GOLD Keeps Breaking Records (Uncut) 02-17-2025

GOLD Keeps Breaking Records – ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It’: Andy Schectman

Hello friends and welcome into Commodity Culture where our goal is to make you a better investor in the commodities sector. My name is Jesse Day and on this episode I’m joined by Andy Sheckman, an expert on gold and silver and the CEO of Miles Franklin Precious Metals. With gold once again reaching new all-time highs, where does he think we are in this precious metals bull market and where does silver currently stand? Is it poised to explode like a coiled spring past its previous highs? Why did Trump launch a scam crypto token at the start of his presidency and will his tariff rampage ultimately backfire? We’re going to get the answers to all of these questions and much more.

Strap yourselves in for my conversation with Andy Sheckman. Andy Sheckman, great to have you back on the show. Of course, a lot of excitement in the gold sector right now as gold once again hitting new all-time highs, hovering close to $2,900 as we sit here right now.

Do you think we’re still in the early stages of this bull market and what are the main themes and trends that you’re currently watching when it comes to the gold market that you think more investors should be paying attention to? Jesse, good to see you, brother. Thanks for having me back. It was nice to see you at VRIC.

Shout out to Jay Martin. Great show, great city. It was great to see you in person.

Gold’s actually at $2,900 as we speak. The futures are above. It was much higher.

It was at $2,930 futures last night. It’s off a bit, $10 down. Nothing goes straight up.

We are seeing action, Jesse, in the gold market that I’ve never witnessed as someone who’s been doing this for, I hate to say this, it ages me, for 35 years. I’ve never seen anything like what we are seeing. I’ve been talking forever, Jesse, about, at least since 2020 publicly, about the amount of physical deliveries, physical demand that has happened off of COMEX and the LBMA.

There was a group in 2020 that came out of nowhere on the commitment of traders reportables. So I don’t want to get too deep, but every week the COMEX market publishes what they call the commitment of traders. And it typically has the commercial banks on one side and the specs, as they call it, the hedge funds on the other side.

And as one goes long, the other goes short. It shows the positioning of the largest traders. And then out of nowhere in 2020 came this third group of reportables that no one had really ever heard of called the others that are largely believed to be sovereign wealth funds.

And we have been able to track and witness and watch in real time the stupidity of the Western suppression scheme of holding down the price of gold and silver with naked futures contracts. As an example, in silver on the LBMA, they have 300 million ounces of a float, they call it, 800 million ounces total of silver. 500 belong to the ETFs.

300 are available. Yet they trade 2.9 billion ounces per day, three and a half times annual global mine supply. They say it’s only 290 million ounces they’re trading, but they say, well, that number could be up to 10 times short underreported because we only post the final settlement number.

So you have 300 million ounces, you’re trading 3 billion ounces every single day. This suppression of which 90% plus are naked contracts, meaning no metal behind it, just commercial banks and their ability to suppress the price of gold or create an illusion or a reality with paper. And we’ve watched as these other banks, largely in the BRICS nations, have drained the exchanges, standing for delivery slowly, copiously, not too fast, not enough to raise the alarm, but slowly enough, drip by drip by drip and taking it from different exchanges and in different manners to bolster their stockpiles.

That’s well documented. Well, if we see what’s happening right now, just for example, in the month of February, Jesse, off of the COMEX market, 59,296 contracts stood for delivery on the February gold contract, far surpassing the largest record ever during the COVID crisis of 47,132 in June of 2020. In other words, that’s 5,929,600 ounces of gold.

Try to multiply that times 2,900 and your calculator freaks out. You get the E. It’s a lot of gold. And who’s got that money? Why is it all coming home? 13,735,000 ounces of silver were delivered on the February contract, 2,747 silver contracts delivered.

Things are happening at a level that I’ve never seen. And I have an opinion on that. But I guess what I’m really trying to say is that, look, gold’s up 200 bucks plus in the last 30 days.

It’s up 900 in the last 365 days. It’s quietly creeping higher. Nothing is stopping it.

And I think that we are moving in a direction that most people don’t. I would say to you, my gut is that they are intending to revalue the price of gold. They’re bringing it all home.

All of this gold is finding its way to the COMEX market, leaving the LBMA. People are saying it’s because of the Trump tariffs. No, I don’t think it is.

I think they have a bigger agenda at hand. And we can talk about that. But a lot of things are lining up.

