Peter Schiff on Gold’s Dominance Over the S&P and the Plot to Stop You From Noticing
Gold has so dramatically outperformed the S&P this century that you’d think CNBC would be recommending it to investors. But they’re not. Peter Schiff explains why.
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Chapters:
0:00 Why Schiff Decided to Start Buying Gold
10:45 You're Being Lied to About Inflation
23:39 How the Government Secretly Rigs the Economy
25:25 The Unemployment Rate Is Much Higher Than You Think
27:27 What Was the Result of the Big Beautiful Bill?
30:10 Is the Housing Bubble About to Pop?
36:20 The Real Reason College Got So Expensive
40:30 The Real Reason Healthcare Got So Expensive
43:50 Crypto vs. Gold
58:11 Will Bitcoin Be the New Global Reserve Currency?
1:02:11 Why Corporate Financial Channels Hate Gold
1:15:04 The Secret Gold Scam Stealing From Americans
I mean, so there's an illusion that, oh, you know, we have all this prosperity because in the year 2000, the Dow was about 10,000 and now it's almost 50,000, right?
So that's a big gain when you price it in dollars that have lost a lot of their purchasing power.
But when you price it in gold and realize that, hey, gold was 300 back then, and now it's 4,300, right?
The gold, it took, I think, 45 ounces of gold to buy the Dow.
And I forget what it is now, maybe 16 or 13.
You know, it's, you can buy a lot more of the Dow now than you could back then.
So what that shows you is that the gain in the stock market is inflation.
It's not real value that's been created in the market.
We've just destroyed the value of the currency that we used to price things in.
And so you need more dollars to buy stocks, but you don't need more gold.
You can buy stocks with a lot less gold because gold is real money.
Government can't just create gold.
They can't create inflation and create gold out of thin air like they do Federal Reserve notes, paper dollars.
You know, originally, the dollar in 1792 was defined as a weight of gold.
I mean, that's really what the dollar was.
It was a specific quantity of gold or silver.
And, you know, for a long time, you know, till 1913, when we got the Federal Reserve, we were pretty much just using gold and silver as money.
And even when the Federal Reserve was created, all the Federal Reserve notes were redeemable and lawful money and gold.
And gold was money up until 1971.
And even though Americans couldn't redeem their Federal Reserve notes, which we call dollars, they couldn't redeem them for gold.
Foreign governments could.
And foreign governments held a lot of gold dollars as a reserve.
But they did that because they knew that those dollars were not only backed by gold, but convertible on demand into gold.
And so we were on a gold standard even through the dollar up until 1971.
But once we defaulted and the U.S. government reneged on its commitments to pay gold for its notes, that's when the real inflation started.
That's when we really started printing a lot of money.
And that's why you had the big price increases of the 1970s.
And it wasn't the Arabs that were just jacking up their oil prices because oil went from $3 a barrel to $40 a barrel.
But it wasn't that oil was getting more expensive.
It's just that we used to pay for our oil with gold and we started paying for it with paper.
But all that money, we printed it in the 60s for the war on poverty, the Great Society, the Vietnam War.
We ran these big deficits, which were small by today's standards, but they were big back then.
And they were financed with inflation.
And we saw the consequences in the 1970s.
And we may have had a real dollar crisis because the dollar lost about two-thirds of its value during that decade against other currencies like the Swiss franc, the Euro, the Japanese yen.
But when Reagan came in and we had Volcker in 1980 and interest rates went up to 20% and we really had some substantial reforms in our tax system and we created a lot more confidence in our economy, we kind of stopped the dollar's decline at that point.
But now I think we're on the verge of a much bigger crisis because I think that this time around, it's not going to be the U.S. going off the gold standard.
It's going to be the world going off the dollar standard.
And you really have to understand the degree to which the U.S. has used the dollar and its reserve status as a crutch.
And our entire way of life as Americans has been supported by the idea that we could just create dollars out of thin air and then use those dollars to buy what the rest of the world produces.
We have these huge trade deficits now.
In fact, Donald Trump used to talk about the trade deficits a lot as being the problem.
They're a consequence of the problem.
