to buy one of these. It now takes about 1.2 million to buy one of these. Which again is not unlike what I said 10 years ago.

2015, this time of the year it was $1100. Five years ago, 2020, this time of the year was $2200. Now it’s $3300 to buy one. The gold doesn’t change. Gold stays the same. So if I’m right about where I think this macro stuff is headed, this melding of treasury and fed and into one policy of 1 1/2% of the short end and 3% of the long hand and we are gonna, that’s what the yield curve is going to be. And under those circumstances we’re going to grow ourselves out of it and everything else. If I’m right about that, we’re going to go to 4400 faster than five years.

And I can say that without having to come up with outrageous predictions about this or that. We don’t have to talk about the London float, we don’t have to talk about silver and leverage. And it’s, it’s just going to happen. And silver will go through 50 and then it’ll probably be like gold. Gold broke out through new all time highs, what at the end of 2023. It then went sideways for about three and a half months and then it went from 2000 to 3, 500. Silver will go to 50 again probably next year. I wouldn’t say it’s going to happen this year.

Craig Mke said Silver’s going to $50 in 2026 anyway. It’ll go up there again and then it’ll fall back and then people. Then you’ll get the people that say it was a triple top and there’s. There are no triple tops. There are double tops, there are double bottoms. Once you top three times in anything, four times, it’s a trading range. So anyway, then you’ll get the triple top people and all this kind of stuff because go up there and it’ll fall back and then it’ll go through and it’ll be 50 something and everybody get all excited and go to 55 because usually things once they break to a new all time high, go up a bit about 10% on the hype and then it’ll fall back and 50 will become support.

I mean this is all exactly what gold did two years ago. Silver will do this in 2026 and then you’re just in this uncharted territory, you know, beyond which be Dragons and that’ll be fun. And then I’m going to sail off into the sunset like Mr. Turk. Hopefully I won’t die like Jim Sinclair, rest his soul, you know, or all the other people that didn’t get to make it to these times. And then, then we’ll have some fun. Yeah, well, I like it. Hopefully Craig’s still alive by the time Gold moves to the appropriate level. It’s the investor optimism I like to see.

Craig, I know we’re over time. One last one if I may and you can give a short answer if you will but just please, please give a short answer. Just the last one though. We’ve seen all this metal come over to New York. So it’s like we talked about London, how they’re a little bit on the lower side here. Yeah. Any. Any thoughts on. I have heard some people say maybe they think the government, the US government is involved but do you have any able to come to any conclusion of anything or what. What’s going to happen with this or.

Yes, this is not gonna be a short answer but I’ll try if you have time. I’m happy to listen. I have been get you out by but go ahead. I write a public article every week for Sprott Money. It’s the only everything else I do on my site which is not like you gotta. It’s always 15amonth to read my stellar analysis so it’s not like it’s a. If you want to participate here and read my stuff every day not you know, we’d love to have you but I write a public article every week for Sprout money just Because I’ve known Eric for a decade and his daughter Larissa runs a company and they’re nice people and whatever.

I’ve been writing about this topic since January, February, you know, we were told, oh, it’s all about tariff concerns and all this stuff and all this metal. Remember Stonex, the big commodity firm said it was 2, 000 metric tons. Remember that? That dude, you know, I know you don’t have that clip queued up, I’m not trying to put you on the spot, but it was some dude from Stonex. They said it wasn’t 7 or 800 metric tons, it was 2, 000 metric tons plus that had left London and come back to the U.S. yeah, this great distortion between spot and futures, all that kind of stuff.

There’s another thing where I think they’re telling you what’s coming. Okay. Besant on February, Sunday, February 3, was standing to Trump’s right in the Oval Office was Trump was signing an executive order thinking about that. Because it, he said in the next 12 months. We’re about halfway through that, by the way. Yep, he said, he said, and he, and he signed. Trump signs the executive order and he says, and somebody says something about, where are you gonna get the money? He says, well, Scott’s got some ideas on that. And Scott’s standing there like, oh, I wasn’t expecting to talk today.

So. And he mumbles his way through about a two minute answer where he talks about the asset monetizing the asset side of the balance sheet. Yes. And that kind of gets there. So like two weeks later, somebody asked him about it on CNBC or Bloomberg. He says, no. I said, I mobilize the asset side. And they’re no, no, no, no. Again, this is where the blob sitting there interviewing him could have said no. Here’s the clip you said monetize. And I remember I wrote a thing for sprouts. And what are they going to monetize? The only assets they have to monetize is the gold.

What are they going to do? Parkland, you know, the tanks, you know, some office buildings. Okay. Also in this is Trump’s idea of creating a bitcoin reserve. Right. There are bills in front of the U.S. house and the U.S. senate authorizing them to do this. Besant came out last week and he said, no, we’re not going to buy existing bitcoin. We’re just gonna. All the ones we’ve confiscated and stolen, you know, from other criminals, we’re going to keep those. And they asked him about Revaluing gold, which is in these bills and where he had flat out a couple months ago said we won’t be doing this.

He said the treasury is looking at revaluing something like that. He said, I doubt we’ll do it. Okay, Again, these subtle language differences, okay? Not monetized, mobilize. Okay, whatever. In, in those bills, anybody, please don’t take my word for it. Google Bitcoin Reserve act or whatever and you’ll see the House version and the Senate version. And in the US The House has a version, the Senate has version goes through committee that gets voted on and then it goes and gets reconciled into one bill because they’re going to be different. And then it goes back to the House and back to the Senate and if those both get voted on, then the President signs it and the President said he wants to do it.

