I hereby place an order for one cheese pizza, one pie. Nothing good on it. Name? I period c, period. Weiner. You do need some gold and silver on you, somewhere where you can actually access it if you need to in a pinch, pay somebody or escape some kind of tyranny or whatever it is that you need. But in terms of connecting up capital and saving whatever has remained of the economy as we know it, then we need to get a gold flow going through the veins of this drugged up economy with so much coke and meth that it’s not going to be recognizable when that drug stops.

That’s it. Hey, guys. Raf here from the endgame investor. And I’ve got Keith Weiner with me on the channel. And I’ve got some important, interesting questions for him that I really want to get his feedback on because I think he’s one of the most unique. You can’t be the most unique. You could just be either unique or not. I think he’s unique in the gold and silver and other precious metals space. And I really want to hear what he has to say. So, Keith, first of all, how are you doing? And I want to hear about your new silver bond and all the other stuff that’s going on with your company.

Hey, Rafi, thanks for having me here. So I’m in London at the moment, traveling on a business. We are super excited because we’re issuing not only our first silver bond, but if you look at the monetary history, certainly with the US, but there was a trend in the western world of demonetizing silver. So the coinage act of 1790 slightly overvalued silver as coin and slightly undervalued gold. We know from Gresum’s law that that means that the gold’s not going to circulate. And effectively, even though they called it bimetallism, it was effectively a silver standard. De facto, 1834, they flipped it and then slightly overvalued gold and slightly undervalued silver.

The UK had already demonetized silver. So what happens at that point is the silver kind of leaves the market, although it’s still in use in 1834 by the farmers and craftsmen and smaller sievers holding metal at home. And then, of course, the wealthy had larger amounts in the banks. And so the banks, I think, would have largely been gold after 1834, which means thats what the bond market would have been after 1834 is whatever the banks had. And so I think this silver bond may be the first silver bond and something on the order of 190 years, so very historic, were financing a silver producer, a mine called Bunker Hill.

And just like all of our other products, that’s denominated in silver, principal repayable in silver, regardless of whatever the price may be, some of you think the price of silver is likely to go up. Many of your viewers may know, and I didn’t necessarily make a lot of friends over many years after 2012, not being bullish every time there’d be a price blip in silver, I’d come out with an article and said, this is nothing the skyrocket that you’re hoping for. But certainly since COVID and recently I’ve come out and said, I believe we’re in a bull market for both gold and silver.

So if you think silver is likely to rise in price from here, then the silver bond is an interesting way to play it, because instead of paying storage fees, you’re getting 12% interest. So why do companies come to you at 12% interest? That’s pretty high. Why is it worth it for them to pay 12% rather than do what other miners do? I guess hedge in the futures market or whatever it is that they do. Why come to you? Well, let’s say you borrow dollars and you’re a mine. Well, then you have this mismatch. You have this price exposure because you have dollar liability, but you have gold or silver as your income or your asset.

So then you have to hedge. So it creates extra moving parts, extra complexity, extra risks, and generally extra costs because you have a trader, you have compliance, you have audit, you have all kinds of things you have to do around that hedge. And it’s just simpler. We call it a more user friendly finance product. The interest rate is what it is. This is a mine. So this is a credit to a business that has all the attendant risks. That’s why the interest rate is what it is. If they were borrowing the dollars, I don’t think the interest rate would be any lower.

I think that’s the market. So we’re in an interesting credit environment, to say the least. In that, credit is pulling back from the margin to the center. You may have seen me on Twitter many, many times. People are posting how the us government is going to have a hard time servicing its debt. The us government is the center of the financial universe. They will be literally the last party on earth to default. It’s pulling out from the margins, and one of the margins is resource sector generally. And then within the resource sector, gold and silver are the margin of the margin.

Credit is hard for these guys to get, which means if you’re in a position to provide credit. It’s a buyer’s market. And so that is part of what explains the interest rate being what it is. So how does it work? People send you physical silver or they send you dollars and then they invest in this bond, or either one or what actually happens, and then they pay you back with the silver that they dig up. So for clients that want to participate in this, open an account, we have to draw the standard AmLa stuff that everybody else does.

