➡ The prices of gold and silver are currently dropping significantly, despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and rising oil prices. This situation is causing confusion among precious metals investors, who are unsure whether this is a buying opportunity or if the rally is over. The article discusses the possibility of market manipulation and the role of banks and the Exchange Stabilization Fund. It also mentions the potential impact of increased debt and money printing due to the war, and the role of levered ETFs in creating trading feedback loops that can distort prices.
➡ The text discusses the author’s perspective on the current economic situation, focusing on the fluctuating values of gold and silver. The author suggests that these fluctuations may be influenced by various factors, including geopolitical tensions, market manipulation by banks, and potential intervention by the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Despite the volatility, the author remains optimistic about the long-term value of gold and silver. The author also highlights the need for individual investors to make their own informed decisions based on their understanding of the market.
➡ The text discusses the role of major central banks and the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) in controlling market prices, particularly gold and oil. It suggests that these institutions may manipulate prices to stabilize the market or benefit national interests. The text also highlights the ESF’s efforts to defend the dollar, which led to financial crises and inflation. Finally, it mentions the potential for these actions to be hidden or misrepresented to the public.
➡ The Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), controlled by the Treasury, has been secretly funding operations globally for nearly 80 years. The ESF gained control of most of the world’s monetary gold through confiscation and devaluation of the dollar, which has led to the dollar’s value decreasing. Despite this, the ESF operates without any oversight from Congress. The article also mentions a merger between Dolly Varden Silver and Contango Ore, which is expected to benefit both companies.

The gold price is getting absolutely slaughtered right now, although perhaps only outdone by the silver price, which is getting slaughtered even more on a percentage basis. Meanwhile, things are not going any better in the Middle East. Brent crude is soaring again, up over 5%. And if you’re a precious metals investor and you’re wondering what the heck is going on here and whether this is the buying opportunity of a lifetime or if the rally is over, well, welcome on in. Well, hello there, my friends. Chris Marcus here with you for Arcadia Economics on quite a volatile day in the gold and silver markets and on planet Earth for that matter, as there is sure a lot happening.

And we will start right in with the gold and silver prices getting absolutely clobbered at the moment. Here you can see the gold futures recovering a little bit. We’re down over 300 bucks now, down $266 at five and a half percent to 4,632. But if you think that’s painful, there’s silver down 10%, was down even more back into the upper 60s. That tip to my buddy Darrell, who called that one so. But quite a move there. And especially just incredible that this is happening while we’re facing and I don’t think this is going on on a limb to say this, but at least in my lifetime, and I think most people’s life, most extreme threat to the economic conditions that we’ve seen.

And on one hand, I mean, we’ve seen this building decade after decade, so that was naturally going to happen. But then you pile on this war where we’re regularly seeing energy facilities that look like this one, with no sign of de escalation that I can see so far, which most certainly makes it easy and understandable to wonder how is it that the gold and silver prices are getting absolutely slaughtered throughout this? And in particular, we’re going to talk about whether if you’ve been looking for a pullback and wanted to buy but felt the prices had gone up too quick.

Is that what this is? Or basically, is the rally over for some context, here we were on that Sunday night open right before all this began. Gold futures over 5,400 there. So gold down 800 bucks since this war began, silver down even more, was up over $96 back on March 1, now down to 69 bucks, almost a $30 move on one of the most destabilizing time periods in political history, or at least modern political history. Meanwhile, we have oil on the rise again. Brent crude over 111 bucks. And Pete Hegseth talking about potentially a $200 billion Iran war spending request.

Did he really say takes money to kill bad guys? Yes, he did. Takes money to kill bad guys. That not the way I would have phrased that. So we see geopolitical uncertainty, we see war, we see inflation already there, especially after yesterday’s PPI report. And now Pete is telegraphing that they’re probably going to be asking for $200 billion. And then here, this is the, the stunner and what we will address in today’s show. So you’re going to want to stick around. You go over on CNBC and they say gold and silver sell off accelerates as the inflation fears grip the global markets.

And it makes you wonder what planet are we living on here? Aren’t gold and silver supposed to be the inflation hedge? Wouldn’t they be soaring in these exact conditions? And if you’re thinking that, I think that makes a lot of sense. And for anyone who is new here today, back in the day when we started this channel, I guess we had a focus on what in the precious metals circuits they call gold and silver manipulation. Used to talk about that plenty. Then JP Morgan got fined $920 million in September of 2020, which really confirmed that there had been manipulation.

