Commodity Culture (Uncut) 12-13-2024

Hello and welcome to Commodity Culture, where our goal is to make you a better investor in the commodities sector. My name is Jesse Day, and on today’s episode I’m joined by Bill Fleckenstein, a professional money manager with over 30 years of experience, an author and founder of Fleckenstein Capital.com where he has written daily commentary on market action since 1996. We’re going to get his thoughts on the gold and silver markets, along with his take on why the gold mining sector continues to lag behind the metal itself, why he thinks the Japanese yen is starting to look like a buy, how geopolitics plays a role in his investment decisions, and so much more. I hope you’ll enjoy my conversation with Bill Fleckenstein.

So I want to start today’s interview with a broad question. Take a step back and ask you what are the main themes and trends you, you’re currently watching when it comes to markets and the economy that you think investors should be paying attention to?

I think given the level of speculative activity across such a wide spectrum, whether it’s leverage on leverage in various ETFs or zero data expiry options or anything associated with the crypto universe, it doesn’t take much of a student of financial history to recognize that this is a wildly speculative moment. That is not necessarily actionable, however, because speculative periods can last for a good deal of time and in fact they usually last long enough to make anyone who points that out look like a fool. Now, you know, we’ve, you know, and these things go to various different levels and we’ve, we’ve got quite a, quite a broad spectrum of things we could talk about in terms of, you know, this makes no sense. But one thing I always do when I talk to someone who I’ve not spoken with in the past to make sure that their audience is aware of is the amount of warpage, so to speak, that has been caused in the stock market as a consequence of the money that goes into 401k target date funds and goes to Vanguard and BlackRock to buy their market oriented ETFs, otherwise known as the passive bid.

I don’t know if you’ve talked to Mike Green or you’re familiar with his work. You are, okay, so we don’t need to spend a lot of time on that then. But that’s something I always tell people. Are you aware of how this has fundamentally altered the way the markets work and the way securities are priced?

Because if you’re not, then you are basically playing a game to the extent that this investing is a game and it isn’t really, but just has some features like that you’re involved in something and you don’t know what the actual rules are. And while there aren’t any actual rules in investing, there are various things that have stood the test of time to keep oneself out of big trouble. And the distortion caused by the passive bid and the amount of people that have followed that with their trend following, or no people noticing, hey, momentum seems to work as a characteristic, and so they start doing it. The concentration of passive vesting is somewhere around 45%, according to Mike, who in my opinion knows this better than anyone else.

And therefore the reason why there are stupendous valuations on securities that don’t really have the growth characteristics to support them. Apple being a perfect example, is because of the way the passive bid perversely makes mega cap stocks even more illiquid. And so that’s the thing I would convince people of. I don’t think there’s any smoking gun on the economy that you can point to to say, hey, we’re about to tip into recession or about to accelerate.

I think most people that are paying attention knows, know that the economic data has been powered to some degree by a 6 or 7% percent of GDP budget deficit. That is a lot of money to help people who aren’t fortunate enough to have a lot of assets. And then you have the market going up, which helps people with assets. So despite a lot of things that have looked to a lot of people like we’re on the verge of recession, that has not been the case.

My view has been we’ve been in somewhat of a stagflationary period. I kind of view stagflation as where the growth rate of the economy and the rate of inflation are similar enough. And so that’s the kind of environment I’ve expected. And that’s where we’ve been.

What that gives way to right now is kind of hard to say. You know, optimism about what Trump’s policies may mean has unleashed animal spirits to some degree since the election. There is a lot of optimism about what might be able to be done, and people have gotten excited. I was around in the investment business.

I was pretty green when Ronald Reagan won, and there was a lot of hope about what he might do. One of the things which they did do is slash tax rates mightily right from 70%, which is where they were at the margin then. But at the same time, Volcker was fighting inflation and he had rates go to 15 16%. Anyways, about a year and a half before all the quote, unquote, good things were able to happen.

Now they broke the back of inflation and the stock market was a pretty good place to be for the last 40 years, barring a couple of bubbles that the Fed created. So people are enthused. But I think you have to be aware of how long this might take. And if you look carefully at the buckets of spending on the part of the government, I think if even if you thought Elon Musk walked on water and was able to find, you know, a massive number of cuts, let’s just say that they somehow managed to find 500 billion.

