Peak Prosperity - Fort Knox: If the Gold Were There, They’d Let Us See It

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Is it Fort Knox or Fort Deception? And if the latter, does that explain the massive gyrations in the gold markets of late, with exploding lease rates in London and speciation that more than 2,000 tons have been flown across the Atlantic Ocean over the past couple of months?Resources from today:Peak Financial InvestingGoldCoreeQRPInterview with Vince Lanci

Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only. Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full. The Trump administration is going to audit the gold at Fort Knox. Is it all there? What if it's not? What should we be looking out for? The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com

to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Hello, everyone. Dr. Chris Martinson here of Peak Financial Investing with another episode of Finance U. Paul is traveling this week. So he got me solo, and then we're going to hear from Paul about his risk-managed portfolio strategy in a recorded piece that we did earlier. Now, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold. One of my favorite subjects. So we're going to talk about the Fort Knox gold, but first let's take a tour through what is actually going on with gold. This is fascinating. I'm seeing increasing desperation out there right now. Gold for a long time has been managed to keep the price sort of in a boundary, in a band. And by the way, so here what we're

looking at, let me get my little drawing tool out, or I'll use a laser pointer. This here, the U.S. markets, London market kind of opens around 4 in the morning, and U.S. market opens at 8. So you can see here during this time of the, you know, London, U.S., they sell gold. And then after our markets close here at 4, all night long, this big green arrow, this is yesterday's action, the rest of the world is buying China. And then, again, 4 o'clock, markets open, London's a little flat, but the U.S. markets immediately they start selling. So what's the

pattern? The pattern is the rest of the world buys gold, U.S. and London, all those criminals, I call them criminals because they're actually selling gold they don't have. And that's going to bring us back to the audit in just a second. Now, this is what it looks like on a daily basis. You can get lost in the noise on a daily basis. But this has been the pattern for a number of weeks now. The United States sells with London, but the rest of the world is buying. Now, how successful have they been? Not that successful. Over time, we've seen gold just rise and rise and rise from just about 1850 an ounce all the way through 2850 an ounce and closing in on 3000. All that action we just saw there was just contained in this little one little bar right at the end, right under my red dot right there.

So the battle, of course, is just to keep it from rising too quickly, because what happens if gold rises too quickly? Well, it creates the perception that maybe people don't want fiat money dollars. In fact, they don't want Federal Reserve notes. In fact, maybe people just would rather hold something real and tangible and not Federal Reserve notes. So let me reverse this for everyone. Right now, everybody thinks about gold and dollars. Oh, gold is $2,954 per ounce as of the time of this screenshot here. But that's, let me flip that. A dollar is worth one 2,954th of an ounce of gold. That's how it is. It used to be worth one twentieth of an ounce of gold back in 1933, back before Roosevelt seized everybody's gold and revalued it to $35 an ounce. And then later, it got revalued to $42 an ounce and so on. Gold tells you that something is going wrong with your

money printing operation. Now, the Federal Reserve, bless their hearts, and I mean that in the southern sense of that phrase, have done an exceedingly poor job managing their one and only product. It's like they had Coke Classic, and somehow they converted it into water buffalo urine. I don't know how they did that. It's like, come on, guys, you had one job. Just don't trash your one product. But that's what they've been doing. They've been devaluing, debasing the dollar for a very long time. Now, if you really want to understand this dynamic much better about what it means to keep it from rising too quickly, we had a really great interview here with Vince Lancey. Check it out.

There's the link. It's back at Peak Prosperity. We put that out on February 8th. And he helped us understand this isn't about tariffs, right? And by the way, this is FinanceU. I do my level best to find guests and also use my powers to help make things simple and understandable. Because finance shouldn't be complicated. It shouldn't be anxiety producing.

It shouldn't be something where people immediately tune out. This is fascinating. Once you understand this stuff, you're watching geopolitics happen. There's intrigue. Wait till you see what happens in the gold audit I'm just going to talk about in a few minutes here. fascinating. Once you understand this stuff, you're watching geopolitics happen. There's intrigue. Wait till you see what happens in the gold audit I'm just going to talk about in a few minutes here. And this is the kind of stuff where if you know it, it helps you understand where the world is so that you can position yourself so that you don't get blindsided by things as they come down the pike. Don't take my word for it necessarily. Barberad at the site left a comment under this particular piece.

It said, I feel so happy. At last, a monetary discussion I understand. Thanks, Chris, for interjecting the simpler asides to clarify for the financially slower members of the tribe. Raise his hand and make sure everyone gets it. Slyon said, I'm a stupid old lady. No, she's not. And I don't understand much.

Yes, she does. But it was a pleasure to listen to two very intelligent men figure out together what could possibly be going on. Thank you both very much indeed. And that's what I do at Peak Prosperity. We help make sense of things because everybody can understand this and everybody should. No jargon. Let's just talk about what's going on. Now, Shanghai Gold Exchange, SGE, they report very different numbers this morning, yesterday

morning, day before for the price of gold and silver than we are seeing here in the West, where we have these fraudulent paper markets, where bullion banks and shadowy sort of groups of people sell paper contracts. But if you have to buy the physical stuff, that's what's going on in Shanghai. Notice here that as of February 19th, silver closed at $34.66. That is a full $2 higher than it was at the same time in the United States. Now, how do you have something such a key commodity like silver off by a couple of bucks per ounce? You really don't. It's impossible to maintain that arbitrage because what can happen is somebody could buy silver for $2 an ounce less,

ship a million ounces into the Shanghai Gold Exchange, sell it, and make a million dollars, right? Or $2 million. It just doesn't exist because if you can make a couple million bucks just buying something here and shipping it there with no risk, that's what you do. Now, Bloomberg says, I woke up today, this is the 20th of February here. You can see the date down here. Bloomberg's giving an idea about why stock futures have slipped and gold hitting a fresh record high. And here's what Bloomberg said, the second middle bullet point. They said here, gold reached a fresh all-time high amid geopolitical tensions and concerns over

Trump administration policies. I'm going to give that three bulls for being completely misleading. It's not because of concerns over Trump administration policies. That's not why gold is going up. Unless it's concerns over what they're going to find if they audit Fort Knox and the gold isn't there, so we have to buy it real quick and stuff some in there and say, oh, it was always there. See? Now, this is, you go to goldchartsrus.com and look at the deliveries out of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Look at the CME gold deliveries. Look at these. Oh, we Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Look at the CME gold deliveries.

Look at these. Oh, we've never seen anything like this. This is 70,000 contracts, a contract for 100 ounces of gold. So put two zeros on there, and what do you find? Seven million ounces of gold leaving just in this one bar right here. This is astonishing. This is an accumulative bar for the year. It's just during that month's delivery, what happened? There would be 12 of these bars per year. Wow, 7 million ounces of gold. That is a lot of gold just all of a sudden exiting. And guess what's

related to that? Gold lease rates, if you need to lease it in London, it's just exploding higher. This right here, this would be, this is the huge, this is the Silicon Valley bank crisis right here. Gold got a little pricey because people didn't know, like with Silicon Valley bank going down and signature bank, was the whole banking system going to go down? So what you got was a big explosion in the price of lease gold for a minute or two or a month. And here it is way higher than that. The stress in the system is extraordinary right now. And this is an important sign. We've been covering this for a number of weeks over at Peak Prosperity.

