This Would Break the System (Uncut) 03-08-2025

March 8, 2025

0 24 minutes read

Jim Rickards: Is the Gold Gone? Did the U.S. Treasury Lease it? This Would Break the System

I know you’re all feeling it. There is so much happening in the gold market right now. We talk of revaluations, uncertainty, shifting trends, even talk about auditing for NOX.

It almost feels as if something big is really coming. So if you have questions or concerns about how this could impact you, reach out to our team. It’s free and they’ll be happy to explain the situation and help you out and prepare.

So scan the QR code right here on the screen or there’s a link below in the video description. Now let’s get to today’s video. This week, global markets fell after steep US tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico went into effect and as the possible ramifications of a global trade war set in.

So what is next? Jim Rickards, bestselling author of Currency Wars and many other books joins us today. Jim, there is talk right now that some exceptions and delays are coming into play. The White House announcing that it would grant a one month delay, for example, on tariffs on automakers.

But overall, what’s your take on what’s next on the trade war front? Well, it’s a very big deal. As you point out, Canada in particular is interesting. As far as Canada and the US are concerned and to a great extent, Mexico and the US, although there are other issues in Mexico, it’s mostly about the auto industry.

Lumber matters, steel imports matter, although that has more to do with China. But I lived in Montreal for two years and I used to go to a liquor store and Trudeau said, well, if the US puts tariffs on Canada, we’re stripping all the American liquor from the shelves. Well, they didn’t happen.

I mean, you can’t get California wine in a Montreal liquor store. You can get French wine and other kinds of wine. I also live in New England.

You can’t get Vermont cheese in Canada. There was the number of US exports that Canada banned, cheese, dairy, wine, liquor, etc., with few exceptions. They weren’t buying that much from the US anyway.

Auto industry is different. That’s a huge deal and that’s really what this is all about. And that’s why Trump gave a 30-day extension.

He didn’t say, I’m rescinding the tariffs. He just put them on the other day, a couple of days ago. But he said, well, we’ll hit the pause button for 30 days while we talk.

It’s a reasonable approach. We’ll see what happens. But of course, China was in the crosshairs.

China’s not getting a pause. Mexico is, so we’ll keep talking. We mean in the US, we’ll keep talking to Canada and Mexico.

The EU is next. They’re going to get whacked, whether it’s 10% or 25%. I mean, it matters, but it’s a significant percentage.

But Trump’s putting tariffs on pretty much everyone in the world. The Canadian case is interesting. Canada is the US’s largest trading partner by volume.

You look at the volume of trade. But the US trade deficit with Canada, or Canada’s surplus, is not the biggest by any means. I think it’s ninth or tenth.

So it’s the largest trading relationship by volume. But it’s not the biggest trade deficit that the US runs. Actually, the United States has a much bigger trade deficit, much bigger with Vietnam.

I mean, who’s talking about Vietnam? Well, we’ll be talking to them, and they might get the same treatment. But so I guess it’s really about the auto industry and subsidies. And it’s very popular with the US auto workers in Detroit and elsewhere, obviously.

Which begs the question, Jim, I mean, from what I’ve learned, and correct me if I’m wrong, the president cannot just use tariff powers, evoke tariff powers, hence the national threat of fentanyl. And that way, President Trump was able to use the tariff. So my question to you is, do you believe the fentanyl story? Is that really the true motivation? He’s cited over 300,000 deaths to fentanyl, or do you think there’s more to the story? There’s more to the story.

The fentanyl issue is real, and it’s coming in from Mexico and is coming in from Canada. It originates in China. This is just a replay of the opium wars of the British who went in guns blazing and attacked Hong Kong to force the Chinese to take opium.

Well, here we are 150 years later or more, and the Chinese are saying, here’s your payback, we’re going to give you fentanyl. And fentanyl is very destructive. It kills, people say 100,000 years, probably a lot more than that.

I know fentanyl victims, I know people who died of overdoses. So it’s very real, it does give Trump a legal handle. But it’s not the only handle.

It’s just not true that Trump needs to go to Congress on this. You write about the fentanyl exemption, national security exemption, but there are a lot of exemptions already in law that give the president the ability to put these tariffs on. So it’s not just a magic wand, he can wave it and say, you get tariffs.

There’s Section 230, the US Trade Act, there are other provisions. And then the big one, the big club is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1978. It could be off by a year, but International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEPA, which gives the president dictatorial powers.

