Chris Olson: Paper Markets Fail as Gold and Silver Reprice for 2026
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Federal Reserve is now experiencing losing money for the first time in roughly 110 years.
It's called the quasi-fiscal deficit.
And so the Fed has stopped sending its profits to the Treasury, and they don't expect these payouts to the Treasury will resume until 2027, 2028.
Then they announced the Reserve Management Purchases Program.
They're going to start expanding their balance sheet again, buying $40 billion a month in Treasury bills while they're still using billions monthly.
So think about this perverse logic who's simultaneously losing money on their existing portfolio and creating new money to buy more government debt.
Welcome to today's interview here on Bartial.com.
I'm Mike Adams, and today, as silver has just crossed $64 per Troy ounce, shocking the world.
But actually, to my guest today, it's perhaps not that surprising because our guest is Chris Olson of Battalion Metals, who is also our gold and silver sponsor.
We've worked with for many, many years, a high trust, high integrity operation.
And our guest, Chris Olson, is also, I saw him at the Ron Paul birthday party.
You know, he's a pro-liberty guy.
His whole family is pro-Liberty.
He joins us today to talk about what's happening in silver.
Welcome, Chris.
It's great to have you on today.
Hey, Mike.
Glad to be here.
Thank you.
Hey, I can't imagine a more historic day than today.
Not only an all-time high in silver, but we are seeing surge after surge, days where it goes up, $2 plus.
And of course, some days come back, some days are down.
But tell us, what do you think is happening with silver right now?
And then I have a long list of questions to ask you.
Well, I think it's a long, drawn-out supply crunch, maybe even a short squeeze potentially.
But it also seems like silver is changing locations.
It's a reordering of the global chessboard.
We've got, you know, the U.S. just recently added silver to its list of strategic assets.
And that indicates a policy shift, potentially hoarding, potentially government subsidies to silver production, also silver consumption and hoarding.
But they're joining a long list of other countries that have already kind of done the same thing.
You've got Russia that's been doing that for a while.
You've got China that's been controlling exports of silver for some time now.
And that's because demand for silver is really inelastic.
So it seems like we've got strategic revaluation happening.
The gold-silver ratio has been very high for quite some time.
And that seems to be coming back down.
This major move in silver now since Thanksgiving weekend, Black Friday, which is kind of when it all started, when it really broke out, is pushing the ratio back down.
I think we're at a ratio of roughly 64 to 1 maybe right now, somewhere in that neighborhood.
So it's yeah.
Well, let me ask you about the fundamentals because clearly this is not, let's say, a Hunt Brothers type of situation where one party is trying to grab all the silver.
This is global industrial demand where China and India manufacturing a massive quantity of solar panels to help power data centers, for example.
And the data centers themselves need lots of silver.
And then you've got the EV industry, which is exploding in China also.
Every EV has silver in it.
Medical devices, the defense industry, massive amount of silver.
So we are looking at now, I think, unprecedented global demand and just flat out, not enough inventory to serve that demand at current prices.
Does that ring true?
Yeah, that's it in a nutshell.
It's been undervalued for a long time.
And roughly 60% of silver is industrial use.
So you can't just turn up the supply or turn off that demand.
Energy needs are only going to continue to climb year after year globally.
So that's why this looks totally strategic.
That's why it's on the critical minerals list.
China announced early this year that they were going to accelerate their stockpiling of strategic commodities, explicitly including silver as a critical mineral.
Which means they're also probably going to minimize silver exports, I would imagine.
Yep.
Yep.
Starting this year as well, they imposed export controls.
They're prioritizing their domestic needs, and that's reversing prior trends where China's been the world's second largest producer, but they are shifting from net exporter to hoarder.
So then withhold hundreds of millions of ounces from global markets every year.
So given that then data center demand is not waning, it's only increasing, given that demand for solar panels is also exploding to power the data centers, because of course, you know, everybody wants to build nuclear power plants, but in the U.S., that takes 15 plus years.
So solar panels, you can put them in in one year or less if you've got the solar panels.
So that's why there's so much demand for that for helping to power data centers.
But because of all these things that we just talked about, it's clear to me, but I want to know if you agree or disagree that fundamental industrial demand for silver is not going to go down anytime soon unless there's some kind of global financial catastrophe, like aliens show up and start bombing every nation or something.
I mean, barring that, if industry is functioning, silver demand is going to continue to skyrocket.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, the analysts are anticipating we're going to continue growth at an annual rate of like 3 to 5%.
So this is going to push total industrial demand above 800 million ounces a year by 2030.
And that's photovoltaic, AI, data centers, electronics, electric vehicles.
And we're in an annual deficit.