Then to fund the account, you can either send in metal and we’ll work with you, depending on where the metal is, to arrange for it to be brought into our network. We have a network of vaults globally, including brinks. Or they can send us a wire and we’ll buy the silver for them at the current market price once they’re in. Were lending approximately $36 million to this mine. But it’s denominated in silver. Which means what the mine owes us at the end of the day is return of silver. And whether the mine literally pays us with silver coming out of the ground, or whether they just buy the silver, they’re selling their silver in one place and buying the silver in another.

Giving back silver at the end of the day, not $30 million. And of course three years from now, the price of silver might be radically different from what it is today. So what price is silver locked in at for this bond? Like what’s the base? There is no real price. I mean we’re going to sell all, we’re raising a million ounces. So if that happened today, it would be 30 million something dollars you’re raising. Okay, sorry. So it’s denominated in ounces that you’re raising, which happens to have a dollar value right now. Okay. And then we’ll sell that and wire them the dollars.

But what they owe the return of is a million ounces plus 12% a year. Okay. Whatever the price may do. Plus, plus 12% in ounces. Yes. Okay. So if you put in 1000oz and assuming now it’s not quite that simple because they’re going to be amortizing in years two and three. But if the full principle was outstanding for three years youd get back 1300. When am I doing it right? Yeah. 13 60oz on 1000 ounce investment, Preston. Okay, so well have a link in the description below about the silver bond and other stuff that monetary metals is doing now.

In the meantime, I got you to myself. So I have some questions. What the hell is going on? I think we talked about this before. I’m not a trained austrian economist or anything. And I know you’re a neo austrian, or at least you learned under the neo austrian school under Antal Fouquete. And we talked about that. So I guess my biggest influence would be Robert Wenzel of the economic Policy journal. He passed away in 2021, but he would follow money supply, right? And it’s really too bad that he passed away in 2021, because there’s some crazy stuff going on with the money, money supply now.

It really hasn’t grown since 2021, at least on net. We’re on the same m two level, more or less, but still the markets keep going up and up and up. That’s just one aspect. And the other things that are bothering me is that the reverse repos, which you could say are balancing out the money supply, they haven’t bottomed out yet, and still the markets are going up. Where is all this new money coming from? As we know from austrian business cycle theory, when the money supply goes down, you have to have a crash. So what is holding it up? What is going on? My particular view is a lot less about money supply and a lot more about interest rates.

And so in my view, even that interest rates are much higher than in 2018. We raised them to 2%, and then there was a big crash, there was a re apocalypse. Now it’s like 5.5% or something, and still nothing. So my explanation for that, I think, let me tell a story. So I have a golf buddy, and when I’m home, which isn’t that often, and when the weather in Phoenix is tolerable for golf, which isn’t this time of year, he and I try to get together for golf three or four times a year. And the mystery that we kept kicking back and forth for at least three or four times that, we played golf.

So over the course of a year was, we know from the bank for international settlements, pre interest rate hikes, before anybody hiked that the total percentage of corporate debt outstanding that was quote unquote zombie was about 20%. So these are companies whose profits are less than their interest expense and post interest rate hikes, obviously a lot more companies. None of those zombies got out of zombie status when the cost of servicing their debt went up, obviously. But a lot of other companies that hadnt been zombie at zero, you hiked your cost of interest by five or 6%, and then suddenly youve made a lot more new zombies.

So what should be happening is the spread between junk bonds and treasury bonds should be not only widening, it should blow out massively, as all of a sudden the market calls into question all these companies abilities to service their debts, which has not happened. And you can watch that indicator. Some people watch Jnk minus tlt. I think a better indicator is the St. Louis Fed has their site called Fred and theres something called the bank of America Merrill lynch option adjusted spread, which is the raw data for all this. And its just humming along at pretty low levels.

And so that was the question that we kept puzzling over golf every time we got together. Its like, what the hell is going on with this? What the hell is going on with this? This doesnt make any sense. I should play more golf. And we, you know, we just assumed, okay, somebody has got their thumb on the scale somewhere, but we couldn’t figure it out anyways, he one time, let’s see, when was this? This would have been, I think last fall, came to me and said, I think I’ve got the answer. I said oh. And he said, so he met with a, an insurance carrier that sponsors annuities and he met with some of the back office people, including compliance.