When you look at the budget deficit, how it’s constructed, that would be pretty heroic. Regretfully, that can’t really move the needle when you’ve got, you know, a trillion to a trillion, close to a trillion and a half in interest payments, you know, and the budget deficit is the trillion and a half or plus. So there are reasons why people have become enthused and what may change on the regulatory front, but there’s a lot of hurdles to get over. So we’ve got enthusiasm, speculation, extraordinarily high value valuations, all of those things tend to create potential risk.

If something can upset the apple cart. The question is what’s liable to upset the apple cart? Usually to have something bad happen, you need to be in some kind of a period of Fed tightening and they’re actually easing even though they are still running QT in the background. So while I think that everyone needs to be aware that it’s a very dangerous period and have some plan about what they’re liable to do, should we start to have a wobble that turns into something else.

For right now, it’s just important to be to know that we’re in a speculative period. There’s going to be a lot of, potentially a lot of motion in the new year relative to things that the Trump administration do that impact the economy. So, like I say, my suggestion would be, would be to be aware of what’s going on. Don’t necessarily do something about it right this minute, depending on how you’re set up.

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Do you think it’s important to have dry powder cash on the sidelines at this point in time with the market being as overvalued as it is? You did say this can go on for a long time, particularly with these inflows, the passive investments into these big ETFs. Do you think that’s an important step to take right now?

Yes, but with a caveat. A lot depends on your age and your economic strata, so to speak. Right. So if you’re fortunate enough to have a lot of assets and if you have assets that can do well, especially if we stay in an inflationary sticky period, which I think inflation will remain sticky, then I think, yes, you can have.

Yes, I believe it’s worthwhile to hold a fair amount of cash right now. But I also hold precious metals and things like that that will. You know, the problem with fixed income is fixed income loses at the margin over time to inflation. Now, you know, people don’t usually think of cash as fixed income facts.

Cash is more like an unexpired call option to allow you to spring at the right moment, so to speak. Right. So, but I think if you’re, if you’re slightly concerned about any of the things that I might say or other people have said, then to hold a little extra cash is not crazy. I mean, yes, you’re going to.

You might miss some upside. And we could have had this discussion about crazy valuations last year. So, you know, I’m not trying to say that I have anything imminent that I can see. If I did, I would say so.

But I think your gut feeling is correct. I think given everything to be to be a Max diamond hand Hodler of almost anything right now is probably dangerous. You got to have some liquidity in case something goes wrong.

Great thoughts. Again, I want to unpack something you recently wrote on fleckenstein capital.com. you said twice in the last couple of weeks I have thought about making an initial purchase in the yen, and both times I have missed it. Of course, if you are long gold, you don’t necessarily need to own yen.

So firstly, what is it that you’re seeing in the yen that makes you think it could be time to buy. And secondly, could you explain why someone who’s long gold doesn’t necessarily need to own yen?

I can actually do both of those things. I’ve been, I’ve been interested in Japan for a long time. One of my first, first big scores was in a non standard way was I was short the Japanese stock market in 1989 and I had some put warrants that traded in Singapore, denominated in yen before the whole bevy of them got issued in America. And I did quite well.

So I’ve paid quite a bit of attention off and on. I haven’t had another investment in Japan other than speculating in the end from time to time. So anyway, the yen is, if you look at currencies from a purchasing power standpoint, that is what is an identical hamburger cost in Tokyo compared to New York or Seattle or Chicago or Timbuktu? You know, there are things that you can try to say purchase.

You can try to figure out if a currency is cheap or expensive relative to vanilla goods and services. The Japanese yen is quite cheap on that basis has been. And the BOJ is going to need to hike rates. They’re going to have to do that because inflation has picked up and is liable to continue to be percolating.

It’ll be at a lower number than what we see, but nonetheless. So I think both of those things are constructive for the yen and the sort of the afterburner for that is I believe the Trump administration will want the yen lower. I think one of the reasons why Trump specifically pointed out the fact that the dollar is the reserve currency of the world is so that when he turns around and does something that’s meant to weaken the dollar, or maybe specifically the yen, for all I know he can say with a straight face, no, we’re the reserve currency of the dollar because we need the dollar to be strong to finance the deficit at the margin and we need it weak so he can pursue trade policies that make exports less expensive and imports more expensive. That’s what he wants to do and I suspect at some point that will happen.