Silver deficit for 2025 alone is coming in at probably 150, 250 million ounces.
Since 2021, we've had shortfalls totaling about 800 million ounces, which is about a full year's global mine output.
So demand is outstripping supply, and the demand is inelastic.
And it's hard to obtain silver.
It's coming out of the ground at ratios of 10 to 1 or less is what I hear from most of the commenters on production.
So you can't just turn on the taps for more silver.
So price has to, it's going to.
And as I understand it, but please correct me if I say anything incorrect here, but the COMEX market and the LBMA are both, they were really designed to trade paper, not to deliver physical silver to much of anyone.
And they are the backbone infrastructure of silver pricing and the marketplace, at least in the West.
But the fact that they are now utterly dysfunctional as more and more buyers are placing contract orders and standing for delivery.
What does this mean for the future of how silver markets even work?
Because the COMEX, at some point, it looks to me like they're just going to have to default on everything.
and say we're only going to just pay you in dollars.
We can no longer deliver the silver that we once promised to.
Is that day coming?
Well, yeah, the COMEX is not really designed to be a physical delivery market.
It's more price discovery, financial netting out between producers and consumers.
It's not meant to flow through the COMEX as much, but it's kind of like this sort of strategic acceptance that that's the fact.
But what's happening now with COMEX breaking down the way it is with millions of ounces being shuffled out of eligible status to registered, which means it's no longer available for physical delivery.
We saw a lot of contracts get moved from that status here just in the last few weeks.
There's hoarding that's happening in the Comex amongst those that hold silver.
And it's just going to result in price discovery being more opaque happening outside of the exchanges.
You're going to have wider spreads.
Physical bullion is going to have wider spreads.
The price will be more volatile.
And it just makes everything a lot more complicated as the price experiences higher volatility and new highs.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
But it makes me wonder, too, because we hear reports of silver mines that are now just bypassing that whole system and selling directly to industrial manufacturers that need the silver.
And so the marketplace is kind of building new pathways of price discovery and delivery because the COMEX system absolutely is dysfunctional at this point.
So doesn't that mean then that fewer ounces of silver are going to be even available for anybody else to possibly buy if it's already sort of pre-purchased by these industrial makers for years to come?
Yeah, it's and that's why the prices are doing exactly what they're doing.
And that's why volatility and spreads will increase.
So it's going to be hard to discover what is the true and proper price for silver.
And right now, we don't, we have good supply of silver right now as a bullion dealer, but the spreads have widened quite a bit because there's so much selling into this market and the price has increased so quickly, so fast.
So we've got a large supply, but a lot of people are buying into it now as well.
And COMEX being dysfunctional with, you know, in October, we saw silver lease rates spiked over 30%.
There were millions of ounces that were being flown to London to basically cover shortfalls.
And we were in backwardation for several weeks where London's spot was well above the futures price that was a couple months out from delivery.
So desperation set in.
Yeah, basically you were loaning silver to London in the hopes that you could buy it back from the COMEX in a couple months and getting paid a very large premium to do so.
Wow.
So it's market function and it's a shifting of where is the silver being stockpiled and stored.
And that's what it seems to be is it's a global rush for resources and value as paper currencies unravel and debt markets unravel.
Well, you know, and on top of this, then we just had the Fed, of course, lower the interbank lending rate.
And on top of that, announcing what I'm going to call quantitative easing.
Again, you know, another $40 billion a month of, quote, liquidity being shoved into the Treasury's books.
This is massive money creation.
This is COVID-style currency creation, which, and I think we're living in the inflation aftermath today of the COVID currency creation, right?
So this means that this, you know, more helicopter money policies, we're going to be dealing with even more amplified inflation in the years ahead, which is only going to drive higher dollar valuations of both gold and silver.
I mean, I don't see any way that that doesn't happen.
What do you think?
Yeah, what you're talking about is the new reserve management purchase program that they just announced yesterday, cut rates 25 basis points, and they're talking about buying 40 billion a month in short-term debt with no definitive end date to that.
Right.
It's, you know, quasi-quantitative easing.
It's targeting short-term debt rather than long-term debt, but that's because they're already underwater on their long-term debt.
And it just shows that the U.S. Treasury debt market, it can't function without direct life support from the Fed and that the path of least resistance is more liquidity creation.
So this means fiscal dominance is here, that the Fed has to accommodate deficit spending.
Now, yesterday when this was announced, the market took a little while to react to this, but now we've got silver up roughly 6%, ripped up from the low 60s to over 64 today, new highs yet again.
So the market's pricing it in.
And there's also another interesting thing.
