➡ The text discusses the potential of gold as a currency, the manipulation of gold and silver futures markets, and the quality versus quantity theory of money. It also includes a conversation between Rafi, the endgame investor, and Keith Weiner, CEO of Monetary Metals, where they discuss various topics related to gold and silver markets. They also touch on the physical gold trade in Dubai and the importance of quality in money creation.
➡ The text discusses the lack of curiosity in understanding the causes and effects of different monetary systems, such as gold mining, sound credit, and money creation by central banks. It also talks about the potential collapse of the dollar due to credit expansion and the shift towards gold as an international settlement asset. The author suggests that this could lead to a financial crisis, with the dollar being the last currency to fail.
➡ The text discusses the global reliance on the US dollar and the fluctuating opinions about US monetary policy. It suggests that gold could become a viable alternative for settling international transactions, especially when other currencies fail. The text also mentions the potential for gold to increase in value as it becomes more necessary for global trade. Lastly, it discusses the impact of geopolitical events on the value of gold.
➡ The text discusses the potential for the U.S. dollar to lose value and the possibility of the U.S. government creating more inflation. It argues that inflation is not a solution, but a problem that can lead to more debt. The text also discusses the role of gold in the economy, suggesting that it still backs the dollar and could balance the balance sheet if the debt goes away. Finally, it discusses the concept of gold backwardation, which is when the current price of gold is higher than prices quoted in futures contracts, and suggests that this could be a sign of economic instability.
➡ The speaker discusses the current state of the silver market, noting that prices are rising while the basis is falling. This unusual situation, known as backwardation, has been ongoing since October. The speaker suggests that this could be due to high demand for silver or issues with the dollar. Additionally, refiners are struggling to hedge and finance, leading to a refusal to accept silver. The speaker also criticizes the existence of the gold and silver futures market, arguing that it doesn’t make sense in a monetary system and contributes to market manipulation.
➡ The speaker discusses how to profit from selling metal and earning interest in gold, promoting a service that helps with this. They also express a desire to connect with someone named Daniel Oliver. They encourage the listener to check out more information through a link in the description.

I do see the early edges of gold as a settlement currency and the nuance, the fine point that I would put on this. Ain’t nobody wants that. Ain’t nobody got time for that. People crave the dollar and at the same time they don’t love U.S. monetary policy. Sometimes they love it, sometimes they hate it. You know, it’s a love hate thing. So like, you know, right now I really love them though. And then we have things like, oh yeah, we’ll have a little war in Venezuela. Oh yeah, we’re going to invade Greenland. I mean, just like crazy, crazy shit that I like to joke and say.

That wasn’t on my bingo card. Bingo. The futures manipulation is the existence of the gold and silver futures market itself. Because there shouldn’t, in a monetary system, there shouldn’t be money being sold on a futures basis for the derivative of that money. It doesn’t make sense. Everything should be priced in gold and silver and, and the, the future should be denominated in gold and silver ounces and not in dollars. That is the manipulation. But that’s the entire thing. Yeah. I say you’re, you’re touching on a topic near and dear to my heart. My heart. Hey guys, Rafi here from the endgame investor.

And I got Keith Weiner of Monetary Metals, CEO of Monetary Metals, where I have gold and silver stored and earning a yield in gold and silver. And I’m pretty happy about that. Keith will tell you more about that in the, in the video. And I was going to ask Keith a few questions about silver backwardation, about something that Daniel Oliver wrote about the second and third phase, third phases of the gold bull market. Whether we’re there and if we’re not, when do you think we’re going to be there and just see how he’s doing. How you doing, Keith? Doing good.

How about you, Ralphie? I’m good. How’s Dubai? It’s starting to get hot in ways than one. Do you ever go back to Arizona? I, I do. I’m gonna be back there in, in March, but you know, Dubai. Okay, good. Wait, in what other way is it getting hot? Besides the weather? The market. Which is why I’m spending so much time here. Right. Okay, good. Phoenix is, is, you know, seismically dead when it comes to gold. I mean, there’s nothing going on. And, and Dubai is, is the, you know, it’s the hub of the physical gold trade really.

An awful lot of gold comes in and out of here. There’s massive gold souk. Huge volumes going through that. And Then the entire gold ecosystem of all the companies that are refining and manufacturing and wholesaling and retailing and everything else. Right. Oh, so you’re there trying to catch a few leases if you can. Just a few, yeah. Okay, good. So I wanted to, the first thing I wanted to do is show you a few passages from Daniel Oliver. Now, full disclosure, it’s nothing that big of a disclosure. I’m just being dramatic. But the most people in the gold and silver analysis industry, community, whatever, I don’t really look up to them as much as I look to the side just to see what they’re saying.

