All Episodes
Previous Next
May 1, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:07:04
Christopher Olson reveals the power of GOLD and precious metals TRAPS to avoid
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome everybody to the Health Ranger Report.
This is Mike Adams, Health Ranger here.
Today we're joined by a very special guest who's an expert in gold and silver, among other topics.
And his name is Chris Olson.
He's with TreasureIslandCoins.com.
Now, as a quick disclaimer before I bring him on, Treasure Island Coins did sponsor Ten of my podcasts previously.
I mentioned them in the podcast because they're really a fantastic source for gold and silver coins.
That sponsorship is over.
So now that that's completed, I've invited him on to talk without any kind of sponsorship arrangement about the market.
Gold and silver coins, how to avoid getting ripped off.
Why gold and silver?
Which is the better buy, silver or gold?
And, you know, what about paper contracts versus physical?
We're going to talk about all those concepts today with Chris Olson, the president of Treasure Island Coins.
Chris is a patriot and a Christian and also believes in the Constitution and all the other good things that we believe in.
So, Chris, thank you for joining our show.
It's great to have you on.
Thanks, Mike.
Great to be here.
Well, this is the first time we've done the interview together with you, so I always like to ask people, give us a little background.
Tell us just a bit about yourself and about your company, and then we'll just jump right into the questions.
Sure.
So Treasure Island Coins was founded back in 1976 by my father, Greg Olson.
And I've really been in the business ever since I was just a toddler, you could say.
He got his start right before the big boom in the gold and silver price in 1980.
And so I remember walking around his shop here in Fargo, North Dakota.
We're the largest coin shop in Fargo.
And I remember back in those days seeing just lines and lines of people going out the door and down the hall at the mall here in Fargo.
All the people coming to sell their silver when silver went up to almost $50 an ounce when the Hunt brothers were attempting to corner the market and start a new currency.
So that's kind of my earliest memories as a young boy, seeing my mom and dad at work doing just tons of transactions and very long hours.
And so I joined on full-time in the summer of 2000.
About eight years later, I got promoted to head of operations.
Now, here in 2012, I became CEO and president.
I've been on board officially full-time now for a little over 20 years now.
Like I said, we've been around since 1976.
That's a lot of experience in the industry.
Tell us a little bit about your personal beliefs and philosophies.
Sure.
So, you know, some of my earliest memories.
My dad has always been a hard money guy, and he was telling me about the Federal Reserve System and the system of false money and the counterfeit behind it since I was just a little kid.
And, you know, that really kind of went with the territory.
He was a coin dealer, a coin collector.
He was a bullion dealer.
And so he's always been, he'd always been a very conservative guy.
I would ride around in the car with him listening to Rush Limbaugh on our trips down to Minneapolis when we'd be taking a truckload of silver down to the refinery.
So I got a lot of exposure very early on to those types of concepts.
And so my dad has always been Explaining to me just what money historically has been, why we use gold and silver for money as opposed to, you know, rocks or glass or anything, you know, paper, that type of thing.
So I'm a hard money advocate and I've always believed and had a conservative mindset and I also believe that You know, from a political perspective, that the government was founded by the people and for the people, and that it's a servant, not a master.
And so, just like we have an inversion of authority in the money system, we have an inversion in authority with government as well, where you have bureaucracy managing government.
The elected representatives, you have bureaucracy managing the people.
And so everywhere we look, we have an inversion.
And so that's something that I've always really opposed throughout my life is this concept of counterfeits and inversions.
Now, the average person thinks that this is money.
They think this is money.
This is garbage.
Real money is something that holds value.
Paper money is just fiat currency, right?
But I was shocked when I started hearing from people About how few people have actually ever owned physical gold and silver.
It was really shocking to me, because it's something I've practiced for 30 years, I think, or so.
I started buying gold and silver in the 1990s, when I think gold was under 300 an ounce or something at the time, and silver was like $5.50, you know?
And I've never sold any of that, so I still have all of that, plus whatever else I've accumulated.
But to a lot of people, it's a completely new concept.
Why is that a struggle mentally for people to realize that gold and silver hold value and that it's real money and a real asset?
Well, I think the root of that is that our system has been geared on basically this asset, this sort of synthetic asset, which is ultimately an IOU and a debt.
And so the Federal Reserve System was created for the benefit of the financial system and the financiers and the major corporations.
And so people are really raised in a system where fiat currency is the only way to do business.
And the effects of inflation are very, very hard for people to notice or to understand.
So it's really a matter of education.
But if you think about it, it's only been since 1964 that we haven't had silver coins in our pocket.
Prior to 1964, all your dimes and all your quarters, they were 90% silver by weight.
All your half dollars, your nickels were made out of nickel, your pennies were made out of copper.
So we used to have a commodity money that we carried, and I think most...
history of that.
So people do remember it.
But the reason that people have such a hard time thinking about gold or silver is the fact that a long time ago, when the Federal Reserve system was instituted, it was really done so for the benefit of the major corporations and the financial system to have a fiat currency that they could it was really done so for the benefit of the major corporations and the financial And so
Everything in our lives is built to interact with that system and with that currency, whether it's the bank, whether it's paying your electric bill, whether it's doing any kind of business.
A lot of that can be laid at the feet of legal tender laws that require you to accept something, an instrument that is labeled Officially, this is a $1, so it's payable for all debts, private and public.
So legal tender laws have enabled fiat currency to take over.
Yet, at the same time, most people don't realize that when they hold dollars or they, quote, save dollars or earn dollars, that they are losing those dollars constantly.
The erosion is happening every second of every day because of the Fed money printing, so the purchasing value of the dollars they hold is losing ground.
It's kind of like trying to walk up an escalator that's coming down.
You know, you're walking hard to try to get up, but the whole system is rigged against you, pushing you back down, and people don't understand, well, why is food more expensive?
Why does inflation exist at all?
And it's because of the increase in the money supply, or the fiat currency supply, technically, and it's theft.
It's theft from the people.
