BRICS Move Gold-Backed Unit Plans Forward Ahead Of October Meeting In Kazan | Arcadia Economics

There’s this concept out there called the unit. It’s an academic paper. And Siri Iglazev, a key player in the russian side of the BRICS plus meetings, is advocating for it. And Dilma Rousseff, head of the new development bank, has been briefed on it. President Putin’s been briefed on it, and so have all the rest of the heads of state, or at least their financial ministers. So they’re aware of it, backing their currencies with 40% gold and other currencies being in the basket, making the other 60% of the unit. Well, hello there, my friends. Chris Marcus here with you for Arcady Economics.

And I am darn excited today because we have not a first time guest to the show, but Matt Riley, who quickly became one of the more popular guests in the Arcadia economics channel. And for a good reason, because about two months ago, Matt joined us and talked about a lot of the research he’s been doing on the BrICS proposal for a unit backed currency, which would be a payment settlement mechanism that included a 40% gold backing. And just as a little background to that, Matt called me, I believe, in February, talking about this. That was before the gold and silver prices started moving.

And now in the time since then, as Matt talked about, our last call has put a lot of detail. We’ve seen more confirmation, several Pepe Escobar articles, and you can see people out there talking about it now. And Matt, you were a big part of that. So, first of all, welcome on in. It’s great to have you back here. How are you today? Hey, thanks for having me on, Chris. It’s great to be with you as well. Yeah. Well, I’ve been mentioning to people that if someone had asked me, hey, if I had only had time to check out one video that you’ve done this year, which one would it be that I should.

Should look at? And I really think it is the talk that we had last time, because, a, it’s something that you were ahead of the curve on, b, now we’re getting more confirmation that it seems to be progressing exactly how you thought back then, and we’ll get an update on that today. And I guess just the other thing I’ll mention before I turn it over to you is that when I went to the Rick rule symposium last July, early July, so about five weeks ago, let’s call it, I had a friend called me who’d been there the first day, and he said, it’s good, but there’s nobody talking about the bricks or the unit or anything.

And that was when I really started realizing that even in the metals community, there’s a bunch of people I have on the show that are brilliant and do a lot of great research, yet even they had not even heard of it. And I’m thinking, well, gee, if there’s a lot of people in the metals world who have still not come across what is already documented to be out there now, let alone the rest of the people in the world, that still, probably a very small percentage of people that are aware of it. We talk about it here somewhat regularly.

And either case, with all that said, hopefully that’s some good background for people who did nothing yet catch the last call, although we’ll link to that at the end and highly recommend watching that. But, matt, perhaps you could catch us up to speed. If there’s any key background I missed there. And then if there’s anything of note that has happened, and obviously leading up to the BRICS meeting in October and anything you see coming on the timeline as far as update, nothing’s really changed. As far as the structure. Uh, to my knowledge, you know, I’ve become more aware of, uh, the BRICS plus meeting timeline, which I’ve, uh, I post some stuff on, uh, Twitter and things like that.

We can go through some of those key dates coming up. Um, but ultimately, I think the issue with, uh, people in the precious metals community not understanding or not just not being aware of what’s going on with the unit is it’s really a geopolitical question. A lot of what’s gone on in the monetary system that we currently live in for the last 50 years has been a financial question. With the financialization of everything and making derivatives of everything in the g seven world, we kind of lose track of what real economics is and what real power is on the world stage.

So I just, I come at it from a military analyst perspective and kind of include that geopolitical bent more so than the financial world. I don’t know, a whole lot of the inner workings of the financial world. I don’t have personal experience in that, you know, so if there’s kind of a lack of awareness, I think that’s why I just came at it from a different angle. I was introduced to the issue from a different perspective. Yeah. And you have a military background, which I think certainly helps with a lot of the research you’ve been doing.

And could you put in context where things are at? Again, maybe a little recap from last time, but for anyone who’s hearing this, for the first time, what we know what has happened in terms of Putin making comments that he’s aware of it and also the impact that you think that that will ultimately have in the gold market. Of course. Yeah. So brief recap of last time. You know, there’s this concept out there called the unit. It’s an academic paper. And Siri Glasgow, a key player in the russian side of the BRICS plus meetings, is advocating for it.