Then fast forward to February of 2021 when we had something called a silver squeeze. And I actually spoke to lawyers and submitted files to the CFTC’s whistleblower line and looked into whether there was a legal case based on manipulation evidence we found back then and in the years since then. There was one point I remember having a guest on and he had been a regular guest and I mentioned something about manipulation and he said we get it by now. Add in that certainly talked about it plenty. I do think some of the counterintuitive behavior was not as frequent or extreme after the JP Morgan fine.

Although there are times where we see things like this that certainly deserve some further attention. And we’ll go through some of the things that the banks have acknowledged doing in the past, but also as I promised all week, well, a lot of the attention and vitriol gets spewed out at the banks. And I can understand over the years as I’ve updated my model on how some of these things work. Yes, I think the banks do things that they’ve been fined for and that the government itself has called a crime. You remember JP Morgan even had RICO charges against it from the Department of Justice a couple of years ago.

Two of their executives did end up going to jail. Although with that said had an interesting person contact me a couple of years ago and talked about something you may have heard of, certainly I had heard of before. And if you’ve ever wondered whether there really is some true hand of God that comes down even above the banks, that maybe they’re just following in some of these situations like we’ve seen the past couple of weeks, well, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. And today we will talk about the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which I’m guessing Scotty Goldbug Besant.

When I had my fund, I think people might have called me a gold bug. And his friends were likely at least somewhat active with, given what has happened here, given that they were even bragging about how they destabilized the Iranian economy throughout 2025 leading up to the protests and then leading up to this. And it is public common record that there are currency interventions. So we will dig into some of the evidence and I will hopefully give you some of the tools so that at least as you’re looking at this and wondering, I don’t know if I if you were looking for a pullback, is this it or have we seen the end of the rally? So when you’re thinking about where we’re at, you see where the gold and silver prices were, obviously you see the debt, you see the fact that harder to imagine who is going to continue buying that debt as it continues to increase while a larger portion of the world now is even going to be less likely to be wanting to rush out and purchase Treasuries than ever before.

Which leaves the Federal Reserve. We’re already heading towards that. We talked yesterday about the bigger problem the Fed is now facing after they got that higher than expected inflation report. So things were already not ideal. There’s a reason the prices were where they were. And then essentially since then we’ve gotten this war which now we’re getting just a preview of the price. So there is going to be more debt added. This is going to add to the money printing and talked earlier this week about how the BIS put out a report talking about the 36% sell off that happened in silver back on January 30th.

So, so I mean, I guess you could say what we’re seeing so far today is nothing compared to that. And in either case they mentioned how now you have these levered ETFs like AGQ that create trading feedback loops that further reinforce prevailing trends and distort prices and amplify the sell off as some of these ETFs have to sell futures. So the more it goes down, the more futures they have to sell. The more futures they sell, the more it goes down. The more it goes down, the more futures they have to sell. We’ve seen this time and time again in the gold and silver markets.

Again, the classic example is in 2008, gold fell from 1000 to 700 and then was at 1900 about three years later. We’ve seen it happen several times throughout this rally. We saw it happen following Covid before the prices then soared. And while I will be clear to say there are no guarantees in financial markets, I mean, if there’s ever been a trading scenario where there was a higher than normal probability that a massive decline that we just saw was due to liquidity or due to the banks or perhaps even due to involvement from the esf, which we will get to in a moment.

I’m just saying that you don’t have any guarantees. But I’ll put it like this, and this is by no means a financial recommendation of any sorts. Although this morning I did wire some money into my trading account. I’d been waiting for a spot to put some option positions on. I’m not saying I will ultimately be correct about this spot, but at least as my background as an option trader, the way I look at these things is that if I pick ten or a hundred occasions and make and spread out my bets, do I think on situations like this I’m likely to come out ahead? I think so.

And there have been some times I’ve gotten that right. Sometimes not yet. All I’m pointing out is that’s, that’s how I’m responding. I mean, I guess maybe Russia, China and Iran are going to start buying Treasuries again and the US will continue spending for the next 30 years. There’ll be no issues and they’ll stop turning to gold. I don’t see that happening. So especially as someone who is looking for a pullback to initiate some things which fortunately had some cash to put into action, that’s at least what this looks like to me. Which isn’t to say that it’s going to rebound tomorrow or that it can’t go lower.

Although in terms of my favorite indicator, what are the gold and silver bugs saying? I’ve seen some panic out there in the last couple of days. Yet when I think about we’ve seen these moves for years, that’s where the experience comes in handy. And if you’re telling Me Silver was $96, there were physical tightness issues as evidenced by the spread in China and now it’s $69 while the world is on the verge of a very dangerous outcome here that they seem to be rapidly heading towards. Then add on well, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m having a hard time telling what is real or not, what is AI or not.

