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March 11, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
57:58
Chris Olson from Treasure Island Coins and Precious Metals answers my questions about gold...
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Alright folks, welcome to today's emergency interview here on brighttown.com.
I'm Mike Adams joining you from my home studio today with our special guest, Chris Olson, who is the CEO of the Treasure Island Coins and Precious Metals Company, which is a sponsor of our show with an update about what's happening with gold and silver.
Welcome, Chris, to the show.
Hey Mike, thanks for having me on.
Yeah, it's great to have you back on.
It's been a while.
There hadn't been a lot of movement in gold and silver prices until the last few weeks, and all of a sudden it's skyrocketing.
As we are recording this, gold is 21.78.
It had briefly hit 21.80.
It's clearly headed...
To the 2200 breakthrough realm, to what do you attribute this, if anything?
Or what are you hearing in the precious metals marketplace that might explain these price moves?
And silver is moving substantially as well.
Well, you know, there's a ton of different things that are all kind of converging together here all at the same time.
We've had interest rates high for a very long time, and people are not sure, economists are not sure whether we're going to have a soft landing or a hard landing.
There's some talk of cutting rates, and so some people want to attribute that idea to why the price of gold is getting strong, because supposedly people are expecting rates to go down and that that's going to be strong for gold.
But it's interesting that even in the presence of rates that, you know, we haven't seen rates like this since 15, 20 years ago, maybe longer, That gold did so well because typically gold is heavily affected by interest rates as well as high prices in equities tend to push the price of gold down.
But not the case here over the last 18 months.
Gold has performed incredibly well in the face of those headwinds.
And most commentators are attributing that to the overall ongoing process of de-dollarization.
And the fact that part of de-dollarization is a replenishing of central bank gold reserves.
So we've been watching a very high premium on the Shanghai Gold Exchange to, say, the London Gold Exchange, the LBMA price or the COMEX gold price, roughly, you know, 2% to 3% at times roughly, you know, 2% to 3% at times where you could take basically kilo bars out of exchanges in the West and roughly 2% to 3% at times, where you could take basically kilo bars out of exchanges in the West and deliver them to Shanghai and make a cool 2% or 3% profit for the service. where you could take basically kilo bars out of exchanges
So there's been a lot of gold moving in that direction due to that premium. - Yeah.
Wow.
Real quick, the accumulation of gold by central banks, especially the one in China, seems to coincide with a lot of announcements out of Russia.
We saw a TASS, Russian news agency announcement earlier this week.
pushing aggressively for a BRICS alternative currency settlement system.
It's clear that that BRICS system is going to be backed by gold, at least in part, even though the actual settlement mechanism they announced will likely be a blockchain-based mechanism.
But it's going to be backed by real commodities.
Gold will be one of them.
Energy might be involved in the mix.
It's not clear yet.
But Russia is pushing to bring as many countries online by the end of this year as possible.
This is a real threat to the dollar or global dollar dominance, it appears.
Well, it's certainly on the horizon.
And you're right that the Russian minister, I believe it was Glazev, who was continuing to talk about this idea of a BRICS commodity-based forex settlement mechanism alongside the national currencies.
And conspicuously, this is excluding the dollar.
We have basically a bifurcation that's happening globally where we have BRICS in the Global South, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
We're talking 51-plus percent of the world's population that is now being led by By Russia and China to develop an alternative economy, an alternative global economy, an alternative global settlement mechanism that excludes the United States and the US dollars.
So it's a very interesting turn of events that's been brought on by the actions of our present administration and how they've responded to Russia.
Which, in many ways, seems to be benefiting Russia and China and not helping the West in any way whatsoever.
So sometimes I've got to wonder who these guys are working for, because it's all too perfect.
The blunders that they've been making, it's really playing into their hands just perfectly.
Yeah, it's like you couldn't actually have a better battle plan to destroy the dollar than to do what they're doing.
But just in the last couple of weeks, the U.S. announced, I think, another 500 targeted sanctions against Russia.
You know, at this point, it's like, why not make it five gazillion sanctions?
Russia's like, so?
Who cares?
We're trading outside the dollar anyway.
Yeah, look how well those sanctions have worked.
They've completely backfired, and I think that was the wrong move from the beginning, because you can't sanction an energy exporter like Russia, because commodity demand is inelastic.
Even if they couldn't export their oil, well, then the price of oil would go up.
It's really quite simple.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, back to gold, it really does look like that's what's happening.
That's where the pressure for the price of gold is and the simultaneous downward pressure on the future value of the dollar.