I’m using dictator in the good sense of the word, meaning you can just do what you want. When it comes to financial and economic matters, where there is a national security implication. Now, that’s not hard to find these days.

I mean, there’s everything with globalization and trade in particular, there’s always an international implication to it, national security or jobs part of national security. I would say, yeah, if you export all your jobs and your economy is suffering, that undermines national security. And that is the main law that all presidents, President Trump, but President Biden also, well, President Biden was busy putting sanctions on Russia over the Ukraine war and secondary sanctions on China.

People didn’t seem to have a big problem with that. But that was all this IEPA, as I call it, it’s kind of the nickname. That’s always the statute they use.

If you read the Treasury Department releases, which I do, they always cite that statute. So I would say you’re right that you can’t just do whatever you want. But the authority is so broad that in effect, Trump can’t put these tariffs on.

He did it in his first term. A lot of the supply chain problems that we saw in 2021 and 2022, people were blaming COVID. Now COVID played a part, but you can trace the origin of that pre-COVID to 2018, which is when the trade war really started.

And the data shows that those original tariffs on China had much more to do with disrupting the supply chain than COVID. Just one more point on the tariffs front correlated to gold. Would gold fall under the tariffs? That’s a question that many people have been asking.

I know he said we’re going to do everything. Nothing is exempt, even though there are some rollbacks now. Would gold be affected? And just one more point, Bloomberg putting out an article this morning saying that we’re seeing extreme price dislocations on gold are fading as tightness in the fiscal market has seemed to ease, indicating this rush to ship bullion to America may have run its course.

So two points there. Would gold be affected by the tariffs? What do you think? And two, was that the reason that we saw this rush of gold from London to New York, from Switzerland now to New York? Gold might be affected by the tariffs. Trump put these tariffs on, they applied to everything.

Now, he’s creating carve-outs, and as he said, the auto industry, they’re getting a 30-day pause. But the tariffs are extremely broad, so they would apply to gold in the first instance, unless he carved it out, which he hasn’t. Having said that, it won’t have any effect on the global price of gold.

The reason is that gold is kind of like oil, gold, a couple of other things. These are global prices. They’re produced all over the world, not everywhere, but in every part of the world.

They’re consumed in every part of the world, and they’re easily substituted. So if the U.S. doesn’t buy oil from Saudi Arabia, we don’t buy that much from Saudi Arabia anyway. We can buy from Venezuela.

If Canada cuts us off, we can buy more from Mexico or more from Venezuela. But the same is true of gold. The price is set in two places, the London bullion market and the COMEX, the New York commodities market.

Physical prices and paper gold prices vary. There’s a lot to it. But my point being, if there’s a tariff on gold coming from Canada to the U.S., just buy it in Shanghai, buy it from Africa, buy it from Switzerland.

The point being, when a commodity is truly generic, a car is not generic. You get a certain brand and a certain set of features, and it’s electric or hybrid or whatever. Cars are not generic.

Gold is. It’s an element, atomic number 79. So the point being, when you have a generic, fungible, global commodity, tariffs don’t affect the price, because if you’re getting hit with a tariff, you just don’t buy it from that source, you buy it from somewhere else.

Now, getting back to your other point, Danielle, about shipments from gold. Yeah, it does appear that there was some kind of short squeeze emerging and that shorts were having trouble getting physical gold to satisfy deliveries. Now, that can only go so far.

If you look at, say, how do you get short gold? You sell gold futures on the COMEX, you know, one month, two months, three months forward. And then you get to the end of the contract and the buyer says, I would like physical delivery, please. I don’t just want to pair off or roll over my contract.

That’s a paper transaction. That’s the way most futures settle. But if someone long in the future says, I’d like to take delivery, please, then yeah, you got to look at the warehouse and see what’s there.

And if there’s not enough, you might have to get it from from London or some other source. Now, that appears to account for some of the deliveries and some of the urgency about that. Having said that, there’s a limit on that.

And you have to read the COMEX rulebook. I’m enough of a geek. I actually have read the COMEX rulebook.

But there are two important rules. Number one, they have a rule that says they can change the rules. So if things get tight or things get disorderly, they can just say, no more physical delivery.

We’re trading for liquidation only. You can pair off your contract, roll it over, but you can’t take physical delivery. They can just say that.