I don't know if you've heard about this, Mike, but it's called the quasi-fiscal deficit, QFD.
So I'm not sure if you heard about this, Mike, but the Federal Reserve is now experiencing losing money for the first time in roughly 110 years.
It's called the quasi-fiscal deficit.
And basically, they're losing about $5 billion a month, and they've accumulated over 200 billion in losses since September of 2022.
Wow.
It's calling this a deferred asset through an accounting gimmick.
But basically, during the pandemic, the Fed bought trillions of Treasury bonds, mortgage-backed securities, all yielding something like 1% to 3%.
And then inflation hits, they raise interest rates to 5 plus percent, meaning they're now paying 5% interest on $3 plus trillion in bank reserves, but only earning 1% to 3% on their bond portfolio in massive operating losses.
And so the Fed has stopped sending its profits to the Treasury, which it used to send $100 plus billion per year in profits.
And they don't expect these payouts to the Treasury will resume until 2027, 2028.
So that's more money coming off the federal budget.
And then they announced the reserve management purchases program.
They're going to start expanding their balance sheet again, buying $40 billion a month in Treasury bills while they're still losing billions monthly.
So think about this perverse logic.
They're simultaneously losing money on their existing portfolio and creating new money to buy more government debt in order.
The treasury's nearly $2 trillion in annual deficits.
And the Treasury is basically stuck.
We're in fiscal dominance.
The central bank is losing its independence.
It has to subordinate its monetary policy to government financing needs, just like happened in Brazil and Argentina when central banks started running operating losses.
And for those countries, that signified a permanent regime change where debasement became the structural trend rather than a temporary policy.
And even major publications have been talking about the debasement trade on the dollar, unable to generate returns in excess of inflation, but it's become basically a secular trend.
And so gold and silver are no longer trades.
They're strategic necessities for where everything is going.
The Fed is operationally solvent.
It can't stop expanding its balance sheet without triggering a government funding crisis.
And there's no exit strategy.
They can't do that.
This ends badly.
In other words, I would say it ends badly for anyone who doesn't have physical gold and silver.
And from what you mentioned earlier about the lending of silver and why those premiums were really spiking for short-term lending, I would imagine that at this point, nobody who has physical silver wants to lend it out for currency because you're not sure you're ever going to get that silver back the way this is going.
Or if you do want it back, you're going to have to get it back at a higher price.
So you're going to have a substantial amount of money to make that happen.
So maybe you're temporarily loaning it to somebody, but it's going to have to be at a high rate of return for you to be able to get it back from the market at a future date.
Okay, Chris, I've got so many questions for you.
But I want you to answer these two.
What is retail demand looking like right now?
I would imagine it's not crazy at the moment.
Most of this is probably non-retail activity.
But then secondly, what's happening with so-called constitutional silver or junk silver?
Because I remember a few months ago, none of the silver smelting operations wanted that silver because it requires extra purification steps.
Is that price?
Is that demand going up?
What's happening?
Yeah, we have a huge supply of it.
And that is because of where the price of silver has run.
There's been a lot of people taking profits in the retail markets.
And refineries are very backed up.
And so 90% silver is actually, it's fairly easy to refine compared to some other types of scrap silver.
But because of the delays and the lack of refinery capacity, that's driving down the price of 90% silver in relation to the price of silver.
So it's very cheap compared to spot because basically, as we're buying it, we have to carry it.
And there's just a glut of it on the market.
So it's really a buyer's market in terms of bullion premiums.
Basically, because the price of silver is so high, premiums have become very low.
And we have a good supply of retail metal in the silver space right now.
And constitutional silver is really the best deal there is.
Yeah.
But I would imagine there's probably going to be a turning point in the minds of the public like we saw.
How long ago was that?
A year and a half ago, almost two years ago with the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
You remember what happened?
The retail market exploded, but that hasn't happened since then.
But I feel like that day is coming back sometime in 2026.
But who knows?
Yeah, it doesn't take much for demand to spike.
Some kind of an event like that, some kind of a geopolitical event.
I mean, it's a tinderbox out there.
So anything could happen at any time.
And if demand spikes up, retail, like supplies, supplies will diminish very quickly.
And we've seen it happen times.
This is the slowest time of the year, typically, in precious metals, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Most people are taking time off, going on vacation, spending time with family.
They're not thinking about the end of the world, or at least they're trying not to, or the end of the dollar.
So typically, this is a very slow time for us.
And right now, it's record volume for this time of year.
So if this is the new slow for us, then we've got our work cut out for us because we're very yeah, no kidding.
Well, I would say that 2026 is going to get very interesting.
Now, I want to mention you were recently featured on Tucker Carlson's show.