And some of them I look down upon, but not very many. The, the, the super hyper, you know, everything’s coming down tomorrow, buy everything now, go into debt. You know, like the Michael Sailors of, of the gold and silver community. I don’t really like them so much, but. And the ones that say manipulation, manipulation, manipulation with everything. And I think we agree on that. But the two guys, the, the two people I really look up to are really you and Daniel Oliver. It doesn’t mean I agree with you all the time, but I, I, I look for your opinion on things because I know that if I don’t have it, I’m probably missing something so interesting that you mentioned Dan.

Because, you know, he and I, you know, talk from time to time. You do? I can’t get in touch with the guy. He’s really hard to, to, to pin down. But yeah, yeah, he is. But just, just tell him, hey, I’m going to be in New York and let’s get together. And that, that usually does the trick. At least it has for me. I would love to be in a room with you two just listening to you talk about. So anyway, he said to me, he said because the whole world believes in the quantity theory of money, which is one of the two foundational premises of Bitcoin.

Quantity theory of money, labor theory of value. And he said there’s maybe a handful of us and you and I are two of them. He said to me that completely reject the quantity theory of money that are all about the quality theory of money. And I said, yeah, you’re probably about right, that there’s probably a handful. Maybe, you know, I shouldn’t say starting with fek a tag because I think it really goes back to Minger. And even a few of the monetarists flirted with it. Newt Wixel found because he was trying to find that the price level correlates to the quantity of money.

And what we found Was the price level correlates to the interest rate which was for him was kind of a, you know, what’s up with that? And then later you know, Gibson discovered this, it’s called Gibson’s paradox. And it’s almost like the entire monetarist, you know, neoclassical, all the mainstream people completely forgotten about this that it didn’t correlate with you know, price levels and correlate with quantity, it correlates with the interest rate and anyway, so Dan and I, you know, go back, you know some years and and agree on, on things that are pretty sort of deep monetary theory level.

So yeah, most people wouldn’t even understand what you’re even talking about. So you know, to agree on things that are so esoteric like that there shouldn’t be a study. There should be. They’re just logic when you get down to it. But yeah, everyone understands like okay, money supply, right? Like M0MT whatever. Like that’s a mainstream concept. And I’m saying like that’s not what drives the price level. What’s not irrelevant pretty much because you can have a rising quantity of dollars causing a falling price level. So it can be absolutely not only interesting correlation but actually in causality depends on where you are in the cycle.

Anyway, I published my theory of interest in prices which is pretty esoteric but quality theory of money is not esoteric either. It’s saying, you know. And I wrote an article about this. Suppose your kid asks you dad, can I borrow a thousand dollars? You’re like what do you need a thousand dollars for? And he’s like I got my things, how are you going to repay me? Well, I’ll find a way. And you know, you don’t believe him and it’s pretty lame because you know he’s just going to go buy video games or maybe drugs or who knows what.

And as the repayment not going to happen but suppose you lend it to him anyway and now you have a little thing written in crayon, a notebook page that says Daddy, I owe you thousand dollars. Now suppose there’s a thousand other daddies in your part of the city who’ve done the same thing with their kids. And so now you have that, then you start trading around those notes, right? No, no, you take all those notes and you aggregate them into a single asset backed security and you go to a credit rating agency and you get different transfers.

But there’s a triple A tranche of this, right? So I mean this is like basically what happens in the financial system. And so if you take Any of that paper. But, you know, we’ll just, for argument’s sake, we’ll just focus on the triple A, you know, tranche. And you sell that to bond investors. There’s. There’s a counterfeiting there, there’s a fraud there. There’s something fundamentally wrong at a moral level. Not like statistics. There’s something. There’s something fundamentally wrong and it’s not an accounting problem. It’s a. Okay, there’s no party on the other side of this who has the means or the intention, but frankly, the means to repay it.

There’s something wrong with it. And so the quantity theory of money doesn’t really heed the difference between money that’s created of quality, that is, there’s something backing it. You know, there’s a party willing to, not only willing to pay, but able to pay because the money was used to finance a productive asset versus, you know, pure printing press stuff, which is, which is worthless or morally worthless anyway, which is the point. So you have quality theory that just tries to look at that and quantity theory that just cares about the stack of the quantity of it.

Now, I ask in one of my papers, you know, the thing I just. I’m sorry, I’m going off on a rant on your show and I’m stealing your bully pulpit here. One of the things that bugs me, right, So a lot of people at tech companies in Silicon Valley like Intel and Apple, they’ll have a sticker on the back of their laptop, at least. This used to be the thing. I don’t know if it’s still popular. Be curious. And there’s just an absolute lack of curiosity when it comes to these things. For instance, there’s, there’s a lack of curiosity when it comes to everything because the culture that we’re in, everyone has to take a position immediately on everything, no matter how little they know about whatever it is.

