Instead of Treasuries, Investors Are Buying Foreign Stocks (Uncut) 03-17-2025

Instead of Treasuries, Investors Are Buying Foreign Stocks – Ep 1017

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Well, the stock markets had a big rally on Friday. The Dow was up 674 points, about 1.7%. Actually, that was the weakest of the indexes, S&P 500. And I guess it was up about 2%, S&P 500.

And the Russell 2000 and the NASDAQ up by about 2.5% yesterday, on Friday. But despite those big rises, the market still finished slightly down on the week. All of the stock market indexes were down.

But I think the real big story of the week was not in the stock market, but in the precious metals market, in the gold market. Gold rose about 2.5% on the week. And on Friday, gold traded in the spot market above 3,000 for the first time in history.

So a significant milestone, not that long after crossing 2,000. We moved up 50% in gold. Gold is actually up about 12% on the year.

That’s a big move. We’re not even finished with the first quarter. Now, silver actually did better than gold on the week.

Silver was up about 4%, traded above $34. Although, like gold, it didn’t hold 34, so it pulled back a little bit, just like gold. So gold closed at around 2,985.

That was the highest weekly close ever. And as I’m recording this podcast on Friday night, gold is up again, not above 3,000. It’s up about $5, $29.90, so about $10 below 5,000.

You know, the significant divergence between gold and silver is, even though silver is, you know, doing well year-to-date, did well on the week, it’s still below its high price from 2020, where silver got above $35. So we’re getting close to taking out that 2020 high. But what’s significant is that gold is 50% higher than it was at its peak in 2020.

Now, I think that’s unprecedented. I haven’t really, you know, gone and looked at the history. But I’m pretty sure that there’s not another period in time where the price of gold rose by 50% and the price of silver went down.

I mean, that is a really weird anomaly that you’re not going to see, because there is a high correlation even today, you know, between gold and silver, very highly correlated. But to have a time period where gold rises by 50% and silver goes down, that really highlights how abnormal this situation is. And again, I think it’s because the main buyers of gold are the central banks.

And the retail public that would normally be buying silver, they’re not active. They’re selling. They’re selling gold.

They’re selling silver. And, you know, some of them are buying crypto. But this really highlights how great the opportunity is in silver.

I mean, I think gold’s cheap too, but I think silver is a hell of a lot cheaper. And people, I think, should be focusing a lot of their precious metals firepower on silver, because I think it is going to catch up and get to where it needs to be when we start to get retail investors coming in. I mean, they’re still missing in action.

They still don’t get it. And, you know, I hear a lot of people say, oh, you know, the young people, they’re buying crypto, so you should do what the young people are doing because they represent the future. They don’t represent the future in that respect.

I mean, yes, the young people are the future. But when they’re older, they’re going to be smarter, and they’re going to be more experienced, and they’re going to have more wisdom. The idea that we should follow the investment advice of kids is farcical.

You know, I’d rather follow the lead of the central bankers. You know, a lot of investors, when they look at the market, they look at insider buying and selling, right? Why do you want to look and see what the insiders are doing? Well, because they generally have better information. I mean, they have a really good feel for the company.

And so if you see insiders dumping stock in a company, you know, that would make you think about maybe I shouldn’t buy it, or if I own it, you know, what do they know? Obviously, they know a lot. They know more than I do. They work at the company.

So if they’re selling the stock, maybe you should sell yours. If they’re buying the stock, if you see a lot of insiders buying, that could be evidence of, hey, maybe, you know, they must know something good is going to happen. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be buying, right? So insiders buying and selling is, you know, considered a pretty good indicator of, you know, whether or not you should be buying because they, you know, they have the best information and they know the most about the company and have the best feel for, you know, its future prospects.

Well, what’s going on with central bankers buying gold? That’s really like inside information on the, you know, the fiat monetary system because they’re at the heart of it. They’re the insiders. The central bankers, you know, are the insiders of the fiat monetary system.

And buying gold is like selling stock because they’re selling dollars. So if foreign central banks don’t want dollars, don’t want treasuries, are willing to give up the 4% yield to buy gold that has no yield. That’s a very strong indication that you should be doing the same thing.

You should be following the lead of the central bankers, not millennials who are still living in their parents’ basements. What the hell do they know? The guys that are at the heart of the fiat monetary system have a much better handle on what’s going on. So you see the insiders in the fiat system dumping their fiat, dumping their dollars.

They’re not buying Bitcoin. They are buying gold. Now they’re also not buying silver.

That is the opportunity for the retail investor to buy that silver. They’re not buying it, not because they’re not bullish. They just don’t have a place to put it, right? That’s not the monetary asset that they want.

But the retail investor should be buying. I mean, people should be calling up Shift Gold, get on the phone tonight, fill up your shopping cart. I mean, silver is going to explode.

You know, I hear people saying, oh, you know, gold, it’s bearish. Look, it couldn’t hold $3,000. I mean, it went above it once.

I mean, you would obviously expect in a big week, gold up over 2.5%, that somebody would take profits at $3,000. It doesn’t surprise me that there was some profit-taking at $3,000 gold. What’s a good indicator is that it even traded above $3,000 and the fact that it ended the week as strong as it did and the fact that silver outperformed.

But also, I like the fact that now we’re getting the gold and silver mining stocks outperforming. The GDX was up 6% on the week. That’s the senior miners.

The GDXJ was up almost 8% on the week. And remember, this is a week where the stock market was down. So even though the stock market was down, and it wasn’t down a lot because of Friday’s big rally, but it was still down, you got almost an 8% move up in the GDX.

Now, what’s even more significant is that we’re still below the October high for the GDX and GDXJ right before Trump was elected. That’s not too long ago. It’s like, what, four months ago, five months ago? Gold is more than 15% higher than it was in October 2024.