As an example, and you can stop me at any point if I’m going too far here, but look, when JP Morgan paid a $920 million fine to the Justice Department, that was bad enough. It was the largest fine that the Justice Department ever handed out. And hang on one second.

My dog, as I showed you earlier, keeps jumping on my leg and won’t leave me alone until I pick it up, and it will distract the hell out of me. Sorry, she’s a new puppy. Anyways, they paid the largest fine that the Justice Department ever handed out.

And yet, somehow they were allowed to be the custodian of the world’s largest silver trust, still, SLV, along with BlackRock. Well, guess what? They just took over GLD with BlackRock from HSBC Bank. And now you have JP Morgan controlling one of the largest stockpiles of silver in the world and one of the largest stockpiles of gold in the world.

I find it a little interesting. At the same time, we’re seeing massive amounts of gold and silver, massive, being shipped home to New York under the guise of tariffs. Now, let’s go back to 2019.

What did the BIS do? Reclassify gold as the only other Tier 1 asset. So you have gold as a Tier 1. You have this cartel bank who’s been really the center of all the conspiratorial talk forever, now the custodian of the largest silver trust and one of the largest gold stockpiles in the world, along with BlackRock. You have all the gold and silver being shipped across the globe right now to the COMEX market.

You have something called the gold revaluation account. Every central bank on the planet holds gold in the revaluation account, all of them. Now, I’ve talked a lot about the head of the Dutch National Bank.

The guy says, let’s revalue gold. We should revalue gold. You’ve got members of the Bundesbank.

Let’s revalue gold. We should put it on par with its current value or higher to offset our balance sheet. Or how about Senator Cynthia Loomis from Wyoming, who advocates for revaluing gold in order to fund the strategic Bitcoin account? More and more and more people are talking about revaluing gold.

How about Judy Shelton, who I just interviewed? Judy Shelton says they’re going to revalue gold. Not in so many words when I asked her specifically, but she wants to have a 50-year treasury collared to gold, redeemable in gold. She said her and Trump had discussed it during the first administration.

If you remember, she was his nominee to run the Federal Reserve. It wasn’t confirmed. Probably will be this time, at least on the Board of Governors.

They’re good friends. She said, we discussed it. We discussed issuing them on July 4th, 2026, the 250th year anniversary.

I said, Andy, they’re going to do that. They’re going to issue 50-year treasuries backed by gold. I said, Judy, what about auditing Fort Knox? She said, absolutely.

That needs to be done. I said, what about revaluing gold? Not in so many words said yes. It would benefit all the central banks who have been accumulating gold for the last several years.

It would definitely benefit the United States because every $4,000 increase in the price of gold gives a $1 trillion free and clear to the Treasury General account. It wouldn’t even require congressional approval. Jerome would just need to be told by Scott Besant, who would be told from Trump, Trump would say to tell Jerome to revalue the price of gold.

Bang, it’s revalued, just like that. If you’re going to establish confidence, reestablish confidence, like Judy said, you need to peg it to gold. Use the marriage of blockchain technology, like a stable coin, and gold.

Judy said to me, Andy, I hope they issue stable coins off the 50-year treasury backed by gold. How’s that? Interesting, isn’t it? Who controls the on-ramps and the off-ramps to all the stable coins now with all the treasury issuance behind the stable coins? Well, that’s pretty much the government. So it’s a way to sidestep the CBDC, have the same effect of control in and out, to peg it to gold, to revalue the price of gold, to bring it all home first.

I mean, you can’t make it up. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care what people say. I’ll go out on a limb and maybe I’m wrong.

But Occam’s razor, man, says that when all of these things start lining up, it’s the most logical answer that prevails to me. They’re bringing all the gold and silver home as much as they can. They’re saying it’s because of tariffs.

It’s not. They have the biggest cartel criminal bank in the world holding GLD and SLV. All of these things, aside from it being a tier one asset and the realization that our treasury market is being forsaken because of inflation, default risk, confiscation risk, sanction risk, all of that stuff.

In my mind, Jesse, that is the trend. They’re going to do something with the only other tier one asset in the world. They’re going to peg it to a system.

They’re going to use blockchain technology a la stablecoin. And it’s going to happen, in my opinion. And that’s why I think all the gold’s coming home.