So I’m interested in the yen anyway and I think he gives you a little wind at your back. Now I have traded around it a couple of times. We have a BOJ meeting coming up and the question is, are they going to actually raise rates or not? I don’t have a strong opinion, so I’ve reduced my position.

Maybe I’ll be right, maybe I’ll be Wrong, I don’t know. So I have a much smaller position than I did before. The reason though, why gold holders. It’s a specific risk that I’m taking in with the yen.

But oftentimes if the dollar is weak, that’s beneficial for gold. Not always, but in the present environment I believe that it would be thus. If you’re already long gold, you have some protection against a weaker dollar already, so you don’t need to go then layer some yen on top of it and take more of the same kind of exposure risk that is that maybe the dollar goes up and that may matter to gold, may not. It would certainly matter to the yen probably.

So that’s why. Because you’ve already kind of got that base covered by being long gold in the first place or silver or whatever your precious metal choice is. I guess I’ll only leave a couple after that. Anyway.

Yeah, let’s switch to discussing precious metals specifically then. You mentioned earlier, holding precious metals could be important at this point in time as well. So let’s hone in on gold first. How do you view the gold market at present?

Do you think we’re in a long term bull market in the early stages? Are we perhaps due for a correction somewhere in between? What are your thoughts?

Full disclosure, I’ve been long gold in one form or another pretty much for 25 years now. I mean really since about 300 or $400. 300. You know, right after the dot com bubble burst in 2000.

I was friendly to it before that, but it didn’t go anywhere. So I. I’ve had exposure to gold for quite a long time. I plan on keeping that until somehow, some way, the budget deficit problems are settled up and the Federal Reserve can no longer print money willy nilly irresponsibly.

I’m in the camp that the Fed has largely been responsible for precipitating asset bubbles. And that’s one kind of inflation. That’s asset inflation. You know, we saw the bubble in the stock bubble that burst in early 2000, the real estate bubble that first in 08 people didn’t even talk about the real estate bubble.

They just call it the great financial crisis. Ha ha ha. I mean the irresponsibility that went on during that bubble and the financing in particular. At the same time you had Greenspan and Bernanke both saying real estate couldn’t be in a bubble.

Greenspan said, because it’s not arbitrageable. And his quote was something like you can’t arbitrage. Portland, Oregon and Portland Maine. I mean, so the amount of lunacy that those two perpetrated on the world, we had these two bubbles.

And then what happened after the first bubble was more irresponsible monetary policy. That got us an even worse bubble that almost vaporized the financial system. Usually those kind of things lead to crises that cause us to solve some problems. And all we got out of that was Obamacare and in an even worse problem with the cost of health care in this country.

So my point is, we use that financial crisis and got zero out of it, and now we have a deficit that is, you know, as I mentioned, a trillion and a half, plus or minus. And the national debt is now 35 trillion. And unfortunately, now these numbers are so big that they matter. I don’t see how we can get past the size of this without trying to inflate our way out of it.

Now, the government will say we’ll grow our way out, but you can only do that if the bond market doesn’t, if rates don’t rise along the way, because as we start to refinance, it’s going to add a few hundred billion to the current rate of interest that the government is paying. And I got it. I got a, I’ve got a cheat sheet here of, I mean, when you look at the places in the budget, you know, Social Security is a billion four, health is 900, interest is a trillion. Medicare is 900, defense is 900.

Income security, whatever that is, is 700. You know, then you’ve got veteran benefits, educate well, I mean, there aren’t a lot of buckets, right? I mean, I think if they can find 5 or 6 or 700 million, that’s heroic, well, that’s not really going to be enough to solve the problem. So I think, I don’t know how they’re going to convince the bond market not to back up or rates to not rise as we go through this period.

And that’s what will be required. So I think that there’s a long way of saying there’s so much pressure, I think the pressure is going to be on to keep rates lower than they should be and at the margin, things that will tend to fuel inflation. Now, if they really cut that amount of spending and cut a bunch of government jobs, you know, that might take some of the pressure off at the margin. But I think that when the rest of the world looks at us, despite the fact of the world’s reserve currency, but they look at the financing and the size of the budget deficit, I think that’s part of a bid behind gold, not to mention when the Biden administration weaponized the financial system against Russia and China, then I don’t think they’ll get the genie back in the bottle on that.