But I would say one thing you should keep in mind, your listeners should keep in mind, is when we're talking about new highs, which...
Every day this week, gold has set a new high, but that's just notional.
So we're talking numbers, like how many dollars.
But when we want to look back at, well, what was the previous high?
So that was like July 2020.
We're looking at about $2,060, but adjusted for inflation, that number today would be $2,350.
Good point.
If we go back to the previous high, August 2011, we're looking at like $1,900, but in today's dollars, that's like $2,500.
Right, right.
If you go back further, January 1980, gold hit $850.
That was the all-time high at the time.
That was like $2,687, maybe $2,800 in That's a really good point.
Gold is not expensive today compared to where it has been in those years that you just mentioned.
Exactly.
It's still undervalued.
And yet, we have also, there have been many warnings that were put out, I think one by a Bank of America analyst, or maybe it was a Wells Fargo analyst, saying, or warning that The U.S. government debt, the national debt, is now increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days.
That is an extraordinary number, and also with the realization that that's accelerating.
So we're going to be at $1 trillion every 90 days pretty soon, and then every 75 days, and then every 60 days, and so on.
Everybody can see where this is going, anybody who can do math.
At some point, you know, it's a trillion dollars a month.
And who's buying that?
Who's buying the bonds?
Right.
Exactly.
And at some point, nobody's buying them.
Because a lot of countries are trying to dump them.
Yeah, that's going to be their trick.
They're going to expect you and me to buy the bonds.
They're going to expect our banks to buy the bonds.
They're going to raise the reserve ratios at your local bank and the cost to carry money.
They're going to be looking for free loans from the American people.
Foreign ownership continues to decline.
So like since 2015, I think bonds were about 35% foreign ownership.
Now they're down to somewhere like 22 or 20.
So it's a steady decline.
Well, our debt to GDP has not been this high since like World War II. And in those days, we factor GDP quite a bit differently.
But now we've got a record $8.9 trillion.
Probably $9 trillion now of debt that's going to mature in the next year.
Who's going to buy all that?
It's the perfect storm.
All of these things converging at the same time.
De-dollarization, debt to GDP, record debt, record interest payments.
And the commercial real estate market has to revalue or restart their loans, refinance their loans over the next two years to a very high degree at much, much higher interest rates than what they originally calculated into the cost of ownership of the buildings.
It's almost like 2008 all over again, maybe worse, but this time with de-dollarization and war.
Right.
Well said.
If you thought the big short was big, this is the really big short, actually.
It seems like that's what we're facing.
Now, let me ask you about supply.
It seems like gold and silver supply at the moment are in pretty good shape.
Is my impression correct?
Yeah, in the United States, bullion supplies have been fully replenished.
Demand has been down in terms of retail demand for a good six months.
It's been pretty slow.
So supplies are replenished.
Premiums are way down.
They're down about as far as they can go right now.
So apart from the high price in gold, which is not really a high price when you look back and think about it, it's a great time to buy gold and silver especially, too, because the premiums on silver are rock bottom compared to where they've been over the last four years.
But also the price of silver has not followed gold on its way up.
So we've got the ratio of the price of gold to silver is like 88 or 90 to 1 right now.
I know.
It's extraordinary.
It's very high again.
So it's still a really good buy to get silver.
In the last couple of years, you're buying it cheaper today than you would have, say, in 21 or 22 when premiums were incredibly high due to the The record-breaking demand and lack of supply.
But now we have a lack of that.
Let's cover that.
Sure.
It was just about a year ago when we had those bank failures in the U.S., Silicon Valley Bank and others.
And you remember very well the instant precious metals panic.
Suddenly everybody in America needed gold and silver now.
And your phone was ringing off the hook.
Every gold retailer in the country couldn't even really keep up with the demand.
And the wait times were getting longer and longer.
But at that time, I think I recall that premiums on silver, on certain silver coins...
We're even in the $12 range or something.
Am I remembering that correctly?
Yeah, that would have been the Silver Eagles, which when it gets into that range, that's where you need to start looking for a different product.
But it's indicative of the supply and demand imbalance because there were plenty of people that were demanding that exact product and they didn't care if the premium is $12 over melt.
And that's exactly what happened.
What are premiums right now, let's say, for what you offer at Treasure Island?
Maybe not Silver Eagles, but generally speaking, what's the range of premiums per ounce right now?
The premiums, depending on the product, I mean, it's going to range anywhere from $2 to $4 kind of on average right now.
And it can be even less if you're buying larger products.
1,000-ounce bars we can get for very, very low premiums.
