Peak Prosperity - The Great Gold Grab – Big Money Is on the Move

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

This discussion with David Russell, CEO of GoldCore, covers gold and silver market dynamics, gold flows, potential gold-backed Treasury bonds, central bank gold reserves, and implications for retail investors and monetary policy.Click Here for Information on GoldCore

Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only. Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full. Every box is ticked here in terms of issues and fragility. This is not a time to have everything that you own in that credit system because you are vulnerable. Absolutely vulnerable. 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. Welcome to this edition of Finance U. We have to talk gold and silver. Those are two separate words today with us, David Russell, a CEO of GoldCore. David, good to have you back on the program. I can't wait to find out what is going on. It's great to be back Chris if that's the Chinese proverb may you live in interesting times. We're living in interesting times that is for sure. We sure are so let's get right to it. I know that Goldcore I mean you have a seat at the LBMA table we've been hearing all the news all the rumors apparently trolleys of gold are heavy and difficult to move. What has been going on from your perspective? What can you tell us?

Yeah, we are. We are members of the we are members of the LVM. So we do attend their events and obviously we do talk to people as well. There is a lot going on in the gold market at this moment in time. And the difficult thing is nobody really knows exactly what it is. You're going to hear a hundred different opinions from a hundred different people. And sometimes what I like to do is try and join the dots. But the only problem with trying to join the dots is that sometimes you might get a square, but sometimes you might actually get a totally wrong and get a giraffe. So you just don't know. But here's what's here. The different things that we are seeing. We're seeing massive flows of gold into the States.

Okay. We are seeing particularly into the COMEX and you're seeing that in the reports coming out of the COMEX. You're seeing the eligible bars. The levels of that are going through the roof. You're seeing the registered bars. The levels of those are going through the roof. You're seeing the registered bars, the levels of those are going through the roof as well. Now, we can talk a little bit more about what they actually mean and what the difference of those things are in a minute, but let's just start to join the dots. What else have

we got? We've got the US administration, you've got Scott Besson standing there beside Trump saying that they're going to look to monetize the balance sheet. One of the things that's on that balance sheet and the easiest thing for them to monetize is gold. There's 8,000 odd tons, not all of it in Fort Knox, again, that's something we want to just have a look at and see exactly what it is that we're talking about there and understand exactly what form that is. But there is in total 8,100 odd tons of gold owned by the US that they're looking to effectively monetize if you join the dots there. What does that mean? Well, they're on the balance sheet at this moment in time. They're revalued at $42 odd, and they're held in an account, strangely enough, called the Revaluation Account. So they are actually on the account of $42. Now that would be like revaluing your

house or holding the value of your house on your personal balance sheet at $10,000 when it's worth phenomenally more than that. Okay. So there is there's questions asked around that. There's another dot to join there. We are getting requests to audit Fort Knox. And as I said, it's not just Fort Knox. It's Fort Knox. It's the Denver Mint. It's West Point. And it's also the New York Fed, which is where all of these are held. So by 56% of it's held in Fort Knox. I think it's about 20% then in West Point, yeah, 20%, but 70% is in the Denver Mint, and then the rest is in the Fed in New York.

So this calls there to audit that. And again, we'll talk about what we actually need rather than an audit, is what we need as an inspection. Another doc to join, right, is you've got Judy Shelton, and she has talked about the US Treasury issuing gold-backed Treasury bonds. Now, Judy Shelton, as you well know, would have been Trump's Now, Judy Shelton, as you well know, would have been Trump's nominee for the Federal Reserve. And it was 2019, I think she would have been nominated. And then in 2020, the nomination failed. But she's still talking about this idea. Trump is back in the White House now. We know that he is not necessarily best pals with the current Fed governor. So we've got Judy Shelton still talking about her gold back bonds. On top of that, we also, what

else have we got? There's a really interesting thing. And I think a lot of people have actually kind of forgotten this. And it talks to this whole problem around auditing Fort Knox. First of all, what we have there is you've got your 4,000 odd tons of gold in Fort Knox and we've got these calls for auditing. What we really need to see there is an inspection. First of all, is the gold all there? That's the big question. There is probably, potentially the gold is all there. Okay. But is it unencumbered? Has it been leased out? What is the quality of the gold that's there? Most of the gold that is there is in 100 ounce bar format, 90% pure, because there would have been coin bars. There would have been bars made out of the coins that were melted down post-confiscation. So what you need to do is go in there, inspect the bars,

so it's not just literally counting the bars. You want to actually understand what the quality of the gold that is actually there, the purity of the gold that is there. Now you also want to understand if there are any encumbrances on that. And here's the thing that I think a lot of people have forgotten is back in 1997, Alan Greenspan said, the Federal Reserve stands ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price of gold rise. That was in 1997. The price of gold in 1997 was a lot lower than it is now. So what has happened in the intervening years? The price of gold rose. So what would have happened? They would have leased gold in increasing quantities in order to keep the price of gold under control. Just to set one more piece of context here,

a dot that I wanna add to this for sure, is so I talked to my friends in the gold space, this is not retail driven. Everything we're talking about is being driven by some monster that has to be the US government. And this is really big. Who else can get Europe to cough up 400 to 2000 tons of gold, depending on who you believe? Yeah, it has to be either.

It's either one big player or it's a number of large players. But they're big. But they are big. They are big. There is something. There is something behind this. Now, what they've done is it can be quite clever because there's an arbitrage opportunity as the COMEX contracts are trading a lot higher than the over-the-counter LBMA gold. Okay, so there's gold sitting in the LBMA vaults in London and there is a contract that is trading in the States and there's a significant difference between those at certain stages of the last couple of months. I've been $30, $40, $50, no difference. There's a massive arbitrage

opportunity that exists where you take gold then from London, put it on a ship or an airplane, give it over to the states and register it for delivery against those contracts, and you can sell it effectively much higher than you bought it. That's the arbitrage opportunity. So rather than it just being a case, this is what I've been thinking about for the last one, rather than just being a case of there being a demand to get all that gold into the US, there's actually been a push as well because all bullion banks and large holders of gold have seen, right?

Well, if I actually just move my gold from London to the U S I've got an arbitrage opportunity. So you say, right? Well, is that arbitrage opportunity just something that happens during the market from time to time? Because it does. Or is there something else that has created that arbitrage opportunity? And as a result, the whole we've seen thousands of tons of gold now naturally flow over to the COMEX. Well I have to think it's so I have two questions. First I have to think it's something other than just

arbitrage because of this which shows the amount that's coming from Switzerland. So these are Swiss kilo bars mostly. Just this massive spike. There wouldn't really be any spot cost difference between COMEX and Switzerland, would there? That wouldn't explain this, would it? No, but what does explain this is the over-the-counter trade in London, the LBMA over-the-counter trade is in 400-ounce good delivery bars. Okay. What you need to have to deliver against a COMEX contract is it historically would have been 100 ounce bars only, but it's actually kilo bars. So you've got 400 ounce bars sitting in the

vaults in London, and you have to convert them effectively into kilo bars in the US. So what happens is they flow into Switzerland, into the refineries, get refined into kilo bars, and then go over to the States. So that's why you're seeing this massive inflow from Switzerland. It's just, that's part of the kind of the effect of logistics of this operation happening. It goes from being converted from a 400 ounce bar here, Switzerland refined, and then moved over to the States. So it can then be delivered against that contract. Okay. And question, how much per ounce would it cost?