Okay. How much gold has moved over? Well, we heard 400 tons, according to Bloomberg. But Philip Smith, group CEO of Stonex, this says, well, he thinks maybe over 2,000 tons. What? Have moved into the U.S. 2,000 tons out of Europe. In fact, we're hearing now, for the first time in many years, that Switzerland is sending more gold, usually those one kilo bar gold bars, over to the U.S.

than are being sent over to China. So that whole from west to east flood of gold that's been going on for, I don't know, 10 years now, seems temporarily to have gone within the west, but from London to U.S. Markets like that. So this is crazy. Big, giant movements of gold. These are elephant-sized moves. This isn't little money. This isn't you and me buying a few extra gold coins. This is massive, big money. This could be sovereign. It's like the U.S. Treasury Department

buying gold. It's really big money. And we know that at least in part because what we're seeing is that these demand for one kilogram gold bars is really high. And this from Ronan Manley over at Bullion Star, he wrote here, quote, Unlike the crash, JP Morgan movement in 2010 or 11, or the silver squeeze frenzy of 2021, both fueled by waves of retail buyers that fell short of breaking the paper market. This time it's deep pocketed, institutional, institutional, and high-net-worth investors making their move. They're buying these things, kilo bars. It's as if the big players have finally woken up to the scandalous paper gold Ponzi,

where LBMA spot isn't backed by physical gold, and the ratio of paper to real gold is an insane 100 to 600 to 1 question. Are they front running the collapse of the paper gold illusion? Now, what Ronan is saying here, for those who haven't been tracking all of this as closely as maybe I have, is there's a physical market for gold and you would think that sets the price, right? It's like there would be a physical market for eggs and you would either find eggs in the store or not. If there weren't enough eggs in the store, the price would go up. And if there were too many eggs, the price would go down. Supply and demand usually rules a physical market. Gold is a physical thing, but it's ruled by the paper contracts where JP Morgan can sell. How

many paper gold contracts do you want? There are a hundred ounces per contract. Like, Whoa, that's a big number, right? That's $300,000 worth of, um, of, uh, of, uh, absolute, you know, massive, uh, gold per, per contract. Right. So they've been selling paper gold forever and ever. That's what they do. And that drives the price. It's as if you went to the store to get eggs. And there are no eggs there. But on paper, there's somebody out front saying, how many dozen would you like? I've got as many dozen as you want.

They just write it down on paper. Here, I'm going to sell you 50 dozen eggs, right? How many do you want? 100 dozen. They keep selling eggs, but there aren't any eggs in the store. Well, what's happening now that Ronan Manley is talking about from bullion star is are they front running this are the big players finally figured out that the whole thing is a scam now how far back does this scam go it goes back a long ways right there's a whole lot of history

back there i don't have time to go into all of it but it starts with the bretton woods agreement 1944 bretton woods being a facility in New Hampshire where they held a meeting. Borden people showed up at the end of World War II and said, how do we rebuild the world? And the United States raised its hand and said, we'll be the reserve currency, and here's what we'll do. We're going to back the dollar with gold. And it worked beautifully until people wanted their gold instead of U.S. dollars. And so then Nixon had to slam the gold window in 1971, August 15th, to be precise.

Came on TV and said, we're going to have to temporarily suspend the gold window, which is still happening. So that's a long temporary, government temporary. You know how that works. So, and ever since then, though, they have been working double, triple, triple overtime to try and keep the price of gold from signaling the wrong things, which is people in it. It happens. If the price of gold just, you know, keeps getting clocked and hammered and all of that stuff in the morning, people lose interest. It's very simple to understand. So they've been using gold as a monkey hammer to keep people's perceptions about how well or poorly they are doing at running the

overall financial and fiscal situation of the United States. So the enterprise of the United States involves and has involved slamming gold. And they've done this with paper contracts. Oh, that is now ending. And what's really fascinating is listening to this. This is just came out, I believe, yesterday. Today is the 20th of February. Listen up.

I'm Judge. Do you know what they're looking at specifically at the Department of Defense right now? They're looking at everything. And are they going to cut more down? They're looking at, we're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there. Are they going to cut more? You know that we're going to go into Fort Knox. Do you know about that?

Sir, sir. How's that bag bump? Are they going to eliminate? We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there. We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there. We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there. I'm sorry, that came through really, really quietly. It's kind of a quiet recording. I thought it would come out a little better, but he's asked,

you're going to go into Fort Knox? He says, yeah, we're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there. Are they going to... You know that we're going to go into Fort Knox? You know that we're going to go into Fort Knox? Okay, that is pretty much a done deal at this point. Do you know about that? Do you know about that?'re going to go into Fort Knox? Okay, that is pretty much a done deal at this point. You know about that? Are they going to eliminate more national security positions? Anyway, we're going to Fort Knox. Oh, so the United States Mint has three main repositories.

One of them is at Fort Knox. It has about half the nation's gold, roughly. They've got some more stored in Denver, and they've got some more stored in another vault near in Maryland somewhere, I believe, and then a little bit at the New York Fed. Okay, so the Mint, the U.S. Mint, under the Treasury, is responsible for saying, yeah, we have all this gold. We have all this gold. We do. And that's Fort Knox. It's a little building. Most of its vaults in the action is underground. I assume it's very, it would be very hard to break in there.

And even if you did, getting into the vaults would be another layer of difficulty. So you would think, you know what? Finding out how much gold the United States has should be simple, right? You would walk into a room and you would count things. It would be very, very easy to figure this out. Auditing gold, not that hard. But you wouldn't know that from the rigmarole. And by the way, before I start on taking you down this tour, this history tour here of what's happening with our gold and prior audits. My hypothesis is that if the gold was there, then there would be tours. It would be like you could go to the U.S. Treasury Department.

You can go to the absolute place where they print money. There's a little catwalk and you can look down on the floor and see all the money being printed and stacked and going into the cutting machines and palleted out like they're proud. They're like, yeah, that's where your money gets printed right there. You see that all that printing happening? That's because nobody's afraid to show you them printing hundred dollar bills because it's actually happening. Conversely, nobody's really allowed to go into Fort Knox and see this stuff like, oh, no, it would violate security. Like in what walking in and seeing where they print hundred dollar bills isn't an insecure situation. Nobody's really allowed to go into Fort Knox and see this stuff. Like, oh, no, it would violate security. And what?

Walking in and seeing where they print $100 bills is an insecure situation? That's not it. That's not it. If the gold was there, my prediction is, my expectation is, there would be a big wall of bulletproof glass. You could get the tour. You'd walk by, you know, vault number 38 and look in like, oh, look at all that gold there. And then you'd go through the coffee shop, maybe get a visconi. And then on your way out, you could buy a t-shirt and a hat. That's what it would look like. Nobody gets to go in there. Okay. Our last full audit was 43 years ago in 1982. That's, that's it. And here's what they said in this audit report here.