If Trump tries to send him, say no, just kidding, we won’t do that again. It doesn’t really work that way. It takes quite a while. So I think there’s a lot of pressures to cause people to want to need to own gold because the pressure is going to be towards continuing levels of inflation.

You know, inflation gets, people get confused when they talk about it. The government says they’re so proud of themselves. Inflation is back down to 2%. But the prices that went up like this, that just means that the rate of the slope of this line is going up at a much slower rate.

Right. The, the things that went from $1 to $2, now that they’re only going up, they’re going up slower. That doesn’t help you. They’re not, they didn’t go back to a buck two and start over again.

Right. So once that psychology changes, which I believe it has, it’s very difficult to convince people that that might not happen again or some variation of that. So I think inflation psychology, which I believe has been underestimated for years because it hasn’t really mattered now, has changed and they’re not getting the genie back in the bottle in terms of changing people’s expectations. I don’t even know if I answered your question.

I went on a long ways about gold, got into inflation, but that’s my answer.

Yeah, no, great answer. I wonder what your current thoughts are in the silver market. I’ve spoken to several people who believe silver is extraordinarily undervalued at the moment. Obviously very far off its previous all time highs.

Do you think silver has a lot of room to run? There’s also that narrative out there that silver tends to outperform gold. In the latter stages of a precious metals bull market. It plays catch up and then exceeds gold in terms of percentage gains.

Is that something you buy into and how do you see the silver market playing out up ahead?

Yeah, I do actually. I was the director of Pan American silver from 2000 for 1996 to around 2011 or 12. The price of silver went from 4 to 40. The price of Pan American went from 4 to 40.

And so I retired off the board thinking, okay, well it’s done its thing, right? So silver’s not that far from its all time high. It’s $32 almost today. 32 to 40, I mean that’s not that far away especially for silver.

A lot of people use the 1980 peak of close to. I think the Hunt brothers got it to 48 or so. But that’s a false reference point. That was an attempted squeeze, didn’t work.

And you can’t people that say because XYZ once traded at 500 and now it’s 10 doesn’t mean it’s cheap. It just might have been stupid, stupid, stupid at 500. So I don’t like those kind of. Well it used to be here and now it’s here.

So therefore it’s cheap. I do believe. I mean the use case for silver has gone up thanks to a lot of solar and initiatives like that. And obviously While, you know, 20 years ago photography used 100 million ounces a year, now you know, electronics which replace photography uses a fair amount, almost a like amount.

So I think that the silver currently appears to be in deficit that when they talk about that that’s primary supply most of all the precious metals ever found are still in existence. Silver does get consumed more than gold. But I’m quite bullish on silver. The public in the US has not really embraced the metals.

I say that because you can look at the inflows into the, into the ETFs and they’re about flat ish this year, even with gold up 25% or so. So there hasn’t been much enthusiasm on the part of Americans net net for gold and, and there really hasn’t been and thus if they’re not going to be buying gold, they’re not going to be buying silver. And that’s why the miners have lagged so bad, I believe. I still think that enthusiastic wave is there in front of us.

It’s hard for me to tell you exactly why it should happen now when it’s kind of not happened, but I just think it’s just at some point the light bulb will go off and there’ll be a bit of a rush. In that environment, silver could trade from 32 to 40 literally in a few days because that’s its personality. It’s a much smaller market than gold and much thinner. And so it tends to get quite rambunctious when the metals markets get, get rolling.

Well, let’s talk about the gold mining space. You recently wrote a tweet indicating you thought Agnego Eagle is a well run company. Obviously the share price bears that out. But conversely, Barrick and Newmont seem to be lagging behind and I think you’ve indicated that you think that’s an issue with how those companies are run?

Could you kind of compare Agnico to Barrick and Newmont and why you think there’s that gap in valuation?

Sure. So first of all, mining is a difficult business. You know, it’s not like opening a lemonade stand. Right.

It takes tremendous amount of drilling and thinking and analysis to figure out what’s that big ore body underground that we can’t see, what’s it going to look like when we start actually pulling it up. And we got to, then we got a, we got to, you know, take the ore, crush it, grind it, you know, refine it, blah, blah, blah. So I have my, I have rules in that I, if I want, if I. The mines, mining companies that I want to own, I want them to be in what I consider to be favorable jurisdictions.