That’s why I think gold is so strong. They want it to go higher. And the only question that I have is, are they going to let it do what it’s been doing for the last couple of months? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Or is it going to go bang on a Friday night, Monday morning? I don’t know. But I do think, honest to God, I really do believe that there is something much bigger going on in the gold market right now than most people would give credibility to. Hey, guys, just a quick break to hear from today’s sponsor, ARK Silver Gold Osmia.

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He is a straight shooter. So go to ARKSGO.com and contact Ian Everard today at 307-264-9441 or by email at ianatarksgo.com and make sure to tell him that Commodity Culture sent you. Well, you touched on this, but I’d like to expand on it a little bit, and that is the gold outflows from London recently.

I want to read you a quote from an article on Bullion Vault. Data showed stockpiles in London, the precious metals central trading and storage hub, shrinking by the fastest amount on record. What do you think is driving these record breaking outflows, and what does it mean for the bigger picture of the gold market? I think the US government and the Federal Reserve are accumulating metal, maybe as part of a sovereign wealth fund strategy.

It’s the Trump tariffs that have accelerated the migration, but that’s not it. I think it’s more along the lines of this is a plan to get the gold and silver home to issue some form of a stable coin, some form of a system collared and pegged to gold to give the United States Treasury market, in particular, and the dollar, credibility. And maybe they’re front running BRICS by being the first one to monetize gold, because remember what Delmar Rousseff said, the head of the BRICS new development bank, the former president of Brazil, what did she say in Kazan? We have agreed in principle to a new settlement token called the unit, which will be 60% currencies of the BRICS plus nations, 40% gold in kilo bar form deliverable upon request.

Now, the unit would only be for central banks and commercial banks. BRICS pay and BRICS clear would be for the B2B and for the consumer. But systems are moving away from opaque debt instruments to transparency backed by something.

And that is what Zoltan Pozar says is Bretton Woods 3, a system that is pegged to commodities and transparency. I think it’s that you’re seeing confidence in the system erode. And the only way to keep the whole system from unraveling, I think, is to have some form of backing, tangible backing, and stop taking promises of governments that lie to us.

And that would be using a marriage like stable coins between blockchain technology, because it comes out and says no CBDCs. OK, fine. Well, how about the backdoor? And if you look at all the stable coins right now, most of them, like USDT, Tether, USDC, which is by Goldman Sachs, the new Ripple one, they’re all massively backed by US treasuries.

So the stable coin thing is being pushed quietly. And I think that’s exactly how you do it. When Judy says to me they’ll issue stable coins off the 50-year treasury, I mean, that to me was the key that unlocked, oh, yeah, this is what they’re going to do.

They’re going to use stable coins to fool everyone from not taking the CBDC, think it’s cool, have it pegged to dollars, or have it pegged to gold. The whole thing is happening at a speed that I think is just a lot more than threats of Trump tariffs. And when you see, like, let me just read something to you here.

In terms of deliveries that are coming into COMEX, JP Morgan set to deliver $4 billion in gold bullion to COMEX in February. Since November, Jesse, almost 13 million ounces of gold and over 40 million ounces of silver have moved from the London vaults to COMEX. It’s as if they’re setting up for some form of a new system or a sovereign wealth system, whatever it is.

It’s bigger than just Trump tariff threats, in my opinion. Let’s talk about silver for a moment here. Performing admirably, we’re about $31.50, I believe, right now.

A lot of people hoping, waiting, expecting for that historic move back past previous all-time highs. It should be noted the last time silver was around $50 was 2011. Adjusted for today’s dollars, I think you’re looking at triple digit silver to even get back to real all-time highs.

What are the main things you’re watching right now in the silver market that you think people should be paying attention to? The deliveries, number one. The erosion of just how much is available. For example, like I mentioned, on the LVMA, they have 300 million ounce float.

They’re trading 2.9 billion ounces of silver per day, three and a half times annual global mine supply. You see countries that are standing for delivery massively. Look at India.

They’ve purchased eight, nine hundred million ounces in the last four years. You’re seeing China fly all around Latin America, in particular Peru, and buying up all the dore and concentrate. Now, they’re paying double what the West will.

Dore would be a bar that is crudely refined by the miners before they send it in for full refining, and concentrate is a sludge. You fill it up in a jar, and that would be the byproduct of the mining endeavors and the dore making. Anyways, all of this is being paid.

They pay double what the West will. They ship it home to China and refine it there. Seventy-five percent of all their silver used in industry right now is a concentrate byproduct.

That disintermediates the market. That disintermediates the ability for the world to price it, to have any idea of exactly how much they’re buying. They’re also the second largest producer of silver in the world.

