➡ The article discusses various global issues, including the importance of silver and critical minerals to national security, political tensions, and the U.S. justice system. It also mentions Janet Yellen’s statement on the need for a sustainable fiscal policy, despite her role in the increase of U.S. debt. The article also covers President Biden’s controversial pardon of Fauci, and ends with a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and his iconic speech. Lastly, it provides an update on Fortuna’s gold production, which met its guidance range in 2024.

➡ Thanks for joining us today, have a great afternoon! We’ll meet again at 4 p.m.

Robert Gottlieb, a former precious metals trader and managing director at every gold and silver investor’s favorite investment bank, JP Morgan, summed up the situation, the markets are in total dislocation. There seems to be a scarcity of available stocks in both gold and silver. Well, hello there, my friends. Chris Marcus here with you for Arcadia Economics on the official start of the new week. Obviously we had a lot happening yesterday, which we will dig through and certainly has not been an uneventful time, but as we’re recording on the morning of Tuesday, January 21st, the new Trump administration has begun.

And as you can see, we’ll take a quick look at the pricing first. You can see the gold futures currently at 2736 has been a choppy week volatile in both directions, although staying roughly flat. And if we take a look back just to where we were at the election on November 5th, which is right up there. So just about even depending on if you go back to the 4th, we’re about flat. And if we take a look at silver, you can see a pretty similar chart. Let’s go back to the one week.

You can see a little bit lower over one week as we stand with the futures at 3113 this morning. As you can see, we did drop below $30 back at the end of December and taking a look back to our election date. There we see on the 5th range between 3112, 3293, and we’re at 3112 again now. So we could go from below that range. We’re about back to even. If you mark it higher, we’re down a little bit lower, although again, as I’ve talked plenty about over these past couple of months, when you factor in what has happened with the dollar index ever since the Fed started cutting rates in September, which is right back.

Where is the 18th? There we go. And you can see dipped under par and had rallied quite a bit. I know it got over 109. It looks like it was just a touch short of 110. I don’t think we’ve broken that level yet. And what’s interesting is that you saw quite a drop yesterday. I talked with Vince Lancy about that, and he felt the majority of that was a belief that tariffs would be weaker than expected. And I’m excited to hear his thoughts on that on the morning show this week. But you can see a big decline rallying back a bit today, although again, this is what I wonder, are we going to see this come back and at some point, especially once some of these plans, tariffs, but also the doge board are implemented.

And I guess I can’t guarantee this, but I sure think it’s likely that if you have the doge board actually do some significant cuts, you’re going to end up with a bigger deficit over time than a smaller one. And perhaps we’ll see sooner than later. So also we’re taking a look at here, we can see the 10 year bond yield, which had spiked last week on the CPI and PPI reports then came, she came back in on CPI and was quite high at one point got up to 4.82, which obviously when you have the debt load that the treasury has is not an ideal situation.

But nonetheless, there we stand in the bond yields. And another thing that happened that really shouldn’t come as a surprise, but we’ve heard about drill baby drill with Trump. And sure enough that impacted the oil markets yesterday. And over the past few days, let’s get a look at the one week chart. And here you can see there was that big decline. Well, this is coming this morning, but here you see yesterday, there was the big decline. Let’s get on to gold and silver, a few things I wanted to touch on here. Obviously, we’ve talked a lot about the EFPs, which is basically the difference between the spot market in London and the futures in New York.

And we’ve seen that spread blow out twice over the past month came in the first time has been choppy, the second time still has not entirely settled back in. Although while that’s happening, again, with concerns of tariffs, how metals will get to different places, we have a new phenomenon that David Jensen mentioned over the weekend. And here this an article from Vince. Lancy mentions a lease rate signal signal intensifying demand. Sharp spike in London lease rates this week’s underscores the growing urgency in the bullion market lease rates representing the return for loaning bullion from London vaults typically hovering near zero over one month lease rates have surged to an annualized three and a half percent.