This looks a lot like videos I’ve seen of Gaza. This person is saying this is Tel Aviv. And if even a fraction of the videos I’ve seen of the bombing campaign done in response by Iran are accurate, just saying we’re not in a good situation. Still haven’t got that whole straight thing removed. Here’s Luke Roman saying keep the Strait of Hormuz closed long enough and it’s a mathematical and logistical certainty. And he’s referring to the global economy being about to collapse. Luke isn’t a fear monger who goes out and says and says these things lightly. Here you can see Luke also mentioning that the US May remove sanctions on Iranian oil stranded in tankers a couple days ago is removing sanctions on Russia.

So these are some peculiar extreme steps. And of course you may have heard about the South Pars gas field yesterday, which I will not get into or claim to be an expert, but just saying that we’re seeing escalation on things with bigger and bigger consequences. So in the face of all of that, at least that’s how I look at it, where this seems a lot more to me like a classic gold and silver liquidation, perhaps aided by banks that in the past in their own chats have referred to themselves as the Silver Mafia as they flex their muscles and drew blades.

Here’s Bloomberg reporting on the silver rigging scheme that again, as I mentioned before, the Department of Justice used RICO charges against here on August 11, 2011 when silver was finishing its run back then on the way up to 49 UBS Trader Road don’t do anything now. It’s going to go up fast, like a roller coaster going up. And then his Deutsche bank buddy said dude, the one lot offer is so powerful, I love it. Depends what kind of market. Sometimes you use muscle, sometimes you use blade. This is a blade. But then the two guys doing it like this together is small muscle and blade.

Of course there’s also the UBS trader known as the Hammer. And while it looks like my old feed to the Deutsche bank transcripts that documented some of the things that came out in their court case from back in 2016 seems to not be available at the moment, I do remember this was in Mayo of 2011 as the price was coming down from 50. There was one day where you saw a similar chat like that and they say let’s go smash it together. And you see silver drop from 39 to 35 that day. Here we see a Deutsche bank trader saying I’m going to ramp it.

That’s my plan. If 53 breaks, I’m going to go guns blazing. Here UBS writes, They’re going to bend this silver lower here I’m going to sell a little more. We need to grow our mafia a little, get a third position involved. And then here this really speaks to what we see happening. Deutsche bank trader responds, who are you gonna call? Stop busters? Not gonna play the Bart Chilton clip again today or go into the definition of spoofing again today. But you see stops get triggered, algorithms get triggered. And in the Bart Chilton clip who did was from the CFTC did their investigation into silver manipulation.

And when I said it is my understanding of that once you get this moving a little bit, then the prices really move and it’s often the same groups buying it back cheaper. Same thing the BIS wrote about here. With futures selling combined with leverage ETF rebalancing to create a self reinforcing loop of lower prices, well they turn around and they sell on the COMEX and further margin calls. So that’s what you’re seeing right now. And where does that leave us in this cycle? I can’t tell you exactly. I’ll mention what I’m doing. Again, this is something where we’re speaking to a lot of different people so you’re going to need to make your own decisions on that.

But when you see silver over a $121 on January 29th, then the next day it’s down to 74, then a couple days later it got down to 64, you at least have an idea of the range and type of volatility that we’re looking at and well, at least for me it’s not a cut and dried science. I’m sure there are technical people who could offer their insight into that. But while I’m not suggesting what anyone else should do and definitely not recommending anyone else to trade options on this at least hopefully that explains, explains why I’m feeling the way I am.

And especially when I think gee, if I’m going to hold gold or Silver for five or 10 years and I look at what’s happening in the world is it really makes sense what’s happening now? I don’t think so. So that is how I’m responding Today, although of course I mentioned that it’s not just the banks and that the Exchange Stabilization Fund does get involved. They’re not very high profile, which I don’t think is by accident. And there’s someone who did a stock sequence of videos about the Exchange Stabilization Fund that have been on Twitter for a couple of years now, maybe even 10 or 15 years.

And we’ll go through some of the background. But here on the Exchange Stabilization Fund you see at the bottom, Secretary of the treasury, with the approval of the President, may deal in gold, foreign exchange and other instruments of credit and securities. Now there are rumblings and clues and hints of when they’re doing some of these things with gold, credit derivatives and other securities. That goes back to what I mentioned about that person that contacted me years back. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to share more specific detail on this. But I remember on some of these similar sell offs he would describe.