I mean, so I listen, there's a difference between the LBMA price and a COMEX futures price. Okay. But still you have to put it on a trolley, get it onto a ship or a plane, provide security, move it, offload it, put it back in, register it. There must be a cost to that. Do you have a sense of what that cost is? I wouldn't have the details on that, but all that I can say is if there's enough of an

arbitrage opportunity available for people to take advantage of it, incur those costs and still able to profit on the trade. But it must be a number of dollars per ounce though, right? It would be a number. It would boil it down to a number of dollars per ounce, absolutely. It has to take into account, you know, the transportation costs. It's got to take into account all of the stocking in, stocking out costs from the various different vaults, the registration costs that are incurred.

But then the biggest part of that is actually going to be the re refining. So melting the bars down and converting them and casting them into kilo bars. All right. So, but the second thing, the other thing you mentioned is, okay, we need to at least take stock of what's at Fort Knox, right? And they mentioned, oh, they have 40,000 bars there. David, is it possible in this day and age to keep track of 40,000 uniquely identified serial numbered things?

Or is that quite beyond us? Can't we just write all these numbers down once and call that the bars? You would hope that, yes, that the records are sound and that there is an audit trail with all of these things because if there isn't, it's the same basis upon which all of our banking system effectively operates. You want you need to have trust in that system. If there isn't trust in that system, that's a bigger problem. And some people might look at that and not understand it, not trust it. Who, who, who am I to challenge that? But the real issue then is, yeah, you can go in there and you can see all the bars. It doesn't really tell you everything that you need to know.

You need to know that they are effectively unencumbered. Have they been rehypothecated? Have they been lent out? Why would they be lent out? Well, if they're trying to historically suppress the gold price, effectively what would happen is those bars would be leased out to, and this happens not just bars and fork knocks, but any kind of deliverable good delivery bar in those circumstances, they'd be leased out to a bullion bank and the bullion bank would sell those into the market in order to keep the price under control.

So once that happens, this is when you have bars on the balance sheet of one company and then they're leased out to another company and then they're sold into the markets and now they exist in two places. So now you've got multiple claims on those bars and they take that takes time effectively to unravel. So you really want to understand whether they have been re-hypothecated, whether they are totally unencumbered. So yeah, so just going in, walking in, counting the bars isn't going to be enough.

Yeah. And on that point, because you mentioned Alan Greenspan said something, I want to be very clear about what he actually said here because this is instructive he didn't say central banks stand ready to sell gold he said ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise so this is a price control mechanism he wanted to talk about was yeah we got gold we can lease it but take us through that when he says that what does that what's that mean lease it to well it would be least it would who? Well, it would basically be leased to the bullion banks.

So the large bullion banks, let's take JP Morgan, for example, the bullion would be leased to them, and then they would sell it into the market. So it's not the central banks selling the gold. It's the central banks leasing the gold. And then JP Morgan borrows that gold. And they're able to, and then JP Morgan, um, bar, borrows that gold, sells it into the market, hedges that exposure, uh, using futures, sells that into the market, uh, to stop the price from rising.

Hello everyone. I just wanted to take a quick break to tell you about peak financial investing. Look, my whole goal in life is to help you be prepared, to help you be resilient, to have you have the freedom you need in order to live your life in the way you wanna live it. And top of that list is financial freedom. Making sure that the money you have saved accumulates appropriately and isn't lost

to some random process of market downturn or something like that. Peak Financial Investing is a place where we will connect you with our endorsed financial advisors who understand the world the way we do. You deserve to talk to somebody who is not going to look at you like a dog listening to white noise when you say, hey, should I invest in gold? Hey, you know, is the dollar going to be okay? Hey, are there any big risks here?

Are there any bubbles we need to be aware of at this time? Great questions. So, when you ask those, you deserve to speak with somebody who's got good answers, thoughtful answers, and knows, most importantly, how they're going to respond nimbly as the world around them changes. Now, this is one of the periods of the most extraordinary changes we're going to see in market structure.

China's coming up and rising. Geopolitical tensions are afoot. We have all sorts of realignments happening. The federal government is deficit spending like nobody's business. You know the Federal Reserve wants to get back to printing like crazy. We understand that gold is popping to all time new highs.

The story has changed. Your investment philosophy needs to be nimble and responsive to that. So at Peak Financial Investing, we'll connect you with people who see the world that way, who understand how to run what's called a risk-managed portfolio to account for all the changes that are coming. Because if the Hippocratic oath is first, do no harm, our oath is first, take no punishing irrecoverable losses.

It's time to manage risk. It's time to understand how the world has changed, and it's time to make sure your portfolio of savings and wealth are there for you and can meet your needs all the way through your retirement. Now, back to our program. I'm sure you saw this, but I posted this, I've been, a couple of years I've been on this, and I think now's the time we can talk about this finally,

which was the WikiLeaks. They showed this December 10th, 1974, cable between London and New York or the U.S. Treasury Department. And it's an interesting cable because it was December 31st, 1974, that gold became legal to own again in the United States for citizens. So they were a little worried, what would the impact of prices be? There's a lot of stuff that's fascinating to talk about in there. But what was interesting was they said, well, you know, we're worried about keeping the

price of gold contained, but dealers' expectations, which is these bullion banks we're talking about, they think there's going to be the formation of a sizable gold futures market. And so they said they believe that the futures market would be significant in proportion compared to physical trading, which would be minuscule by comparison. And also express the expectation that large volume futures dealing would create a highly volatile market and in turn volatile price movements would diminish demand for physical gold holding, most likely negate long-term hoarding, not investing, hoarding, you can see their frame

of mind here, by US citizens. So they said, wow, we'll just fire up these paper-based futures markets, we'll create volatility, we'll control expectations and we'll basically crush people's desire to hold gold. How have they, did they do that and have they been successful, do you think? There's absolutely no doubt that the futures exchange has the ability to – not that the exchanges have the ability, but the users of those futures exchanges have the ability to influence the price.

