TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #712: The Great Precious Metals Shakeout with Vince Lanci

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Marty sits down with Vince Lanci to discuss the chaotic selloff in gold, silver, and Bitcoin, China's broken precious metals market structure, the geopolitical implications of the Kevin Warsh Fed nomination, and how gold is being positioned as collateral in a de-globalizing monetary order. Vince on X: https://x.com/Sorenthek STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Promo Code: TFTC99 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Lygos: http://bit.ly/3ZtQLwp Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be vince welcome back to the show we're in the midst of uh a chaotic time in precious metals markets bitcoin markets markets in general so i thought it was uh fitting to catch up with you markets apocalypse yeah uh like it's a silver mcgeddon bitcoin apocalypse gold uh gold nato i don't

know i guess we need to come up with a a funny term yeah so i'm just looking at trading view right now yeah um gold hit 5600 what's it show thursday afternoon now it's trading at 46 around 46 38 went as low as uh 4 400 earlier this morning silver similarly blow off top hit 121 76 trading at 76 was as low as 71 this morning bitcoin obviously it's a 50 sell-off i mean that's you know that's that's crazy this this i could say this as a person who's been in the market since 1994, there's never been anything like this ever, period, ever. And it's happened for good reason. I mean, in 1994, there was when George Soros cornered silver. In 1997, there was Warren Buffett. In 1993, there was the BCCI scandal. It was our very own Bitcoin scandal.

In 1993, silver was trading like $4, and an investment fund was found to be fraudulent in the Middle East, and so they had to puke all their silver because they didn't have the money. It's the opposite of not having the coins, and that made the market drop like 10%, 20% in one day. There have been all kinds of things, but nothing's like this. And the thing is, there's so much more going on behind the scenes that we know, but that's not what we're talking about today. What are we talking about? Well, let's start with onstage in front of the audience and just talk about what's topical, which is the nomination of Kevin Warsh for chairman of the Federal Reserve. Obviously, a lot of people are looking at that nomination and looking at Kevin Warsh's perspective on markets and particularly Fed policy and identifying him as more of a hawkish Fed chairman. If he gets to the nomination process and is is thrusted to the throne of the Federal Reserve, many people are attributing the crash in gold, silver and Bitcoin markets to his hawkish nature.

um start there and then we can we can uh speculate on what's happening yeah i think i think uh i think it's it's kind of interesting because as soon as he went to the forefront and i did a little research he came across as historically a policy hawk when he was with obama and uh and then the pushback was he isn't a hawk he's um a real politic person and then you know he started seeing some interviews with him saying that he was uh very dovish and i went okay so this guy is basically he goes with the flow uh and then the markets kept selling off. And I say, well, don't they get the message? So I guess the market doesn't believe that he's as dovish as they think. Or maybe it's reacting to the fact that they think the Fed actually does

have to hike. I don't know. But it certainly seems to be spreading. It started out just as tech stocks. And now there's other stocks involved. And, you know, Bitcoin took a dip, stabilized, another dip. You know, I mean, I bought today, to be clear, just because I see big money buying and small money selling. And I have a feeling that I might have to hold on to this for a year as a trade. But, you know, I added to a position today. And then you have China. What the hell's going on in China? I'm getting the impression that they're stagnating again. And all this is coming out after Japan has a rate problem, you know, because their currency is dropping and it just, it doesn't stop.

So usually this is the alarm bell for me. Usually when we can't, you and I collectively can't get a handle on why something is going down, like in general, the market itself is tech stocks, for example, and nothing is slowing it down. I'm under the impression that there's something else going on that we don't see. And I don't know what that is. I can't see any more bad news that has to come into this market. You know, it's, you know, the war in the Middle East is continuing.

The war in Ukraine is continuing. Trump is in the process of backing off of tariffs. Maybe he needs to back off of tariffs a little bit harder for this market to stabilize. But for the life of me, I can't figure out. I mean, I can't figure it out. I just don't like my reason for Bitcoin not benefiting from the disinvestment in gold. Not that I think it should be one-to-one. I just think there should be some money going into Bitcoin.

It's kind of like, you know, disappointing, especially with all the money flowing into Ethereum. And Ethereum is not moving either. So, anyway. I'm not sure if you followed the event on October 10th last year in the Bitcoin and broader crypto markets, but there was an API problem with Binance specifically that blew up. I mean, the story is that it blew up a number of market makers, which in turn messed up. I did follow that. So I think there's some people that are saying that the blowback in the aftermath of October 10th is still lingering in the market in the sense that market makers haven't had the confidence to come back and bring a liquidity profile to the market. I could see that being the case.

Yeah, I don't know. They're not stepping into the breach? I'm not sure what it is. Yeah, I don't buy the microstrategy stuff. I mean, I'm not a fan of his approach, but I don't buy that as being a problem. I buy the problem as being a lack of liquidity. And it sounds like indirectly we're lining up with the same ideas. Somebody's not doing what they're supposed to do as a market maker.

And we were mentioning before we hit record, but bringing the focus back to China, there's a particular, would you say, long-only fund for gold there specifically? Oh, yeah, yeah. This is actually very interesting, and there's really no one that's covering this, but it's correct, and it's why we're doing what we're doing, meaning whipping up and whipping down. If you're reading the mainstream media, what you're going to see is truthful arguments, but they're saying speculators – first of all, I mean, just in case people aren't familiar with it, silver and gold together, but silver more exaggerated, spiked to the highs last week, and now it's getting slaughtered. And the reason it's being given is unhealthy speculation, momentum trading, and that there's truth in that if you're looking at the Chinese speculators. But in the US, there's no speculation right now, there's very little speculation. And what's really going on is China has a faulty market structure.