All right, well, here’s the banks and then here’s where the government hand of God comes in and knocks it down. And well, I guess I don’t know this for sure. I do think this person was accurate in what they were saying was some stunning information. And for example, let’s take a look back to something that I know many who are watching today are familiar with. Here we have the famous clip of Ross Benham of the CFTC. This was back in February of 2021 when GameStop was blowing up and there was a plunge protection meeting. Here you can see called by Janet Yellen convening the heads of the sec, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve bank of New York, CFTC and the Treasury.

Janet Yellen is calling a meeting of top financial regulators, discuss the market volatility and shares of stops, silver and other stocks. And what did they find? Well, here’s Ross Benham, then commissioner of the cftc. And in many respects the resiliency and the market structure of the futures market really were able to tamp down what could have been a much worse situation in the silver market. Now back in the day I made quite a spectacle about that one file complaints with the cftc, asked what was the dangerous outcome if the silver price rises, if there’s more buyers than sellers and is that a good thing, that there’s a market structure designed to tamp down that sort of volatility.

I don’t see it being tamped up today or when the price was down 36%. So that was a rather odd comment for someone who’s a regulator to make, especially when he Also mentioned all of these things together I think really were very managing what was at some point in those few days in late January potentially a challenging situation and give credit to the account for utilizing its authority and some of the tools it has within the margin space to. To control the sort of the price and the volatility. Excuse me, to. To do what? Control the sort of the price, the volatility.

That kind of sounds like market fixing if I didn’t know better. A very bizarre comment from a CFTC commissioner right after Janet hosted that Plunge protection team party. Now, on one hand these details do pop out from time to time. Gatta has done a great job of documenting a lot of the admissions. And also, in case you think I’m going down a conspiracy rabbit hole or haven’t backed up with enough evidence so far, let’s take a look at young Chris here reading Paul Volcker’s own autobiography. Been reading Paul Volcker’s new book, Keeping at It. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Page 61 here. These are Paul Volcker’s words, not mine. Two events in 1968 had disturbed already unsettled international monetary affairs. Strong public demand for gold had required intervention by major central banks which sold gold from their reserves to prevent the price from rising above the long established $35 an ounce. That was part of an agreement between a pool of countries established early in the Kennedy administration to defend the gold price. As official reserves of gold seeped away, France in 1968 decided to cease its share of the sales. Now if that’s the case, which group would have been the one that actually could have been facilitating something like that? This is where I would look.

And perhaps another time we can organize some freedom of information request acts. Because while I cannot prove it, I do genuinely believe that in situations similar to what we are seeing now in gold and silver markets that you have a combination of all of the above. Are there levered ETFs driving things? I have no doubt that’s contributing. Do we have the Stop Busters doing their thing? I have no doubt that’s contributing. Is the CFTC somehow most likely exacerbating the issue? Well, they’re either asleep or probably doing that. And my guess is that if you knew what the Exchange Stabilization Fund was actually doing, guessing you would find a connection there too.

And think about it like this. If Scott Bessen is willing to say so, depending on how you count it, that’s 10 days to two weeks of supply that the Iranians had been pushing out. That would have all gone to China. In essence we will be using the Iranian barrels against the Iranians to keep the price down. So if they’re talking about keeping the oil price down, are you sure that they’re not doing things to move the gold price in different directions? Especially when Scott Bessen also said that the rise in the gold price was good for the US and there’s already legislation proposing to have the Fed’s gold certificates revalued from the 4222 statutory price up to the market price, which would result in a payment from the Federal Reserve with newly printed money to the Treasury.

And that also means that the higher the gold price goes, the more cash the treasury gets, which, if there’s anything we know that Treasuries like it, is cash. So in either case, I don’t know if this necessarily give you a specific answer, but these are some of the things that do happen that don’t get talked about often. Although for a little more of the background of some of the things that the Exchange Stabilization Fund has been involved in that have been documented. Well, let’s start here by Eric decarbonow of Market Skeptic. The esf, in trying to defend the dollar, was essentially running a giant Ponzi scheme that was doomed to failure.

The steady drain on US Gold holdings was a threat to the ESF because if it led to dollar devaluation and economic depression, the entire world would have focused on the confidential accounts of the Exchange Stabilization Fund and the activity it was financing. This also meant defending the Bretton Woods Agreement. And what else has Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen said about the Bretton woods realignment? I feel very strongly that this is the last chance to grow our way out of this. I also felt very strongly that we’re in the midst of a great realignment, kind of a Bretton woods realignment’s coming in terms of global policy, global trade.

