The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
The Arterburn Radio Transmission is a blend of cutting edge commentary, fused with guests who are the newsmakers and trailblazers of our time. Your host Tony Arterburn is a former Army paratrooper, entrepreneur, and historian. Tony brings his unique perspective to the issues facing our country, civilization, and planet.
The Arterburn Radio Transmission Podcast
#52 WWG&CS Interesting Times with Andy Schectman
Discover the secrets to wealth preservation through the eyes of Andy Schectman, owner of Miles Franklin Precious Metals, as he shares his compelling journey from humble beginnings to achieving over $10 billion in sales. Andy's story is a testament to resilience and vision, starting from selling life insurance policies to borrowing $60,000 to launch his company. Listen closely as he also discusses his friendship with Robert Kiyosaki and their shared mission to prioritize one’s future self, providing invaluable lessons in investing in precious metals.
We then shift gears to the complex world of banking and financial stability. The warning signs of bank failures loom large as we dissect the implications of the Dodd-Frank Act, and the unsettling potential of bank bail-ins. We highlight real-world examples, like the failure of the First National Bank of Lindsay, Oklahoma, and the contrasting treatment of larger banks, stirring a conversation on public awareness and the role of precious metals as steadfast assets amidst economic turmoil. Insights from financial heavyweights like Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones underscore the enduring strength of gold and silver, even against a strong dollar.
As the episode progresses, we navigate the turbulent waters of global financial systems and the shifting landscape of economic power. The role of the US dollar as the world reserve currency is put under the microscope, alongside the BRICS' emerging influence and the decline of the petrodollar. We also delve into the strategic movements in the global silver market, with countries like Russia and China making significant plays that could signal a global power shift. Through these discussions, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the evolving role of precious metals and central bank digital currencies in shaping the future of global finance. Join us for a thought-provoking examination of these critical issues and their potential long-term impact on international relations and financial stability.
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Wise Wolf Gold and Crypto Show. I am your host, tony Arterburn. I am with a very special guest, a gentleman I've wanted to have on for a very long time, someone I look up to and I've followed. I've seen him on well, everywhere, anywhere that they're talking about of importance, they're talking about precious metals, commodities markets, the financial system. You're gonna see, uh, my guest is andy sheckman. Uh, he is the owner of uh miles franklin precious metals, uh commentator and precious metals expert. Uh andy, welcome to the show, thank you for having me, tony.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it, brother, it's a pleasure to be here well, we're honored and uh, we were talking off uh off air about you know we have a little bit of commonality. You know we have family businesses that we run and I wanted you to talk a little bit about your background, like coming up, and I know you started your business.
Speaker 2:About my job I used to joke, but he's still alive and looking back at it, it's been a blessing my dad's middle name, but I guess it's important to phrase it in a few different ways Tony, but the biggest. What I'm really trying to say as I explain my background is the way that I look at gold and silver and as we continue our discussion maybe that should be the way people frame my answers we're the least likely cast of characters to have achieved the level of success we have. My dad's middle name is Miles and his best friend who lent us $60,000 in 1989 to start a company on a wing and a prayer, to start a company on a wing and a prayer. His middle name was Franklin and we started in a one-room office the size of a closet. My parents sold their life insurance policies. We come from nothing.
Speaker 2:My dad took a job a few years earlier out of desperation with a company in the United States, in Minneapolis I don't know why I just said the United States, a company in the United States, in Minneapolis. I don't know why I just said the United States A company in Minneapolis called Investment Rarities. And he did it out of desperation. Both he and my mom worked in the clothing industry. My dad worked with Champion, the sporting goods, gym wear, if you will and whatnot. Gym wear, if you will, of whatnot and um, they lost their job in the recession in in like 83 and, out of desperation, took a job in investment rarities. So he was a. He said he wanted that job like a hole in the head, but he had to put food on the table. He had a degree in in history, had no understanding of economics and of precious metals. Immersed, immersed himself in it, however, and very quickly understood it was not the what that mattered but the why, and took to it, like you know, fish to water, and was very successful right out the gate and then ended up actually teaching the new brokers a year later on how to integrate into the company. And then was asked to speak around the world representing investment varieties, where he was met by some folks in Zurich. Switzerland asked him to bring the concept of Swiss annuities to the United States, annuities cut off of a Swiss insurance industry that had never seen a company failure in almost 300 years. So this is the genesis of it.
Speaker 2:So I'm 19 years old, went to the University of Minnesota to play baseball, hurt myself, go to work with my dad in a one-room office the size of a closet. My parents, as I mentioned, sold their life insurance policies, borrowed 60 grand. This is before the internet, typing a newsletter out on the word processor. I was fortunate enough to spend three summers in Zurich learning from Swiss bankers, three in a row, when I was 19, 20, and 21, which shaped the way that I look at things.
Speaker 2:But before we got going, my dad said to me look, you'll buy, I'm going to make, there's only one rule and only one rule, and I'll fire you if you deviate from it. All right, cool, dad, I can deal with one rule. What's that? He said? I won't let you make the same mistakes I made as a younger man. You will buy something for yourself every week or every two weeks when you get paid, period, I don't care if it's one ounce of silver. You'll buy some metal and you'll put it away. Period, all right. Well, heck, that's the only rule.
Speaker 2:Somehow, by the grace of God, tony, we will be celebrating our 35th year in business and 10 billion just over 10 billion in sales to date. This February will be 35 years. I don't know how we did it, but I've honored my promise to my dad, even though I've owned the company outright for almost two decades and he's still alive. I talk to him every day. He won't fire me anymore, but I've. I've bought something every two weeks for 35 years and when I tell you it was the best gift I've ever been given in my life, it is. It was his way of teaching me the law of compounding Um and whether it be the compounding of time. Like you know I know you're big into weightlifting. You didn't just go in the day after New Year's with a new resolution and work out really hard for for three days to look like you do. It's the compounding of time and effort doesn't have to be interest. Time is a big compounding um function as well. And you know you had mentioned um offline about.
Speaker 2:You know seeing me on Robert Kiyosaki show. He and I have um. Robert and I have become friends and we talk a lot about uh, his board game, that that he made uh, which is basically getting out of the rat race. And if you don't pay yourself first always, if you don't prioritize your future self, you never get out of the rat race. You know we mentioned you mentioned to me that your son works for you and I just hired my son Also. He was at Price Waterhouse for a few years and wanted him to find himself first. And now he's working for me and I made him do the same thing that my father did me. And now he's working for me and I made him do the same thing that my father did me.
Speaker 2:But your son, just like mine is, you know, it's kind of like you 20 years ago. And if you could say something to yourself 20 years ago like hey, man, we got things to do in the future, so pay yourself, start taking care of your future self. Prioritize yourself. Let the laws of compounding work for you rather than against you. Give yourself a chance to get out of the rat race by prioritizing, because you know, if you're anything like me, you wake up one day and you're like well man, where'd all the time go? I still feel like I'm 25, but I'm not. And where'd the time go?