And off the record they said that they have the green light from the regulators to buy junk credit without necessarily reserving the capital against it. So the rules for pensions, insurance funds and the like, you can buy whatever asset you want, but the amount of leverage that you’re allowed to use depends on what kind of asset. So if you’re buying treasury bonds, you can use a lot more leverage. You don’t need to reserve a lot of capital against it. If you’re buying junk bonds, you have to reserve a lot more capital. So that’s what keeps junk bonds at a higher rate.

Yeah, sure, everyone wants the yield, but they can’t buy as much of it. The portfolio has to be a lot smaller. But now the regulators are, as of that conversation, according to that one. But it was a major insurance carrier said that the regulators are giving them a wink and a nod to buy what they want. And you can see the attraction both to the regulator. I mean, attraction. This is all extremely perverse. I want to be really clear, none of this is good, but to the pension fund or to the annuity, they’re under capitalized. I mean, they’ve just had the rug yanked out from underneath them.

With higher interest rates means lower bond prices. They’ve taken massive capital losses, which they don’t mark the market for a variety of reasons, but they know the losses are there and so they’re trying to recapitalize. If you can buy junk bonds at three and a half points above treasuries, then you’re recapitalizing that much faster and you’re squishing the spread. Right. Right. So then they keep those spread trading tight and the regulators don’t want a crisis. I think todays fad, if they were to describe the fad of 2007 and 2008, is that they would say that the fad of 2007 2008 was asleep at the switch.

They were blind to what was going on or not. They were blind, but they werent proactive enough. The last thing that we actually want as a hyper proactive market interferer, the more hyper proactive they are, the more that theyre jumping on everything, which means theyre tamping down all the signals. And so the spread between junk and treasuries is an important signal and they’ve completely not even distorted it. They’ve completely suppressed it into meaninglessness. Right. To use a crude analogy, basically they would complain about the 2007 2008 Fed, like to say that the economy needed like a kilo of cocaine and you only gave it like a few grams.

Right? You didn’t give it enough cocaine. Exactly. No knives. Good nibor. And so the solution is more cocaine. And if cocaine’s not enough anymore, then give it crystal methamphetamine. And if that’s not enough anymore, then I don’t even know what the next drug, fentanyl, whatever comes after that in terms of severe consequences. But yeah, that’s what’s going on. So in my view, everything is downstream of credit. And as long as the Fed is going to be that hyper proactive, that every time the dike springs a leak, the fed springs another tentacle and plugs that leak, then they can tamp down not only signals, but ultimately drive proximal causes for massive waves of selling.

Nobody’s forced to sell, no one’s getting margin calls, no one’s getting giant mark to market losses or not mark to market, but still real losses, everyone is fine. And then the system can continue to lever up Preston. So then what stops this? What is the end of this manipulation that they can’t tamp down forever? They still can’t violate the laws of physics or economics. They can postpone things. But what is the ultimate limit here? The ultimate limit ultimately is this is a process of consumption of capital. We’re feeding more and more capital at a faster and faster rate into wealth destroying enterprises.

Well, the amount of capital that’s available is absolutely finite. And of course the economy is producing capital as well. So its a race condition between the production of capital and the destruction of capital. But with the destruction racing faster and faster its going to win. And so you have a picture of mises right over your left shoulder and muses talks about the credit boom, the false boom created by the expansion of credit. And he says that there’s no escaping, I forget I’m not going to express it as eloquently as he does. There’s no escaping the consequences of the end.

Your choice is basically take it voluntarily or involuntarily. And if you do it involuntarily then you have the crack up boom. I just don’t think we’re that close yet. I think we’re years away from that crack up boom, especially in the US dollar because we’re sucking in the rest of the worlds capital. Its the other currencies that go first and ive been saying that since 2010, approximately that all the other currencies will fail first. Its the US dollar that fails last and not because of any merit per se, its just that its the center of the other currencies are credit pyramid on top of dollar credit.

And the need for dollars is greater and greater and with that need effectively everyone’s bidding up the dollar. So let me challenge you on that a little bit. I had a thought, and I wanted to get this by you to see what you thought about it. So my way of thinking about this is that I understand what you mean, that the dollar is going to be the last currency to fall. And in the pyramid structure of it, I also agree with you that the dollar is at the base of it and underneath that is gold and silver and everything else is on top of it.