You have Russia, who’s come out and publicly said, we’re adding it to our strategic stockpile. Governments really don’t say that very often. Then there’s some interesting things happening right now in SLV.

A lot of the manipulation that people talk about is centered around GLD and SLV, where you’re able to naked short an ETF, which makes no sense. Check this out. Over the last couple of weeks, the fees to borrow, if you’re short and you need to borrow or borrow to go short or borrow shares to cover whatever it is that you need to do, SLV borrowing fees have soared from 0.05 percent to 12 percent in the last couple of weeks.

The shares available for borrowing have collapsed in the last 10, 20 days from 10 million shares available to only 10,000 shares available. That’s a 99.9 percent reduction. 953 million ounces are sold short out of SLV.

This is setting up for a massive short squeeze. So you get all these people that short the hell out of SLV. And now if there’s 953 million ounces sold short, I think that works.

I think it’s 10 ounces per share. There’s not enough shares to cover that if everyone tried to cover. I just think that when you see the massive movements from London to New York, when you see these types of discrepancies in SLV, when you see the massive purchasing, and you’re looking at an asset that’s coming out of the ground at a ratio right now of 7 to 1, 7 to 1, meaning 7 ounces of gold for every 1 ounce of silver was 16 to 1 for 5,000 years.

It’s priced at damn near well 80 to 1, and the world is accumulating it. It’s because of the naked shorting. It’s because of what they do on the LBMA.

It’s because of the 2,000 percent rehypothecation on COMEX, where if 20 people hold a contract, one gets the silver. If he or she is lucky, the rest get cash settled. It’s because of the distortions created by these Western central banks in order to support an illusion.

Now, I believe silver has been suppressed largely because of the military-industrial complex, and I’ve talked a lot about the amount of silver used in high-tech weaponry, which ironically over the last decade plus has been stripped from the Silver Institute’s numbers of supply and demand, but it’s real, and there’s lots of evidence that points to it. I would say to you that they’re the reason why eight Western banks have held the largest concentrated short position in any commodity ever traded on COMEX. Those banks have been suppressing the hell out of the price of silver to maintain the ability for the military-industrial complex to make and sell high-tech weapons.

Same thing on LBMA. It’s the same banks. They’re stupid enough to think that this game could go on forever.

What is changing is that the countries… Stop it. Sorry. I got to put her down now.

She’s starting to bother me. That the countries that are doing this are sophisticated, that being the BRICS nations. They’re coordinated.

They’re motivated. They’re wealthy enough. They see what we’re doing, and they’re using it against us.

See, this is where I think maybe the new administration understands that they cannot suppress the price of metals because it falls right into the hands of the countries that are de-dollarizing and taking gold over treasuries and dollars, and that’s what they’re doing, and I think maybe they’re going to let the prices rise, and maybe this is why they’re bringing it all home first. Get it all home. Let the price go higher, and now you stop the ability of these countries to drain the world’s exchanges, to stand for delivery the way that they are.

It becomes a whole lot more difficult, so to me, Jesse, there’s a whole lot that goes into this. There’s a lot of moving parts, but if I had to be just plain and simple, it’s the most undervalued asset on the planet, and it’s the trade of a generation. I really do believe that.

There are very few things I’ve ever seen that have asymmetrical qualities the way this does, meaning lowest downside, highest upside, and that’s silver. 1,000% to me. I want to pull on that thread you mentioned about the SLV ETF that there are fewer shares available to borrow by quite a drastic quantity for the purposes of short selling, and that the fee to do so has also risen.

Is that because so many people are short right now? It’s a supply-demand issue, or is this a new policy enacted by the ETF? Why is that taking place? Well, it’s not a new policy. It’s that there are a lot of players short, and look, the conventional reason for ETF outflows, so there’s less shares, people are selling the ETFs or whatever, it would be interest rates, strong dollar profit-taking, et cetera, but what’s happening suggests a much deeper shift. These large withdrawals, meaning there’s less in the way of shares, to me indicate that big players are cashing out before a potential exposure to the scheme.

Governments, central banks, wealthy elites, they’re all removing physical gold and silver from the ETFs to consolidate control of the real assets, in my opinion, before whatever happens, and you can’t be naked short without the ability to pay it back. You’re dead. So they’re all cashing out, and they’re getting out, and the big, big, big money has the ability to cash out and redeem it in gold or silver.