And Dilma Rousseff, head of the new development bank, has been briefed on it. President Putin’s been briefed on it, and so have all the rest of the heads of state, or at least their financial ministers. So they’re. They’re aware of it backing their currencies with 40% gold and other currencies being in the basket, making the other 60% of the unit to stabilize foreign exchange rates. And then in the course of the paper, it also talks about a multinodal network. And this is, you’ll see BRICS countries talking about trading national currencies. That’s how they’re doing it, essentially, from a rough perspective.

Consider a currency to be a node, effectively a central bank operating with, you know, their commercial banks and their jurisdictions under them to make it work. Because one of the key things that they’re doing is they’re trying to change the existing system as little as possible. They want all the same channels, messaging systems to work and integrate. They’re really just talking about changing the denominations of contracts, derivatives, foreign exchange structure, things of that nature. I say just, you know, that’s the base layer. That’s a monumental lift. Right? Yeah. So that’s the background on what unit is.

And we talked about in the last episode how I think that’s going to integrate with a project called M Bridge, meaning multiple CBDC bridge that’s run out of the BIs innovation hub in Hong Kong with five national players, China, Thailand, Hong Kong, the UAE, and now Saudi Arabia being the newest official member of that plan. And those things combined, Enbridge is, you know, you go through a unit, white paper. Enbridge is exactly the functional system and technological base layer that would enable that system. And you see BRICS Bridge referred to in a lot of BRICS press releases and things that come from finance ministers of various nations.

So that’s. That may be what it’s named officially, I don’t know, but it’s going to be the structure of Enbridge with the FX mechanism of unit. And it’s being discussed at the highest levels. Heads of state, ministers of finance, right now, a lot of sausage has been made behind the scenes. They’re doing the details and they’ve been doing it for at least 18 months in BRICS meetings, much less domestically in the individual countries. So that’s, that’s kind of a brief update of where it stands. And we can, we can look at some key dates. I guess if I pull it up here.

Where’d it go? Obviously, we have the BRICS meeting coming up in October being one of those. Yeah. So the meeting in Kazan, the heads of state meetings, is where final decisions are made. Right. And authorization, just like in Johannesburg last year, they gave their finance ministers and governing bodies permission to work together. They needed directly a zon authority is what we call it, military planning to. Essentially your leader has given you permission to go direct to your counterparts of another nation or organization to be able to do something. But are you expecting any sort of major announcement specifically regarding the unit? What would your guess be of what, if anything, they’ll say about the unit in particular at this October’s meeting? Man, that’s a good question.

I don’t have a definitive answer for you, unfortunately. You know, you’re not necessarily expecting a. I don’t expect them to mention the name unit. I mean, if they do, you know, I’ll be surprised. Okay. They will likely call it something else and they’ll talk about the structure and national currencies. Now how they back that is going to be something unit like or that exact structure, but called something else between sovereign central banks and their authorized participant players within their jurisdictions. But geopolitically, what they really want to talk about are their own currencies. So when you hear trading in national currencies, think about the base layer that that trades on.

Right now, the base layer of international finance is us treasuries and say 8 trillion in foreign held us treasuries. Underlying that gold is replacing us treasuries and has been for several years, obviously accelerated post Russia Ukraine war and the freezing and pending seizure of russian assets. So that’s accelerating. And as that gold replaces that base layer, how do they include that in their foreign exchange? Fixing and making that gold relevant to their own national currencies in a way that isn’t dependent on the us dollar units, that mechanism, I just don’t expect they’ll call it that. So you’ll see them focus on an announcement regarding trading and national currencies.

And likely more of the announcement will be about the technological base layer of how they’re going to do that. You’ll probably hear them talk about nodes, small countries having equal footing because they’re really going to emphasize that China and India and Russia aren’t out to dominate you financially. Ethiopia, one of the newest members of BRICS to enable them to integrate into the system and not feel like they’re abandoning one hegemon for another. They really want to assuage these smaller nations fears of, you know, leaving domination of one system to just be dominated in another system. They want to ensure their sovereign autonomy.

They’re really going to play to the little guy in their press releases. All right, and something you mentioned in there that was actually leading to my next question in terms of the impact on the treasury market and also putting the whole involvement in gold in perspective, where it’s one thing to say, okay, maybe they’ll go to a system that has gold involvement and certainly that sounds exciting in its own right, yet how much gold is it going to require? I mean, there’s a difference if you need an ounce of gold versus 4000 tons somewhere. So trying to help put that into context, and I know both you and I are big fans of Luke Groman who often talks about.