And it's been going on so long that it's normalized and people don't even understand that that is confiscation of your money.
It's theft by the Federal Reserve.
It's incredible.
Well, and that goes right to the root of why have wages been increasing since the mid-70s but purchasing power hasn't?
Why does it take...
Two parents now to go to work just to earn a living wage for a family, where in the past it could be just one.
And so it's this very slow, very subtle transfer of power and purchasing power from the middle class to really ultimately the upper class and the international financial institutions.
Yes, and a good way for people to really wrap their heads around that is to think about the number of labor hours it would take to earn enough money to buy a car.
So in the 1970s, the labor hours required to buy a car might be one-third of what it is today, something in that realm.
Or how many labor hours to buy a house?
Today it's double or triple what it was then.
So even if you're earning more, even if wages are going up, like you said, Chris, the purchasing power isn't there.
But if you had bought gold back in the 70s, you know, you would have conserved that purchasing power.
It buys the same stuff that it bought then, even though today in dollar denominations the metals are worth more because the dollars are worth less.
That's really what it is.
Exactly.
And it's a form of money.
It's an asset that really is hard to control.
It's hard to confiscate.
It's hard to seize.
But, you know, I remember when I first came on board full-time here at Treasure Island back in 2000, I was selling Krugerrands over the front counter for about $280 a coin.
And today, they're about $2,000 a coin.
So...
That's quite an asset that you can use to preserve your wealth.
And you know, that's really what it's for.
I've been explaining this in some of my podcasts, that this is about wealth preservation or asset protection at this point.
But the mindset of people today is FOMO, fear of missing out.
They want to be in the market because they see the market going up.
They want a return, or at least a perceived return, on their investment, even though money in the stock market isn't real until you sell.
And even then, it's still in fiat currency, so it's still losing value.
But there is a psychological resistance to preserving wealth.
People want to earn something on their money, even when they're risking losing all of it.
Because if the market collapses, which is going to happen at some point, it's so overvalued, people could lose 50% or 70% or, like in the dot-com crash, 99% of certain stocks.
But why in your mind, why is there such resistance to this idea of just protecting your assets, not losing anything, when people always just want to make more in a risky way?
Well, I think that it's kind of a trickle-down effect.
Our entire economy is built on taking massive amounts of risk and constant expansion and money printing.
And so it requires an ever-expanding pool of participants in order for the system to not collapse.
It's a con game.
So you have to get new people to keep buying in, and the people that are there, you have to convince them to never leave.
So, there's an interest from the very top all the way down into encouraging exactly that type of behavior to keep your money in the system, to keep your money invested, so to speak.
And, of course, there's a proper place for that in a properly functioning free market economy, but unfortunately, we don't have that.
And so, the natural human instincts are being diverted into a system that ultimately doesn't serve No, but the investment bankers are better off.
They...
Yeah, they get to pad their pockets, and all of the consultants that work in the IPO industry and so on, they get away like bandits.
But let's talk about ways to own gold and silver.
So I'd like you to address, some people think they can buy paper contracts.
And then they're owning gold, but it's just paper.
And I mean, gosh, look at the recent news.
JP Morgan just admitted to massive fraud.
They're paying almost a billion dollar fine.
And I think admitting to five felonies for rigging the gold market.
So, you know, that tells you something.
But talk about paper contracts versus physical versus also gold mining stocks, too, because some people have a lot of interest in gold mining stocks.
Sure.
So, you know, like paper contracts are, you've got a few different types.
You have the regular futures contracts that are traded on the COMEX, the commodity exchange.
And then you've also got OTC gold forwards, which are basically a derivative of some type of a bank in the London bullion market system.
We use paper contracts every day as part of our business model, but it's not the actual product that we trade.
We use it to hedge the price risk.
And so we're constantly buying and selling paper contracts.
And sometimes we take delivery, but most of the time we're just netting that out.
And so that's typically what the futures contracts and the paper contracts are meant for.
And incidentally, that's also where the spot price comes from.
And so the spot price of gold or silver is a very important concept.
People talk about it a lot of time, but they don't know what it is.
We get asked that question a lot, like, how can I buy gold or silver for spot?
Right.
You know, where is that price?
Why is it used?
And ultimately, what the spot price is, is it's based on the most actively traded current futures contracts.
So if you wanted to buy gold or silver for spot, you would have to buy a futures contract.
And then you would have to wait for it to mature.
And then you would have to pay for all of it and you'd be buying 100 ounces of gold or 5,000 ounces of silver and the gold would come in the form of a big 100 ounce bar or the silver would come in the form of five 70 pound silver bars.
So if you want to buy silver at spot You have to buy it in the form of five 70-pound silver bars, which you then get a receipt for in a warehouse in New York.
So now you've got to move it.
You've got to take delivery of it.
But that's what the contracts involved.
Owning precious metals, it's all about the quality of your custodian.
There are different ways to own gold or silver, like an ETF, like the GLB or the SLV. But in that case, you don't actually own the gold or the silver.
You're owning shares of a corporation whose prospectus says that the bulk of their assets are going to be gold or silver.
So those shares could track gold or silver, but you don't actually own the gold or silver.
And It's always some counterparty risk involved and that's one of the benefits of owning bullion is you can remove counterparty risk from the scenario.
Well, that's exactly the thing.
A friend of mine says, if you can't touch it, you don't own it.
And a lot of our readers are very concerned about collapse scenarios.
And frankly, most of the world is waking up to this reality now all of a sudden.
Grid down failures, civil war, international war, nuclear war, whatever.
Earthquakes, who knows?
Solar flares.
If you don't have the silver and the gold in your possession when whatever hits the fan, You're probably never going to get it because, like you said, it might be in a warehouse in New York.
It might be in a corporation.
You own shares of the corporation.
The corporation says it's got the gold, but you can't go get that gold.
You don't have a right to that gold.
Owning it physically is a key advantage.
And just about the paper, I understand that you might buy and sell paper contracts as a gold company.
