Silver’s Biggest Opportunity in Years? (Uncut) 02-14-2025

Silver’s Biggest Opportunity in Years? Feat Peter Krauth – LFTV Ep 210

The US produces only 25% of the silver it consumes. It needs to import 75% of its annual silver consumption. And most of it comes from Canada and Mexico.

They now have to keep printing all we crash. We’ve got this ticking time bomb talking gold with the one and only Andrew Maguire. Welcome to life from the vault.

Welcome to life in the vault. My name is Shane Moran, and I’m thrilled to be your host for this episode. And from the entire life from the vault team around the globe, we extend our heartfelt thanks for your unwavering support here.

As we continue into 2025. As you might imagine, our community is expanding week by week, and we couldn’t be more excited. Now we’re in the midst of historic times.

And today we’ve got the one and only Andrew Maguire in the vault. He’s a precious metals expert and whistleblower. And he’ll be joined today by a returning guest by popular demand, Mr. Peter Kroth.

Now, they’re here to talk silver. So buckle up. And it’s going to be an incredible episode.

Life in the vault, you know, brings you exclusive insights and updates you simply won’t find anywhere else. And this episode is going to be no exception. But just before we dive into talking gold, the silver edition, with Mr. Andrew Maguire and his featured guest, Mr. Peter Kroth, let’s take a moment for a second to spread word about this channel and and hit that like button and hit that share button and share the video and forget.

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And we’ll do just that now. So make sure you hit that like button. And without further ado, let’s head over to the introduction of Mr. Peter Kroth.

For those who haven’t already heard of him, he’s a 20 year veteran of the resource market with a specialized focus on precious metals, particularly in silver. Now, Peter is not just an expert. He’s an educator, an investor, and he has turned his extensive knowledge into a tool for others to benefit from.

So Peter’s contributed to numerous articles and interviews with respected platforms such as Kitco and BNN, Bloomberg, the Financial Post, Seeking Alpha, Streetwise Reports, and many, many, many more, making him an in-demand source for silver related news and insights. And with that, let’s cross over to the UK and some in-depth silver talk with the one and only Andrew Maguire and our special guest, Mr. Peter Kroth. Over to you, Andrew.

Well, hi, Peter. Thank you so much for a return visit with us. You wouldn’t believe how many people have been harassing me to get Peter back.

I mean, what good timing today there, Peter. We’ve got gold and we’re recording this on Wednesday the 5th, just so that people know where we’re recording this from. But basically, we’ve got gold rising up, making all-time highs.

Each fix has been, this is the seventh fix now above 2,800 and it’s looking pretty good. Hey, Peter, we’re going to talk about silver here because obviously it’s lagging a little bit. But I think from our perspective, we have complete faith that it’s about to rally.

But let’s ask you what you’re thinking today as we parachute in and perhaps maybe the best place to start would be 2024. Did silver do what you thought in 2024 before we look at anything now? Thanks for having me, Andrew. Always fun chatting with you.

To your first question, yes, it did. In fact, I had said that I saw silver reaching $35, I think I had said originally in the last quarter. It did that, I think just prior to that or just near the beginning of the last quarter, hitting $35 and then dialing back from that.

No complaints on my end. It did underperform gold slightly, which given, I guess, maybe some of the macro economic environment, perhaps not too surprising. But as I say, it did meet my target and did perform well.

And I’m going to repeat what you said as we’re speaking. Gold’s hitting all-time highs, just very exciting. $28.80 was the last that I saw for spot price.

Silver was, I think, at almost $32.50. That means if you look over the past maybe six months or so, I think $32.20 was the previous peak in early October. I think it was October 3rd or 4th. So we’ve now taken out that high.

Hopefully, we’ll close today above $32.20 and that will mean a new high for the past couple of quarters. And obviously, very bullish. When you look at momentum indicators, just in the silver price, for example, things like the RSI, the MACD, these things are all trending upwards.

They certainly point to strong momentum. They’re not overbought even at this point, which is quite encouraging. So I actually think that we could potentially see over the maybe the next few weeks or at least by the end of this quarter, we may actually see $34 or $35 silver.

Now, I’ve been telling my subscribers that I thought in the first half at least of this year, we would go back to $35. Again, that could very well, you know, this is one of these psychological ceilings, so to speak. We could bump up against that and not necessarily make it through in a sustained way immediately.

But I think that, as I said, $30 would be the new floor. We’ve seen that for some time now. I think once we reach above $35, that will become a new floor.

And I actually think that by the end of this year, sometime in the second half, we can probably at some point touch the $40 level. So with gold going ballistic the way it is, and I just saw a quick headline this morning from the World Gold Council that 2024 saw another thousand, I believe it’s a thousand tons of gold being bought by central banks. That’s three years in a row, extremely bullish.