And it is what they did to the Hunt brothers in 1980, I believe, 80 or 81, when they tried to corner the silver market. But there’s another principle, which is also in the rulebook, but it’s just more broadly stated. Futures exchanges say, all of them say, we are not a source of supply.

Now, it is true that you can provide notice and take physical delivery of the gold in a futures contract. That is true. But they only want a little sliver of that just to kind of keep the paper price and the physical price in line by linking it to the physical price through physical delivery.

In some cases, there’s a little bit of an arbitrage, but not much. It basically keeps those two prices in line. That’s the purpose of it.

If all the shorts, sorry, all the longs got together and all put in notice of physical delivery, I promise you, by noon that day, the comics would say, sorry, you know, trade for liquidation only. You cannot take physical delivery. We are not a source of supply.

So this notion, a lot of gold bugs have it that somehow you can use the futures exchanges to break the market. No, you can’t. Only to a point.

I haven’t seen any evidence that gold was being shipped to beat the tariffs. We haven’t even put tariffs on the UK or Switzerland. We probably will, at least the UK, but not yet.

I think there might have been a mild short squeeze unfolding, and that accounts for the physical deliveries, but that’s not going to go too far because the futures exchanges can shut it down. When does it become a problem then? Because you’re saying they can just change to liquidation, then do things just operate smoothly? Or when could there be that break in the system? Well, in the scenario I gave where, too many longs, futures longs, put in as a delivery, the comic says, sorry, too many, we’re not a source of supply, trade for liquidation. Okay, so that puts out that fire.

But if that was a real demand, then where are those buyers going to go? They’re going to go to the physical market, and then basically the London Metals Exchange and the London Ring. And that’s where things could get very hairy, very quickly. I’ve been talking a lot about this because Trump and Elon Musk are going to Fort Knox.

Yes. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, no, please.

The gold is there. People know that only about slightly less than half the gold, the US gold is in Fort Knox. The other half is at West Point, in a vault, in a secret location.

I can’t say where it is, but I know where it is. And then it’s a little bit at the- You’ve seen it. I know where it is, but it’s classified, so I can’t say more, but people know it’s there.

But they don’t know where it is, but it’s there. It’s an Army base. So half is at West Point, half is at Fort Knox, approximately.

And there’s a sliver at the Denver Mint for making gold coins, basically. But that’s it. So it’s not all at Fort Knox, but they’re going to go to Fort Knox.

They’re not going to do an audit. I mean, to do an audit, you know what a gold bar, 400 ounce gold bar looks like. They all have serial numbers, assay stamps, refinery stamps, purity stamps, etc.

You have to sit there with a ledger and take each number and compare it to the ledger and make sure they’re all there and adjust for the purity. Some of these bars, by the way, have been lying around since the 1920s. They’re not four nines.

They could be 97% gold. I’m not saying they’re fake. I’m saying they could be 97, 98% gold.

They’re nowhere near four nines. 400 ounces, maybe. Some of them are a little gnarly.

I’m not saying it’s not there, and I’m not saying it’s not real gold. It is. But if you’re actually trying to price it out, you have to adjust for purity, weight, and basically the things I mentioned.

So all they’re going to do, it’s going to be a photo op. So by the way, if you’ve ever held one of those bars, it’s like freeways. They weigh about 25, 30 pounds.

But they’re going to hold the bars up, say it’s here, show you some pictures, and go away. That’s not an audit, but it is like the mother of all photo ops. But I think it’s a good thing.

I think the American people have been lied to so much by the government on so many issues from COVID to climate change that a lot of people don’t think the gold is there. Well, obviously, it’s there. Do you think that the Secretary of the Treasury would let the President go to Fort Knox if the gold wasn’t there? So of course, it’s there.

But here’s the bigger question, the much more important question. It gets back to what you were talking about, Danielle, with these deliveries from London. Is that gold leased? And that’s a very big deal, because very few people understand gold leasing and how it actually works.

They assume that if JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley or Citibank lease gold from Fort Knox, that somehow they back up a truck and take the gold away. No, that’s not what happens. It’s a paper transaction.

I can lease it to you. We have a leasing contract. You pay me the equivalent of rent, maybe 1%, 1.5%. It’s a way for the Treasury to make a little money.

The gold stays right where it is in Fort Knox. But in my example, JP Morgan would now have, as lessee, would now have title to that gold, and more importantly, a right of rehypothecation. That’s a fancy word, but it basically means they can lease it to somebody else.

