And you know, certainly he can, has a lot that he can say.
How can you justify two and a half billion dollars not even to build?
I mean, this is not foundation costs or grading costs or this is just decorations right, they're going to remodel it with decorate two and a half billion dollars of decorations for these existing buildings.
That's outrageous, but I said so.
He's going to audit that, but he's not going to audit the FED itself.
He's not going to audit Fort Knox's gold.
Let's focus on this other thing over here.
That really doesn't matter, except as an indication of the corruption and the um uh, just the raw power that the Federal Reserve has.
It's absolutely astounding, I mean, and and people are following this like this is a good thing and I I think it's just chaos for the sake of chaos's sake and the whole thing that's pushing all of this.
You know the drive in prices is the movement out of, like safe haven traditional markets where people played, and you know there's long-term paper markets.
This is, this is fear yeah, and again it's governments that are involved and people might think, I enjoy um, where we are in the silver price.
I think it should have taken a little bit longer.
These massive hikes that we've seen, that are really unprecedented since the 1970s, and this won't.
I don't believe this will end like the 1970s.
David, I don't think that you know if silver went to from 52 to two uh, in 1980, we're not that.
That's not going to happen.
Um there's, it's not going to happen that nothing like that's going to.
There might be some pullback and there probably will be, both in gold and silver, and there's profit taking.
That could go on, but I I think we're pushing new boundaries and price discovery every single day and this is um, a reflection of the weakness of the dollar, the weakness of the fiat system, the massive, the systemic, uh malignancy of worldwide debt, the global debt.
That is really, I mean, it's bankruptcy on paper for pretty much the entire world.
If you look at debt to gdp and we've been talking about that for a long time and it's only accelerating.
But there's there's an underlying uh, I think, story going on with silver because of the governments that I think are starting to realize that these strategic assets, and especially silver gold, things like that, they're reaching for the physical bullion and all the paper markets.
Those days are gone and thank god, I mean I, I remember february of 21, David I, they did the Wall Street bets and they did the whole the Reddit People and they did this.
You know, buy silver and uh it, it.
People were sold out of physical silver all around the country and they were trying to get the price to move by buying out the physical silver.
And people went and bought physical silver out of uh shops and one of my, my shop, was that way and we sold out and the next day the price went down.
And that's because they did, because they sold off these paper markets that they used to be able to control the price.
They sold off 1.5 times the annual supply in one day and just sold.
You know hit sell sell, sell and it dumped that price down, so the spot actually went Down.
But if you went in to go buy silver the next day, you couldn't get any.
And I thought, this is broken.
This can't last.
This is a complete exposure of what that market was.
Well, we're not there anymore.
And I don't think you can't go back.
You go to the beginning of the year when we talked about the Black Swan event, really with unintended consequences, was just the threat of tariffs and not giving clarification on whether gold or silver or commodities would be tariffed if they entered into the country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that alone started clearing out vaults and contracts were called.
It's a cascading event.
It needed to happen.
But that was the unintended consequence.
Without that, we don't have $4,600 gold on our way to 5,000.
We don't have that.
If you remember, last year, we hit an all-time high over 30 plus times.
I think almost every time I come on the air with you, there'd be a new all-time high.
That's right.
So we're just really unprecedented, it's uncharted waters, and nothing really in history lines up to what we're watching exactly.
I don't think it even rhymes.
Well, yeah, it's a very different time.
If you go back and you look at the 1980s, what was happening to that in terms of gold and silver, that was the shock that was sent through the system because of the energy, because of OPEC and the oil shortage and embargo and things like that.
That set off a wave of inflation.
And we saw that in the interest rates.
And so just in this last week, kind of to underscore that, the fact that Trump is talking about the confiscatory interest rates on credit cards.
Well, that's there because they got rid of the caps on usury.
It wasn't a federal cap, as I pointed out this week.
It was state law.
And this is a tradition that had gone back to the 1500s in English and American tradition that you would not charge more than 6% or 8%.
It'd be illegal.
That'd be considered to be usury, loan sharking, that type of thing.
But because we had such rapid inflation, first the Supreme Court and then the Congress and Supreme Court in 1978, then the Congress in 1980 did things to essentially get rid of the state usury laws.
And so now Trump wants to do just a one-year moratorium on these ridiculous rates that they're able to charge people.
It's the most amazing thing, but it really does show the character of the banking system, Tony, when you see how they come back and they say, well, if you cut the interest rates that we're allowed to charge poor people who can't pay off their balance, that would hurt the poor people.
That would restrict their credit.
It's like, how does that hurt the poor people if they're not allowed to go into debt to you for 20 to 30 percent a year?
I mean, it's a oh, and of course it would hurt us as well.
But yeah, it would hurt you, but it would not hurt the poor people.