A dealer because the right kind of futures contracts can reduce your price risk in the same way that a farmer who's, let's say, growing corn could purchase futures contracts to reduce his price risk of what happens to his corn.
So that's a way to use contracts to reduce risk.
It might be a better comparison to compare us to the grain elevator, which is kind of what we're like.
Got it, right, right.
Right, okay, so the farmer is more like the gold mine that's mining it, and then you're the grain elevator, so you need to reduce risk.
But the average end user, the customer, they don't need to deal in paper contracts.
All they would do is increase their risk, probably.
Right, and that's not the goal of most people.
Most people who are looking to own gold and silver, they want to actually own it, and it's about You think of it as an insurance policy against systemic risk and against inflation.
The asset itself is one side of the coin, but the other side of the coin is perfecting the security, the quality of the custodian, and the best possible security is to own it yourself.
If you can...
Have it in your own physical custody and possession.
Then you know exactly where it is and it's under your full control.
The next best Situation is going to be a very trusted custodian, like a non-banking institution that specializes in holding bullion for people.
And that's something that we also operate as a depository here in Fargo that is specifically crafted to individuals being able to hold precious metals at that location.
But in that type of a scenario, you're going to want to know a lot about that company.
You're going to want to ask a lot of questions because there are many companies out there that you cannot trust and you should not trust.
Yeah, I want to talk about that in a minute, but just to your point, many people who live in, let's say, an apartment in a city, and let's say an apartment in Portland, right?
And they're worried about riots for good reason.
They're worried about their apartment building being burned down or theft or Exactly.
Yep.
Well, that makes a lot of sense.
Let's talk about, but just to wrap up your thoughts on spot price.
So in the marketplace, there's actually a premium on physical coins right now.
So tell us about that premium and how that works with supply and demand.
So it's just like the underlying commodity price of gold or silver.
Like, you know, why is silver $28 one day and then $23 the next day and maybe $35 a few months later?
It all has to do with supply and demand.
So the underlying metal price is affected by supply and demand and also the premium for finished product is affected by supply and demand.
And so there may be only a certain amount of Krugerrands or a certain amount of Silver Eagles to go around.
Or, for example, my favorite product, which is the 90% silver coins, the quarters and the dimes that are minted in 1964 and prior.
There's a finite supply of that type of silver.
And so it has a value of its own.
And so that premium represents Both the scarcity of that particular form of silver or gold, the demand for that particular form of silver or gold, and the cost to acquire or produce it.
And so like a U.S. Silver Eagle, to get those from the United States Mint, you have to buy them 25,000 ounces at a time.
You have to truck them, and you don't get to pay the spot price of silver to buy them.
The Mint itself requires a fee per coin to purchase those that covers their costs to produce.
So the premiums that you pay above spot represent all the costs that go into the production and the transportation and the insuring and the cost of money for that particular product, as well as the supply and demand of that particular product.
So you've got two things affecting the premium of any type of coin or bar.
So what are premiums running right now for silver and gold?
Roughly.
Well, premiums on silver, they're going to range anywhere from 10% over the spot price of silver right now to, you know, 25% is going to be kind of the average premium, depending on the form and the quantity of metal that you purchase, and that is over the spot price.
And likewise, Much of that product, if you were looking to sell it to a precious metals dealer, they're also going to be paying a premium above spot for that.
The gold products right now are typically trading in the range of 2% to 5% over the spot price.
And it all depends on exactly what kind of coin you want and the volume involved as well.
No.
And it's a little higher these days than it typically has been.
Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that too because, of course, a lot of people are realizing their paper money is going to become worthless at some point.
You know, when I look at the Fed's balance sheet and it just went up by $6 trillion, I'm like, buy silver at any price because, you know, the dollar, I mean, it's a blowout.
It's a blowout.
You know, these MMT theorists think that they can just print money forever.
Doesn't work that way.
The history of the world has shown us hundreds of times that when you debase the currency, I mean, even going back to Rome.
When they were physically debasing the coins at that time, eventually it ends in collapse, collapse of the currency.
And then everybody loses who's left holding that currency.
So it's kind of obvious to any of us who can do math where this is all headed.
We just don't know when exactly.
But the outcome is never in doubt.
That's why I say people don't worry about the fluctuations so much of gold and silver, because once you're in it, then the fluctuations stop.
You now have ounces.
And stop thinking about your metals in terms of dollars.
Start thinking about metals in terms of ounces, right?
Yep, exactly.
It's a long-term insurance policy, ultimately.
And the analogy I like to use, basically, it's kind of your time preference or your trust in the future.
And if you had a time machine in front of you, and you're going to step into that time machine, and you're going to warp one year into the future, and I gave you a briefcase that's got a million dollars worth of cash in it, or say $800,000 worth of gold in it, which briefcase would you take through in the time machine?
Exactly.
Just alter the variables in that thought experiment.
What about six months in the future?
What about five years in the future?
What about a million cash and 500,000 worth of gold?
And most of the time, when you think about it, that time machine, if you're stepping through it, you want to bring the gold, not the paper.
Absolutely.
Yeah, you might show up in the future with a briefcase full of dollars and just get laughed at.
Ha!
That was obsolete five years ago, you know.
Yeah.
But let's talk about one of the reasons why I really appreciate your company.
And, you know, I'm very particular about who I ever do sponsorship kind of deals with.
And as you were a sponsor of our podcast, that was because In my dealings with your company and also my family members, you've had very good pricing, but more importantly, honest transparency about what you have in stock and when you can ship it.
Now, you don't always have everything in stock, but you know when you're going to get it and you know when you're going to ship it.
I've seen a lot of bait-and-switch operations online where retailers will say they've got these coins, US Mint coins, at a bargain price.
You call them up and then it's just this Run around bait and switch operation.
They don't really have the coins, can't really get them at that price, and they want to sell you something else.
So talk to us a little bit about some of the shenanigans that happen in the retail precious metals marketplace.
Well, that's one of the things that you want to watch out for is any transaction involving precious metals, you want to have a firm delivery date on that transaction.