They're not the problem per se.
But what enables these huge trade deficits, we have over a trillion dollar a year trade deficit, is the world is willing to accept the money that we print for the goods that they produce.
And when you produce goods, you need a lot of resources.
You need land, labor, capital.
You need factories.
You need supply chains.
You need raw materials.
You need workers.
Energy.
And you don't need anything just to create money out of thin air.
The Fed just adds zeros on a computer.
And so we're able to create dollars that the world wants, and we get all their stuff.
We didn't have to produce it.
Then the world takes the dollars that they earn from us, and they buy stocks, they buy real estate, they buy our bonds.
And so as a result, our asset prices have gone up and goods prices have stayed down and interest rates have been relatively low because we're able to borrow what the rest of the world saves, even though we don't save very much ourselves and we don't produce very much.
We get the benefit of all these goods that are coming in and we get all the foreign savings that are financing our spending.
I think that, you know, when Donald Trump talked about Liberation Day, ironically, it was the rest of the world that is going to be liberated from the burden of having to support the U.S. economy.
When Trump says that the world has been screwing us over and ripping us off, he's got it backwards.
We've been screwing them over because we've been getting their stuff and all we do is export our inflation.
They get our paper.
We get things that make our lives better.
And they get our IOUs.
And then, you know, they use our IOUs to buy up our financial assets.
But I think this is all changing.
And I think what we're seeing now in the price of gold, where it's finally broken out of its consolidation, because after gold went from 300, 250, 300 to 1,900, right?
That was a 10-year move.
It went sideways from 2011 to 2024.
And it really broke out at the beginning of last year.
And it's more than doubled since then.
Silver has finally broken out.
Silver had a double top at around 50 from 1980 to 2011.
And it just broke out this year.
Gold broke out last year.
But now you're seeing this movement out of dollars.
Foreign central banks have been huge buyers of gold because they've been moving away from the dollar.
They've been divesting themselves of dollars and buying gold instead.
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Well, the major central banks other than the West, you're talking about in Russia and India and China and even smaller ones, Poland or various countries are buying gold.
And they're buying gold because they want to get out of dollars.
And in fact, one of the things that happened to really cause this to happen in a bigger way was when Biden was president and he sanctioned Russia.
And in sanctioning them, they basically took away a lot of their dollar reserves that they had entrusted in dollars.
And we basically pulled the rug out from under them.
We sent a message to the rest of the world that you could be next.
That if you hold your reserves in dollars, you're vulnerable.
I mean, it wouldn't even store value, but as a reserve asset.
And so that was a political impetus.
But the real reason for getting out of the dollar is that we're going to destroy its value.
We have these runaway deficit spending that is the source of all the inflation that we have.
It's the Fed monetizing the debt that the government is creating.
A lot of people don't know what inflation is.
They just think it's prices going up because that's what the governments tell them or some economists tell them.
But prices going up are a consequence of inflation.
They're not inflation.
Inflation is an expansion of the supply of money and credit.
And when you expand money, you expand credit, that bids up prices.
And so as a result of inflation, prices go up.
The root of the word, inflate, means to expand.
Prices don't expand.
They go up, they go down.
And if you get an old dictionary, get an old Webster's dictionary, even as late as the 80s, and you look up inflation, that's exactly what it says, an expansion of the money supply.
But the government kind of redefined inflation because if you define it properly, well, it's pretty obvious who causes it.
But if you change the definition to rising prices, now the public blames whoever it is that's raising the prices.
That's where it's coming from.
And so the government is able to blame the private sector, whether it's corporations or workers for prices going up when they're simply raising prices in response to inflation.
And of course, sometimes inflation doesn't just cause prices to go up.
It prevents them from going down.
See, in a free market economy, in a capitalist economy, the natural tendency for prices is to go down.
The only reason that you don't buy something now because you want a lower price is because you can't afford it.
And so you're hoping that the price will go down and then you'll be able to buy it, which is what the free market does.
So it's nonsense to say that we're not going to buy.
I mean, would it be a disaster if food got cheaper, if healthcare got cheaper, if energy got cheaper, if clothing got cheaper, if everything you needed was less expensive?
