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May 2, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
47:55
Treasure Island CEO gives insider update on gold, silver, central banks and fiat currencies
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Welcome to today's interview on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And as you know, I've been talking about gold and silver and precious metals for quite some time, with now yet another bank having failed in the United States over the weekend.
First Republic Bank, it's done.
The FDIC stepped in and seized control over the bank on Monday morning and then turned around and auctioned off its good assets to JP Morgan, leaving the bad assets, whatever those may be.
We'll probably never know the full story in the hands of the FDIC, which means, guess what?
It's going to be taxpayer money that covers the losses of those assets taken on by the FDIC, which means more money printing, which means more devaluation of the fiat currency, which means there are more reasons, yet again, to look at gold and silver as a store of real value.
So joining me today is Chris Olson, is the CEO of the Treasure Island Coins and Precious Metals Company, which has been for quite some time a sponsor of my podcast.
But they're not only a sponsor, Chris is also, of course, strongly tied into the intelligence and the analysis of the metals markets and what's happening, buying, selling, premiums, delivery, supply chain, all of it.
So those are the questions we're going to be asking.
Welcome, Chris, to the interview today.
It's great to have you on.
Hey, Mike.
Thanks for having me on again.
It's about time to get an update from you, so I really appreciate you taking the time to join us.
So let's step back, actually.
Let's go back in time to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, which seems like that was almost a couple months ago or something at this point.
Three banks collapsed at that point, and then, as I understand, the entire gold and silver retail industry just got slammed with epic collapse.
Just unprecedented demand.
Is that true?
Tell us about that and tell us, have you or other companies sort of recovered from that surge?
Yeah, it was definitely unprecedented epic demand, which occurred immediately after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
There were a lot of people who thought that this was going to spread systemically throughout the entire system.
And they were probably right.
It probably would have if the Fed had not stepped in with its $25 billion fund to basically bail out the banks without bailing them out.
So that was a very quick move by the Fed to deploy all that money.
And probably did prevent for a short time maybe that cascading domino of multiple bank failures which could have easily occurred if people had really sensed that they needed to pull their assets out now.
But that still did happen that people have pulled out more money out of the banks than at any other point in history, I think, prior to, well, many decades ago.
We've got a record outflow out of banks in this country and so we saw the brunt of that here where we had record demand for a good three to four weeks following March 10th when the bank went down.
Was there a change in the way people were talking to you or did you have more first-time customers than usual?
Did you have higher order dollar amounts than usual or what were the differences that you noticed?
It was really all of the above.
The phones were ringing off the hook constantly.
We had phone calls from the moment we turned them on in the morning until the moment they were over in the evening.
The phones were just packed.
Many people waiting in line.
Some people had to wait 30-40 minutes to get a call back.
And it was a lot of first-time people who had not purchased precious metals before but had been thinking about it.
And there were very many high-dollar transactions.
You know, we're talking half a million, a million dollars.
People are moving very large amounts of money.
And that size of an order became very common in those days.
Alright, yeah, thanks for switching out your headphones there, your microphone, Chris.
This will be better.
Okay, so as you were just saying, you saw much higher, people purchasing higher amounts than usual.
Was there a sense of, I don't know, more heightened concern in people's minds, or was it very rational to just realize, hey, the banks just can't be trusted anymore?
What were those conversations like?
I'm curious.
Well, it was a combination of all of the above.
I think people were panicking and probably had very good reason to be concerned at that point, given that the financial system is incredibly fragile at this time.
And there were a large number of people that were coming out for the first time.
They'd been thinking about buying precious metals for quite some time, but this was kind of a catalyst that they needed to get started and go ahead and make the decision.
The price action has been very strong.
It seems like the floor for the price of gold and silver has really raised, and so we don't see the types of pullbacks that people have been accustomed to, and so people have decided that now is a good time as any.
The ceiling is also much higher for gold and silver, given the global demand for the precious metals.
So just given the instability, I think all of those things were a perfect storm at that particular time.
Lots of new customers, very large transactions.
And from that point until now, we had over 15,000 transactions, individual trades, that we've actually been processing since March 10th.
How do you even keep up with that?
I mean, that's crazy.
It's not easy.
It's not easy.
We've got very good systems here to automate and consolidate and bring all of the order information through to our shipping department.
We've increased the number of people in our shipping department by about 30%, and that was after increasing that number by about 50% a couple years ago.