Doesn’t even matter. Money, not money. Politics, geopolitical, whatever, PhDs, PhDs in monetary economics. I’m not curious. And I asked the following question. So if inflation is an increase in the quantity of money, and we’re not too picky about what we want to define money to be. Money is whatever the government tells us it’s supposed to be. Whatever. Okay, so in the gold standard, gold mining is an increase in the quantity of gold, what are the causes and the effects of gold mining? Okay, leaving that aside, now in the gold standard also, you have honest, sound credit, which is a loan of gold to a productive enterprise that has the means and the intent to repay and it eventually will repay.

What are the causes and the effects of sound credit in an honest monetary system? Okay, leaving that aside, in a dishonest monetary system such as the one that we find ourselves in right now, where the central bank is putting it out because of obviously funding the welfare state, but also monetary policy, so it’s a highly politicized process. What are the causes and the effects of that kind of money creation, if you want to call that money? Now you set those three things side to side. Causes and effects of gold mining, causes and effects of honest, you know, gold backed in gold, redeemable credit and the causes and effects of, you know, issuing irredeemable credit.

And you compare those three things. Isn’t anybody curious that clearly they don’t have the same cause? Leaving aside for the moment, are the effects the same? The causes are quite different in these three cases. Right? That should be pretty clear. That should not be. I mean I say a lot of things that are controversial that should not be controversial. Okay, if the causes are the same, that should at least raise the question. People should at least be curious. Are the effects the same of three different phenomena that have three different causes, Are the effects all the same? Well, maybe, maybe not.

Nobody’s curious about it. The quantity theory of money says ignore all that, just add up the quantity and that tells you everything you need to know. F of X, the function is a function of X which is the quantity. And then some sort of equation based on the money supply will give you the general price level or mv equals, you know, whatever. And there’s no curiosity there. There is this rote recitation of canon and these, you know, whether it’s a pseudo equation, whether it’s a bunch of anti concepts, whether it’s just a rubbish of saying that the price level comes from the quantity.

There’s no curiosity there. And people should be curious. It reminds me of that phase in physics in the early 20th century. I forgot who said it was like he was telling his students not to go into physics. This is like before quantum theory ever came out or anything. Or general relativity or anything. He’s like, yeah, don’t go into physics. Everything is. We already found out everything here. It’s going to be boring. There’s nothing to do here. Was that, was that Neil Bore’s? It might, it might have been Neil’s Bohr. It might have been him. It was somewhere, somewhere in his era.

Yeah, or who’s the guy who said that’s not even wrong and then took a Paper crumpled up and threw it in the bin. What the hell is his name? I don’t remember. Wolfgang Collie. It might have been Paulie’s. Oh, the exclusion principle guy? Yeah, okay, it might have. It might have been Paulie’s professor. It might have been Niels Bohr, but it was one of those guys. Yeah, right. Everything’s been figured out and then they discover quantum weirdness and, and you know, all that throat. Anyway, so let. Let me. Let me get into what Daniel Oliver said and you know, imagine yourself in like one of those police interrogation rooms with a double way mirror and a light in your face, you know, trying to intimidate you.

I know you know where they are, so tell me before I do some damage you won’t walk away from. So Daniel Oliver says here is talking about the second and the third phase of the gold bull market. He says the difference between the first phase of the gold bull market, he says, which we. He says is supposedly over since that big drop, right, is that during previous periods the QE money was dispersed throughout the globe, sparing the US the full brunt of the inflationary effects. If gold is replacing the dollar as the international settlement asset, which seems to be ongoing, then the new QE money will mostly stay right here in the US as inflation picks up again and bond investors begin demanding a yield premium to protect against inflation, the Fed will find it has to buy ever more bonds to affect interest rate.

This will be the second phase of the global market, a move that has not yet begun. The move, the move to reflect the market realization. The Fed is powerless to save private equity or control interest rates without buying the entire bond market. The third phase. Now this is where I want you to really chime in here will be when the higher rates create a government bond death spiral. The higher the interest rates rise, the larger the interest payments go. The worse the deficits, the greater the supply of Treasuries and the higher rates will rise. Positive feedback loop, right? This is the rapidly intensifying government crisis.

Either the government defaults or it orders the central banks to buy all, any and all Treasuries, destroying the currency. This has always been the end game. And no, I did not influence him. He doesn’t know me and he doesn’t know that I am the end game investor. I didn’t, I didn’t like, you know, copyright the term endgame or anything like that, but that’s what I say. And then he quotes Mises, a quote we both know very well. There is no means of avoiding the Final collapse of a boom brought by, about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrop of the currency system involved.