Absolutely. Now, there's a lot of people when they look at that, and they look at the various different exchanges and say there's massive amounts of paper, there's 400 ounces of paper ounces for every one ounce. That's not entirely accurate. I mean, the futures exchange for gold operates and provides the same service as the futures exchange for the commodities. It provides liquidity. And if we took it back to something really simple, like wheat, and farmers being able to guarantee a price for their wheat so that they can understand what their cash flows are going to be for the next year so that they can manage that exposure. If you don't have a futures market, you are going to be at the whim of whatever the price is when you have actually harvested your wheat in the fall. And depending upon what happens

from a weather point of view, from a soil point of view, from whatever point of view, there could be massive volatility in that. But a futures contract, when they were created, allowed farmers in that instance to be able to guarantee a price for their fall wheat in the spring. And that allowed them to plan and plan for the next harvest and the one after that and so on and so forth. Now, if the only people that were on the other side of that, if there was only the amount of contracts in existence for the amount of physical wheat that there was going to be, there wouldn't be very much liquidity in that market. So it gets opened up effectively to speculators, people who think that the price of wheat is going to rise or we're going to fall over the next couple of months, dependent upon crop reports, weather reports, whatever

it is. And because there is more players in that market, it brings more liquidity. And it means that for smaller markets, that they're less likely to be manipulated. Because if you didn't have that, you'd have all the buyers on one side, you know, when they're buying, you have all the sellers on one side, and you know when they're buying, you have all the sellers on one side and you know when they're selling and they're going to be settling for the physical wheat at a point in time. There's massive manipulation available in that. So more contracts existing than there is actually physical commodity to back that adds liquidity

to the market. The problem then becomes when that becomes exponentially larger. But let's just put it this way. Like a contract, the COMEX contract for gold, it's a 100-ounce contract, and it's going to settle on a particular day. You've got this thing called open interest. An open interest is a total of all of the contracts that exist in that market. Now, if we didn't have that and you and I wanted to have a bet on what the price of gold is going to do over the next three months or six months, we'd have an agreement between us and we'd say, I think it's going up. And you say, well,

I think it's going down. We say, right, well, okay, let's make a bet. And we'd say, for every dollar that it goes up, I'll pay you, you know, for every dollar that goes up, you're going to pay me X. And for every dollar it goes down, I'm going to pay you, you know, I'll pay you X. And we'll settle that on a particular date in the future. And say, okay, well, we've effectively established a contract. We've effectively established a futures contract. But the reality is, I don't know whether you're going to turn up on that future date if you

owe me money or not. So I'm worried about, so let me talk about the potential for manipulation. I understand that it could do good. We're producers and consumers and so we want to hedge and you want to know what the price of wheat is going to be in the future. So do I, because I bake it and you grow it. Okay, fine. So we could agree on that.

But we allow these other speculators to come in, and then they provide additional liquidity. Now, when they become more of the signal than the noise, which is the producer consumer interaction, 99% of all trades are just settled between guys like you and me. We don't touch it. We don't grow it. We don't consume it. Well, then that could become an issue. And isn't it so this has to be highly regulated, because I could I could imagine in my head david something where you and i were too nefarious bullion banks and we decide we like the price of silver to go down

tonight at two thirty in the morning i could sell you a whole bunch of contracts it's something fifty cents below spot and you buy them that begins to set the reference price but now i'm kind of exposed to you sell me an offsetting amount of contracts also below another 50 cents lower, and you and I just start swapping contracts back and forth and they net out to basically nothing but what's happened is we've just driven the price. It's possible for shenanigans to exist in an unregulated space. It's entirely possible for shenanigans to exist in unregulated space. That is correct. The thing that resolves this is when

people actually want to take physical delivery. Because when people want to take physical delivery, those that are short those contracts don't want to be in a situation where they're actually scrambling. Because remember, we've gone from having a contract where we're posting a little bit of margin to now if I'm forced to, I don't want to stand for delivery. So I'm going to liquidate that contract close to the expiry date because I don't want to go from posting a bit of margin to manage my contract to actually have to go and pay for an entire gold bar. So there's a bit of manners put on this whole thing by the settling of physical and those that are standing for delivery. And there's a bit of manners put on this whole thing by the settling of physical and those that are standing for delivery. And that's the challenge, which is that historically,

and you can see in the in the graph, historically, you don't have that many people standing for delivery. But now when you see more and more and more people stand for delivery, that's when the market starts to get very tight. That's when the market starts to get very tight. That's when the bullion banks who potentially have been looking to manipulate the price one way or the other start to go, hang on a second, this market is getting tight. More and more people are standing for delivery. And what you'll see is that the open interest towards the end of that contract starts to fall and come in. But that's the leveler. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing more people now potentially standing for delivery. So the big question is, why is that?

There are people that are saying, I'm going to take delivery because it's an easier way than themselves having to get gold shipped in from abroad if you're taking a very, very large quantity of it. Stanford delivery for a COMEX contract. Now this all becomes a little bit more complicated because you ask, well, what actually happens when you stand for delivery? It doesn't necessarily mean you automatically get your gold bar. It means you get basically a warehouse receipt.

And there have been some experiments done by people in the bullion market who said, well, I'll actually stand for delivery and take this. And it can't take months for you actually to get that physical bar, which some people look at and say, oh, that's time to mind to effectively time to mind to default. Yeah, it's a default. Right. I remember Eric Sprott in 2014, took nine months and they gave him every run around in the book and they said it's coming soon, the check is in the mail, it's on a boat, like nothing. He just couldn't get it. And that was for silver, you know, which ostensibly they have X hundred million ounces and you

know, just parked in dusty shelves. They just couldn't get it to him. Yeah. I mean, so that's the situation that we're finding ourselves in. There are more people that are looking. There are more contracts being registered. There are more people looking to take delivery off the COMEX. And that's why we're seeing this kind of this.

That's why we're seeing this this this squeeze on the physical. Yeah. So what is your sense from the LBMA perch? Is there a physical shortage? Are people starting to get nervous? Are there any signs that that maybe there's some encumbrances that are too difficult to work out? What's going on? Do you think? Well, in terms of in terms of the conversations, they're not necessarily conversations that

would be would be shared by shared with with us as such. But the last communication that I saw from the LBMA was that in terms of the gold that's sitting in London, that there's still very strong, robust stocks of gold there. A lot of it's sitting in the Bank of England, and they aren't necessarily set up in the same way that a commercial vault would be, because effectively what they're doing is they're holding gold there long term for central banks and some of the larger players. So they're not necessarily set up for the same type of delivery mechanism that would happen in more of a commercial vault. So they're saying there's technical delays. So you've got a combination of technical delays of getting the gold out. You've got some timing delays in terms of getting it from London to Switzerland and Switzerland to the US.

But they're saying that ultimately that, yeah, it's robust, it's strong. You have to try and figure out what they mean by that. Yeah. So, I don't know if you saw, but this was a lot of fun. So it was just last year in Australia, Senator Renick was grilling the RBA, the Royal Bank of Australia, those two jimokes there on the lower right. So anyway, he's asking, he's like, Hey, where's our gold? They had 80 tons of gold and they, they're like getting all hot under the collar and they're like, you know, it's coming. It's there. It's ours.

Don't worry. It's ours. He's like, well, then why did they recast the bars in 2015? Why do we have all new bar numbers? And they're like, oh, well, you know, it's because. And so if you once you pierce through all of their hemming and hawing, David, and you get past, you get past this idea. Senator RENIQUE.