So gold has moved up by 15% and the gold stocks are down during that time period. Now, it’s not going to stay that way. These gold stocks, I think, are going to be up more than gold, a lot more than gold this year.

They got a long way to go to catch up, just like silver has a long way to go to catch up. So I would be buying, actually, even before I bought silver, I’d be buying the gold stocks, right? Because I think that’s where you get your biggest bang for the buck. But for the physical, you want to go and you want to load up on physical silver.

But if you’re a speculator, you want to load up on these mining stocks because I’ve never seen a better risk-reward dynamic. It’s so asymmetric, skewed in the favor of the gains. I don’t see a lot of downside risk.

I see a lot more downside risk in the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ is in a full-on correction. It’s come down 12% from its highs.

At the same time period, gold’s gone up 13%. Almost a one-for-one negative correlation. By the way, Bitcoin is down 24%, 25%.

So you’re getting twice as much down in Bitcoin as the NASDAQ. So it’s like double correlated. But obviously, if Bitcoin is correlated to the NASDAQ and not gold, it’s not digital gold.

It’s a digital tech stock, except without the prospect of ever having any earnings or ever paying a dividend. So what the hell is that worth, right? If you’re a digital stock with no earnings and no dividends, you’re nothing. But it’s not a store of value.

It is in no way similar to gold if it goes in the complete opposite direction of gold. And I think that’s going to be more obvious because if this is a bear market in the NASDAQ and not a correction, right, a bear market is down 20%. And if the NASDAQ goes down 20%, Bitcoin is going way down.

Bitcoin is going to go down double. Bitcoin is going to be a lot below maybe 65,000 at a minimum, which means it’ll be less than Michael Saylor’s average cost for all the Bitcoin he’s leveraged up to buy. But if the NASDAQ is in a bear market, if you look at the last three NASDAQ bear markets, the big one was in 2001, following the tech bubble.

NASDAQ almost dropped 80%. During the bear market in the 2008 global financial crisis, the NASDAQ was down 55%. And in the recent, like, very abbreviated COVID bear market in 2020, the NASDAQ was down 30%, right? So the average of those three is actually 55%.

So if this is going to be an average bear market and it goes down 55%, where the hell is Bitcoin going to go? I mean, it’s going to get decimated. You know, it’s going to get obliterated. And not just this price, but the whole narrative.

Because gold’s going to go up. If we’re at a bear market in the NASDAQ, gold’s going way up in that bear market. Now, if we don’t get a bear market or if the bear market gets cut short by the Fed, right, which I think is the only way that the NASDAQ’s not going into a bear market, and the S&P for that matter, the Russell 2000’s almost there.

I mean, we’ve moved down like 17%, 18%. So the Russell 2000 is going to be the first index to tip into bear market territory. But I think if we don’t get the bear market or we don’t get a bear market where we’re down 40%, 50%, it’s going to be because of the Fed.

It’s going to be because the Fed comes in and rescues the market with rate cuts and quantitative easing. But if that happens, that’s even more bullish for gold, then the market’s going down. And so even though gold is negatively correlated to the NASDAQ when the NASDAQ is falling, it’s going to be positively correlated when it’s rising, if it’s rising because of rate cuts in QE, especially if inflation is still above target, which it will be.

That’s going to be the game changer. It’s going to be that the Fed is going to be easing when inflation is above its target. That’s never happened before.

Ever since they made up this 2% target, all of their easy money, all their rate cuts, and all their QE, they’ve been able to get away with that under the pretense that, well, inflation is below target, and so we can do this. They’ve never done it when inflation is above target. Because now there’s no excuse, no pretense.

And I think there you’re going to get a big drop in the dollar, which we haven’t had yet. Yes, the dollar index has been going down, but you’re still looking at, what, 104 on the dollar index. It hasn’t really dropped very much.

We’re at 103.7. So we’re back below where we were when Trump was elected. So all of the Trump dollar gains have been eradicated. But we haven’t really had a weak dollar.

If the Fed starts cutting, or when the Fed starts cutting, and going back to QE, the dollar is going to get killed. And that is an environment where gold is going to shine much brighter. See, the gold’s been strong even when the dollar has been relatively strong on foreign exchange markets.

But when the dollar gets weak, which it is going to do, I’m convinced that we’re going to see a much weaker dollar, then that is going to be very bullish for gold. But I also think, you know, in this shakeout, we can see the whole Bitcoin narrative fall apart, in which case there’s no reason for a strategic reserve, and people will realize that. And so we’re not going to have it.

We’re not going to have it on the state level. I think you’re going to see all the selling from the ETFs. People will realize, what the hell do I own it for? If it’s just digital risk, I get plenty of risk in the stock market.

Why do I need it in crypto? If the whole idea was, well, this is a safe haven store of value. No, that’s gold. So if you want gold, you buy gold.

You don’t buy Bitcoin if you want gold. You buy Bitcoin if you want risk, but you might as well buy something risky that actually has value. You might as well buy a stock that has earnings or might have earnings or that pays a dividend rather than that pays nothing.

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Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode. All right, so speaking about inflation, you know, we got inflation news that came out over the last couple days. And I think the inflation news is one of the reasons that we got a relief rally on Friday in the market because the news that came out was better than expected, or at least it wasn’t worse, because I think maybe the markets were bracing for worse.

So we got the CPI on Wednesday and the producer price index on Thursday. Now, I did my last podcast on Tuesday, so we hadn’t gotten these numbers yet. So the CPI number came out.

These are the February numbers. And they were looking for an increase of 0.3, which would have been an improvement over the 0.5. That was a shocker from January. And so we actually came in lower at 0.2. So that was the good news.