They said here, you have to go all the way down to the footnotes. The footnotes to Appendix 1, 1986. They said here, but number two, Slashy, on a Smith-Corona. As of September 30th, 1982, 100% of the gold stored at the depository was audited under the initial continuing audit program. And between, excuse me, between July of 83 and July of 85, the gold was audited in accordance with a plan approved by the treasurer as follows. You can see that there's 147 million ounces there, but they audited 15 million ounces, 14, 11, 12. There are a bunch of different vaults and they would open a door up and take some out and audit that chunk. So they didn't do full audits, right? And they say the continuing annual audit from the

same document here, they say in fiscal year 1986, audits of government owned gold were conducted at the United States Mint in Denver and in Fort Knox. That's in Kentucky. The audits were conducted in accordance with the revised audit guidelines, which is like, oh, we don't have to look at it all anymore. We'll just look at some. And they said they conducted a required statistical sample of gold melts within randomly selected compartments at the facilities. And I have, my first question is, can I find something in here that describes what that process of random selection was? There are 42 vaults down there.

Did they have 42 little pieces of paper and a half that they shook and took out? Or was it random with one of the auditors going, I need you to look behind that door, not that one, and that one. They didn't describe, like, this would be a normal part of a normal report made by normal human beings who weren't trying to hide anything. You would explain what your random selection process was. They just threw it out there, and it's like, you have to accept it. Oh, yeah, we randomly selected compartments, and everything checked out. Bro, it's just the weirdest thing. And so, yeah, here you can see, you know, what. It's just the weirdest thing. And so, yeah, here you can see, you know,

what they did here during the years. And you can see they're an 83, 84, 85, getting my laser pointer thing. They're missing 89 ounces, 27, 37. Those were because they were drawing samples out and they left. So they took 89 ounces out, 27 ounces out, 37 ounces out and off it went but when they add up everything they're convinced that they have 147 342 million and 25 ounces of

gold okay and i got all this from bullion star here and um coos jensen uh uh was uh did that uh posted that's Really good stuff reporting there. So this is what they said. This is very hard to find pictures from Fort Knox. Very hard. But this is allegedly a picture from Fort Knox. And they say this is one of the compartments. I'm like, that is a really weird way to store gold.

You know, that's just sort of stack it up there. And how would you randomly select bars out of that if you wanted to get bars that were super buried back there? You can just imagine the auditors coming in going, you know what, let's just go with this bar on the top, this one up front. I'm going to randomly select these three up front here because getting to the back would be a royal pain. This is a very, very interesting, difficult way to go about handling gold. Now, remember, too, we had Steve Mnuchin show up with old turtle head there, Mitch McConnell. And they said, oh, hey, yeah, first Treasury Secretary

since John Snyder in 1948 to actually visit the gold. And then they come out, oh, glad gold is safe. That's a very declarative statement. What did they do to assure the gold was safe? Well, we had these wonderful pictures there, Steve Mnuchin, and he's got some gloves on and he's holding a gold bar and somebody handed him that gold bar. And again, look at this.

It's just stacked up behind him. They're like layer row after row, just stacked. You know, that's how, that's what you do. You just stack the gold. We're not like a rich nation that could afford like a big vault where you

could actually have like, you know, standard shelves. We just stack it up and it's all there. Trust us. And you can see old Turtlehead doing the same thing here, holding probably the same bar, different pair of disposable gloves. I'm glad he didn't glitch in that particular moment. But way back in the day, in the 40s, we had Mary here here who was the mint secretary at the time uh i don't know

why every she's in one or two vaults and she's always doing this that that was the approved photographer like mary show us how excited you are by the light bulb up there i think that's what it's happening i'm not positive but look at like who stores gold this way just start it's like it's this is this is like when when my kids were like eight i'm like store the gold in the vault and they like okay and they just started stacking it up look at how it's just stacked to the ceiling in the back just like somebody was up there like shoving the last few up in that last row up there this is crazy this is this is proper gold storage right here you can see that there's a little hole here. Every single bar, you can actually get your

eyes on it. There's no such thing as a bar sort of stacked and hidden behind other bars. You can see the number on every bar because somebody thought it through and had the bar numbers facing out. And so everything is completely auditable and observable. This is the New York Fed. Two separate gold vaults. I guess this is vault 31 here. They slid the door open. You can tell these are different vaults here because you see this staggered row right here. That one's missing from here. And you have instead these side gaps over here. But again, look at the leaning tower up there. New York Fed's like, what are we going to do with all this gold, Mortimer? I don't know. We'll just start stacking it up there. And then when they audit it, do you really think they dismantle all those tons of gold, pull that all out, make sure the gold bars in the back are fine? Or do they just kind of go, you know, why don't we just take these three from up top here? Well, I mean that in the positive sense, tried to get to the bottom of all this in 2011.

And he held this meeting. And it was to investigate, it's called Investigating the Gold, House Resolution 1495. The Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2011. And the oversight of the United States gold holdings. Now I'm going to get my highlighter out here and see. So as you can see here, the Honorable Ron Paul, chairman of the subcommittee. And we also had Paul Jones, Lutkemeyer, Huenziga, Schweikert, Clay, Maloney, and Green, Chairman Paul. He calls the meeting to order and he says here, I will start with my opening statement and proceed to anybody else who's anxious to do the same. For far too long, the United States government has been less than transparent in releasing information relating to its gold holdings. Not surprisingly, this secrecy has given rise to a number of theories about the gold at Fort Knox and other depositories.

Some people speculate that the gold has been involved in gold swaps with foreign governments or bullion banks. Others believe that the gold has been secretly shipped out of Fort Knox and are actually, you know, others still believe that the bars at Fort Knox are actually gold-plated tungsten. Historically, the Treasury and the Mint have dismissed these theories rather than addressing these concerns with substantive rebuttals. No one from Congress has been allowed to view the gold at Fort Knox in nearly 40 years. Recent photographs of gold holdings seem to be hard to come by, and the Mint and the Inspector General's audit statements contain only the bare minimum of information. Now, he's absolutely right. Later, Mnuchin came along and, you know, said, oh, I saw it with old turtle head there, and they had their white gloves.

But they were brought into a special room, and some gold was wheeled over to them, and they were handed a bar. And then they said, oh, yeah, it's all safe. It's all, it's cool, man. It's here. Now, part of this 2011 oversight panel here by Ron Paul was this gentleman, Eric Thorson, down here, who's the inspector general of the Treasury Department, came in and delivered a prepared statement to the committee. Now, the Treasury Department would be responsible for the mint as a subcomponent of the Treasury Department,

and the mint is responsible for making sure all the gold is there at Fort Knox, also in Denver and other places. Okay, so here he said here, Mr. Thorson comes in and he says, oh, before I discuss the details of the audits that are the topic of this hearing, I want to make one point very clear, he says. One hundred percent of the U.S. government's gold reserves in the custody of the Mint has been inventoried and audited. Furthermore, these audits found no exceptions of any consequence. This is technically accurate, which is the best kind of accurate. But he didn't say here 100% of the gold reserves that were audited this year.