It’s the big commercial banks. They can redeem their shares and take the real physical metal. The whole thing with SLV is that even during the silver squeeze in February 2021, BlackRock had to overnight change the prospectus and say, well, because of the volatility, there may not be as much silver in the trust as there are shares outstanding, and that can present a big problem for short squeeze or for shorting this ETF, is more or less what they said.

It’s a setup right now where the dummies who don’t understand what’s happening will find out exactly how dangerous being naked short something is, and the big money, they’re front-running this, and they’re getting out, and they’re taking their shares and redeeming them for the real silver. I don’t think it’s as mundane as profit-taking or getting away from interest rates or whatever it may be. I think it’s a whole lot deeper than that, and I think to be naked short right now in silver or gold, and in particular, ZTFs, which don’t have enough in the way of float to cover on the other side, is as dumb as a mud wall and in a rainstorm, and I think that will bear true if this trend continues.

This is the first time we spoke since Trump took office. He started his presidency with a bang. It’s been a breakneck pace, all sorts of executive orders, terror threats, which I want to talk about in just a moment, talking about acquiring the Panama Canal, Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, etc., quite a hyperbolic start.

I want to focus on one aspect right now that people seem to be glossing over and kind of forgetting about, and that is that he started his presidency by releasing a scam crypto token and then having his wife do the same thing. Trump coin shot up to nearly $75 a coin upon release before collapsing, likely driven by insider selling, to where it now stands at around $16. Presumably Trump has enriched himself and a circle of insiders at the expense of his more gullible followers.

I think a crime is literally being committed here, as occurs with a lot of these unregulated crypto tokens, a crime that I think will never be prosecuted. Am I making too big a deal of this? I just don’t see how a president like that can be trusted, who starts off his presidency that way. And I’m saying that, I think a ton of my viewers are Trump supporters, so I might get some angry comments, but I don’t see how that can be a justifiable action.

I wonder what your thoughts are. Well, I mean, look, first of all, we don’t know if Trump or Melania accumulated it and dumped it. Maybe it goes higher down the road.

I mean, is what he did legal? I think it’s legal. Is it immoral? Maybe. This is the stupidity of, and again, I think it’s not fair to cast judgment.

I mean, I get what you’re saying, first of all, Jesse, I do. I mean, yeah, if it laid out just like that, yeah, it’s troubling. But did it? Did he sell? Did he dump? Did his family dump? Who knows? I think it’s the stupidity of the get-rich-quick mentality that my mentor Richard Russell used to say, if you make 7% a year, you’re a rock star.

The concept of hard work, of compounding of time and interest and effort, those things are, you’re an old timer if you think that way, like I do. It’s like working out in the gym. You don’t go in January 2nd, work out for six hours, and then you’re done for the year.

It’s the concept of the time, the concept of putting in the work. And I think there are a lot of people who just think of getting rich quickly. And it’s worked for some if you’re shrewd enough to get in and get out.

But I look at that more as an indictment of the system and less of the president, that you have these people who just have given up on understanding that that’s not how fortunes are made. I mean, if you do it, you’re lucky. But to me, it’s the compounding of time, of effort, and saving, and investing, and reinvesting.

You have a whole culture that has been bred of instant gratification not being fast enough. So I guess I would just simply say, I would withhold judgment on the president to see, I guess, if it ever came out that he and she loaded up on it and then the next day dumped it all. That would be a little bit troubling.

But I’m sure there is a shred or a thread of truth in that. But I think, again, it’s an indictment of where we are in the cycle instead of them directly. Well, I want to continue along the lines of Trump’s actions since taking office.

He threatened tariffs, as I mentioned, for Canada and Mexico. Back down at the last moment after speaking to Trudeau, what’s Trudeau still doing talking to world leaders? And he’s appearing on TV. He’s supposedly supposed to be stepping down from the mantle of prime minister, but there he is front and center somehow.

Nonetheless, he spoke to both leaders. And it looks like there’s a, well, there is a 30-day freeze for now. However, now he may be implementing tariffs on all aluminum and steel imports to the U.S. Historically, have these type of tariffs ever been beneficial? And do you think this heavy handed use of tariffs could potentially backfire and harm the U.S. economy? Well, I think you go way back in time, tariffs were very beneficial.