Canada is particularly a good place to be. The US Depending on what state you’re in, some parts of Mexico, although that’s less friendly than it used to be, and so on. And then I would like to have companies that have enough property of their own that they can drill it and create growth or they can create growth through their exploration, even if they have to acquire a new piece of semi raw land or a junior or something like that. Because.

And then of course you want it, you want companies that are, that are, that are run well, which is a little more subjective. And you kind of only tend to know that after you’ve been involved with the company for a while. But, and so if you take a look at Agnico, you know, the bulk of their assets are in Canada. You know, they’ve got a couple others, but that’s not really.

And they’re in pretty good places too. Australia, I left them out so. And they can control. Oh, I left out another thing.

I want companies that have higher grade. I don’t want to wash dirt. You know, the lower your tons, sorry, grams per ton are, the more you’re kind of, if things can go wrong for you don’t have much wiggle room. Right.

Whereas if you, if you’re mining, you know, seven tenths of a gram versus seven grams a ton, that’s a big deal. So Agnico has pretty rich minds generically, but not. There’s a couple that aren’t the same and they’re all in, like I said, the most departments are in Canada. The management there is terrific and so that’s why it’s done well.

What’s happened this year for the first time in a while, in my opinion is Some of the higher quality ones, at least the ones that tick my checklist, have done quite well, while some of the more generic ones haven’t. So if you have a more generic one like say, Barrick or Newmont, they’re very big to begin with, so it’s hard to move the needle from a growth standpoint. So you’re basically stuck just with the price of gold. But then you might have properties in unfriendly places.

Like, you know, there are parts of Africa or parts of South America where they are capricious and changed the rules. And so the problem with those two is the kind of assets they own and where they own them. Not necessarily that the management is so bad, although you have to question some of the acquisitions that have been made by them in the past, although present management wasn’t necessarily there when those acquisitions were all made. So that’s not to give them a black eye.

So it’s just harder to move the needle. So three of the best ones this year happened to be ones that I own, Acneco, Alamos Gold and Wes Dome. And they all have those characteristics. And even new gold, although it’s not a high gram per ton company, the guys that have run it have done a good job of turning it around there, so it’s extra, extra cheap.

Anyway. There’s been a real stratification, in my opinion, between ones that have a lot going on for themselves away from just the gold price and don’t have geopolitical kinds of risks. Those have tended to do better. And that’s been the key this year.

At some point there’ll be a mad rush and all the speculative garbage will go up, and the garbage will go up faster than the good stuff, but we haven’t gotten close to that yet.

Are there any other commodities outside of the gold and silver space that you’re watching right now that you think could do well? Up ahead, any thoughts on uranium, oil and gas, copper and other base metals, or anything else that you’re watching?

No, because for my purposes, having as much exposure as I do to silver and gold, I don’t feel like I need other things. I would be friendly to the energy market if I thought it was set up right. Maybe that’s going to develop. I don’t know.

It’s. I don’t. I don’t feel like I’m as good at analyzing them as I am some of the mining companies and the metals, but. And also I think the uranium sector has done well.

I was pretty friendly towards it, but when it was on Its back, so were the miners. And I chose to just continue to beef them up. Other than getting involved with uranium or Cameco or some of the better uranium, I think they’re all fine. It just, it doesn’t, I don’t feel a need to get involved with them right now.

Now if we had some disruptive event and the market got, you know, scrambled and everything changed around and might I buy some. Yeah, I’d be inclined to look there but I don’t, I don’t have any exposure right now.

And when looking around the world today, are there any markets, whether emerging economy or otherwise, that look attractive to you versus the US at the moment?

Well, I’m sure there are. I’m not much of an emerging market investor. I do think that Japan is probably going to do well over the next five years or so. So anyone who is inclined to do that or you know, some people have to allocate to sector funds and you know, some Japanese oriented exposure I don’t think would be a bad idea.

But it’s not anything I’m doing right now. But if I was to do that somewhere I’d be. That’s where I would be looking.

Very interesting. I want to pivot a little bit to discussing free speech as a thing that comes up on the show a lot. Despite the fact that we’re a commodities investing show, we’re kind of beneath the surface. Also a bit of an anti government pro profile freedom show.

And I noticed that you were posting some of these things on X so I thought I would bring it up. I mean the latest thought that comes to mind. Yeah. Is the attack on free speech happening around the globe.