Now, Bitcoin people have to know this, like, I mean, Bitcoin people have seen this with with faulty ETS, with Mt. Gox, and all that shit that you dealt with over the years. But it's kind of like this. China has a very closed market structure. And so you can trade futures, but not everybody can trade futures. You have to have your money in a futures account. Most people will look for exposure in a stock investment, just like in the US. And they'll put it in a fund or an ETF type of product that gives them exposure.

Now, silver has been rallying for good reason, for related to multiple reasons, but all of them are fundamental. You know, gold's been being bought by central banks and silver's being bought because what's happened is gold's gone up so much that people are looking at silver going, well, maybe that's cheap. Maybe I should buy some silver. And what they're doing is they're piling into silver now at the same time that industrial demand is picking up for solar panels. Now, the reason China is the problem, and I'm not saying this politically or geopolitically, is because they have a product out there called the SDIC fund. They only have one equity product for exposure into silver. And that product is a long-only fund.

So it's not truly an ETF. You can't short it. So if you want to buy exposure in silver, you buy it. Now, all that guy can do is buy futures to parallel how much money has flowed into it, not the price of it. So if silver rallies a percentage point, and you and I are, you know, the Wongs, and we're out there, we're going, I want to have silver exposure, your choices are limited. And so you throw your money into this SDIC fund, and it goes up 2%. And then it goes up. And then so that attracts people going, that one's up even more than silver.

or maybe we should buy that. It starts behaving like a leveraged ETF, and it has no right to do that. Now, there's no one out there keeping a lid on it by shorting it and buying the futures. There's no arbitrage. It's a long-only fund. You can't sell it. And so this thing, which, by the way, is the perfect vehicle to get a market higher, because the money stays in that fund it doesn't go out and it's just kind of like uh bottled up critical mass you know what i mean um and this thing gets out of control and what happens staying focused only on china is china 85 of the solar panels that go into europe are sold to them by china and solar panels use silver And India probably does the other 15%.

But their appetite for silver has been just voracious for the last two years, going back to right after the first silver squeeze that they called it. The second silver squeeze, I should say. And what happened was the industrial demand was getting front run by the U.S. ETF demand. They usually like to buy during U.S. hours because we're dummies and we sell it all the time, right? Then it's going out to China. Now you've got this long-only fund that people are going, oh, look at that. It's going up 2%.

Let's buy it. And so they're buying it. And the Chinese market structure is such that there's no silver available for them locally. So they have been depending on a lot of imported silver over the years. And this is where it gets interesting. While all this is going on, all this snowball effect is going on, the United States finally figures out that its supply chains don't work. That it can't get silver or copper or anything else it needs to build its power grid back. So it says, wait a minute, we have to start getting raw silver.

We have to start getting finished copper. We have raw copper. So how do we do that? Well, we do that by going into Latin America and saying, give us what you got. And Latin America, for the last 10 years, has been selling it to China. And they still have plenty of it. But China's like their customer now. And so what do we do?

Trump comes out with his Dunrow Doctrine, Monroe Doctrine, basically. And he says, China out of Latin America. Now, I can confirm this. You know, you had Josh Farrow on last week, and he and I have had conversations from different perspectives. He's boots-on-the-ground fundamentalist, and I'm boots-on-the-ground financial. And he said to me that he was on a trip recently, and he bumped into some military personnel in the Caribbean. And they told him that they're there now to minimize Chinese influence over Latin American commerce. And I was like, whoa, that makes sense.

Then I saw in the marketplace J.P. Morgan starting to take in silver concentrate, which is basically raw silver. And when you take those two things and combine it with China, that means China is not getting its raw silver. That means China is getting squeezed. That means China needs to buy it if they want to sell their solar panels. And so they started to get short-squeezed over there. Their industry needs to buy it, plus they had some short funds that they needed to buy it. And then come Thanksgiving, we talk, I think, after this, but then come Thanksgiving, J.P. Morgan, which has a bunch of silver available in the Comex, gets it pulled by China. And J.P. Morgan says, no, we're not giving it to you.

So China is now making sure the U.S. has cut off their supply chain. We've just gone in and basically invaded Venezuela and deposed the leader, Maduro. I think China is a little bit stressed. And so their industrial business started to buy the silver. And there's a spread. It's kind of like when you trade Bitcoin on two different exchanges. Back in the day, you'd have different prices on Binance versus Kraken or what have you. Well, Shanghai is trading 110, and Comex is trading 100, and you can't buy one on an exchange

and sell it to other, because it's physical. You've got to transfer. It's not that easy to do. Financials are broken down. You're tariffing me. I'm tariffing you. We can't do paper arbitrage. And before you know it, someone in China gets their ass handed to them, and it spikes.