If tariffs are actually being imposed to support a domestic manufacturing capacity, then yes, the thing is that these, much of what he’s saying are not really tariffs, they’re sanctions masquerading as tariffs, threats, do this or I’ll do this. That’s not a tariff to me, that is a sanction and it can very well backfire. You’re seeing that already in the way that China’s pushing back and other countries will push back as well, it will crystallize the resolve of the BRICS.

I think there is justification in some respects for tariffs, it’s not tit for tat. But the way that it’s largely being done to me is not a tariff, it is a sanction and that will have ramifications. I think after what’s happened the last four years, a gesture of an olive branch and unification might be a better path, but who am I to question, he seems to be getting some of the results.

You can see he threatened Mexico with it and all of a sudden they’re sending military to the border and I saw just the other night they’re stopping fentanyl and meth and cocaine and marijuana and weapons and all sorts of stuff just in the first couple of days coming across the southern border. God knows how much of that stuff has poured into the country over the last four years, so to some degree it works and to some degree maybe that’s what is needed, but in general what we are seeing are not tariffs. Tariffs are used to support your manufacturing.

We don’t have anything in the way of manufacturing anymore, we’ve offshored it all and I think that can have negative consequences and to some degree it probably will, but nonetheless some of it seems to be working. So I guess we’ll have to give them the benefit of the doubt this time, see how it all plays out. If I had my druthers with our neighbors to the north and the south I would rather find a way instead of being told by politicians and state members of the state department that it’s not safe to go to Mexico right now, I may would rather do the olive branch method and ask for joint help in solving this problem rather than threatening through sanctions, masqueradings, tariffs.

What are you watching right now when it comes to the geopolitical landscape? You mentioned BRICS there, obviously Trump also threatened tariffs on them if they try to work outside the US dollar. China seems to be moving into a very strong economic position despite all of these headlines we’re seeing in the West that China is going to collapse any day now. One of my friends posted on X an article from 2014 I think it was that was saying all the exact same things the headlines are saying now, the end of China, it’s going to collapse and yet it seems to be performing quite well.

Obviously it has its issues as well, we’ve got the Russia-Ukraine conflict which continues to move forward depending on who you talk to. Most guests on this show say Russia’s winning by a country mile, however we do see some western media say that well Ukraine could actually be able to win at some point. Not to mention the conflict in the Middle East, Trump is now talking about the US will take control of Gaza, will turn it into a resort.

What are you paying attention to right now when it comes to the geopolitical landscape and how do you separate the kind of signal from the noise when looking at that world? I think the geopolitical side is getting very concerning to a degree. I mean there are reports that Iran is just a few days away from having the capacity to build a nuclear bomb. What’s going to happen there? You think Israel will let that happen? I don’t.

Will the US get involved? Not sure. This is closer than people think. You look at what’s happening with the BRICS, it’s growing.

They just brought in Indonesia as a full member. There’s another 23 that are fully applied. Indonesia has the largest in-ground supply of nickel on the planet.

Their president, Wadudu, has called for an OPEC-style cartel of rare earths. As it is, China refines 100% of the rare earths. The Eurasian continent is responsible for 90 plus percent of mining all the rare earths.

It’s a growing trend. You look at Russia and the Ukraine, and it’s absolutely appalling and disgusting to me. Our involvement there, largely because if you listen to Senator Lindsey Graham, who comes out and says about two months ago that this war is about nothing but resources, that that’s what people are missing, he says.

He says Ukraine has the largest, they’re the breadbasket of that area, and they supply wheat to most of the world from over there, and that they have the largest in-ground supply of rare earths, period, and trillions of dollars worth. That’s what it’s all about. What did Zelensky just say the other day to Trump? We’ll give you our rare earths, just help us continue this stupidity, this war.

Now there are rumors that, and again, they’re just rumors. Are they true? Not sure, but rumors that you have U.S. weaponry that was in the hands of the Ukraine that are being sold to the Mexican drug cartel, and they’re ending up over there, and the CIA knows about it. I mean, reading all this kind of stuff, your head starts to spin.

The geopolitical side of this is not over, and nor is this the end of China or the end of the BRICS. I think that the moves that are being made have not done anything but to crystallize the resolve of the majority of the BRICS countries. There are others that are still playing the fence, like Saudi Arabia.

I think they’ve chosen sides in reality, but they’re still straddling the West. I think that this will be a very eventful, chaotic year. People probably are expecting a little more calm under the Trump administration.