It’s not necessarily I think he expects that we’re going to see the dollar lose value, but it’s not that we’re going to lose that. It’s going to lose the reserve currency status. But more so what’s changing more immediately is that the treasury as the store of value is what’s changing and shifting towards gold, which would be reflected by the system that if proposed, if it goes through as proposed, yet the same time just, and you could correct me if I’m mistaken here, but to hopefully lay this out properly for the audience at home, it’s not as if every transaction of BRICS government does they need to be shipping out gold, but you’re settling that out maybe at the end of the month or the end of the quarter.

So with all that said, is there anything you’ve learned yet that could put in any sort of context what amount of gold or even the type of impact that it would have to have? I know you mentioned last time that essentially if we’re going to be trading oil in some form of gold backed currency, then you’re going to have to have a bigger market. So anything along those lines that you could put in perspective for people. Yeah. So go back to that number, 8 trillion, right. Roughly us treasury debt outstanding or that’s held by foreigners. How much of that’s held by central banks? I don’t know.

The number off the top of my head. But we’ll just take the 8 trillion number. If you take the highest estimates of BRiCs gold holdings that are out there, some of it speculative, that would give you the lowest minimum price of gold that they need. If they just threw everything out on the table and announced all their gold, say it’s 80,000 tons between 40 supposedly held potentially up to somewhere in the 20 to 40,000 ton range by China. You know, another potential ten to 20,000 tons owned by Russia and you start throwing in all the other countries, just use that number, you get to around $3,200 goal.

But they likely wouldn’t announce everything they hold, especially China, and they would likely need a higher price than that for liquidity purposes. But you got to step back and think about it differently. That is a gold price at current foreign exchange rates, roughly whatever it is now, like 7.1 or 7.2 yuan to dollar or 80 or 90 rubles to the dollar. Ultimately, if those countries are gaining strength on a purchasing power parity basis because of the actual underlying strength economically of those countries, their manufacturing base, their population size, their natural resource base, then that the gold that they need to back that system really wouldn’t be dependent on any us dollar price.

As their currencies stabilize against gold, the price of gold in us dollars becomes less and less relevant to their financial stability. And just on a grand step back looking perspective, as the inflation that’s been created by the Federal Reserve and other western central banks through the eurodollar system and commercial banks, as that gets more and more isolated, that inflation gets more and more isolated into the G seven itself and especially the United States, then that can have dramatic effect on USD price of gold. While not necessarily affecting how much gold BRICs plus needs to back their own financial system, if they’re creating a new system, the whole point is to isolate from the dollar.

The USD price of gold will matter less and less. Yeah, and I like the way you phrased it in there, how the us price of gold becomes less relevant to what they’re doing. It’s already 51% of the globe’s oil exports and believe we’ll be seeing several more countries. I know there’s a long list that have applied or shown interest in joining. So if you have that type of environment, here’s the thing that maybe a couple of weeks after our first call, I’ve been wondering about ever since from a free market perspective, and maybe that’s not always what we have entirely.

Yet if they’re selling oil and other goods and receiving a currency that has some gold backing. And then heres the western currencies that theyve tried to get away from. Doesnt that over a longer term almost force the west, if they still want to be competitive, kind of forces them into bringing some sort of, whether its gold or any sort of tangible backing, because otherwise you would get priced out. Is that reasonable way of looking at it? I think so. Or at least some sort of fiscal stability to the US dollar price of gold, or really to the dollar value versus goods and services that matter, because ultimately we’re not going to eat or use as a heating mechanism gold.

Right. It’s all just a medium of exchange, ideally. So the US dollar value versus energy and food, commodities and industrial metals and finished products and things like that, in order to maintain that value, it will need to be backed with something, you know, and back to your net settlement comment earlier, it doesnt have to be fully backed. I mean, the reason bricks doesnt want to do a full 100% backing. There needs to be room for credit expansion. Theyre not trying to go 100% gold backed. And if that were the case, they would just exchange gold coins.

Their currencies would be irrelevant. The same would go for the United States. There would be leverage to the gold price, but it would have to be reduced. Luke’s talked about this, Judy Shelton’s talked about it. And ultimately we need to get back in the US to just based on the assumption that we have the 8133 tons of gold that we claim not even going into whether or not that’s true, if that’s the case, we need to get to the point where there’s a price of gold, where we can roughly back US treasury debt outstanding 35 trillion, not including unfunded liabilities, to roughly 30 or 40% back.