That's almost like saying, sorry, you're not going to be able to drink your paycheck or pour it into the casino slot machine.
You know, we're going to prohibit that.
But it truly is exploitative.
And it's been there for a long time.
And so what I thought was interesting was that Trump got, first of all, Scott Bessant was confronted at one of these economic clubs about that and said, you're starting to sound like Elizabeth Warren.
And then Trump called Elizabeth Warren.
So on economic issues, we've got the Elizabeth, Trump is Elizabeth Warren.
On issues of war and peace, we've got Lindsey Graham.
That's kind of where his advisors are, right?
We're supposed to believe that he's the peace president.
He's a Republican, and yet he's looking at Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham.
They are his influences.
But when you look at the, when you're talking about paper, silver, paper gold, we're talking about stuff on the Shanghai Stock Gold Exchange, which is SLV for silver and GLD for gold.
This has been the way that a lot of people who were typically in the stock market would just move things over into silver or gold.
But I noticed what you talked about was something that was far more broken than what I saw.
I just saw, you know, I guess back in 2018 or 19, I saw that when gold was moving, the paper gold was going in a different direction or staying still.
You know, it wasn't tied to the spot market.
And I thought, why is that?
And I started looking into it and I realized I wasn't really getting gold when I bought paper gold, when I bought GLD or whatever.
And that's really the issue.
And I think it's something that we need to be concerned about as you see Tether going in and saying they're going to tokenize gold into their stable coins, right?
It's not clear how that's going to work out.
I mean, who audits that to see if they've really got the gold there?
That's the issue with the Shanghai Gold Exchange and Silver Exchange.
Do they really have the gold and silver or are they saying that they've got it and then trading paper contracts for it?
It may not be tokenized because it's not on the blockchain, but it is still securitized, just like the phony mortgage is in 2008, right?
Well, that's right.
And the beautiful thing that happened in 1974, we were, because of Gerald Ford taking over after Nixon resigned, we got the ability to own gold again.
It was legal after, you know, FDR from 1933 to 1974.
It was FDR that made it illegal for you to own gold.
You couldn't, I remember listening to Robert Kiyosaki.
He was coming back from Vietnam as a Marine and he smuggled in a Kruger grand that he bought just after we went off the gold standard.
But, you know, you mentioned something earlier that I think, and this is why I brought that up, that we can, you know, own gold and they may be making a play on that eventually.
We have to be vigilant on that.
I mean, I think you mentioned Tether and some of these stable coins and how do they back this up?
And, you know, people ask me about gold standards and all the rest, but we already really have one.
And that's because we're outside.
When you and I have a gold or silver coin or an ounce of bullion or a bar and it's recognizable, we're outside of the system.
We're our own bank.
Same thing with Bitcoin.
You know, millions of Americans are unbankable.
And you have these predatory institutions that you mentioned.
And they're all fruit of the poisonous tree.
We got this financial system that we have post-1971.
When all bets are off, when you have a fake currency, it tends to create these type of entities that prey on the lower economic strata.
You just can't get out of that cycle.
I mean, it hasn't been that long ago.
I had to use some of those things when I was between ventures and stuff.
I had to get small loans, weekly loans, stuff like that.
And it hasn't been that long ago.
And, you know, this is the reality I live in today is a lot different than it was 10 years ago when I, you know, when I, so I had to use some of those things and they're awful and they're hard to get out of.
Yeah.
So they keep that cycle.
You know, it is a trap.
It's just, you know, same thing that Trump says a one-year moratorium on this.
Well, you see that kind of stuff all the time.
You know, somebody's, you know, move your credit card balance over to everything.
You won't pay any interest for a year or whatever.
Then it shoots up higher, much higher than where you are right now.
You know, and so that kind of stuff, you know, what Trump is proposing is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
And it's not something that's going to work out for the benefit of consumers, just like his 50-year home mortgage is not going to work out for the benefit of consumers.
That would be a horrible thing to get involved in.
And price controls.
Yeah.
We know that price controls don't.
This is the 70s all over again, but just worse.
I mean, just on every scale, the corruption, The amount of bureaucracy, everything in between is amplified.
So, you know, when you the true prosperity would cure a lot of these ills and a real free market would cure a lot, but this is crony capitalism.
This is what happens when you, all these things, these entities that are tied to the central bank and everybody waiting for on bated breath on what the Fed's going to do with interest rates instead of just worrying about economic outcomes and building infrastructure, economic infrastructure, all the stuff that should be going on.
Right.
And that's why, that's why the new $100 bill is a silver, it was one ounce silver eagle.
My friend Charlie Robinson sent me a meme that said that yesterday.
I thought that's about right.
That's good.
I like that.
The new $100 bill.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everything that Trump is doing is a gimmick, right?