So when people say, oh, the BRICS is moving to a different currency, I kind of, I channel you in my own way and I say, well, other currencies are just derivatives of the dollar anyway, so like they can’t really escape it. Like if you want to escape the dollar, you got to dig underneath it and you got to go to gold and silver if you want to have honest exchange. But no one’s going to do that, at least not yet. So my thought on this is that yes, the dollar is in a way going to be the last currency, but when other countries go to the dollar, when their currencies aren’t working right, America or the United States exports its inflation to other countries.

And when treasuries, when they reach a certain level, right, and the US dollar starts to not hyperinflate but like jog and price and consumer prices in America start to really go higher, faster, then other countries, then all the exported inflation to other countries floods back into the US very, very quickly. I don’t know where this tipping point is, but that would be an argument to say that the US dollar collapses much faster than any other foreign currency would in its own hyperinflation, which is like on a drip feed. And they just go through these jogging inflations for years or decades.

I don’t think that’ll happen in America. Because once all the exported inflation in terms of treasuries and dollars abroad goes back onto us shores, it’s going to be like you’re pushing down a spring, you let go and boom. What do you say to that? I don’t. That’s not the model that I would use. Okay. One of the, everything that we’re taught about money just isn’t really accurate. And one of the things, it’s easy to think of a dollar the same as gold. Okay, sure, they can print more dollars and you can’t print gold. It’s a quantity difference.

The difference between gold and dollars is quantity is limited. And people make the same argument for bitcoin, but the difference is the dollar is not a thing. It’s not an object, it’s not an entity, it’s a relationship. It’s a relationship of being owed. It’s actually a negative relationship. One party owes another, and there’s a lot of dollars out there in the rest of the world, which means there’s a lot of relationships of owing between one party in the rest of the world and another party in the rest of the world. Even at a mechanical level, there’s no way for all of those holes, all of those relationships of owing to come flooding back into the US.

It just isn’t how it works that way. The thing to keep in mind why, as the debt goes higher and higher, you tend to get lower and lower interest rates. And with that, you tend to get soft, if not falling consumer prices, rather than rising consumer prices. If you look at it from a quantity perspective, like why haven’t consumer prices skyrocketed? That was the big mystery for quantity saver money post 2008 is massive, massive increases in quantity, and we didn’t get that massive increase in consumer prices. A lower interest rate incentivizes more producers to borrow more, to add more productive capacity.

So if you have a chain of hamburger restaurants, and you always have a business case, let’s say you have 50 of them, you always have a business case for building your 51st store. And that business case is a spreadsheet at the bottom is red, which means it’s sub marginal. And then they come along and they lower the interest rate, which is a very significant interest expense. It’s a very significant cost in operating a hamburger restaurant. So they lower that interest rate from whatever, five to 4%, let’s say. And suddenly the bottom line of your spreadsheet flips from Red to Black Inc.

And you’re in business. So you borrow and you build another hamburger store producing more hamburgers. Now, unless the appetite for hamburgers suddenly increased, which is not what we’re supposing in this example. We’re supposing the interest rate is the only change. So they change the interest rate. You build another unit selling more hamburgers, then the price of hamburgers is going to be soft, if not falling. The same thing happens to the companies that make all of the equipment that go into the hamburger restaurant, the grilling equipment, the plate glass windows, ceramic tiles for the floors, the porcelain for the toilet fixtures, computer equipment.

Everybody is borrowing more to increase productive capacity because the interest rate change is an important signal to their businesses. One reason why tinkering with the interest rate has such a massive effect on the economy, and ultimately so destructive, is that there wasnt any increased demand for hamburgers. There was suddenly a decreased cost of building a hamburger restaurant, which in a free market there wouldnt be. So thats one thing that drives down consumer prices. But notice, it also drives down return on capital across the entire economy. So you have more and more debt obviously piling up in this scenario, and more and more businesses that are desperate, hungry to service the debt.

And they need revenues. Revenues in excess of costs is the only way to service debt. The more debt that’s out there. And I wrote an article years ago looking at how many dollars, which, by the way, is perpetual. Every year those demand for dollars, based on the amount of debt outstanding, thats far greater than when they printed the original dollar. Now you have every year in perpetuity x amount of dollars of demand for dollars. That creates its own demand for dollars, right? Yeah. Right. Supply of demand is demand for dollars. And the demand side is greater.