And we have different products all the time that we have specials on where the premiums get slashed, or maybe we have a very large purchase that comes in and we're able to pick it up for a good price.
We like to pass that on.
But right now, just looking at the premiums on silver, say, 100-ounce bars, We're looking at...
I've got generic silver 100-ounce bars that we're selling for like 50 cents over spot, as low as.
So we're looking at...
Per ounce, of course, for the viewers.
Yeah, per ounce.
But what about one-ounce coins?
Yeah, when it comes to...
What about the one-ounces?
One-ounce coins...
Let me take a quick look here.
Depending on the coin itself, we're looking at $2 to $3 is what I'm seeing on average for some of the cheaper coins.
Let me just mention to the audience, too, the website where you can find all this.
You can go through our sponsored site, metalswithmike.com, and that will take you to Treasure Island.
I do want to have full disclosure, Treasure Island is a sponsor of us.
We do not earn a percentage on sales.
Thank you.
for mentions in my podcast, although there's no special compensation for today's interview.
I'm just trying to get the latest details from you, Chris, about where things are in the marketplace.
But would you do me a favor?
If you do a big buy of, like you get a big supply of silver in and you've got a really great deal, would you alert me so I could pass that along to my readers any time this year?
Yeah, I'd be happy to.
I think we've got one coming up soon, so be on the lookout for that.
I'll be happy to.
Okay, yeah.
Just send me a text, and there are deals like that.
Sometimes I might be interested as well.
I'm trying to get out of the dollar as fast as I can, but it's impossible fully because we have to pay bills and meet payroll and so on.
Exactly.
You know, I'm in the same boat as other people, other customers of yours that are like, well, I feel like I'm going to lose everything that's sitting in the bank, frankly.
That's my concern.
Yeah, well, and there's a number of different ways that can happen.
When and if the financial system does finally have a show-stopping glitch, you could have a bank holiday where you might wake up and you've got to bail in and you get 80% of your money back or maybe it's devalued by 20%.
Who knows?
And we keep seeing signs on the horizon that that type of thing might possibly happen.
I don't know.
I can't predict the future, but you really have to wonder when you have this perfect storm coalescing and you have an FDIC that isn't fully funded.
It seems like a giant confidence game or a Ponzi scheme.
It's all good while the getting's good, but how long can that really last?
U.S. Bank profits, they fell 44%.
In the fourth quarter of 2023.
Wow.
So banks are not doing super well right now with these high interest rates.
They're closing offices all over the country, too.
I've seen a lot of bank closures or branch closures.
Yeah.
Let me ask you this.
In terms of what your customers are telling your salespeople when they call, And, you know, I would imagine your customers usually have, they might explain their situation and describe their goals and give reasons why they're interested in gold and silver.
Has that shifted in the last six months in any significant way?
In other words, are there newer or is there more emphasis on certain reasons now that people are getting into gold and silver versus a couple of years ago?
Or is it the same?
It's pretty much the same.
And the typical reason is it's a survival mentality.
You stock up on gold and silver the same way that you would stock up on ammo, guns, food, or take out an insurance policy on something valuable.
And so...
People love the idea of having actual physical control of real wealth that can be traded that's highly liquid that is a true cryptocurrency because once you have it, it's not on a blockchain.
Nobody knows Where you have it, whether or not you still have it, what you've done with it.
But it's yours.
It belongs to you.
So people are looking for privacy and protection from confiscation through inflation.
It's pretty much the same thing.
We've had You know, in the last three or four years now, since COVID and since coming into contact with you, we've had many, many new customers and the majority of them have been first-time buyers.
So that's the other thing that's very interesting is the number of first-time buyers that have come into the precious metals market who have never thought About owning it before.
And the actual number of people in this country that actually do own gold and silver, the amount of money that's been allocated towards it, it's a very tiny percentage.
So it doesn't take much to move the needle when people start to get interested in why it's a good idea.
You make a really important point there that very few people yet recognize how critical it is to own gold, which means there's a lot of growth potential in the marketplace.
But yet, interestingly, more and more people are aware of the devaluation of the dollar.
So we're seeing, even among younger people, Not only are they recognizing inflation, because how can you not if you buy food and pay rent?
Everything's more expensive.
But I see more and more young people now realizing, hey, wait a second, where's this coming from?
They're printing dollars.
This is a form of theft.
It's funny.
It's like an Austrian economics awakening moment for the next generation.
Like, this is a scam!
And I'm like, yeah, welcome to the club.
But they're just now figuring it out.
And I think even a lot of those people are open to the ideas of honest money.
I would consider gold and silver to be honest money.
Yeah.