Well, can I, I just want to table those serial numbers as well. He's trying for serial numbers. But could I get on notice, because I'm pretty sure you won't know if you chop your head, how much the RBA and the Government of Australia pays the Bank of England to store the gold in England. And the reason why I ask that is, as you you know we've just been on a public works committee where we've been down in the basement of the RBA building and there's obviously vaults and things down there. Would it be possible if we brought our gold back to Australia and stored the gold in the vault at the bottom of the RBA building that would be a way to

pay for the cost of the asbestos so that's going to cost about a billion dollars. Wouldn't it be a way to help pay for that refurbishing the RBA building? Well we can take that on notice. Well we can take that on notice. I guess what you'd be doing though is spending a lot of money securely bringing all that gold back. So that's 80 tonnes of gold under security plus all the freight. And the other thing you'd be... So what about the security? freight and the other thing you'd be potentially yeah yeah it would take some time you'd have to find someone to buy it from the other thing you'd be doing is you'd be giving up the option

to lend out that gold and we might as you've said in the past though that gold doesn't move it's just a it's lent out to people who pay us interest for those loans while... That's right, but you can still do that if the gold's here. That's all electronic. No, they don't want it here in Sydney. They want it in London. Yeah, that's what worries me. And as you'll see when I've tabled these figures is that the serial numbers have all been refined from 2015 or 14 onwards.

So and that's part of the reason. But I don't want to dwell on it. So what was fascinating there, David, is the RBA told him, oh no, we have our gold. It just sits in London. And he's like, so it's all there. And they're like, yeah, it's all there. And then they explained, oh no, but it has to be in London so we can lease it out. And then it all got leased out.

And then when they did get their gold back, it had different serial numbers. And they came up with this excuse that said, oh, well, it's kind of like gold gets musty or something like, well, you have to re-refine it from time to time, right? Never mind that gold sits on the bottom of the ocean after the Atocha sinks, and it comes up good as the day it sank. So it was just, why is there this much seeming obfuscation, if not, dare I say, lying about gold? Why is gold such a mysterious substance? Yeah, well, it's, I think you've got to make a distinction between gold being a mysterious

substance, because it's not. And how gold is managed by central banks, bullion banks, and so on. You know, the comment of, I bring it back to that comment by Alan Greenspan where central banks stand ready to lease gold into the market should the price rise. Ultimately, that is leasing gold to somebody else in order to sell that gold. And when the person sells that gold, it gets delivered somewhere. So I think what you're seeing in that clip there is somebody who fundamentally doesn't understand exactly the logistics of what happens in the market. So if you get gold bars back, and they are not the gold bars with your gold bar numbers

on them, they're not the original gold bars. And why would you not get your original gold bars back? Because they're no longer there. If they're leased into a bullion bank and the bullion bank sells them into the market, and they deliver that to somebody, they are ostensibly that person who bought it, their gold bars to do what they want with at that stage. So that could have gone into, I don't know, jewelry manufacturing, electronics, whatever it is. They'd be melted down and used.

Now, there would be a responsibility on the bullion bank's part, their legal obligation is at the end of that lease to return the equivalent amount of gold. And that's why we have the concept of London Good Delivery Bars, because they say, well, what is it that we're leasing? Well, we're leasing London Good Delivery Bars that have these specifications. And what will be returned to me? Well, London good delivery bars with the same specifications and the same ounce weight. And do I really matter

if I'm looking at 400 ounce gold bars? There's no numismatic value to these. There's no aesthetic value to them. They are just guaranteed. The purity is guaranteed. So most industrial commercial buyers of gold bars don't care as long as they have the equivalent amount of ounces and the equivalent amount of purity that's returned back to them. So you're seeing in that instance is somebody fundamentally not understanding what happened in that instance, which is gold bars were leased into the market. They were sold on by a bullion bank to somebody who used them, melt them down. And then they would have rolled that lease over continuously until a point where for whatever reason they decided they were no longer going to continue that lease, at which stage they would have to return the equivalent

amount of gold bars to the original owner. The equivalent amount, not the same, because otherwise to the original owner, the equivalent amount, not the same, because otherwise for a lot that gold is used in industry and it can only be used in industry when the form is changed. So that's what happened. The form changed and they had to, they were contractually legally obliged to return the equivalent amount of the same weight and the same purity. And as I said, that's why we have these specifications and standardizations, the idea of good delivery. That's what it is, because it's an agreed format that we will be able to exchange. Well, now, I get that. And that all makes perfect sense. I think the concern that Renwick

was getting to eventually was, let's say I'm Australia, I've leased my gold, you've taken it. And then you've put it somewhere somewhere and maybe it got leased again because it was sitting in your possession. Now you decided to lease it and then somebody else decided to lease it and this is all very easy if we just said this serial number on this bar belongs to the RBA and I've leased it to you. If we find that it's been released ten times and there's nine other subsequent owners who think they they have rights to it It doesn't couldn't that could that not create some difficulties?

Not necessary because in the situation where you're leasing you are literally you're you're leasing it right? The ownership is not the ownership the underlying ownership. You're not buying it The underlying ownership is not changing you have to you are your counterparty is contractually and legally obliged to return that to you. So if I lease, if I lease a car, I don't own that car. But if you sold it to me after leasing it. If I leased, if I leased it from somebody else and I sold it to you, that's now yours. Yes. Yes. And then so I own it. Now I lease it. Right.

Yeah. And then somebody else buys it and then they lease it. Right I lease it right yeah, and then somebody else buys it And then they lease it right have we not all do we not all own the same car? Event potentially This is why I think there's so much smoke in this area because this would be so simple to actually Lock down. It's the simplest of things. Physical possession is actually very easy to track. Yes, but you lose the utility then. So if a central bank leases gold to a bullion bank

and that bullion bank sells that gold into the market, it's selling it to somebody who wants to use it for a particular reason. They want to take it out and change its format. It's a very basic thing. They want to turn it into gold chains, gold jewelry. So the format has been changed. Well, it's all fine unless in the chain of custody, this is potentially fractional reserve selling, right? Totally. Yeah. So, that would be the only issue, is if 10 people think they own the same thing.

Yeah, absolutely. So, the guy who's bought the gold to turn it into jewelry thinks he owns it. It's on his balance sheet as an asset. The central bank who had it originally, it's on his balance sheet as an asset. The central bank who had it originally, it's on their balance sheet as an asset. But it's not the same bars anymore. They'll have registered that we have these bars, but they've leased them out. They've been sold into the market. They've been turned into jewelry. Now what happens is the bullion bank at the end of that lease, when it is no longer rolled over, is obliged to return the same format and purity of gold to the central bank.

Which is all well and good, as long as they can get their hands on some gold. Exactly. Exactly. And this is when we're kind of joining the dots, this is what we're talking about. So you've got Greenspan in 97 or 98 saying, we are going to lease gold when we're kind of joining the dots, this is what we're talking about. So you've got Greenspan in 97 or 98 saying we are going to lease gold, or stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities. So if the price rises, the price rose. So obviously they were leasing gold in increasing quantities. So that gold is out there and those leases in a lot of instances will have rolled over. Now they're saying we want to go back. Right. Now a lot of that gold will have been sold into the market format changed. Now the bullion bank is going, where are we going to get it from? Now they're under pressure. And that's why we're seeing this movement to go back and this appetite for physical gold.