And in the bill, the funding, the as Besson said would have to be deficit neutral. The deficit neutral funding of this is an accounting Gimmick where the US which currently by federal statute values their gold at $42 and 29 42.2222 22222. That’s in the federal US code. Written in these bills is the process to amend that code. Demand that the Secretary of the treasury meld melding of the Fed and the treasury demand back from all the Federal Reserve banks all of their gold certificates. And then the Secretary of the treasury shall reissue within 180 days new certificates for the Fed to hold based at the current market price.

It’s in the bill says that this is what they’re going to do. Okay, revalue the gold at the current market price. Now again, I don’t know what that means for the gold price other than gold is a store of value, which is what Besson said last week. It’s not an antique. That’s something that as the Ben Bernank said, we just hold out a tradition. No, Besson said it’s a store of value. So we’re now going to mark it back up to what it actually is. But the gimmick, the accounting gimmick is if you mark, if you change that mark just to today’s price, it’s about $800 billion that the Fed suddenly has that then they can just hand to the treasury on a deficit neutral basis.

It’s 800 billion. That just comes out of nowhere. That won’t be inflationary. Right. Well, they take that $800 billion and they buy whatever that is, 200,000 bitcoins a year for five years. That’s how they’re going to do it. They’re can, I’m not making this up. They’re telling you where this is going to come from. So anyway, putting it back together with Your initial question 15 minutes ago, it seems like why is the US repatriating all this gold? Remember the talk about we’re going to audit Fort Knox back in February and then that just poof. Well, if you’re going to re, there might be some value to actually if you’re going to do these certificates rather than just outright fraudulently say that we’re evaluating something we don’t have.

Well, okay, we’re gonna, we’re repatriating our own gold from wherever ahead of everybody else before everybody else gets whiff of this and starts a bank run. So anyway, that’s how I think all this stuff connects, Chris. And again, I don’t mean to be Russell Crowe and his in, you know, John Nash in his garage with you know, all these post it notes and strings, but I do think that you, if you connect the dots, you can see what’s coming next year. And it’s really not a whole lot different from me continuing to buy silver when it was 14 and 1610 years ago because I could connect the dots and I see, I saw what the math was going to be.

This is just the same kind of exercise only in a much shorter term. And I think they’re telling you that 2026 is going to be a doozy. Well, I think you may well be right and you violated the unruly. You put a timeline on it. But I did. I mean, I guess if gets his Fed pick by then and like what are you expecting? So that’s 12 months. I didn’t say maybe or I didn’t say spring, but I, I do think people will start to figure this out more if, if Powell makes it all the way to May when the end of his term Trump will nominate somebody probably or tell who he’s going to nominate by the end of the year and people will start connecting the dots, which is kind of what happened in February with the gold price.

Anyway, people started figuring this stuff out which is why we had with the dollar going down such a big rally to start the year. So anyway, moral of the story is I wouldn’t get discouraged right now. I don’t know what the price will do in the short term. Who does? I think we’ve got some interesting times ahead, my friend. Well, as the old saying goes, it’ll be obvious enough that Even a Keynesian can see it. So, Craig, beautifully done, my friend. You covered. Jeff Curry, bank of England. Look at that. Char intergalact grams per ton on planets that have not been formed yet, which not many other people qualified to touch on these things.

And fortunately, if those Keynesians start coming around in 2026 and they need a little info on where to go, can you let them know about our beautiful TFMR site? I’m looking at that chart. I mean, we’re recording this on Tuesday the 19th. Yeah. Not going too well for silver so far here today. Look at that. Remarkable. The low grand open interest came out higher than expected, which is. Chris, turn that to make that a five minute chart. That’s the one over there on the left. Right? All right. And then move your little crosshair across to that little peak.

Right? And go back. Go back a little farther. Go back a little farther. Go back a little farther. What’s. What time? No, no, nope, you went that other, that little peak there sticking up. Right. That’s when the big boy opens back, Back to the right, back to the right, back to the right. The last peak before the first dump. This one. Go back a little bit to the left. Yeah. What time is that on there? 8:35 Eastern. Right when the COMEX is opening. 7:20 or 8:28 25. Yeah. This is Eastern time. Yeah. So everything’s fine. So there you go.

So anyway, don’t let them freak you out. This is BS and you’re gonna have to deal with a lot of it. Now. Options are going to expire on the COMEX next Tuesday and the September Silver is going to go off the board and there’s going to be longs that are liquidated that don’t get fully rolled. We’re into all that crap again, so just don’t. If anything, there’s your headline. Craig Hempke says don’t be discouraged. Yeah, well, I look at Craig with the optimism and we didn’t even get to cover football on camera today. Although we did make some good bronco jokes for our old hombre Dave before we started.

So anyway, folks, at home, you can find the great Craig Hempke@tf metals.com report. I was pulling it back up. I’m like, I think there’s something in there. Elsa. TF metalsreport.com or by clicking in the link in the description field below right down there. And Craig, great to catch up with you as always. And this was a fun one today. Unfortunately, you know all those things that you were saying back in your 20s. We’re seeing them happen now. I mean, maybe some of them aren’t so fortunate, but it’s not. It’s not 2012 anymore, as they say. And anyway, thanks for coming by, making some sense out of all this.

And we’ll have to do this again soon, my friend, before the next macro cast comes out, right before the Jets super bowl parade. So let’s do it anytime. Thank. Thank you for the. The open mic. And let me grab it and run with it. It’s always fun. Chris all right, buddy. Jeff would be proud. And we will see you again soon. Sam.
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