Well, it's all about power, ultimately, because when you have a monetary system that's not actually moored or anchored to any form of reality and you just give the central bank carte blanche authority to engage in purchases and lending to its heart's content and you have these very low Right.
Right.
And there's no doubt that that's why the standard of living and the purchasing power of the average American has just dropped every year since we went off the gold standard, since the 1970s.
Every metric does that as kind of a breaking point for the American middle class.
And it's never going to get any better until we come back around to an honest money system.
And the best system that anyone's ever devised is one that is backed by at least a large percentage of gold.
Say 40%.
That was the original Federal Reserve ratio back when the Federal Reserve note first came out in 1914.
And there's also talk that whatever the unit system that they're going to be launching with the future blockchain for BRICS, Enbridge, that entire interoperability system, they're talking about 40% gold For that, and then 60% other national currencies that could be redeemable for energy or that type of thing.
When you unlock a monetary system from reality, it's a huge transfer of wealth and ultimately power and centralization of power.
And it's probably the number one contributor to our problems as a nation.
Everything we see around us all goes back to that problem.
It's always been about the money.
No question.
Yeah, the instant money creation by the powerful elite is really a source of tremendous evil in our world because they can print money and fund propaganda, which they do.
They did that during COVID. They can print money and fund wars, which they do.
They can print money and fund IRS agents to knock on your door and threaten you, and they do.
They print money to fund every evil thing they want to carry out.
But you mentioned cryptocurrency earlier, although you used the term crypto with precious metals meaning hidden.
I think the real meaning of the word crypto means hidden.
Right.
Right?
So gold and silver are, quote, hidden currency in the sense that they're not trackable.
They're not electronic trackable.
They're not in the bank account if they're in your hands.
But Bitcoin itself, by the way, is rising just as gold is rising.
Bitcoin, I think, is at its all-time highs again.
It's at 69,000, or was last time I checked, a couple hours ago.
Yep.
Bitcoin being backed by nothing physical, but only by its utility and its non-confiscate ability, it does have in the minds of many people really strong intrinsic value in the sense that no government can counterfeit Bitcoin.
But I would offer to our audience, if you've been holding Bitcoin and it's back up to its record highs, Why not convert a little bit of that digital stuff into real physical stuff right now?
You could sell some Bitcoin, buy some gold, and then you got it.
The gold's never going to vanish, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And it's hidden.
So it's even more private than Bitcoin because the IRS can figure out what your wallet ID is and they can see every transaction that's ever gone in or out of that wallet.
And you look at the KYC that's Involved in Bitcoin transactions.
I mean, trying to deal in Bitcoin, I've never felt more surveilled in my life when I've tried to buy and sell Bitcoin in any of those exchanges.
So if you want to unlock that $69,000 price, you've got to be dealing on those heavily regulated exchanges.
So yeah, that whole system is pretty questionable to me.
Yeah, well, it's gone through serious ups and downs.
And of course, we had the Sam Bankman fraud SBF fiasco with FTX that just obliterated.
In fact, that's what took Bitcoin off of its highs and crushed it for the last couple of years.
The thing is, that can happen at any time.
There could be another big scam that is sort of, you know, boiling up to the surface that we haven't really heard about yet.
But when it comes to gold and silver, So there's no scam because it's an element on the table of elements.
It's naturally scarce.
It's real.
It's physical.
It's been around since the beginning of the universe.
And it's not going anywhere.
That's the thing.
And you don't need a wallet, a password.
You don't need a computer to work.
You don't need a power grid to work.
Gold always works.
And there's only one gold.
It's not arbitrary.
Like, if we're talking about, let's say, BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or whatever, talking about how they want to structure their new currency and what they want to back it with, why would they choose Bitcoin?
Why not Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision or Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum or any other proof-of-work coin or just invent a new one?
It's like all of that stuff is really arbitrary, but there's only one gold, and everybody knows what it is, and you can't counterfeit that, and there's no alternative version other than silver to some extent.
Yeah, and gold isn't going to fork into a competing gold, just like you're saying.
There's no forking gold.
Yeah, and you can't corner the miners on it either.
You can't corner the blockchain like you could with...
You know, there's various attacks that could be leveled against probably any of the cryptocurrencies if you have enough money and the right team of people that you want to try to attack them and disrupt those systems.
So, you know, I think there is some value to the cryptocurrencies and certainly there's value to the technology itself.
The distributed ledger technology and the public key cryptography that's involved in that, that's going to be the bedrock for the future financial system, especially between central banks, because that's how they're going to be able to get out from underneath these centrally cleared systems like SWIFT, where they can easily be sanctioned or cut off at the whim based on politics.