Now, that's what joined the dots again, when you have all of this talk about auditing fork knocks, inspecting that. Right. What's the first thing that you're going to want to do? We want all our gold back now, guys. And now you've got to panic. Bullion banks panicking because they can no longer control this by the futures market. They need the physical. This is the thing. This is the straw effectively that breaks the camel's back when it comes to the futures market. So what they're going to do, stand for delivery. That's one way of getting it. Bring gold in from London. So now they have a legal and contractual obligation to return gold that has been leased. So option one, a few decades since August 15, 1971, there's been some leasing and maybe

not everything's there. So a little bit of a panic. Let's undo a few decades of of leasing and maybe not everything's there. So a little bit of a panic, let's undo a few decades of, of leasing and stuff and, and price management and whatever else we were doing, legitimate and, and official, whatever the, whatever the actions were. Option two though, you mentioned Judy Shelton's idea of, Hey, what if, so Scott Bessent I think is a really smart guy. I've listened to him a bunch. I actually know somebody who knows him well and said he's a really smart guy, studies his history, reads no stuff, smart guy.

We're both smart guys. I present this data all the time. We look at the way in which the monetary system in the United States, and by extension the world has been operating since 1971, has been on this basically untethered debt accumulation basis. It doesn't take, David, it doesn't take a math genius to say this doesn't pencil out, right? We just know that. United States, debt plus IOUs,

which is underfunded social security and et cetera, it doesn't pencil out. So if you know that, what do you do? And so the scuttlebutt that I'm sort of, I wanna test with you here is this idea that somebody setting up for potentially, I won't call it a second, well I might, it sounds like somebody's getting ready for a different monetary device in the United States.

A gold-backed bond is essentially a non-federal reserve obligation that's backed by gold. That's a competing parallel currency. So if you said, if I said, hey David, I'm going to come do your roof, and the cost is 10,000 Federal Reserve notes or 5,000 Treasury gold-backed notes, would we not be creating a parallel, if not competitive, currency system? I would want gold-backed Treasuries, not Federal Reserve note-backed Treasuries. That would be me. Effectively, I mean, if that's the way that it is structured and you have the option between

something that's effectively backed by a fiat currency and you know exactly how that has been treated over the years, printed into practical non-existence at this stage, or you have the option to invest in a bond that is backed by gold and will hold its value over time. Which one are you going to—it's a no-brainer, effectively. It's a no-brainer. But you say, right, well, okay, well, the current value of that is, what is it, $758 billion is the value of the gold holding once they revalue it from $42 and ends. It's only a drop in the ocean in terms of the debt. So there has to be more to it. I haven't figured out what that is yet, but there has to be more to it because you'd only be solving a very, very small problem.

Well, we would have to add one or two zeros to the back of gold's price. Yeah. For it to pencil out. Yeah. You'd have to, I mean, in order to back the 34 billion or debt now, I think it's something like $140,000 an ounce. You know, but how do you practically do that? I mean, there's a lot of people who say, no, well, they'll revalue gold to

20,000, 30,000, 140,000, whatever it is. But how do you practically do that without effectively destroying the dollar, creating hyperinflation? You know, nobody has yet to practically explain how that happens. Well, I struggle with it because I keep trying. There is no math solution. So the problem is that the dollar is already destroyed. It has been. And I think that the Federal Reserve had one job, one job only. If you gave me a magic

printing press, David, and said, Chris, your job is to just not screw the pooch on this thing, I would not have done what they have done in bailing everything out, everything at all times, right? So that was that, I think under Greenspan, 1987, he had a chance and he whiffed and he set us down a long chain of trouble that gets us to where we are. The problem is, is that the dollar is already a ruined currency. We just, it's like it's an elephant that's been morally wounded. It's walking around, probably has a few years on its feet, but it already has a math problem that I don't know how to resolve. Yeah. And as you say, the one, you know, the one, you add a zero or two zeros to the, to the, to the gold price, effectively, that's kind of what's, what potentially would happen over time. But I

don't think that's something that can be that can occur by the, you know, that the stroke of a pen or an executive order on a Sunday afternoon. Does this connect at all to the so-called crypto sovereign fund that Trump and Besant have talked about? I don't know if it connects to that. And but what it does, what happened on Sunday and the whole idea of the crypto reserve, it does demonstrate that they are willing to try creative things and that their appetite to take these risks is quite large. is quite large. So when it comes to gold and revaluing gold, I'm quite sure, like, you know, we read the interviews and the videos and, you know, what Judy Shelton is saying. You can

imagine that that's only a tiny sliver of what has been discussed and what, you know, the kind of creative ways to approach this that we won't have even thought of at this stage. There's a saying from Steve Jobs, which is you can only connect the dots looking backwards. And I think that what will happen as we go forward, maybe it's three months, six months, maybe it's two years, three years, whatever it is, and something happens, something's been announced, and we'll go, okay, looking back now, I can see the path to it, and from this position, that's really obvious. But at this moment in time, it's pure speculation. Right. David, any concerns for our, you know, I'm a retail purchaser of gold and silver,

any concerns that retail may get locked out of this market at any point in time? There's a number of different ways to approach that. When I talked about this movement of gold from London to Switzerland and Switzerland to the US, there's a number of refiners that we deal with in Switzerland. Some of them have stopped minting the lower format bars like the 50 gram Go bar and the 100 gram Go bar. Now it's relatively temporary and the reason that this always happens when there's a bit of a supply chain issue, which is what we're having now, they're overwhelmed trying to convert the London Good Delivery Bars into Comex Good Delivery Bars. So then they have a look at the, obviously, their production plan, they say, well, temporarily we're not doing that.

Right. And they are very much the retail offering. In the short term, that doesn't matter. There's plenty of them on the shelves of bullion dealers and they can access them. If this thing goes on for longer, then you start to have a little bit of a supply chain issue on the retail products and you'll see the margins on those products going up. At the moment, you're not seeing much, if anything, of an increase in the margins of the retail products. So it just tells you there isn't a problem there. Now, it doesn't mean that there isn't something that is brewing. The other thing is, you know, well, I started investing in gold in the very, the very late 90s, early noughties, it was significantly cheaper than it is now. You're talking $250, $300, $350 for an ounce of gold. You can get one tenth of an ounce of gold for that now.

So an ounce of gold or kilo of gold is well beyond the reach of most investors. And so that kind of dynamic is changing. So what that does though is it forces investors into smaller formats and smaller formats actually have higher premiums on them because effectively it takes as much to mint a 10 ounce bar as it does to mint a 1 ounce bar or even to mint a much smaller, but as a percentage of the value of that item, it's a lot bigger. So in terms of taking physical delivery of gold yourself, when the price continues to increase, it's a smaller and smaller format that you have to take. And you also want, because you think you want things that are divisible, right? You know,

if you've got, if you've got, you know, the price of gold goes to 10,000 and you've got 20,000 to invest in, well, you get two one ounce bars, it's not really very divisible for you. If you want to, if you want to realize some of the profit in that at some stage, you've got a choice of selling one of your bars. So you need divisibility. So you want to have that, the profit in that at some stage, you've got a choice of selling one of your bars. So you need divisibility. So you want to have that. You'd be going for smaller formats that allow you to sell off one tenth of an ounce at a time.