He's actually in 2011 referring back to that last final full audit from 1982. And I'm going to show you what they did in the intervening years and since this statement here. He says here, I also want to assure you that the physical security is absolute. I can say without any hesitation because I have observed the gold and the security of the gold reserves myself. And you, if you don't trust this guy, can't you just see this guy slapping on the hood of a used car? This baby will get you where you need to go. Smack. That's how I see it. Anyway, I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't judge a book by the cover, but listen, this guy was hired in by George Bush, right? Yeah. The guy who brought us 9-11, weapons of mass destruction, all those greatest hits, also gave us Eric Thorson. So not exactly on the trusting sort when it comes to that administration at all.

Carrying on accordingly, he says here, quote, the requirements of H.R. 1495, which calls for a full assay, inventory, and audit of gold.R. 1495, which calls for a full assay, inventory and audit of gold reserves of the United States, together with an analysis of the sufficiency of the measures taken for the security reserves of such reserves is redundant of audit work already done. Hey, trust me, bro, he says. He's like, no, no, we already did that. I under yeah, you got this H.R. 1495, but it's redundant. We've already done it. Like, oh, it would be, you know, it takes so much time. You know how hard it is to audit these things.

You got to, first off, you should see how we've stacked the compartments. I mean, you got to take all these bars out. Nobody can think of another way to do it. So it's really quite the pain. I mean, this is just ridiculous. It's pretty laughable. This is also from Eric thorson's statement he says quote in all 42 compartments at these three hardened facilities holds 699 515 gold bars with a

fineness or a purity ranging from 0.47 to four nines 0.9999 with with an average fineness of.9006. The average fineness, these are not good for delivery bars. Good for delivery bars are 9999, four nines, right? These are, this is melted coins. I don't even know what a.47 is. Is that, they have some 14-karat brooches hanging out in the vault i don't know what that is but at any rate he's saying oh yeah yeah no no we have all this stuff and it's perfectly fine it's just got this really weird pure it's not a good for delivery gold that's for

sure um carrying on down here he says uh pursuant to that order the committee for continuing audit of the u.s government owned gold performed annual audits of the Treasury's gold reserve from 1975 to 1986. And now it's 2011. Like, we haven't really seen the need to do it since then. But I assure you, 100% audited. And I've seen it myself. It's all there. Like, this is just...

Trust me, bro. I'm not the trusting sort Eric the committee was made up by staff of the treasury the mint the federal reserve bank of new york hey listen if you can't trust the scout if you can't trust the career bureaucrats who are overseeing the stuff that's their trustee saying trust us we've audited it right what has doge found so far doge has found that every single place it's looked it's found massive waste fraud and corruption and a lot of thieving and stealing and double dealing by career bureaucrats so he's like i don't worry the committee is treasury we got people from mint the federal reserve if you can't trust them who can you trust right carrying on quote the annual

audits by the gold committee ended in 1986 after 97 of the government old gold held by the mint had been audited and placed under official joint seal you're going to hear this again official joint seal this is a big concept i'm going to show you it's kind of funny when you get it's kind of funny skipping some stuff down at the bottom in yellow, quote, the financial statement audit is performed by KPMG, the big audit firm. Under contract with my office, KPMG has relied on our audits of the gold reserves when rendering its opinions on the Mints and treasuries financial statements they have assured themselves as to the independence and reputation and qualifications of my audit staff hey we got this audit report from kpmg yeah where'd they get their information uh we gave it to them but they told but they

checked us out man and they said we're swell guys. It's crazy. All right. So carrying on from Eric Thorson's frankly unbelievable testimony here in front of Ron Paul, Ron must've just been tearing his hair out. All of this. He says, quote, furthermore, in addition to observing the inventory of the gold for all the audit periods, we selected and tested a statistically valid random sample of gold bars using a 95% confidence level. How do you randomly sample bars that are stacked like that? Like, let's say you have a true random generator, you throw the dice, and it says, I need a

bar from all the way in the back right corner. Do you seriously think they unstacked all those bars and went to the one in the back corner? Or do you think they just pulled the ones on sort of the top surface there? They don't explain. A standard audit procedure would say, for each one of these 42 compartments, here's the condition of the compartment. Here's the stacking of the gold bars.

Here's how we did our random selection. And here's specifically how we asked. They're just like, oh, we assayed these these bars did you drill all the way through the bars did you scrape a little off the surface which would have maybe missed the fact that there was tungsten in the center did you put them down through some sort of a ping analyzer or spectral source so that you could look and see if there was anything sort of like lead bars in the center of this? Did you perform a specific gravity test just to make sure it was the right density? Did you do any of that? No, we assayed them after randomly selecting them.

And they give you no detail on that, as if that would be too complicated to explain how you might perform an audit. When people don't tell you something in their materials and methods section. It's because they're trying to hide something. I'm a scientist. I know all about that game. I've seen it way too many times. It's not so much what they do say as what they don't say. So they never told us how they randomly selected the compartments. They never told us how they randomly selected bars.

They never told us how they went about assaying the bars. They're like the three only most important things when it comes to doing these sorts of work. It's crazy talk. At any rate, he says down here, last quote in yellow, as discussed earlier, by the end of fiscal year 2008, all of the gold reserves in the men's custody had been 100% inventoried and audited. End of story. You know what's fascinating? You know what happened just recently? Trump fired 17 inspectors general, including one from the Department of Treasury. That's fascinating to me. So we have Trump saying, let me, because this happened first,

hey, I'm going to fire some inspectors general and maybe he didn't really care about firing the inspector general from say HUD or labor. Maybe he really needed the one from treasury out of the way so that he could get on the plane and say, maybe we will just got it. Maybe we should go to Fort Knox and see what's there. Okay. This is fascinating.

So just, just some guessing there. Now, Eric Thorson, again, to Ron Paul, because this is the last statement, this is the last piece of data we have. There's a lot of audit reports from earlier, but they're, again, mysterious and incomplete. And some of them are missing, by the way work performed by my office. Here's what we did. Direct physical observation of the gold reserves and deep storage compartments inventory. And this included, he said, one, reviewing and evaluating internal controls and to include the physical controls over the deep storage gold. We verify the existence of the bars in each compartment by visually inspecting the gold bars. Yeah, they're there. I the gold bars. Yeah, they're there.

I see gold bars. Let's guess they're all there because we can count X across and Y deep and Z. Yeah, they must be there. He said, oh, we visually inspect it, like open the door. Yeah, look, there's gold bars in there.

So look about the right dimensions. Yep, close the door yeah look there's gold bars in there so look about the the right dimensions yep close the door this is insane that he thinks he can get away with this we visually we looked in there we visually inspected the bars this is crazy talk to me yep that's trust me bro we visually inspected the bars and then they compared the records for each compartment inventory to he doesn't say that you know what what we did? We took every bar out. We matched it up against a list of bars. That would be the correct statement there. Oh, no, we compared records.

We good? And then they statistically selected some for sampling, right? They compared the finest, blah, blah, blah. Okay, all that. So that's part one. Second part. They did two things. Here's the second part.