That we need a lot higher price of gold certainly would seem to be the case. And do you think we’ll see some sort of gold price reform, whether officially or unofficially? Luke talks about that a lot, where he thinks we’re getting closer to the point where some sort of revaluation, some component of the currency systems is going to either happen or be forced to occur. Do you see that as well? I do. Now. How transparent that is depends on leadership, which is not encouraging. Regardless of your political bent, you know, who you want to win an election.

It’s not like the standing bureaucracy that’s going to surround any candidate for office or Congress is going to be all that competent at managing the transition. But yeah, I, the transparency of it will depend on who’s elected and levels of leadership. But there is going to have to be some sort of recounting or resetting of prices. Whether or not that happens instantly on a long bank holiday weekend or they manage to do it over time, I think they’re managing to do it over time currently is not relevant to me. Honestly. I think it happens within a year span once they initiate that process.

But whether or not it’s over long holiday or over the course of a year, something like that, who knows? Maybe they’ll decide they want to double the strategic bitcoin fund and why stop at that was an interesting one to see. Now that theyre going to revalue the Fed gold from the $42 on the gold certificates up to the current market price. So at least if they were stopping at the market price, then at least theoretically a cap. Although if they dont stop the market price and maybe less of a cap and what else do we need to fix? I take their comments on a strategic bitcoin reserve with a grain of salt.

It’s election season and both sides, regardless of whatever they think of the bitcoin thesis, are 100% pandering to the bitcoin market and bitcoin holders and feel that way. They’re just, they’re just getting after votes. Even after someone’s elected in the first year, how much of what actually comes out of their mouth or what’s published is what they’re actually doing less than we would like? Yeah. Well, interesting. In the same year that the Federal Reserve in Philadelphia published a study on the gold standard and whether that would help stabilize prices. Interesting to see these things pop up.

Obviously we had the german and dutch central bankers talk about revaluation accounts and we will see if more comes of that. Although Matt, the next one I did want to run by you, we talked a little bit before we hit the record button, is that if most people still have not heard of this and if part of the program this year in the Pepe Escobar article, he mentioned public awareness. So if governments do start rolling this forward in an environment where I think certainly not everyone on the planet thinks, hey, we’re going to some sort of gold back store of value, yet as it starts happening, you can see we’re heading somewhere in that direction.

And in other case, if you start having the governments do this and making it publicly aware, don’t you also along the road there have the citizens at some point, once they start finding out, start front running what the governments are doing, certainly, and that’s already happening in India and China, Russia as well, we don’t see much news of it. Right. Because there’s a firewall by g seven states to try and prevent that information from crossing over both ways. And, you know, China, Russia are the same way. They’re trying to insulate themselves from outside information. But, yeah, ultimately, the, the retail market, especially on bullion, will respond to retail demand from the middle class.

But what’s really going to move the market, and Andy Shekman refers to this all the time, the slowly, slowly, then all at once, when what we would call the whales enter the market and start buying tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars of bullion at a go, and it up and disappears. When somebody comes in and buys out miles Franklin or comes in and buys out Dylan Gage, one of the larger wholesalers in the nation, that’s when the stuff really hits the fan in the retail market. And do you think we are headed towards that point in silver? We certainly are, yeah.

By and large, at the retail level, it’s net selling. Because you and I have talked about this offline. Americans are broke. The government statistics don’t reflect that. We’re already in recession, but everybody knows on the street that we actually are. And people are selling silver just to cover their bills. A little bit of gold, too. Less gold because more silver is held by middle class. But that is starting to get tapped out. And once that runs out, that’s feeding the industrial side of things a little bit. This structural mining deficit that we’ve seen for the last three or four years is really going to get exposed.

And that gets reflected in the retail market with blown out premiums. I don’t expect to see the bullion banks and the sovereigns, China included, are not interested in seeing a $200 silver spot price that would harm industry. But the spot price and futures will go up. But what youll see is the premiums just absolutely blow out. Back during the SBB crisis of last year and the banking collapses that were happening at that time. And silver squeeze in 2021 and 2022, you saw silver eagle premiums, for example, going up to anywhere from 50 to sometimes almost 100% of the actual price of silver, usually in that 60% to 80% range.