But in that, then there is the challenge of you're into higher premium products. Yeah. Now, just for people's sake, a kilo for us American people who don't have no clue what that, what is that, like a bushel? It's about the size of a chocolate bar. How much would that chocolate bar be today? It's about, it's kind of a little bit smaller than your mobile phone, let's put it that way.

Okay, there we go, perfect, even better. Yeah, it's about, it's 32.15 ounces, That's what a kilo is. So 32.15 times the spot. So it's close on 100,000. Yeah, 96 grand right now. Yeah. So if you have 100 grand to invest, you're getting a kilo bar. And if you wanted to realize some of your profit as it goes up or just liquidate it for whatever reason, you can't sell a portion. You can sell the whole thing or nothing.

So this is the challenge, whereas historically that would have been at $300 odd an ounce, it's 10 grand. So you might have had 10 bars for your 100 grand. Now you can sell off. Now you've got the visibility. But now people are going to be forced into the much smaller format coins and bars with higher premiums. That's the challenge. It is. And I waved this around. This is a tenth of a gram lodged between two currency. Yes.

Got it there. What do you think of those? I think they're interesting. I use them given to clients. They're nearly like little business cards. People remember you when you get them. They're not hugely popular on this side of the water. They're very popular obviously in the States and they are actually currencies in some states. So, I mean, there's a practical and a functional value to them, which is fantastic. They're beautiful to look at as well, and they're coming out with new designs. I like the technology behind them. I've met the guys who own and run the company. They're good guys. who own and run the company, they're good guys.

So yeah, they're very, the margin over the spot price is big, but that's what you're gonna get as you go down. That's, I don't know what size this one, what size is this one is, it's tiny. It's 1 1,000th of an ounce that one. So the margin over the spot price is huge, but they have an intrinsic value. Yeah. Can we talk David Silver very quickly?

Make Gold Great again on Twitter saying that the silver shorts continue to go all in, up to 860 million ounces short. I don't know if that's a lot or a little, but when they were 665 million ounces short, they almost lost control in October of 24. Eric Sprott said bullion banks not able to cover their shorts. And of course, we're all familiar. We've seen this LBMA silver holdings down from 1.18 billion ounces down to what I'll call that 750 million ounces. It's a pretty big drop, but it was 71 million ounces dropped in January of 2025 alone. That's a 10% drawdown.

What are you seeing in the silver side of the story right now? On the retail side of things, we're not seeing much. I mean, this is the thing about this bull market. The retail investor has been absent from this bull market, unfortunately. Unfortunately. And I'll just go off on a bit of a tangent here. I mean, ultimately, when we position and we sell gold, it's silver to a degree, but not necessarily to the same degree. It is the one way for people that are able to take their wealth out of the credit system. One way. And if you think about it, most of, if not everything that we invest in, is basically investing in that credit system. So if we look at cash on deposit with banks, it's recorded on the bank's balance

sheet as a liability. It exists in the most part, unless it's cash in your hand, which if you stick that in a safe for 10 years, it's going to be worthless. It exists as ones and zeros on a bank somewhere, on their ledger. Shares, the the same effectively exist on a ledger somewhere. Now you can try and take share certs out but the share cert itself has no intrinsic value. If the underlying asset, which is the company, isn't performing its duty and continuing to deliver its management perform and it continues to deliver profit year and year and year. Treasury bonds is the same. Treasury bonds are in the credit system existing in ones and zeros and they effectively are the government or corporate, if it's a corporate bond responsibility to manage

affairs in terms of the government manage the economy so that they can raise taxes so that they can actually repay the the interest and the principle on that bond it all exists effectively in this credit system gold is the one way when you lose faith in that credit system to be able to say, I'm taking some of my wealth out of the credit system and I'm parking it over here. And when I'm ready at a time in the future, I will put that wealth back in. So when I purchase gold and silver, I'm taking wealth out of the credit system. And then when I sell it, I'm saying, OK, I've got faith in this credit system. And I'll put I'll put my wealth back to work in there.

So that was a little that was a little tangent that just just go off. But that's the way that we that's the way that we look at it. And the reality is what we're seeing at this moment in time is we are seeing central banks around the world, governments loading up on physical gold. So they are effectively taking out of the credit system. And you say, right, well, why is this happening? Because it's not just happening in isolation in one or two countries. It's happening around the world, loading up on gold. So they are taking their

wealth out of the credit system. So why is that? Again, join the dots here. And what you find then is when that's happening, that the retail investor has been absent from this, absent from it. And they can be absent from it because they can look at gold as an investment. Okay, well, it's done really well over the last couple of years, but I don't know if it's going to go higher from here. It's not that. Gold, a lot of times, is effectively an anti-investment. It's that way of taking your wealth out of the credit system. And we all need to have some of our wealth out of the credit system. Because if it's all there, all in the credit system, it's somebody else's liability, it

requires somebody else to perform a duty in order for it to maintain its value. In the good times, in financially good times, geopolitically benign times with clever central bankers at the wheel. That's okay. But does it feel like that now? We are far from that. We've got a war on the continent of Europe. We've got traditional diplomatic relations breaking down. We've got a very fragile financial system, a very fragile banking system, massive amounts of debt in the system like we've never seen before. Every box is ticked here in terms of issues and fragility. This is not a time

to have everything that you own in that credit system because you are vulnerable, absolutely vulnerable. So taking some of that wealth out, and it doesn't matter if it's, you know, if it's coins, bars, whatever it is, taking some of your wealth out of the credit system and having it yourself. That's a necessity for the times that we're in. A necessity. And depending upon your take on what's going on, is it at this level or does it at this level, it'll determine how much of your wealth you want to leave in there, if any at all.

Right. Well, you know, I investigated something called the great taking with a lot of depth, and it's a thing, right? There's the possibility that under certain circumstances, if the piping and machinery of the financial system, as complex as it is, gets frozen, the authorities may, they have a variety of triggers they can pull, including up to including—shoot, we have to recapitalize all these things you've never heard of, the piping and the plumbing, right?

These are central clearing parties. These are OTC houses. It's all kinds of crazy stuff for derivatives. It's a lot of stuff. And so when people say, well, what can I do? The only thing I can think is to default back to that quote by JP Morgan himself, only gold is money. All else is credit.