And I saw some of that interview.
And my goodness, everybody that watched that was so impressed with your knowledge of the silver industry, your analysis.
I mean, you and your family and the people you work with there in your company are extremely knowledgeable.
I want to mention that Tucker Carlson is the co-founder of Battalion Metals that you launched with Tucker, and you are our sponsor also.
So thank you for sponsoring us.
I want to give out our web address, metalswithmike.com.
We'll take people to battalion metals.
That's metalswithmike.com.
And tell us about, can you talk about the Tucker-Carlson partnership briefly and how that came together and what it means to you?
Yeah, it was a lot of serendipity and coincidence that brought us together.
And he had been an indirect customer of ours for several years.
And when he left Fox News, he was approached by many different gold companies that are in the IRA space.
There's a bunch of these companies out there that are, frankly, in my opinion, criminal, that defraud retirees of 40, 50, 60% of their net assets on a regular basis.
And they've been doing this for decades.
And their strategy is to go after a guy like Tucker, somebody who's influential, has a big audience, doesn't really understand the industry very well, not an expert in physical precious metals, and convince them that, hey, gold and silver are a great idea.
Look at us.
We have these great reviews, five stars, and there's a secret to how they do that.
And wouldn't you like to promote gold and silver to your audience?
And we will pay you lots of money every year to do it.
And there was actually a bidding war amongst these companies to figure out who could try to get him.
And the number exceeded $20 million per year.
Wow.
So he starts looking into that and his team starts investigating.
And that's what he does.
And they figured out really quickly that this was a very bad deal for their audience, that this was a very shady setup that these companies had where they're charging.
I've seen recent Invoices from some of these companies where they're charging $8,000 an ounce for gold.
They're charging.
So they're basically stealing from the elderly and just packaging it as a gold IRA or something like that or a silver IRA.
Exactly.
Somebody comes in, they spend $100,000, they give them $50,000 worth of gold at a time when premiums are at record lows and these guys are charging 60% premiums on what they sell to these people.
And these people have no idea that it's happening.
They deceive them as to the true value of their account for as long as they can.
And then when it comes time to actually liquidate, silver or gold could have doubled and they're still underwater.
You know, I want to talk to you more about this very issue.
But you may know, I've mentioned this before.
I wasn't offered Tucker Carlson money, but I was offered $100,000 a month to promote one of those companies.
And of course, I said no because my spidey sense was going crazy.
Like there's not a chance that I would do anything that would harm my readers, my listeners, et cetera.
But $100,000 a month is not pocket change either.
And I can only imagine that the way that they offer people, larger influencers, millions and millions of dollars is because, well, they've got these crazy margins by ripping off their own customers.
And that's so it becomes very lucrative, but incredibly dishonest.
And yet, somehow it's still like none of these people are being prosecuted for this that I'm aware of.
There have been a few cases, mainly in California, where some of these companies have been forced to disgorge profits, but there's no overall federal regulation that prohibits this kind of activity.
It's basically buyer, it's a self-directed IRA.
They're not required to act as a fiduciary.
They're not required to act in their clients' best interest.
They lie and they misrepresent.
And that's where some of these companies have been caught.
But even if you look in their paperwork, and I've seen some of it recently, we've had a lot of people coming to us since this episode aired saying we think we've been ripped off.
And so I've been able to look at some of the client agreements.
And these agreements explicitly state our spread may be up to 60% on product.
It's in black and white.
I can show it to you.
And what's crazy is that the receipts that I've seen from this particular company, they charge the client well in excess of the 60% that they've told them was their maximum in the paperwork.
So it's even worse than what they admit to in writing.
And there is no federal regulation that prohibits it.
That's basically buyer beware.
And they're preying on people's confidence.
They're preying on their trust in the celebrity that refers them.
And then they have a very clever strategy when it comes to the reviews on these different review sites.
And they'll talk about five-star reviews.
And I think that's also how they trick these celebrities into doing a quick look and saying, oh, well, these guys look above board.
They've got five stars.
They've got hundreds of reviews.
They must be fine.
And the secret is that the bad reviews get targeted.
If somebody leaves a bad review on one of these sites, the company will contact that customer and convince them to remove the review in exchange for being made whole.
Look, we'll refund your will buy it back from you above market rates.
We'll get you some of the money back.
Will help you out, just remove the review.
I see.
And that's how they do it.
So it's a whole racket, which is very frustrating because, in my opinion, the Federal Reserve is also a racket and the dollar currency is a racket.
And then you try to get out of that and you want to go into metals.
And then you get hit with these other rackets from these dishonest operators.
And that's why it's so critical that you, what you are doing is such high integrity, full transparency.
