Gold to Hit $6,000 Under Trump? (Uncut) 04-25-2025

Gold to Hit $6,000 Under Trump? Dollar Reset & Bitcoin Boom Ahead | Frank Holmes

Welcome to Kitco News, I’m Jerry Safran. The U.S. dollar is under growing pressure and now the warnings are coming from the top. Goldman Sachs says the dollar has much further to fall, projecting a possible 25-30% decline based on historical parallels.

The IMF is forecasting a sharp slowdown in U.S. growth for 2025 and foreign demand for U.S. assets, long the backbone of dollar strength, is showing signs of weakness. Gold recently touched a record high of $3,500 an ounce and now JP Morgan, among others, is calling for $4,000 gold within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant is calling for a reset.

He’s urging the IMF and World Bank to focus on economic stability and development, not on climate and social policy. Now, his message is clear here. He says the global financial architecture is off track.

Joining us now is someone who’s warned about this months ago, Frank Holmes, who’s the CEO of U.S. Global Investors. He’s also the executive chairman of Hive Digital Technologies. Great to see you, Frank.

Welcome back to Kitco. Hey, it’s great to be back and yes, up for gold. Up for gold.

Listen, man, it’s been a crazy time watching it. We just talked about that $3,500 mark before it had a little bit of a pullback. Now, last time you were on our show, you said we were entering a secular bull market in decentralized assets and you also highlighted gold’s outperformance since then.

As I mentioned, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, well, they’ve joined your call predicting $4,000 by 2026. But Frank, I got to ask you, I mean, did you expect gold to move this quickly and what’s driving it now? No, I think it’s actually been lagging and where $1,000 would be sort of the normal model. But now when I look at M2 growth globally, I look at the G20 countries, in particular the most biggest of 10 countries.

And I think the gold should be going to $6,000 over the term of President Trump. I laugh when I see the front page of The Economist with a broken eagle saying there’s 1,300 and some odd days left of his term. And by that time, gold will be through $6,000.

Wow. Okay. Well, it’s quite a call.

I mean, you were right on the last one. We’re going to have to see. I mean, it’s been, these swings have been huge.

A hundred dollars a day, sometimes two, it hit $3,509, it pulled back over $200. Now it looks like it’s rebounding rather a little bit here. Investors are looking for signals.

How do you interpret this kind of volatility? I mean, is this just the nature of repricing in high stakes macro environment or does it suggest something like fragility? Government policies are a precursor to change. And governments have two policy machines, monetary or fiscal. Monetary is money supply and interest rates.

Over here on fiscal, it’s tax and regulations. Well, what did we just see with President Trump, which shifted the global trading tectonic plate shifts like a massive earthquake happening and tsunamis happening all over the world is a reset button on the tariffs. So if the tariffs go up 25%, then the dollar has to go down 25% is what some simple big money central banks, sorry, brokers are calling this sort of shift.

That’s why they’re saying the dollar will fall. It will. I don’t think it’s going to be a straight line, but there’s a reset button that’s going on and there’s a dynamic that you have to recognize that it’s also a war with the leader of China.

Xi Jinping has allowed for what they call typhoon. There’s two big typhoons that hit America. One is called Volt, V-O-L-T, and the other one is called SALT, S-A-L-T, where the government agencies of China have been hacking into the power stations was called Volt.

And then last year, it was going after all of Washington, D.C., millions of people’s information on telecom and he just shrugged his shoulders. So I think we have to realize it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or Republican that’s in power, the State Department is very threatened by the predatory practice of Xi Jinping. And since he’s become the dictator for life, he has escalated substantially military spending.

He also has icebreakers and he’s making nuclear icebreakers because he believes the Arctic Sea is his and he’ll come in to rule over Greenland and Canada. So these sort of signals, and he’s also fighting the de-dollarization of the dollar and getting the BRIC countries to go anti the U.S. dollar. Well, all really has happened since then is dollar trade has gone up and the euro has gone down.

And so I think that we’re in this sort of reset budding and have to recognize what the real battle is and what I think Trump’s strategy is, declares this tariff battle with everybody in the world, and then he merely drops back for 90 days for those really are not the enemies of the state, it’s China. But there’s no pushback or pullback with China. And so we’ll see that debate unfold, whereas other countries will come to negotiate.