Now here, what I, what I’m saying here is that I think Daniel Oliver agrees with me that we are headed to an end game, which means the destruction of the dollar. And I know you don’t like to think about that because you don’t want to think about zombie apocalypses and all that stuff, but I’m asking you logically if this is the monetary system that we’re in and Mises was right and Daniel Oliver I think is right too, how we, how do we can’t avoid a collapse of the dollar? It’s coming. What? Why? How could it not be soon for, I mean, look how fast things are moving.

So just, just to correct a, just a quibble about a point, I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. I mean I’ve written papers like, called, you know, When Gold Backwardation becomes Permanent, which is about financial Armageddon. Right, which is our next topic. Yeah. And you know, so absolutely, I do think it’s coming. I think the dollar is last. Like they’re all, all the currencies are failing and the dollar will fail to last. And so right now I think we’re actually seeing an increase in dollarization because of dollar stable coins.

So if you are subject to one of the myriad of governments around the world that have, you know, horrific inflation rates and capital controls and other things that try to keep you locked into your currency, then you can buy, you know, tether or one of the other dollar stable coins. And that is going to be an enormous influx of capital into the dollar. So but let me start out with where I agree with Dan. I do see the early edges of gold as settlement currency. And the nuance, the fine point that I would put on this, ain’t nobody wants that.

Ain’t nobody got time for that. That is the irony of the whole thing. So the world outside the US and you probably see it in Israel, is, you know, there’s a love hate relationship with the dollar. On the one hand, everybody craves dollars because everything’s financed in dollars. At a bigger level, there is no international bond market in shekels, There is no international bond market in lira or you know, whatever. It’s a dollar, it’s a dollar world. Which means if you have dollar debt, you must seek dollar Revenues to service your dollar debt. It’s that simple.

And every time, what is that expression? Every time the US gets a cold, the rest of the world sneezes. That’s not changing anytime soon, in fact, ever. There is no other paper currency that can remotely, like orders and orders of magnitude come to replace, you know, the dollar in any of this stuff. So, you know, people crave the dollar and at the same time they don’t love U.S. monetary policy. Sometimes they love it, sometimes they hate it. You know, it’s a love hate thing. So like, you know, right now I really love them though. But it’s, you know, depending on where in the world you are, you get various different versions of the short end of the stick.

And they don’t necessarily love US foreign policy, which I don’t think I’m being too political to say of late, it is at least inconstant and unreliable. And, you know, no matter what part of the world you’re in, I think everybody would agree with that statement. And so at times, you know, Trump is making friends with certain countries, at other times, he’s making enemies. Sometimes the same country in the same week. You know, so everybody would love an alternative to settling in the dollar. The problem is if you want to settle in what, rupees, rubles, I mean, they all have capital control, so there’s no market for those currencies outside those countries anyways.

Gold is the only viable alternative. Gold is the only thing. And ain’t nobody want that. Ain’t nobody got time for that. So I love this quote from Winston Churchill where he said it was a backhanded compliment at least he said, God bless the Americans because he said after they’ve tried everything else, they’ll do the right thing. And I think, man, what a perfect quote to describe how the world is to going, going to move to the gold after they tried everything else and nothing else works and everything else fails and they fall on their face finally in the end, you know.

So countries are going to use gold to settle when nothing else is working. Yep. And only reluctantly and only dread, kicking and screaming. Because if you want to import, you know, the, the beef or the coffee or the iron ore or whatever it is, you got to settle in something that’s going to be acceptable to seller. Gold will always be acceptable and maybe you don’t have anything else that would be acceptable. So. So that’s what it’s going to be. And so if you want to define that as phase two, I don’t really think in terms of Phases like that.

But if you want to define that as phase two. Okay, so phase one is essentially people buying gold as a non expiring call option. Yeah. Just to give you, give you context, the first phase, he said, began when Russia’s dollar assets were confiscated. Right, that’s, that’s, that’s what he says. He’s like, that’s, that’s when the, the dollar regime started to shake. Right. And since, since then, since then gold has gone like sort of parabolic since it was it June, February 2022, something like that. I mean I, I would call the new gold bull I started. The gold price really was picking up in the end of 2019, but I would really say post Covid with CARES act and other things like just massive, like let’s shut down the economy and throw free money at people so that they can pretend that, you know, they can still keep consuming even though no one’s producing anymore.

But anyways, so people are essentially in that phase one, buying gold as a non expiring call option on what they think may be to come. Okay. And, and maybe that’s close to what Dan is saying. Then phase two. Okay, we’re, we’re starting to see, I think, the very early edges of the use of gold as medium of exchange, at least between, you know, national, you know, trading blocks. Now I have to say, and it amuses me to no end when the bitcoiners say gold is nowhere in the world used as a medium exchange. I happened to call on this jewelry wholesaler and you know, towards the end of the, after the meeting, let’s give you a tour around the, you know, the place.