Speaker 2:And the best gift that I've ever been given in the way I look at precious metals is that it's wealth. It's wealth, tony, that's outlived two world wars, german hyperinflation, the Great Depression, every pandemic, anything the world's ever thrown at it. It's wealth that the most influential, well-informed traders in the world are acquiring at a level the world's never seen, that being the central banks and, interestingly enough, repatriating it all, bringing it home from the New York Fed and the Bank of England, the two centers that gave direct access to the COMEX and the LBMA. They don't care. I want it in my possession because it is an asset that has no counterparty liability. It is simultaneously an asset that is not someone else's liability, in other words, and I think that when we talk about gold and when we talk about the success of my company, it's, you know, to me it's just common sense, and that's one thing that we've used.
Speaker 2:We've talked about information and education for 35 years under one fundamental tenant, and that is that gold and silver are not investments and they may perform like one, but they're wealth. And if you look at it that way, it makes the and at the time it's like, yeah, easy to say when you're struggling to buy it, but in the end, he's like you'll define your wealth by number of ounces. And, it's true, you don't look and remember what you paid for this, this, this, this. You could probably figure it out, but it's about the number of ounces.
Speaker 2:So, as we continue this discussion sorry to be so long winded I just want you to know that to me it's wealth, and it's wealth that I hope I never need to use. Maybe for an opportunity everyone looks at it for an emergency. Maybe there's a hell of an opportunity, but if not, I know that I can give it to my kids. I got three and long after something like this is hanging from a frame in the Smithsonian as an example of what used to be gold and silver will still be immutable wealth, even in the year 3000, when my great great great grandchildren are using the gold and silver that were passed down throughout the ages. And that, to me, is how I look at metal not as an investment, more than anything.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely, and you know it's interesting. We were talking about lessons from fathers and I've heard you talk about that. Before You're going to save something, put away something and keep it, and you measure your wealth by your ounces. Of course, what you're talking about too, in the sense that gold and silver outlast countries. They outlast currencies. My son did the same thing. I've been telling him put something away.
Speaker 1:We had a coin come in a few weeks ago. It was a gold Soviet coin from the Soviet Union 1979. And that's the year I was born. But he said hey, dad, can I take this in lieu of salary? Can I just take this? Can I take the gold coin? I'll use it. And I said sure, I'll give you a bonus for this week and that can be your salary. He put that away and I told him. I said you see, that coin is again minted by a country that no longer exists, but the gold remains.
Speaker 1:The same thing with the Roman Empire, any other civilization that's fallen or collapsed, or any currency that's collapsed, and we're literally in an experiment. You know, you know this since 1971, when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard. We're in some sort of experiment and it looks like this is the end game of, basically for Gresham's law, where you know, when bad money enters the system, good money goes into hiding. When bad money enters the system, good money goes into hiding. At this point we're reaching really just a tipping point where it's going to have like a swing back, a pendulum effect. That's what it looks like to me because of the debt, because of the currency creation, and I mean, what are your thoughts on that? Do you see like a complete pivot that's what I see when the BRICS nations, to me, the BRICS meetings and all the things that are going on aren't necessarily about them creating a unified currency, more about cross-border payment systems and the revaluation of commodities. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a high probability we'll see gold revalued. I do, and I think that it will experience a renaissance of sorts. You know, people are very unaware of things that have been built into the system right now. The great taking by David Rogers Webb everyone should watch talking about the rise of the DTCC. You can go to YouTube and you can go to his website I think it's thegreattakingcom. His book is downloadable PDF. It's free, or I would advise going to YouTube and let him narrate his book for you. It's about an hour.
Speaker 2:When you talk about what's going on with the banks. The first national bank of Lindsay, oklahoma, that just failed two weeks ago, friday. That's the first bail-in in this country. 50% of the uninsured deposits are gone. Of course, when Silicon and Signature failed, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of uninsured deposits were covered because it was Oprah Winfrey's money and tech startups in Hollywood and well, that was too systemic of a risk for the system, according to Janet Yellen and the FDIC and the FOMC and the president.
Speaker 2:But people are unaware that the Dodd-Frank Act called for bank bail-ins instead of bail-outs where you are an unsecured general creditor last to be paid. People will wake up, I think, if you see a big bank fail, not this little unreported podunk flyover part of America in rural Oklahoma, with only $7 million in uninsured deposits. Half of it are gone, just like that, bye-bye. You have a million in that bank. You get $250,000. That's the FDIC insurance. You get half of your uninsured that's $ FDIC insurance. You get half of your uninsured that's $750. Half is what? $375 plus $250. That's six and a quarter. That other $375, you kiss it goodbye If they do have. It says that well, you might get more when we sell off the assets of the bank, which in the article it says are far less than its liabilities to creditors and others whatever others are less than its liabilities to creditors and others, whatever others are. But the Dodd-Frank Act says they have up to four years to pay that out, and in the form of bank stock of the new bank. It's just horrible. They'll never get that money back again. But what if that were to happen to a big regional bank, a big one, and it's bailed in and people don't even know bail-in exists? What's going to happen? And they'll look and you will see a renaissance we have begun to see, after a two-year drawdown in the ETFs, like right down a 45-degree angle.
Speaker 2:We're seeing a pickup where the Western ETFs are now starting to acknowledge what gold and silver are. You got guys like Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones talking about gold and Druckenmiller saying something to the extent of if you don't own gold, you don't know economics. It is beginning to fall lightly into the conscious subconscious of the things. That's so interesting about that statement, tony, is that we've seen gold defy what the Western economists would say is impossible, and that is we've seen a strong dollar. Even if you believe the information out of the, you know the BLS you should take the L, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, throw that in the garbage and just call it the BS, the bullshit and the CP lie. I mean the CPI. If we believe that, which it's a lie, I mean John Williams of ShadowStatscom will tell you inflation is 11%, not three and a half. But even if we believe it, you know we've had a positive real return between short-term treasuries and inflation. We've had a strong dollar.
Speaker 2:We've had outflows out of the Western ETFs, meaning no Western participation, and yet gold still goes higher and higher and higher, outperforming everything. It's doubled the performance of the 10-year treasury over 25 years. It's beaten the S&P 500 over that same time period since 2000,. Even with dividends reinvested, which has averaged about 9.6% versus 9.9% on gold. It's an asset that it's like the tortoise and it's not flashy like the hare, just keeps on marching ahead and it hasn't been noticed. You add into it something like a bank failure or some sort of an event that wakes people up to the systemic nature of the system. I think you would see much, much, much more mainstream participation and as someone who's in the gold industry like yourself, I think you would agree industry like yourself, I think you would agree and it's not talking our books collectively that something like that.
Speaker 2:You know Rick Rule's a buddy of mine and he says that there's a one-half percent participation, one-half of one percent from Joe and Jane Six-Pack to the Harvard Endowment Fund across the whole financial matrix in this country in metals. And if that went to five percent, that's a tenfold increase in demand. How hard would it be for you to get product at a tenfold increase in demand across the country? Because they say there's no bull market like a metals bull market, for one reason that the scarier the world gets or the higher the price of gold and silver goes. I mean gold was $1,200 in 2000 or 10 years ago in 2015. So it's well over doubled.