And then that person can lease it to somebody else, and so forth. So what you end up with, Danielle, is you have a chain of leases or what are called sales of unallocated gold. So what’s that? So I call up JP Morgan and say, I want to buy one ton of gold.

That’s a lot of gold. But whatever, say one ton of gold. And they sell it to me unallocated.

Now what that means is that there’s no actual gold in the contract. In other words, it’s not like I have bar numbers. I own it on paper, but there’s no physical gold behind the contract.

It’s just, I basically have price exposure, and I can say I own it, but there’s no physical gold behind it. So my point being, if JP Morgan leases the gold from the US Treasury, which is entirely plausible, and then leases it to other parties or sells it on an unallocated basis, you very quickly get to a point, I think we’re way past this point, where you could have 100 tons of paper gold transactions supported by one physical ton that got leased from the Treasury to JP Morgan. Now, we’re not talking about the futures markets.

The futures market is a whole other thing. But we’re talking about unallocated and leasing and rehypothecation. So if I were Elon Musk or President Trump, I’ve spoken to people close to the White House about this.

I said, why don’t you ask the Treasury if this gold is leased? Now, I’m pretty sure they won’t ask that question. Because if you do, you are tampering with the primal forces. You are getting at something.

And you know who Blythe Masters is. Blythe was the head of global commodities trading for JP Morgan for many years. She’s moved on to other things.

She’s been away from that for a while. But she said something some years ago, and I saw it and I verified it. Then I went back to find it and it was gone.

It was erased from the internet, but she said it. She said, gold never settles. And what she meant by that was, all the paper gold transactions in the world will never turn into physical gold.

They cannot. It’s impossible. There isn’t enough gold.

And if we even tried, gold would go to $1,000 an ounce so fast, you couldn’t, the ticker couldn’t even keep up. So in other words, as long as the longs and the shorts are happy, and everyone’s got paper gold, everyone’s got price exposure, you make money, you lose money, whatever, but you don’t try to turn it into physical gold. Everything works fine.

Gold never settles. You just roll it over and roll it over, close it out or sell it to somebody else. But if you ever had a real run on the paper market, it would be, you’d break the market in a heartbeat and gold would, as I say, it would almost overnight.

Just want to back up. I just want to back up a second. Because if we look at inflows into the ETFs in the month of February, we really saw a surge, a significant inflows on gold backed ETFs and physical deliveries on the COMEX in February, just completely out of whack there, Jim.

So somebody wants gold. Somebody’s buying gold. What’s your take here? Retail is a little more active.

You’re right about that, but they’re not really driving the market. In a panic, they will, but it’ll be too late. I mean, it’ll be, I’m saying buy gold at 700, 1300, 1900, 2000.

It’s now close to 3000. People just don’t do it. It’s fine.

I’m not in charge of their finances, but people just don’t do it. The funny thing is, Danielle, this is just human nature. When it spikes to 4000 or 5000, then they’ll run out and buy it.

They could have had it at 1300, but they’ll wait until it spikes. That’s just human nature. The big buyers are the central banks.

They’re the players, some institutions, some hedge funds, but mainly the central banks. And we know who they are. It’s Russia and China, but also Vietnam is a big buyer.

I mentioned their trade surplus earlier. Okay, what are they doing with the money? Well, one of the things they’re doing is buying gold. Kazakhstan, Turkey, Iran’s buying it.

They’re not transparent, but they’re buying it. And Mexico and many others. So the central banks are driving.

The inflection point was 2010. From 1970 to 2010, central banks were net sellers. But since 2010, they’ve been net buyers, but the amount of buying has been going up.

Russia has increased their gold reserves by five times. In 2009, they were 600 tons. Today, they’re about 3000 tons.

That’s a five times increase in 16 years, but that’s still 500% more gold. By the way, that gold has saved them in the Ukrainian war because the US put financial sanctions and tried to steal $300 billion of US Treasury securities that Russia paid for with dollars that they made by selling oil. When we froze the US Treasury securities, and now we’re in the process of stealing them, they stole $50 billion out of $300 billion to make a loan to Ukraine that’s never going to get repaid.

But Russia had put Elvira Nabulina, who’s the head of the Central Bank of Russia, she had put 25% of their reserves in gold before the war in Ukraine, again, in this period since 2009. Now, here’s one of the ironies and shows how much the US doesn’t understand about this. The war and the central bank buying and the kinds of things we’ve been talking about have driven up the price of gold so much that Russia has made $100 billion of profits on a market-to-market basis on their gold.