I go in this room. Oh, this is the room where the, you know, the retailers are counting and verifying. Okay, it’s 16 of these rings and 15 of these necklaces and whatever. And they had this giant bolt cutters, like the kind that, I mean, the thing was like over a meter tall. And I’m holding, it was heavy, like, I don’t know, probably 20 kilos at least. I’m a pretty big guy and I could really feel the weight of it. And the, the nipper end, you know, the business end of this thing was like this big, right? And I’m like, man, you must, you know, have to cut into some serious like high security locks.

They said, no, no, no, we use that to cut gold bars. I’m like, what? And he said, yeah, yeah, it’s a settled payment, right? When, when, when the jewelers pay us, they pay us in kilo bars and that’s how we make change. I’m just like, this is nuts because I’ve written for years that, you know, the thing with larger bars is, you know, you can’t very well cut off a, you know, take it like gold is soft. You could take your knife and cut off a corner of it, but you ruin the bar. And now nobody knows what it weighs anymore.

They don’t trust the providence of it. And I said, you guys have made me wrong. I’ve been writing about this for years. Oh yeah. You know, if somebody, you know, if a jeweler buys gold and owes, you know, or buys jewelry and owes 3.72 kilos, they’ll take out four kilo bars and we cut off a chunk of the fourth. That’s changed. And I said, are you guys accurate at estimating, like, how. Yeah, we’re pretty good, actually. Pretty good, yeah. The remaining part is a credit or a debit on account for the next order. And so, yeah, they are using it.

But at the national level, you know, India bought oil from Russia. This is going back a year or two now, and they’re paying in rupees because, hey, the brics country is all for one, you know, one for all and all that. And I think Russia knew this was going to happen, but they were doing it as a stunt. What, the rupee fell? Yeah, of course it did. To, to poke the, you know, the eye of America and say, see, we’re settling in local currencies now. Anyways, the Russian finance minister, you know, came out with a statement and he said, yeah, we’ve been accepting rupees for oil.

We’re not going to do that anymore. We’re not going to accumulate a pile of useless rupees. That was his, his term, his phrase. And so of course, I mean, nobody wants rupees. That’s, that’s it is what it is. So what is it going to be? It’s going to be gold. And when, when that starts to happen, you know, that call option starts to get a little bit more looking like it’s in the money. Like, okay, this is going to be an actual, like everybody in the world is going to need gold in order to, to settle things.

So the price really perks up. And then of course, the leverage speculators get into it, drive it ahead of it and then, you know, they get flushed out. On January 29, we have in our supply and market outlook report pictures of the intraday action with the basis of what happened on the 20, I think in the 2026 Gold Outlook report. That’s it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So that’s, that’s what you should look at. That’s in the description below. We’ll have a link for you there. Check it out. And anyway, you know, we have some pictures of what happened intraday and let’s just say it’s not what most people, most analysts are saying happened, to say the least.

And anyway, especially in silver, we had an enormous flush of, of leveraged, you know, future speculators and you know, probably got to it much healthier. Well, what, what I noticed particularly about the gold market less than silver is that open interest was about 542,000 contracts at a peak about maybe 12 trading days, 10, 12 trading days ago. And then it, it flushed out to about 400,000, which is very, very low. It hasn’t been that low since, you know, before COVID the last 10 years even. So it looks like, it looks like the speculators have been flushed out.

And I don’t know if we’re going to go up immediately now, but I think we’re near a price low, if not in time. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think all the, you know, and we talked about this in the report, but all the macro drivers, all the geopolitical drivers for higher gold prices, you know, we talked about last year are still here and then some. And then we have things like, oh yeah, we’ll have a little war in Venezuela. Oh, yeah, we’re going to invade Greenland. I mean, just like crazy, crazy shit that I like to joke and say.

That wasn’t on my bingo card, bingo, you know, going on. And all of which increases, you know, uncertainty increases fear, increases, you know, concern. Like, okay, what if, what if the US Isn’t all that, what if the dollar loses all that stuff? People, people turn to gold or at the very least, the US Government’s going to be forced to, you know, try to deliberately create more inflation in order to. Now I think that theory is, is, is not just wrong, but I think wrongheaded inflation is the process of borrowing more. So, yeah, it may be true, maybe not in some cases, but it may be true that each dollar of debt is worth a bit less.