So to that extent, blockchain technology is going to be very liberating in that it will enable sovereign nations to settle quickly their international payments between one another on their own terms and not have to be stuck in a centrally cleared system like SWIFT. Yes, and I would add to that two things.
If it's a truly decentralized blockchain international settlement system like what BRICS is talking about, it's impossible for anyone to weaponize it for economic sanctions.
Because it's distributed.
The ledger is distributed.
If you don't want to participate, then you have no power in the system.
That's it.
You can just choose to not participate.
But why would you do that?
And the second thing is, no nation can counterfeit the currency.
This is key.
The dollar is obviously counterfeited every day.
Again, a trillion dollars every hundred days.
Counterfeiting is the very basis of the current dollar currency, and that's why it will collapse.
You can't counterfeit a blockchain system.
You did say correctly, though, Chris, that it can be attacked with proof of work.
But I would imagine that the BRICS system probably won't be proof of work.
It'll probably be more like a proof of stake type of system.
So there is some level of shared control.
Nevertheless, I don't want to get into all the technical details here, just saying that governments can't counterfeit it.
But let me shift gears here, and I want to ask you a different question about off-ramps, because I've had this conversation with a lot of people who say, hey, Mike, I love what you're saying about gold and silver.
Yes, I get it.
I want to preserve my assets in metals during this time of economic chaos.
But after that, let's say the banks collapse, the dollar collapses, and then society is rebuilt, because it will be.
Then what do I do?
Like, what's the scenario that you're thinking of or hearing from customers of how do they reintroduce their gold and silver back into the next economic system?
Well, there's always going to be a market for currency conversion services.
So that's essentially what we do.
When we're offering to sell you gold for dollars or other currencies, we're performing a currency conversion into a commodity.
And it's the same for a grain dealer or a cattle yard.
The only difference is that with this commodity, it also acts as a currency.
So it's a commodity currency, unlike the other commodities and unlike the other currencies.
There will always be a market.
What it's going to look like in those days is anybody's guess.
I think 10 years from now, everything is going to look very, very, very different.
And I always say that necessity is the mother of invention.
So comes the time, comes the need, comes the time, comes the solution, it's going to be figured out.
And there's various ways it could play out, but, you know, Maybe we go into some kind of an inflationary scenario, and if Trump wins, we probably will, because it's very likely that he's going to raise tariffs on imports probably 10% day one, probably 60% on China.
That will further increase the bifurcation between East and West and North and South.
So in order to fund our debts and in order to, you know, who knows what his plan is going to be to rejuvenate the American economy, but it's going to require that the dollar become much, much weaker and that imports become much more expensive.
And so a devaluation of the dollar is actually really good for American innovation, at least in terms of its parity to other currencies, because we're too reliant on imports.
And the only thing we export is our currency.
And that's been the great problem, but also the great source of our power and our source of our corruption for the last 40, 50, 60 years.
So as that changes, we could see inflation very high for many years to come and maybe some kind of a new...
ultimately a new Bretton Woods agreement that could involve a revaluation of gold against the dollar and if we if we could get some honest people in government I don't know if that's actually possible that's maybe a misnomer but if we could get some people that cared about our country in there they could come up with a solution for our currency too and maybe we could have some kind of a gold standard again but that would require a massive revaluation and
And so if you're holding gold in some form during that transition period, that's going to be part of the key, among other things, to preserving your purchasing power and the wealth that you have.
And then whatever that new system is on the other side, you're going to be able to integrate your gold back into it.
And you will be there.
Your company, which goes for multiple generations, will be there.
Let me just mention the website again.
Metalswithmike.com is where people can go through and find your website, the Treasure Island Company.
And I want to mention that you also offer vaulting services that are...
It's pretty special.
It's not your usual vaulting service.
Some people don't want to take possession right now.
They might not feel like they can secure it themselves as well as others.
Or they might be ready to move or maybe they don't live in a safe part of town or whatever.
Vaulting services.
Please describe what you have for people.
Yeah, so we work with any depository in the country, and there are many.
And then we also have a sister company here co-located with us called Dakota Depository, which is a totally separate legal entity, a separate company.
And the service that it provides is pure bailment custodial service.
That company does not buy or sell gold or silver.
It doesn't hold any on its balance sheet.
It's strictly a third-party custodian.
And metal that you put in with Dakota Depository, the way it is held physically is that it's actually physically segregated.
So if you have an account holder, we allow any account holder to come to our premises and do an audit on their holdings.