So we keep expanding.
We're hiring new people all the time and working overtime.
We've got guys staying late.
We're working weekends.
It's been difficult, but we know that a moment like this comes only once, and so we've got to give it our best.
Thankfully, it has slowed down.
It's begun to taper down over the last three weeks.
The massive demand that we were experiencing shortly after March 10th has subsided for now, so we're getting a good chance to catch a breather.
When the next one comes, we'll be ready.
We'll be that much more ready for it, and we'll be able to move much more quickly.
So let's back up even more.
Before the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, as I understand it, there was almost really a flood of silver inventory in particular among silver retailers, right?
Because many companies, including yours, had placed a lot of wholesale orders last year with the mints around the world.
And because of the delays, you had to sort of pre-commit to those.
And then maybe you can correct the time frame, but between Christmas and Christmas, You know, mid-March, wasn't there kind of a glut of silver inventory and premiums collapsed?
And then Silicon Valley Bank hit and the whole thing just whiplashed from that point.
Everything reversed.
Is that right?
That's exactly right.
Yeah, the amount of inventory that we have in stock drew down significantly.
We're probably at about 30% of the levels that we were prior to the Silicon Valley collapse.
Interestingly, it looks like the network and the infrastructure within the United States between the various mints that we're working with, people are improving, so we're able to keep that supply moving at a quicker pace.
We're able to reload our supply faster, but it did get drawn down very quickly.
Any sustained amount of time of that kind of demand is going to put massive strain on the entire system, and premiums did go back up.
Not to the levels that they were summer of last year, not yet, but just what happened with Silicon Valley Bank was enough to put premiums throughout the entire industry up significantly, and that still has not changed.
Well, and this brings up a really critical point about the supply chain and how much demand that your company can handle.
I mean, the whole industry, the whole retail metals industry, it's kind of a narrow door.
There's only a certain number of people that can fit through that door at any one time.
And the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, I think, kind of stressed that.
I remember hearing I had a quote complaint from one person.
It was like, oh, it's going to be three weeks before I get my silver.
And we were like, well, did they tell you it's going to be three weeks?
And they said, yeah, we just don't like that it's going to be three weeks.
Well, try being someone who doesn't even know about this and the banks are collapsing.
And then if you're late to the game, it's not going to be three weeks.
It's going to be never.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And we try to be very transparent and upfront about the delivery delays on all of our products.
And Like I have said before, and you just alluded to now, there's only so much minted product that is available at any one time.
So if you get several hundred million dollars worth of orders pushed through the entire bullion industry in the United States within a week or two, That really starts to put a lot of pressure on the available inventories because those inventories are not infinite.
Once that inventory drawdown occurs, that's when premiums start going up.
You start seeing the delays.
It's at that point where you don't have as much discretion in terms of what you're going to get.
You're just looking for whatever's going to be available.
At that point, you're looking, instead of at the nice one-ounce coins that most people prefer, You're looking into 100-ounce or even 1,000-ounce silver bars, for example, if you want to get silver.
And silver is always the first thing to take the big hit on inventory being drawn down.
Gold is a lot easier to move.
It's easier to produce and move around.
Silver takes time and energy to produce it and move it.
Yeah, in fact, I want to ask you about mining, but first, let me just lay out a couple of things.
For those of you who want to get gold and silver, the web address to go to is metalswithmike.com.
That will forward you to the Treasure Island website.
In full transparency, I do want to say that your company, Chris, is a regular sponsor of my podcast, but you are not paying for this interview.
This is not a sponsored interview.
I actually just contacted you last minute for an analysis of what's going on in the market, but that you do sponsor us for the podcast on a regular basis.
But you don't pay us a commission on sales, so it's a fixed fee, so we are not compensated based on commissions.
I just want everybody to know that.
Yeah, go ahead.
That's absolutely correct.
Yeah, I mean, there are some players out there that I think charge too much and then they pay a commission out to the influencer who promoted them and, you know, whatever.
But I just don't operate that way.
But what I want to ask you about the supply.
It seems like silver mining is, of course, very slow to ramp up.
When there's more demand.
Very slow.
You know, the mining sector is slow to move up or down.
And also, as I understand it, and this is part of my question to you, Chris, the mining of silver is a very large percentage of silver that's mined is actually a byproduct of other mining, other minerals that are being mined like, I don't know, you know, copper or what have you or aluminum.