Maybe, however, you owe exponentially more of them. You can’t get out of the hole by digging deeper. And so inflation is never actually a way out. It’s only, you know, drilling down. That doesn’t mean that the policymakers wouldn’t try it because let’s just say they don’t agree with Keith Weiner on economics. Do you mind If I put in a dumb and dumber meme here, we’re in a hole. We’re just gonna have to dig ourselves out. But if. Let’s spend like one more minute on this and then move into the gold. Backwardation vs backwardation vs forward curve inversion that we discussed before.

But if. If Daniel Oliver is right about the third phase, that. What he calls the third phase, that the. Eventually the Fed is going have to buy the entire bond market and destroy the currency. That. That is the end, isn’t it? So I. I’m not. I’m not with Dan or maybe anybody else in that. I think we have lower interest rates coming, not higher. So I don’t see that runaway spiral just at the moment. But, you know, I mean, I certainly agree with Mises, and I think Dan, in the broader sense is right, that in the end, yeah, this is what happens.

And, you know, I’ve had some interesting opportunities to talk to folks about kind of the technicalities of the bond market and how things work. And at the Fed and the Fed’s, you know, not just balance sheet, but P L. Right. So the Fed has a P L. What’s a P L? And what’s a P L? Profit and loss statement. Oh, right. Sorry. Okay, got it. And, you know, so the Fed makes interest on, you know, the bonds that advice. And then the Fed pays interest on reserves, which are, you know, the deposit. Yeah. So they’re two.

They’re $243 billion in the hole last time I checked. Right. So it’s a moment. They’re cash flow negative. So that. That is what. What I say about that, actually, Keith, and I think you’d appreciate this, is that when people say the dollar is not backed, it’s not backed by anything but faith. No, it’s backed by the assets on the Fed’s balance sheet. However, there are 243 billion actually unbacked dollars because they’re backed by deferred assets, which literally do not exist. And the debt assets are denominated in the actual liability that the Fed, you know, owes in the very dollar.

So it’s like a twisted thing, but the only real asset on the balance sheet is gold. Therefore, I say we’re still on a gold standard because if. If the gold in the. Because there’s still gold on the balance sheet, which is technically owned by the treasury, owned by the Fed, and therefore gold does still back the dollar. It’s just inflation is on top of that, you know, and that’s what goes away. And that’s Daniel Oliver’s thesis that once the debt goes away, the gold in the balance sheet takes the room of that lost value and then balances the balance sheet that way.

Yeah. There’s, there are a lot of people and I’ve met, you know, like Swiss bankers for example, who think. Yeah. That if the gold price goes enough, goes up enough, recapitalizes, you know, balance sheet, which, which is true. I mean if you measure the balance sheet in dollars, that’s true enough. Just a function of what the gold price might be. So I just wanted to say as an interesting aside, because you mentioned Fekete talked about this relationship between the Fed and the Treasury. Right. So the Fed’s asset is the Treasury’s liability and the Treasury’s liability is only payable in terms of the Fed’s liability.

Yeah. And so Fekete calls this a check kiting scheme. You know what it reminds me that reminds me of. I can’t help but mention this just because it’s on my mind constantly now and you don’t have to give me your opinion on this, but it reminds me of the way that, that vaccines are tested because they’re tested with a, with a placebo. A placebo that’s basically a previous generation of vaccine which is itself is tested against an untested vaccine that they’re testing now. So it’s a circle with no actual placebo control. And if you look deeply into the trials, you’ll see that that’s true.

But it’s the, it’s the same. You know, we’re relying on you to pay this back and the thing that we owe itself and then it’s a circle and then it just collapses in on itself. But anyway, yeah, in the end. But then the question is what’s the path to get there? So I argue, probably my most important paper, when gold backwardation becomes permanent, it’s all over the Internet. Anybody can Google that. And I argue that at the end it’s not quantity of dollars, it’s not even necessarily a spiral of interest rates, it’s when the gold owners, and they’re the only ones who count in this equation by the way, because there’s always demand to buy, always demand from people who have dollars to buy some gold, but there isn’t necessarily demand from the people of gold to trade it for dollars.

So when we get to that point, and that’s what backwardation is all about, which is I think our topic here, then you get permanent gold backwardation and by process of arbitrages the prices of all Commodities will be driven to infinity or to the point where everybody takes a fork and sticks it. Say okay, so stick a fork in it, we’re done with a dollar and that’ll be arbitrage and you know, completely unstoppable force. When that finally happens, I don’t think we’re that close to it. Okay. So I think that’s, I think that’s the main difference between, between me and you.

It’s just timing really. I think we’re pretty close to it. You don’t, I mean maybe you’re right, maybe I’m right. I don’t know. But what I wanted to ask in the specific question on this is that we, you, you talk about backwardation as a differential between the London spot price and the New York futures price or the nearest futures price in silver. That’s happening now and it reasserted itself after the big crash from 120 to about 66 low. And now I looked at your, your data science charts. The silver basis is like, like re expanded. The co basis is now up, the basis is negative and gold is getting closer and closer to that.