Why does the Fed have to prevent that from happening?
But people don't look at asset prices rising and they don't think that's a bad thing because people think that they're getting richer because prices are going up.
But it's really distorting the economy.
You don't want prices to go up because we print a lot of money.
You want stock prices to go up because the companies are inherently more valuable because they're generating more earnings and their stock price is higher because they're worth more, because they're earning more.
You don't want just the price to go up because there's so much cash that's bidding it up.
But that's really what's been happening.
And that's why when you look at prices from the terms of gold, you can see that real prices are falling.
But I wanted to get to why we had this big spike in inflation under Biden.
So when we got COVID in 2020, the government basically implemented the most inflationary combination of monetary and fiscal policy I'd ever seen.
And I called it out on my podcast at the time when everybody was swearing, oh, deflation.
And I was like, look, this is massive inflation that's coming.
So when COVID hit, we shut down the economy.
We told people, don't go to work, stay at home, don't produce anything.
But then we said, but don't stop shopping.
So everyone's going to get a bunch of money.
We had the paycheck protection.
We had these enhanced unemployment benefits.
We ran massive deficits.
The Fed printed money like crazy, right?
We doubled the Fed's balance sheet for like $4 trillion to $8 trillion.
Everybody stayed home and got money to spend.
So we had all this money to spend, but we weren't making anything.
And so I knew that the consequence of that was going to be soaring prices.
Now, inflation, right, the expansion of money supply always acts with a lag.
If I create a bunch of money today, you're not going to see it tomorrow, you know, at the supermarket or at you know, at Walmart.
There's a little bit of time.
It could take six months, it could take a year before you really start to see the effect of all that inflation in retail prices.
So, what happened was if you look at the CPI in the final year of the Trump presidency, the last three or four months, it really started to shoot up.
And it continued for the first few months of the Biden presidency before Biden's policies had ever come into effect, before the first stimulus check was put in the mail.
And that inflation continued.
So, the CPI was up 9.1% during Biden's first year, his first term.
That was all Trump and on Trump and the Congress under Trump, because all the money that was created that resulted in those price increases was created before Biden got into office.
Had Trump been re-elected, it would have been the same thing, right?
We would have had just as high a move in CPI had Trump won.
So, it's not because we elected Biden, right?
That it was already baked in the cake.
And the main reason that Trump didn't get re-elected, whether or not you want to think it was rigged or not, the main reason was that Trump got elected promising to make things better.
And at the end of his first term, they were worse because all Trump really did was continue the failed policies of Obama.
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I mean, unemployment, the way they measure unemployment now, they used to, when they measured unemployment, the official rate.
So when they go back and they say, hey, unemployment's not as bad as it was in the 70s, of course, it's actually worse if we measured it the way we measured it then.
Because back then, if you were part-time, had a part-time job, but you were looking for a full-time job, you were still unemployed.
And now you don't count, right?
You can be working one hour a week and you're not unemployed anymore.
Even if you spend the rest of the week looking for work, you're still not unemployed.
You used to be unemployed.
If you stop looking for work because you can't find a job and you're just tired of looking, you really want one, but you're just not looking because you're convinced there is no job for you, you used to be counted as unemployed.
Today they say, well, you're discouraged.
We're not going to count you.
So if you give up looking for work, but you don't have a job, you're no longer unemployed.
But back in the 70s and 80s, you were still unemployed.
So we've basically taken so many unemployed people and we've decided that we're not going to count them as being unemployed.
That's the reason that unemployment is so low, because we're not counting all these people.
If we still measured unemployment now, the way we did in the 70s and 80s, the official unemployment rate would be well over 10% and the inflation rate would be at least double what they claim.
And Donald Trump, ironically enough, when Donald Trump ran for office the first time, he said this.
If you remember, he kept saying, don't believe these government numbers.
They're fake.
Unemployment is a lot higher.
But once he became president, then he told everybody the numbers were real because he wanted people to believe he was doing a great job.
And so he pointed to the same government numbers that he said were fake when he was trying to get elected.
All of a sudden, they were real when he wanted to use those same fake numbers to pretend that the economy was doing well when it wasn't doing well.