And if you look at the numbers, I don’t know if I’ve pointed this out before with you, but when I saw that for 2023 and 2022, that gold buying by central banks was above a thousand tons. I did the quick math and I saw that that’s really about a quarter of every ounce of gold was bought by a central bank in the last now three years, which is very impressive. So think about that.

25% of all the physical gold is being bought by central banks. Just outstanding kinds of points and drivers to understand, to grasp and to consider in terms of what the big smart money is thinking and doing right now. You could argue, maybe you’d have some pretty good counter arguments.

In fact, I could think of a few, but nonetheless, you’d have to imagine that central banks have amongst the best information. And if this is the kind of action that they’re taking, then it speaks volumes. And the beauty of it is, Peter, is that we’re talking about central banks.

We’re talking about central banks outside of the US here. We’re talking about all the Basel III compliant markets, which means because gold is Basel III compliant. So therefore, if you put up a gold offering, you better have it fully NSFR compliant backed.

Therefore, it’s T plus one deliverable. So what we’re seeing, the beauty of this is that while it’s great to see the official numbers there. And as you say, that is mind boggling.

It can’t be hidden. It is what it is. The beauty is that it’s being settled physically.

Now, when, for example, in the physical exchanges, unlike the COMEX, which is diluted and not for long, we hope, but anyway. But basically, for me to trade or not me, but if somebody wants to trade on the SGE, Shanghai Gold Exchange, first thing you need to do is buy that bar. Physically own that bar.

It’s actually inscribed to you. And only then can you sell it. Only then can you.

So in other words, it kind of imposes a discipline on you. You think, well, do I really want to sell it at this price? So yeah, I think to me, that’s the beauty of this is it’s being settled in physical markets. And each time we see another ounce, another kilo, another ton heading in that direction, it’s not coming back.

And we know that what that’s doing is sucking paper market liquidity out of the only exchange still not compliant. This beauty to me. Absolutely.

And something that I kind of wanted to point out is that if you think about, you know, the stats that we’re getting from the World Gold Council, you know, I’m not the first one to say that they tell you what they’re able to get official numbers for. And there is probably little doubt that the buying is actually well beyond the numbers that we’re getting. So that’s also telling that it’s probably, you know, I can’t even venture a guess in terms of percentages beyond the numbers that we’re told.

But I can only imagine that it’s significant, meaning that, you know, it’s probably well beyond a quarter of all the gold flowing to worldwide central banks, typically non-Western central banks. So, I mean, you know, people are just sticking their heads in the sand if they don’t make a point of thinking about what the implications are of this. They’re just massive.

You know, they are not comfortable holding, I was just looking at some stats the other day. The percentage of holdings of reserves by central banks globally has been falling for the last 20 years or so. And we’ve gone from, I believe it was around 62-65% to about 54% now.

And the trend is clearly downwards. So central banks around the world are doing two things. They’re doing a lot of things, but two main things maybe for us to consider and keep in mind there, you know, have huge implications given what we’re talking about is that they are buying gold, physical gold hand over fist.

They are selling US dollars at a very, very steady pace. So, you know, how much more indication do you need? Again, with some reservations, I’m going to call this the smart money. So, you know, keep that in mind when you think about where you think things may be headed.

And I also think that there’s a good chance that the broader stock markets have rolled over. There are a few indicators of that. I think the S&P peaked from what I saw just earlier today.

I looked at when its last high was. This was three days after Trump’s inauguration. I think that there was a lot of, I’m going to say, you know, hype and maybe also a lot of FOMO and all of that sort of stuff built in.

Now, a lot of that had to do with the tech stocks. We’ve seen this, you know, potential real threat coming from DeepSeek AI out of China that was apparently a lot cheaper to develop. If the air comes out of the magnificent seven, that is almost certainly going to have big repercussions across the broader indices because of just so much of the value of these indices in these seven stocks.

And, you know, so much of that has to do with AI lately. And that’s been a big driver. So, you know, if I look at it this way, if the broad stocks have, in fact, peaked and continue to trend downwards at some point, this is not going to happen immediately because there’s a lot of hopium out there.

But if that is the case, it could take a few quarters, maybe two, three quarters. And, you know, the early, the smart money is going to start to see that this may not be coming back. These stocks were wildly overvalued anyways.

And if they continue to trend downwards and, you know, again, the smart money has tremendous capabilities for research and looks at sectors and compares sectors and sees what’s going on in, say, precious metals, for example, both the physical prices and the equities, the stocks, the mining stocks, whether it’s producers or explorers or anything in between. And they see that these continue to trend higher at some point. Starting with the smart money, you’re going to see a shift of sectors from, you know, losing momentum, tech, AI and, you know, Magnificent 7 in particular, but more broadly, the broader indices losing momentum and continuing to trend downwards.