So, The silver mining industry is not really able to or even wanting to respond as quickly to the demand as people might expect.
It's not like they can just make more silver instantly.
It doesn't work that way, correct?
Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
And the amount of silver that's coming out of the ground, it just continues to diminish in terms of the ratios of, say, silver to gold that's actually available.
So, The existing supply above ground of silver is not sufficient to withstand too long of sustained demand.
I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but when you look at the numbers, it's not very impressive in terms of what people could actually invest in and purchase right now if everybody was looking to buy it all at the same time.
So you would see the price moving up very quickly, and miners and producers and recyclers and other people that hold metal, they would have to respond to that.
And so if the price did move up high enough, fast enough, you might have people that are willing to take profits at that time, and that would kind of become the supply source for the physical bullion is other people selling.
It's not very quick to come out of the ground and become a useful product that you can purchase right away.
So inventories are not sufficient to meet a sustained demand.
Yes, absolutely.
And then we have the fact that many nations and central banks around the world are now ramping up, well, they've been ramping up their purchases of gold.
Recently, Venezuela, I believe, announced that they're using gold to try to shore up their currency, and they're going to need, I think it was $100 million in gold, which actually sounds low, but...
I think that's what it was, $100 million in gold just to shore up their currency and try to stop hyperinflation.
I don't think that's going to be enough, but it's an indication that as fiat currencies get weaker and weaker or devalued across the world, isn't it true that more nations are wanting to increase their central bank purchases of gold in order to make sure their currencies are defended against currency speculators, for example?
That's absolutely the case, Mike.
That's the biggest story that's happening right now with metals.
And it's a consequence of the United States weaponizing its currency because that doesn't come without a cost.
And right now, I think the figure I read was that 30% of all countries right now face sanctions from the US, the EU, Japan, the UK, etc.
That's a weaponization of the currency system.
Central banks are looking at ways to protect themselves from that.
What do we see?
We see that central banks are buying more tons of gold now than at any time since the data begins, which is in 1950 sometime.
Right now, 33% of monthly Global demand for gold comes from central banks.
Wow.
That's huge.
Nine of the top ten are in the developing world, if you include Russia and China, Russia, India, and China.
These countries are all in talks with Brazil, South Africa, etc., about creating a multi-factorial currency system, basically, to trade with one another in their own currencies, and they're looking to use gold We're good to go.
It's now become a national security risk.
And so that's why we see central banks are just, they're the major buyer in the gold market right now.
But isn't that fascinating that central banks are buying gold like mad?
You know, China's central bank, I think, in the fourth quarter of last year purchased something like 300...
Tons of gold or something in that range.
But at the same time, the governments of the world are telling people that gold is an ancient, useless relic.
But then all their top people are stacking gold, and all their banks are stacking gold, and their central banks are stacking gold.
And it's like, okay, we don't believe you when you say that gold is an ancient relic.
Gold has survived the collapse of every civilization in known human history, and it still has value today.
So what are your thoughts on that?
They're telling us one thing, but then they're doing exactly the opposite.
They are buying gold like crazy.
It depends on what country you're looking at.
In the West, you see that the banks and the governments have typically tried to paint a picture of gold being a barbarous relic, but actually, I think the mainstream media and some of the banks are starting to come around to the idea of gold.
I think you're going to see in the mainstream media even more favorable coverage of gold here over the coming months because it's gotten to a point where it just can't be denied anymore.
These media institutions rely on clicks.
They want people reading their stories.
It's becoming an open secret.
We're in a crisis right now that is not like anything that we've seen since Nixon took us off the gold standard.
That's creating a sea change in everything.
Take Russia, for example.
They scrapped their 20% value-add tax on gold, and they also scrapped the 13% income tax on profits for gold as well.
So they are incentivizing their people to purchase as much gold as they possibly can, and Russian gold miners have boosted their output by about 27% year-on-year as of this past March, according to the latest data out of Russia.
It depends on your government and it depends on your media, but I think the story is going to change very quickly on gold, but it's not going to be good for countries or for nations that are not running fiscally sound budgets or that don't have good gold reserves to back up their currencies.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And, you know, I've talked about gold and silver as sort of hitting the pause button on your assets, just freezing the value.
Because I don't like to talk about gold and silver as a speculative investment, because the price manipulations are pretty intense out there.