You protect people's privacy.
You protect people's wealth.
And that's what you are in business to do is to help people protect their assets.
And that's why we partnered with you now for, has it been six years or I don't know, many years.
And I do not get complaints from customers about what you're doing.
I get people love the fact that your staff helps them decide what's best for them, but there's no arm twisting.
There's no pressure.
There's no fast talking, you know, sign this, hurry, you know, none of that garbage.
And those are all red flags that you're about to get screwed.
So folks, be very careful.
And Chris and I are not going to name names here, but believe me, there are top name people behind these gold scam companies, people whose names you probably know in the conservative movement who have been, who are very famous people, and they're involved in ripping you off.
So just be very, very cautious.
Yeah.
And that's kind of been our policy, not naming names, but I would like to say yet.
Yet.
We're considering just how we might go about doing that.
And so we probably will be soon.
I hope you do.
If you do, we will help amplify that message because it needs to be stated.
I mean, these people are crooks, flat out.
It's so bad.
And we've talked to a number of brokers that have worked in these boiler rooms where they've got 80 or 90 people working call lists all day long.
And they are encouraged to sell the product for as much as they can get the other guy to pay.
They don't have a set premium.
When you deal with battalion, our brokers cannot raise your price.
They can only lower it.
And the prices that we have set are already very competitive.
Occasionally, we'll do a price match or something like that if it turns out that we're above somebody else.
But our brokers can only lower the price.
They get a small share of that as their commission, but they're not incentivized to raise that price at all.
In fact, if our brokers lower the price, our broker still gets the same percentage of a commission credited to them.
It's the owners that make less money in that case.
And when Tucker approached me and we discussed what he wanted to do in this space, we both discovered that neither one of us was interested in getting rich.
We wanted to approach this as a mission.
And that's exactly what it is.
So we have no desire to enrich ourselves.
We want to enrich our people.
We want to pay our people well.
We want to give our customers the best possible experience with the best possible technology and customer service and the best possible pricing.
We want to be transparent about everything.
And that's step one.
But also, we want to blow the lid off of this corrupt industry that is preying on some of the best people in America right now that are just trying to protect what they have.
And the thing is, they're stealing money from these retirees, but it's not just the retirees that they're ripping off.
It's their children and their grandchildren.
It's the second generation.
So we already have a problem with generational wealth accumulation in this country.
And we've got these shysters, mostly in California.
You see them coming out of LA, but they're all over the place these days that are just confiscating these people's wealth, just taking it.
It's highway robbery.
It's disgusting.
And we're going to put an end to it.
Reminds me of the film The Wolf of Wall Street, where the guy was just selling junk bonds to anybody he could talk into it.
But we call this like the wolf of Gold Street, I guess.
And it's, yeah, they're just dialing for dollars and trying to trick people into giving up their money.
And folks, I mean, our audience is very well informed.
And I think almost everybody watching this has some amount of gold and silver stacked right now.
Even if it's a small amount, it's something.
But I would say that a lot of people are going to increase their stacking of ounces of gold and silver.
And I'd like you to address the issue of physical ownership or vaulted in an allocated or even a segregated manner versus the counterparty risk of just having silver paper or a silver ETF or a silver fund.
That's not the same thing, is it?
Can you speak to that, Chris?
Yeah.
So with the ETFs and the funds, you're owning a security in a company whose assets are primarily gold and silver.
So you own the underlying metal that is in that ETF.
It's very easy to buy and sell.
But there is some additional level of counterparty risk in that relationship.
It's the custodian itself, the trust itself, the vaults.
There's concerns about rehypothecation and how some of those metals are allocated.
But more importantly, you can't even take physical delivery.
You don't have any rights to do that.
Only the authorized participants can actually exchange the physical amongst themselves.
Now, the next level down from that is going to be professional storage.
And Battalion does have an offering called Battalion Bunker, where we partner with carefully selected depositories.
Right now, we have two.
One of them is CNT in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, who is a family-run, owned, and operated enterprise that goes back 50-plus years.
We've known the Oliaris for a very long time.
We're very good friends with them, very trustworthy people.
And they happen to operate a newer COMEX facility.
So they have deep understanding and connections in the industry.
And so we've partnered with them to be our flagship depository offering for Battalion Bunker, as well as another facility operated by Loomis Loomis in Long Island, New York.
And we have more that we're going to be bringing online in 2026.
And the reason that it's a good option is, and the reason that we choose these specific locations is we're looking for a good counterparty, but also high amount of liquidity in that space,
in that vault, where there are other market makers beyond just ourselves and other financial institutions where it's possible for us to make a larger market and be able to liquidate tens of millions or potentially hundreds of millions of dollars for our clients when they want to convert it back into currency for whatever reason they might have.