Speaker 2:If you called any of your clients and said, hey, man, you've doubled your money and then some you want to sell it, they had no thanks.
Speaker 2:Tony, appreciate you checking in on me, but no, I'm not going back into dollars. And that's kind of what it's like is that the higher the price goes only reinforces the grip people have on their gold and silver. So, yeah, I see a time where getting product becomes very difficult as the public wakes up, whether it be through a banking crisis, election interference, you name it. I mean, look, there's 25 million people in this country illegally, which bothers the hell out of me. And if one or 5% of those people are pissed off at this country illegally, which bothers the hell out of me. And if one or 5% of those people are pissed off at this country, well, you do the math. I mean that's 1.1 million people or so. That's kind of crazy. So you know you're talking a standing army. There are so many points along the you know possibility curve of what could wake people up to owning metals that very quickly could change the entire landscape of this industry like that overnight, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:I think it was. Churchill said something about the terrible ifs. The terrible ifs accumulate. We have so many things in the periphery that threaten the status quo, the stability, the economic order of things. Now, you're absolutely right and you know the mainstream doesn't cover this like they should. They have no idea what they're talking about. They don't recognize, like what you just talked about with gold stats, and you know weighing it against the market. It's just again, it's not flashy, it's like the tortoise, like you said. But what is interesting is a lot of that is changing because you go back to 2011.
Speaker 1:What was the all-time high at 2011? Was it close? 1915. 1915. I know we got close to 2000. But I was saying this on my show the other day If you look at that chart, it's 2011. And you fast forward to the next all-time high was 2020. Right, and I believe I was hosting a show for the David Knight Show on InfoWars live when that happened and they put the gold price up and I remember thinking, well, that's a huge milestone. And then you know it took another couple of years. I think it hit another ATH after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. But now, andy, I think it's had an all-time high. Was it 34 times in the last nine months, or something?
Speaker 2:like that. Yeah, it keeps on marching higher and you know it's interesting. The question is well, first of all, you know it's been at all-time highs against most of the currencies of the world for quite some time now. You look at silver as an example. It's at all-time highs right now against the rupee, the rand, I think the Canadian dollar pretty close to the euro. Again, the inordinate, unjustified strength of the dollar masks what gold and silver are really doing.
Speaker 2:But I did an interview with a member of parliament from the UK recently. He said you know, andy, money creation in the West and the United States has averaged 7% for the last 10 years. Now, I think that's low, but let's just talk about what has happened. If that's true money creation, tony, is the definition of inflation it's not prices, that's price inflation. That's the symptom of money creation and it's the symptom of inflation. So if we believe that that 7% rate is accurate, there's something called the law of 70 seconds, which is mathematical law. You take an interest rate divided into 72, and it tells you how long before your principal doubles. So in this case, if money creation or inflation, where you inflate, the money supply has been averaging on average 7% per year for the last decade. That would then say 7 into 72, 10 years, 10.2 years.
Speaker 2:10.2 years ago, our dollar was worth double what it's worth today and if that's true, well, gold was 1,200 bucks in 10 years ago, in 2014. So did the dollar lose half of its value or did the gold just over double? My point is is that you can make that over my shoulder. You got Roosevelt confiscating gold with his executive order. There are $20 gold coin and a $20 gold certificate, and the gold certificate says payable to the bearer on demand in gold coin instead of in Godway Trust. But let's just pretend Grandpa left you 500 of these and 500 of these Now. The $20 gold certificates work more than a $20 bill. I'll give you that.
Speaker 2:But just for the sake of argument, $520 bills in one shoe box for grandson Tony and $520 gold coins they were interchangeable. It's the same thing. It's an ounce of gold, just about for grandson Tony, and you open up that box when you're 18 years old. It's presented to you by your, your parents, and this was from your grandfather and God rest his soul and the whole nine yards, and well that you know those. That that $20 bill, even though you got 10,000 bucks worth. But okay, 10,000 bucks, 500 of them, that's a lot of money. It's great, but the same amount in gold, which were interchange, interchangeable. It's worth a million dollars plus, and you know so when you talk about did gold go up or did the dollar go down. Twenty dollars back then in 1933 would have bought you a suit, a tie, an overcoat, shoes, the whole nine yards um. And today that twenty dollar bill wouldn't even buy you a tie, might buy you your shoelaces, but it's not going to buy you the suit. That ounce of gold is still going to buy you everything. So it's gold.
Speaker 2:Hangs with the declining value of the dollar, the inherent inflation that's built into the system. The Fed talks about striving for a 2% inflation rate. We're never going to get to 2%. They pivoted when they're 65% away from their two percent target rate. So they didn't signal a victory on inflation. They're waving the white flag. But I've always thought why? Why pick two percent? How about negative two percent? Because the lower the inflation rate, the higher the standard of living. Inflation's not going anywhere. You know we have a $36 trillion debt nearly, and $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities Medicare, Medicaid, social Security, government, military pensions At a time when the appetite from the rest of the world for our treasuries of any duration.
Speaker 2:I think they're uninvestable. Myself, 10 years and out. I mean you ought to be out of your mind to buy a 10-year treasury paying 4%. You know it's a guaranteed bond of confiscation. I mean you might as well kiss your purchasing power goodbye. So who would want to hold it? Point of it is is that we're entering a period of time that is vastly different than ever before, and I think a lot of the smart money is replacing gold with treasuries or the other way around. Replacing treasuries with gold has no counterparty risk. It's doubled its performance. It doesn't have inflation risk. In fact, it retains its value through inflationary cycles.
Speaker 2:That's what this is all about. It's the rest of the world understands, and maybe the weaponizing of the treasury market certainly helped. But the fiscal irresponsibility of this government where we're creating 100,000 in debt every second, one, two, three, four and keep on going, a trillion every 90 days. A trillion seconds ago was 31,688 years ago. It took 200 years to do it the first time. We're doing it in between 90 and 100 days. The irresponsibility is off the charts and that's not going to end. So this is why you own gold. This is the important part of it, and this is why the biggest money in the world is moving in this direction accumulating gold, repatriating it, selling treasuries or letting them roll off their balance sheet, because they understand that this is a country that has chosen inflation over austerity.
Speaker 2:This is a nation that's got big problems with debt, with immigration, with judicial system, with the electoral system, with the wokeness, with all of this crap that used to be the hallmark of this great country. This is why I personally want President Trump to win, to regain some sanity. We're so far departed from the culture. Our culture is being whitewashed. The monetary stuff you can deal with, you know.
Speaker 2:You look back at this country's stand with its back against the wall. It's always risen to the occasion, but the difference is we were unified. Look at World War II. We were all Americans and we weren't defined by who we voted for in the last election. And you didn't have to go to Thanksgiving where your wife says to you, like she does to me don't say a damn word, not a word until at least dessert. Okay, because I'd like to finish dinner tonight, because I'm that guy that would, you know, get into a conversation and then, all of a sudden it gets heated at the dinner table with your family, because that's how divided we are on these issues. So these are times unlike any I think we've ever seen, and this is why you can only save the world one person at a time, starting with yourself and your immediate family.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I think, as a Chinese curse says, tony, may we live in interesting times the next several days. As we're recording this day before the election, I think all bets are off to see how things. I left Minnesota and moved to Florida four years ago, three and a half years ago, in what was supposedly the peaceful George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, and they were anything but peaceful. So let's hope that we don't see a repeat. But something tells me one way or the other, you got half the country pissed off and really angry about how this all unfolds. I hope I'm wrong. I truly do.