And so they should be able to tell you whether that product is live and in stock, or if it's a couple weeks out, they should disclose that up front.
What we do is when we sell precious metals, coins, or bars of any kind, we're only selling product that we either have in stock or we have at some stage in the lines of production so something that's coming from a trusted mint and we're going to get an allocation say next Tuesday and then it's going to be on a truck and we'll have it on Friday we'll start selling into that allotment and put people in line and we're going to give you an indication of when we estimate that's going to ship of course sometimes there's a delay but by
and large we have a pretty accurate system where we can give you a very good idea if you can't get that from the person that's trying to sell you precious metals You need to be wary.
And if somebody has habitual delays, you know, repeated delays, that's the sign of something where you've got to watch out for.
And there's a number of precious metals companies here in the last 20 years that we have watched go under with other people's money.
Tolving was one of them.
He was a very popular website.
Hans Tolving out of California and he was selling precious metals for cheaper than any other dealer in the industry with free overnight shipping on everything and this guy there was no way that he was making money and at the end of the day he ran out of money but he didn't run out of his customers money and so there were millions of dollars worth of orders that went unfulfilled where he was robbing Peter to pay Paul And so that's a situation that happens frequently in
this industry.
Northwest Territorial Mint is another example.
And so that's actually why the CFTC had model legislation passed years ago at the state level.
Are you in California?
Because the lights keep going out.
Yeah, no, it's actually, I'm not in a very well-lit room here, and my computer monitors are what are half of my lighting situation right now.
I see, okay.
And they keep going to sleep.
Anyway, the CFTC had model state legislation that they put forward that got passed in most states, and finally it became part of Dodd-Frank, where ultimately, if you are selling precious metals, You have to deliver it within 28 days of payment or the CFTC can come after you.
So the feds are enabled to go after guys like this who take payment and then it's been six weeks and they still haven't delivered?
Well, guess what?
You've got a lawsuit on your hands.
That guy's now breaking the law.
And so that's something you really have to watch out for.
Are there retailers that are still violating that rule right now?
I've heard of a few that There are sometimes red flags you got to watch out for.
I also had a bad experience a few years ago with a retailer.
I don't even recall who it was, but it was one of the popular ones at the time.
I had purchased, I think, 500 silver coins, you know, 500 ounces of silver.
And I was assured it was going to be U.S. Mint silver.
But when I got the shipment, it wasn't U.S. Mint.
It was all this random...
Like, what is this stuff?
And some of it was tarnished, and it was like no-name coins.
I'm like, how am I going to unload these one day?
No one's going to trust what these are.
So I got taken by a little bit of bait-and-switch.
Yeah, that's very odd.
That should never happen.
You know, somebody could make an honest mistake, but if that was not a mistake, that would never happen with us.
You know, if we made that kind of mistake, what I would have done is given you, I would have sent you a UPS label.
I would have had the truck come pick that package up from you.
And the moment that package got scanned, I would have sent you the replacement.
Because if we make a mistake like that, we're going to fix it.
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
No, I was just really surprised by this.
But in the end, it was like, well, it's still silver, so I'll take it.
Maybe I'll melt it down one day and do something different.
But we do have to be careful in this industry.
For some reason, the precious metals industry does attract a lot of charlatans.
And I've also seen the bait and switch where they get a customer on the phone who wants to just buy, typically like an older lady, let's say.
All they want to do is buy gold and silver, and then pretty soon the salesperson is pushing all these numismatic collectible coins at very high markups.
I've seen that happen a lot.
And often with the story that it's going to be confiscation proof.
Right, right.
Protected from future government confiscation.
Yeah, let's talk about confiscation.
That is a concern that people have, because it did happen in the history of America.
But then again, you know, once you own the metals, it's off the grid.
Who's dumb enough to show up and turn it over to the government after you own it?
Yeah, you know, that's a...
That's a really good topic.
People ask me a lot about the confiscation that happened in 1933.
And the way that that started was that the president issued an executive order, and it was eventually followed by an act of Congress that made owning gold illegal in the United States.
Hard to believe, but people went along with that.
And so in 1933, it became unlawful to trade gold contracts or gold coins or to even deal in it.
You had to turn in all your gold to your local Federal Reserve Bank and get Federal Reserve notes.
But you have to keep in mind that at the time...
The dollar was backed by gold.
And so the reason for this order was to concentrate all the supply in the United States into the hands of the Federal Reserve System.
Because at this time, there were many national banks around the country and state chartered banks where banks could actually issue their own bank notes.
The law at that time allowed them to do that and they could issue bank notes on the basis of gold that they had on deposit.
And so the Fed wanted all that gold to be on deposit with them.
And so People turned in their gold, but it was primarily aimed at the big institutions.
The banks and the major corporations that had a lot of gold on their balance sheet, the Fed wanted them to turn it in.
So with the executive order, all the regulated institutions, just like that, they did it.
As far as individuals went, a lot of individuals voluntarily did it and brought their gold in for about $20 an ounce.
And then later on, they raised the price of gold to over $30.
But the thing is that nobody was ever actually convicted under that law of ever not turning in their gold.
There was one person charged, but he was never convicted.
So it's not something that people need to be too worried about, I don't think, in my personal opinion.
A lot of people talk about it, and like I said, it's a scare tactic, because then a lot of times they're going to talk about Well, but if you buy this kind of gold, the government will never confiscate it.
This numismatic form of gold that I can earn an extra 10% premium on, now it's going to be confiscation proof.
But that's not proven, that's not for sure, and very, very unlikely.
Well, I always tell people the easiest way to not get your gold confiscated is to hide it.
I mean, what, you think the government's going to come into your house and tear out all the drywall and break up all the concrete blocks and all the places that you've hidden your gold bars under your frozen soup in the freezer?
No.
They're not going to do that.
They don't have the resources for that.
They would start with the ETFs.
If they wanted to do that, they would start with the ETFs.
They would start with the big depositories and the big custodians.
But why would they want to do that unless they were intending to back the dollar with gold again?