So if you want to be sure that you can keep your stuff, gold is the answer to me on a monetary sense. Silver is a different story. People often say Chris, gold and silver like it's one word. It's two words. And I own them for entirely different reasons. Silver's my bullish bet on the future. Silver is my bet that we're going to have a strong industrial recovery someday and that

we're going to need it, right? Because it's like this amazing element and it does things that are irreplaceable on the periodic table. Right? So that's a different story. It's a different story. But at the same time, it still has being that physical, tangible asset, you still have the ability to take some of your wealth

out of the credit system. Out of the credit system. By buying silver. Yeah, and if I could get your take on this real quick, so this is comics delivery notices for silver, it's a bit of a spaghetti chart, so for people who aren't maybe watching but listening, we're looking at a chart that shows tons up the y-axis Days into the delivery month across the x-axis and we're looking at a bunch of years December

2020 March 2021 etc coming on up through and what we're seeing here is that March of 25 Has the steepest highest delivery notices out of any of the months on here. Mm hmm. What do you what how are you what do you see when you look at this? I don't see very much actually to be honest it's all blurry. Okay so I hope I did a good job explaining it then. All I say is there's one thing to the one thing to understand as well is there's this kind of effect of

delivery months in both gold and silver. February was a delivery month for gold. Top of my head, I can't remember exactly the sequence of months that it is, but silver, March. March is a big delivery month for silver. So that's why we're seeing a spike up here. Not just because it's March, but because March is a delivery month. So if there's going to be a scramble for delivery, it's going to be in March.

So what we see on here is across five different years from 2020 to 2025 is December and March. There's a May and July in here. But again, December and March, there's a September on here, but then a March, July, September, then December and March. This is the highest fastest delivery month out of the last five years Yeah for this March. Yeah closing in on 1700 tons we're gonna see some interesting things by the end of this month. Yeah You know, so there are people that are bought there are people that are buying physical gold or buying physical silver You know you say right? Well, okay if they're buying so much physical silver, why is the price down? Why is the price not going like that? And this is back to the conversation we were having at the beginning. Buying physical silver, people are selling the contracts. So when we have a lot

of people then standing for delivery, this is the thing that can pull that house of cards down. So it's going to be an interesting month. We could see a spike up towards the towards the end of the month in the silver price Well, I mean there's sort of ordinary spikes I'm a little concerned that you know, we're coming into and I've been waiting for this for my whole life, right? The dreaded comics default, right and and what is a default? I think Eric Sprott already showed he had a default, right? They said oh, we'll get you your silver in two days and it was nine months, right? So that that feels defaulty to me, but at any rate, you know nine months. Okay, that's grand What if there was 12 months? What was you know, what it was? What's this two years? At what point do you call a default?

Yeah, I Wanted you haven't got us when I come looking for it. If you haven't got it you've defaulted Not I give you nine months to see if you can find it somewhere. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, we saw this during the housing crisis, right? So there were all these CDOs that were in full default, obviously, the bond had not been paid on time. And so what we saw was that the houses refused to declare that, the ISDA refused to declare those defaults. They said, no, we're just not going to call them defaults.

I know you didn't get paid on time. And that is the definition of a bond default. But that would be awkward. Just change the definition. So, yeah. That's all you have to do in those circumstances, Chris. Just change the definition. Exactly.

So that's why I do advocate, though, for bird in the hand, right? So quick question. You know, if things got really scrambly, right, like let's say they really got grabby around all of this, who's actually at risk? So all that stuff, Pete, let's imagine I think I have registered stuff on the vault tables in comics. If comics really gets in trouble, do I own that? If you have a registered, if you have a, because it's eligible and there's registered, right? So if people, if, if there are bars that are put into comics, they're eligible, that means they are of certain specifications. And at a stage in the future,

you can move them into the registered category, which means that they are there available for delivery against a contract. Okay, so let's back it up. Let's say I have eligible bars. Let's say I just- If you've eligible bars, your bar should be, you should have specific bars

sitting there in a COMEX depository. They're effectively allocated to you. Yeah. And in a pinch, though, you think— They are not there. They are not available for delivery against any contract. Well, I'm asking about that because I haven't actually read the contracts deeply enough. I mean, I read GDX, sorry, GLDs, right?

The prospectus is this thick. I'm holding my fingers about a half inch apart. It's big fat prospectus. Way down deep in there it says, oh yeah, Force Majeure. Listen, you know, if we decide, we'll just give you cash, you know. Is there something like that maybe parked on the on the comic site? I mean, just I'm, I'm getting to the idea. I haven't dived into it. I haven't dived into it that much detail, but there will always be that there's more than likely going to be a force majeure contract in most of these, right? But if you're in an eligible category, that just literally means that you have silver sitting in there. You have decided to put

your silver into that vault, right? You might be a silver producer, for example. You could be a silver miner refiner has put those bars into that because that's where you are going to sell them at some stage in the future and how do you sell them? Well you're going to actually let them be delivered against a contract so they'd have to move from being eligible into being registered but if you are that refiner that has put that in there and they are eligible they're there, they're yours. There's an interesting thing just you mentioned GLD there, and it's another one of the dots that we can look at joining here, is that we've seen the lending rate on the GLD shares increasing significantly. And it's funny because when this got queried, it was announced, well, GLD doesn't lend

gold. All right. All of the gold that GLD has is there registered against it. It doesn't lend gold. So don't worry about that. But what does happen is that shareholders of GLD can borrow and lend shares of GLD. And this is where it becomes interesting. Because you can borrow shares of GLD off somebody, and if you have a basket, which I think is

equivalent to about 10,000 ounces, you can then take delivery of physical gold from the GLT and once you've taken delivery of the physical gold you can go and sell it into market or go and sell it to whomever it is that you want. So you can borrow the shares off somebody so you don't own the shares you're just borrowing them and if you borrow enough of those shares you can then take physical delivery against those shares and you can take that physical gold and sell that elsewhere. Well that explains something doesn't it right because we saw the price of gold rising as the amount of tonnage in GLD has been falling which is an unusual situation

normally those go at the same time as the lending rates for GLD are going up. So it's another way to take physical delivery of gold. Again, another dot. But if I go further in that dot, it's somebody who does that is not dollar sensitive, right? Because you're going to eat it on that trade at some point because you have to return those GLD shares that you borrowed short, right? At some higher price. This feels price insensitive. So when I see non-economic players come in, it's either a central bank or a government. They're the only people who don't care. It's a big player. And there is a reason that we are not aware of. Well and the sad part again, back to retail David, is that, so I called my friends who have coin shops and things.

Retail's been selling, whether they're squeezed by circumstances, but like grandma's silverware is coming in. The premiums right now on 33 and earlier, so-called numismatic golds collapsed almost back to spot, saying people are selling coin collections off for whatever they can get. It's just not, it's just not there. How do you explain that? It, well there's a number of, there's a number of kind of contributing factors to that. One is this is, Well, there's a number of contributing factors to that. One is this is happening on a monetary policy basis. This is not the man in the street.

The man in the street is not aware of what's going on. If the man in the street knew and really understood how fragile the credit system was, they'd be asking questions. They wouldn't at this moment in time, if they understand how fragile the credit system is, they don't necessarily know that one of the antidotes to that for them is to purchase precious metals. So gold and silver, gold in particular, has gone so much out of the average person's psyche over the decades. We talk to, we're constantly talking to our high net worth individual clients, corporate clients,

and they are becoming aware of gold only for the first time now. You get asked the same question, can we actually buy physical gold? You mean we can actually buy the bars? We can buy the coins. It's gone so much out of the psyche of most people. If you think about what it was like many decades ago, where, you know, your note in your pocket was backed by physical gold and silver. It was there in your face every day.