Speaker 1:I don't think you are, unfortunately. I think that's just built into the system. Now it's got to play out and there's a lot of unknowns Again. That's where you know, in an uncertain world where people are running the precious metals, commodities, the stability of the dollar, the stability of our institutions has come apart and you can look at cyclical history that happens If you follow the historians Strauss and Howe.
Speaker 1:They wrote a book called the Fourth Turning. We're basically 80 years out from Breton Woods, so it's between 80 and 100 years is the Romans call it a saccharum or you have a major change in society and that's playing out. That was the end of World War II, it was out of the Great Depression and all that. That was that last fourth turning, and then this one, and let's hope that it's not exactly like the last one. It doesn't have to culminate in a giant war or an upheaval or anything like that. Maybe it's a lot of institutional changes, but that is the the order of the day. It's, it's chaos and uh, trying to find some stability in the chaos is is the goal, it should be the goal of anybody who's paying attention. But uh, the days of what we perceived as is normal if you had normalcy. That's very dangerous right now because changes in the wind, not stability.
Speaker 2:It's very common at the end of long macro trends to have that recency and normalcy bias. It's normal, you know, and there's a whole school of investing Tony called wave theory, elliott wave and Kondratiev wave and you get a lot of people who put a lot of stock in in the validity and the whole thing is based on human emotions. Um, and the peaks and the valleys that are, that are have been seen for centuries in the way humans react to things and the euphoria and the chaos and the fear and um, that's. You know that that's something that I think is that is why so few people succeed in investing, where the smart people find value in things that are undervalued and underloved and they see this country will always remain that way until it doesn't. And then you get this mass wave of panic and emotional driven buying or selling or whatever it may be. I think it's appropriate to look at things that way.
Speaker 2:Most people can't get out of the way of what they don't see coming and when this comes it's going to catch so many people off guard. You know, just ask people. You know what makes the dollar the world reserve currency. You won't get maybe one intelligent answer out of 100. Ask people. What is a bail-in? Do you know what it is? What is the Dodd-Frank Act? Or you can ask them all what are the BRICS? What's the Belt Road Initiative? You can ask them all of these questions and most of them will just be ignored or they'll say I don't know, tell me about it and you know where is the reporting.
Speaker 2:Why aren't we being told that gold was reclassified, the world's only other tier one reserve asset next to US dollars and treasuries? Is that why all the central banks are buying it and selling treasuries? I mean, these are the things that we need to know to think critically, but we're not being told them. You have to go to alternative media like yourself, and I'm all right with that, but the legacy media has failed this country in many respects. You can look at the lawsuit Trump is levying upon CBS in 60 Minutes as a prime example of that. They are not helping the public make an informed decision. In fact, they're so biased that the decisions become visceral if compared with the other side. In other words, how could you support this guy, this and that? Because the message has been distorted and poisoned by the media, which I hate to say, but in every respect, I believe it?
Speaker 1:Oh, I believe it. I mean you can tell that they serve some sort of narrative function for institutions that have nothing to do with finding the truth or investigating anything or shedding light on anything. Maybe at one time they did, but I don't take any stock in what's out on the mainstream. I have to go searching for what the true headlines should be. I mean, gosh, andy, we lost the petrodollar and nobody said anything. And that's like the cornerstone of what supposedly the currency is based off of.
Speaker 1:After Nixon took us off, the gold standard was at 73, 74,. We did the agreement with the Saudis to denominate all the crude transactions in dollars, basically OPEC, and that's what made the petrodollar. And if you study US foreign policy, it was always assumed that a lot of the things that we did that were Middle Eastern centered or, you know, around that area, was to prop up the petrodollar and they literally just let it lapse. I mean, how do you explain that? How do you explain that there was no resistance, no summit? No, you know, trying to codify anything, anything just literally just let it go. And I have so many questions about that. What was your take on that?
Speaker 2:I mean, look at our lead economic advisor. Many of your listeners may remember Jared Bernstein on Twitter trying to explain bond sales. It was the most humiliating thing I've ever seen. He's our lead economic advisor. He's a dude with a degree in music and a master's degree in social work. He calls himself an inclusionary economist whatever the hell that means but his whole thesis is to lose the reserve status. That it's a privilege we can no longer afford.
Speaker 2:And you know, signing an executive order to go green when our relationship with OPEC and Saudi Arabia is the linchpin to the hegemony is really not the smartest thing in the world to do. And then, by weaponizing the dollar and creating an environment where because half of the petrodollar deal was yes, we will protect you, saudi Arabia, and, by extension, the Saudi Kingdom, and you'll value oil and dollars, but then you'll take the excess and recycle it into US treasuries. Well, the treasury market has been weaponized. Last year was the first year in 45 years where gold was less volatile than the 10-year treasury, and you can see where we make it seem like to the world that rates will stay low forever and then jack them up after everyone loads up on them by 500 basis points in a year which destabilizes the treasury market. So we sign an executive order to go green, we weaponize our treasury and the way that a lot of these countries look at us is hypocritical. Janet Yellen can say well, we're okay with Xi Jinping and Putin being buddies. You know in the bricks and my initial thought was well, that's very nice of you, madam Secretary, thank you, but if one penny is given by Xi to the Putin war machine, we'll sanction their banks, their companies in Beijing itself. And I'm thinking well, what about the you know 200 billion we've given the Ukraine? And the Stinger missiles and the F-16s, with no congressional oversight? Does that not count for anything? Or the fact that we have invaded Iraq 20 years ago under false pretenses, never found those weapons of mass destruction, destroyed their country, toppled their regime and guess what? We're still here 20 years later. Hey, we're still here and we're sanctioning 14 of their banks for trading with sanctioned banks in Iran to secure liquid natural gas to cool their homes in the summer. So we sanctioned them while we're still there.
Speaker 2:They made $90 billion in oil revenue in 2023, asked us for a billion towards the end of the year. Can we have our money back? It's held at the Federal Reserve in New York. They can't even control their own natural resource 20 years later and we're like, yeah, it's yours, but this isn't a good time, come back next year. So what have they done? They're kicking Western coalition forces out of the country. They have formally applied to the BRICS. They make trading in dollars illegal and as of January earlier in the year here, eight months ago, they got rid of all dollar bills in any bank in the country.