And the year-over-year inflation, which was 3% January, was supposed to be 2.9 February. That came in at 2.8. And ex-food and energy, 0.4 in January was supposed to be 0.3. We got 0.2. And year-over-year core, which was 3.3 in January, was expected to be 3.2 in February, and instead it came out at 3.1. So 0.1 above expectations, but more significantly, it wasn’t, I mean, 0.1% below expectations. More significantly, it wasn’t in the other direction.

So I think that kind of helped spark the relief rally that we had. But, you know, I would not take any comfort in the February number. Because, first of all, even if that’s the real number, I mean, we’re still nowhere close to 2%.

I mean, if you annualize 0.2, that’s like 2.5. So it’s still not low enough to get to the Fed’s target. Yes, it is lower than the prior few months, but I think it was mainly driven by oil prices, which were down. And, you know, I don’t expect oil to stay at these low prices, especially with all the other commodities still ripping.

You know, I think oil is going to turn around. So this is a temporary reprieve. But also, you know, they can come back and revise the number.

I mean, you know, the numbers are never that reliable anyway. But even if it is reliable, it’s one month. Inflation is not coming down.

So nobody should take a look at the data and think, oh, you know, we’re going to get relief. We’re not. And, in fact, you know, the consumers are a little bit smarter than the professionals, I think, on this one.

If you look at the inflation expectations that we got in the consumer sentiment number that came out on Friday. And, you know, we didn’t really get a lot of talk about this number. I didn’t even realize it came out.

In fact, I was on a plane on Friday coming back from Connecticut. But the number, the March number for consumer sentiment, which is the one which is when it came out. So March consumer sentiment plunged to 57.9 from 64.7. That is a huge drop.

The consensus was for 64. Now, 57.9, that is the lowest it’s been in two and a half years. Right now, yes, it’s more Democrats than Republicans are worried.

But, you know, increasingly, maybe some Republicans, certainly independents are getting worried, too. But the inflation numbers, the one year inflation expectations spiked up to 4.9 percent. Now, that’s the highest since November 22.

But more significantly, again, the Fed claims to put a lot of stock in these expectations. They really believe that it’s a field of dream situation, or at least they pretend that inflation is a function of expectations. And that’s, again, a way that the government likes to blame the public for the inflation they create.

But the logic is if people expect inflation, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because if I’m a businessman, I expect inflation, I start raising prices. If I’m a worker, I demand a raise because I think there’s going to be inflation. And so because we think there’s inflation, we cause the inflation on our own.

It’s kind of like a time paradox. But it’s all a bunch of nonsense. But the Fed claims to believe it.

And the Fed keeps maintaining that inflation expectations are well-anchored at 2 percent. I mean, what are they looking at well-anchored? How are we anchored to 2 if we’re at 4.9? I mean, we’re way adrift. We’re not anchored at all.

We’re way far from 2 percent. So the Fed has to acknowledge that they’ve lost control of expectations. But more significantly than the one-year number is the five-year number.

So consumers expect inflation to average 3.9 percent over the next five years. So that’s basically double the Fed’s 2 percent target. So what are they supposed to be doing? They’ve got to rein that in.

They’ve got to take those expectations and throw a line around them and pull them back into the dock or where the anchor was. That is the most inflation that consumers have expected since 1993. That’s over 30 years ago.

A lot of people that are listening to this podcast, I know I have a lot of young people listening to the podcast, they weren’t even alive 1993. They had little kids. I mean, that’s a long time.

So what is this telling you? Now, maybe they think it’s all about the tariffs. I don’t know. But these tariffs are going to really be a noose around Trump’s neck because all the bad stuff is going to get blamed on these tariffs, the inflation.

It’s going to let the Fed off the hooks. Oh, look at all the inflation. They’re going to blame it on the tariffs.

That’s another reason why we shouldn’t do them because it gives the Democrats and the Fed a card to play that they otherwise wouldn’t have. This is the Trump card. It’s the tariff card.

And they’re going to be able to pull this thing out and blame all the inflation on the tariffs. And the same thing with Doge. They’re going to blame the recession on the Doge spending cuts, even though they’re not cutting spending.

I mentioned on the last podcast, and I meant to mention when I talked about Thomas Massie and the fact that he was the only House Republican to vote against the big ugly bill, the ugly bill that nobody wants you to see because it increases spending above what Biden was spending. This is like a Biden budget that we’ve got that they just approved, even though the Democrats are saying it’s terrible because they wanted to spend even more than what the Republicans spent. But the Republicans are still spending more.

The deficits are going up. So it’s a distraction, what’s going on with Doge. Those are the imaginary cuts.

Some of them are real, but they’re not nearly big enough to offset the real cuts that the Republicans just passed and the Senate passed it too. And initially, Chuck Schumer was telling the Republicans, no, we’re going to shut down the government. But then they decided not to shut down the government because apparently they said that’s going to give Trump too much power.

And so they agreed to sign off on this continuing resolution. Well, if the Democrats claim that it was good for Trump to shut down the government, then why didn’t Trump want the government shut down? If he could use the shutdown to enact real cuts, then why was he lobbying so hard to get the Republicans to keep the government open by running bigger deficits? Why was he so insistent that we increase the debt ceiling by $4 trillion? I mean, if he really wants to cut spending, here’s your chance. Once again, didn’t do it.

This is exactly what Trump did the first time. And I criticized him every step of the way. He signed every budget he should have vetoed.

And the same thing is going to happen with this one. But I forgot to mention on Thomas Massie. So after Donald Trump basically said, we got to get rid of Massie, we need somebody to primary him so we can get him out of Congress.