As this thing sinks, its the sinking of the drowning of the debtors, not the hyperinflation of the consumers going to crack up them. So if you measure the failure of the currency by looking only at consumer prices, then you would have a false signal. Thats not showing the failure of anything, because consumer prices is not where the action is. If you looked at marginal productivity of debt, for example, you might see the action there, where theres just this diminishing effect, it takes more and more dollars of fresh, newly added debt every year to add less and less gdp.

Action. You’re describing the exponential curve of debt. You’re just describing it from one direction. I think I’m just describing it from a different direction. In the end, we all end up in hyperinflation one way or another. Yeah. Not because of a quantity of dollars sloshing back to the US or anything. So probably my most important article, and if you haven’t read it, or if your viewers haven’t read it, I recommend it. The article is called when gold backwardation becomes permanent. And that is the failure mode of the dollar. And it’s not about the quantity of them, it’s about the gold owners saying, you know what, I don’t trust the dollar anymore.

The debtors that owe me a are not going to be capable of servicing this. And so when we finally get to that point where all the debtors are fully saturated, cant support another penny of debt, then the system fails because it requires exponential growth of debt. And when they cant absorb any more debt, then the whole thing comes tumbling down. And that will be a point at which weve destroyed so much productive capital. I think this will be a truly horrific scenario because we won’t be able to produce food and energy at industrial scale anymore. And when that happens, we’re going to have to break down into communities.

Yeah, but when you can’t produce food in that quantity anymore, then a lot of people are going to die. That’s the problem with that. So if you want to destroy capital in order to keep the boom going on and on, which is what they’re doing, ultimately. At the end of the day, you destroy enough capital, you get to that point, and that’s a calamity to mankind. Why can’t, theoretically, this is why I tell people to stack gold and silver. Why can’t the people in that scenario, everything is breaking down. The prices of everything in terms of gold and silver go so low that why wouldn’t the gold and silver owners, whoever they are, be able to buy up these enormous pieces of capital and repurpose them or cut them down into smaller units or something? I mean, it’s not like anything disappears in a financial crisis.

Everything is still there. You’re just saying some of it is inoperable. Can’t we reorganize to feed people? Well, I’m saying what’s happening is capital degrades as it’s used. Every bulldozer wears out, every factory piece of machinery has a useful service life and then at the end needs to be replaced. So there was an alarming trend after 2008 of oil refineries in the United States, one by one, getting to end of life. And this was more of a problem of regulation than availability of capital. It didnt make any business sense for them to refurbish it. With a new permitting and new licensing and new taxes and new whatevers, it was easier to shut it down.

And so the US lost quite a lot of refining capacity post 2008. So this is the scenario in which, okay, sure, you still have a farm, you still have the land, but every aspect of it has been allowed to degrade, to rot. Your buildings are busting at the seams and leaking at all the seams and practically falling over because they’re not getting maintained. Your equipment, the fleet of tractors, one by one, are breaking down. You have more and more tractors to cannibalize for parts and fewer, fewer that are working anymore. Eventually you call up to buy a part and the parts not available because the part manufacturer, their factory is degraded anyway.

It’s a horrific scenario that I don’t care to dwell on, but that’s the end of it. And gold, backward nation is the process where gold is no longer being, no longer bidding on the dollar, but people with dollars still want gold. What they discover is they can buy oil, lets say, and trade the oil for gold. So youre right, the price of oil in gold terms will be collapsing at the same time that the price of oil in dollar terms will be skyrocketing. Now, in a certain sense, you could say thats a boon for anybody holding gold.

Theyre rich. But most people dont want to dish their savings just because consumer goods have gone on sale. And that’s not going to be an environment conducive to making a business investment. It’s going to be an environment of chaos and panic. And the people with the gold are going to be largely, I think, sitting on it, waiting for some clarity that in that environment doesn’t come. This is where monetary metals comes in with gold and silver loans to try to have some kind of a healthy aspect to loaning. Right? That’s the theory, yeah. If we can get gold and silver to begin circulating before that disaster, we can avert it.