Speaker 2:So you know our actions of weaponization, of hypocrisy, perceived hypocrisy, mismanagement of the dollar, signing an executive order to go green. You know when your point, the 50-year anniversary, was in August and the Saudis didn't sign the exclusivity deal, they said, yeah, we'll still take dollars, but we're going to take other things too. That lights the fuse, really, on the hegemony. In fact, I would argue that killed the hegemony. It didn't kill the supremacy. We're still the supreme currency in the world, but we're not the only. See. That synthetic demand for the dollar because every country had to stockpile it for to me, will only crystallize their resolve.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you're familiar with what the BIS did at the 12th hour to the Bricks, which is right out of a James Bond movie, tony, I mean it seriously is to me it's like I don't know. It's right. Let me just get to the point. So I've talked a lot. So there's a man named Sergey Glazyev and for four years I've talked about this stuff on 4,000 YouTube videos. And the reason I said that there would be a common settlement currency not a common currency for the BRICS, but a common settlement currency not a common currency for the BRICS, but a common settlement currency for energy, particularly in commodities but because Sergey Glazyev, who is the Eurasian Economic Union finance minister, he said there would be that we would have a basket of commodities and a basket of currencies and this will ultimately be the BRICS system. And I researched him a lot, read a lot about him, followed his work and believe that that's where we were going to go. And we kept reading about this.
Speaker 2:And so last year, the China, Hong Kong, thailand and the UAE announced that Project Enbridge is now operational and they did two test trades. China traded digital yuan with United Arab Emirates, who is a BRICS member, to buy oil and to buy gold. Two transactions and I said that's interesting. They chose those two because I believe they're both being remonetized remonetized Iran awarded the biggest contract they've ever given to any other country, to remodernize their biggest airport in Iran, and gave it to China, and they're paying for it in oil. And you can see when China goes around and uses their digital yuan. Whether it be to buy corn and soybeans from Brazil or technology from Russia, they're paying with this digital yuan, which is immediately convertible into gold in the Shanghai Gold Exchange. So gold and oil are becoming worth more than the currency that purchased it.
Speaker 2:But Enbridge was designed by China, hong Kong, thailand, uae. It's a cross-border payment system that allows these countries to trade their own central bank digital currencies with each other, free from any interference in the SWIFT system. It's a big deal, and standing behind this program is the Bank of International Settlements, which is a Western institution, and I've always saw that and kind of just conveniently look past it. It wasn't my mistake. Well before I go down that road, let me back up and backfill.
Speaker 2:So there was a meeting that coincided with the G7 meeting in Italy a month and a half ago and it was a BRICS meeting in Novograd, russia, where Delma Rousseff came out and she's the former president of Brazil, she's the head of the BRICS New Development Bank and she said publicly that we've agreed in principle to a new settlement currency called the UNIT. It will be gold-backed by 40% 60% in the BRICS Plus currencies. It will be redeemable. It will be held within the borders of the countries that mint their own tokens. That's why we've seen 40 countries repatriate their gold from the Bank of England and the New York Fed. It's less to do with the weaponization and more to do with the fact that I believe it was going to be.
Speaker 2:It would be the backing of a new settlement currency that, instead of being held like the Bank of England to give access to the LBMA or New York to give access to the COMEX, the white paper on the unit says it will be held within the borders of the countries that make these unit tokens. That will be traded over Enbridge. So they say it's going to be traded over Enbridge. Then all of a sudden you see Saudi Arabia join as a fifth participant. So Saudi Arabia doesn't go to the meeting for the G7. They go to the meeting for BRICS at the same time, where it's announced that the Enbridge will be the platform to trade a new settlement currency pegged to gold, and it's not compatible with US dollar or the SWIFT system at this time. So it would be a way for energy to be sold in local currencies, trade done in local currencies back and forth, free from the ability of the SWIFT to stop it to impose sanctions. And the BIS Innovation Hub is also behind it. They've been helping develop this. They're the ones that reclassified gold tier one in 2019. They're the ones pulling the strings in many respects, and my mistake in this was to overlook the BIS's role in all of this.
Speaker 2:And I was given an interview with Michelle McCorry two weeks ago of Kitco, and she might be the best interviewer I've ever given interviews with. I tell her that because not only does she do her homework, she always says to me before we start listen, I agree with most of what you're saying, andy, but I am going to push back because that's what good journalists do. I said all right, michelle, I'm ready for it. Throw, throw, throw at me whatever you got. And she says when I say this, I say look, they've agreed in principle.
Speaker 2:Delmarusov comes out and says we have agreed in principle to this new token. It's called the unit. It will be traded over Enbridge. Enbridge is a cross-border payment system and these countries can trade with one another. No swift intervention. Saudi Arabia just became the fifth full participant. Dollar is not compatible. This is the future of settlement in the global south that will circumvent the dollar.
Speaker 2:And she said something to me and and it was like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Why didn't I think about this more? She says, but andy, isn't the bis a western institution? And I'm like, yeah, you're right, michelle. And so we go back and forth. And I'm like, yeah, you're right, michelle, and so we go back and forth.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, you know, it was strange that the bricks came out in their little manifesto that they made, or their whatever you want to call it. It's like a 50-page thing. I tried to read all of it, kind of like a document of how it all went down during their meeting, this big meeting that they just had, and I found it interesting that they were saying things like you know, we subscribe to be good partners with the WHO, the World Health Organization. I'm like what? And the BIS and the IMF and the United Nations? And I'm thinking, well, wow, maybe Michelle and I were onto something, because maybe these people at the BIS, the big bankers, the old Western bankers, they realize they can't have a one world currency like they always wanted. But maybe they'll have a two world currency where you have Project Cedar and Agora from the West with Project Enbridge from the east and they would integrate with Enbridge and you can have the BIS and the IMF pulling the strings on top of a digital system. Instead of having a one-world currency, they'll have a one-world system that they can stay on top of.
Speaker 2:Okay, going down that road, now here's where it gets dirty. Here's where it's like I don't know it's. It's where it's espionage. It's right out of a bricks meeting, I mean right out of a James Bond movie, what I'm trying to say. So you have this thing going on where the BIS was standing behind it for five years and developing this. You get this, this knucklehead, and developing this. You get this knucklehead.
Speaker 2:Vedat Patel come out of the State Department recently and say any challenge to the SWIFT system and the dollar's role is a threat to global democracy. A week ago, paul Krugman says that de-dollarization is, in fact, impossible because there just aren't any good alternatives. And you got the State Department come out and say any alternatives to the SWIFT system and the dollar are a threat to global democracy. Really, that was an interesting statement to hear from us, but here's where it gets dirty. So now, remember, this has been going on for five years with the backing of the BIS, helping China, hong Kong, thailand, uae and now Saudi Arabia. And you can't make this up. They say the article is titled Enbridge being shut down question mark and you get this guy named Augustus Carstens, who looks like Augustus from Willy Wonka only grown up and he's the BIS general manager, and he says we cannot directly support any project for the BRICS because we cannot operate with countries that are subject to sanctions. I just want to be very clear about that. And then you get Agath Demarius, a senior policy fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations.
Speaker 2:In the long run, there is no doubt that the mechanisms like Bricks Bridge could be useful for China, russia or others to hide sensitive transactions from Western authorities. The underlying technology is a tool to circumvent sanctions and potentially undermine the dollar's dominance in the global financial system. So my question to you is, tony, where the hell have they been for the past four years, three years, all of this shit that's been going on with Russia? They just now, the day that you know during the meeting. After all, after it's viable, it's been launched, it's ready to go, even even only in minimal terms, like they're like. Launched. It's ready to go, even only in minimal terms, like they're like. Yeah, it's going to grow much bigger, but it is now minimally viable. We can start trading on it and the BIS is standing behind it. The innovation hub has been helping these countries for years. They know that it's a BRICS settlement currency platform that sidesteps SWIFT. They know that R stands for Russia in the bricks.