Visual inspection of the official joint seals. Okay, all that. So that's part one. Second part. They did two things. Here's the second part. Visual inspection of the official joint seals. Remember I told you to get back to the joint seals? We have some joint seals on previously inventoried compartments. So what did they do? Inspected the official joint seals used to control compartments containing previously inventoried gold to determine whether the seals had been altered or compromised in any way. Look. These doors

with the big vaults on them, combos. The big vault doors, they have seals on them. And we inspected the seals and said, oh, they look good to me. Bob, that look good to you? Eric, that looks fine. That's what they did. They visually inspected the seals. Now you're thinking,

what kind of seal is this? Must be a very special seal. You're right. This is one of the seals. Foolproof, I tell you. There's not... It's a little cable with a couple of swaged things on there. And you'll notice, with a sharp eye,

you can see that it's got one of those three ring binder plasticky sleeves and it's got something in there and somebody had signed that thing and they said well you know what we did we compared we compared the signatures yeah we compared the signatures on the seal see if they agree with the signatures on the original there's no way

anybody could that's 100% foolproof I don't see how anybody could just fake one of those, you know? Crazy. At any rate, this is going to be a lot of fun. I can't wait to see what they actually find. Listen, there are only three options. All the gold is there.

More gold than we think is actually in there, because I don't know, maybe we stole it from Iraq or something, right? Found it in a water truck and brought it home and put it in Fort Knox, stacked it to the ceiling. I don't know. Or the gold that we think is supposed to be there isn't actually there. I'm putting money on number three, just because I know that they've used gold and shenanigans around gold.

And there's all this huge, up to 2,000 tons of gold is suddenly flooding back from points unknown. There's that, you don't get that level of panic in the system unless somebody knows they got like, ah, we've been kind of monkeying with the gold supply for decades. And now we have to make square. And by the way, again, it shouldn't be like Ron Paul shouldn't have to like organize a committee and get people and prepare reports and rooms full of people all arguing over. It's all there. Trust me, bro. KPMG is of people all arguing over it's all there trust me bro kpmg is there seals it's all sealed and that's how we know it's there because the seal was there i looked at the seal myself

if it was there they would just say oh yeah come on down anytime you want how's next tuesday work right and people would go and they wouldn't visually inspect and ron paul would go okay so i guess it's all here and they would close it back up again if he wanted to come back the following wednesday he would it would be no big deal because it's a big deal it's a big deal that's how we know that's how we know these things okay now i'm carrying on we know that there's some stuff going on in silver here's uh b Brian Kuzmar describing how do I know there's a silver shortage coming. Well, in the industry he's in, he says he works with silver and he says for decades, we buy tons of scrap silver from dealers, from jewelers, from estates. We fill up 55 gallon drums, ship them out, wash, rinse, repeat week after week, year after year. However, the real fact is there's a lot less coming in in the last decade than decades

before and less and less silver scrap coming in every year, which is an important source of supply in this story. And for what it worth, the barrels weigh about 700 pounds when properly loaded. All coin will fit even more because they stack a little bit better. So those would weigh a lot more. At any rate, here's somebody who's in the business of getting a lot, their hands on what's called junk silver or recycled silver or scrap silver coming in and saying, there's just not as much coming in.

By the way, the Silver Institute puts out this big report every year and says, oh, here's how much silver there is. And they always have a very large, reliable amount of scrap silver coming in. More here and here, maybe from somebody on the front lines, like, yeah, that might be BS. A lot of BS in this territory. As well, we know that silver is leaving London. The little goldish colored bars, that's how much on a month over month is coming or going. And the silver line is how much the LBMA actually has. Notice that this doesn't go to zero. Let me get my laser pointer. This goes down to 700, 600.

So there's still 600, 730 million ounces there ish, right? Do they tell me up here? Oh, 760 million ounces. Yeah, okay. But it's been, do you notice the trend since 2020? Silver has been leaving and leaving and really accelerating leaving of late. So silver is heading out. Bob Coleman saying January silver outflow from LBMA vaults was a staggering 71 million ounces. So you could imagine if you lost 71 million ounces month after month after month and you had 700 ish million ounces you got 10 months before it zeroed out no more left but they don't even have that much time obviously because they don't own all of the silver that they're storing so they couldn't even ship it all out if they wanted to japan

now short of silver south korea short of silver and gold. These are the kinds of creaking and popping sounds you see when something dynamic is really happening in a market. So gold and silver, my full attention, something's happening. I have a whole theory about what's actually going on with gold. I think that there's something about Fort Knox that plays into this. There's something about our new Treasury Secretary that plays into all this. And there's something about the fact that the Federal Reserve note, what you call a dollar in America, the Federal Reserve note has been mismanaged to the point where I think it's an irrecoverable, unsavable unit of measure. Too many have been printed.

The Federal Reserve has done a terrible job managing it. And now they're in deep doo-doo. And that explains, of course, why Jay Powell looks like he aged 10 years in the last couple of months, why we're seeing all of this stuff. People have caught the message, but welcome to America where we sell paper, silver, and gold all day long. Why? To keep you out of the game, to confuse you, to make sure more people don't catch on while rich people are busy backing the truck up.

But they catch on to this stuff earlier in other countries, where they don't suffer from the same levels of financial shenanigans and propaganda that we're treated to here in the United States and also much of Europe. Now, is there a market crash on the way? This brings us to our next part of this. This is quick. I just want to talk about this because let's look at some data. All right. This is from Valentine's Day. Credit card debt hits a record 1.21 trillion. These are super stretched consumers.

Look how much has been going on the credit card ever since COVID ostensibly ended here at the beginning of 2021. Look at this. Unbelievable. From about 700 and call that 70 billion to 1.2 trillion, $500 billion of borrowing. That stretched. The market stretched a lot. Here's Financealot noting a chart, which is the all-popular megaphone pattern, right, or jaws of death pattern, saying that if this market cracks, which is the Dow Jones, and goes back to this bottom of the megaphone before it can begin going back up again, that's about a 90% fall. I'll get you into that. I'm not saying it's going to fall 90%. I'm just saying it's super stretched. A fall would not be unthinkable here. As well, the markets are stupidly extra pricey as expensive as they've ever been you have to believe that this time is different to be buying them at these

levels but retail has been FOMO fear of missing out FOMO buying these past couple of months just retails piling in it's usually when the pros are piling out and then the market can fall a little but what we're looking at here is the U.S. stock market capitalization. How much is the total stock market worth compared to the M2 money supply, which is a broad measure of money? And it hit 289% in 2024, getting dangerously close to its dot-com bubble peak, where, of course, the market fell, went up, fell again. But anyway, it's just saying it's pretty stretched. All of these things are stretched at the same time. We know for a fact that the government is going to be in a spending decline phase for a period of time.