So the big, beautiful bill was the worst thing that we've done under Trump because the big, beautiful bill not only preserved all the deficit spending under Biden, but it expanded it.
It made it worse, right?
We made the deficits even worse by increasing government spending and through tax cuts.
And so now we're going to have even bigger deficits and the Fed is going to be monetizing those deficits.
Money supply, you know, after it just buys, prints money and buys the bonds.
And in fact, just last week, the Fed basically said we're going back to quantitative easing without saying it because they don't want to admit it.
But they announced, you know, they were doing quantitative tightening, right?
They were shrinking their balance sheet because the balance sheet blew up after the financial crisis and then after COVID.
And so the Fed was reducing, shrinking the balance sheet and they stopped in December, just this month, but now they restarted expanding it again.
They're now printing money to buy up treasuries in order to suppress interest rates.
But the underlying problem of the U.S. economy has been for decades now, interest rates are too low, right?
Everybody says, oh, we need lower interest rates.
We need lower interest rates.
We actually need higher interest rates.
The reason our economy is so screwed up is because interest rates have been too low.
That's why nobody saves because you don't have a return on savings and everybody is going into debt.
We have record debt in the government, record debt in the corporate sector, record debt in households, all because the Fed has kept interest rates too low.
And they've done that to keep this bubble economy going.
In fact, that's the real reason.
When the Fed started hiking rates, the reason it stopped hiking rates wasn't because they finished the job and they beat inflation.
It was because the banks started to fail.
You had several banks that went under because of higher rates, which was another thing that I predicted, just like I predicted the 2008 financial crisis.
I predicted that the Fed was sowing the stage of another crisis by keeping interest rates so low because the banks were loading up on low-yielding long-term mortgages and government debt.
And everybody thought this was great.
People could go out and borrow, buy a house and they can borrow money at 3% and 4%.
But I was pointing out, well, what happens to the lenders who own all that paper when interest rates eventually go up and they're stuck with this long-term debt where they're collecting 3% or 4%, but now their cost of funds are 5% and they're getting killed.
And I said exactly what's happening with the housing market now.
You have a situation where the Fed has inflated a housing bubble bigger than the one that popped in 2007 because they kept interest rates so low and people were able to borrow money to bid up home prices.
But now that mortgage rates are not rock bottom anymore, they're still not high.
They're still low by historic standards.
They're just not as low as they were, right?
7% mortgage is still pretty cheap.
But you can't afford to buy a home at a 7% mortgage that was priced for a 3% mortgage.
And so now you have a situation where real estate prices have to fall.
Well, you know, what's happening is a lot of the people who own their homes and have these low mortgages, they don't feel any pressure to put them on the market.
I mean, if they can get a high price, they'll sell.
No, there are a lot of people that should be working, but the government has given them an alternative.
And that is a huge problem.
That is a whole different topic.
But the point is that there aren't a lot of homes being constructed and there's not a lot of homes for sale because the people that own the homes, they have such a good deal on their mortgage that they don't work.
But the Fed created that problem by blowing up this bubble in the first place.
If we'd never had the artificially low interest rates, and of course, the other problem was the government guaranteeing the mortgages, which enabled people to pay more for homes than they otherwise could have paid.
Why did you've referred a couple of times to quantitative easing, the post-financial crisis, interest rates at zero, but that went on for like, what, 15 years?
Whenever the government comes in to try to help you pay for something, they actually make it more expensive.
If you look at all the areas where the government is involved in a big way, which would be housing, healthcare, education, that's where prices have gone up the most, right?
It's because the government gets involved and subsidizes it.
Before the government got involved in education, college was not expensive.
If you were upper middle class in the 1940s, 1950s, you could afford to send your kids to Ivy League schools.
It was, you know, wasn't that big a deal.
If you were poor, like my father grew up poor, right?
He wasn't dirt poor, but he thought he was like upper, lower, lower, middle.
But my father, father, you know, they had eight kids.
And people would work their way through like my dad did if they didn't come from an affluent family.
But they did the same thing with health care.