And the precious metals sector continuing to trend upwards. I want to give you a really, really interesting stat that a good friend and a very bright young guy by the name Tavi Costa, if anyone does not follow him on Twitter, I highly recommend it. Again, his name is Tavi Costa.

He works with Crescat Capital fund managers, and he puts out some of the absolute best macro research out there. Fantastic charts on almost a daily basis. And about, I’m going to say maybe three, four or five months ago, he put out a fantastic chart where he looked at the precious metals producers that are in the S&P and they are not an index, a sub index, but treated them as if they were their own sub sector of the S&P and compared them to all the other sectors of the S&P.

Andrew, they were the single highest cash flowing sector of the entire S&P. We’re talking about 40% free cash flow from the large precious metals producers. So the smart money will see this, the smart money will start to shift where the value is and where the cash is coming from and where the dividends will start to come from.

And I think we’re going to start to see a lot of M&A, a lot of activity is going to come. I mean, I talked about that over a year ago in the Silver sector, and then that’s really started to happen last fall. There were two big deals that happened within a matter of weeks of each other.

You had Kerr Mining buy out Silvercrest. You had Hecla, sorry, no, First Majestic bought out Gato Silver. And so a small sector shrank to a little bit smaller even overnight.

I like both deals. I think it makes the acquirers immediately stronger and more Silver rich in terms of their overall production and better cash flowing as well. But all this to say that I think we’re going to see this start to ramp up a lot as the metals prices go up.

It makes cash flows that much richer, and whether they use their cash or they use their new higher share prices as currency to go out and buy competitors, I think we’re going to see a lot of activity there and these are going to start to make the new headlines. Yeah, and I think that segues kind of nicely into Silver as well. And I this is so interesting, Peter, because when you wrote your book, The Great Silver Bull, and I think this was at its time, there was very few people who were focusing on Silver.

And I think what we’re talking about now, then it’s very nicely into when you talked about Silver’s historical role as money. And this is what’s ultimately driving this attraction. I mean, after all, Silver’s money, gold is money.

They’re money. They trade as a foreign exchange trust. They’re not commodities.

They act, they of course have commodity, well, Silver has a commodity influence, but it’s money. And I think, so when you put that, you’re talking about something after putting it into historical context as really, when you put Silver into your portfolio, I remember you talking about your book, you were basically saying, you’re going to outperform inflation when you do that. And now you’re talking about some interesting stuff here, which we don’t cover.

We don’t cover the stocks. And I think this is where we have so many people asking questions for you and about you. And I think what you’re talking about to me, does this mean, can we interpret this to mean that the lagging minor sector, which you look at, and you say, how is it possible that they could be underperforming to this level when we have such bullish inputs everywhere else? Obviously, you’re just segueing nicely into that.

So you’re seeing M&A activity, you’re seeing, what else are you seeing, Peter? Well, there’s something I wanted to point out that really kind of shocked me. It’s, I’m going to say, in some ways related very much to what you just pointed out about, you know, Silver being money. And so, and my book.

So interestingly enough, in the book, so this came out in May of 22. And one of the things I said in the book at the time was that companies, I’m quoting here, companies may one day, I’m talking about public companies, may one day be challenged by their shareholders for holding too much cash as it loses purchasing power, hurting share values. So here’s what I’m going to say, maybe didn’t, shouldn’t say shocked me, because I did say that back in 22.

But I came across something from last December, which very much lines up with my statement in that in the book. And so both Amazon and Microsoft had shareholder proposals that were submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research. And so stay with me here, because this was that they should consider Bitcoin as a treasury asset.

Now, I know, you know, you have your detractors, and you have your lovers of Bitcoin, I don’t want to go into that at all. What I will say about Bitcoin is, in terms of how it’s relevant here is because it has a cap on its ultimate number of coins to be mined. And so for many, it’s considered hard money that way.

So if we accept that for a moment, then I think this is very, very telling. Because here’s the statement that the National Center for Public Policy Research made when they wanted Amazon and Microsoft shareholders to consider Bitcoin as a treasury asset. They said, during inflationary times, corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, not only by working to increase profits, but also by working to protect those profits from debasement.

Now, I asked you, Andrew, how does that how much does that sound like what I said back in 22? Absolutely, bang on. Absolutely. So this says to me that shareholders in the know, are starting to wake up to the detrimental effects of inflation.