And they could put a fingerprint on one of their coins.
Let's say they had 10,000 coins, silver coins, and they put a fingerprint on one of those coins.
They'll find that same fingerprint a year later, five years later, because none of it's ever commingled.
It's not treated fungibly.
So there's a number of reasons that we do that.
But that is one of the key distinctives of what we do versus some other depositories might commingle your property and they'll just treat one silver eagle as the same as any other.
We keep it segregated by owner.
But it's...
It's a service that's worth it once you have large amounts.
I always encourage our customers, take physical delivery if you can, if you have a good plan for it, hide your precious metals, hide your gold, hide your silver, put a little bit in your safe, use that as a decoy, but keep the bulk of it hidden somewhere else because if somebody were to ever, God forbid, break in and hold you up, first thing they're going to tell you to do is open the safe.
So, you You keep a little bit inside the safe as a decoy, and the rest of it, you just have it carefully hidden.
And with gold, that's really easy to do.
That's the nice thing about gold is you could fit a million dollars worth of gold in a box that's the size of a large shoebox and weighs about 40 pounds, and you've got a million dollars right there.
You can bury that and hide that in a lot of different places.
Silver, when you have large amounts of silver, that's typically where we see people wanting to utilize our services to have the metal held in the vaults in the warehouse or large amounts of gold where you're just no longer comfortable having it in your possession.
And then once it's in the vault with us or any vault in the United States, you know, it's all full service.
So if you want to sell it back You can sell it back to us at any time.
And if you want to take delivery of it, you can come pick it up or we can ship it to any location that you need it to go to.
And what about your...
The fact that you're insured.
Talk to us about the safety.
Is it Lloyd's of London that you're insured with, or who covers?
We have specie insurance that is underwritten by multiple underwriters through the Lloyd's of London syndicate, and then We've also never even had a loss.
So when it comes to something like that, the insurance companies are doing really, really well.
They're happy to insure a precious metal storage facility that has lots of assets under management.
They love that kind of an account because there's virtually never a loss.
And so we do have that insurance.
We do fully guarantee any losses that ever occur God forbid something should happen, it is fully covered.
And it would be really tough for someone to get away with the entire facility because we've been thinking about...
We're running low on space, and so we're presently planning a new facility that we'll start working on within the next year or two.
But just the logistics of moving the entire depository holdings from one location to what we hope would be the final location, a very large and hardened facility to last us maybe a century, it's going to take us months to move everything.
It's going to require tractor trailers, and so...
I can only imagine.
Do you remember the movie Die Hard 3, I think it was, where they were robbing the New York Federal Reserve?
I don't remember the scene, no.
Well, that was Jeremy Irons was the bad guy.
I think it was Die Hard 3, 3 or 4.
I think it was 3.
And they had broken into the Federal Reserve, and they had hijacked like a dozen dump trucks.
To put the gold in the dump trucks.
And even then, they were vastly underestimating the weight of the gold bars that they were stealing.
Like, they were carrying around a pretty big stacked pallet of gold bars with just a regular forklift.
And it's like...
Yeah, I think it's heavier than that, actually.
I mean, it looked like, at least my memory is, it looked like a pretty big chunk of gold bars there.
And it's like, moving this stuff is crazy difficult.
Even if somebody were to break in like some super ninja, you know, how much are you going to carry in your pockets?
You know what I mean?
Not that much.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, we've got quadruple redundant monitoring systems, every type of communication method with law enforcement.
And our local police and sheriff know who we are and exactly what's happening in the facility.
And it's under constant surveillance.
And so, yeah, you know, it's a good deal for the insurance company because really, really, it's virtually impossible for anyone to do much damage.
So the biggest fear that people have is just government confiscation.
What would happen if the government just decided to come down on the ownership of precious metals like they did back in the 1930s, which is a question we get asked a lot.
And I always tell people, I think you'll see that coming because they would start, if they were going to do something like that, which I highly doubt they would, I think they have a different plan, but they would start with the ETFs and the very big custodians.
You would see those things happening first, long before it would come to a smaller independent operation like ours.
Yeah, good point.
That's what I like about your operation.
You are independent.
You're smaller than the big guys, but you're big enough to have a lot of infrastructure in place for safety and protection, and also economies of scale for people who want to do large amounts of buying or selling.
And you get that both ways.
I mean, some days somebody calls you up and says, hey, I want to unload $10 million of silver.
Will you buy it, right?
I mean, you get those calls.
Oh, sure.
Absolutely.
Well, we are market makers, so that's also a distinctive that separates us from a lot of the other guys that you'll see selling bullion, is that we do make a very big bid-offer market where we're buying and selling precious metals from dealers and other companies and All the time.