But I'm talking about just freezing the assets that you have now, even though the dollar is losing, by my estimate, about 2% per month in its purchasing capability.
Gold is not.
Gold is just holding that value.
But one question that I have for you on this, and this is a question that people have asked me, is, well, how liquid is it?
So if they have, let's say, one ounce gold coins, and they want to turn those into dollars, how much friction is there in that?
Can they ship them back to you, or can they sell them locally?
And if they do ship them back to you, how can they ship them safely in a guaranteed way so that if they're lost or stolen in shipment, they're still covered?
How do you answer those questions?
In terms of the friction side of things, there's always going to be some friction when it comes to bullion coins and bars because you're essentially taking delivery of a finished product and all of that takes time.
It takes energy and it takes time and so there's always going to be friction when you're moving it around.
But that's the most secure way for people to own their assets, to hold and to control either in a depository that you can trust or in your own hands, the physical asset.
But that always comes with friction because to move it around, to sell it back, That takes energy.
Conversely, you could have something like an ETF. ETF, you don't actually own the gold.
You get some exposure to the gold price.
But there's very little friction, very little cost because you're just trading electronically on paper.
So that's the big difference is that you're going to pay higher prices in terms of the friction just to get the physical material.
But the benefits that come with it, most people think That they're worth it, that the benefits are there.
And the nice thing about precious metal coins and bars is that they're liquid pretty much anywhere.
Anyone that has gold and silver, if you're in a city that has 100,000 people or more, you're going to find at least one bullion shop that's willing to give you cash on the spot.
Now, they probably won't pay you as much as we would pay you.
And there's plenty of people that will compete for your business to buy whatever gold or silver you might want to sell.
But the nice thing is, you can sell it anywhere in the country on a moment's notice.
That being said, we're always buying anything we sell, we buy.
And we can help get it back to us as well.
So we do have a program where we do offer fully insured UPS shipping labels to help people move the metals back up to us here in Fargo.
Especially on larger deals, that's something that people definitely take advantage of frequently because we do have a very competitive bid and we will help get it back to us and pay you out very quickly.
Okay, so just to confirm that, because I'm a customer of yours.
I've bought metals from you, but I've never shipped them back.
Actually, I've never sold any metal that I've ever owned, ever.
So that's why I'm not familiar with this process.
But if I wanted to sell them back to you, or let's say some other customer has, I don't know, 50 gold coins, so it's worth over $100,000.
They call you and you would give them a printable UPS shipping label and then instructions on how to package it up and they drop it off at a UPS store?
Is that how that works?
Well, pretty close.
We provide the label.
We provide the instructions.
You have to follow it very carefully because it's an insurance contract, so you have to do everything right.
And then you actually take it into a UPS customer center, which is not the same as a UPS store.
It's like a hub.
Take it to the hub.
They sign off on it.
You have that signature and now that package is insured up to $150,000.
I see.
Okay.
And the packing, I would imagine, has to have certain types of tape and certain thickness of the box and things like that.
Yeah, and we spell that out in the paperwork that you agree to follow those terms, and it spells it out in great detail how you need to pack it.
Okay.
Did I ever tell you the true story of how I went onto one of your competitors' website and I bought one gold coin.
They would only ship it through the United States Postal Service.
So it was a USPS shipment.
And...
When that was, quote, delivered to me, it was signed, my name was signed by the mail carrier, and the coin vanished.
Oh, my.
And it turns out the mail carrier had stolen that coin.
I kid you not.
I still have that carrier's signature on paper.
I saved it.
And I had to go into the post office and say, this signature's not mine.
Who the heck signed for this, and where is my gold?
Ha!
And then they said, oh, we found it!
We found it!
It was a couple days later.
They found it and then gave it to me.
That happened.
Wow.
Yeah, that's incredible.
And we only ship USPS if it's a P.O. box and our customer specifically requires that we ship by postal service or if it's a lower value shipment, say like less than $700 I believe is the number that we use.
But we guarantee every shipment that we send out.
So if that had been our shipment and the carrier had done that to you and you weren't able to recover it, we would provide you the replacement.
We guarantee that.
Yeah, that was a really interesting experience on my part because I think this is valuable to share with the customers, the listeners here, because I called the original retailer, again, one of your competitors, because I do like to spot check everybody in the industry, and I called them and I told them what happened and they said, great, all you have to do is go fill out a police report.