And then it magically ends overnight. And so now the market comes off. They find the silver, is what I said. And the Chinese speculators who are being blamed for this are really a function of the government having these ridiculous products out there that are imperfect, kind of like the—what was the name of the fund? The Grayscale Fund? you know, that's futures. I mean, it wasn't as obvious that that was a big problem, but

same idea. So China has pretty much gone on a buying binge of precious metals for the last three years, and they finally caught someone cheating and lying. It's going to be just like any other scandal. You're going to find out that people were selling silver they didn't have, kind of like, you know, the custody and rehypothecation issues that are going on crypto now. Same idea. So I think the market's done for now. I mean, I don't want to give you a directional prediction, except to say that it's gone from being overbought to being oversold in three days. Do I think it's going to go up from here? No. Do I think it's going to go down from here? No. I'll just reiterate what Josh said. Between 50 and 150, or more likely between 60

in $110. I don't think it's going to go back up to $110. But the fundamental problem isn't solved yet. They still don't have the silver that they need in the future. And America has pretty much started hoarding it with the critical mineral status. And the result of that will be, as Josh had said, nine months out, there's no silver for Europe. And I checked the Bloomberg forward rates, and nine months out, the forward rates for gold and silver are higher. So there's people that are worried about future supply. It'll be almost like if the halving didn't happen.

You know, they're dependent on that supply, and it's not there. So that's the long-winded version, but hopefully that helps. Yeah, definitely paints a better picture. is i mean you have the mechanical side um of the issue which you just described but then even last week the uh the social side was really beginning to send alarm bells to me i mean just both charts were parabolas and then you have people in line i had a buddy in the bitcoin space he's an australian he wrote a tweet right about um he was like okay i've hit my target so I'm going to take my risk off the table and went to a physical dealer shop

to sell some of his silver, and the line was out the door, and people were talking about how they were up 100% on the trades they made three weeks before. Oh, yeah. You had the mania aspect of it leaning full bore. I mean, you guys joke about the boomers finally making money in silver. That joke, that meme is real. Silver had $50, and gray-haired guys were lining up.

But I was getting calls. How about this? I was getting calls when silver was trading $70 on the way up. And dealers were calling me up saying, I just got a bunch of junk. And for those of you that aren't familiar with junk, junk is pre-1965 coins, which are 90% silver. And they trade at 90% of the silver weight. and we're talking about you know talking about a hundred dollars and four hundred dollars in quarters that's worth thousands of dollars you know like tens of thousands of dollars so a quarter

is worth seventy dollars at that at one point it was like that because it was almost an ounce or a little bit less than an ounce ninety percent of seventy dollars when i was trading a hundred dollars, a 1964 quarter was worth $70. That's insane. And you and I look at it, we go, that's insane. But meanwhile, it happened that it persisted for a little period of time. Well, during that time frame, everyone over the age of 60, over the age of 70, with bags of coins in their basement, were going through them and bringing them and dumping them on the lap of all these dealers. Here, what will you give me for this? And they were buying it like $10 on their spot because these are older people. They're getting advantage taken of them. Maybe they

don't know. And I started getting calls during this time. Hey, Vince, are you in the market for silver? I'm like, nope, not buying right now. I'm trading it. I'm long it, but I'm not buying physical right here. Well, I got some junk coins. I'm like, yeah, OK. I don't want junk coins. I I don't own a refinery, but I understand the merit of them. He goes, well, I'll give it to you at $3 on their spot. And I'm like, whoa, that's cheap. I'm like, all right, fine. I'll take some.

Then the next day, Silver's trading 95. And I go, do you still have any of those coins left? He goes, yeah, I do. I'm like, really? Why isn't anyone buying these? And he said it to me. He said, because they won't stop coming in the door. All these old people are coming and going, here's my quarters.

Can I have some cash? Can I have some cash? if only they were young enough to buy bitcoin i guess right but um they're selling it liquid like the meme is real it's real and and but then something weird happened and i almost i almost got frothy myself um it broke 105 and i called the guy up i go you still have those coins no i mean what happened he goes everybody cleaned them out just yesterday and i went so at that point he said to me i didn't say it to him he said to me we are in the fomo stage now we are in the froth now because when people are calling him up because i call up and check he's like people were

calling me i'm going buy more buy more he goes that they thought it was over a hundred dollars it's never going to go back down again and sure enough he was right that was the top his name was brian that was the top he was right about that brian kuzma so anyway um it's a shit show it's like it's like any other media yeah you know that's why it was funny then you had uh all the silver influencers on x and we're going to 150 we're going to 200 we're getting back to the gold silver ratio of years past so it's at least got to go to 500 eventually and uh i don't know gravity just looking at the chart it's like gravity has to set in at some point oh yeah yeah i mean um uh

the the the the argument of silver going to five hundred dollars i don't buy into because i don't haven't really heard an argument i just heard a price prediction the argument of silver going to 200 or 300 i do buy into but not tomorrow the reason i buy into it is real simple if you go back and you look at what happens to any mineral when the u.s puts it on the critical minerals list, using lithium and uranium as the examples, when they get put on the list within five years, they triple in value. And when silver was put on the critical mineral list, it was worth $40. But it triples in five years. This tripled essentially in five months, right? What's that? August, September, October, November, December, five months. I mean,

that's insane, right? So for me, as a trader who says, I actually handicapped this, I said silver should go to $143 within 50 months. That was my math. Soon as they made it critical minerals, I went, all right, lithium is the home run, uranium is a little bit less of a home run, I'll average the home runs, $143 in 50 months. So I bought it. And then it goes to $80 in three months. And I go, okay, maybe it's going to shoot to 200 and then back down to 140. But this is goofy. Goes up to 120 and that's the end of it. That's the complete end of it. And so if you say to me, do you think it'd go to 200, $300 over the next five years? I'm like, yeah, absolutely. I think it's going to happen in the next five minutes. No, this market is ridiculously overbought

and everybody's so smart about that now. But I have a lot of subscribers that wanted it to go even higher. And I kept saying to them, don't buy it anymore. Take profits. Don't sell your physical. Sell paper if you have to. Don't buy it. And you know, it turned out to be wrong for two weeks. But when it's right, man, it's horrible. You know how it is. So freaks, if you've been listening for a while, you've probably heard us all talk about BitKey. It's a Bitcoin wallet built for people who want self-custody to actually fit into their lives. BitKey is a private multi-sig wallet that removes the biggest point of failure in traditional self-custody, the seed phrase. no ceremony nothing to hide and no single mistake that can put your bitcoin at risk we all know