You understood that. You understood that connection between that dollar that you spent and the metal that backed it. People don't have, you know, the generations that have grown up aren't even aware of that. Aren't even aware of the history of that. This is possibly surprising to bring that into focus for people, and if this is blurry, I'll read it to you. Over the past year, Nvidia's stock has gone up 37.29%, which is not bad. And gold over the past year has gone up 38.8%. So gold over the past year is now a more exciting investment than Nvidia.

Yeah. Yeah. But who's buying it? It's not the same people that are buying Nvidia. It's not the same people who are buying Bitcoin as buying gold. By the way, they have the same effective yield. It's exciting. But if you are a central bank, if you are a government and you have a strategy, okay,

you have a long term plan, are you going to shout it from the rooftops and tell everybody or are you just going to quietly buy as much as you can. And this is the these are the kind of the official like, if we look at what China has done, they've been quite, I mean, they've been quite sneaky, right? Because there's all the official reserves, all the official gold that they're buying in and recording. But they're going around the globe and they're buying Dore. And you say, well, what's Dore, Dave? Dore is basically what mines produce. It's very poor quality gold. It's pre-refined gold. It looks yellow. It's very yellow and unattractive. It can be like, some instances nearly like sludge. It's the pre-refined gold and they're going and they're buying that directly from the mines and they're taking it back to China and they're refining it into four nines gold

bars. That's not appearing on any official records of international transactions. So you know, this is what's happening and I'm quite sure China isn't the only ones that's doing it might be the only ones that have been caught doing it. But they're probably not the only ones that are that are that are doing it. So people are, you know, people mean government, so they're doing this as quietly as they possibly can. And the may over the last couple of months now just triggered something. So it's come on all of our radars and we're watching the international flows all moving into the US at this moment in time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we know that the BRICS, you know, I've talked about it, so-called unit,

and they were going to back this currency that they were putting together with gold potentially, and then Trump came out right after the election and said, yeah, don't do that. If you back any BRICS that use anything other than the dollar for backing, you're on't do that. If you back any any bricks that do use anything other than the dollar for backing, you're on our bad list. Okay. And so he put the kibosh on that, I guess. But, you know, I was surprised to find out that, you know, when I go to a coin dealer here in America, I don't know what it's like in Europe, because I haven't been there in a while in a coin shop. But but here it feels a little almost like you should wear a trench coat, put some glasses it's like it's like you know it's got a little sneakiness to it but I saw these

pictures of the Shui Bei gold market in China 120,000 gold outlets 8,000 gold companies like the most amazing displays of gold people just walking in and buying it for the Chinese New Year which seems to happen like five times a year I'm not totally clear on on what what their holiday season is but which seems to happen like five times a year. I'm not totally clear on what their holiday season is, but it seems to be all the time. Right. It's a very different thing over there. It's a really big established market. Yeah. Well, it's an established market, but it's an established market because there's such a strong gold buying culture in China now know, you look that there is in other countries as well, India in particular, there's a really, really strong gold buying culture. There isn't the same

strong gold buying culture in most of European countries. There isn't the same strong gold buying culture in the US as there exists in the Far East. And that could be to our detriment. They reckon that the Chinese government owns about 25,000 tons of gold, but they also reckon that the population has another 25,000 tons. So they say, well, if we ever wanted to back our currency, it would be backed by what the government owns, but also effectively what the population owns. You know, so it's 50,000 tons of gold there. So we've got the situation where, you know, in the US you've got 81,000 tons. You've got 50,000 tons in China alone.

It's huge. Absolutely huge. Yeah. huge, absolutely huge. Yeah and then I guess final question you know when I talked with Vince Lancy he said oh Basel 3 you know this is where gold is a tier one asset now on on bank balance sheets but that takes effect in the US on July 1st of this year 2025. Is that a driver at this at all to you? Is that a dot in this or is that just a dot? It's a dot yeah Yeah, it's a dot we didn't get. It's a dot we didn't get ran to, but it is an it is another dot. You know, so all and it's the only other tier one asset.

You know, so fit and it's physical gold. It's not an allocated gold. It's physical, it's physical allocated gold. So it's another dot. So if we look back at it, as I said, you know, that Steve Jobs, the quote is very pertinent here, you know, you can only join the dots looking backwards. We've talked about so many of these dots today. I think it'll become very obvious to us at a stage in the future that well, Well, I'm surprised. I saw a bunch of companies Microsoft turned it down but you know they're talking about should we be putting Bitcoin on our balance sheets. I haven't seen that same talk around gold yet but it is a tier one asset and if I was a fiduciary of either a pension fund

or a large corporation treasury I'd be thinking about it. Well we are actually seeing more companies now picking up the phone to us. Are we? Yes. Oh, that's good news. Okay. More companies. As I said, this hasn't been a retail-led bull market because the price has been driven by central bank buying, undoubtedly. But what we're starting to see is the high net worth individuals, companies, pensions starting to ask questions, starting to get involved and seeing, well, as a company, can I buy gold?

Absolutely, you can. Can I put gold on my balance sheet? Absolutely, you can. We're seeing the likes of family offices coming on there, you know, they deal a lot, you know, intergenerational wealth management is what they're doing that, you know, and they're starting to say, Should I be looking at gold? We get we get financial advisors, wealth managers who are kind of saying, I'm starting to get asked questions here, but I don't know how to answer them. All right. You know, people ask me, can I buy gold? I don't know. You know, so it's starting. It hasn't been a retail led bull market.

It's been that price has gone up to nearly three thousand dollars an ounce. And it is driven by central bank buying. That central bank buying and all of the dots that we're talking about, they're not for nothing. There is something afoot. There is a fundamental shift in monetary policy globally on the horizon. I have no doubt about that because all of these things happening and it being for nothing, it just doesn't pass.

It doesn't pass muster. So there is definitely something afoot. And when you get central banks that are saying increasingly, I want to take more and more and more of our wealth out of the credit system, you've got to wonder, should I be doing the same thing? And the answer to that is, well, it's always it's always prudent to have to not have all of your wealth in that credit system. It's always prudent to have some of it in your control. There's one thing, and I meant to say this on a podcast before, and you hear it a lot with gold investors and silver investors, is if you don't hold it, you don't own it.

And where that is, that is effectively true having it in your possession or in a private vault. Right? But I, I highly recommend, it's always a throwaway comment that people make, I highly recommend that people stop saying that. And the reason is, the minute that you say in a public arena, if you don't hold it, you don't own it. I know you own gold and I know where you keep your gold. So for security and safety, stop saying it. Good advice. Good advice. Well, David, thank you so much for your time today. David Russell, CEO of GoldCore,

and for all peak subscribers and peak members, we have a special affiliate relationship that gives you a great deal with GoldCore. And I, David, just to echo and sort of build off of that last point, the reason I am a GoldCore user is because I want my stuff off- site and I want it out of country in some cases. And I think for people for whom diversification and safety matter, you have one of the best products out there. Thank you for that, Chris. Appreciate that. So with that, thanks very much.

I can't wait to see what's going on. And if things explode one way or the other, we'll be calling you back. Awesome. Talk to you soon. All right. Thanks, David. Cheers. Bye.