Now when Fiketa was talking about gold backwardation was he talking about London prices? Don’t care what city it is but like they’re the spot market and New York is the futures market. Is he talking about that or is he talking about forward curve inversion meaning the price of spot gold in New York, the spot contract is more expensive than a future March and then more expensive than and that’s more expensive than March, than April which is more expensive than may, etc etc. Which one is it? He was talking about physical gold cash on the barrel head versus any futures contract.

He wasn’t really, I mean he was aware that the futures market is structured like in gold you have February, you have April, you have June, you have August, you have October, you have, have December. In silver you have March, May, July, September, December. He was aware of that but he wasn’t really too concerned about the difference between this contract versus that contract. He was saying that gold, right now you have a gold bar, I have a wad of cash that price versus you’re going to sell me a contract for gold delivery next month when that’s inverted and that’s backwardation.

Now I don’t recall him being that specific about would all the contracts go into backwardation. I’ve written about that. I used to write a great deal about that because after 2008 gold would be in and out of backwardation. And what I noticed is that the near contract would be the most consistent to go into backwardation and the next contract much less frequently but sometimes did. And I think there was one or two occasions where the next contract after that also did. And I said okay. In my view all contracts when they tip into backwardation, that’s really the danger sign probably if you think about it.

Probably you should see a perfect inversion of the forward curve as well as all contracts and backwardation. So in other words, spot above, you know, in this case, well for gold we’re sort of past February at this point, but spot being above April, April being above June, June being above August, August being above October. So that’s, that’s forward curve inversion, right? That’s right. You see you should have in the, in the final end of, end of end like the end endgame. I, I think what you’d expect is the entire forward curve perfectly inverted and spot above the near months.

Okay, that’s what I think the end would actually look at. But I think more importantly what you’re going to see is a price. The price is going to be rising exponentially while backwardation grows, not shrinks. Have you ever seen silver and backwardation for this long? I couldn’t tell you how long but I can say it’s been on and off since October 9th, but pretty consistently on. I can’t, I can’t. I’d have to go back and really study the data to speak to the length of it. But the, the magnitude of it. So on October 20th, if you wanted to sell spot silver, if you had a thousand ounce bar silver you could sell and then by The December contract, $2.15 per ounce was your profit to do so.

That’s, I don’t know if that’s the biggest I’ve ever seen but that seems pretty extreme. And that’s only for you know, a couple of months. So if you annualize that, we’re pretty big percent. I think that was like 27% which is, you know, silver is always, you know, not only is the silver price more volatile but the, the silver basis is more volatile than the gold basis as well. But that seems pretty extreme. And you know the thing about. Right so, so a year ago I wrote the supply and demand report or the, excuse me, the gold market outlook report.

And I say we have a bull market and blah blah, blah. You know what happened in the last year? Well, okay, obviously the price went up which I said the price was going to go up. I said the price was going to go up last time when it actually Went up, but I’ll call that a victory. I’m trying to be conservative, not sensational. But what happened in the year since then is that in the metals, and most especially silver, we’d see rising price and the basis not rising. And in fact in silver the base is falling while the price is rising.

So you could say, okay, that’s exciting because that means much higher prices to come. And boy did we get like, you know, I was seeing that when, when the price of silver was at inflation 30s. The basis, the silver basis is still negative. Right? Silver basis right now is negative. I looked, you know, right. I think I looked on Monday. But yeah, it was. And anyways, all through 2025 you see this rising price and that basis stubbornly refusing to rise and even falling. And so yeah, that predicted, as the theory predicts, you know, higher prices to come.

And boy was that true. Now here we are at 80 bucks something and it’s still backwardated in the near contract. And the basis is certainly not anywhere near the interest rate, which is what it should be. The basis should be marginally above essentially Libor. And it’s not anywhere near that something is rotten in the state of dollar or in the case of silver, it could be this isn’t entirely monetary, that this could just be that there’s just crazy demand for silver and maybe a little of both. Now there is something rotten in the state of dollar, which is at the same time that you have incredible scarcity of the metal.

The primary producers of the metal are the refiners. Yeah, they can’t hedge, so therefore they can’t bring it to market. Right. They can’t hedge and they can’t finance it and therefore they’re refusing silver. And so the worst of it, I think the worst of it is a couple weeks ago, but at the worst of it, you know, if you said, okay, look, I’ve got a stack of 50 Silver Eagles and you went to a dealer at least in the US I don’t know what it’s like in Israel or other parts of the world. They’d be like four to six weeks, like send it to us now and we won’t price it or pay you for at least four to six weeks.