I don’t think so. I think this will be a year of chaos, and I think, obviously, the hot points would be Iran, the Gaza area, of course, with the Russian-Ukraine war still happening. These are areas that are unresolved, and I don’t think that you’re going to see it just go away.

Quite to the contrary, I think there’s going to be things that will shock people. I think really probably the scariest part of all, if I had to guess, would be what happens with Iran. Israel will not allow them to have a nuclear bomb when they publicly say that they want to wipe them off the face of the earth.

I think that that ends up being something that has yet to even be factored into people’s thinking. It’s not over yet, in my opinion. Well, I want to end by opening the floor to you.

Is there anything on your mind, whether it’s something we haven’t yet discussed you think it’s important to touch on, whether there’s something you want to emphasize, whether that’s about gold, silver markets, geopolitics, or otherwise? Hit us with it. Again, I would just say to me, I think that this rapid repatriation of gold and silver that we are seeing is suggesting a very big strategic shift. And I would not look past that, Jesse.

I think what we are seeing right now is so far outside, you want to call it an outlier, it is so far outside of anything I’ve ever seen in my career. And the interesting thing about it is that the American retail public is completely asleep at the switch. The market is being driven by central banks right now.

And the central banks are the ones that write the playbook. They are most well-informed traders in the world. And the American public is stuck in this NVIDIA, Bitcoin, Apple, risk on trade.

I don’t think we’ve even begun to see the fallout of what would happen if we see some sort of a market crash. Because you have everyone in a handful of seven stocks. You get everyone in Bitcoin.

And yet, the biggest money in the world is buying physical commodities hand over fist and repatriating them, taking possession. It’s not an inflation trade. It’s a chaos trade.

People are afraid. It’s uncertainty. They’re buying gold and silver and taking possession of it because something’s coming.

And they don’t do those kinds of things at that level just for the hell of it. They don’t reclassify gold as the only tier one asset in the world. They don’t repatriate all their gold from the Bank of England and the New York Fed.

They don’t bring it all home to the Comex. They don’t do all of these things. You don’t see JP Morgan now move to holding GLD and SLV if it weren’t something bigger coming.

In my opinion, I just simply think that this is being largely ignored by the American public. It is being hyperdriven by the most knowledgeable, well-funded, and well-informed traders on the planet. To me, there’s a story that I think you and I will pick back up on here maybe in a few months that we’ll see gold and silver at levels that people are shocked by.

And that’s exactly how it works. The big money is always in position before the little guy even figures it out. And here we are at $3,000 gold and not a damn word from the media.

People are sleeping at the switch. Rick Rule will tell you one half of 1% allocation to precious metals from Joe and Jane Sixpack to the Harvard Endowment Fund. So as gold and silver, I mean, if you would have told me in my career, most of which when gold was under $400, I’ve been doing this for 35 years, that gold would be at $3,000 and the public is asleep at the switch.

The lowest premiums I’ve ever seen ever on gold and silver coins because the public isn’t participating in it. I mean, they were wildly in it during the pandemic. And then Trump coming back to reestablish our culture has made everyone turn a blind eye to the monetary side of things.

And that’s a problem. And everyone is overloaded into a handful of stocks in a banking system that is massively overleveraged and undercapitalized and haven’t seen the end of that story yet either. I think this will be a very interesting year.

I think it will be the best year ever for gold and silver. And the sad part is it’s being largely ignored by the American public, who is all crammed into the risk on trade, maybe at a time when they should be looking elsewhere because the biggest money in the world is doing just that. And they’re always the ones that lead the crowd.

So I guess only time will tell. And maybe I’m stupid for publicly saying these things, if that’s how I feel. But honest to God, Jesse, in my heart, I feel that there’s something way bigger than meets the eye happening with gold and silver.

And I do believe when you get the Treasury Secretary who says it’s his largest holding, that being gold, when you get Judy Shelton says we’re going to peg it to gold 50-year treasuries, when you see it all flowing home, when you see the biggest Western cartel bank holding it all in the form of ETFs, where they could take the ETFs on a Friday night and be sitting on the largest stockpile of silver in the world on top of what they already own and one of the largest of gold and say, well, what? We didn’t break any laws. You can still own physical gold. That money that was in GLD, well, now it’s in your money market account.

Go buy physical gold from Miles Franklin. Go feel free to do that. Buy from the US Mint.

My point is all of these things are setting up for something much bigger than I think people are betting on. And my money is on gold and silver reaching levels. And again, I think it will reach levels that no one dreams of, but that’s not why you own it.