Yeah, we’re seeing it unfold in real time. I think this morning they were just talking about Korea as well, right? Coming to the negotiating table. Yes.

It’s been unrealistic what’s going on, that they have open ports, they’d be able to send anything into America, infiltrate the social media, infiltrate selling anything they want to it. But if America wants to sell something to them or luxury good companies like even LVMH wants to go to China, it’s much more expensive. So the worry is that all the Chinese tourists, because I also have Jets ETF, so I tracked all the tourism around the world and it’s been picking up.

Well, it’s cheaper for them to go buy purses, Ferragamo, Versace, Prada in Europe because the tariff is so high in China and they go back with it. And so it’s recognizing we’re going through this reset button that the currencies will reset. And I really am not as bearish as everyone is.

This was in New York on the weekend and there’s no bear market. There’s no big recession. Every restaurant, every theater is sold out.

The airplanes going up there and back are sold out. And then I went to Toronto, same thing, flights sold out. So I really don’t, I’m not so negative as a lot of people are.

There are certain pockets are having challenges. But overall, I think we have to sit back and say there is this shift on economic policies. One is really a trade war with China and I think it’s just going to unfold and it’s going to make gold a decentralized, more valuable asset.

And what really amazes me is there’s still apathy by investors. Like if you take a look at the gold flows into the bullion ETF, it just happened in the past month. It really happened after February the 15th, sort of like Valentine’s Day gift to everyone was buy gold.

And you can see the gold stocks all of a sudden soar by their 50 day. Money finally comes back in. I think the biggest ETF in the U.S. for equities last year saw $2 billion dollars relief, whereas gold went up and gold stocks are making huge free cash flow.

Newmont’s results came out today, home run. They’re not buying though junior gold mining companies, they’re buying back their stock. They’re increasing their dividend.

So the big gold mining companies are very different of how they’re functioning. And I don’t know where they’re going to find their reserves. They’re not hodling their gold like Bitcoin miners do.

They’re basically selling it, but they’re using that cash to pay down debt, buy back stock. Interesting. Okay.

Come back to what you were talking about. I mean, we got into a lot there and on the tariff front within China, it’s been interesting to watch because I mean, some argue that the lack of retail froth is like you said, kind of a bullish sign that we’re nowhere near a top. Are institutions starting to crowd the trade too aggressively in gold? No, they’re so far from it.

I mean, in 2003, we saw bullion breaking above the 50 day and we saw the gold stocks. Well, it’s interesting that IBD, who I love to follow, Investors Business Daily, has the 50 best stocks based on revenue momentum and earnings momentum and price momentum. All three factors have to be aligned.

And a couple of weeks ago, gold stocks are all of a sudden over 20% of the 50 stocks that are in there. 12 stocks are in there and several of the royalty companies are in there. So they’ll start to wake up to that.

But we’re not likely, I saw in 2003, because we would see huge gold fund flows and it’s almost like an apathy towards the asset class. And gold stocks themselves fell down to one quarter of 1% of all ETF assets. And so I think there’s huge upside in the gold stocks.

And with bullion, they went down to 1% and now it’s climbing its way back, pushing to 2%. I’ve always advocated a 10% gold and rule. And I think we’ll probably run a peak dope before like 5%, 6% of diversified portfolios with long bullion.

I think we’re in the throes of that. So we’re early in a secular bull market. OK, well, let’s get back to the dollar for a second, because as I mentioned at the top, we got Goldman Sachs now saying that the U.S. could fall another, the U.S. dollar could fall another 25 to 30%.

Ray Dalio is warning of deep geopolitical fragmentation. And of course, BRICS nations are actively stockpiling gold. How do you see the dollar trading this year? I think the dollar is going to trade down.

I don’t think it’s going to collapse unless interest rates fall further. And there’s a big push of which is a forbidden transaction to try to have the president influence the monetary policy makers are supposed to be independent and to get rates down. That would make rates negative.

Well, if he’s able to do that and get the rates negative, gold can turn around and be easy 6,000, because then the currency would fall. When you get negative real interest rates, you get money printing more than the inflationary rate. It triggers devaluations and gold as an asset class all of a sudden gets that resurgence.

What do you think about the Bitcoin price in U.S. dollars? I mean, what do you think that these impacts with the dollar going down? What’s it going to do to that price? Well, Bitcoin is totally different. Two weeks ago, I was at Blockchain Week in Paris. And it just shocks you.