So you have to have a lot of liquidity.
You have to be able to move that metal in and out and you have to be able to audit it.
So the metal that we control in those locations is fully segregated into our specific holding.
So the holding that we have is not commingled with anyone else's.
And then we perform regular audits of it where we basically go count and verify that every ounce that is in that location matches exactly what we have on our books that's being held on behalf of customers.
And it's fully reserved.
It's 100% there.
It's audited.
It's on demand.
It's not rehypothecated or lent out.
We can't legally do that and we would never even think of it.
And we have to charge a small fee to cover the vault space and the insurance.
And it can be delivered on demand or it can be liquidated on demand.
I trust your vaulting services over any other vaulting service that exists.
And it's funny, the only feedback or criticism I've ever heard from people who use your vaulting services is them saying, oh, my silver has doubled or tripled in value, which means I now have to pay more for storage.
I'm like, wait a second.
You have half a million dollars in silver.
It just went to a million dollars and you're complaining about a couple hundred dollars in storage fee or whatever.
I'm like, come on, put this in perspective.
It's a good problem to have.
It's a good problem.
Yeah.
Of course, you'll take delivery of it.
Now you've got a million dollars worth of silver.
Where are you going to put that?
Where are you going to put that?
To that question, Chris, I have just published a book.
Last night, I published a book.
And I don't know if you know, we created a book creation engine.
It's called BrightLearn.ai.
And the book is right here on my screen.
It's free for everybody to download.
It's called Vanishing Vaults, The Ultimate Guide to Advanced Caching and Misdirection for Hiding Gold and Silver.
And so you can find that book at books.brightlearn.ai, along with all these other 30 books that I've published there.
But this one, I put in all my notes into this book about all the best caching and hiding ideas, including like pouring into concrete yard furniture, like you can store gold inside the concrete and then you need a sledgehammer to redeem it.
But there are a number of advanced ideas.
So for people who want to get more creative with hiding gold and silver at home, this book covers inside your home and outside your home in a yard or a more of a rural type of environment as well.
So that's available.
Or you can vault it with Chris's company, Battalion Metals at metalswithmike.com.
Either one is secure.
Yeah, I love that you put that book out, Mike.
I'm going to take a look at that.
Security by obscurity is one of the best things to do when you have metal in your possession.
If you've got a big gun safe somewhere in your house, don't put all your metal in there because if it puts a gun to your head, put a little bit in there so you can open it up and say, oh, yeah, that's everything here.
Go ahead and take it.
And the rest of it's hidden throughout the house or in the yard or whatever.
Just don't lose your treasure map.
Someone trusted.
You have to give them your treasure map so that if something happens to you, they can go find where you've stashed all your horde.
Right, right.
And we even talk about methods of that.
Like if you bury it in a certain location, you have GPS, latitude, and longitude, which consists of different numbers.
You can give one set of numbers to one party that you trust and another set to another party with instructions, right?
If something happens to me, you two get together, open the envelopes.
Now you've got, you've X marked the spot.
Yeah.
So there's multiple ways to, you could even have, you could have like an encrypted zip file with the notes, and then you have a third-party person that says, you have the password.
If something happens to me, you give the password to these other two people, right?
You can, you can make this as complicated as you want, or you could just keep it simple.
Yeah, it's kind of like the multi-signature offline wallets where it requires four or five different people have to come together in order to unlock it.
So that's a multi-sig treasure map.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Love it.
Yeah, very cool.
Okay.
So, Chris, from here forward, the only, and I'm guilty of this myself.
There have been times, like I hesitated buying silver earlier this year at $34 because I thought it was too high.
And of course, I'm laughing.
I ended up buying, it did drop $230.
I bought at $30, and I'm so happy that I did.
But the only resistance that I hear from people right now is like, oh, I'm going to wait for it to pull back.
It's, gosh, it's 60.
I'm going to wait until it hits 50.
Folks, it might never hit 50 again.
I mean, I can't promise that.
Maybe it will.
Maybe it'll hit 40 again.
But you might have missed the boat too at those levels.
Who knows?
What do you think?
Yeah, if it hits 50, I'm going to make another large purchase.
Me too.
Purchase at 30, and then I actually decided to sell it back at 32.
And this was about two years ago.
I really wasn't sure.
Got distracted, silver broke 50.
And finally, about three Sundays ago, I capitulated and added a very large amount to my personal holdings at like 56.
I thought, now's the time.
This looks good.
And now it's up eight bucks.
So I feel pretty good about that.