And you know, when I made that statement in the book, I had, it’s funny that we were just talking about the Magnificent Seven, because when I made that statement, in the book, I was talking about the FAANG stocks, and I’d gone and I’d done a quick calculation, you can find this very easily. I went looked at, you know, at the time, it was, you know, Facebook and Amazon and whatever, Microsoft, Apple, you name it, Google, or Alphabet. And so these FAANG, these large FAANG stocks, I looked at them and I said, interesting, let’s see how much cash they have on their on their balance sheets.

Well, this was early 22. They had 500 billion of cash, if you added all the cash together across these five companies, that’s half a trillion dollars in five companies. And that was when it struck me and I said, wow, you know, and this was we’d seen inflation start early 22, quite a bit already at that point, it did peak only a few months later, but I was looking forward and I was looking ahead and trying to assess what, you know, the implications would be.

And that’s when it struck me and I said, you know, shareholders of public companies that hold huge amounts of cash are not going to sit back, they’re going to hold them to account and they’re going to put pressure on them and they’re going to say, listen, you cannot just leave that cash there. If even with official numbers at three percent, there’s better things you can be doing with that cash. Here’s one other interesting point.

Not long after, Tesla of all companies went and changed their internal policies so that they could, they would allow holding of things like Bitcoin, holding things like gold, gold ETFs, precious metals generally and other hard assets. So in some ways, Tesla was a little bit ahead of that. They went ahead and did this themselves.

But to me, it was a sign of things to come. And we’ve seen again, I talk about this in the book, but we’ve seen in Idaho, for example, there was, I’m not sure whatever ultimately happened with it, but there was a concerted effort in the legislature to allow the treasury of the state to own things beyond, you know, these so-called safe U.S. treasuries and these kinds of things, because what they were paying was well below the inflation rate. And they were asking to allow for the treasury of the state to hold things like silver and gold, you know, at least partly to help protect the citizens of the state with the treasury’s holdings so that they would not be so hurt by inflation and the value of these assets falling on a net basis.

So anyways, I’ve talked about this enough. I’ve made my point. But I think that these are the kinds of things we need to look for.

It’s very telling to me that you have sort of the broader, more generalist public waking up to these things. And one last thing is that inflation expectations, they have risen considerably over the last, I’m going to say, few months. There was some stats that said that Americans, you know, this was much lower just a few quarters ago, despite what we’ve seen in inflation the last three or four years.

Americans now expect over the next five to 10 years that annual inflation is going to average three to three and a half percent. That’s, you know, I think that’s very generous. I think it’s going to be well beyond that.

But still, these are much higher than they were previously expecting. The general public is starting to really realize now that inflation has become embedded, is not going away. And this is, you know, just part of new reality.

So yeah, I mean, these are the kinds of things people are realizing are coming down the pipe. Yeah, it’s really interesting because people are actually putting their money where their mouth is. Because, for example, Swiss pension funds have said, right, you know, we’ve got another first year asset class.

We’ve got, we have the US treasuries, we have gold, first year asset class, and suggested and have, and actually are actually converting some US treasuries to gold. And the fund manager at UBS, I think he’s got 1.2 trillion under management, doing exactly the same. Now, why are they doing this? They’re doing this for exactly the reason you said.

And interesting, you mentioned not just it, but Tesla is one example, for example. Again, if they want to value their assets, if you buy gold, a first year asset class gold, then there it is, first year asset can be valued as cash, essentially. And then you mentioned silver.

Well, yeah, and we know that they literally go buy Mexican mine supply, silver mine supply directly to the factory. And they’re not the only ones doing that. So it’s interesting, because they’re not, as I say, I think people are putting their money where their actual mouth is.

And they’re acting now, because of the inflationary, this is a wealth protection move. It’s not for nothing that you’ve had large retailers. I’ve heard, these are the kinds of things that are hard to track with much precision.

But anecdotally, some bullion dealers have been struggling at least on the silver side, to be honest. They’ve been saying that they’ve been buying a lot more silver than they’ve been selling. And yet you’ve got large retailers like Walmart, like Costco, saying, you know, we’re doing over a billion dollars in gold and silver alone per year.

I’ve even heard that some bullion dealers may be buying some of their bullion from Costco and Walmart, because the pricing is so good. So there is the potential that people have shifted. And you know, consumers are wise, they will look for a price.

And the product is fungible and equal and you’re getting the same quality. There’s little doubt. The one thing they will not do, at least at Costco, from what I’m told is they will not buy it back.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t sell back to a bullion dealer or something like that. But it appears there may be a shift where consumers, small retail consumers have gone to these large retailers to get their physical metal. And because we know they’re reporting that their numbers are very strong.

So the buying is happening. It’s certainly happening. That may be where some of it has shifted to.