And because of that, we know it's going into the spending decline because, you know, Elon's on it. Trump is on it. We see the Treasury Secretary. They're all saying the same thing. Here's Elon on February 17th saying, America is going bankrupt from extreme levels of government spending. Either radical action is taken or we're toast. Radical action means cutting government spending. And when you cut government spending,

big old stretched markets have a harder time staying stretched. It's just a law of life. So I'm going to quote Clint Eastwood here. Well, punk, do you feel lucky? That's how I feel when I look at that chart. I didn't mean to call you a punk. I'm just getting there. All right. And we also are hopefully all familiar with housing and how housing leads the way and that, you know, housing markets are sometimes a key indicator of things and that if housing rolls over, ouch, that can mean a recession is on the way. Not all markets are like this. We've talked about Washington, D.C.'s housing market has absolutely rolled over at this point. But that makes sense.

There's a lot of people losing their jobs in that area right now. But Texas is having difficulty. And now we're seeing Florida. And this is from Nick Gurley again, who I've posted before and quoted before, but this is months of supply on the housing market in Fort Lauderdale, which is over on the East Coast. This is north of Miami, so a pretty key market, and 9.84 months of supply on the market. Wow. Ouch. That's in Broward County generally. So that's a big deal. And that's higher even than

the housing bubble peak way back here that they saw back here. So that's, yeah, this is a pretty big deal. He says it's the highest level since the end of the 2011-12 crash. So pretty big deal, but note the trend there. Now, what do you do if you think that you got money in the markets and you're worried that the markets are stretched a little bit? Well, the answer to that is you consider having a risk-managed portfolio strategy running your portfolio. That's what I'm a big proponent of, a big fan of, and that's what we're recommending at Peak Financial Investing.

And now let's hear from Paul Kiker of Kiker Wealth Management talking about their risk managed portfolio strategy. It's unique. Pretty, it shouldn't be. It should be very common. But unfortunately, it's all but unique in the financial space. Paul, take it away. You've heard the term past performance is not indicative of future results.

And that is so true. And the time of which you start makes all the difference. And those are forces that are so far outside your control. So what we're going to do is show exact same strategy with different starting years. So the program that we use in the retirement planning process uses actual historical returns, which are called rolling period analysis. So the first thing I'm going to start with is somebody that's the age of 70. We're going to assume that they're going to live to the age of 92. And we're going to start with 1926, and we're going to go forward 22 years.

Start with 1927 and go forward 22 years, 1928 and so forth. So we can actually go all the way back to the year 2000 and go forward because we have data up to 2003 with actual historical performance. Now what's fascinating before I get into this, our whole industry uses Monte Carlo analysis with all of the financial planning programs. And it's really fancy, it's really sexy, it's all this mathematics, and it's one way of dealing with an unknown future. But the problem is, is it uses so many calculations that are out there. It dilutes historical reality. And what I have found, just anecdotal, not full evidence, you know, I haven't done the mathematics behind it, but in my experience of comparing plans

to the actual historical rolling period, to the Monte Carlo analysis, it overestimates your probability of success by about 15%. So now that I've laid that kind of background, let's dig into this just a little bit. So the first thing I'm going to do is just quickly take you through the data that we put in there. So in this scenario, I'm assuming that someone needs $100,000 a year of income, and we're going to look at 3.5% inflation for 22 years. So in each scenario, we're going to increase that cost of living by 3.5%. And that's the reality of what I've experienced. I will tell you this, in 26 years of working with retirees, starting in 1998 in this industry, it's not the market declines that, don't get me wrong,

they can wipe you out if you're not prepared for it, but not planning for inflation is the one thing that causes people the most trouble. So if you're 70 today and you need to live on $100,000 in income, by the time you're 92, you're going to need $296,000 in income just to maintain the same standard of living. Okay? By the time you're 80, you're going to need $141,000 a year in income just to buy the same amount of soup and beans. And if you're healthy and you're 80 years old, you're still traveling a lot. I mean, I have people that will tell me, though, but I won't travel as much when I'm 80.

If you're fortunate enough to be healthy, you're going to travel just as much, if not more. Now, also taking into consideration Social Security, I just picked a number, $2,000 a month. But in our retirement analysis, we run a 2. a half percent increase in social security because the unspoken little evil secret is the social security adjustments. And I would say prior to 2020, I would say it was 30% less than the actual cost of living. I would say it's half the actual cost of living now. So I'm undercutting that by 30%. So then I'm taking a portfolio. I just picked $2 million. I can take different portfolios, put in tax rates and fees,

and I'm doing 60% intermediate government bonds and 40% treasury bills. So in that scenario- It's very safe. This person's all on fixed income. Very good. All on fixed income. They're scared. They don't know what to do.

They don't want to pay any fees. They put 100% in there. Now, the average person is going to say, hey, I'm 70. I've got $2 million. I can live on $100,000 a year. I don't need to carry any risk. Let's take a look at that throughout history. So when I look at this, it does the calculations every single time,

so it takes a few minutes to get through there because computing power is cheaper than storage power. So what it comes out with us in this situation is it tells us that if you live to 92 and inflation is three and a half percent, you get a 65 percent probability of success and a 35 percent probability of failure. OK, so I've had people tell me, look, I won't live that long. Okay. I've got clients that didn't think they'd live past the age of 82 that are 93 now. And because I was persistent enough and helping them plan for the future, they've not gotten themselves in trouble. But this is what's really powerful right here. So when we go back, okay, remember, this is a very conservative portfolio. It's all in fixed income. So if we go back historically, this is the actual account balances that this individual would have had in this hypothetical scenario if today was 1981 and they went forward. Well, Chris, what was the common theme of 1981? We had really high interest rates in 1981, didn't we? So that was the best historical period that you could have been in. Yeah, because you could have got 10-year bonds at 14%, but if we're

assuming inflation's 3.5%, your green line goes up. That was awesome. You're exactly right. So perfect scenario, right? This is other periods like 1973. We get down to 1963. That's the actual, so same strategy, different starting year, and a different following economic environment. Okay, so if it's a green line, it means our strategy succeeded. We might have had in that green line a little less leftover to distribute to our heirs in probate, but we made it without running out of money. Okay. Because it's a green line. All right. Yeah. So green line is success. Red line is failure. Okay. So when we get down in here in 1933, okay, after the worst decline of the Great Depression, interest rates were low for a long period of time. You would have actually run out of money at about the age of 90.

So you can see because it's fixed income, this is a slow decline. But the worst period would have been if today was, let's see here, if today was 1941, that same investor would have outlived their funds. Okay. Now for that individual, let's assume that they own their house, you know, cash and paid for, you can use that as a reverse mortgage, you know, but you're still looking at the situation to where you run out of money before you run out of life. So that's one scenario. So that's a safe scenario. Well, let's go look at other scenarios. So if $100,000 a year, $2 million, intermediate term government bonds and treasuries, you've got a 65% probability of success if inflation is 3.5%.