And recently we’ve seen Romania’s Constitutional Court cancel the presidential election over what they claim was Russian interference. I believe they said tick tock specifically was somehow involved. But nonetheless social media, which is a little strange. I don’t think they give in depth details on that.

This prompted the current president to call for quote strengthening the security of social media throughout the eu. He spoke to Ursula Vanderlin about it. We all know what that means. There’s been a ton of other recent examples.

Obviously uk, Germany throwing people in jail over social media posts. Why do you think this is happening in these nations and how can it be stopped, if at all?

I’m glad you’re championing that. Cause you may notice that I might pinned tweet on Twitter has to do with. I do a podcast with Grant Williams from time to time on an ad hoc basis called the Endgame and we interviewed Alex Berenson in the fall of 21. He was radioactive at the time because Twitter had canceled him.

The government had gone to Twitter to cancel him. It’s the subject of a lawsuit right now that he’s got, suing the federal government for violation of his constitutional rights. He won the case against Twitter and his crime was being right about the fact that the vaccines did not convey immunity and that there were harmful side effects. He talked about that in the spring, summer of 20.

So that when the data started coming out from Israel. So anyway, they banned him and they were. And that was when the whole free speech, sorry, the whole censorship complex was at its strongest here in America. It’s now.

And so I felt like you that if you can’t speak freely, you can’t change anything. Look how close we were to the media being able to muzzle everyone. Look what they did during COVID I don’t care what your view was, but to stand up and say the silence, the science is settled and if you have a dissenting view, we’re going to cancel you. When it turned out the people that had the dissenting view were in fact correct and no apology from the other side.

So the danger is that once you get control and you control the media and you can start essential, you can make the truth can be deemed a lie and lies are deemed to be the truth. And anyone who’s honest has seen that in the media repeatedly. You know, the New York Times, all these places. It’s perverse, but the faction of the public that used to be considered liberal now are advocating for totalitarian policies because it seems that they just want to get their own way.

And I think what they learned during COVID was, hey, we can be thugs. If the media believes us, we can do whatever we want. Now how the people in Great Britain are putting up in England with what going going on there, getting locked up for tweets or Germany or the atrocious things that happened the Australians during COVID and the New Zealand. So it’s what they did in Canada.

So in the English speaking world, we’ve kind of broken free. And Elon Musk gets some credit for that, for buying Twitter and kind of opening it up, getting the Twitter files open, which started to happen because of barons and suit. So I think as a country we’ve turned the corner on that. At least I hope we have.

And that people, as we get farther away from the zenith of that, it’ll begin to look more and more dangerous and stupid. And maybe the media will actually decide, hey, maybe we should just try to present both sides of the story and see what people think on their own instead of telling what they’re supposed to think and lying about it. So that’s my hope. Whether it’s going to happen, I guess we’ll have to see.

You know, we’ll know. Probably know in a year for sure.

Yeah. I actually fled my home country of Canada during COVID I’m in Serbia right now. I moved to Croatia initially, but the Balkan region, nobody here trusts their government.

You know what I have. I have a handful of friends from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and one of my better friends emigrated back when it was communist. He snuck, you know, he. He illegally left the country, and he kept saying to me, what’s happened to America?

What’s happened to America? He said, this is what I tried to leave. And perversely, I’ve said, well, if. If things go badly here, we’ll have to go to the battle.

Because it’s all fresh in their minds, what this stuff leads to, and they’ve seen it, and they know how bad it can get, and they don’t want any part of it. So the freest places in the world are where you are right now?

Yes, yes. And I mean, particularly when it comes to Serbia, these people will protest at the drop of a hat against anything that they disagree with that the government is doing, oftentimes violently. That’s an interesting fact, is that the people here are not afraid to get violent if they feel like their rights are being violated, which I kind of take some comfort in. When you look around and you go, they don’t trust the government.

They don’t trust the government, and nobody trusts the government here. So it’s a great place to be in that sense. I wonder, you touched there on Trump’s presidency and the fact that Elon Musk bought Twitter and Trump’s talking a lot about free speech being protected, you see America being set on a better path at the moment. How much of an impact do you think that is going to have?

Because obviously, there’s still a very large portion of the country that believes in censorship, that wants more government intervention. And it also is very bitter that Trump is talking about these things in the way that he is. How do you see all of that playing out for the future of free speech in the United States?