I mean, health insurance and healthcare is expensive because the government is so involved in it.
And even if you look at where the government is not involved, like LASIK surgery, prices have come down for those procedures because the government doesn't pay for it.
And the reason that we all have insurance, right?
People have insurance for everything now.
And in fact, what really made it bad and Trump doesn't, the Republicans want no role in repealing it is under Obamacare, they said that insurance companies cannot discriminate against people who are already sick, right?
If you have a pre-existing condition, the insurance companies have to charge you the same as if you were completely healthy, which destroys the whole concept of insurance and makes it extremely expensive.
I mean, of course, we don't have anything approaching a free market.
Nothing resembles a free market.
It's a monopoly economy.
It's cartel.
But all of this is described as a free market, thereby totally discrediting the concept of free market economics and ensuring that we're going to get a socialist system.
And it's very unfortunate because a lot of people look at Trump and they say, well, he is a pro-business president.
And he is pro-business, but he's not pro-capitalism, pro-free markets.
Donald Trump wants to micromanage the economy from the White House.
Like he's the CEO.
He wants to decide where he thinks capital should go and direct it into industries that he likes or companies that he likes.
And that's wrong.
I mean, one of the big industries that he's promoting is crypto.
And for me, I think this is a complete waste of capital.
Now, yeah, I mean, if Americans want to throw their money away in a lot of these crypto companies, all right.
I mean, it's unfortunate.
But if the government is now promoting it and pushing money into this industry that might have gone someplace else if it was a free market, this is doing a lot of harm.
They didn't make money in crypto because they, you know, produced products that we consume or provide services that improve our lives.
The people who've made money in crypto, and I know a lot of them, they've made money in crypto because the crypto that they bought a long time ago went way up.
You're talking about people who put the same, but when you buy gold, which I'm totally, I own a gold company, I'm totally for buying gold, but you're not, it's not a creative act.
You're not making anything.
You're not making anyone's life better.
You're not really adding to the sum total of the economy.
You're not doing anything other than buying something low and holding it until it gets high.
Look, if we buy stocks, right, for our customers at Europe Asset Management, which is my company, the most important criteria is the current earnings and the dividends, right?
So I'm buying companies because they generate income to me as the owner.
Just like if I were to buy real estate, I would look at the rental income.
If you just buy real estate because you think the price is going to go up, well, you're a real estate speculator.
Maybe you'll speculate right.
Maybe you'll be wrong.
But it's different from an investor who is looking at the cash flow.
So when I buy a stock, if I'm getting a seven, eight, 9% dividend, right?
Because I own that company, it's paying me a dividend.
I don't need the stock to go up.
I just get my share of the income.
I'm buying into a business that is generating income.
Now, if the business grows and generates more income in addition to my dividend yield, when I go to sell the stock in the future, if it's a more valuable company that's generating more income and paying more dividends, then I can sell it at a higher price than what I paid, right?
Because the business itself is more valuable.
But if you're simply buying a company that doesn't even make any money, then maybe it's losing money and you just want to bet that in the future it might make money, you're speculating on a stock.
You could speculate, but it's very different from being an investor, right?
You're a stock speculator.
But when you buy Bitcoin, you're not even speculating in the sense that Bitcoin is going to earn money in the future.
It's marketed as if it were digital gold, but it's not digital gold at all.
It's got nothing in common with gold.
Gold is a valuable commodity.
Now, when you own gold, when you decide to buy some gold, what you're doing is you're storing that gold so that somebody in the future can use it, right?
Gold is unique among commodities in that it doesn't decay.
It doesn't spoil.
For thousands of years, gold will stay the same.
And if a ship sunk 500 years ago in the ocean and you can salvage that ship today, if there was gold in it, it looks exactly the way it looked when the ship sank.
They are important and valuable because they're needed in all sorts of industries.
And so when you are storing gold, the gold that you're storing can be used in the future, not just by a jeweler who would want it to make jewelry, but to use in aerospace, in consumer electronics, in medicine.
There are all sorts of things where you actually need gold.
No, but when you look at gold and you look at the things you can do with it and the properties that it has, you know, we as humans value the properties that gold has.