Even just a ten ounce bar, you know, you’re seeing 20% to 30% premiums to spot. You know, right now, that’s back down, I think around like three and a half to 4% level. When silver goes beyond 30, as it obviously will again, and then heads towards 35 and beyond, those premiums are going to come back and while price may muddle around under 50, I don’t know. I’m not a technical trader. I’m not going to sit here and pretend to say, and draw lines and say, like, this is where it’s going to go and it’s going to have resistance here and blah, blah, blah.

I can just tell you the premiums are going to blow out and they’re going to be back to that 30% plus range for a ten ounce bar and probably up to that 60% to 80% premium range, if not higher, for silver eagles. And that’s how it’ll be reflected in the retail market. Robert? Yeah, that makes sense, obviously. Fascinating, maddening picture in terms of silver supply and demand, where on one hand we still have the green agenda, tripling of energy by 2030. So it doesn’t seem like things are slowing down there. On the other hand, like you point out, has been a lot of selling, really over the past year, although I know you see this on the wholesale level and what we’ve talked about before, and I still.

I don’t know there’s a set answer, but I think there’s. It makes sense that there’s a lot of people who’ve held silver for a long time, and when the price went 30, $32, most of them are up ahead. And it seems, I think there’s, like you mentioned, also a lot of people who are looking for cash. But I think there’s probably also a lot of people that finally saw the price over 30 wanted to cash out of either case, for whatever reason. If people wanted to sell with the price over 30, I’m sure not everyone’s doing it on the same day yet.

We had a couple months there. I wonder if the majority of the people who wanted to sell as soon as the price got to 30 have already done so. Obviously the price has now come back in a couple dollars from there, so maybe that changes things. But again, it’s not a clear picture, but anything you could say about signs of, do you think we’ve exhausted most of that selling so that next time it gets to 30, that’s already been cleared out or anything you could share on that? And also, along with the part that you mentioned, that several of the bullion dealers are melting some of those coins and then it’s being used for industrial.

Yeah, I’ll get to that industrial thing at the second half of the answer. But the. Have we exhausted retail selling? No. And the reason, you know, retail buyers are fickle, man. It’s do the opposite of what you would think would be successful from investing. When the price is surging and going higher and higher and higher, the hands get tighter and tighter and tighter unless bullying comes out of the retail public. So that push up to up past 32 a couple of times over the last few months. While I think the people that are selling once it gets beyond 30 are mostly buyers in that late 2020 into the silver sprees of 21 and 22.

Like you’re not looking at a lot of sellers that are selling because it hit 30 that bought during the last spike back 2011 and prior. It’s recent buyers. Things happen so much faster with e trade platforms and things of that nature that the patience is way down compared to 2011. So what really pushes people to sell is not when it hits 32 but when they see it pull back from that and they think it’s never going to go there again. So it hits 32 a couple times and pulls back. I think it touched below 27 a little bit when the yen carry trade blow up, news hit the wire and thats certainly not done.

But at least that calmed down. But when you see that big pullback thats actually whats encouraging people to sell. I dont know when its exhausted right now. I know just kind of preparing for this. I was touching base with more local coin shop customers of mine just to kind of, you know, take the pulse and they’re still anywhere from three to one to eight to one sellers to buyers in the local coin shops. I think it needs to be a distinction made. Also, some of those retailers that have access to an online market that also sell online, we’re not talking about that.

We’re talking about walk ins that are either selling or buying. It’s heavily on the sell side, but new generations of buyers buy a lot more online, right? I mean you go back to 2005 and anybody buying silver is going to have a hard time trusting an Internet purchase to get it there. And some what, somebody’s going to mail me like through the mail system, a box of precious metals? I’ve done that before. Yeah, I mean I have too. And probably the majority of people listening to this podcast have at some point. But that was not the case 20 years ago.

Right? Most silver holders or precious metal buyers at that time would not trust a system like that. But a lot more people are buying online now is the point. So I don’t know how much that affects or offsets the buyer side because there are more online buyers than sellers. But it’s still not accommodating all the stuff that’s being bought over the counter. So what they’re doing, these guys are turning that stuff around, particularly 510 ounce bars, anything sterling, anything that’s really beat up, 100 ounce bars that come across the counter, stuff like that. And they’re buying it at a price point, you know, that makes it profitable to just sell it up to larger wholesalers that have their own mints that can make it into nicer retail product.