And Peter, the other thing is we talked about gold making all time highs here, I think we’re talking about 2,900 futures, we’re talking 2,875 or 2,880 in spot. I mean, goodness me. And then we look and the first thing that brings to mind is, okay, where’s silver? What? 87 ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold? Hang on, something is radically wrong.

And I think, then you suddenly think, well then, so we have our calls. I go around all the desks at 5am every morning, all the Asian desks. They cannot believe that it’s manna from heaven.

They cannot believe they are buying so much stock. And obviously, we’ve got this interim situation where you’ve got, they’re trying to plug the hole, the big chasm, the abyss, as I call it, in the comics. And so you’ve got premiums.

And in fact, we evidenced in one instance, I snapshotted it and put it in an episode, which you just did, a buck 34 per ounce, a buck 34 premium. All of a sudden, now you’ve got, and each time you’re doing that, you’re sucking supply out of local London. You’re sucking physical supply, which has gone below threshold levels.

And what are you doing there? What you’re doing is not only are you sucking it in, but all of a sudden, I can now afford to put it on a plane. Off it goes. And it’s there in 24 hours, much like we put gold on a plane.

So this is ludicrous. I mean, so really, you’ve got this drain, this literal drain coming out. And in fact, refiners, 8 to 12 weeks, if you want size, 8 to 12 weeks for gold.

Ask for silver. Sorry. Well, you can lock it in in the stock market, but you’re not going to.

We’re making money on gold. We’re not going to. So we’re not even refining silver at this point.

This is worse than, COVID was a single event where refiners were shut down for a period of time. Naturally, there was a bailout. Everyone jumped in.

Now, there’s no COVID. It’s just simply a supply shortage. All that’s happening here is that no one wants to put anything on offer at this price.

Give me a proper price, and there’ll be, someone will sell. Maybe it’s 38. Maybe it’s 40.

Maybe it’s more. But the point is, if I then look, and I know we talked about this last time, the silver ratio. And when I do my calls around, the aggregate of all the liquidity providers I speak to are saying, that’s going to break.

This is going to break the ratio trade. So then they’re saying, well, I’m saying, well, where do you think realistically, and not tomorrow, but where realistic? They’re saying, well, go right back to 2011 levels. It was 33 to 1. Where do you think? At 3,000 gold, that’s 90 bucks silver.

I mean, it’s not rocket science. It’s not even high in the sky. Your thoughts? I mean, absolutely.

I agree. There are a lot of things right now. The premiums are very high.

There’s the whole tariffs thing that in the US, they were worried about importing silver. And then tariffs kicking in. So a lot of silver has flowed towards the US.

There has been a lot of pressure on London inventories. We’ve seen those drain pretty quickly. And what I find interesting is that, if we switch to gold for a moment, I was just reading a few days ago that the delivery is normally a matter of a few days.

And technically, you could argue that London has defaulted because they’re now asking for a matter of weeks, maybe four weeks, even more to make delivery. So is that a default? I don’t know. If normally you’re getting it in a matter of days, and that’s what you’re used to, that’s what you’re expecting.

And now you’re telling the customer to multiply that by maybe 10 times or more, then is that a default? Look, the jury is out. You make your own decision. But in some ways, that may be viewed that way.

We’ve talked about this before. Silver price isn’t high enough. What has kept perhaps a bit of a lid on it has been these inventories at the large exchanges.

And to your point earlier, I think that the big consumers have gone and tapped into these inventories, and we’ve seen them drawn down dramatically. That can only go on for a while. There was a great report by TD last year that actually agreed with the points I had made only a month earlier.

And I think that, like I said, there are no doubt considerable inventories that go beyond identifiable ones. So the identifiable ones being COMEX, London, Shanghai. So there are large private holdings if you add up small individual holdings and perhaps a few larger sort of institutional ones.

I don’t know of any in particular. They’re not the kind of thing that they publish. But you’d have to imagine there are probably a few billion ounces in that kind of, let’s say, type of inventory.

So some who say, well, we’re exaggerating, overblowing the situation. There’s all of this silver that we can tap into to meet demand. So by the way, we’re going to have been now four years in a row of silver deficits, to the tune of if you add these four years together, we’re talking about 80% of one year’s supply in just the last four years.

So that explains why these inventories have been drained. But what I was saying earlier about tapping into these other inventories that we can’t identify, that we know are there from individuals or whatever, that that silver will come to market. And I’m willing to agree that, yes, that silver will come to market.

However, my point or my question becomes at what price? And that relates to what you said earlier. What will be reasonable? Some will need to liquidate. That’s one thing.