So yeah, we froze $300 billion in Treasury securities, but they’ve been continuing to sell oil and natural gas, and they’ve made $100 billion on their gold, which thanks to us, because we’re the ones causing all the problems. So they’re the driving force. Now, Russia has shown a lot of finesse in how they do it.

They buy 10 tons a month, 20 tons a month. Some months they skip. Recently, they haven’t reported anything.

I don’t think that means that they’re not buying gold. I think it probably means they’re buying the gold through the sovereign wealth fund instead of the central bank, which is what China does. China has been buying gold all along, but we don’t really have hard data because they don’t buy it through the central bank.

They buy it through their sovereign wealth fund with something called SAFE, State Administration of Foreign Exchange. So they have these pockets where they can buy gold without putting it on the central bank balance sheet. But that’s what’s really driving the price of gold.

And if you thought about it, you say, well, gee, why doesn’t China just announce what they’re doing and bid off the price of gold and make a lot of money? Well, the answer is they’re not done buying. Exactly. See, if you were buying, you wouldn’t want the price to go up until you have all you want.

When you have enough, that’s different. But if you’re still a buyer, you want the price to be moderate. So what’s going on is a great game involving the major powers, involving gold.

There’s more to it, but that’s what’s driving the price higher. Just one more point to wrap and it’s a big one, but it’s exactly one week since we saw the Zelensky-President Trump interaction in the White House. I’m curious to get what your analysis was of that.

And there was talk again of a World War III brought forth by Zelensky. Overall thoughts there, Jim? Well, it shows that Trump derangement syndrome is not confined to the U.S. media. Speaking of World War III, my friend Christy Freeland came out the other day and said, I want Canada to build closer relations with UK so we can rely on UK nuclear missiles to protect us from an attack by Trump.

I was like, okay, who’s the warmonger here? But anyone who understands Russia, the Russian way of war, international economics, and what’s been going on in the Ukraine was completely unsurprised by what Zelensky did. Anyone who believes that we’re fighting for democracy, there’s no democracy in Ukraine. The political opponents have been put in jail.

Zelensky’s term expired last May. May 2024 was the end of his term. Since then, he’s been an instant military dictator.

The political opponents are all in jail. The idea we’re fighting for freedom is a joke. It’s a neo-Nazi sympathetic dictatorship.

That’s who you’re fighting for. Trump understands that. I think in particular, John Ratcliffe at CIA, Mike Walsh, National Security Advisor, certainly Pete Hagseth at the Pentagon, they all understand it.

They’re determined to get out in the best way possible. Everyone’s like, oh, you’re giving Putin what he wants. No, we’re not.

He already has it. I keep trying to explain to people, when you win a war, you get to keep stuff. Russia took the four provinces they want.

They’ve got them. They’re not giving them back. That’s what happens when you lose the war.

If Trump brokers an agreement or forces an agreement that gives Russia those provinces as part of the Russian Federation, he’s not making a gift to Putin. Putin won it in the war. All Trump’s trying to do is stop the killing and 700,000 Ukrainian young men and women.

I think the White House is done with Zelensky. He proved one more time that he’s a thug. He has his hand out.

He wants more money and more weapons, period. He wants to keep fighting. He wants to keep killing Ukrainians.

Eventually, he’ll retire to his mansion in either Dubai or Miami. But Trump sees through it. I don’t expect that there’ll be any kind of reconciliation.

Every day, first we cut off weapons. Then we cut off money. A few days ago, we cut off intelligence sharing, which is a big deal because Zelensky can’t even carry out the limited attacks he’s capable of without US satellite imagery.

That’s been cut off. So, I understand Ukraine. I understand the United States.

I understand Russia. What I don’t understand is the UK. Boris Johnson was a complete failure, but why that has carried through to Keir Starmer.

Actually, Liz Truss is a mentor. She understood what we’re talking about, but not the others. But they’re just totally around the bend in terms of supporting Ukraine.

The problem is the UK and France and Germany, they can talk a good game. They don’t have the resources. The UK army, they’ve got like three divisions.

Russia has 15 divisions in Ukraine. That’s not the whole Russian army. That’s just what they have in Ukraine, 150,000 troops.

That’s about 15 divisions. UK only has three in total if they send them all to Ukraine. They don’t have one soldier left to defend England.