Highest level since at least 2022. This unprecedented move reflects surging demand for bullion in London’s vaults with similar dislocations seen in the silver market. And there you can see the lease rate with quite a spike here. So adding to the stress and pressure in the market, does that mean that it will blow up tomorrow or next week? Of course, not, but I would suggest when you have a fragile market, it’s a little bit like playing Russian roulette. There’s going to be one of these times that we see something happen, perhaps similar again to what happened in 2020 when we had an EFP crisis, the gold price moved and silver price a little bit later.

But during the EFP crisis, the gold price moved up quite a bit. And you had some of the banks suffer some big losses. So anyway, market participants now warn of a potential scarcity of freely available metal to satisfy dealer demands. Robert Gottlieb, former precious metals trader and managing director at every gold and silver investor’s favorite investment bank, JP Morgan, summed up the situation. The markets are in total dislocation. There seems to be a scarcity of available stocks in both gold and silver. So there you have it. That is from former JP Morgan, managing director Robert Gottlieb.

And well, we’ll leave this one and come back to that. But in terms of the stocks, let’s go to that first because in fact, we’ll go to gold first. I know I have my silver bias, but here we see a lot of gold has been coming back into the COMEX. Here is registered and let’s go to the sixth month because it’s small there, but you can see between December, we’re just about 8 million ounces and now 11.22 million ounces. So that is the registered category. If we take a look at the eligible, we can see a similar pattern where it went from just about 10 at the end of 2024 and is now up to 13.

And I’ll even show you the combined chart because you can see here this green, darker green registered, lighter. I don’t know if that’s lighter, how you would describe that green, but that’s the eligible down there. And you can see this went from 18 ish to 24.86. So we do see gold coming back into the COMEX. Interesting that we also see a lot of inflows into the ETFs over the past month here. These blue bars show the inflows. So let’s back this one out a little bit. Let’s take a look at the two year, just so you can see.

That’s quite a chunk of metal. That’s come quite a chunk of gold that’s come in over the past, just over a month. What do we got? Six weeks there, we’ll call that. So you see metal moving under this stress. And if we take a look at silver, let’s go down here. Here’s the combined. And you can see we went from about, let’s call that 265 million ounces up to 330 million ounces. So according to my math, that would be 65 million ounces approximately. And again, interesting though, in silver, we see that eligible, let’s get the six month here so we can put that better, eligible went from 228 to 258 in the past month and a half.

Although interestingly, we’ve seen the registered has come down from 80 to that’s just under 72 as of now. I don’t know exactly if there’s a specific conclusion that you can draw ironclad from what’s happening yet, except that we see stress in the market, we see a lot of metal moving. And I think that’s where we’re at now. I’m not going to over extrapolate, shall we say here. But anyway, let’s take a look at the silver holdings, where we see a slightly different pattern, some inflows over the past three weeks that dipped here.

And then again, you see metal starting to come in end of December and throughout January, not quite as extreme as on the gold side. But anyway, another thing that happened along with Trump coming in, this was from about a week and a half ago, although securing critical minerals, vital to national security, official says, and if you caught that call we did with Keith Neumeier, where he talked about how they had petitioned the Canadian government to have silver included as a critical mineral. He also mentioned that they had talked to the US and the US person didn’t say that they were wrong, but actually said, Oh, that was an oversight.

We should look at that. Still waiting to see how that shakes out. Although again, here you see Defense Department talking about critical minerals, vital to national security. Obviously we know that silver has a lot of uses that are hard to replace. And perhaps we will see some attention paid to silver on that at some point. But China restricting critical minerals, Russia announcing that they were going to start investing into silver. I still wondered that some point if military tension escalates, does that become an Achilles? Of course, with the situation with Russia and Ukraine, hopefully now that Trump is the president again, seems like he has a better relationship with Putin than Joe Biden did.

And hopefully we don’t get to World War Three. Although I have a feeling that the next couple months are going to be quite volatile in a lot of ways. So I think we can safely say, hopefully we don’t get to World War Three and move on from there. A few last notes before we wrap up here today. Janet Yellen fiscal said she actually zero hedge reading this as a quote, fiscal policy needs to be put on a sustainable course. And I guess zero hedge beat. They phrased my thoughts on that perfectly.