Right.
So that's the scenario where that would actually occur.
So OK, let me ask you another question to shift gears here a little bit.
And, you know, we didn't talk about this beforehand, so I apologize if I'm surprising you about this, but Bitcoin.
A lot of people are pushing Bitcoin as, quote, digital gold.
And, you know, I've been very critical of that in my own podcast because I think that's insane.
The word digital and gold are contradictory.
Gold is gold because it's physical, because it's an element.
Everything digital can vanish with one power outage.
I mean, gosh, a couple of days ago, 911 services went down nationwide because Microsoft had a glitch in their server.
So there goes all your digital whatever.
It's gone, you know.
But I've even seen some gold dealers, I'm not going to mention any names, like precious coin dealers.
I think I heard one of them running an ad telling people call in to set up a Bitcoin digital gold IRA or something.
I'm like, this is insane!
What are your thoughts on, you know, I mean, we can all be pro-cryptocurrency in theory and so on, but in terms of the claim that Bitcoin is digital gold, what do you make of that?
Well, I think when people call it digital gold, what they're referring to is the fact that Bitcoin, it's going to be a limited supply just like gold.
And also it can't be counterfeited just like gold.
You really can't just produce gold out of nothing.
So I think that's where they're coming at from that.
But I think Bitcoin is a very big experiment.
I'm no expert on it.
There's a lot of people who are very bullish on Bitcoin, a lot of people that I respect, and then other people that take a contrarian view.
I think it's very interesting.
But like you say, it's not very useful in a collapse scenario.
It may be useful under certain collapse scenarios, but imagine an EMP. Imagine something where you do have very limited internet connectivity.
I don't know what you would do in that type of a scenario.
Right.
I can see its usefulness if you need to get out of, let's say, Venezuela and the country or China.
Let's say the country, the government won't let you move money through the banking system or physical gold or anything like that.
You could slap a bunch of dollars into a Bitcoin wallet.
You could then physically leave the country, relocate in Switzerland or wherever, reopen your Bitcoin wallet and you've got access to your funds.
I can absolutely see the utility in that, but as a former software engineer and owner of a software company, I can tell you that the supply of Bitcoin is not limited because the whole thing is run on software, and software can be changed at any time.
So there is no limit to it.
And they're forking Bitcoin all the time, new forms of Bitcoin, which means they can change the limits all the time.
So the scarcity argument actually falls flat versus with gold, the scarcity is physical.
Because it's hard to get gold out of the ground.
It takes work.
It takes effort.
It takes energy.
It takes labor.
It takes investment money.
That's never going to change.
No one is ever going to create a magical, like, gold synthesizer machine.
You know?
Believe me, they've tried.
It's the same time machine experiment.
Let's say it's 10 years.
I mean...
I don't know if I would want to have a million dollars worth of regular Bitcoin versus $100,000 worth of regular gold because I have no idea in 10 years where the current version of Bitcoin might be.
It might lose all confidence for whatever reason.
You've got quantum computing.
You've got other technology that could possibly be breaking encryption in the future at some point.
So, I mean, I think it's an interesting tool that is good for short-term use, but as a long-term investment, I don't think it's proven and so I'm skeptical myself.
Let's move on to gold versus silver for people who are looking for not only protecting their assets, but perhaps looking for the best deals in terms of what is underpriced the most, what has been suppressed the most.
There's this thing called gold to silver ratio, and under this ratio, silver looks really undervalued right now.
Do you concur with that, or what's your take?
Yeah, you know, the gold-silver ratio is a great indicator.
And if you look at the history of the gold-silver ratio, you can see that we're kind of close to all-time highs.
So what is the gold-silver ratio?
It's the number of ounces of silver that you could buy with one ounce of gold.
So right now the ratio I believe is about 80 to 1.
One ounce of gold is going to get you 80 ounces of silver.
Not too long ago it was well over 100 where an ounce of gold could get you 100 ounces of silver.
Or more.
I don't remember exactly what the exact number was right off the top of my head.
But throughout history, that number has been more like 20 ounces of silver to one ounce of gold.
Sometimes 16 ounces of silver, maybe even less.
So what is the real exchange rate value between silver and gold?
What should it be?
Right now, nobody knows.
There's a lot of people who have some really good research on this topic, like Ted Butler, for one, where they say they think it should be 12 to 1 or 10 to 1 on the basis of the amount of silver that's in existence compared to gold.
The thing about silver is that we're losing a little bit of silver every year.
Because it doesn't get recovered through recycling.
It gets consumed in industrial processes.
So we're constantly losing our silver, but our gold, we always recycle it.
So that ratio should be tightening up.
But instead, the price of silver compared to gold is very undervalued.
You know, like if we took the price of gold right now and...
Say we took a 40 to 1 ratio, we'd have almost $50 silver right now.
In fact, last time gold was at these prices, silver was spiking up to $50.
So compared to the price of gold, you've got two choices.
Either silver goes up or gold goes down.
And the way things are going with the dollar itself, I don't see gold going down in the long term.
What do you think explains this unusual historical disparity?
Is gold overpriced or is silver underpriced?
Or both?
I don't think gold is overpriced.
I do think that silver is underpriced.
And the reason for that is that it's a very thinly traded market.
And it goes back to what you said at the beginning, where the amount of people that actually have gold or silver as an investment is minuscule.
I think it's less than 1% of investable wealth in this country is in any form of precious metals.
So you don't have a lot of demand on this pool of silver, and it's also a very easily manipulated market.
And so that's something that's been happening now for decades.
There's been a lot of manipulation in the silver market, and that's a topic for another interview.
But you can just do the research yourself and see how much manipulation has occurred.
And all of that, of course, is based on The fiat money system, the leverage, the credit, the amount of credit that can just be issued.
So it's a lot of smoke and mirrors about what is this worth, what is that worth, and people fighting a war that's basically currency wars, and silver's a casualty.
Well, the number one thing I like about gold and silver is that the Fed can't print them.
That's like...
There you go.
So it's going to hold some value.