I mean, why would you want to get rid of Massie? He’s the one guy that really wants to cut spending. He’s got some real integrity. He believes in the Constitution.

He takes his oath seriously to preserve and defend the Constitution. If Trump really wants to balance the budget, Massie’s his best friend in the house. He’s the guy that will vote to do it.

And he can lead the effort. But Trump said he wanted to get rid of Massie. And I’m like, no.

I want to send him some help. We need more Thomas Massie’s in Congress. But I donated to his campaign.

After that, I went up there and I maxed out, at least for me. And I donated to him. But I think other people, my followers, should give this guy some money, not just to help him get reelected.

And he’s probably, look, I think his constituents appreciate what he’s doing. And they’ve tried to get rid of him before in the primaries, and it hasn’t succeeded. But I think it’s a strong show of support when you send him money, not just to help him get reelected, but to send a message that there is support for a Liberty congressman.

Like Ron Paul. Ron Paul’s got nothing but good things to say about Thomas Massie. When you get Elon Musk reposting Ron Paul, Elon should be telling Trump, hey, Massie’s our guy.

I mean, you don’t want a bunch of yes-men in Congress just to go along with everything Trump wants to do. But maybe that’s what Trump wants. But if he wants to really help the country, this is not what he should be doing.

To me, it’s a revealing that we’re getting more of the same. Most of the difference is in the rhetoric of the campaign and some of the people that he had to bring into the tent in order to win. And so he was talking and telling the Libertarians what the Libertarians wanted to hear to get their support.

But right now he’s not governing that way. Yeah, we are talking about some cuts. But again, this is not nearly deep enough to get the job done.

Anyway, I want to get back to the inflation numbers because we got the one-two punch on inflation, right? We got the CPI on Wednesday. Then we got the PPI on Thursday. And same thing there.

In fact, this was even better. So although actually, no, there was a revision. So last month, the PPI was up 0.4, January.

They revised that to up 0.6. That’s a pretty bad number. The sting was taken out of it, though, in the February number, which was supposed to be 0.3, and that came out at zero. So overall, you look at the two numbers, it was better.

And the fact that the closer one was a zero shows, all right, at least we’re headed down. And the year-over-year really dropped. It was supposed to be 3.5 year-over-year PPI last month.

And they thought it would come out at 3.4, and it came out at 3.2. So that beat. And on the core, the core was up just 0.2, and prior month was 0.3. And the year-over-year core was 3.3 versus 3.4. So moving in in the right direction, but still way above 2%. But I think the markets were relieved that it wasn’t worse because so many of the recent numbers have been worse than expected.

Investors may have been racing for another worse-than-expected number. We didn’t get it, and so we got the rally. But the significant thing about the whole decline in the stock market, too, is that the bond market hasn’t rallied because a lot of people are talking about, well, maybe Trump, they really want to get the stock market down so they can get interest rates down because in the past, when the stock market has sold off, that’s caused investors to move into bonds.

They’re not moving into bonds. They’re moving out of the dollar, and they’re moving into foreign stocks. I mean, so that’s what’s being done.

So even if this was on purpose, which it’s not, right, the U.S. stock market going down is not driving investors into U.S. bonds. It is driving them into foreign stocks. And, you know, I mentioned this on a podcast before, but I really want to reiterate it.

So the five mutual funds that I manage, Euro-Pacific funds, right, we have had seven consecutive quarters. This is the seventh quarter. We’ll see, you know, maybe it’ll turn around, but so far.

Seventh consecutive quarters of outflows, meaning that more money has been taken out of my funds than put in. We’ve never had a string like this. You know, the funds have been around for over 10 years, and I’ve never had a string like this, not even close.

You know, most of the time, money comes into the funds. Yeah, we have had periods where we’ve had outflows, a couple of quarters in a row, but nothing like this. Seven months in a row, money has been sucked out of my mutual funds by investors.

The worst quarter, the worst one by far, was the fourth quarter of last year, right? People just, I got to get out of Peter Schiff’s funds. I don’t want to invest in international stocks. I don’t want to invest in gold stocks.

And I talked to a lot of the people personally who decided to sell. Now, a lot of them I couldn’t talk to because they buy the, you know, they own the funds at Schwab or Fidelity, and I have no idea, you know, they’re buying or selling, right? But people who owned it through the reps that I work with, you know, Europe Pacific, former Europe Pacific Capital, guys that are working at AGP or the guys that work for me in Puerto Rico at Europe Pacific Asset Management, right? So those guys, when they want to pull out, a lot of times, you know, I get on the phone and, you know, hey, you know, why are you giving up? Why are you throwing in the towel? And usually people tell me, look, you know, I’m not making enough money. The returns aren’t what I expected.

I’m going to get into the U.S. market. I mean, that was where most of the money was going that was pulled out. I mean, some of it even went into crypto, but most of it was going to go into the U.S. and most of it was going to be skewed towards tech because that’s where all the big gains were, right? Tech.

And of course, the AI story and all that is a powerful narrative driving people into these NVIDIAs and all these stocks. And so a lot of people are like, look, you know, I believe in what you’re saying, but, you know, it’s just taking too long and I got to get, you know, I got to get in on the action in the U.S. market. I can’t, you know, miss out on this anymore.

I really got to invest in U.S. stocks. And then especially with Trump, like when Trump won, that really accelerated it because, you know what? He’s going to really make America great. And the stuff that you’re saying might happen, but now it’s way in the future.

And so I need to get on board the Trump train. I need to get more money into the U.S. stock market. And so I’m going to I’m going to sell.

And everybody was negative on Europe. And people thought the dollar would keep going up. And people thought gold was going to get killed because, you know, Trump was going to make the dollar strong and strong U.S. economy.