But is that the vast majority? I guess it depends on what’s going on globally, economically, etc. But I’m willing to bet a lot of that is stackers that have no intention of selling and really, really need to see a much, much higher price before they will let go. So I think that if slash when these identifiable inventories are at critical low levels and supply needs to tap into these unidentifiable or sort of private hoards, I think that will come out in dribs and drabs.

And that is what’s going to drag the silver price a lot higher. It’s going to be, like you said, price discovery for what is a truly fair price for silver. And that’s much higher than where we are today.

Yeah, Peter. And I think the reason is as far as gold is NSFR compliant. And so that changed the game.

You don’t have to look at any chart. And the first of I mean, in fact, when the Bank of International Settlements covered all their final of the 500 ton of bets was on the it was in November of November the 3rd, I think it was of 2022, just two months before they they they revalued gold as a first asset class. Now, silver still isn’t now.

It still plays the paper game. And here’s the problem. I think what you’re saying is is is what I’m seeing is, yeah, at this price, a paper price it because it’s not a physical price.

But if it if all things were level and much like the SGE or a physical exchange, I have to own that bar, I have to fully pay for that bar. I’m not buying it on four or five percent or six percent margin to control the price. Now, then I start to look at.

Hang on. Now I’ve got a level playing field. What is the real price I would be happy to sell my silver for? And you then look at the supply demand and that supply demand.

What you’re saying is it’s a hell of a lot higher than where it is now. And of course, there’ll be any amount of silver to meet demand, to meet Samsung’s demand, to meet to meet all, you know, Apple’s demands or whatever it might be. You know, of course, there is.

But as you say, at what price? And I think that’s the problem. And I think this kind of leads into then people kind of leads into one thing that I wanted to mention. People are saying, oh, the price is of silver and gold has gone up because of tariffs.

No, tariffs just exposed the chasm between the paper and the physical market. There’s no going back. You’ve just exposed a weak flank.

And you don’t think that India, that China, that the BRICS nations see this discount and jump in and buy, knowing this is a window that’s about to close. So, of course. So now, while tariffs are the excuse, and yes, it just happens to have exposed this scam, the paper scam.

And when we do see the, I think it’s the COMEX that has to catch up. And I think the spot price of silver has to catch up with where the EFPs are at this point, because ultimately the COMEX has to become Basel III compliant. And if gold’s Basel III compliant, it sure as heck makes silver a little more compliant.

So anyway, it’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, I want to just sort of add something about what you just mentioned about the price in China, because you have to own that bar.

Well, if you look at Shanghai prices versus the COMEX, the premiums are actually just under 10%. So this is much closer to a real price, I believe. And so if you say 10%, let’s say on current prices, so that’s $3 more, we’re at $35.

We’re at $35. That’s a much, much more realistic price, I think, than $32 right now. Much fairer and a place where I think realistically the market, the silver price market can and should be clearing transactions.

I want to point out something that I came across when I was looking back at some of the numbers that were put out by the Silver Institute. And so they originally had forecast that there would be a silver deficit for 2024. So they put out their survey in April of every year, and then they revise it.

They kind of give an update in November of that same year. So for 2024, they had said that there would be a deficit of about 215 million ounces, which, as I say, it has been pretty close to the last, will be pretty much average for the last four years. In November, they revised it downwards.

They said, oh, well, the deficit’s only going to be more like 180 million ounces. So that’s not huge, but still. And their reasoning was, they said, well, there’ll be a little bit more supply, just a little.

There would be somewhat less jewelry and silverware demand. What’s interesting, though, is that they show as a separate line their net investment in silver ETFs. And the original forecast was that the flow into silver ETFs was going to be only about 50 million ounces for 2024.

When they revised their numbers in November, that actually doubled to 100 million ounces. So they’re seeing a lot of silver is actually now flowing into the silver ETFs. And so if you include the net investment into silver ETFs and look at the kind of market surplus or deficit that they were forecasting in November for all of 2024, it was going to be just below the all-time record deficit of 2020, which had a 300 million ounce deficit.

Their forecast in November is that 2024 would show a 282 million ounce deficit when you include flows into silver ETFs. So these are the kinds of things that I think gets missed by the market and really is indicative of the appetite for physical silver and how and where it’s flowing. And I look at the chart for the SLV ETF, the world’s largest silver ETF.

There are all sorts of arguments about whether the silver is there or not. If we ignore that for a moment, according to official numbers, since July of last year, silver has really started to flow back into that. So the demand has been there.

We’ve seen the number of ounces that they hold rise considerably since July. So we do, in fact, see silver flowing back into silver ETFs. That’s a real thing happening.

Absolutely. And kind of to circle back to this, I get people literally, I don’t know how many phone calls I’ve had about, well, the tariffs, you know, and then they talk about the tariffs and then we just kind of discuss the tariffs. But to me, the beauty of it is that it’s exposed this problem.