Speaker 2:And then they announced just so, y'all know we can't do this we're going to pull the plug at the 12th hour. It's like you want to talk about espionage or James Bond or dirty, dirty dirty. We help you set it up for four years, we build this damn thing with you and right when you roll it out, no, we're pulling the plug. Sorry, because Russia's involved. Where was this rhetoric leading up to this? Where was it two years ago? And so when you talk about crystallizing the resolve of these countries, it just further explains why these countries don't trust the West. And you know, michelle was right. I should have focused on it more, but this is a very fluid, changing deal.
Speaker 2:People used to say to me Andy, the West won't go down easy on this and I always thought what are they going to do? This is exactly how they do it. They infiltrated, they saw the technology that was mostly Chinese based. They stood behind it, they helped it, they foster it. Here we are at the last moment, boom, pull the plug. Now it hasn't officially been pulled yet, but even the fact that they're saying this, and, and the head of the imfs, we can't do anything, that, will, you know, allow a sanctioned country to. You know, the imf or the bis won't be part of that.
Speaker 1:It's pretty dirty, if you ask me it is very dirty and you know it really gives them an opportunity to play the US and our currency against others and the commodities and cross-border payments. It's something like Thomas Jefferson said that merchants have no country. You know, you talk about the banking institutions and that's really. It is out of a Bond movie. I mean, that's what you know, a Bond narrative, because that's what that was. The villain, you know was. You know somebody bond narrative, because that's what that was, the. The villain, you know was.
Speaker 1:You know somebody that was part of the banking. They call it combines. You know the banking combines and consortiums that unite together or whatever to to form their own, their own agenda, and that's really what this is. That's. That's a paradigm shift, though, because you kind of think that it's, it's monolithic. You know that there's the west, there's the institutions that were, of course, the bis precedes, uh, the great depression. I'm pretty sure that it goes back a little bit before um, but but the imf was born out of breton woods, uh, the world bank and other things. So that's interesting. You know that. That it's not. It's not something that's a competing system. They are literally part of. You know the new rollout. They've decided to jump ship it looks like, or at least play both ends against the middle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so the West has. You know, we have something called Project Cedar and Project Agora, which are answers, if you will, to the BI or to the M-Bridge. But it really, I think, shows why these countries won't trust us anymore. Even Putin said during a meeting in St Petersburg not too long ago that the Bretton Woods system is dead and the dollar is backed by nothing but trust. And this is trust. That just goes to show much of the world doesn't trust us anymore. And this is exactly why and you know you mentioned do you think gold will be revalued earlier? I do.
Speaker 2:It's held, ironically, in an account on every central bank balance sheet, what's called the gold revaluation account. That's the name of it. You can't make that up. You can't make that up. And the head of the Dutch National Bank has been calling to revalue gold for ages, where he's saying look, we got $35 billion in gold valued at $35 an ounce on our balance sheet. It's still valued at the Bretton Woods price and the current rules. The reason it's called the gold revaluation account? It's actually a liability on their balance sheet. The asset itself is on the asset side. They mirror each other, so they balance out. You're not allowed to use those funds to offset liabilities. They're like well, why don't we just change that rule, revalue the price of gold and our balance sheet goes from putrid to pristine, just like that, and I always thought that was interesting. That's pretty much what Roosevelt did in 33 after he confiscated gold. And I always thought that was interesting. That's pretty much what Roosevelt did in 33. After he confiscated gold, he devalued the dollar by 40 percent, paid everyone 20 bucks, then devalued the dollar by 40 percent. Gold was immediately worth 35. And I figured, well, you know they could do that, but he was the only one talking about it.
Speaker 2:Then you get Cynthia Loomis, the senator from Wyoming who's now talking about it, saying you know, she spoke at the Bitcoin meeting in Tennessee a month or two ago when Trump spoke and talked about building a strategic Bitcoin account, and she said yeah. She followed him right after he got off stage, said I'm going to float a bill down to the House floor that says we should revalue the gold that the Federal Reserve is holding on behalf of the Treasury and revalue it to a level sufficient enough to take some of those proceeds and buy Bitcoin for the strategic account. As crazy as it sounds, it's not so crazy. I mean, janet Yellen wouldn't even need congressional approval to do it. She would just tell Jerome Powell here's what gold is, and then the Fed or the Treasury could then make an open declaration to any sovereign entity you want to send us your gold, We'll pay you X for it. Every $4,000 increase in the price of gold gives a trillion free and clear to the Treasury general account and that's kind of I didn't love.
Speaker 2:I said this to Michelle. I didn't love the title of our talk, something like gold to 130,000. I think people looked at it as kind of hyperbolic. But my point to her was well, in a world where Bitcoin can be a million dollars or people don't think twice about that why couldn't gold be 130,000? You put it at that level. You've now completely wiped off the liability side of your balance sheet or offset it with assets. In other words, you put it at 130,000 an ounce. Tell every country in the world you want to sell us your gold. Here's your money, we'll pay 130,000 an ounce. And now your balance sheet is perfect. You've offset the liabilities with an asset and you know it would behoove every central bank on the planet. They're the ones all accumulating it.
Speaker 2:We know that they're intending to peg it to a system. Even the IMF. You mentioned the Bretton Woods. It came out of Bretton Woods. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:There was an article in 2020 where you know, on the Bretton Woods website saying we want a new Bretton Woods. It's 150 or so countries that comprise the Bretton Woods. They all want a new Bretton Woods. And's 150 or so countries that comprise of Bretton Woods. They all want a new Bretton Woods. And even the BRICS, in their last meeting last week, said we want a new Bretton Woods. That means they want a new dollar system, something that's different than what we already have.
Speaker 2:So Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the IMF, talks about this sort of. They wrote a report at the beginning of last year and it's something like you could Google it. It says gold as an international reserve a barbarous relic, no more question mark. And she came out recently and said any central bank digital currency not pegged to something is fiat. Well, why would it be gold? Because the BIS, the most powerful bank in the world, who we just got through talking about reclassified gold as the world's only other tier one reserve asset in 2019. This is why it would make sense, and that's next to US dollars and treasuries. That's why it would make sense to use gold and distributed ledger technology, aka blockchain, to peg these two or marry these two together to provide some form of credibility to a system that lacks it.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think these are crazy, crazy times, brother, and I do think that gold will be central to a system that is in desperate need of trust, because, you can see, we've done our best to squander the good graces that our foreign creditors have given us for a long time, to squander the privilege of being the world reserve currency, but, after all, that's what our lead economic advisor advocates for in his report called dethrone King dollar that was picked up in the New York times and the Washington post. He advocates for privilege. We can no longer afford Um, and you know so. You can't make a lot of this stuff up, but I do think that we have done more to destroy um, this country, the current administration has, in the last four years than any external foe ever could have done. We've weaponized the dollar, we've inflated the crap out of it. You know, we've let 25 million people in here illegally. There are questions on the integrity of all of the cornerstones and hallmarks of this country, from the judicial system, the FBI, the electoral system, immigration system, everything. And we're printing money at the pace of 100,000 in debt per second, 24-7.