Part of the promise of Bitcoin when I first learned about it was it was anonymous and private, and it allowed you to circumvent the AML laws and the KYC laws, and you can transact without the government knowing what you were doing.
And that was a positive aspect of it.
Yeah, that was the whole appeal to me, which is completely lost now that it's all in ETFs and Bitcoin treasury companies and all that.
But even though that was appealing, Because it didn't have any real underlying value, you couldn't really keep a lot of money in it.
It was only really useful, I think, for people who were doing something illegal.
Because there, you know, if you have to launder money because you're doing something illegal, even if I end up losing 20 or 30% of my money in Bitcoin, because I accept Bitcoin and by the time I use it, it's, you know, it's lost 30% of its value.
That's fine because criminals are used to paying to launder money.
Well, what they're looking for in crypto is validation.
They want the regulation to validate the product in the industry so they can get people to buy it by saying the government has blessed it.
The government now endorses it.
The government is supporting it.
And the reason that so many politicians, including Trump, the reason that they support Bitcoin is because Bitcoin supported them, right?
People that got into Bitcoin early made so much money because so many other people got in late that they were able to pay off a bunch of politicians and get them to support Bitcoin.
They supported this whole idea of a Bitcoin strategic reserve, which is really just a Bitcoin bailout fund trying to use taxpayer money to buy out Bitcoin.
But the Bitcoin industry was able to pay off a lot of politicians.
And can I just ask, though, I mean, a lot of what you're saying is obviously true, but I also think you've described the decline of the U.S. dollar, its diminishing purchasing power.
So clearly there needs to be a new global reserve currency.
You don't want it to be one owned by a geopolitical rival.
So why wouldn't Tether, why wouldn't Bitcoin be the new global reserve currency?
And so there's a difference between money and currency.
So currency is backed by money.
So when we were on a gold standard and we had paper that was redeemable in gold, the paper was currency.
The gold was money.
So currency is like a money substitute.
But you can have two kinds of currency.
You could have legitimate currency, which is backed by real money, or you can have fiat currency, which is backed by nothing.
And so what we have now is fiat currency.
And the question is, well, could we replace that with Bitcoin?
And I don't think that that's possible because I don't think that Bitcoin has any value beyond its appeal that a greater fool is going to come and buy it.
Central banks can't hold Bitcoin as a reserve against their own currency.
If they had to sell it, I mean, the price would drop sharply.
Well, the main difference there is, you know, they're both in a way fiat in that both Bitcoin and the dollar derive their value from faith and confidence.
I mean, you have me, El Salvador bought some Bitcoin.
I mean, you have some foreign governments that have sovereign wealth funds where those sovereign wealth funds have kind of bought some Bitcoin ETFs or maybe they bought strategy, you know, which was a big mistake.
But because they're, you know, these investment managers are under a lot of pressure, just like any other manager to perform.
And so a lot of these crypto-related assets went up.
And so there was a pressure.
Hey, I need to put these in the portfolio.
And so you have allocations.
And then the crypto community tries to pretend, oh, these governments are buying up Bitcoin.
They're not really buying Bitcoin.
The managers of these sovereign wealth funds have taken a small allocation.
I think that's all going to stop because this is going to blow up.
You know, the people who are putting money into crypto now into Bitcoin are going to lose a lot of money, right?
They're the exit strategy.
I mean, that's why Bitcoin hasn't gone up.
You know, Bitcoin's real high watermark was four years ago.
It's down about 40% priced in gold over the last four years.
So we've been distributing Bitcoin from the strong hands that bought it early, the OGs, the whales, to the retail public has been buying it at these inflated prices for years.
And eventually, you know, the bottom is going to drop out of this thing.
So that lead, I mean, you're making a very, I would say I'm biased, of course, but you're making a pretty compelling case for gold on a bunch of levels.
But one, most obviously, is a hedge against whatever the hell is going to happen next.
Like, so if you were giving advice to someone you love, like, I've got $100, what do I do with it?
I think the wise, the loving advice would be put some of it in gold.
Well, short-term interest rates have come down, right?
The Fed has cut rates three times.