But I think while it’s really unlikely, monetary gold and silver could effectively even be sanctioned. I mean, if it was to roll out, OK, Canada and Mexico, what they’re going to do is what? Reroute their gold and silver production to Switzerland, UK, the UAE, be very happy to take it, or directly to the BRICS countries. But that leaves the US in a problem because they don’t have sufficient production to meet their own needs anyway.

So they’re going to have to, they’re going to have to circle this stuff back in, it’ll have to flow back in and it’ll be the same silver and gold. Once you melt it, you’ve lost the identity of it. That’s right.

And in fact, I was just looking at some of these stats recently and the US produces only 25% of the silver it consumes. It needs to import 75% of its annual silver consumption. And most of it comes from Canada and Mexico.

Mexico being the world’s largest silver producer and being just below, just beneath, you know, immediate southern neighbor to the US makes perfect sense, perfectly logical. I cannot see any kind of tariffs on silver, for example, lasting for very long, if at all. And your presentation in October, you were so far ahead of this because what you said was that you were talking about the amount of silver required to feed the AI industry.

And where is that happening? It’s happening in America. So where’s the silver coming from? That’s right. Absolutely.

And I was just reading again yesterday, in fact, about the energy demand. And I was saying at the time, it was going to be the magnificent seven that would tap into things like nuclear, for example. But these are very, very limited opportunities.

One, how much unused or underused capacity or dormant nuclear power plants can you find, especially these days with NIMBY and all the rest of it? And it takes a little bit of time, but it takes a lot of capital to revive these things. The beauty of it is that you can do it relatively quickly. Once it’s up and running, the power is relatively cheap.

But importantly, it’s also very, very stable. So it’s what we call base load energy, which is fantastic. That is a luxury you don’t have with a lot of the renewables.

Nonetheless, I do think that because of the speed of being able to get something like solar or wind, online solar in particular, I think there’s sort of two sort of downsides with solar. If you’re looking for data centers to supply energy to data centers, one is the space that they take, the solar farms, and then two, they are not base load. So the power will fluctuate.

So you need to make up for that. Either have other sources, maybe from natural gas or whatever it might be, or you need to have battery storage, which is also a bit of an issue. But you can get that stuff permitted very quickly and built quickly.

And you’re essentially off grid once you have that as well, right? You’re independent. This is your source. You tap in to all of its power for yourself, and you’re not relying on anyone else.

But the utilities, when the AI companies have gone, sorry, the data companies and the AI consumers and so on have gone to the large utilities and said, hey, look, over the next five, 10 years, this is what we’re going to need. They’re almost uniformly told, sorry, we won’t be able to deliver, you’re on your own, you have to manage. And this is why they’re plowing tens of billions of dollars into just the energy side of the data centers and the AI implications of data centers and all the consumption that that will mean.

So even if it’s not like a perfect solution, solar, which is a big, obviously, the single biggest individual industrial consumer of silver, I think that this is going to continue to feed into demand for silver as data centers. You can also look at it like this. Even if data centers themselves don’t go necessarily that much towards solar and look for other sources of power, that will shift the requirements of others potentially to go to solar as the data consumers say, I’m going to use nuclear or natural gas or whatever it might be and leave these other sources to some of the other consumers.

So it, as I say, it may do nothing less than just shift who’s consuming this solar energy. So definitely something to watch. And we’ve seen that continue to ramp up as I expected.

And I think, you know, I know in this country, and we’ve gone on this, it’s actually a mad bender. It’s just to just go on to pure solar, wind power, solar, but we don’t have the batteries. Now, when I, in your, you were the first person to actually inform me about this new Samsung had developed a battery that to me that is, I think you mentioned how the performance, maybe you could read, go over the performance was phenomenal, requiring a lot of solar.

But if that isn’t just powering cars, but if it’s there to flywheel, the power coming off intermittent power sources, then that has to be also a huge demand. Absolutely. And that that battery is potentially a game changer.

I mean, just to kind of reiterate some of the the things that some of the characteristics, you know, your best electric cars today have maybe somewhere around a 400 kilometre range, this solid state battery from Samsung doubles that to 800 kilometre range. So if you think about and I think realistically, I don’t have an EV. But realistically, that’s an impediment for me to know that I could only do 400 kilometres if I know I can do if I can drive nonstop for 567 hours, that makes it a lot more attractive to me that I don’t need to stop sort of halfway through a day’s a full day’s drive to recharge that which could take me an hour or more that the recharge on this battery nine minutes, comparable to going to a service station and filling up your tank with gas very close the lifespan 20 years on the battery.