Here's a question I get from people, and I'd like you to address this.
People say, okay, suppose I buy gold and silver...
In preparation to preserve assets during some kind of collapse.
And then things go bad in society.
The United States of America ceases to exist.
The dollar collapses.
The currency collapses.
The USA breaks apart like the old Soviet Union did.
Now I'm sitting on gold and silver.
How do I turn that into the new usable currency?
What's the process to get it back into a bank account where people can use it to shop for groceries?
Things like that.
Well, in a systemic collapse scenario, how do you turn your gold and silver into money?
The answer to that question is you don't, because it is money.
So in the initial stages of a collapse scenario, you would be using it as a form of barter.
And in any type of chaotic situation like that, people quickly figure out What is a good store of value and what's a good medium of exchange?
So it could be food or rations.
It could be lead or bullets, for example.
It could be weapons.
But gold and silver throughout history have always been the ultimate medium of exchange because they meet all of the criteria for money.
But if you're in a situation where In the future, you're going to see a new currency unveiled.
It's again, you're going to have...
Every world currency has some component of gold attached to it.
That's why the Federal Reserve has 8,000 metric tons, actually more than 8,000 metric tons of gold on their balance sheet.
Gold remains the cornerstone of every currency in the world.
Every currency has some amount of gold.
So if there ever is a collapse, if there ever is a reset, reset, you can bet that the future revaluation and the future international banking system is going to involve some agreement on the value of gold and the parity of the different world currencies on the basis of the amount of gold on the balance sheet of each of those entities.
And so in the United States, that might result in a requirement that gold be valued at, say, 15,000 US dollars, because you've got this many dollars and you've got this much gold.
So how much dollars is it going to take to get that gold off of your Fed balance sheet?
In any scenario where you have a currency that goes down, a new currency is going to emerge, and it's always going to be based on some kind of standard of value historically.
You know, that's a really good point.
These central bankers, publicly, they say gold is archaic and gold is pointless, but then privately, they're all hoarding gold.
Nations are hoarding gold.
China's been buying gold.
The US, Germany, Bank of Japan, everywhere, the EU. Everybody understands that ultimately it all comes down to gold, whether you're a central bank or a nation.
And if you have to have a new currency at any point, because let's face it, every fiat currency eventually fails, but when it comes time to have a new currency, it's got to be backed by something or there's no faith in it.
And fake currencies, i.e.
fiat currencies, are rooted entirely in faith if they're not backed by anything.
And I think that faith is going to be hard to come by when people lose everything in the next collapse.
I mean, who's going to trust the system?
You know?
Oh, here's purple money instead of green money.
People are going to laugh at it.
Well, we used to insist on honest money, and it was once Congress's job to regulate the value of money, to regulate the amount of gold that a dollar was defined as.
And even in the beginning of the Federal Reserve, they required Federal Reserve notes be backed by 40% gold on the balance sheet of the Fed.
That was the original deal.
But that number just kept coming down.
They made excuses.
Let's make it 30%.
Let's make it 20%.
Let's make it 5%.
Let's make it nothing under Nixon.
And so with Nixon, they ended the convertibility of gold.
But they still have it on their balance sheet.
Why?
Like you said, every major country in the world is increasing its reserves of gold on their balance sheets.
Why?
Why does the Federal Reserve value its gold at $42.22 per ounce?
Why is that?
And when you look at the Fed's balance sheet and you look how big it is, and when you want to say, well, maybe the Fed is bankrupt, maybe the Fed's underwater, well, maybe $42.22 isn't the real value of gold.
They've got that much gold.
All they need to do is revalue it and the Fed's balance sheet becomes whole again.
But that's going to change the entire geopolitical power structure because every other country in the world that has a massive gold reserve in their central bank, they're going to have an instant inflation of their purchasing power as well.
And that's what the United States is trying to avoid is giving this purchasing power to holders of gold rather than holders of dollars.
Right, where they can control it.
There have been some interesting developments over the last few years that indicate even states are planning on some kind of fiat currency collapse.
The state of Texas passed a law to build a state-sponsored repository for gold.
I believe that's under construction right now.
It's an operation.
It's an operation?
Okay, I didn't even know that.
That's great.
There are pension funds, large pension funds, I mean, multi-billion dollar pension funds run by some of the biggest cities in America.
At least one of them I've heard of now has allocated something like 5% to purchase physical gold.
I believe that's the Texas Teachers Fund, I believe.
Is it?
Well, you know, I monitor the news and I see these things and I keep thinking, you know, this is fantastic because years ago no pension fund would have purchased gold.
They would have just bought stocks and counted on the stock market going up.
So doesn't there seem to be this increasing awareness that, hey, we better have a plan B here in place?
I would say there's some increasing awareness, but again, it's still minuscule.
And that's why we haven't seen the massive price action that could occur.
Because when you see real public awareness begin to take hold at the municipal level or at the state level or with these different funds that are being managed, I think you could expect to see some real changes happen very quickly to the price of gold because the demand is going to go up.
And then the next step in that is a quality counterparty, a quality custodian.
Where you're not going to have a force majeure issue or some kind of a bankruptcy issue like if a GLD were to go bankrupt or one of the custodians such as HSBC or some other bank.
That's holding that gold.
So Texas is really leading the way.
They have their own depository.
They have their gold on hand for the amount of gold that they have invested with state funds.
But it's still a minuscule amount of the general public.
Foreign governments, Russia, China, India, they understand what's happening.
The average citizen, the average state government or municipality, they don't understand the value of having gold as an insurance policy on your balance sheet.
Well, and many of these municipalities are going bankrupt.
I mean, look all across the country.
The state of Illinois is totally broke.
I mean, they're fudging numbers just to stay afloat.
And look at California.
What, they're going to be $50 billion?
No, $100 billion short probably by the end of this year in their state budget.
And these are all cities that have been run on debt and fiat currency and not thinking about hard money and have massive obligations.