There’s 9,500 people attending, spending $1,000 a ticket. You can’t get that for a gold equity or gold or ETF conference that people would be spending that amount of money, institutional retail. So the Bitcoin crypto ecosystem functions on its own.

It’s just recognizing it’s its own sort of beast outside of stocks and bonds and banking. And I do believe that it will continue to grow. And there’s a slow overlap between with the Bitcoin ETFs coming into what I call my world.

That other world is slowly coming in. But it’s so robust, it’s so strong. I saw on a board, all these companies were funded for Web3.

I didn’t know 80% of them. So there’s money going into not junior exploration. It’s going into Web3 ventures.

And it’s not the French people as a whole don’t invest in the stock market as a percentage. I think it’s like 1% versus 20% are active in the U.S. So it’s very small. But when the crypto ecosystem, it’s big.

So then you have to look at the differences. But there is a lag with money with M2 rising. Then something like six to eight weeks later, Bitcoin starts to get its traction.

Right now it’s very sentiment driven, with President Trump recognizing everyone that bought his meme coin, doing a black tie, like a golfing event. And I think it’s interesting that the president is entertaining and embracing the crypto ecosystem. And a meme coin, not Bitcoin, but the meme coins are the third derivative of the Bitcoin network.

So I think that it trades, it will trade higher. It will trade higher because a lot of generations X, Y, and Z and millennials are the real big pushers for that industry. My vintage and age will slowly buy for some price appreciation.

As they slowly learn, they’ll probably more quickly go into gold and listen to the program. And if you’re not 10% weighting in gold, then you’re going to miss one of the greatest trades ever. Yeah, absolutely.

I’m going to get into more on gold and we got to talk about the miners. But before we do, and we’re talking Bitcoin, we now have this Cantor SoftBank and Tether forming a $3.6 billion SPAC to launch this company, 21 Capital. It’s a Bitcoin accumulation vehicle.

We’ve had the CEO, Jack Mullers, on this show before. Now, I guess they’ll control about 42,000 Bitcoin out of the gate. What’s your take on this as a parallel to what Michael Saylor did at MicroStrategy? Well, I think that Jack Mullers reminds me of a young Robert Friedland who’s got the gift of gab and has built an enormous amount of wealth for a 30-year-old young man.

And he’s done a spectacular job educating people about what is Bitcoin, what does it mean? And the same thing with Michael Saylor. And there’s this big push that you shouldn’t have so much cash in your balance sheet, that you should be owning Bitcoin. And so I find that interesting.

There’s a sort of big educational, big push for that. And so we’ll see how it unfolds. But there is serious money because Tether is a serious beast.

It’s really hard in the gold world and in the stock market world. Tether’s over there. It’s over there.

But Tether makes more money than what BlackRock makes with $11 trillion. Tether makes $100 million in revenue per employee. They only have 175 employees and they made $13 billion profits last year.

Tether has 100,000 Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Tether has 50 tons of gold. Tether is the go-to place for people outside of America because when you leave America, people want the dollar.

So the Chinese can dump their dollars. Tether’s infrastructure, I guess their network, will be funding the buying of that. They own more U.S. bonds than the German government.

They are a serious player in buying government securities. And you’ve got to think of the number. They have over 300 million wallets or accounts.

And that’s like $4,000 per account because people in Argentina don’t trust the local currency. They don’t trust it in Venezuela and Colombia. So they end up putting their U.S. dollars outside into a Tether.

And so Tether has become the place to go to have digital U.S. dollars. And this is pushing for a stablecoin in America. And now the EU is making announcements that they’re very worried about the U.S. pushing for this type of stablecoin because it will affect the big balance of trade, will make them irrelevant because the rest of the world wants American dollars.

Yeah, it’s not going anywhere. We’ve been talking about de-dollarization trends for a very long time. And when you talk about this SPAC that we just kind of touched on, this $3.6 billion 21 Capital Company, we talk about Michael Saylor’s company.

Do you think that this is the start of a Wall Street bidding war for Bitcoin’s finite supply? And if so, does it help the case or does it hurt the case for gold? I think that it can dampen the gold for young investors and speculators that want to speculate. But I think that the centuries and centuries of gold as an asset class and the buying by central banks of gold, I don’t think that that is going to go away. I think we’re going to run in parallel and both are incredible decentralized assets.