But I was just looking at the gold-silver ratio chart that was put out by Crestcat Capital just two days ago.
He put out this great chart showing that the ratio of the price of gold to silver has been for five years.
It's been over two and a half standard deviations above its historical mean price.
Wow.
And to come back to just two standard deviations, we'd be looking at somewhere like 50 to 1.
And, you know, we've seen the ratio at 90 to 1, 100 to 1, 120 to 1.
And now it seems to be trending down.
Silver is moving up every day here, practically making new nominal highs, while gold is being relatively stable because that's because the ratio is coming down.
And where's the ratio going to go?
Where should it be?
If we had a 55 to one ratio right now, which is still above two standard deviations above the historical mean, well above the historical average, which is roughly like 29 to 1 right now for like the last 300 years, including recent history.
But if we were back at 55 to 1, silver would be $85 an ounce.
But here's the thing: silver actually has not made new highs.
It's made nominal highs.
If you adjust for inflation to what silver did in 1980, you've got to get in the neighborhood of $150 an ounce for it to be an actual inflation-adjusted new high.
So maybe we've got a lot more room to run.
Well, I am now convinced because of the fundamentals, the fundamental demand.
See, I've done a lot of work on the power shortage that we have in America and the need for power in the data centers in order to compete in the AI race with China.
And Trump announcing the construction of 10 nuclear power plants is a tiny drop in the bucket and it won't do jack for 15 years.
Solar is, and also gas turbines are five years wait time right now, by the way.
So solar is the only fast power that you can put in for data centers.
That is solar combined with big batteries, right?
And thus, that's going to drive silver demand through the roof.
So to me, the fundamentals are very clear.
In addition to EVs and defense industry and telecom industry, et cetera, we are looking at, I mean, folks don't take this as financial advice, but I don't see how silver isn't $100 sometime next year.
I mean, usually I'm late.
Like this summer, I was saying silver was going to hit 50 by the end of this year.
And here it is at 64.
So, you know, it's already blew that out of the water.
But I don't want to make predictions for people because everybody should do their own research, but I don't see how this stays anything under $100 for very long.
Yeah.
And the future appears to be scarcity.
And globally, players are gobbling up all the natural resources, hoarding it.
We've got tariff concerns.
We've got export controls.
We've got the threat of global war.
So it's, you know, where else are you going to put your money?
It's the recommendations that are typically made for what percentage of your investable assets by the big institutions, they're raising those percentages.
Like it used to have the 60-40 stock bond portfolio, which was kind of the gold standard, is now no longer valid.
I've seen recommendations, 60-20-20 stock bonds gold, or just replace bonds with gold.
And treasuries are no longer the neutral reserve asset.
They have a geopolitical national security counterparty risk.
So central banks, I think it was just this year that for the first time, central bank reserves of gold exceeded their reserves of U.S. treasuries for the first time in a very, very long time.
So there's a definite trend to this as to what holds real value and where are we going to be in 10 years.
Is it going to be a more dollar-centric world with less volatility and more peace?
Are we going to cut government spending?
Are we going to slash entitlements?
Is that even possible in this democratic system that we have?
I don't think it is possible.
So they're going to have to print and spend in order to fund the government while the Federal Reserve continues to suffer losses on its balance sheet with its quasi-fiscal deficit.
Yeah, they're going to print and print until the end is the way this is going.
And by the way, I'm not sure everybody recognizes this, but on the scene behind you, and I don't know if that's just a photo or if that's real, but those are monster boxes of like 500 coins, and you've got lots of different boxes.
Can you describe what's there?
Yeah, we've got, I don't know how much you can see, but it's shelving back in our vault area, monster boxes of silver on my left, monster boxes of Canadian silver maples in the yellow down on my right.
You've got Philharmonics up here, other types of silver, and then one of our vault doors.
So yeah, it's just an image.
I'm not actually sitting here, but it's one of my nice I like to use during interviews because it kind of sets the stage for what we're talking about.
But that is an image taken.
It's a photo taken of your vault.
Correct.
That's our facility.
Yep.
Wow.
And yeah, I mean, it provides context because a lot of people don't know that your company traditionally has been involved in wholesaling gold and silver to a lot of the other retailers for decades.
I mean, you want to speak to that?
Yeah, well, that's, you know, my dad started the company in 1976.
We got into wholesaling, distribution, market making in the 90s, and I came on board in 2000.
And that was where I started to focus all my time and energy was refining that market and all of our processes, building our capital position, becoming more competitive.
And that's ultimately what drove the majority of our growth for the next 20 years.
Treasure Island Coins was the name of the company.
We started a wholesale division, which we spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary in 2010 called North American Bullion Exchange, which has been our market-making entity.