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they accept bitcoin via strike so go to slnt.com tftc to get 15 off anything or simply just use the code tftc when shopping at slnt.com patented technology special operations approved it has free shipping as well so go check it out that's what's shifting this back to the geopolitics of the day i think that's the big question and pulling wash into this the monroe doctrine the the Don Roe Doctrine as well. I think Warsh is a particularly interesting pick considering the fact that he's basically an understudy of Stan Druckenmiller,

who Secretary Besant has worked with as well in the past. And obviously we've had this for Sabre, Sabre from Trump for two years about consolidating treasury and Fed policy. And it seems like Kevin Warsh is the guy that will go affect that policy since him and scott besant are are very close and have the same um same sort of market teacher in their careers uh and it seems like we're gonna have a consolidated from between the fed and the

treasury which will have geopolitical implications and i think scott besant said it publicly a few weeks ago what was the most surprising part of taking the treasury job and it was um um national security which geopolitics plays into so what's your view on how things are being set up on the geopolitical side of things right now that's well starting with your your your your savvy comment about the whole soros drunkenmiller relationship it's like drunkenmiller's got his his buddies in there now you know uh wash and uh and besant geopolitically as it manifests locally there's a very clear thread about the point you brought up there. And that is the world is deglobalizing. And because the world is deglobalizing, without getting into the minutia

of it, when the world was globalized, the Fed was the most important part because monetary policy allowed us to reach out into other countries. Fiscal policy is tax and spend at home. The fiscal Fiscal policy is essentially tax and spend, and monetary policy is print and distribute. So monetary policy is the network. Fiscal policy is the money. So as the world de-globalizes, and you can see this in the personalities of the leaders being hired, they're regional leaders, they're nationalistic, they're more conservative, They're less worried about kumbaya all over the world, they're more interested in their

own national priorities. Well, as that happens, all these countries we all know are fixing their supply chains, fine. But what we don't talk about is they're fixing their money chains, which is their payment rails, which is their payment chains. And those are equally important for a different reason. So I'm a country in Europe. Italy is a good example.

Italy's got fragile supply chains. It depended on China. It depended on Europe. It depended on Africa, depended on the U.S. And so they're working on those, getting those fixed up. You know, we need to get our this from there, energy from there, energy from there. But also monetarily, they recognize that they have to build their own military. They have to build their own infrastructure.

And you don't do that with monetary policy. You do that with fiscal policy. You raise taxes or what have you. But when you do that, you make your central banker less important. And in fact, they've gotten so adamant in this that they've said to their central bank, that gold that you're holding, they hold on to their gold at the central bank level. We don't do that here. That gold that you're holding on to, that's ours.

Give it back. So essentially, their treasury said to the central bank, give us the gold back. In the U.S., as you rightly bring up, the subordination of the Fed to the Treasury is happening. The Fed will either fold into the Treasury or – but you know what? Now that I'm thinking about this, yeah, this is a good point. I mean, this is a good point because of what you brought up. If the Fed gets subordinated to the Treasury, becomes more dependent on it, becomes more beholden to it, then the Fed becomes the brake. You know, the fiscal side is we're going to print money, but we're going to give it to this industry and that industry and this industry and that industry, as opposed to the Fed printing money and just raining money on everyone in QE.

So what you have now is you have Besant saying we need to print money. It needs to go to that industry, defense, infrastructure, power grids, things like that, as opposed to the Fed just printing money and saying it goes where it goes. So the subordination of the Fed to the Treasury is a symptom of the geopolitical changes that are coming on. And that is monetary policy doesn't matter. We can't influence people's economies with monetary policy as much anymore. And we've got to take care of home. So I think it's possible, coming back to your point, it's quite possible that the market

is looking at this saying the punch bowl is really over. Maybe Warsh isn't a hawk, but if Besson's in control, maybe we're going to be raising rates. So I think that's a valid argument that we should think about. Maybe the party is a hawk. I've recorded a recap episode of the fund. I'm a partner at 1031, one of our principals there, John Arnold. he writes a weekly recap and this week was focused on on the wash nomination and dissecting his views on on fed policy and what he would do and he's explicitly said hey i would

like to bring rates down lower but i don't want to expand the monetary base um and i think that's right all well and good to to think about but structurally is it actually possible um like you're just gonna is john arnold on your board no it's not it's not the it's the real john arnold it's not a john arnold from the john arnold foundation uh the the billionaire commodity trader it's another one uh no i say that because i could have given you a john arnold story about how he picked my pocket for two dollars well take it here it's not the john arnold i'm talking about so all right i'm i'm referring to john arnold i mean this is actually a pretty funny story because this is a nightmare for me that I survived. So I'll give you a trading story