And so now they have the Fed funds at three and a half to three and three quarters.
But the 10-year treasury has stayed around 4%.
It's around 4.15%.
The 30-year Treasury is around 4.8%, right?
So they haven't been able to move long-term rates down.
And I think long-term rates are going to soar in this country.
And I think in order to prevent long-term rates from really rising, the Fed is going to be monetizing more debt, printing more money, creating more inflation.
Remember, we're spending now over a trillion dollars a year just on interest on the national debt, like 1.2, 1.3 trillion.
That's going to hit $2 trillion probably sometime next year because almost all of the national debt is financed with treasury bills, right?
Back when interest rates got to 20% in 1980, most of the national debt was long-term.
So it was unaffected by the big move.
It only affected the new borrowing.
But now, if a third of the national debt comes due in the next year, the government has to refinance that at whatever the current rate of interest is.
So I think we're headed for this fiscal time bomb where the cost of servicing the debt is skyrocketing.
I mean, in not too many years, it could cost us more than we collect in taxes just to pay the interest on what we've borrowed.
Because the debt service costs are exploding.
And the only reason they're not much higher now is because rates are still low.
4% is low.
Donald Trump wants them lower.
He wants zero or 1%.
But the reason he wants that, he wants just more inflation.
He wants to try to blow air into the bubble to hide the fact that the economy is actually getting weaker.
So he just wants to make the bubbles bigger by creating more inflation while at the same time claiming that he's vanquished inflation, all because energy prices have come down and energy prices have come down.
In fact, energy prices are as cheap as they've ever been.
If you look at how many barrels of oil you can buy with an ounce of gold, oil is dirt cheap.
The question is, how long is it going to stay this cheap?
I don't think it's going to stay cheap.
I've been buying a lot of oil stocks now.
We've been increasing our allocation of energy because I think we're going to see a big move up in oil prices.
The one factor you haven't mentioned is technological change.
So with gold, too.
I mean, if gold prices, I don't know what the threshold for gold is, but if it gets to, you know, six grand an ounce or something crazy, somebody's going to figure out a better extraction technique and there's going to be a lot more gold and prices will fall.
I mean, I'm doing that and you should look into this too.
I have a, on Shift Gold, I have a T-Gold, which is ultimately going to be tokenized gold.
I haven't launched the token yet.
But right now I'm helping people buy gold and silver that we're going to tokenize.
So once you have the gold, you'll have the ability to withdraw it either in a physical form or in the form of a token.
But the idea of a gold-backed token, the idea of T-Gold is so that you can use your gold easily as a medium of exchange and you can transact instantly over the internet.
Somebody in the United States can make a purchase from somebody in Australia and pay them instantly with gold.
You don't have to send the actual gold to Australia.
You just send the token, which represents ownership of that gold.
If you have the token, then the gold belongs to you.
And so if I want to give you my gold, I don't have to drive down to the vault, grab some of it and bring it to you.
No.
I just send you the token and now you own the gold.
Just like paper money, when paper used to circulate, whoever had the paper had ownership of the gold.
The paper currency was titled to gold.
And so now you could do that with a token through a blockchain.
Look, when you, you know, with course, it's a legal contract.
It's a law.
So if I sell you a gold token and that's like an IOU, it's an IOU for gold.
And I legally, contractually am obligated to pay you or whoever is the bearer of that token.
So while you own the token, the gold belongs to you.
But if you spend that token and now somebody else earns it because, you know, they provided goods or services or you just gave them a gift, now they own the gold.
Now they don't have to come and get it.
They can just leave it there and just transact the token.
I mean, that's what people did.
If you go back to the days of a blacksmith with your gold, you would have gold and you left it with a blacksmith and he gave you an IOU.
And if the people in the town knew the local blacksmith and they recognized his IOU, you could spend it.
People would take it because they didn't have to go get the gold.
They knew the gold was there.
The problem would be, of course, if the blacksmith absconded with the gold.
But in capitalism, and I have this argument all the time with these Bitcoiners because they think that what I'm doing with tokenized gold, they think, well, you have to trust the third party.
So I want to own Bitcoin because I don't have to trust a third party.