And then take this police report and then we'll process it that way and then we'll refund you.
But I ended up going to the post office and saying, look, I'm going to fill out a police report if you don't give me my gold.
And that's when they, quote, found it.
Yeah, and that's the standard requirement for all the insurance policies is that a police report does have to get filed.
Otherwise, you could have people just making stuff up all the time.
So that's one of those necessary steps.
But yeah, I'm glad you got the coin.
But that type of thing does happen.
There is fraud out there.
There are bad drivers.
And that's why we carry a very expensive insurance policy.
And we've never failed to deliver a single order.
We've had stuff go missing like that and it's a problem that we deal with.
It's part of the job.
I will say that UPS, I think you use UPS most of the time.
UPS has been very reliable.
And we've never had any issues with UPS delivering packages like that.
So I guess that was just a USPS local rural carrier situation, whatever.
But moving on, I just thought I would share that story with you.
Insurance is critical to have.
So I guess the bottom line, folks, is you can buy gold.
You can hold on to it physically.
It's near liquid in the sense that you can send it back And then what, Chris?
Once you receive the gold, do you issue a wire, a bank wire?
It depends on how you want to be paid and the size of the transaction.
Typically, we're going to pay out by a check, but we can do direct credit to the account through ACH or we can send a wire.
There are different fees associated with that, so there's like a nominal fee for a wire fee.
But if it's a big deal and you want to get the money instantly, that's the best way to do it.
We send out wires all the time and we're happy to do it and we process it very quickly.
Now, is there then, for fraud protection, you know, for you to protect your company from fraud, is there some kind of, like, gold purity testing requirement for customers maybe that you haven't worked with before that say, hey, I have these gold bars that maybe vanished from the airport in Canada a couple weeks ago, or whatever?
Yeah, that was quite a story.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, like, how do you...
Is there a test that's required?
Yep.
So...
We have many decades of experience in our shipping, in our vaulting department, and basically every product gets looked at by at least three different people who check it in, look at it, and if something looks fishy, we have multiple ways to test it.
We have conductivity testing, specific gravity testing, x-ray spectrometry testing, and also ultrasound, which is what we use on some larger bars.
Like 100-ounce bars.
The big scams are usually things that target us and never the customer.
A 1-ounce coin is very hard to counterfeit.
That's one of the reasons that sovereign-minted coins are so popular.
If you're a Chinese counterfeiting operation, you might be happy to counterfeit a 10-ounce gold bar.
But you're not even going to touch like a one ounce gold eagle because number one, you're going to have the secret service looking for you because you're counterfeiting what's officially US currency.
But number two, the coin is very difficult to create a replica that actually looks legitimate.
It's a very intricate design.
And then the metal that you choose is never going to look right anyway.
It's going to be too big.
It's going to weigh too little.
So we're very accustomed to exactly what the real thing looks like.
We deal with it so much.
But the real problem is somebody trying to target us with like a drilled and filled bar.
Like the old scam is take a kilo bar, drill it, fill it with tungsten, patch the end with gold.
And now you send somebody a bar that's five ounces short, but it looks like nothing's happened to it.
So for that type of thing, we're going to do ultrasound testing and other specific gravity analysis.
Or we're just going to chop it in half and melt it, which is quite often what happens with the larger kilo bars.
Yeah, that's interesting.
So an ultrasound test would show, I guess, the differences in the density as the two metals change as you're sweeping it over the bar.
So you would see that instantly.
You see a little cavity in there where suddenly you've got an object inside the bar which is no longer uniform.
Right, right.
Man, that's fascinating.
Well, it's shocking what people will do to try to rip off...
You know, anybody these days.
I mean, people are out there counterfeiting currency, of course.
I mean, that's been going on since the beginning of currency.
And, like, that's even crazy because why would you counterfeit something that's going to go to zero anyway is my question because the currency is not looking too good right now.
But whatever.
It's all counterfeit.
Yeah, it's all counterfeit.
Good point.
Okay, so what else do people need to know about anticipating where you think things are headed in terms of the supply?
Not the price, because I don't like to talk about speculation, but supply.
Because I think these bank failures are going to continue this year.
Yeah, I'd say it's very likely that we're going to continue to see stress on our financial system and We're just waiting for the next shoe to drop.