At some point, probably soon, in my estimation, some of these cities and states are going to have to declare bankruptcy and go belly up and screw all their bondholders probably and all kinds of things.
That's going to be a time when people will want something that's real.
Well, in that scenario, how much you want to get, they get a bailout.
That's the most politically expedient way, is to bail out the bankrupt institutions so you can keep the voters happy, you can keep the pensioners paid, but they're going to get paid in dollars that are worth less and less and less.
So all of these unfunded liabilities that the U.S. government has, that the municipalities have, that go into the tens of trillions of dollars, I think maybe over $100 trillion is now the number for the unfunded liabilities.
What are we going to do about that?
I don't think we're going to declare bankruptcy or just straight up say we're not going to pay them.
I think the natural tend that we've seen with the government is to get the stimulus, get the bailouts, get the financing, get the money, and what that means is we're just spreading the losses across everybody.
We're socializing those losses and that's why you need to own gold and silver is to hedge yourself against the inevitable bailouts that are going to continually occur and they're never going to quit because the entire system is unsound.
Yeah, that's right.
We did a story the other day on Natural News.
The actual debt of the federal government is really $135 trillion, not what the official is like $26 trillion right now, which is insane all by itself.
That's insane.
I mean, when Obama started his eight years, I think our national debt at the federal level was around $8 trillion or something in that range.
Obama roughly doubled it to $16 trillion.
Trump took over, COVID hit, and everything just went insane.
Now it's $26 trillion.
You know, if Trump gets a second term by the time he's out of office, we might be $40 trillion in debt with the official numbers.
It doesn't even count the obligations, the long-term pensions, the additional bailouts from the second wave or whatever.
At some point, that system is not sustainable.
We just don't know when it's going to break.
Let me get to a practical question.
I appreciate you chatting about all this monetary theory and so on.
But for people who are first-time buyers, what's the best format for them?
You can buy one-ounce gold coins or one-tenth-ounce coins.
You can buy one-ounce silver rounds, but silver takes up lots and lots of space compared to the gold coins that are very efficient.
You can hold $50,000 in your hand like this.
I should say $50,000 worth of gold like this, whereas silver, it's much larger.
Sort of what do you recommend people buy as a mix of different denominations of gold and silver?
Well, typically, my preference is to be at least 50-50 silver and gold because I do believe that silver has much greater potential to increase in price compared to gold.
But you want to have a little bit of both because silver can be much more volatile than gold as well.
And it depends on what you intend to do with it.
Maybe you want to move the money or you want it to be very portable.
In that case, you're going to want a lot of gold.
But the type of product that we sell It's your standard government mints and your LBMA certified reputable mints and it's coins and bars.
And so we have a huge supply.
We are one of the largest suppliers of precious metals in the United States.
We actually supply many other dealers and brokers besides just ourselves.
And so we make a very large market, a very large two-way market, and so we maintain a supply of all of the most in-demand precious metals, and that's what we focus on.
your bread and butter type bullion.
It's going to be your silver maples, your gold maples, your silver and gold eagles, the 90% silver, reputable one ounce rounds and 10 ounce bars and 100 ounce silver bars.
And so it's that type of thing.
I'd say 50-50 gold and silver is going to be your ideal mix.
Now, what about the issue of, we've seen this in the press over the last few years of counterfeit gold bars where people take tungsten and then paint it with gold on the outside or whatever.
That's turned up in the press.
How big of a problem is that, and how do people not get conned by something like that?
It's a great question, Mike.
It's an increasing problem.
A lot of that stuff is coming out of China.
And it's typically going to be in the 10-ounce bars.
That's where we've seen it the most.
All the product that comes into us is coming in through a strong chain of custody process.
Most of the product that we deal in is coming directly from the mint that manufactured it.
So we have a chain of custody, say, all the way from Switzerland with PAMP to a New York vault to Fargo.
And so we know exactly what's happened.
But we also buy coins and bars off the secondary market all the time because we make a market for that and people need to be able to sell their precious metals.
And so we do test.
We have conductivity testing.
We have x-ray fluorescent testing.
You also have...
Mass displacement, where we can test a bar and see exactly what kind of mass is inside that bar, how many atoms.
So we have a lot of experience with that.
And a lot of times we can tell it just by looking at it.
Something doesn't look right.
Our vault guys deal with so much precious metals every day.
And we also unconditionally guarantee all of the precious metals that we sell are, in fact, authentic.
They're not counterfeit.
One of the best ways to protect yourself is to avoid those larger bars.
A coin like the United States Gold Eagle, for example, you'd be a fool to try to counterfeit a gold eagle.
Number one, it would be technically very difficult.
And number two, it's a federal crime because it's also technically U.S. currency.
So you would have the Secret Service knocking at your door.
It would be a lot of work to try to counterfeit a gold eagle.
Also, a Canadian gold maple has very strong anti-counterfeiting technology.
So, and it's very difficult to counterfeit a one ounce coin.
Very, very difficult, if not impossible.
So the amount of resources that would be required to do that are too high of magnitude.
It's the 10-ounce gold bars that you're going to want to be questioning and also 1-ounce gold bars and buying metals off of eBay.
We see a lot of that stuff off of eBay.
It happens a lot.
If you've got a seller who's got 37 positive reviews and he's selling you a 1-ounce gold bar, you might want to think twice.
Yeah, buying stuff on eBay, the online retail for stolen goods.
Right, counterfeit goods.
Well, that's also Amazon.com in the supplements industry.
Half of it's counterfeit.
But speaking of theft, the question people have is, they say, okay, let's say I'm going to buy $50,000 worth of gold, and you're going to ship it to me.
Have those shipments ever been stolen?
And is it insured?
And what happens if it never shows up?
Because we've seen even postal workers stealing, let's say, firearms, for example, out of the mail.
So how does that work?
So everything that we ship is fully insured.
We have a very comprehensive policy with Lloyd's of London.
It's a special insurance policy that precious metals dealers like ourselves have to get.
And so they cover losses on our shipments actually up to $150,000 per package.