Right. So that’s what happened. Well, look at what’s happened year to date.

Year to date, the Dow is down about 2 percent. The S&P 500 is down 4 percent. The Nasdaq is down about 8 percent.

And the Russell 2000 is down about 8 and a half. That’s so far this year. So those are what my clients bought when they sold my funds.

Well, what’s happened to my funds this year that they sold? Well, the gold fund is up almost 23 percent this year. Now, I think it should be up a lot more than that. I think it will be.

But still, that’s I mean, people missed out on that game. You sold my gold fund in December. You missed out on that big game.

Worse, if you bought the Nasdaq instead of going up 23 percent, you went down 8 percent. My dividend payer fund, which is a stock fund, right, conservative dividend paying stocks, is up 17 percent this year. 17 percent.

That’s what people are buying as they’re getting out of U.S. stocks. My dividend payer fund is in a category. Morningstar puts it in this foreign value category.

It’s number one in the category. It’s got the best return of all the funds, hundreds of funds that Morningstar tracks. But, you know, all the funds are up.

I mean, I think the average maybe is up, you know, maybe 11 or 12 percent and we’re up 17. But foreign stocks, foreign markets are doing really well. People missed out on that.

Value fund, my value fund is up 13 percent on a year. My emerging market fund is up 5.7 percent. And even my foreign bond fund is up 4.3 percent.

So even my foreign bond fund is beating the U.S. stock market. But if you think about this, let’s say somebody got out of my funds and bought the Nasdaq. As of right now, the Nasdaq would need to rally.

If you did this at December 31st, right, the end of last year, you sold my dividend payer fund and you bought the Nasdaq. You know, QQQ, something like that. The Nasdaq would have to rally 27 percent for you to get back to where you would have been if you just stayed with my fund.

Assuming my fund stops going up, right, because if the fund keeps going up, then it’s a moving target. But what I think is more likely to happen is we’re going into a bear market. And let’s say the bear market ends up being a 40 percent drop in the Nasdaq, right, which, again, would be lower.

The average of the last three Nasdaq bear markets was 55 percent. So 40 percent would be, you know, not as bad. And a lot of people would say, well, how can we possibly have a bear market in tech stocks where we’re going to have this AI boom? Yeah, right.

I know it’s already priced in. A lot of good stuff is priced in. And a lot of times you have a bear market and it starts when everything looks great, which, of course, all bear markets have to start when everything is is looking fantastic.

Everybody’s optimistic because that’s why the market goes way up. Then something goes wrong, something upsets the apple cart, and you get a shakeout. And even if the long term bullish story is still there, that doesn’t mean we can’t have a big shakeout.

But let’s say the Nasdaq goes down 40 percent before the Fed pulls out the QE or whatever. I think that, let’s say it takes a couple of years, I don’t know. I think my dividend payers fund could double while that’s going on.

And so if you get 100 percent move in the dividend payers fund and you get the Nasdaq going down 40 percent, now you need the Nasdaq to triple to break even more than triple. You have to go up about 225 percent to get back to where you would be if you just stayed in my dividend payer fund and it doubled. But again, the dividend payer fund would have to stop going up.

It would have to go sideways because if it kept rising, well, then you’d need even more than a triple because you’d have to catch up to the moving target. And I think it’s going to be even worse for the gold fund, the people that got out of the gold fund, because that’s where I think we’re going to get the most upside. The sleeper is the emerging markets because the emerging markets are only up.

I said my emerging market fund is up 5.7 percent. That’s actually beating the category by a couple of percentage points. So most of the money that is moved out of U.S. stocks has gone to other developed markets.

So continental Europe, China, the rest of the emerging markets have not gotten the money. But I think that’s really going to happen once the dollar really cracks. I think once you see the dollar index sub 100, I think a lot of money is going to flow into emerging markets.

So I think my emerging market fund for the equity perspective, non-gold, I think that’s the sleeper right now. But the other significant aspect of all this is just contrarian indicator. We just had a record.

The most amount of money that the total withdrawals dwarfs anything. I mean, the amount of money that was taken out of my funds in the fourth quarter of last year is off the charts compared to any other quarter in the 11, 12 year history of my fund family. We never seen anything like it.

So we have the most money pulled out of my funds, probably in advance of what’s going to be the best quarter they’ve had. Certainly on a relative basis compared to the U.S. market. This could be it’s not going to be the best quarter, I think, for the gold fund, but it might.

You know, we still have, you know, a couple of weeks left to March. But. I think on a relative basis where the U.S. market could still sink more, you know, I mean, we’re still there’s a lot of downside risk, I think, for the rest of the month in the markets.

There’s a lot of negatives out there. And so it makes sense that investors got the most bearish on my strategy at the bottom and they bailed out just before a huge run. So I think what you want to do with that information is use it as a contrarian indicator.

Hey, retail investors turn bearish on foreign markets. And it wasn’t just bearish on me. They’re just bearish on foreign markets because my funds were investing in foreign markets and gold stocks.

So investors turn bearish on those stocks just before a huge rally. But the point is, the huge rally is just getting started. It’s going to be a lot bigger.

And most of the people who cast out of my funds over the last few months, they’re probably not going to come right back. I mean, people don’t, you know, turn on a dime. No, they should.

In fact, if you’re listening to this podcast and you are one of the clients who got out of your Europe-Pacific funds or closed out a managed account and got into the U.S. stock market. Yes, you made a mistake, but you can correct it. I mean, you can never get back the money that you missed out on over the last few months, but you can correct it and not miss out on the next few years or the next decade.

I think we have a long way to run on the international bull market, on the gold stock bull market. And we could be in a U.S. bear market for a decade or more, especially in real terms, priced in gold or priced in foreign currencies. So you can correct that mistake.