We had COVID. We had Ukraine.
We have the weaponization of the financial system.
We have a recession that's coming in.
You've got Fed interest rate hikes.
You've got banks failing.
So I think it's really just a matter of time.
I don't think it's clear skies or smooth sailing from here on into the future.
That's definitely out of the picture right now.
So in moments of calm, like we're kind of walking into right now, It's a good time to get in while supplies are good and while the phones are not ringing off the hook and we can actually fulfill orders in faster than three weeks.
I think it's going to be a continued game of us just trying to keep up.
There's lots of stress in the market and when the next big event happens, It's going to be all hands on deck for us, and premiums will be going up, and supply will be getting crunched, and lead times will extend weeks into the future.
Yeah, if not months at some point, depending on how much demand there is.
And that wouldn't be unique to you.
I mean, that would be across the board.
All the retailers would be crunched at the same time.
Yeah, and that becomes a real problem once we get out to months.
We have a policy of not selling out past four weeks.
So we need to find product that we can get into your hands within at least that time.
And so if it gets to that point, we're looking at stuff you don't – maybe you didn't want to buy a 1,000-ounce bar, but now that's your only option.
You've got to take a 70-pound brick of silver home with you.
So avoiding that is also a good reason to buy it while things look good.
Yeah, if you throw those bricks in your pockets, big silver blocks, someone will notice and it will slow you down if you're fleeing a collapsing city, by the way.
Just as a cartoonish side note, did you hear about the legislators in Texas looking to pass a law that would be a gold and silver-backed digital currency run by the state of Texas and redeemable, actually, for gold in the Texas depository?
Which is located in Central Texas, by the way.
Did you hear about this?
What are your thoughts about that?
Yeah, I've heard about it.
It's a good idea.
It would definitely have some major growing pains in terms of the liquidity of the currency.
But I think growing pains like that would be good to go through.
This is definitely something that needs to be done.
I think states are going to be the last line of defense for the citizens of this country because if we do have a collapsing dollar, if we do have some kind of a digital currency that they want to use to replace the U.S. dollar with, that just means more loss of freedom, more control over your life.
You take a look at the state of North Dakota.
We have a state-owned bank in this state, which was created in the early 1900s specifically to give the people a better deal in terms of their commodity trading that they were engaged in.
The farmers here in North Dakota, they created the Bank of North Dakota.
And in the Constitution itself, it says that no state will emit any type of money except that that's minted of gold and silver.
So I think that's one of the primary duties of the states to protect their citizens and provide for a medium of exchange that can act as a store of value at the same time as being a medium of exchange.
So I'm very excited to see that bill, and I look forward to following where it goes.
Yeah, me too.
Because I see as the national currency, the dollar, of course, you know, I believe it's going to collapse.
It's going to go to zero at some point, like all fiat currencies seem to go eventually.
But the fact that states like Texas and other states, even Wyoming, for example, are recognizing gold, and the fact that Texas is...
Essentially preparing to have its own state-based currency when the dollar collapses.
To me, that's a sense of relief because I still want to be able to conduct business, even if it's just in the state of Texas.
But I need to be able to buy, sell, and transact.
And frankly, for me to take orders from somebody somewhere else, I can't wait for them to ship me one-sixteenth of an ounce of gold or whatever to If I could have a gold-backed digital currency, I would take that and ship the product to them, and then I could take that digital receipt, and I could drive to the vault and say, give me gold, and they would do it.
I think that's awesome.
Yep, I agree, and that's the idea.
And that's what a lot of the central banks around the world that I was discussing, these nine out of 10 developing nations in that top 10 list of banks that are buying gold, they are setting up exactly that type of a format.
There's a lot of talk about central bank digital currencies, and there's a couple different types of what those digital currencies look like.
But what's happening with the global south and the BRICS nations, Russia and India and China, et cetera, they're trying to create a digital currency system which will enable them to get rid of SWIFT, to get out of the Western financial infrastructure, the plumbing, and create their own plumbing to get out of the Western financial infrastructure, the plumbing, and create their own plumbing where they have a double or triple authenticated distributed ledger system between them where they can see who has what gold and who
And this provides them with exactly the same thing that you're talking about, the ability to have a store of value, a medium of exchange with a counterparty that you trust, where you know that the gold is there.
And if you want to take delivery of it, you send back your digital units and you take delivery of that physical gold, and now you're just crediting a different vault in a different country.