The size 50% smaller than a lithium ion battery. And so, again, this this really, really could be a game changer. Naturally, these are going to be more expensive as they’re brand new.

Samsung expects that they’re going to go into, you know, higher end sort of luxury vehicles, EVs to start with. But if this, you know, is the real deal in it, and it’s adopted, and you get mass production and economies of scale, this is going to really make a huge difference. And there I’ve looked, I’m not able to find, you know, reliable information about the amount of silver because the reason we’re talking about this is the silver that will up in that battery.

I’ve not found any kind of reliable information. Samsung, from what I’m seeing has not, which for understand understandable reasons, they’re not being specific about, you know, the makeup of this battery. But the estimates that I’ve seen are anywhere from 100 grams to a kilo of silver could go into each vehicle of silver going into each EV.

So, again, a huge new source potentially of demand for silver going to towards EVs because of this new battery. So it’ll be, you know, really exciting to watch what happens with that. Well, and into a four year supply deficit.

I mean, it’s mind boggling stuff, Peter. I think anyone who hasn’t considered silver really ought to be thinking about it now. And we’ve just mentioned some pivotal things that are going on.

The exposure of the paper to physical disconnect, the attraction that of silver at this price got flowing east. And now the thing is, you cover a lot of this stuff. And now I wanted to bring up, I know that you obviously you have your own newsletter focused exclusively on silver.

But you also have a new newsletter publication, I think called The Silver Advisor. Can you just tell us, so obviously the silver one stays in place, but this, can you tell people what this is? Because I’m sure it’s of interest. Absolutely.

So as you said, my original newsletter is Silver Stock Investor, and I cover the whole silver space, everything from talking about physical silver from time to time, but then more on the equity side. So silver ETFs, large producers and everything down to junior explorers. But this new service is Silver Advisor.

And Silver Advisor is a free service, a free newsletter for subscribers. And what I do is I follow companies in there, which typically not exclusively, but so far, at least have been companies that have quote unquote graduated from my paid newsletter to this free newsletter service. And these are high potential silver stocks.

I’m very selective about who I follow in that newsletter. And really what I’m doing is I, any material news that comes out of these companies, I will review, analyze and comment on usually the same day as the press release, which is the idea behind that is to have, you know, my thoughts go out to subscribers and give them the opportunity to act on it if they want to that same day, whether that means buy, sell or whatever they may be doing with that stock. And so, yeah, I mean, there are a few names in that newsletter now.

I’m gradually growing the following of the number of silver companies that are being included in that letter. So that’s, as I say, that was launched in the beginning of this year, Silver Advisor. There are two companies, Cerro de Pasco and the other is Kootenai Silver.

Both of them are in Silver Advisor. Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be adding new companies in terms of who is being followed. And if your viewers want to go and sign up for this, as I say, it’s completely free.

They just need to go to thegoldadvisor.com slash registration and look for Silver Advisor and subscribe right there. And you’ll get free news and analysis on silver companies that are high potential companies for the entirety of this cycle. And obviously, for people who really take silver very seriously, professionals as well, your other newsletter, it’s the only, actually it’s the only newsletter that focused 100% on silver.

That’s exactly right. So you would probably be, from what I’m hearing, so probably that’s where a lot of the subscriber stuff happens. And then once, you’re giving people really a heads up, an advantage of getting in early days.

But then once that’s, once you’ve sifted through, once it’s sifted through and met all your benchmarks and already people are probably benefiting from it, then you would actually parachute that in to the Silver Advisor at some point and allow other people to enjoy it. And then perhaps when people read that, they can always move up and subscribe to the higher service. But I think, to be honest, I honestly think, Peter, people who take things seriously ought to pay because to be honest, there’s a lot of free stuff out there.

And I’m not saying this isn’t a value, of course it is, but there’s so much free stuff out there. And I think when it’s free, you can run, put it on three times the speed and do five other things. But when you’re paying for something, you want value out of that.

And you want to see what am I getting out of this? And therefore, so I would strongly suggest people to maybe just sign up initially for that. But then if it’s serious, I honestly would suggest, because Peter is an absolute expert in this area. I’ve had so many requests for him to return here.

Peter, we’re going to have to ask you to come back again. But thank you so much for joining us today. And obviously, we’ll put all the links up so people can easily find you, click and find you.

But thank you for just sharing some of your time with us, precious time with us today. And I hope people really enjoy it. Andrew, it was my pleasure as it has always been.

And I certainly look forward to our next chat. It’s always fun. And hopefully, again, I have something of value to contribute.

Well, you have and thank you very much. Bless you, Peter. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Andrew McGuire and Peter Croft for another fascinating discussion. And we want to really hear from you, our Life in the Vault community as to who you’d like to see next.

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