But most people and again, I would assume that my customers are just a sample of investors at large. And in fact, my customers probably were less likely to throw in the towel on foreign stocks than your typical investor. So if my customers were getting rid of their foreign stocks to buy U.S. stocks, imagine general public how much more they were doing.

So I’m sure there was all kinds of redemptions out of these stocks. So the retail investor did the opposite of what he should have done. And it’s probably going to take another year or two of really great returns in the international market before a lot of people that bailed on those foreign markets come back.

But they will come back, right, that they always do. People chase prior performance. I’m sure that after my funds have a phenomenal year in 2025, we’ll start to see inflows picking up in 2026.

But if investors were smart, they would have been buying the hell out of my funds at the end of last year and selling the U.S. stock market because it was so overvalued. But that’s not how investors work. They buy what’s up and has already gone up and they sell what’s gone down.

So I think it’s a great contrarian indicator. So the people who are listening to the podcast, they should be sending money in, putting more money in my funds, putting more money into my separately managed account. So make sure and talk to the reps at Europe Pacific Asset Management.

I wanted to follow up, though, on another thing from the last podcast. So I started talking about the SEC and I said, you know, we shouldn’t have an SEC instead of just trying to find business friendly people to chair. Let’s just get rid of it.

And I also mentioned getting rid of the FDIC, the deposit insurance. And I mentioned that, you know, only about two percent of the bank deposits were lost during all of the Great Depression, all the years of the Great Depression. And and somebody pointed out in the comments, oh, wait a minute, Peter, like nine thousand banks failed, which was almost 40 percent of the banks in the country.

Right. So you’re talking two percent. How can that be? When 40 percent of the banks failed, well, the banks that failed were smaller banks than the banks that didn’t fail.

So even though 40 percent of the banks failed. That only represented about 10 percent of the total deposits, so 90 percent of the bank deposits didn’t lose anything. Ninety percent.

No FDIC insurance at all. Right. So 90 percent of the bank deposits were completely safe throughout the entirety of the Great Depression.

Now, what happened to those nine thousand banks that failed? Yes. In those banks, people lost money. On average, about 40 percent was lost.

Right. So that means some people lost less than 40, some people lost more, but you had 40 percent of 10 percent, that’s four percent. So I said two percent of the bank deposits.

You know, I just I knew it was small. I couldn’t remember. But I went and looked it up after I read this comment again, which shows you I read the comments in his YouTube.

And so I wanted to, you know, bring this up in case other people thought that, hey, Chip doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You know, the banks failed like crazy during the Great Depression. So 40 percent of 10 percent is four percent.

So four percent of the deposits were lost with no government insurance at all. That’s pretty damn good considering how bad the depression was. But there’s another factor that is very important.

During the 1930s, prices fell by 30 percent, 30 percent. So if you had your money in the bank and lost nothing, you gained 30 percent purchasing power. Even if you lost 20 percent of your money, you are still 10 percent better off because the 80 percent you had left bought you more because the price of everything you needed to buy went down.

So bank deposits are far safer when there’s no inflation. Now, contrast that to what happened over the last few years. No banks failed, right, because the government has them all guaranteed.

But how much inflation did we have? I mean, bank deposits, I say since Covid, at a minimum, your bank deposits, you’ve lost 25 percent, you know, and we’re only what, four years into this decade. Right. And bank deposits, you know, your interest payments are next to nothing.

And so you’ve lost 25 percent, maybe 30 percent of your purchasing power on the money that you left in the bank. That is far worse than the entirety of the Great Depression, because, I mean, again, nothing was lost. Right.

Four percent of the deposits were lost, but the deposits gained 30 percent of value. So all bank deposits collectively gain value during the Great Depression with no government insurance. Yet now with government insurance, they’re destroying the value of your savings through inflation.

Why? Because the only way the government can prop up these banks is to create inflation. So when we had a sound monetary system, when the government didn’t guarantee any bank deposits, we had sound money. So the money that you put into a bank retained its purchasing power.

The free market works. But now that the government has all these protections, oh, we can’t allow any banks to fail. So we have to have government insurance so that you’ll never have to worry about your bank failing.

OK, you don’t have to worry about your bank failing. You have to worry about the money that you put in the bank losing its purchasing power, which is really what you care about. When you put your money in the bank, what are you trying to save? Right.

You’re trying to save purchasing power for the future. It’s not just how many dollars I have and I don’t give a damn what I can buy. What you’re trying to bank is future purchasing power.

And so far less purchasing power is lost. In fact, no purchasing power is lost during the Great Depression. Bank balances gain value in a free market with sound money and not any government insurance.

So that’s why I’m saying we don’t need it. We don’t need government insurance. It introduces a huge moral hazard because of government insurance.

Banks take all sorts of risks that they wouldn’t take without that insurance. Customers allow them to take that risk because they don’t give a damn either because they know it’s insured. But the only way the government can make good on its commitments, the only way it can keep these banks from failing, is to destroy the value of the deposits with inflation.

So that’s why I tell people you have no way to win in a bank account. You are going to lose, no matter what. Because if the bank fails, well, then you lose because you lose your money.

If the government bails out the bank, well, then you lose your purchasing power because they have to create massive inflation in order to do that. Now, another thing I wanted to point out, I just got another FOIA production from the US government. Because, you know, I have two lawsuits against the government.

I have my civil rights lawsuit that they still haven’t even answered. They keep getting extensions to answer. I have got answers from local government in Puerto Rico.

They’re trying to throw out my lawsuit. They’re trying to say they have sovereign immunity so I can’t sue them. They’re claiming I waited too long to sue them and the statute of limitations is over.