Or a lot of it’s getting sold as shot, thousand ounce bars, wire, plate, powder, you name it, in industrial fashion. So the industrial side is making up for that lack of buyer and they’re sucking that silver out of the retail silver customer base. And like for example, I posted something on Twitter a while back just to kind of like give an example, you know, right now. See how does read it. You know, lcs is, are making a living buying over the counter anywhere from a dollar to $3 back a spot and selling to large wholesalers that also own refineries at anywhere from twenty five cents to a dollar back a spot.

Those refiners make their own silver brands, but they are increasingly making industrial production as well. An example, the bid from a wholesaler to buy a canadian silver maple is $0.75 over spot. That’s what they’ll buy it back at. And their sale price is $1.35 over spot. I know some of the people that don’t have exposure to wholesale level where you’re buying tens of thousands of dollars at a time as a precious metals business are going to say like $1.35 or spot. Yeah, that’s where it’s at. For large wholesalers. Well that’s a 60 cent spread between their buy and their sell.

Okay. You know, they’re moving such volume that that’s profitable for them. But go to their ten ounce bars. They’re buying those at $0.65 back of Spotify and sterling. They’re buying it considerably cheaper than that. I won’t go into how they weigh that because they still do it in an antiquated pennyweight measurement. While their sale price for 500 ounce increments of silver shot is plus $0.25. Well that’s a 90 cent spread. Now there’s some manufacturing costs in there, you know, probably around, you know, $15 to make the shot out of whatever it is they’re getting in. As long as it’s three nines, fine.

We’re not talking about the sterling conversion. You take that out and that’s a 70 cent sprint. So they’re making more buying 510 100 ounce bars off the street through local coin shops and turning it into shot than they are on their canadian maples. And then that doesn’t even go into that. They have a refinery in house, which some of them do, turning it into spools of wire or 500 ounce bags of powder or plate. Some of the more detailed manufactured products, the. The premium on that stuff is higher than silver eagles, but you have to manufacture it.

Cost is significantly higher than the manufacture silver shot. Okay. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you mentioning that because I thought it was interesting when we talked offline and would be helpful for people to have some insight into what’s going on there, which is not always easy to see. So appreciate you sharing that and everything else that you shared here today. And I guess maybe the final question I have is, and I think you kind of answered this already, but maybe as a good recapper, seems like your impression of how likely things with the unit are to go forward and the likelihood of being successfully implemented has not changed.

And that it’s still looking to you like this is they’re running the ball past the 50 now and there’s open field and it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to catch them. There could be a bolt of lightning, but feel free to adjust any of that there. But is that about right? No, no, my opinion hasn’t changed. My assessment hasn’t changed all that much. The information I’m seeing come in is just confirming it. Man, I would love to get into a conversation, like a genuine conversation with somebody on Twitter on here that has some refuting evidence. I want to see something that tells me I’m wrong, but it’s ultimately a geopolitical question.

It’s not a monetary or financial question. It’s do they have the geopolitical will to actually get this done? And do they have the geopolitical power, they being BrICs, plus, do they have the geopolitical power to get it done? And financial industry analysts will look at and measure things by swift or DXY or whatever their favorite metrics are. And a lot of those have a lot of meaning in a financial realm. But coming from the military side, the paradigm I look at things through is one of the many we refer to often is called dime. So you got diplomatic information, military and economic levers of power.

And when you look at those and how they’re changing, I would give BrICs the advantage and diplomacy. They’re not trying to strong arm people. And the US and the G seven are encountering the Streisand effect. Once you freeze russian assets in 2022 and go back to sanctioning France for their engagement with Iran during the JCPOA negotiation process. You start doing that enough, and the harder and harder you try and squeeze your allies, supposedly, or even your geopolitical foes, the harder you try and squeeze them with that financial mechanism, the more and more you confirm to them their need to transition to a new system.

And I think we’ve crossed the line of the sand about the more and more that the G seven do to try and counter this. They’re just reaffirming the geopolitical will for BriCs plus to get it done. So the other parts of dime information, I still give an edge to the G seven information control, really, just in the population’s belief in government information systems. China and Russia lie to their populations, too, but for the most part, chinese and russian people know that their governments are lying all the time. I think Americans are getting the hang of that now.