Treasure Island Coins began to market retail direct to consumer through web sales and phone sales more heavily in 2016.
And then when COVID hit, that really just exploded.
But it was on this infrastructure, our logistic capacity, our capital position, our ability to fulfill orders, our vaulting capacity.
All of that is what contributed to our ability to make an offer to Tucker Carlson and his people that we could actually sustain the level of demand that we expected to come from his audience and to help him start battalion metals.
So without what we've been doing here for the last 25 years and really the last 50 years, none of that would have been possible.
So we move a lot of metal every single year, and that's really our specialty.
Well, as a longtime partner of yours or an affiliate, I got to say I'm thrilled that you partnered with Tucker Carlson because I have so much respect for him, his voice, his courage, his integrity, and his deep search for the truth about every single topic.
I think he's just the greatest journalist living in the Western Hemisphere today, honestly.
And he interviewed Putin, too.
Total agreement with that.
No, I couldn't be happier.
And it's an amazing opportunity that we've had.
I love the fact that it's Tucker, of all people.
I really look up to him.
So it's a huge opportunity for us, but also the industry and also what it represents for what we want to do in shining the light on what's been happening to people and putting these scam companies out of business.
Yeah.
And I'm sure that this interview will get spread around them.
I've heard that there's a lot of chatter amongst them right now about Battalion and about what Tucker is doing.
And they have every reason to be worried.
I'll just put it that way.
Yeah.
And I've interviewed Andy Sheckman on this topic as well.
And he said exactly what you said, that it's a scam-infested sector of the industry.
And for the integrity of the industry, those scammers need to be rooted out.
Very simple.
So whatever you want to do to help expose them, we will support that.
And just have your legal fund ready to go before you start naming names and have all your facts as you always do.
I'm not telling you anything new, but you're going up against some heavy hitters who have deep pockets because they stole it from people.
They have a lot of ill-gotten gains that they're going to want to deploy offensively and defensively against what's coming, but we will be well prepared.
I'm sure you will.
All right.
So folks, the website where you can get to Battalion Metals and give us credit for the introduction is metalswithmike.com.
That's our affiliate site.
We do earn a small, very small percentage of your purchases.
But even then, the prices are really extremely competitive.
And you'll see you can get real-time live pricing on the website.
No con artist, no rip-offs, no bait and switch, no nonsense.
Okay.
So you want an honest, high-integrity, trustworthy gold and silver retailer with world-class vaulting services.
That's battalion metals at metalswithmike.com.
Chris, is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap this up today?
Just for your sake, also, if you do check out on battalionmetals.com, make sure you see the Ranger affiliate code in there, which should happen.
If you go to metalswithmike.com, that should happen automatically.
If you don't see Ranger in the code, type in Ranger.
You'll get the shipping insurance fee waived.
It's a small fee, but it's just something that we say as a thank you for coming to us from Mike.
Yeah, good point.
Yeah.
Use the discount code Ranger and you'll save the shipping insurance fee.
There's still a shipping fee, but not the shipping insurance fee, which is an additional fee.
But overall, if you think about what you're getting from your company with the privacy, with the integrity, and just the trust factor that's there, people are thrilled working with you.
And you're going to get gold and silver securely into their hands.
And from there, you know, the sky's the limit of where this goes.
So thank you for what you're doing, Chris.
I really appreciate working with you and all that you've given our customers over the years.
Thanks, Mike.
We're glad to be friends with you too.
We appreciate it very much.
And we appreciate you.
All right.
Well, be well.
And please keep me posted, Chris.
You know, you can text me at any time with any alerts or anything that's happening in the industry.
Please do so.
And I'll do my best to keep our customers informed.
It's nice chatting with you today.
We'll talk again soon.
Sounds good, Mike.
All right.
Take care, Chris.
Thanks.
All right, everybody.
Chris Olson there.
Wow.
What an extraordinary individual.
And also, just to let you know where his philosophies are, I ran into him at the Ron Paul birthday party in Texas not long ago.
We were both attendees there.
I got to see Ron Paul speak and had a blast.
So again, metalswithmike.com is the website.
Don't take anything in this interview, though, as financial advice.
Do your own research.
You should note that we have our AI engine at brightu.ai that does have a financial coach with a, with plenty of disclaimers there, but you can ask it questions also.
And it's great talking about how to reduce risk and how to do more research.
And it's fully trained on gold and silver and honest money and the books of G. Edward Griffin and much more.
So you can find that at brightu.ai if you want to do more research.
But thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger here at Brighttown.com.
Get ready, folks.
2026 is going to be a really radical year for the financial markets.
Take care.
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