So, none of it makes sense. The search for truth is becoming harder and harder, Jim, because you’re right. The media machine is a powerful beast because immediately after that interaction, I would say the world primarily was more sympathetic towards Zelensky.

Those who have forgotten about Ukraine all of a sudden are once again fighting for Ukraine. It’s back in the news cycle. From that extent, it worked.

Yeah. I’ve said before, Trump said the same thing the other day, and I agree. It’s not a question of being pro-Russia.

It’s a question of being pro-peace. I don’t favor Russia. I favor peace.

This is a war that never should have happened. When Zelensky said, right now you have an ocean separating you from Russia, right, his comment about that and how it’s going to move closer to the U.S., like now you might not feel it, but you will feel it, circling back to his point about World War III. Do you see any truth in that? I mean, my point is, did that comment frighten you, Jim? I’ve been thinking about it for years, and we have come closer to World War III than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I talk about this in my new book, My New GPT. I have a chapter on nuclear warfighting. So there were a couple of close calls in the 1980s that I talk about.

But we’ve come closer, we are closer than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1980. But who’s driving it? It’s not the Russians, and it’s not particularly the Americans. It’s Zelensky.

Zelensky wants everything he’s done. The mineral deal that he walked away from, talks with Macron, Starmer, the rest, everything he’s done is aimed at one thing. He wants NATO membership.

He’s not getting it. But the next best thing are what they call security guarantees, and that involves U.S. troops on the ground, or you could put U.K. troops on the ground with some backup from the U.S. But it’s all designed to do one thing, Danielle, which is to drag the United States into this war so that you have a war between Russia and the United States. That’s what they want.

That’s World War III. Trump is smart enough to avoid that. People like me and many others have been calling out Ukraine on this.

That’s all they really want. So yeah, his description of the potential, I would take it at face value. They want World War III, and it’s important for the United States and Russia to back away from that, which is one of the reasons we have to abandon Zelensky.

He’s actually kind of crazy, if you ask me. Jim, just one final point. We’re wrapping, I promise.

But every time I speak with you, I truly see it as a gift. You’ve covered the gold market, as I have, for so long. You’ve written about it numerous times.

To see gold so much in the news now, between Fort Knox, the gold that’s moving, demand for gold, overall, how do you feel? Do you feel like, yeah, finally, gold’s making the headlines it deserves? Yes. It’s nice when it goes up. But here’s what I always say, Danielle.

Gold is not going up. The dollar is going down. As gold is constant by weight.

As I said, it’s an element. It just sits there. But in the time I’ve been an investor, it took $700 to buy an ounce of gold.

I have friends who bought at $200. Good for them. I’m very happy for them.

But I started buying around $700. It used to take $700 to buy an ounce of gold. Today, it takes about $2,900 to buy an ounce of gold.

The ounce of gold hasn’t changed. What changed is that the dollar has collapsed. People keep saying we have a strong dollar.

I hear that all the time. I look at it and I say, compared to what? Compared to the euro, and the yuan, and the yen, and Swiss francs, and sterling, yes. But compared to gold, no, the dollar has collapsed compared to gold.

That to me is a better metric. But I’ll tell you a secret. Here’s what’s going on.

Everyone’s like, where’s the BRICS currency? The BRICS are supposed to be having a currency. They’re going to replace the dollar and do this and do that. Trump said, if you BRICS come out with a currency, I’m putting 100% tariffs on you, 200%, whatever it takes.

Everyone’s like, where’s the BRICS currency? They already have it. It’s called gold. Why would you go out and print up a new currency? If you’re Russian, I’m China, we’re trading, I’m selling you manufactured goods and semiconductors, and you’re selling me oil, natural gas, or whatever, and I’m paying you in rupees, and you’re paying me in yuan, or whatever, we have a trade balance.

A lot of it nets out, but there’s some net balance. Somebody owes something to the other, or whatever. You settle it in gold.

Because you’re settling on a net basis, not a gross basis, you don’t need that much gold. It becomes very feasible. You can keep it in a vault and change the title, but you can also just put it on a plane and ship it over.

The BRICS don’t need a BRICS currency. They already have one and it’s gold. Jim Rickards, always great catching up with you.

People, folks can find you on X, the handle, the Real Jim Rickards. At Real Jim Rickards. Thank you.

At Real Jim Rickards. We’ll see you soon, Jim. Thank you so much.

Thanks. And thank you all for watching. We’ll have more great content coming your way.