This is a lot of what I taught at Yale, I’ve been studying my whole life. I’d like to be part of it, either on the inside or the out. And now he’s the head of the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Because any major reform of the Bretton woods system, especially the World bank and the International Monetary Fund, would have also exposed the ESF’s activities. The ESF needed to do whatever it took to defend the world’s monetary system and the American Doll dollar had to be propped up, even at the cost of begging. This is how the dollar’s defense began.

Required intervention by major central banks, which sold gold from their reserves to prevent the price from rising. The Steady drop in US Gold defied all attempts to plug the drain. And by 1967, the United States was at the brink of a fiscal crisis. The London gold pool failed in 1968, in the face of the largest gold rush in history. Buyers throughout Europe demanded gold and mob scenes erupted as the price soared. Many refused to accept US Dollars as payment. Gold stocks were cleaned out virtually overnight. The trading in gold was colossal. The rush was on because speculators had become convinced that the US Was nearing the end of its gold tether.

Having tasted blood and scenting the kill, they ripped and clawed the remaining gold stocks from the gold pool. The whole international monetary system was collapsing. With the treasury controlling its actions, confidence in the Fed collapsed. The Fed became a joke. The Federal Reserve hurl thunderbolts and nothing happen. It tells the world solemnly that by golly, it means business in stopping inflation. But it doesn’t know how. U.S. deficits spiraled out of control. And the more money these deficits created, the more severe the inflation. The law of supply and demand made this inevitable. Declining currencies accelerate as they fall.

And the dollar was crashing against gold. And consumer prices were soaring parabolically. The ESF’s Rosa bonds and forward transactions created losses as the dollar depreciated. The ESF soon registered a neg capital position. It was technically bankrupt. A sense of fear of the unknown was being transmitted by the normally cool operators of the New York Fed. Not only was the dollar falling against stronger currencies, but also weaker ones. There was a sense of panic in newspapers. The treasury was being openly ridiculed. Then, in 1979, the dollar lost its biggest support. The European Community was determined to avoid further inflation.

And so the treasury was told that support from Europe was gone. The vulnerability of the dollar was impossible to. Congress was warned that America was about to experience a holocaust of runaway inflation, a cataclysm which would make the depression seem like a tea party. Then deficits stopped mattering. In 1981, caught in a tide of red ink, administration officials tried, somewhat implausibly, to downplay the traditional view that deficits lead to spiraling prices. Stunned audiences were told that there is no direct or indirect connection between deficits and inflation. The US Then ran massive deficits and inflation went down.

The link between deficits and inflation broke completely. After deficits stopped mattering, the dollar soared and the ESF’s profits skyrocketed. In 1980, after dumping 100,000 tons of gold onto the market in a desperate attempt to keep prices down, the treasury halted regular gold sales. Gold prices then entered a 20 year bear market. But let’s not forget about the good old currency interventions too. Currency interventions to prop up the dollar. In 1961, the ESF began intervening in the foreign exchange market. However, there were some problems. By 1962, the ESF had committed much of its resources through the provision of foreign aid, wasting them funding covert operations.

The IMF was also drained of most of its golden dollars. Remember that the ESF’s desperate dollar defense is to hide this fact to begin with. Anyhow, the Federal Reserve System’s resources were quickly recruited to supplement the dollar’s defense. And the Fed gave up whatever was left of its independence without much of a fight. I am worried. Unfortunately for the esf, it had another problem. The way central banks defend their currencies is by selling off their foreign reserves. And the ESF did not have any foreign currencies on hand. So the treasury used a variety of strategies to come up with the foreign currencies it needed.

It got West Germany to prepay its World War II debts. The treasury also borrowed to get the money it needed using a series of special treasury bond sales to foreign governments. These were called Rosa bonds. They were denominated in foreign currencies and were part of America’s national debt. But hey, I mean, at least you can count on them to be looking out for your own best interests, right? In many instances, the CIA has persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold or even scrap stories. This has helped the Agency change some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories.

The ESF’s twisted logic. Consider this. First, the Fed has established currency swaps on the ESF’s behalf. Swaps are a type of derivative. Second, the ESF intervenes mainly in the forward market through the New York Fed. Forwards are also derivatives. Now, on the New York Fed’s website it states the Fed historically has not engaged in forward or other derivative transactions. This lie is produced by the ESF’s twisted logic. You see, anything the Fed does on the ESF’s behalf doesn’t officially happen. The Secretary of the treasury is under no obligations to comply with the general laws of the United States in handling the stabilization fund.