Yep, definitely at an increasing rate. Americans well trained. Yeah, G seven countries are getting a real taste of that. You know, you point at turning points like the canadian trucker protests, or what’s going on in the UK right now, or what’s been revealed about american media organizations over the last eight to ten years. Like Americans are catching up to speed real quick about how much they can trust information that comes out of essentially state sponsored media outlets that we call the legacy media. But I would still give the G seven an edge on information control and.

Yeah, just information control of what their, their population will and won’t believe and then militarily, it’s pretty even right now. There are plenty of studies that have been done and some of them have been alluded to, even classified ones that have been alluded to in the, you know, like the. The general point has been published and released by the DoD that like, hey, war with China is not going to go how you think it’s going to go, or how the military industrial complex would like to portray that. We go toe to toe with China and the Caribbean Sea.

Sure, we win, but they don’t have those ambitions when it comes to influencing stuff like in the second island chain out to Guamdhenne, like point blank, we would get our ass kicked. If you want to look at the length of the supply chains and logistics of fighting on their turf and the weapons that they have now and their willingness to use them, we’d probably get it taken to us. It’s yet to be seen how the chinese military would perform. Right. The leaders of the chinese military know that it’s not going to be easy, but they haven’t seen war in a long time, and they may need a quick reminder that war sucks, by the way, there’s just a more recent generation of battle tested warriors on the us side, unfortunately.

Kudos to the Chinese for minding their own damn business and not fighting everyone around them like us politicians are wanting to do. But back to the point. Pretty even. But it’s trending the bricks way just because of the economic element, the industry that they have backing it, the issues that are revolving around rare earth metals or microchips and. And various needs. The west doesn’t have the industrial base that the G seven does. But then you get down to the economics. That’s what’s happening right now. I would give BRICs to the advantage economically. You talked about earlier 51% of energy resources, or oil and natural gas in particular, and that gives the impression that the other side, you know, we have 49%.

But that’s not true. That’s just the countries that are in Brics. You go to the US and the G seven, I don’t know what the number is, but I think it’s around 35% to 40% of the global oil and energy market. So they have a significant advantage in energy, exploitable resources, and population. They have people, you know, regardless of what demographic trends are happening, you know, China’s one child policy and things aside, and they still have 1.4 billion people, and India surpassed them in population. Russia can trade timber, you know, energy. All those aspects of diplomatic information, military and economics are either BRICS plus is ahead and the gap is widening, or it’s trending in their direction.

With a slight g seven remaining advantage. All the trends are heading towards Bris plus. So they see this, and that’s part of the calculation of the will to make it happen. And combined with what we talked about a second ago, the streisand effect of the harder the g seven, IMF, bis, what have you, presses them and does things behind the scenes and assassinates leaders and does things like that. They’re just confirming the need to do what they now have the geopolitical strength to actually do. So, yeah, I think it’s gonna happen, and we’ll certainly hear a lot more about it as the Kazan summit approaches in October, and then we’ll get some official announcements.

Well, it is a fascinating time to be alive and quite a lot going on here. And Matt, really appreciate everything that you’ve shared again, and I think this one will be really helpful for people as well. So perhaps just in wrapping up, if they want to follow your research or get in touch, I have the Twitter page pulled up here, and perhaps you could let them know where you are there and anywhere else you’d like them to find out about. Yeah, just right there. Ef bullion, as far as, you know, tracking and engagement and things like that.

Really? I put some stuff out there, but, you know, I follow Vince and you, Luke, and a number of other people just through Twitter, which is honestly, in my opinion, the best source of like single stop, you know, source of information. That’s a good start. Just get multiple sources. You know, a lot of people don’t have a lot of time on their hands, which I understand, and you’re a great one stop shop as far as podcast to listen to on your way to work or something like that, just to stay informed. I would point people more in your direction, or Vince or Luke or something like that.

Then follow me on Twitter. You’ll see me go off the rails on other topics sometimes. Well, I love it. As you can see here, I have my notifications checked, so my phone buzzes and a lot of great stuff you share there, just like you did today and on our last call. So either case, we’ll wrap up for now. But Matt, thank you again and be fun to stay in touch. We’ll do this again soon enough because here we are. Geez, mid August already and October only a couple more months away. So a lot happening and thanks again, and we’ll.

We’ll pick it up again soon. Yeah. As an honor, Chris, thanks for your time.
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