Wait, wait, it was fight Fed vice chair and chair from 2010 to 2018, who’s been Treasury Secretary since 2021. And who oversaw directly the and who directly oversaw and presided over $15 trillion increase in US debt. I guess I will try to avoid saying something unkind and just Janet Yellen. When she says fiscal policy needs to be put on a sustainable course, I will say as an American, I find that one offensive. So there you go. And here’s another one that I am sure people saw on Monday. Biden pardons Fauci in effort to guard against political potential revenge by Trump.

Now this is for crimes that Fauci has not been charged with. And I guess my initial reaction and how I still feel today is that when he does, when Biden does that, does he essentially say that the US justice system is broken? Because he’s giving someone a pardon who, according to Biden has done nothing wrong. Now, if this man has done something wrong, why would the justice system not want him to be held accountable? And I guess also is that saying that depending on who the president is determines the justice system. Again, not saying this is going to make gold or silver shoot up tomorrow, though.

So when you think about how we have this dollar that’s backed by full faith and confidence in the US, you see these things happening over and over and see more of them happening on a more regular basis. Not a good sign. And interestingly, though, we have from just Dario, who I know a lot of people watching the show watch, he mentions, okay, so the presidential party doesn’t cover crimes against humanity. This means that Anthony could still be prosecuted according to international laws. So we will see how that goes. Although just to me, the idea that someone that seems worthy of investigation and we’re just giving a pardon before he’s been investigated.

And if he is indeed guilty of what a lot of people do believe he is guilty of, the idea of protecting that doesn’t sit well with me anyway. I’m guessing it probably doesn’t sit well with you either and good exercise in handling what we can. And also, how do you handle that one emotionally? I think that’s a tough one for many people, although, but we will leave that there. And perhaps a good one to end on. Obviously, yesterday was Martin Luther King Day. And I know in the past couple decades, perhaps some of these holidays in the US come and go and life is going on, and we often feel busy and been trying to do a better job of taking some time to stop and appreciate whether you disagree with various holidays or not, but what’s happened with our country.

And on that note, I thought I would share the Martin Luther King speech, because I’m guessing there’s some people who haven’t seen it in a long time or maybe never. So we will play that one for you here now in honor of Martin Luther King Day. I have the pleasure to present to you, Dr. Martin Luther King, dear. I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.

It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. 100 years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. 100 years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material process. This nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope, this is the faith that I go back to the south with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith we will be able to work together to pray together to struggle together to go to jail together to stand up for freedom together knowing that we will be free one day. This will be the day this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning my country tears of thee sweet land of liberty of thee I sing land where my father’s died land of the pilgrims pride from every mountainside let freedom ring and if America is to be a great nation this must become true and so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York let freedom ring from the heightening alligators of Pennsylvania let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of color not only that let freedom ring from stone mountain of Georgia let freedom ring from lookout mountain of Tennessee let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi from every mountainside let freedom ring and when this happens when we allow freedom ring when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet from every state and every city we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s black men and white men Jews and Gentiles Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hand and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual well there you go I hope you enjoyed that hope you enjoyed all of today’s show nice to be here with you as we start this new phase of American life and just as we wrap up did want to mention that Fortuna had their production and 2024 production and 2025 guidance outlook out this morning and in terms of some of the highlights Fortuna did indeed come in their guidance range in 2024 with a total of 455,958 gold equivalent ounces which was within their range of 452,000 to 499,000 ounces of gold so they did hit guidance and they also had record production in both the fourth quarter and the full year of 2024 and quite a bit happening unfortunately on the tail of this news we’ll have Jorge Ganoza the CEO of Fortuna Mining joining us at 4 p.m eastern right at the close of the markets today to talk about the numbers also look at what they have in store for 2025 and hopefully we will see you there so enjoy your afternoon thanks for being here with us today and I will see you again at 4 p.m
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