here. During the early 00s, 01, 02, there were natural gas problems. There was hurricane season, there was winter coming up, and the October contract and the March contract are the two contracts that get the most volatile. And there were these very exotic options called spread options. So March versus April, the spread itself can be very volatile. And I was the market maker. I was the designated market maker in this product on the NYMEX floor. And they were extremely complex and very difficult to trade. It'd be like trading options on crack spreads. It'd be like trading options in two commodities, like crack spreads, heating oil versus gasoline and what have you. But the two months that this customer picked, I didn't know who the customer

was at the time. This customer picked was March, April. And these months are typically very dangerous. March is the end of the winter. And if it's a cold winter, March explodes. And April's the beginning of the summer. And nobody ever wants April. So there's a seasonality like March, April. Nobody cares about it. And at the time, March and April were kind of like right here. nothing was going on and so here i am selling these calls to some guy some guy you know on the floor but i'm like i'm 80 of the liquidity and uh he's got a huge position and then don't you know it cold snap market rallies now i'm losing my ass okay i don't know it's john arnold yet but it is john arnold uh i'm losing my ass he was running centaurus at the time and he just

crushed uh brian hunter at amaranth i knew people at amaranth as well anyway so natural gas starts to rip i panic the good panic and i cover my risk i don't i still have these stupid options on you can't get out of there like a roach motel you know and uh i knew who john all was he was respected he was legitimate and he was an ethical massive trader in natural gas and you always wanted to know if you traded with him because he was going to be right and you better over hedge. But I didn't know I traded with him. So the market's on the highs. I actually turn a profit, a big profit, easily seven figures, let's put it that way. And I decide to get out of half of my risk, which means I need to go back to that customer and get him to give me the other half

of my risk. So I turned to the broker. This is a floor at the time. I turned to the broker and I go, hey, that customer of yours that bought all those March, April calls from me, calls. They were bullish calls. I go, call him up. I want to buy them back. They're worthless at this point. They already done their work. Call him up. I want them back. Guy calls him up. Vince, I got him on the phone. He says he doesn't want to get rid of him. Now I'm kind of panicking. I'm like, why? Why? He goes, because he turned them into puts, which meant he's now bearish. And so my, apparently they say my face turned green and then white. I'm like, who's your customer? And he went, well, I shouldn't say who it is, but it's the guy named after the bakery,

Arnold Bread. And I go, and I looked at him, I said, Centaurus? He goes, yeah. I go, I turned around and I went into the ring and I panicked. I bought everything that I had to get back to cover my position. And I lost everything that week. Everything. I completely lost everything that week because the market went down. And he actually said on the phone, this is a nice guy, sorry, but he really needs them. You know, I know that he meant that. He probably was screwing me over a little bit too, but that's okay. He's a good trader and I respected that. Anyway, so they carried me out on a stretcher a week later because of John Arnold. So when you said his name, I immediately had PTSD flashbacks. I'm like, John Arnold. Anyway, that's it. I just

wanted to mention that to you. It's a good story. It's a funny story because I'm still alive to talk about it. But I lost seven figures that I had made and then lost seven figures. So I went from, let's say, I'll make a number up, up 2 million to down 1 million in three days. It was a complete disaster that's a whipsaw i almost done uh i mean a lesson in survivability too short term i mean maybe some lessons for people out there just got wiped out this week whether it's in bitcoin gold or silver it's long i know right i mean i got lucky i got lucky to survive that but i'll never forget that because i knew who he was and i'm like and i'm like he's not a dick if he's not selling them to me then maybe he's he means it and i went all right i'll go

in the ring i'll start covering what's vince no what's he know like people were freaking out what does he know i'll tell you what i know i'm gonna lose my ass if i don't do this and of course i lost my ass anyway so yeah our john arnold has a good uh a good story too he used to work at citadel uh for ken griffin he's told this publicly so i think he's comfortable with me sharing it but he gets an email one day from ken griffin's uh executive assistant like hey ken wants to talk to you and at the time he's like a low level analyst lower level analyst uh at citadel and he's like oh god the big boss wants to talk to me and like ask the executive assistant like are you sure he's like yeah he wants to talk to john arnold um here's his number give him a call so

he calls him up and ken griffin's like hey john like uh what do you think about this this gala next week and our John Arnold's like uh let me like doing research trying to answer on the go and then like 30 seconds into the call Ken realizes it's not the John Arnold that you were telling a story about and says oh I gotta guess oh my god that's funny that's he probably gets like big name Michael Jordan I have an uncle that's a similar situation so freaks when you take bitcoin seriously you start with custody you want to control your keys avoid single points of failure and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what Unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multi-sig

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hodlers. Or opt for the highest level private client service with Unchained's signature and get a dedicated account manager, discounted trading fees, exclusive access to events and features, and much, much more. If you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your Bitcoin without giving up control, go to unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at check out to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multisig volt. That's tftc10 at unchained.com. Sup freaks. Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments. Marty, your skin looks so good. You're looking fit these days. How are you doing it? Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more. Trying to get my swell on. Trying to be a good example for my young son to fit. Healthy dad,

but part of that is having a good regimen, particularly staying hydrated, making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body that is why i use salt of the earth i drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt the earth i'm liking the pink lemonade right now it's my flavor of choice uh this is their creatine i've added this to my regimen they have it in these packets as well uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling you want to work out while you're traveling but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa it's very very uh nerve-wracking at times you have to explain hates it's not what you think it is it's creatine i'm trying to get my swell on um make sure you're staying hydrated