Because of this, the ESF has been a source of funds or discretionary executive branch spending, the likes of which Congress has sought to prevent. The Iran Contra scheme being a recent example. The ESF has a long history of credit operations and the tables accessible on the Treasury’s website give a history of ESF credit arrangements. As you can see, the ESF has been funding covert operations around the world for nearly 80 years. One of the many reasons the ESF keeps a low profile is the fact that it’s done a terrible job. Since the ESF was put in charge of defending the dollar’s value, the greenback has been on a one way track to worthlessness.

Notice that for the period of time that the Federal Reserve was in charge of defending the dollar, it did its job. The dollar kept its value right up to the Gold Reserve act of 1934, when all the Fed’s powers were transferred to the Treasury’s esf. Hijacking the Fed. The Gold Reserve act gave the treasury the means to completely control the Federal Reserve. It gave the Secretary of the treasury such powers of a permanent nature that he could nullify anything the Federal Reserve did. It nullified, if not scrapped, the Federal Reserve System. Even the question of where the ESF got all its money is embarrassing.

After confiscating all the gold in America, the Treasury devalued the dollar, creating a huge capital gain. This profit became the war chest of the treasury, the Exchange Stabilization Fund. This visual history of the Fed shows how gold holdings were forbidden. Then gold was revalued and the profits put into the Exchange Stabilization Fund. A key point here is that the Treasury’s esf, through confiscation, took control of three quarters of the world’s monetary gold. The ESF was a guaranteed disaster and people knew it back in 1934. Well, that’s encouraging. Furthermore, there was no limit to what the Secretary of the treasury could do with that money.

The bill’s wording gave the treasury unlimited authority to deal in almost anything. Worse still, because the ESF was conceived to operate in secret, Congress decided to never look at what it was doing. Since its creation in 1934, the ESF has operated with no Congressional oversight whatsoever. Anyway, there you have it. There’s a little bit about the Exchange Stabilization Fund. And just to wrap things up when it comes back to why are the gold and silver prices down so much? Well, there’s a lot of factors. Liquidity stops banks. I’m guessing the ESF has not been uninvolved in these markets.

Perhaps we’ll find out one day for sure. But that is my own internal belief. And when I look at the things that are happening in the world, which include gold and silver getting pummeled because people are worried about inflation, I also do think we’re eventually going to hit some point where when inflation or readings of inflation go higher, we won’t see the metals sell off because people are Worried the Fed’s not going to cut interest rates as quickly, but they’re just simply going to want the gold and silver. So. So we’ll see how long that takes.

Although one last piece of news before we wrap up here. We did have some news this week from Dolly Varden Silver as they have received shareholder approval for their merger with Contango Ore, which we talked about with Dolly Varden CEO Sean Kunkan a few weeks ago. Actually had Rick van Neuwenhuis, who is the CEO of Contango, join us as well to explain the synergies and why they’ve discuss decided to merge the two entities at a time when Dolly Varden was acquiring a lot more ounces in their inventory. And now they have the benefit of some of the producing mines that are owned by Contango or to help fund the development of that.

And let’s take a little listen to what Rick van Neuwenheis had to say about the deal. It was very much like the Montreux project, a million ounces. And we see the ability to execute this direct shipping or model for Johnson Track. And that’s where the real synergies with Dolly Varden come in. Because Johnson Track, it’s a high grade deposit. It’s, it’s over 9 grams per ton gold equivalent. It is gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc. So we can put those two projects together and as, as Sean referred to, I heard him say earlier, we’ve gone from a five year plan to a 20 year plan.

And, and that’s, that’s, that’s fundamentally what the merger does. And it does it with $100 million. When the merger happens, we’ll have about $100 million in the bank. We’ll have a, we’ll be generating $100 million of free cash flow on average from Moncho and then that’s plenty of money to continue to advance all three of our other projects. And I think you heard Sean refer to them as districts and that’s what they are. Well, thank you to Rick and Sean. Certainly, even with the prices down a bit, this is a, an incredible price for the mining company.

So if prices stay even remotely where they are, let alone if they did end up going higher, which I do still anticipate over time will be the case. And despite the decline in the midst of things getting kind of rocky in the world, not something that I’m too particularly concerned about. And certainly for the mining companies, that is going to be incredibly good news for them. And to find out a little bit more about some of the drilling results that Dolly Varden has had leading up to this deal. Well, just click on the video that’s coming your way now.

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