If you go up to a moderate growth portfolio and none of these are risk managed, okay, risk management is an overlay. The reason we don't run risk managed and the historical back test is what if a nuke goes off in Los Angeles, right? Nobody can prepare for that. You know, God forbid, sorry, I had to pick a city. So, or if the new Madrid was to go off in St. Louis, we can't prepare for that. So I still want clients to be able to survive a major decline if it's an event that we can't prepare for. So here's the counterintuitive part, Chris. There's so many people that retire on one side that say, I'm scared of the market. This is a crazy game. I don't want to participate in it. I don't understand what's

taking place. So I'm going to go all into fixed income. They think they're making the right decision. But if inflation continues going forward, they're actually putting themselves at a greater percentage probability of failing than somebody who does a moderate growth portfolio. So let's take a look at this one. We're going to have some more variability. I haven't changed anything in this scenario, except we've gone up to 70% equities in a modern portfolio theory portfolio

and 30% in fixed income. What we want to do is we go take a look at that spaghetti chart. Guess what? A completely different number one year is 1975. The problem that I'm seeing right now, Chris, when I talk with people and when I look at the industry at what I know, I have a lot of really good relationships with advisors that are on the buy and hold, modern portfolio theory, passive side. And I have a lot of conversations with them asking them, so, you know, what are you showing clients and what's the data? All of the data that they're showing clients and all of the information that they're giving is assuming that the next 22 years or 25 years is going to be the same scenario as to what happened in 1975 going forward or 1979 or 1980.

These are all of these starting years. Okay. And then you've got 1976, you've got 1977 and even 1984. So that's a highly unusual period of time throughout history. So remember exact same strategy, different period of time, different economic environment. if this was after the Great Depression in 1932, you know, you're okay. But what if today is 1929? That individual that's 70 years old would have run out of money by the time they were 88. If they were 60 and retired, they would run out of money by the time they were 78. So you can see 1929, 1928, 1927 are the historical periods of time that it was taking somebody out. 1926, 1937, 1931. And look at that. 1999 was successful, but barely. Barely. Yep. So, you know, one of the ways that we deal with it is to go back and show clients, look, based on your situation, the income that you need, the assets that you have, we count rental property income, we count pensions about balancing out that risk and reward. And once we get a resilient plan

in place, then we turn around and implement the investment strategies that will help maximize their probability of success against their unique risks. So if you're an individual that is appropriate to be 100% fixed income, we establish parameters that, okay, if inflation heads at this level, or your portfolio gets down here, we'll have to increase that risk. Now, I like to show this because so many investors are much more aggressive right now. It always happens at the top of the market, because all they can think is, hey, it is different this time. But one common theme, and this is what I saw back in the year 2000, is so many investors had given up on bonds, they'd given up on value stocks, and they didn't want to be in a 70-30 equity portfolio because they felt like this was going to go on forever. They went to 100% equity portfolio. We think that we can get wiped out going back to the Great Depression. But in this scenario that I have highlighted right here,

if an individual was 70, had $2 million, increased it at 3.5% a year inflation, and was 100% equity portfolio, and they retired in the year 2000, they would have run out of money at the age of 90. So if they lived beyond the age of 92, they would have been in trouble. And nobody anticipated that would happen back then. So this isn't just a phenomenon that goes back to the Great Depression, this thing in the past that we think that we'll never see

again. It goes all the way back to the year 2000. So we don't even have to have this massive Great Depression for people to be unsuccessful right now. Because most people don't realize the risk that they're carrying in their portfolios. They're just kind of partying like it's 1999 without the realization that the stock market was getting ready. The S&P 500 was going to go sideways for the next 14 years. Now, Paul. Yes. Three and a half percent.

Let's say I'm a little more bearish than that. Let's imagine that I don't believe the government's three and a half percent. But let's just say my personal experience looking at property taxes, looking at prescription drug prices, looking at my grocery bill. Let's imagine that I actually think, for some weird reason reason that my inflation is twice that. Now what happens? Well, I don't have twice that at 7%, but I was prepared for that. I've got 5.5%. So one of the things we do with clients, I take everybody through 3.5% and 5.5%.

And then some people I take through seven and a half. The problem is, is most people would have to dramatically alter their lifestyle at five and a half, at seven and a half, but five and a half can do a lot of damage. So let's go back and look at this scenario. $100,000 a year at three and a half percent, very conservatively invested had a 65 probability of success versus that same allocation at five and a half now they're at 34 so how many of you would walk outside the building that you're sitting in or the car that you're sitting in if they told you that you've got a 34 chance of survival and a 66 probability of being struck by lightning within the next hour i don't know about you chris but i'd sit in my car for the next hour right

now where you were at 95 before and a moderate growth portfolio at three and a half percent inflation now you're at a 79 probability of success. So you are more successful in a more aggressive portfolio at 3.5% and 5.5% inflation, but you still have to consider that situation and build in some extra alternatives. So what would I do? And if you're at 100% equity portfolio, you're at 74. So five and a half percent inflation can be absolutely devastating for those who haven't planned for it and haven't prepared for it. So what I try to do when I'm working with clients, go ahead. No, I'm sorry. I just want to see some of those spaghetti charts here. Maybe for the 34%. I mean, is that, are we crashing and burning 10 years into

our program or is it like, like what's happening? Oh yeah. Let me go back. I hit the moderate growth. So I'm going to have to go back just as soon as this is done here. Well, we can look at that one. That's fine. So I'm here. Yeah. 34%. So the interesting thing is, is this is representative interest rates through actual interest rates throughout history for 60% of those funds being in intermediate-term government bonds and 40% being in short-term government bonds. So with the interest rates that were paid earned, and let's assume that the government continues to have a heavy hand over interest rates, in 1946, a 70-year-old would have used up all of their assets by the age of 87.

And there's not much variability because it's a slow decline. Well, Chris, here's the same thing that I saw. I mean, I've had people come in in 2014 and 2015 who bought 7% CDs in the year 2000, and they were giddy that they missed the market decline. And then by the time the year 2014, 15 came, they'd had 0% interest rates for four or five years, but their cost of living had doubled over that period of time. And then they had to make massive revisions and most of them had to have make massive lifestyle changes, sell the home that they did, that they did hope that they would never have to sell and downsize at the age of 80 because they were healthy and might live another 12 to 15 years. So, yeah, you can look at that and see if it was the year 2002

and you were conservatively invested because that's 2002 right there, and the reason that you would have failed is because interest rates hit zero for such a long period of time and you had to increase your income, you're either going to have to use those assets up to maintain your standard of living or you're going to have to completely sacrifice your standard of living to preserve those assets. Because of poor planning, there's going to be pain to pay at some point in the future for the individual who took this path in the year 2002. That make sense so far? It sure does. Yep. Okay,

so let's now let's go look at that moderate growth. You can stop me, Chris, if I'm beating this beating this to death. I love this data. Because I'm telling you, the clients that I take through and I do this with, they have a peace of mind and they consistently tell me that they have a peace of mind. Not that they still don't worry about all the things, but they know that they've done everything that they can prudently do to put themselves in a position of success. So if we're at a five and a half percent inflation with moderate growth, look at this. If the valuations that we have today and you don't have a strategy that can reduce your risk, okay? So if you're passive, you're a long-term buying holder. You're never going to sell. You're not going to make that mistake, okay? If you have convinced yourself of that and you're ignoring what's happened when periods of time throughout history that the

markets have been this expensive, then right here's exactly what happened in 1929. Okay. I'm a, I'm a long-term investor. I'm going to buy and hold. Now you're down 70, 80% in overall markets. And then by 1934, the market bounces a little bit. Then you have this big decline from 1937 and the 1942. And, and then your portfolio is done and you're out of money by the age of 84 14 years into your retirement so what if you're what if you're 60 what if you've done great hey i've been a great investor and and and i'm aggressive and i can handle this volatility and i'm going to retire at 60 and you're drawing five percent off of that portfolio and you have to increase for inflation and it's not completely different

this time, what are you going to do if you're 74 and you run out of money because you weren't aware of what would have happened historically for that lack of knowledge? And not only that, you're talking right there's the year 2000, Chris. So if you were an investor that retired at five and a half percent inflation in the year 2000, you you're 60 you're out of money at 78 guess what i didn't have any clients that experienced that by god's grace but i've talked to a lot of people that have come in and said hey you know is there some miracle that you can work no there's not you gotta sell your house and downsize or do a reverse mortgage or dramatically cut your standard of living you can't take those trips you wanted to take anymore. And it's miserable. It's heartbreaking for me because