A good working definition, not a formal definition, but a good working definition of a gold standard is when anybody who wants to can deposit their gold and earn interest on their gold in gold. Therefore, the gold standard is when we scale up. And that’s what we’re basing to do right now, you do that, you know, with everybody earning interest on their gold, they’re doing that by financing production. So now we’re financing production in gold, not in dollars, which means that businesses now make, you know, are seeking gold revenues rather than dollar revenues. It changes the whole dynamic of the economy oriented towards something that’s honest.

And ultimately, if you pay a debt in gold, the debt is extinguished. If you pay a debt in dollars, the debt is shifted around. The dollar is an IOU. Right. So what you’re saying is this, if I may put it so eloquently and poetically, I advocate hoarding some amount of gold and silver to protect against endgame. Now, what you’re saying is that that’s not going to work that well, or as well as I think it will, because we’re talking about the destruction of the entire capital structure of the global economy, and a hoard of gold and silver is not going to help you.

Instead, what you want to do is invest in a company like Keith’s monetary metals and restart a gold silver loaning flow that is like the flowing lifeblood of an economy. Instead of having transfusion bags in a basement where you can maybe find a patient that needs a blood transfusion, but then you won’t have the capital to administer it, so you can save the planet by becoming a monetary metals client. Yeah. Obviously, everyone is going to pursue their own interest, and I certainly would be the first, not the last, to say everybody should have a certain amount of gold and silver on hand, that theyre not investing, that theyre just holding.

And should it come to the end of the capital structure and the end of the economy as we know it, the gold may not avail you, but you may be better off having the gold than not. And I have several folks that I know, including Fakate, who escaped Hungary in 1956 because somebody had some gold to bribe a guard in order to be allowed to pass out. So having that may be quite useful. On the other hand, I saw a museum exhibit some years ago, and these were gold hoards that dated to the time of collapse of Rome, 476 AD.

So these were very wealthy people that had hundreds or thousands of ounces of gold, which in those days was a lot of money, just as it is today. And that these hoards were discovered during the construction boom after World War two in Europe. And they were digging for taller buildings, they were digging deeper foundations and came across these old villas or whatever that had gold in the strong room or something. So these were people that I don’t know what happened to them. They could have been walking on the street and got killed. It could be they took their family and a small bag of gold and they left a larger amount in the villa.

Planning to come back. Maybe they fled, who knows, to the south of France or to Austria or something, planning to come back. It wasn’t safe after that. Obviously the roads, you get killed on the roads. And so the old man, to his dying day says, hey, there’s gold in our villa back in Rome, youre back wherever. And then the kids eventually grow up, they become old. They tell their kids, three or four generations later, it becomes like this legend, grandpappys gold. And nobody believes that anymore. Its lost for 1500 years and then rediscovered. So the gold didnt necessarily avail those people.

So yeah, but look, basically you want both. You do need some gold and silver on you, somewhere where you can actually access it if you need to in a pinch pay somebody or escape some kind of tyranny or whatever it is that you need. But in terms of connecting up capital and saving whatever has remained of the economy as we know it, then we need to get a gold flow going through the veins of this drugged up economy with so much coke and meth that it’s not going to be recognizable when that drug stops. That’s it.

Theres two reasons to become a client. One is its better to get a return on your gold than to pay storage fees. And the other is theres a purpose here. Were trying to restart the circulation of gold and silver in the economy, which it wont do as long as people are just sterile asset. People just buy it, wait for the price to go up or they get sick of that when the price goes down. How many people do you know that sold during the dark years between 2012 and say 2019? They just sell based on price.

And that’s not doing anything for the economy. And obviously it’s not doing anything if you sell when it’s down. It’s not doing anything for you either. Right. Well, look, we’re in for an interesting time. And hopefully a combination of stacking and lending and gold and silver can, can salvage what good remains of human interaction and, you know, we’ll be okay. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but the world’s not going to end. And thanks to people like Ethan and yours truly, hopefully we can save things. You’re frightened. A good fight. Raffi. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

And we’ll put all the links in the bottom of the description if you want to become a monetary metals client. I. And as always, you can buy gold and silver and store it in a dirty man safe with Miles Franklin or any other company that you wish. And you can also send it over to Keith to start a loan. Thanks for coming, and I’ll see you guys soon. Hello. Pizza delivery for icy wiener. Aw, crud. I always thought by this point in my life, I’d be the one making the crank calls.
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