And in the cases that we have had losses, it's very rare, but it does happen a couple times a year.
And in most cases, we get a replacement out to our customer right away.
As soon as UPS or the post office gives us a final determination that the package has been lost, we get a new package out right away.
And then we let our insurance company turn around and pay us back as soon as they settle the claim.
And we've never had a problem getting our claims settled.
And it's not a huge problem, but it is a real risk, and so we do insure it, and that risk is never our customers.
Our customers know that when they purchase the metals from us, we're going to get it to them.
Even if it's lost, we're going to replace it.
I'm just curious, if you don't mind me asking, in the few cases that you've seen, what was it?
I mean, who was stealing it?
It's a complicated scenario.
Sometimes it's an inside job with FedEx or UPS. There have been times where a driver left it on a doorstep when he shouldn't have and it got taken by a porch bandit.
Or it's just a mysterious disappearance is most often what happens where it's somewhere in the mail stream And then it just stops tracking.
It just mysteriously disappears.
And so the reasons for that, you never know.
And we try to get the investigators involved, but it's ultimately we kick it up to our insurers and the underwriters are the ones that go through with the criminal investigation because they want to try to recover their payout.
And quite often they do.
So over the years, it's been less and less and less.
Thankfully, I think they've begun to root out a lot of these people.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I run healthrangersstore.com, and we ship a lot of storable food buckets.
Some of it goes through the U.S. mail, even though mostly it's UPS and FedEx.
But we have seen a lot of theft increase lately.
And we think it is UPS workers.
And we've also noticed that firearms manufacturers that sell parts, such as complete AR-15 uppers, which you can buy online because it's not a full firearm, such as Palmetto State Armory, we've noticed that they've started covering all their cardboard boxes, covering it with a blank neutral plastic sheeting type of covering to blot out their name.
Because firearms parts are disappearing in shipments now.
There seems to be a real increase in theft.
But when you ship coins, I mean, I've received shipments from you.
It doesn't say, obviously, gold inside.
You know what I mean?
It's not obvious what it is.
Yeah, we ship it in basically plain brown wrapper, brown tape, very, very secure, very hard to open.
It's never going to break during shipping, but it's as unobtrusive as possible.
We use acronyms for our name on the shipping.
There's no mention made of precious metals or anything of value.
We pack it so securely so that we cannot hear the coins jingle.
It's not always perfect, but that's our goal, that we don't want to hear any clinking or banging.
It's a real problem, but that's exactly why we do have the insurance and the guarantee.
Well, that's awesome.
And here's a tip for customers.
One time I purchased a case of silver coins and it's heavy.
You know, it's a U.S. mint, you know, green plastic case.
And if you shake it, the coins will shake inside.
And I was picking this up from, you know, one of those like mailbox places and the employee was asking, what's in there?
What's in there?
And I just said, bullets.
Because, you know, bullets are really common in Texas, and bullets aren't worth nearly as much as the silver.
So I said, bullets.
Oh, okay.
Okay, you must be a hunter.
Yeah, welcome to Texas, you know?
That's a great answer.
Yeah.
Or you could just say machine parts or whatever, but bullets is a good answer, and usually people stop asking questions when you say bullets.
Any other final thoughts, Chris, because we're up against time here.
You're so gracious with your time.
I really appreciate you being willing to spend this with us.
What are some last thoughts that people should know before they make a decision to purchase gold and silver?
You know, you're going to want to go with a reputable dealer and then selling back.
You're usually going to be able to find a place to sell back close to you, but we also purchase from people all over the country.
We can help facilitate the shipping to return it to us.
And then also, we didn't cover the fact that you can own precious metals in your self-directed IRA. So that is an option for a lot of people.
And we've been able to help a lot of people convert IRA funds into physical gold and silver.
In that scenario, you can't hold it yourself.
You do have to have it with a depository that's approved by the custodian.
And we do work with a number of custodians that you can actually store that gold and silver with us here in Fargo and physically come and see it.
If you want to.
So that's something that a lot of people do ask about.
But beyond that, I think we've covered everything pretty well.
And I'm just happy to answer any questions that you or anyone else has.
Well, I would direct people to your website.
It's treasureislandcoins.com.
They can also check out, I mean, we've got metalswithmike.com up.
It just forwards there.
They can check gold and silver spot prices.
They could call you to find out about the actual real street price on any given day.
And even for consultation, I know one of your Salespeople have been very helpful consulting with many of our readers, sometimes spending quite a lengthy amount of time educating people about what they need to know.
That's one reason I wanted to do this interview, by the way, was to help answer some questions for people before they call, so they're not asking the same questions over and over again.
Let's just make sure we put that up on screen, treasureislandcoins.com.
And folks, be careful where you go to buy things.
Check everybody out.
It's just like when you buy from us, you buy storable food that's been lab tested.
Well, you buy gold and silver from Treasure Island Coins.
It's been tested or certified.
It's traceable.
It's the real deal.
So there are a lot of scams out there.
You've got to be careful where you're getting your food, where you're getting your gold, where you're getting your ammunition, for that matter.
You don't want defective reloads with primers that don't work from some discount secondhand place.
You want factory-primed ammo.
Because it needs to go bang when you pull the trigger, you know, in your Mad Max scenario.
So do everything right.
I mean, do your homework.
Due diligence really, really works.
But thank you so much, Chris.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you, and I hope you'll join us again in the future.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me, Mike.
It's been a pleasure.
All right, thank you.
Well, that's the interview, folks.
I appreciate you tuning in.
Share this with everyone who may benefit from it.
And be sure to check out more interviews at brighttown.com.
My channel there is HR Report, and we've got many other great interviews coming up on a variety of subjects.
And don't forget to check out our preparedness videos also on that channel about how to get ready for what we think may be coming.
Thank you for watching.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
You can download it for free by subscribing to the naturalnews.com email newsletter, which is also free.
I'll describe how the monetary system fails.
I also cover emergency medicine and first aid and what to buy to help you avoid infections.
So download this guide.
It's free.
▲
Export Selection