And that's how we started, really.
Our retail side that we've gotten into here in the last seven, eight years is more of a recent thing.
We primarily were wholesalers since the late 1970s.
So that's really where we built our businesses, on the wholesale market-making side of the equation.
Okay.
I'm glad you pointed that out.
And we did cover that in a previous interview, but I didn't mention it today.
You're right.
Your company has handled very large wholesale volumes for a long time.
But that actually leads me to my next question, which is about counterfeit gold bars or attempts at counterfeiting silver bars and so on.
Tell us about how bad is that product?
What is a problem in the industry?
And what does Treasure Island do specifically?
If you receive a shipment of bars, gold or silver, what tests do you subject them to to determine their authenticity?
So the primary problem is going to be when you're getting stuff in from third parties.
So the vast majority of the material that we sell is coming directly from the primary refineries and from the mints that have produced it.
So you've got a good chain of custody.
It's coming in their wrapper.
It's coming in their box.
It's coming off the truck that you hired to pick it up at their location.
So when you've got that chain of custody, it's not as big of a problem, and it doesn't require as deep of an analysis as a mysterious package that might come in from some smaller dealer in another state, and maybe they sold us 30 gold bars that they bought over the front counter.
Now, that's the place where you have to start looking out, because there are scams out there that involve Counterfeit bars that get sold on different Chinese sites and different websites that you can go and purchase these things.
And what the scam is, is you'll get some guys who will buy a type of counterfeit gold bar and then maybe they'll buy...
Ten genuine gold bars of the same kind.
And they'll try to go to a local coin shop and say, hey, I've got 15 gold bars here.
I'd like to sell you.
Five of them are fake.
And so they just made that much money on the fake gold bars.
I probably shouldn't be saying this because now somebody might get an idea.
Probably not your listeners.
Well, I'm pretty sure they've already thought of that.
The criminals have already figured that part out, right?
Exactly.
But this is how they operate.
So when we get packages in from dealers, they go under pretty intense scrutiny.
The first line of defense is the eyes and the hands of the team that opens those packages.
So the guys that open our packages, they have seen everything.
Most of these guys have been with us for over 10 years, some over 15 years, and they've seen every type of counterfeit bar or coin you can imagine.
Um, and so, and, and there's usually a pretty good telltale because gold has a very specific gravity.
Um, and, and so to, to counterfeit a one ounce gold bar, it's either going to weigh less than an ounce if it has the same dimensions as a genuine gold bar, or if it has the same weight as a genuine gold bar, it's going to have larger dimensions.
Depending on the material that they make it out of.
So it's usually a telltale.
You can see it in the color.
You can see it in the weight or in the dimension of the bar.
But we have different types of testing that we will put things through if our detection system gets triggered and we see something that doesn't look quite right, where we can test the conductivity.
We can take larger bars.
We can test the specific gravity and see the water displacement and figure out exactly what is the density of this object in total.
And also, there are...
Like a sonar, ultrasonic kind of test that you can run on larger bars, too, to look inside the bar and see, was this bar drilled and filled?
Where some of the larger bars, like a kilo gold bar, that's a scam where they'll drill into them and take out maybe an ounce of gold and then just fill it up with tungsten and cap it off on the end with gold.
And so for that reason, larger bars like that typically, you know, we're going to chop them in half or just melt them when it comes to the larger bars.
And that's also one of the reasons that larger gold bars, even though they're a really good value, sometimes they're not going to be as liquid or they're going to be treated with more skepticism because that is one of the targets for that type of fraud when you take them off of the exchange or out of a sometimes they're not going to be as liquid or they're going
And that's also one of the reasons that the sovereign minted gold and silver coins are also very popular because it's one thing for criminals to counterfeit a bar that's made by a private mint.
It's another thing entirely to counterfeit a United States gold eagle that's minted by the U.S. government because now you've got the Secret Service involved.
Now you're not only counterfeiting a gold coin, you're counterfeiting something that's officially U.S. currency, because it does say $50 on those coins, and that's just a nominal sort of gesture.
But it is officially legal tender, even though it's worth more than $50.
So for that reason, that's one of the reasons that people do like to purchase the sovereign minted coins, because there's virtually no examples of counterfeits out there.
It's difficult to counterfeit one of those coins in the first place.
And then once you go to all that trouble, keeping that operation underground and keeping the FBI and the Secret Service off your back, that becomes another problem entirely as well.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I've never, of course, counterfeited a U.S. minted coin, but I have destroyed a couple.