For the person on the streets, the silver coins are the best way to go. They’re the best tangible, portable wealth to protect against money printing. So we’re spoiled in America and Canada because we haven’t seen the banks being forced by the government to come in and confiscate your dollars like they have in Argentina in 2002.

So we live in a different world, very critical of our own governments, but we don’t realize that when you leave North America, this is what they want. And so I think that the whole tether, they’re big gold buyers. Their tether stable coin continues to see money flows and they continue to buy gold.

They’re stashing it all away in vaults in the mountains in Switzerland. So there is something significant happening outside of what the average person understands in the crypto ecosystem. So Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the leader.

Bitcoin proof of work demonstrates a significance. And it’s also the charge that Bitcoin mining, what we’re doing like in Paraguay, we become something the government gets, US dollars every month. They go sell their electricity.

Paraguay sells it to Argentina. It’s no pay or slow pay. And here it’s paid every month so they can run their fiscal policies better.

So Bitcoin comes to the rescue. Hive is so excited about it because we get low cost hydroelectricity and that’s a win. So I think that you’re seeing that the Bitcoin mining and that whole ecosystem is building out electrical infrastructure all over the world.

And then after the Bitcoin platforms are built, then you’re going to see high performance computing come in. And we’ve seen that in the US. But it’s really distraught to see how the GLD hurt the gold stocks on a relative valuation basis unless they show that high free cash flow.

That’s what they’re doing now. But the same thing with the Bitcoin ETF has hurt overall a lot of the Bitcoin mining companies not realizing that we hodl and that we have free cash flow and we continue to expand dramatically. Yeah, when it comes to gold there, I mean, if the post Bretton Woods system is starting to kind of fray here, what should investors be doing right now to prepare? Because are we watching, it seems like we keep talking about it, but are we watching the world begin to rediscover gold as the foundation of a new monetary order? I think that for the older school central bankers, yes.

I think that they feel that it protects the value of their currency from the volatility of the politicians coming and going. The left coming in, the right coming in, the left going out, the right going out. That volatility impacts fiscal policies, which then impact the country’s currency.

And the central bank is to have monetary stability. So what they’re recognizing is that gold helps with that stability. And so they will continue to buy gold.

The more popularized we call the political realm around the world in these election cycles, the more significant is if I’m a central banker that I need a rudder in the water, it is gold to run it. So I don’t think that’s going away. Where America is going to lead the charges is Bitcoin and Bitcoin becoming a reserve and buying some more Bitcoin or functioning to allow America to become the most dominant Bitcoin mining nation in the world.

That will develop a lot of stranded electricity that will create a lot of jobs. So I remain really bullish on the sector. And I think some of the least expensive when you look at the Bitcoin miners, they’re trading like a lot of the junior gold stocks.

And when they get that bid, it’s so fast how they take off on the upside. So if you’re not a buyer on these dips, then you’re going to miss it. Okay.

So they’ve had a little bit of a haircut. You heard it here, I guess. I mean, this is obviously part of why gold and Bitcoin are rising, right? Because confidence in the traditional system is falling.

What’s your outlook for the Bitcoin price this year? I mean, I think we’re around 93,000 right now. Well, I think it goes through 100. Technically, when it goes through 97, where there was a lot of coins sold, then once it chews through that, then it pops to 120, 150.

It’s easy for it to go to a quarter million dollars as the adoption takes place. And that’s because the security is real. It’s capped at 21 million coins.

19.5 million coins have been mined, of which 3 million have been lost. Lost to computers by people not realizing that they owned it for $10 and $100. And they threw out the computer.

It’s destroyed. There’s so many of these great stories on it because it’s not tangible, because it’s virtual. And I think that coming back to this adoption process, you have to follow what’s called Metcalfe’s law.

And Metcalfe’s law is an exponential rule, like Moore’s law for the cost of making chips. In the opposite, as people adopt and the supply is limited, prices grow exponentially. And what was Bitcoin two years ago? It was 26,000 this time.

Where was it a year ago? Around 62,000 or something like that. What was the average price last year? 65,000, 66,000. Is Bitcoin up today? Is it up this year? Absolutely.

So it’s putting that in that context that do I think you go from 26 to 260,000? Yes, I do. I think it grows exponentially. Yeah.