Well, of course, if you put your Bitcoin on an exchange, if you own it through an ETF, of course, you're trusting a third party.
But I have no problem with trusting third parties in capitalism because a business that has a reputation and has a brand wants to maintain the value of that brand.
I mean, the insurance industry is a perfect example of trust.
When you buy an insurance policy, you're relying on a third party, the insurance company, to pay your claim.
If you have fire insurance, you're trusting that if your house burns down, the insurance company is going to pay you.
But the bigger thing is you're just trusting that the people who believe in Bitcoin, who believe that nothing is something, continue to believe that and continue to do that.
I mean, the only risk there is somebody could steal it from you if they find it, right?
You could lose it, right?
You know, if you have gold.
But the thing about tokenized gold, and I recommend that people have both.
They have physical gold and they have some tokenized gold because the tokenized gold is the gold that you can use in commerce, that you could easily spend.
It's much more difficult if I have bars of gold or even gold coins.
Even a one-ounce gold coin is $4,000.
A tenth of an ounce coin is $400.
So if you want to buy something for five bucks, you can't really do it.
But if you have the tokenized gold, then you can easily transact.
You can buy a cup of coffee and the barista can accept payment in gold.
The big problem, though, and I want to congratulate you too on battalion gold, right, that you set up.
Because, you know, when I started, as I mentioned, when I started in this industry, in the gold industry in 2010, for over 10 years before that, I was just telling all my customers, buy gold, just go out and buy gold, right?
Even though I didn't sell it, I thought everybody should own it.
And I just said, you know, go out and get it.
And little did I know that people were just getting ripped off because I found out years later, people would call me up and they would say, you know, I just sold some gold.
You know, I bought it, you know, it was $400 and now I sold it at $700 and I lost money.
Well, how'd you lose money?
And I started looking into it and I found out that when they bought gold, when it was $400, they didn't pay $400.
They paid like because they didn't get $400 worth of gold.
They just paid $400 to get like $200 worth of gold.
Yeah, they got, and so I set up Shift Gold simply because I didn't want people to get ripped off anymore because it was so pervasive.
And it was almost because so few people were buying gold that the only way that the gold industry could make money was to overcharge.
And what really made me furious, and I don't even want to name names, but I had a, you know, is that they would go to some of the most popular conservative talk show hosts and they would pay these guys to recommend their gold company.
The only reason it worked, Tucker, the reason it worked is because the people who listen to their favorite talk show hosts and the guy would say, here's the firm I trust.
This is where I buy my gold.
Yeah, because they don't rip you off, but here's where I get my gold.
Go buy your gold there.
And the listener who is very loyal to the talk show hosts and trusts them goes to that gold broker and just assumes they're getting a great deal.
Hey, you know, so-and-so wouldn't recommend this company unless they were going to treat me right.
And so they didn't shop around.
And in fact, they make it impossible to shop around because they sell coins that nobody else has because they're so obscure.
And they try to pretend that they're not going to be confiscated or they have some kind of collectible value.
And it's all BS.
They have no value.
All the money went, it goes into the pocket of the salesman because these gold salesmen work on commission.
And if they sell you maple leaves at a 1% markup and maybe they make $200 in gross commission and they make $30 for themselves, or they can get you to put the $10,000 into these two coins and they make $2,000.
Now, the thing is, gold has gone up so much that a lot of those people don't even realize because now they could actually still sell their gold at a gain, but they would have a much bigger gain if they hadn't been ripped off.
In fact, I have a special report.
I remember I wrote this report.
People can get it.
It's on my website on shiftgold.com, but it's classic gold scams.
And I go over all of the tricks, all the things that gold salesmen tell you to steal your money, to convince you why you shouldn't buy, you know, a maple leaf or a cougar and why you should buy this certain.
And they have all these tricks.
And a lot of times, too, they'll even advertise for these, you know, they'll have a low price on a maple leaf, right?
That might even be lower than what I would charge, right?
But then when someone calls up to buy it, they don't sell you that.
Or if they're charging you 50% more than the price of gold and the price of gold goes down and they have to give you back 10% of what they overcharge you.