i have become addicted to these it's made my life a lot better i can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away i can supplement i can bring the creatine wherever i need to just put a couple packets in here before i head to the gym bring this to the gym drink out glass bottle make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc bringing this back to wash and what john arnold and i were discussing this morning is uh i think wash has publicly said he'd like to do uh interest rate lower interest rates but restrict the expansion of the balance sheet not only restrict it but begin or continue to um unwind

the fed balance sheet and we were discussing that like i think the probability of being able to execute on that is very low um and john was yeah i'm sorry yeah i was gonna say john was explaining there like you could get qe via another route, which is you push all that treasury buying onto the commercial banking system by changing the SLR and other stuff. Right, right, right. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, when you phrase it that way, you're John Arnold. Sounds like you might be onto something. Simply put, we had started, we just started something that's called RMB, but it's really QE. Basically, the Fed is going out and buying three-year treasuries instead of

selling 10-year treasuries like it should. And so now we have a little bit of this yield curve control concept of QE coming. Maybe Walsh is going to kill that at lower rates. Maybe the market is telling him that's a bad idea. So I think that's actually a good point. It's not so much that washes a hawk it's so much that he wants to stop the qe and lower rates which might be might be an error at least to how the market is looking at it but you're saying that he could do a different type of qe or a different different manifestation of qe what does john say you just do qe via another means which is you go through the commercial banking system and basically set up like shell shell qe and you change the reserve requirements for treasuries and you

highly encourage the commercial banking system to issue credit to the industrial policy. To lever up. Right. Lower reserve requirements. Let them lever up. Give them a free toaster. Tell them to go for it. We'll be here when things blow up. That's right. That makes sense. That might be what we're looking at.

What do you think the next six months looks like in terms of how all this shakes out? What are you looking for? What are the big dominoes to fall or headlines you're looking for in the geopolitical sense? Well, starting with metals, assuming there's no geopolitical news, I would say I think metals need to go sideways.

I'd like to see them go sideways for three months as opposed to dive or re-rally. I mean, believe me, I want it to re-rally, but I don't want it to do anything right now. I want it to just kind of figure itself out and let the fundamentals reassert themselves. But geopolitically, it's actually pretty digital for me geopolitically. If you read Michael Hartnett, the CIO at Bank of America, he's been pretty good with this lately. And he's of the opinion that Trump domestic policies must mirror what he's dealing with overseas. So because of his overseas difficulties,

he's essentially adopted Nixon's model. It doesn't look like Nixon's model, but it is. The first thing is Nixon, Richard Nixon, spent a lot of money domestically, and that's what Trump is doing. He did that. Nixon was basically a liberal Republican. Then what Nixon did was he put in price caps. Now, Trump hasn't put in price caps. He's not going around saying he can't raise prices. He's going around to each industry saying he can't raise prices. Lower your prices to the drug industry. Lower your prices to the utilities. He's going around industry by industry and in a populist sort of way, getting prices controlled, trying to anyway. And the third way is, well, Nixon was constantly trying to get rates lowered.

So he's Nixon, as far as I'm concerned. Good or bad, he's Nixon. Now, the problem with this is for Trump to do this, he's trying to raise money with tariffs. And I think he's going to run into a brick wall, and he's going to realize that as long as tariffs are in play, and he can't get rates lower, or at least with QE, he's going to hurt the economy at some point. And so I think he's going to have to walk back the tariffs again, taco, if you will. And he's going to have to, he's going to cave on tariffs. That's my opinion. That's my opinion. Behaviorally, he's going to cave or compromise on tariffs.

And so that's my geopolitical comment. And that will be done to rescue the domestic popularity. Now, what can save him is if we do actually get peace in the Middle East, but we do get peace in Ukraine. So I'm looking at it that way. I'm looking at, he has something he has to do that's not going to be good for, that's going to be good for the market, but bad for him. He needs something good for him that's also good for the market. So my position is, my position is the next six months, I'd like to see the markets go nowhere. And I think the Fed would like to see the markets go nowhere as well. Sideways is transitioning to something different. And let's see what the midterms bring so we can see if Trump is a lame

duck. He's a lame duck, but so we can see if he has influence anymore. But going into the midterms, do not be surprised if we see a tariff compromise, because it'll pop the markets and get him his votes back for his midterm electorate. So that's where I am geopolitically. Well, I think there's going to be a war. I think the big problem coming on the horizon is us getting China out of Latin America, believe it or not, makes Taiwan a bigger risk. The moment that Trump said Monroe Doctrine, China put out a paper. And the paper said, it used to say, we like Latin America, we like Latin America, we like Latin America, and we also own Taiwan. That's their paper, right? But this new paper that came out when Trump

made his point was, Taiwan is ours. We love Latin America. Taiwan is ours. And so the rhetoric changed and the order changed. So what they're saying is, you know, it's kind of almost like a meme now, but what they're saying is, if you can go in and you can take Maduro out, we'll do it in Taiwan. So that's the wild card. The wild card is, if Trump doesn't give in on tariffs and China struggles a little bit, maybe they do a little bit of their own domestic flexing to look powerful so my wild card is my black swan is taiwan uh my done deal is tariffs easing and my hope uh for the economy is uh a war ending over the next six months i mean not very exciting to talk about today but i think we're all kind of tired from everything that's