And that's the system that they're attempting to set up right now.
And so to have states in the United States that could start to model that exact same idea, I think it's a necessity because they're doing it in preparation of something that's coming.
There's a big change coming.
So we need to be doing the same thing here in the United States.
Let me plug your website here for you.
MetalswithMike.com takes you straight to Treasure Island Coins and Precious Metals here.
And the thing I love about your website is you offer real-time pricing.
You can go here to the U.S. Mint, for example.
You can look at gold coins.
Now, folks, the prices you see obviously are going to change in real-time because this was recorded in advance.
But let's say you want to look at...
Royal Canadian Mint Silver Coins.
Well, you can bring that up and get real-time prices.
And then you can also contact them to ask questions or talk about silver IRAs or things like that.
So again, metalswithmike.com gets you there, and then you can check all these things out for yourself.
But Chris, back to the point that you were just making, I think that I think we're looking at the failure of a lot of, especially Western currencies, including the Euro.
I think the Euro's done.
I mean, not tomorrow, but it's on its way out.
I think the yen is on its way out.
I think the dollar's on its way out.
And it seems to me that globally, any nation that wants a functioning currency, whether they're West or East or whoever, is going to have to have it backed by gold because the trust factor is just not there anymore.
People aren't just going to blindly trust paper currency any longer, is my opinion.
Yeah, and it's the store of value problem has been the problem since 1971 when we got taken off the gold standard, but there was still confidence in the United States and in the rule of law.
So you had this kind of Pax Americana that held the financial system together.
Every country didn't dump the dollar for gold in 1971.
The price of gold floated up and down, so they just agreed to debase their currencies against one another over time.
But everything changed under Biden when he pushed the button to implement the nuclear option against Russia and say that we can cut you off from SWIFT, we can seize your Forex reserves, and at that point, it's no longer a matter of is it a store of value or not, or how is my currency being debased, but it's outright theft.
So now you've got counterparty risk, which has completely upended this entire thing.
So over the next 10 years, it's going to be a consistent strategy of de-dollarization as the various nations decide we're going to do business in our own currencies.
We're going to settle in gold.
We're going to do real business.
And we can't trust any one central counterparty of a global reserve currency.
It's not going to work anymore.
Yeah, I think you nailed it right there.
And I think history will look back and see that moment as the most insane, irrational and destructive decision ever made in American history.
Maybe by design.
Maybe by design.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, this has just evaporated global trust in the dollar.
And since then, as you just said, Chris, we've seen Russia, India, China, Turkey, Iran, China, Brazil, even many South American countries doing deals to clear transactions directly with China and yuan or directly with Russia and rubles and so on.
The dollar is like literally the faith in the dollar is collapsing at a rapid pace around the world.
There's no question about that.
And I don't know how we could ever get it back.
I don't think it comes back.
Well, yeah.
And if it does, it's going to be under a set of new rules.
And we're not going to be the ones who decide what those rules are.
I think those rules are being decided right now.
I think it's going to be a slow burn, but it's going to be an inevitable burn.
And it's not going to happen overnight or tomorrow, but we are going to see bank collapses.
We're going to see recessions and runs on the market.
We're going to see the rest of the world continue to buy gold and silver.
That's going to keep the price at a floor.
It's going to raise the ceiling.
And here's an interesting statistic that I was just reading before this interview, that the number of countries with central banks that are looking to launch their own digital currency has tripled since 2020.
It's more than 110 central banks representing over 95% of the world's GDP.
And when I talk about the digital currency, it's not about so much a control network for controlling the currency of the people.
They could keep the same paper currency, but for them to do settlements bilaterally with other counterparties, that that's the infrastructure and the technology that they use To say that, yeah, this transfer actually happened so that they can have plumbing that operates outside of the SWIFT system.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
The SWIFT system actually is kind of an old-school digital currency interbank clearinghouse system.
Right.
I mean, it's really a messaging system.
It's a central ledger.
Right, exactly.
It's a central ledger.
Yeah, you just nailed it.
And that ledger says that, okay, this amount is deducted from this bank and this amount is credited to that bank.
And that consists of a transfer.
I mean, that's what a transfer is.
It's actually two entries in the ledger.
And that ledger had one authority, one control, which was the SWIFT system.
And then when Biden weaponized that system, well, guess what?