Yeah, that’s exactly what Brian Kuzmar was saying when I had him on last week or a week and a half ago. He can’t, he can’t take junk silver anymore from people who want to sell it to him because he can’t get front money from the refinery because they’re all clogged Right. So there’s a perversity there. And I think the key takeaway from my dissertation was a sign of a healthy economy is a sign of increasing coordination. Increasing coordination is when spreads are narrowing and discoordination is when spreads are widening. So now we have this incredible widening disc coordination.

So people that want to sell their silver to market are getting absolute crap prices. Or some dealers are like, oh yeah, we’ll buy for melt at spot minus 20% or something. Keith, I have, I have a theory. I wanted to. We have not much time left left. My battery is dying and my charger isn’t working. So we have, we have, we have like 10 minutes. So I have a theory that just came to me and I wanted to put it by you. I had this guy, Brian Kuzmar of Commercial Rare Coins, Precious metals. Nice little shop.

I wanted to. You said you talked to him once or tw. Twice and Nice guy. And he, he said. I told you what he said he couldn’t, he can’t buy junk silver from the public anymore because he can’t ship it off to a refiner. And his theory is that they’re. They’re clogged with mining supply. I have a different theory. It might not be mutually exclusive to his theory, but my theory is given that there is backwardation in the silver market, they can’t profitably hedge, therefore they can’t refine silver. That’s right. So they, it’s not that they’re clogged, it’s that they’re turning it away.

Both from the miners, possibly. I don’t have a lot of data on that. And certainly from the bullion dealers. Absolutely. So very perverse. It’s a sign of discoordination in the market. Okay. And that brings me back to my position on what market manipulation is. I don’t talk about the Crimex and this and that. Maybe there’s spoofing every now and then, you know, these minor little stupid things. Stupid things that they do and get. They could find $100 million for whatever it is, JP Morgan and like the, the crowd likes to talk about that. I don’t care about that.

But what I say the manipulation is, the futures manipulation is the existence of this gold and silver futures market itself. Because there shouldn’t, in a monetary system there shouldn’t be money being sold on a futures basis for the derivative of that money. It doesn’t make sense. Everything should be priced in gold and silver and, and the future should be denominated in gold and silver ounces and not in dollars. That is the manipulation. But that’s the entire thing. Yeah. I say you’re, you’re touching on a topic near and dear to my heart. In the gold standard, there is a market for the, you know, future payment of gold.

It’s called the bond market or maybe the bills market. It’s not a futures market. And you know, gold and silver, well, gold went on the silver futures market after. So Nixon, you know, destroyed the last vestiges of the gold standard in 1971. He said temporary. So everyone’s like, what do you mean? What do you mean? By 1975 was clear it wasn’t temporary. So then, okay, let’s might as well re. Legalize it. Who gives a shit anymore? And yeah, let’s see it on the futures exchange with gold trading right next to frozen orange juice at pork bellies.

Yep. And they thought it was a joke. They thought gold would be $5. You’re right, it shouldn’t. A futures market is for things that are produced seasonally and or where there’s very significant risk of supply shocks due to natural events like weather. So a futures market is really ideal for agricultural commodities where there’s significant uncertainty about what’s coming. The time of the harvest. The idea of putting gold there is truly, truly absurd. Yeah, well, we covered a lot of ground and my computer’s dying. I got to get a new charger. But Keith, is there anything you want to say to the crowd and to our loyal fans and those that don’t like us at all and whoever is watching about monetary Metals, about the 2026 Gold Outlook Report and maybe about the end game? Download the report.

You may hate it, but I think you summed it up fairly well when you said, you want to listen to my opinion, even if you don’t agree, read it. There’s stuff in there. Even if you don’t agree. You’re gonna see something. A different perspective than you would in most other analysis out there. We pay interest on gold and silver for people that thought, okay, I bought gold because I thought the dollar was going to shit. You were right. The dollar did start to go to shit. It’s much shittier now than it was when you bought. How do you profit from that? And the only way conventionally is to sell your metal, which means get more of the very dollars you thought were going to probably still are or put it to work earning 4% interest in gold and, you know, basically have your cake and eat it too.

So that’s, that’s what we do. Follow me. At real Keith weiner on x monetary-metals.com and. And monetary-metals.com Rafi link in the description below. And I am your affiliate proudly. And that’s. That’s really nice. Yeah, no, no, you know, I’m just adding that it’s okay. It’s link. It’s in the description below. Check it out. I. I love Keith’s service. Helps me sleep better at night. And. Yeah, it was. It’s been a good. It’s been good talking to you. Maybe I’ll see you another few weeks. And tell Daniel Oliver I really want to talk to him. And I.

I wish you could put us in contact. That would be awesome. All right. We’ll try to do that. Okay. Thank you.
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