going on exhausting well that's uh i certainly am but like as you're explaining that and obviously the last two days everybody's been hyper focused on um on markets on gold and silver particularly but if you just look at the last three weeks you have like the ice riots in minneapolis this clawed bot thing hitting the market everybody going crazy over the ai uh obviously venezuela from a few weeks ago oh clawed bot yeah nobody's talking about it my neck of the woods but you're right that's a big deal yeah it's a big deal it's just like this whipsawing of narratives um like i woke up today i'm like what are people saying about ice in minneapolis and nobody's talking about it online you have the epstein files getting

released everybody's focused on those right now um i know i feel like i'm getting chewed up by the news yeah well it's like that's why i like talking to people like you because you focus on the long term signal and you're diving into uh research and literature that is relatively under the radar that people aren't focusing on but you get these these signals and bringing back to china taiwan i think venezuela was a very bold move as an american i think it's actually it makes sense to make that move but to your point um it was humiliating for the chinese the chinese had a delegation there that day got no warning yeah but i know we did it let me ask you a question do you think it was truly humiliating or do you think i mean it

it was humiliating let's not be let's not lie about that it was humiliating but do you think that china knew about it and had to go along with it you know what i mean i don't know i i mean i'm assuming they didn't and can you imagine just going in there and saying oh china's there let's do it because china's there to really stick it to them i mean that's pretty it's pretty embarrassing you know we just went right in there and did that with sound weapons or whatever the hell yeah the discombobulator um no but it's like you're towing a line because like to do that and then to expect china not to do anything like that's a that's a very bold calculus so maybe they won't do anything and maybe china is the paper tiger the people some people have been talking about for

for years you know maybe maybe i mean look they i mean i'm not an expert in this area but i've Talk to people that understand a lot more than I do. Like, you know, a land war in China is one thing. A land war in Asia is one thing. But an ocean war with the US? Apparently, China doesn't even really have a deep water port, or what they call it, a blue water port. So that's difficult.

I mean, they have the artillery, but they don't have the access. Like, we have California. California is a deep, long water port. China doesn't have that. so they're limited in their in their ocean projection so maybe they are the paper tiger that you saw maybe paper dragon i guess maybe is that what they would be but uh i mean to your point and i'm not sure if you've seen the reports of them retrofitting um shipping shipping uh boats with with military equipment there's like no what are they doing putting like missile systems

in like large shipping container ships uh they're repurposing oh really like freight ships is is that a sign of weakness i don't know i don't know sign of uh yeah interesting that is wild yeah this year started off hot real hot like bringing it back to midterms well we've had a good year in the last month right i mean every january has been crazy for the last four years it's just you know in war well then again it is trump it is trump you know you gotta have you gotta respect trump's chaos that's what he's all about and so i guess we could really end by like focusing in on the monetary order side of things if we're in a bit of a reprieve metals cooling off bitcoin cooling off people catching their breath but i mean

based off my conversation with josh seems like people are some countries are dashing for physical on the back end and obviously the last time we talked we talked about the gold or warrant um go to shanghai exchange and sort of that need to create that oh yeah the gold on what we have you want to talk about that again it seems like things have progressed and whatever that's yeah that's actually you know what yeah we should talk about that china i mean last time we talked china was uh taking the gold in their vaults and putting it aside on warrants and nobody knows on want for a while. But since then, since we talked last time about this, we went into the whole big thing that was picked up by that YouTuber. So thank you for that exposure, by the way.

Since that has happened, Marty, since that has happened, Hong Kong has announced that they're doing a joint venture with Shanghai to produce a cross-collateral product. So your gold in Shanghai can be used as collateral in Hong Kong with all the risks involved with that. And so it's kind of like the vaults. Look, we talked about this. We told this Fred Flintstone blockchain. That's what we called it. Is that what you called it, I think? It's Hong Kong, it's Shanghai, it's Saudi Arabia, and it's maybe two or three other places. And your gold is there, your gold is there, my gold is there. And so they're connecting these with this blockchain type of product, whether it be, I think it's Cardano that they're leaning towards right now.

Yeah, they're leaning towards Cardano. And then they're creating this basket called the unit, and the unit basically is a basket of gold plus currencies. And so you're over in Saudi Arabia, and I'm over in India, and I have a vault with my gold in it, and you have a vault with your gold in it, and we have this token that goes back and forth that says the gold's there, the gold's there, and so we trade. Well, the reason that that's not a fallacy, not just a fantasy anymore, is because Hong Kong said they're connecting with Shanghai. Now, it may seem like they should obviously connect because they're both Chinese, but the reality of it is Hong Kong's a different jurisdiction. And so, Shanghai is purely China, and Hong Kong is a gateway to the Western world.

So, you've got, this is coming from reliable sources, you know. I've been working on this for about the last six months, and Eric Young, King Kong on Twitter, or X, I should say, he provides his own perspective, and that is gold is going to be used as collateral for financing developing nations' economies. So right now, the U.S. will say, you have a treasury, I'll give you money against it. China is saying, you don't need a treasury, you can do it with gold. And so the gold in China and the gold in Hong Kong are going to be the first node that operates. So this warrants in China thing, this is, I mean, you know, I don't want to get like

too bubbly about it. This is happening. the dollar is going to be directly competed with by gold as a collateral not as a currency it's not a currency it's a collateral asset it's gold it's a pet rock it sits there it doesn't do anything great we know what it is today we know what it is tomorrow they're not ready for for uh uh immutable ledgers they need to be involved in it they're ready for oh yeah i think that's where something. You think that's worth something. We know it's worth more than a treasury because the U.S. can't be trusted. Let's use it. Let's use silver too. No, no, no, no. Stay with gold. All

right. Nobody uses it. It's useless. It's pretty. And so my gold is in my vault. Your gold is in your vault. We have a token that says that my gold's here. You have a token that says your gold's there. I buy some wheat from you. You buy some oil from me. We settle the trade in gold. And that's what the Hong Kong-Shanghai is going to be. It's a big, big, big fucking deal, Marty. And like, it's going to happen soon. And maybe that's why everybody's freaking out about metals right now. Maybe you got to get your collateral.