It no longer became a...
I mean, the reserve currency status was gone.
Shattered.
Digital transactions will be pursued by these nations around the world first between each other.
And in fact, that's already happening.
I mean, China's already clearing some trades digitally with other countries.
And then the next step is for them to push central bank digital currencies onto their own domestic populations.
That's where they're going to meet a ton of resistance.
Right.
Exactly.
But the nice thing is that if gold and its corollary silver play the main component within those systems, then you can expect that that's going to be a medium of exchange that you can continue to deal in because ultimately it's about settlement. then you can expect that that's going to be a These currencies represent a claim on some kind of a good or service.
And so if these digital currencies are being backed by gold or oil or soybeans or whatever, the commodities are the real thing.
That's where the real activity is happening.
The digital currencies are just a means to internationalize that trade across borders.
I think it's a good thing for people.
I'm hopeful that we can maintain some kind of a control Where a central bank digital currency is not the primary means of us actually settling transactions and that we have no other alternatives because that's a real problem, even if it's a gold-backed central bank digital currency.
At that point, what's the point if it's backed by gold if you can't ever transact in something other than that digital currency?
Well, right.
And I guess this is the last question because we're going to wrap this up.
But personally, if they roll out a central bank digital currency, which is a surveillance system, I would personally rather use a cryptocurrency than a CBDC. Even though the cryptocurrency might not be backed by anything, but I just want to do a transaction and get out.
Like get in, transfer, buy, sell, collect, whatever, and then get back out of it.
I would trust a decentralized cryptocurrency system more than a centralized bank at that point.
And I think a lot of people are thinking the same way.
Yeah, I would agree.
Or you could use the original cryptocurrency, which is gold.
Yeah, but I mean, I'm talking about like long distance, you know, transactions.
Right.
Fast overseas transactions, things like that.
But yeah, if I can meet somebody in person or I'm in a farmer's market, I'd rather just buy in gold or silver.
You know, for bread, beef bones for my dogs, seeds, whatever, ammunition.
Here, have silver, man.
Let's do it that way.
That's more reason to build local, to buy local, to do everything locally because you can maintain some level of sovereignty and freedom if you're not forced to use these long-distance settlement mechanisms or digital currencies.
We need to be more self-reliant as communities.
Completely agree.
And I guarantee if you go to almost any local farmer's market and you start offering to buy in silver, you're going to get a lot of people saying, heck yes, do you have more silver?
Because we have more beef in the freezer in the back and it's free-range grass-fed.
Good habits to get into.
Definitely.
And it's good to kind of sort that out in advance so you know who's going to take metal coin.
So, Chris, this has been really fascinating and informative.
Anything else that you want to mention here as we wrap this up?
You know, I think we covered all the main points.
I would just say that, yeah, right now we've been getting caught up with that massive influx of orders that came after the Silicon Valley bank failure.
So we're getting to a point where we're caught up.
It's been tough, but we're waiting for the next shoe to drop.
So I'd say it's a good time to get in before that happens.
Who knows what's going to happen between then and now or what that's going to look like, but we'll be ready for it when it comes.
That sounds perfect.
And thank you, Chris, for taking care of our audience, our listeners.
They have a very positive experience with you.
I get a ton of positive feedback.
And as you know, I'm a customer of yours, and I tell all my family and friends, and most of them are customers of yours, too.
You treat everybody right, honest, ethical, informative, secure, discreet, all of that.
You do it right.
So thank you for doing that.
Thank you, Mike.
We appreciate it.
We appreciate you.
And finally, again, one more time, folks, the website is metalswithmike.com.
If you want to check out what they have available, just be patient, or better yet, get product now while the surge is not going crazy, because who knows when the next surge is going to begin.
It's always better to do this when the phones aren't ringing off the hook.
But hope you learned a lot today.
Do your research.
This is not financial advice.
I'm not encouraging you to speculate on gold or silver, but rather encouraging you to do what's right to save your assets in a world where fiat currencies are collapsing in value and banks are collapsing, it seems like, every couple of months.
Another one or two banks, the collapses are actually taking place.
It's no longer a theory.
It's a fact.
It's happening now.
So do what's right for you to alleviate your risk as much as possible.
Thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams and feel free to repost this interview if you wish on other platforms and channels.
Get ready, folks.
Get ready.
It's coming.
Take care.
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