You don’t own it to get wealthy. You own it because it is wealth that has outstood two world wars, German hyperinflation, the Great Depression, every single pandemic. And what did he do? What did he do, Roosevelt? Well, his first act in office in April of 1933 was to confiscate gold.

Okay, but why? Because he paid everyone $20.55 for their $20 gold coin. $0.55 was a lot of money in 1933. Everyone was happy.

And then he devalued the dollar by 40%, just like that. And now gold was up 40%. Same thing was true in 1971 when they closed the gold window at 35 bucks.

Now it’s the market revalued gold. Market revalued gold to where it is now at 2,900. Well, what happens if they just decide to revalue gold that is held on their balance sheet at $42 an ounce in the United States and 35 in every other country? And bang, it’s $5,000 an ounce.

Well, what does that do? Well, that just gave $1.25 trillion free and clear to the treasury. What if they make it 10,000 an ounce? Well, that just gave 2.5 trillion to the treasury. How about 145,000 an ounce? Well, now your balance sheet is completely pristine offsetting by assets and liabilities.

What did Bassett just say, Scott Bassett? We are going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet. Well, what assets do we have? Five trillion plus in assets. The largest, oops, the largest being student debt.

Well, we’re not going to monetize that. The second largest being military. Not going to monetize that.

How about land and gold? Oh, maybe. Sure. Why not? Well, what else is he talking about by monetizing the asset side of the balance sheet? Do you see the clues that they’re giving you? It’s his largest asset.

That is gold. He admits to it, the new treasury secretary. My guess is, Jesse, there’s a whole hell of a lot more in store for what gold and silver represent to this new administration, rather than an investment to all you all.

No, it’s going to be a lifeline to reestablishing confidence and trust in the West. And it’s the only way to do it, in my opinion. So we’ll see if I’m right.

Either way, I always speak my heart. I mean it. And I look at gold and silver as wealth, not an investment.

And I think that’s going to bear fruit here in the actions of this new administration. Tell us about Miles Franklin, precious metals, and where people can find you. Well, we have our own YouTube channel, which I had you on and got tremendous response, which is the Miles Franklin YouTube channel.

Our website is Miles Franklin. We’ve been doing this for 35 years. We’ve done about $11 billion in sales without a material customer complaint ever.

And if people are interested, the best thing to do on our pricing is just to send us an email at info at milesfranklin.com. No obligation. If you just want to see our price sheet, which will be as good or better than anyone in North America. We don’t publish it for a myriad of reasons.

Just send us an email, say, I want the price sheet. No obligation. If you want to be contacted or have questions on anything you heard here or any of the other interviews I do, just send a message saying, contact me, put your phone number down.

We’ll do so. Otherwise we won’t. If you want to be contacted and you haven’t heard back or ask for the price list and haven’t heard back within just a few hours during normal business hours, check your spam.

Sometimes these emails will get trapped in spam coming from a corporate server, but info at milesfranklin.com, Miles Franklin YouTube channel. Check out Jesse’s interview with me and you get to hear Jesse on the other side of the microphone. He knows as much or more than anyone I ever talked to.

So Jesse, it’s always a pleasure to be here with you, brother. I appreciate you letting me speak my mind right, wrong, or indifferent. I will just simply leave this by saying, everyone says this time is different than it never is, but this time feels really different to me.

Something is going on under the surface that is just way different than anything I’ve experienced in three and a half decades in this industry. So buckle up. I think 2025 will be a year that is more interesting than people are anticipating on many levels.

And I look forward to picking up where we left off and talking about it as I’m sure there’ll be plenty to talk about down the road. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much once again for coming on Andy, and also for hosting me on your show, Little by Little on the Miles Franklin channel.

I’m going to put a link in the description to milesfranklin.com. I’m going to put that email address info at milesfranklin.com. And of course, the Miles Franklin website will also be linked below. Always a blast, Andy. Can’t wait to do it again.

Yeah, man. You’re one of the good guys in the industry, Jesse. And thanks for being a buddy, and thanks for having me on.

And you stay well. I look forward to chatting with you real soon. And thank you for joining us today.

This episode was brought to you by ARK Silver Gold Osmium. For all your precious metals needs, head to arksgo.com and contact owner Ian Everard today at 307-264-9441 or by email at ian.arksgo.com. And make sure to tell them that Commodity Culture sent you and I’ll see you guys in the next episode. Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources.

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