I mean, we know that obviously we have our gold bugs, our crypto fans, and sometimes there’s this give or take a divide. It feels like sometimes I’m in a debate. But Frank, as someone who leads both a gold and crypto business, what do you say to them? And how do you position when both assets are moving aggressively at the same time? Well, I think you should have both.

I think that having a 10% weight in gold, the golden rule is really important. It has shown up this year in particular. And having gold stocks, they’ve done phenomenal.

They will continue to do phenomenal. And I think that when you look at Bitcoin having a 5% weighting, in particular of going into some of the crypto mining companies that are showing strong cash flow and growth profiles, I think they’re the ones that you want to have that weighting. And so in a diversified portfolio, we’re talking about 15% in these decentralized asset classes.

Both are portable. One is tangible. You get to wear it.

The other one is virtual. And you get to send it faster and easier than you get to send money on PayPal. So it’s recognizing that you should have actually have both of those decentralized assets in our diversified portfolio.

Yeah, interesting. And yet, of course, we saw those spot Bitcoin ETF inflows nearly hit a billion dollars on Tuesday alone. I mean, do you see this as an institutional investors allocating across both gold and Bitcoin? Or is it one asset starting to cannibalize the other? I think there’s been a bit of cannibalization.

But I do agree that there’s adoption. And it just has more and more committees. We’re seeing states like Missouri all of a sudden adopt a policy to own Bitcoin.

And what happens if you get 40 of the 50 states having a policy that the pension funds for all the government employees can own Bitcoin in their 401k? What happens with that? Just like what happened when they could buy the GLD and being a list on the New York Stock Exchange? Well, that allowed billions of dollars came into gold. Big difference is that Bitcoin would took 10 years for 50 billion going into billion, only took 10 months going into Bitcoin. That’s sort of the difference.

And I think some of it has to do with demographics. Yeah, speaking of demographics, you were talking about the demographics with mining companies. And it’s hard to get in front of some younger eyeballs.

I mean, I’m not sure if everyone knows, but you were a pioneer at Franco Nevada in the early days of the streaming model. Obviously, that went on to become a very large company. If we were seeing $3,500 gold back then, what would that have meant for royalties and long term cash flow forecasts in this space? It’d be exponential.

It wouldn’t be a linear line. And I think that that’s where we’re going to get this reset, where I was doing calculations with our gold fund manager. And he said, if we start getting like we’re getting back in 2003, a million dollars a day, then 10 million dollars a day, and then 50 million a day.

If we start getting a million dollars a day, all those juniors and mid caps would light up because there’s only two or three gold funds now that will buy the small cap and the micro caps. They’re basically gone as fund managers. And I think that it’ll just be like this.

It’ll happen. 50 million comes in and all of a sudden we’ve got to deploy 50 million dollars in junior mining. Do you know what’s going to happen to those prices, us trying to find the value proposition and not move the markets? We’ll move the markets.

That’s the reality. And when it happens, I try to explain to people, it happens so fast. Yeah, hopefully it’s not just a liquidity rotation playing out in waves here.

It will. It will. And what happens then when the seniors all of a sudden start buying these juniors for reserves? That is not happening when you saw what Newmont’s release was today.

So that means that gold is going to trade higher. And if these big gold mining companies ever start coming up with hodling 10% of their free cash flow to keep building in the bank, I think that gold would be 4,000 next week. That’s what would happen in the confidence and supply demand dynamics.

All right. But you got 6,000 during the Trump presidency over the next three years, right? My lips to God’s ears. But it’s not because there’s a crisis, the world falling apart.

It’s a reset button. It’s a readjustment of geopolitical trade that’s going on. And let’s hope that his negotiating and his policies work out.

But we do know that the currency will be under pressure and not because of BRIC countries, and not because of the euro, but because of the tariff tectonic plate shift. Yeah. A lot of things taking place at the same time.

All right. My friend, Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of Hive Digital and CEO of U.S. Global Investors. Always a pleasure.

Thanks again for joining us, Frank. It’s great being with you. And stay long or you’ll be wrong.

Stay long. By the dip. Thanks, Frank.

Appreciate your time. Of course, for more expert interviews and real-time market coverage, be sure to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications right here on Kidco News. I’m Gerry Safran.

We’ll see you next time.