Well, I have. I mean, my hope is that. That sanity will prevail. I mean, all you have to do is study a little history to see what trying to.

What censorship leads to versus what free speech leads to. And the People that are advocating for the policies of censorship and no free speech or what they mean is if it’s not speech I like, then it’s miss or disinformation. I mean, I can’t believe these bozos are back trying to say that Tulsi Gabbard’s a Russian. Anyone they don’t like is a Russian agent.

When they already ran that play and they had the 51 intelligence officers who said it was obviously a fake. And now Joe Biden pardons his son because not only not fake, it was real. I mean, how can they even bring it up? But they can because there’s no consequence to them anyway.

I think we’ve turned the page on that. I want to believe that. I think they’re censorship is going to be under pressure for the next four years and maybe once we get away from that, we’ll be gone for good. Maybe they’ll try to fight the whole time.

You can see they’re not giving up anybody. They don’t like that Trump has voted that once these proposed that he wants who almost all of them are definitely not deep state, you know, pariahs. The media attacks and they attack them because, you know, whoever is they’re beholden to doesn’t like them. I mean, and I think somebody needs to get a serious defamation suit to stop some of this.

And maybe something, maybe, maybe that’ll happen, something will prevent that from happening. You can’t walk around, it’s not mis or disinformation when people, they’re just out and out lying or making it up. And once you start doing that and you get away with it, it’s hard to stop. So.

But I think we’ve turned the corner there. At least that’s what I want to believe.

I wonder what you have your eye on at the moment when it comes to the realm of geopolitics and in your opinion, but both with your own investment decisions, do you look at geopolitics and does that play a factor and do you think that investors should be paying attention to geopolitics or is it mostly noise when it comes to actually making investment decisions?

I think it tends to be mostly noise. Obviously, certain moments in time, events spill over and it matters more. But, you know, it’s, I mean, we’re fortunate here that we’re in America from a. It’s hard to attack us just from a physical standpoint and, you know, our defense being what it is in our Navy, et cetera.

So I think largely the geopolitical things don’t haven’t mattered much to us. Now, you know, Europe’s, you know, Europe is. I think I didn’t say this earlier, but one of the reasons why the yen might be the default better currency is because the euro has Europe. The European bureaucracy is so bad and you know, they’re all about the anti free speech that I don’t see how anyone says, well, I don’t want to own dollars.

And you know, you really want to buy euros. I mean, so that’s why precious metals have benefited, because there’s not much of decent choice in any kind of any kind of a currency you could put money in. That’s why I think the yen might do well by default as well. That’s part of the reason.

But mostly I don’t think analyzing geopolitical stuff matters, saying, look, Ukraine, the Ukraine war hasn’t mattered, even as it seems like the warmongers in Washington have. I’m not a pacifist, but there’s a difference between being, you know, trying to do something sensible and being a warmonger. You know, as hard as they’ve tried to get us close to World War 3 with Russia and Ukraine, it hasn’t. Luckily they haven’t.

And it hasn’t really much mattered to the markets. So I think the markets are pretty good at adjudicating geopolitical stuff. I mean, it causes a little tremor first and then it gets ignored. Usually it’s because it’s not really going to matter.

That doesn’t mean always, but that’s usually the case.

Well, Bill, this has been a fantastic conversation. Greatly appreciate you coming on the show. Could you tell us about fleckenstein capital.com what it is you do there where people can find it and any. Anything else you want to talk about anywhere else you want to direct people online, feel free.

Well, you already told them where they could find it. Fleckenstein capital.com it’s a website. I’ve been writing a column on investing since 1996. I did it in various places and I started on my own website in about 2004.

I write a column daily. Sometimes there’s a lot of good stuff in there, sometimes there’s not much because depends on what the market gives me. I also answer questions every day and I think that’s proven to be quite valuable. You know, I have been at this for a long time.

It’s $130 a year. I priced it that way so that even if you had a paper out, you can afford it. But. So that’s, that’s what’s there.

I’m also on Twitter. I don’t post all that often, but my handle there is eccap. But if what I have said is marginally useful and you want to read more about it, you can. I would go to the website because I’m not.

I talk a lot of inside baseball on my Twitter feed.

Great. Well, I’ll put a link in the description below to the website as well as your Twitter. Thank you once again, Bill, for coming on the show and sharing your knowledge with the audience.

Hey, thanks for having me and thank.

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