Speaker 2:So that's not what you do if you want to be the world reserve currency and then sign an executive order to go green which is spitting in the face of you know what makes the dollar, what gives it its hegemony? The petro status. So all of these things taken together in and of themselves, each one of these things are bad enough. You put them all together and you can see a pattern, and it is a pattern of is this too stupid to be stupid? Are we trying to reset the system? Are we incentivizing the world to dump dollars? Are we incentivizing the world to find alternatives? I don't know. I mean and then again you see the BIS do this I just don't know other than to say that the actions that our government has, the path that they're taking us down, is a very dangerous one. And again I'll say is it too stupid to be stupid? Because ultimately this all leads to a reset or a revaluation of gold, or a reset of the system that is highly over leveraged and under capitalized.
Speaker 2:And it's been a privilege to be the world reserve currency we should be clinging to it instead of destroying the value of the dollar to stabilize in the Treasury market, weaponizing it, and to be the world reserve currency. We should be clinging to it instead of destroying the value of the dollar, destabilizing the treasury market, weaponizing it and going around the world imposing sanctions, which many believe to be hypocritical. You couldn't draw up a better thing to not do if you wanted to retain your reserve status. But this is why I think you see the rise of the BRICS and all of these countries that are pushing back against this nonsense. Where does it lead? I guess only time will tell. But if, if they were a new settlement system for energy, yes, it would disincentivize the holding of dollars and the street, the synthetic demand that has been created for every country having to own dollars to buy energy. If that was gone, all that money comes rushing home, which creates hyperinflation, which then would push interest rates to the moon to compensate, which would then collapse. The entire system, stocks, bonds, real estate, the dollar, the banking system, the insurance companies. That's the Klaus Schwab moment. And now you point to those sons of bitches. They did it to us, they did it to us, rallying cry, and that's when you get into, maybe, a CBDC.
Speaker 2:Lael Brainard, the number two advisor for the U S government. If she wins, lael Brainard will run the federal reserve. She's a modern monetary theorist. She was number two under Powell recently where she left after being at the treasury she went to the Fed. She developed or worked on the CBDC with MIT when Biden signed it, fast-tracked its development one of his first executive orders. She just ran point for FedNow, which is Venmo and Zelle on steroids, backed by the Fed. It's being piloted right now. She's a modern monetary theorist.
Speaker 2:What better way to issue a CBDC than when the whole system collapses? And it was. They did it to us because they dumped the petrodollar. And now you know people would be less hesitant to take a central bank digital currency if they were made whole when their whole everything blew up, than being forced to take it or having even being incentivized to take it under orderly conditions because of the tracking and the loss of privacy and all that kind of stuff. But in an event where people have to take it to survive, they will. Could that be where they're going? I don't know. All I'm simply saying is that all of these things together make you go. Hmm, it's interesting, and we really haven't been good stewards of the world reserve currency.
Speaker 1:I mean, in my opinion, I look at it, it seems like a controlled demolition. I think it was James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense. He told Joe McCarthy, of course James Forrestal mysteriously fell out of a window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was opposed to some of the you know, the birth of the national security state and other things in foreign policy. But he told Joe McCarthy that if they were simply stupid, that every once in a while they'd err in our favor. But they never do.
Speaker 1:He's talking about the establishment and I think that's what I, that's really what I perceive of this, andy. I mean it's there's nothing that's been done. And you, you talk about the last four years. It is a scorched earth. I mean they're just literally just bringing the temple down on all of us, not trying to bolster anything off-ramps to peace. There's no summits, there's no communication between world leaders, especially in these potential kinetic conflicts like Ukraine or what's going on in the Middle East between Iran and Israel and the United States. There just seems like there's nothing that is stopping the forward momentum of whatever they're headed towards, some sort of you know get great reset. They call it that, some sort of cataclysm.
Speaker 1:But the world as we know it is going to change and there's nothing that you and I can do about it. There's, it's not. It's not reversible at this point. There's changes on the horizon and again, we can prepare for that and we can make better decisions if we have the information. That's what you and I try to do and talk to people, at least to get them to ask a different question. We may not have all the answers, but we definitely think that you should ask different questions, especially in this reality. But we could talk forever. I'm going to have to end the show pretty soon because I'd like to come back and do it with you again.
Speaker 2:I'll have you on my show too, Tony. I mean, you're, you're a smart guy, you get it. You're one of the few people that I talked to who truly gets it. Um, and if you're like me, you know this is cathartic to be able to talk to someone, Cause you know, most people you come in contact with in your daily life have no idea, and you try to help. But it's not something that's pleasant, you know, and that's the thing. It's not about making profits and buying Ferraris, you know. It's about protecting what you've worked so hard to obtain. It's about preparing. It's about, you know, reining in. These are the reasons why so few people want to listen to what we have to say until it's too late. So, yeah, I enjoyed the conversation too. I'd love to come back on any time you got time, Just let me know. I'd love to pick up where we left off.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely. I'll close with one last question, because we didn't even talk about silver and I've heard you talk about it, but I got from you and I didn't realize about the 500 ounces of silver in each Tomahawk missile, the military industrial. There's so much that made sense from that interview you did with Robert Kiyosaki. I started, just the wheels started turning. I go, wait a minute. That makes total sense, you know, with JPMorgan Chase's role of suppressing the market and everything else. But something happened that wasn't covered by a lot of people. I think the Jerusalem Post picked it up. But Russia is adding silver as a strategic reserve asset and along with platinum and palladium. But they really put the silver out front. I thought that was interesting and from my reading of history, that really hasn't happened since the pre-communist Chinese at least that's the way I understood that China was a big silver market. That was their basis for their currency. What do you, just as we close out, do you think that is as big a deal as I thought it was?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's huge as a matter of fact. And at the same time you have India, who's bought between 800 and 900 million ounces in the past three years, and China, who's the second largest producer of silver in the world. I've been talking with a guy named Sean Kunkun, the head of Dolly Varden Silver, who said to me Andy, they're flying all around Latin America, the Chinese are. They're going directly to the miners and they're disintermediating the marketplace and the banks and they're buying the concentrate and the dore. A dore is an unrefined it's a crudely refined bar that the miners will pull the silver out of the ground. They'll crudely refine it to maybe 40% or 50% pure and then they send it to the refiners to make 999. The Chinese are saying we'll pay twice what the West will pay. We'll buy it and ship that in the concentrate, which is like a byproduct sludge. We'll ship it back to China and we will refine it ourselves. So you have China buying up all and they're the second largest producers in the world and they are now net importers after years of being net exporters. They're buying up unrefined silver right from the miners, india buying everything that's not nailed down as much as they can between eight and 900 million ounces. And, lo and behold, silver's at all time highs against the rupee. And now Russia, these three the BRICS members now Russia's saying we're gonna add it to our state fund, which is something you're right. You don't ever hear that this is huge. And when you realize that the London Metals Exchange trades 2.9 billion ounces of silver per day, that's three and a half times annual global mine supply, 90 plus percent of it paper naked contracts. These banks in the West are short on the LBMA between four and six billion with a B ounces of silver. It's less transparent and less regulated. It's not an exchange. It's the over the counter platform where it's me and you shaking hands, and so there's less regulation, less transparency, and that's why we don't know exactly how many ounces, but it's between four and six billion. They're short. And at the same time, on Comex you have five banks short between seven and 800 million ounces. These are as dumb as a mud wall. They're suppressing the price because of the military, industrials, complexes need for silver. There is between 500 ounces in the cone of all of these high-tech weapons, and that doesn't even take into account aerospace, like the stealth bomber, and all of this stuff requires silver Used to be reported. The military used to report their numbers. They don't anymore. The Silver Institute completely ignores it and yet says we're still going to have 230 million ounce shortfall this year, but no military involved in it. And the bigger question is why would five banks hold the largest concentrated short position in any commodity traded?