And, you know, I didn’t wait too long because it took me a long time to get the documents that they were covering up. I didn’t get the evidence. You know, I didn’t want to file the lawsuit without some good faith evidence.

And now they’re saying, well, you waited too long. Well, yeah, because it took me so long to get the evidence and I’m still trying. And that’s why I’ve got this other FOIA lawsuit against the IRS.

And they just produced another batch of documents, another 38 pages. You know, all of a sudden, they should have sent me these two and a half years ago when I asked for it. And all of a sudden, oh, here’s another 38 pages.

They sent me the last one was another 100 pages. They had initially sent me 335 pages. But again, it took me a couple of years to get those pages.

They were supposed to send it right away. That’s the FOIA rules. But anyway, so they sent me these 38 pages.

And again, you got to look at these pages. I put the exhibit up. Go to 9fraud.com. It’s the last exhibit, more FOIA evidence.

So they sent me these 38 pages, which are all basically e-mails between IRS agents about me, about my bank and about me, because that’s what I’m asking for. I’m asking for all the correspondences over a particular time period that discussed me and the bank and Operation Atlantis and the OSIB press conference, all this stuff that they need to provide. This is not top secret tax information.

There’s no indictments. There’s been no criminal charges. So there’s no reason why they can’t give me this information, other than the fact that they don’t want to incriminate themselves.

So they’re not giving it. So I get these 38 pages. 31 of the 38 pages are completely redacted.

I get an e-mail and the entire body. Now, some of the e-mails, I can see who wrote the e-mail and who received it, and then they black out the entire body, and all I can see is sincerely, you know, John at the end, right? But I can’t see anything that’s written in that e-mail. Why? Why can’t I see it? Obviously, because they don’t want me to see this evidence that proves that they committed a crime.

But anyway, so there was one e-mail on the 38 pages that they didn’t redact. And even that one unredacted that they thought, well, OK, this one, we can let them see this one. You can imagine how bad this stuff is.

They won’t let me see if, you know, I can even find proof in what they let me see. Right. So you can and you can see this e-mail.

It’s on nine fraud website. But I’m going to read it’s a short e-mail. And but it’s very, very telling.

So this is from Justin Cole, who is the PR guy at the criminal investigation division of the IRS. So he’s supposed to help help the IRS get publicity to scare people into paying their taxes by highlighting all the criminal investigations. Right.

So he does that. He writes the e-mail to James Lee, who’s his boss. He’s the chief of criminal investigation.

He was at the time the new chief is a guy named Guy Fuscio, who’s also copied on this e-mail. And by the way, you can see that Justin Cole, when he when he e-mails Jim Lee, he copies one, two, three, four, five, six, seven other IRS agents. So it’s so important that he wants seven other IRS agents to know about what’s in this e-mail.

Right. The the subject line is New York Times article on Operation Atlantis. Now, it wasn’t on Operation Atlantis.

It was about my bank and about and about the deal that I had with OSIF to return the money to depositors, which unfortunately they still don’t have. You know, we’re almost three years into it and none of the depositors got their money. But the article was really about my bank, not about Operation Atlantis.

But, of course, they know that the reason my bank got shut down is because Operation Atlantis. That was all part of their plan to frame my bank. And so here’s how the e-mail goes.

It says, Good morning, chief. Passing along a New York Times article that I discussed with you last night. Right.

So we already had a conversation with the guy last night. Oh, I got to call my boss about this article in The New York Times. It’s so important.

I’m going to call the boss to talk about it. Regarding Peter Schiff’s comments and the status of indicated because there was an investigation and they didn’t find any evidence of crimes. Right.

So they obviously don’t want it because they’re trying to pretend that I’m a criminal or that the bank was breaking the law. He says, I am quoted in the article basically reiterating all of our previous talking points. Right.

So they have a list of talking points that they’re allowed to say, right, which are all a bunch of lies. But they’re trying to thread the needle because they have to be careful because they don’t want to, you know, really violate the law any more than they are. He says, quote, Peter Schiff.

Right. That’s me in quotes never came out of my mouth. So he wants to let his boss know that my my name never came out of his mouth.

Now, why does he want to reassure his boss that my name never came out of his mouth? Well, obviously, he was instructed not to speak my name, not to mention me. And so he wants to let his boss know, don’t worry. Hey, I didn’t mention, you know, doesn’t matter what the reporters wrote.

I never said Peter Schiff. Those words never came out of my mouth. And I want you to know that.

Why? Well, because obviously he was told not to mention me. Now, why? Right. I’m the owner of the bank.

In fact, I’m the only shareholder. Right. They think this bank is helping people launder money and evade taxes.

If it’s doing that, I mean, obviously I’m the guy behind it. I mean, how I mean, how can I not know that my own bank is doing all this? And in fact, if you go back to the the the articles from Australia and 60 Minutes and my defamation lawsuit. I was the center of it all.

I was the guy that was doing it. I mean, I was you know, I was the mastermind behind the whole tax evasion money laundering scheme. I put my bank in Puerto Rico specifically to help my criminal customers launder money.

That’s what they accused me of. And when I when I filed my lawsuit and we said, OK, what’s your evidence? The only evidence they had. And, you know, that’s in quotes.

The only evidence they had that my bank did anything wrong was my public comments, anti taxes, anti regulations. Right. And even the judge laughed at them.

They said, so you’re telling me that, you know, you said he’s guilty because he doesn’t like paying taxes. Who the hell likes paying taxes? He said, if that’s the case, you know, half Australia is guilty or whatever. Of course, I complain about taxes.

I complain about regulations. And that was why I was guilty. That’s why the bank was guilty.