I may have violated the law somehow, but I was testing to see if I could use U.S. silver eagles to make colloidal silver in a deionized water solution.
And so I slightly ionized some small millionths of a gram of silver off the coins.
And so I did that.
There's probably some rule against that, but I don't even know where those coins went anymore.
But the good news, folks, is you can make colloidal silver from U.S. Silver Eagle coins.
It actually works.
And then we did the lab test on that and found out it's perfectly safe to use.
There's not much in that other than silver.
I guess, are U.S. minted silver coins, are they three nines?
They're three nines.
Or is it four nines?
Yeah, they're three nines.
Three nines, yeah.
Okay.
So we found, I think, some, there was a little bit of iron, a little bit of, I don't know what else was in there.
I'd have to go back and check.
A little bit of nickel, a little bit of whatever.
But for like a topical colloidal silver solution, it would work great.
Yeah.
Another use of silver coins that maybe the average user isn't thinking about.
Okay, Chris, our hour's almost up.
I can't believe it.
But is there anything else you want to leave our viewers with here before we wrap this up?
Well...
Not anything in particular.
It's been slow, and so I guess the general thoughts and ideas behind precious metals still apply.
I think everybody should have some percentage of their liquid assets in physical bullion and some exposure to the gold price, at least, if you're not going to have physical bullion, you know, find something.
But, you know, don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Get some silver also.
And keep your money invested in other places, too, because there's still opportunities out there somewhere.
And there always will be in the future, too.
But it's a good time.
It's really a buyer's market.
The prices are high because there is so much demand internationally.
But with silver in particular...
It has not followed gold up to these record nominal highs.
So silver in particular, it's a good time to buy silver.
It is a buyer's market.
We do have plenty of metal on hand, and so it's shipping out very, very quickly in terms of the turnaround time.
You can purchase from us online at metalswithmite.com.
You can call us at 701-282-4747.
We do have trained precious metals experts who are happy to answer any questions, especially for first-time buyers.
We're happy to take as much time as you want and just have a conversation.
We do that every day and we can also call you back.
I should also mention you have silver IRAs that are available as well.
We work with a number of custodians, so if you do have money in an IRA, you don't have to take a distribution to buy physical gold and silver.
Depending on the custodian, you can either change custodians or move the money, but you can keep the money within the IRA and purchase actual physical gold or silver with that money, and we can tell you how to do that.
It's actually a very simple process.
Okay, that's great to know.
And it's funny, despite what you just said about right now actually being an ideal time to buy silver, for example, because premiums are so low, supply is good, 9 out of 10 people will wait until there's a bank panic, and then they will all call at the same time.
So that's usually the way it works, right?
Yeah, we're kind of used to that, but then things get a little stressful, the premiums start to pop up, and wait times get longer, so...
Yeah, that seems to be the psychology.
Most people wait until they're feeling the heat and things are going nuts to take action.
But I think it's always a good time to take action because we see the writing on the wall.
Where things are going.
Even if Trump wins, the dollar has to go down.
Tariffs are going to go up.
We have to restart American manufacturing.
And Lord only knows what's going to happen with this election.
And in the days running up to the election, we've got, what, 8 to 10 to 12 million people that have come across the border.
What percentage of those people mean us harm?
How many Chinese nationals military age have we seen come across?
You've covered this at length.
So there's so many different factors that are at play right now.
So precious metals are definitely a component to whatever type of preparation your audience is doing.
And I'm sure most of your audience is preparing in some way.
And, you know, we stand ready to help assist in that.
When it comes to bullion, we can set you up with the right package of coins or bars and help you be prepared because we don't know what's coming.
Yeah, well said.
This is going to be a very interesting year, as they say.
All right, well, Chris Olson, thank you so much for your time.
Again, folks, it's metalswithbike.com that will get you to the Treasure Island Company.
Don't hang up, Chris.
Chris, I have a question for you off camera, but thank you for your time today.
This has been very helpful, and folks should watch gold and silver prices and the banking system situation.
A lot of rules are changing.
The federal emergency funding ends March 11th.
That was kind of a bailout of the banks that were insolvent.
Thank you for your time today.
From the last year, but that program is ending now.
So commercial real estate is having to refinance.
There's going to be a lot of regional bank collapses because of that over the next year.
So do your research.
Make your own decisions.
Don't take this as financial advice.
Get your own advisors, but make sure you know what's happening and take active steps to protect your own self-interest.
And thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams here of brighteon.com.
Take care, everybody.
Our interviews and content are made possible by your support for HealthRangerStore.com.
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