He's not, you know, affordability is the big issue.
That is the elephant in the room as far as these elections are going.
And 92% of people who have jobs, we're not talking about people are unemployed.
92% of people have jobs said that they're struggling, according to a recent poll.
So when you look at affordability, and Trump comes in, he wants to play some financial games to help you to get a house, he says.
But if you are, you know, if inflation is eating into people and taxes and all these different predatory things that we've got in terms of mandated insurance and this and that, all of that is there and all the government regulations that are raising the price of things and killing industry and killing manufacturing.
We look at all those regulations.
If those are there and the society is fundamentally sick and getting poor, there isn't any kind of financial game that you're going to play that's going to help anybody.
I mean, it's just something that kind of a sugar high that he's hoping people won't realize until after they voted for it.
I saw this article, Tony.
I thought this was interesting.
Egyptian army holds billions in secret cash as a country.
This is a debt deadline.
And so, you know, they've got all this money in the Egyptian army.
And the Egyptian government says, wait a minute, we got to make a debt payment to the IMF.
And they said, well, we're not telling you where the money is.
You know, all the money that Trump is funneling over to the Pentagon.
And he loves to brag about his tax increase as if people fill in the blank and they think, well, he's going to use this tariff revenue to get rid of the income tax.
No, that's not going to happen.
He's going to use it to pay down the debt.
No, that's not going to happen.
He says, I'll give it back to you as a check.
That's not going to happen either.
He's talking about how let's increase the new record defense budget.
We just went over a trillion dollars for the first time.
Let's make it one and a half trillion.
Yeah, so we are flush with cash now.
It's amazing, but when you watch him, you can start to see the lines of how this guy bankrupted six casinos, can't you?
Well, you could, it has the hallmark of everything that is short term.
Yeah.
Everything is short.
This isn't long-term planning.
Again, not building financial infrastructure, not incentivizing the free market.
We're not doing any of that.
This is crony capitalism.
And you see the breakdown of institutions.
You just mentioned the Egyptian army and the hoarding of cash.
By the way, keeping it from the IMF, which was born out of Bretton Woods in 1944.
This was the old economic world order that is coming to an end.
There's the new institutions are being born, new factions are being born.
That's a key indicator, especially since we went off the petrodollar.
I mean, it wasn't an official thing.
We just lost it, right?
In 2024, that agreement pretty much lapsed.
And people have been asking me, is Venezuela about repropping up the petrodollar?
I'm like, no, I don't think that it is.
We're going in a completely different direction.
And maybe they don't even know where they're going, but it's the, you know, the digital currency certainly on the rise, the off-ramps for the stable coins and all that.
We can, we could, we'll be talking about that in the months and years to come.
No, that's institutional breakdown is what you're watching with the Egyptian issue.
And I think that's going to start happening more and more.
Where, you know, the hoarding of cash, the hoarding of commodities, because the bracing from impact, what comes next?
We don't have trust.
And the trust is diminishing.
And trusting us as far as being the world's reserve currency in the stable country that we were perceived to be is completely off the table.
Everything is coming unraveled because we're here at the end of this fourth turning.
I just saw a clip.
I can't remember the woman's name.
We've seen her on this Ukraine thing several times.
She's notable because she's one of the youngest people in terms of leadership.
I mean, we have this gerontocracy now, you know, ruled by really old people.
She's in like her 30s, I think.
And she came out and said, she's been the spokesperson for the EU in terms of Ukraine and things like that.
She came out and she said, well, I think when we look at what's going on, we just need to have a drink.
This is her remedy.
It's so bad.
I think the only way we can cope with this is just to get drunk and drop out of reality.
And I think that's a harbinger of what's coming, don't you?
I think that about sums it up.
When they've reached, they've run out of tools, whatever's in their tool bag, they've run out of.
And I think you'll see that a lot more where just people just shrug.
That's why we don't talk about the elephant in the room.
We don't talk about the debt anymore.
Nobody really talks.
You get like one, you get Thomas Massey.
We'll talk about it.
This is not even talked about by the so-called conservative movement.
I think that you covered that well this week.
Conservatism is dead.
It is.
Modern conservatism.
This isn't Russell Kirk.
This isn't Pat Buchanan.
This isn't any of those.
There's no intellectual heft behind any of this.
This is group think, cultish behavior, and parroting headlines and things that are void of any sort of thought.
And it's really sad to watch because that's the camp that I came out of.
I mean, I'm more of a traditional Edmund Burke or something type of.
Yeah, no, it's not any principles.
They're just trying to conserve the status quo.
The status quo is given to us by the liberals who seek to destroy us economically and in terms of liberty and the rest of this stuff.
But you've talked so much about the massive debt that we have that all these different countries have.