You know, like if Bitcoin were collateral, they'd be like, I need it tomorrow. And Bitcoin will eventually be collateral, you know, but that's the point. Everyone, I mean, I know you're not, you don't need to focus on Bitcoin, but I really think it's important to juxtapose Bitcoin with gold here. If you think central banks are going to say, let's use Bitcoin now, they're not going to say it. They all have gold. They're not going to throw it out. They're going to use what they have.

And then they're going to say, wait a minute, I have too much gold. Maybe I should buy some Bitcoin. So that's the evolution for immutable ledgers. It's like once you realize that, it's just a brick. You don't need a brick. You can just use a ledger. So anyway, gold is going to be the bridge off of treasuries and on to a more appropriate, perfect money, whether it's Bitcoin or something else. I don't know. But gold, it's gold's turn. It's gold's turn. That's it.

Well, it's interesting. You mentioned this no topography between China and Hong Kong and the fact they're starting this. i'm not sure if you caught it but tether has launched a gold back digital currency as well tether gold and so you have this sort of east west west they own as much as like a central bank now oh yeah they own something like 14 tons or something like that um 140 tons 140 tons yeah oh yeah yeah i did i did a write-up on it that's interesting i i completely spaced on that but that's that's really important now this is a different product i mean not different product but i want to get your thoughts on that i'm thinking that look i got from a reliable source not only tether is doing it but tether's major competitors are doing it two of them are and in saudi arabia

someone's doing it with silver i don't know what not saudi arabia uh dubai like that makes sense dubai blockchain crypto tax-free haven if you're going to make a product you want to make it in Dubai. Dubai is where you want to be. And so I think if you look at it from the normies or normal people that are looking at the United States, you got Trump, he's a gold bug, right? You're going, well, in February, IRAs can now have gold in them. And we do need to buy more gold because China's using it. How can we get more gold in the country without distracting from the dollar? Well, first, let's get Bitcoin under control. We got that? Okay, we got that under control. Now let's start buying gold through tether i mean i'm not outright saying it but if i were tether and isn't the ceo

of tether a former government official of tether usa bo hines yes he was working under david sacks as the cryptos are yeah so there i mean it tether buys gold whether it's for the united states or not they're going to create a product and when the united states says okay you can put gold in you're a 401k and all the boomers and generation x people like myself are like okay i'll do that well it's like well here's the stable coin tether uh to give you it's kind of like it's new it's hip but it's still gold it's you know the whole world is going to start using gold somehow because they're not happy with treasuries anymore and eventually they'll use something else but right now it's gold that's a good point i forgot all about yeah as you were describing the uh the

china hong kong gold relationship it just made me think like huh it is interesting that tether launched tether gold in last uh last year and they've accumulated so much like is that yeah like some not that i'm a big believer in 3d or 4d chess behind the scenes but it does make you a conspiratorial mind and you wonder like but it might just be because they see they see all this gold at shanghai exchange getting called a warrant and say all right we need to counter position this so like tether like we need you to launch this as well right well you know three years ago hsbc created a product and this ties into tether hsbc created a product three years ago that would be a gold-backed stablecoin now

they're they're trying to launch it for retail in asia you know thailand indonesia those areas around there and i don't know that it's caught on yet but tether just hired hsbc's best traders duh it's all happening you're right that's a good point yeah look at us solving the problems we got it we got to get it so tether's going to launch a product we got a good education you know we're able to think uh think clearly about this stuff yeah yeah we went to a pretty decent high school i know that right uh whoa wait where'd you go to university depaul university in chicago oh okay i went to st joe's university you're a trader but you went to depaul so that's pretty good were you when you were telling that arnold story were you at cbot or um were you trading

new york no i was i was in new york uh natural gas options are new york exchange so i was i'm a new york floor guy chicago floor guys are actually better trader than new york floor guys but uh we don't we don't we don't tell them that but yeah yeah i worked i worked at a man were you in chicago i was in chicago like 2009 to 2014 but i worked at a man of shooters fund which is a bunch of xc bot guys and they had uh incredible war stories from the floor oh yeah there's all kinds of good stories chicago is chicago is a very bizarre place for the trading on the floor new york is smaller in terms of trading and there's more colorful stories but chicago chicago if you look at the trading pit from this from the uh from the

from the uh whatever the observation deck it was like an ocean it was and every corner of it was was like where's waldo really fascinating stuff anyway yeah it was uh i was i mean by the time i had got into the industry it was all servers and there was a bunch of uh a bunch of nostalgia for the old days of screaming on the floor and throwing the signs yep yep yep i hear you well vince appreciate your time this afternoon i think uh it's a good update things are cooling off off it's good to recalibrate figure out where uh where things are where they may go and catch your breath every once in a while it's funny it's funny because you know here we are being relatively mellow and i'm going yeah but you know what tomorrow it's probably going to

shit something's going to shit something's going to hit the fan and you and i'll be like no break for us now but anyway beats digging ditches thanks for having thank you vince go go uh join the gold fix sub stack freaks it's a great read peace and love okay thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free

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