I saw people that still had the health to be able to go do these things, but because they didn't understand history and they were convinced in the midst of that 2000 euphoria that it was different this time and they've suffered the consequences but those people get pushed to the back and you know that's not somebody that CNBC brings on there because it doesn't sell stocks it doesn't sell mutual funds it doesn't sell you don't hear about those people and they and they're certainly not still at the country club telling you about what happens because they can't afford to be at the country club anymore. So anyway, I hate to get on my soapbox, but right there is 2002. Right there is 1963.

Well, let's put 2000 on there. Can you find 2000 for me? Right there is 2000. Can you see that, Chris? That one, 2000, yeah. So all the charts we just reviewed prior to this section, right, where you said it's not just expensive, but these are the most expensive ever. Our closest historical analog is going to be that red line right there.

Yeah. We're basically starting at that red line, only maybe even more expensive right now. Correct. But everybody's expecting, because they're advisors on the passive buy and hold side who don't study history and understand it are saying, hey, this is like 1975. You know how that would perform historically given current valuation levels. What are my odds? They should be able to answer that question. It's a very obvious question, right? It is. It's a very obvious question. And unfortunately, it's something that our industry just doesn't do and look i understand that monte carlo analysis utilizes that but jeff the uh manry the creator of this program and and i and i tell him i talk to him all the time i'm like what you have done and the program that you have created i pray that i leave a legacy that's

that impactful in people's lives because the tool that he created, you know, going back to 1991, because he had seen so many problems of people coming out of the 70s. And even though the 80s were great, people were having trouble. So he was a student of the markets. You know, he explained how Monte Carlo even puts in some dampening of the volatility in there. And look, I can't tell you how many people have come in and I sit down with them and I'm like, look, you have an 80% probability of success if you retire today.

And I don't feel comfortable doing that considering the markets are high. If this was 2009, I'd feel a little bit more comfortable because we've already got that overvaluation behind us or maybe yeah, 2000, 2002, 2009. And they're like, well, I went to so-and-so, and they're telling me I've got a 95 or 100% probability of success. And I go look at it, and it's a Monte Carlo analysis simulation. And look, I understand we have an unknown future. But if I have Monte Carlo simulation versus a historical rolling period analysis, I'm going to choose the historical rolling period analysis. And I can't remember the name of the individual. There's a famous mathematician. I can't think of his name right now. I had a Canada that there's done a lot

of studies on this, that I've got a couple of books unveiling the retirement myth and a few others that that are powerful that point this out you know and do you really want somebody giving you all kinds of sunshine and rainbows for your retirement you want to have the reality of your situation and make those adaptations now and I can't tell you how many times there's two things that people don't know when I send them the questionnaire 90% of people send back I people don't know. When I send them the questionnaire, 90% of people send back, I really don't know how much I need to be able to live the lifestyle I want in retirement. Because what our industry does, it says, go accumulate $2 million. You can draw four or 5% off of that and you're going to be fine. Okay. Well, that's great on the data they're going back to the 1975. But if you look at the rest of the story, I used to love Paul Harvey when I was younger.

I love listening. And here's the rest of the story. Maybe that's what's wrong with me today, but that's it. But it helps me help clients. Let's put it that way. But the rest of the story is you have to assume perfection. So, you know, I get to meet with clients and I'll say, okay, here's where you are. And then they spend some time thinking about it. And once they understand how important that number is that they need to live on, they come back to me, well, I actually need a little bit more. Because what you don't want to do is get into retirement, think you can live on $100,000 a year and you're actually spending $150,000.

So once we have that plan in place, the investment side is easy. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's stressful, but especially in an environment like this, but those tools is pretty clear when it says you need to sell as a fiduciary, we sell on lower risk parking treasuries, you know, 2022, you know, it had us reduce risk. I looked Chris to buy TLT in 2022 and I said, no, TLT doesn't look good. So we parked in in money market, and we took a lot in treasury money market, and I took a lot of heat over that from some clients. But I just explained to them, I said, look, this is what it's telling us. Let's just wait and see how this unfolds. Give me three more months. Give me four more months. When I don't know what to do, we're going to park it in something safe. In hindsight,

that was a good decision. And only with the benefit of hindsight do we know. The thing about doing this plan to help people prepare is we can use the benefit of hindsight and estimate to the future so we can say, okay, what type of environment is it historically that would have wiped you out and caused you to be unsuccessful? And Chris, we just showed the exact same type of environment we're in right now is the one that would have caused people to be unsuccessful historically. So you have to assume that it's completely different this time. And if somebody chooses to ignore it, I mean, I've had clients that have had a 50% probability of success and I'm like, I would not retire if I was you. And they're like, Hey, I'm good with a coin toss.

Okay, well, now we know, I know what I got to deal with. And here's how we're going to, you know, help you walk the path that you're comfortable walking on. All right, welcome back from that. Thank you, Paul, for that. For anybody who's interested in talking with Paul and his amazing team, please go to peakfinancialinvesting.com. There's a very simple form to fill out. Somebody from Paul and his team and or his team will call you back within 48 business hours to set up an appointment. By the way, they are booking out pretty far right now because a lot of people interested in making sure their portfolio is managed and managed really well by a true independent professional.

With that, thank you very much for listening, everybody. Please, again, come by peakfinancialinvesting.com if you want to find out more about Paul and his amazing services. As well, we have other financial offerings there around gold. I would remind you, GoldCore is our preferred partner for offshore storage and purchasing of gold and silver. And as well, if you are a self-employed business person, having what's called an EQRP gives you complete checkbook control over your 401k holdings. So I have one of those checkbook 401ks. I'm self-directed. It's a wonderful thing. I can buy all kinds of things I care about in it,

such as hard assets, rather than just the usual long-only or longer-only stock and bond portfolios that a lot of 401k plans seem to offer. So with that, come by peakfinancialinvesting.com, find out about gold, Paul's services, retirement plans. We have everything you might need there to weather the surface, take control of your financial future. And we'd like to trust and verify as much as possible that what we hold, we actually hold. So with that, thank you very much for listening. Let's hope the gold audit comes off without a hitch and it's all there. But if not, we've got fireworks on the way. Bye for now.