Speaker 2:I got two minutes and I got to go, but I want to show. Can I share my screen with you? Absolutely, I'll show people this so that you can see it in real time. And then I got to fly, but let me share my screen here. This is a presentation I gave at Rick Rule's conference. Can you see that? Yes, all right, so let's find this slide. Okay, it starts right here. Let me make this bigger. Let's do this. How do I do this stupid thing? Let me just make this bigger. Okay, you can Google this right here, subcommittee S.2768. You can see it's 1942. But this is a congressional hearing.
Speaker 2:The present consumption of silver for war purposes is at the rate of 100 million ounces a year and growing rapidly, according to the war production board. It's only matter months before war demands will increase sufficiently to require at least 200 million ounces per year. It's 1942. Here are the silver supply and demand numbers for this year by the Silver Institute Industrial 9%. Electronics and electrical 9%. Photovoltaics, that's solar panels 20%. Raising alloy and solders 3%. Other industrial 9%. Photography negative 3%.
Speaker 2:Where is military? This is why you have this. The red line. This is comex. The red line are four big commercial banks. The eight line, the green line, are the four plus another four. There are eight commercial banks. They're the big western eight banks that are shorting the markets. So ask yourself, why would eight look at here's crude? Ask yourself, why would eight look at here's crude oil, right here? Why would eight banks hold the largest concentrated short position in any commodity ever traded in the history of the COMEX? In silver, interesting platinum, gold, palladium are the next three, but this is the largest concentrated short position ever and because we're holding it down to fund the military industrial complex. This is what the rest of the world is doing. This is what China and India and Russia are doing.
Speaker 2:These are the LBMA vaults. Of the 800 million ounces they have, they say it's the second lowest holdings they've ever had since they started keeping records on the LBMA 140-year-old exchange. Of this, 800,000, 500,000 or more belong to the ETFs. That leaves three, uh three. That leaves 300 million. It's 800 million. That leaves 300 million ounces available. So I'm going to stop sharing right now. Do I do that? Uh, just you. They're trading 2.9 billion ounces. They say 290 million, which is the whole float, that whole 300. It's basically traded every day. But they say it's 10 times undervalued or underreported, because they only report the final settlement numbers, which means that's 3 billion ounces per day. They're trading three and a half times global mine supply annually. But it's all done on paper.
Speaker 2:So these countries are like okay, you guys are stupid because we are now coordinated, motivated and sophisticated and wealthy and we know what you're doing. You're suppressing the price for whatever reason. I'm sure they know what it's for. Why do you think India has bought, you know, between 800 and 900 million ounces? Why is the largest producer or second largest producer of silver in the world flying all around Latin America buying Dore and concentrate? And now, why is Russia buying it? Because they know it's not industrial, it's strategic and the West has held the price down forever to allow the military industrial complex to create weapons to fund the ever increasing wars they play both sides. If you had silver where it should be, it would be too expensive to make these weapons. It would change the dynamics of this country very quickly, or at least the power elite. That's why you have these banks suppressing the price, as stupid as it is, and that's why the rest of the world has caught on to it.
Speaker 2:And while many of these countries in the South, like China, russia and India, ah, so we'll do the jujitsu. We'll use the leverage of your opponent against them, we'll drain the exchanges. This is why they're not bitching about it, but they're forming their own exchanges at the same time, like the Shanghai Metals Exchange and the exchange in Moscow and they talked about the BRICS Gold Exchange this last meeting and the Dubai Exchange, which will take over legitimacy. In fact, in the last six months, the volume in the Shanghai Metals and Gold Exchange is up over 500%. It's now the second most heavily traded metals exchange in the world, surpassing the COMEX. They're gaining legitimacy. They're buying up all of our commodities, using the suppression as a tool for subsidy.
Speaker 2:It's the dumbest thing in the world. So that's going to change and you'll wake up one day and silver will be way higher than you could ever imagine, because it will result in a failure to deliver or something along those lines. That creates a panic in the market, prices go up, short positions have to cover. Or one of these eight commercial banks says I'm not going down with all you guys, it's every man for himself Bye, I'm out, I'm covering and bang, you get short covering the short squeeze. Or boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It just goes higher than you can imagine and it's an existential threat to some of these commercial banks who are stupid enough to maintain that leveraged, naked short position in an environment where countries like China, russia and India are saying ah, this is how we beat you. Instead of going into a war, we'll just drain the exchanges using your stupidity, using your suppression and the ability to stand for delivery where no one ever did. That's how this all breaks apart.
Speaker 1:Andy, thank you for making the complex digestible, thank you for your leadership and I wanted to say, as we close, there's an old joke from the Nixon administration. He had a speech writer named Herbert Stein and Pat Buchanan would joke about it and said there was a. They called it Herbert Stein's law. It says if something cannot go on forever, it will stop, and it looks like that's uh, that's going to be true here, with all of these commodities and pricing and uh metals, the financial system itself, uh but uh, interesting times and thank you for for being here. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1:You know, that's a.
Speaker 2:Chinese curse brother. So, uh, so they are, unfortunately. I preferred it when it were. You know, mellow, mellow, but nonetheless, tony, you're a good man. I'd love to pick up where we left off. I'd love to come back anytime and I'd love to have you on my show as well. So thanks for having me and God bless this country. It's going to be an interesting week. Let's hope it. Let's hope we're all wrong in what we see and that this is a smooth transition and a good, a good um, a good model for the us to, to, to, to start, to, you know, move forward from. So, any case, thanks again for having me and I look forward to doing it with you again appreciate you, andy.
Speaker 1:See you, brother, thank you. All right folks. What a great interview. I've wanted to talk to andy for a very long time and I'm Appreciate you, andy. See you, brother. Thank you. All right folks. What a great interview. I've wanted to talk to Andy for a very long time and I'm hoping we'll talk again soon. And be sure and share the episode. I'm going to put this out on all the channels, not just the Wise Wolf channel. But be sure and share the episode. Go check Andy's channel out, make sure you follow him and anything that he's doing Always a wealth of knowledge.