Right. Well, that that may have been why they suspected it. But once they investigated it, they found that I dotted every I and crossed every T twice just, you know, just to make sure.

And so. They should be talking about Peter Schiff, but the reason they can’t mention me is because they know I was investigated criminally. They know I thought they found nothing wrong.

They don’t want to mention my name tied to the investigation because that’s a violation of law. Right. That’s my presumption of innocence.

I think there’s they can say, look, we’re allowed to talk about the bank that we’re investigating, but we can’t talk about Peter Schiff. We can’t claim that we investigated him when we found that he did nothing wrong. We can’t insinuate that he did anything wrong.

So don’t mention his name. You can say all kinds of bad stuff about the bank, but don’t say anything bad about Peter Schiff, which is all BS, because anything bad you say about the bank, of course, is going to reflect on me because I own the bank. I’m the face of the bank.

It’s my bank. Right. So they want to let the media trash me like, hey, we can’t mention Peter Schiff.

Let the New York Times do it. Let the age in Australia do it. Yeah.

Let them accuse Peter Schiff of being a criminal. We’re just going to keep our mouths shut because we don’t want to get sued or we don’t want to violate the law. But, you know, they’re getting sued anyway, because clearly, you know, leaking the information on the bank and the stuff they did was about me.

So he tells his boss, hey, I didn’t say Peter Schiff. Just want to let you know that I didn’t mention it. Now, he said.

Peter Schiff never came out of my mouth, but the Times took some liberties with my very brief comment. So he’s saying, look, I didn’t mention Peter Schiff. And to the extent that it looks like I did, it’s because the Times took those liberties.

Right. So he’s covering his butt. Hey, maybe they quoted me out of context, maybe.

But don’t worry, I did not violate the rules. I did not mention Peter Schiff. So, again, that shows you because if I did anything wrong, why wouldn’t they mention me? They found no evidence that I did anything wrong.

Yet I lost my entire bank. And I everything I invested in it and they destroyed my reputation. But here’s, I think, the best line.

It’s the last one. He said nothing in here. I’m worried about.

Nothing that I’m worried about. He’s the IRS. What are they worried about? He says, don’t worry.

There’s nothing in The New York Times article that we should worry about. Well, what do they have to be scared of? What do they have to worry about? Obviously, they’re afraid that they may say something to implicate their whole scam. They know that they’re breaking the law.

Right. They know that they framed an innocent bank. Right.

They organized and coordinated this whole thing. They got the OSIP commissioner to shut down my bank, even though she was totally prepared to approve the sale to Kinta. They were not going to shut it down.

They came in there on behalf of the J5 and strong armed her or promised her something and got the commissioner to shut it down. The whole press conference. So they can pretend that my innocent bank was guilty so they can salvage their failed investigation and turn it into a into a fake success.

And they have to make sure not to say anything that would implicate themselves in that wrongdoing. So that’s why I said, look, I read The New York Times article. Don’t worry.

Nothing to worry about. Nothing I said could be used against us. The article is OK, so you can sleep well.

You know, it’s all OK. Right. If they were innocent, if they didn’t do anything wrong, he would not have written.

I’m not worried because the only reason you’re worried about what might come out in an article is if you have something to worry about. Well, why is the IRS worried about it? Because they. But it showed the content, but it shows the continued interest.

Right. The continued interest in what? In in their fake story. Yes.

The media was interested in this bank that was owned by Peter Schiff that was shut down for money laundering and tax evasion. Yes, that is the story that the press was interested in. This bad bank helping criminals launder money and all these governments of five countries got together and they put a stop to it.

Great, great job, guys. You know, you really put a stop to this criminal enterprise. You finally took a big bite out of crime.

You’re going after the tax evaders and the money launderers. And it’s all BS. But that is the story that they generated.

They cultivated it. They nurtured it, you know, with their press releases and their their phone calls and all their media events to try to spoon feed that fake news to the media, knowing that the media would then spread it to the rest of the world. So I thought that was a very good email.

I really want to see the ones that they won’t let me see because everything they’ve let me see has incriminated them. But 90 percent of the stuff I can’t see any of it. And if the stuff that they’ll let me see is so incriminating, I can only imagine how much more incriminating this stuff is that they won’t let me see it all.

Anyway, that’s it. I’m going to be doing more podcasts, obviously, next week. It should be another interesting week.

We’ll see how gold does. I have a feeling that next week will probably be above 3000. But again, it wouldn’t surprise me to get some resistance at a big round number like that.

But the interesting thing is maybe the gold stocks will keep climbing because people realize that maybe we missed the boat on on a big move in gold. But we have a chance to get it in in the mining stocks. Also have a chance to get it in silver.

So go to Shift Gold, buy silver, go to the Europe Pacific website, get my funds. You can get the Europe Pacific Gold Fund, EPGIX. You can get that at any discount broker.

You can get that gold fund, EPGIX. And the one I mentioned, my dividend payer fund, that’s doing so well this year. That has a no load ticker value fund as well.

You just got to go to the Europac website and get the information. In fact, you could buy all the funds on the Europac website. Don’t forget, sign up at Shift Sovereign.

We got a lot of good content that’s been coming out. I don’t want anybody to miss any of the the content that we’re putting out at Shift Sovereign. And if you’re not following me on X, follow me.

I am. I am posting a lot. There’s a lot of news, a lot of fast breaking news comes out all the time.

And so you want to get my take, because I think I’ve got one of the best takes, because there’s so much BS out there when it comes to the news, especially the financial news. And if you’re not yet following me on YouTube, I’m really trying to get to 600,000. I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time getting to the 600,000 subscribers.

But if you’re not subscribing, subscribe and tell your friends and get and get them to subscribe. Bye for now.