The GLOBAL RESET Is IMMINENT (Uncut) 03-16-2025

GOLD Is Telling YOU: The GLOBAL RESET Is IMMINENT | Willem Middelkoop

Everything we were quite sure of in the last 50, 60, 70 years is now getting questioned, and this is part of a larger, well, you could say an 80-year cycle. Every 80 years, 80, 90 years, the system, the world seems to change. Putin is allowed to bark and bite, so the master can stay silent in the background.

But Putin understands without China he’s so one day Putin won’t be there. And then it will be very interesting to see what China’s plans are for Russia. Hello and welcome to Soar Financially, a channel where we discuss the macro to understand the micro.

My name is Kai Hoffman. I’m the Ed.J. Armani guy over on X and, of course, your host of this channel. And I’m looking forward to welcoming back Willem Middelkoop.

He’s the founder and CEO over at the Commodity Discovery Fund. We’ve had him on the channel a few times. It’s been a while now, and today we just witnessed history together.

Gold broke through $3,000 in the spot market. Not the futures market. I only look at the spot market personally.

So we’ve seen some history being made this morning as we record this on Friday, March 14th. Of course, I’ll have to discuss with Willem what pushed gold prices to this level and what is potentially driving gold prices higher right now. Where is the momentum coming from? Lots to discuss here.

Before I switch over to my guest, hit that like and subscribe button. It helps us out tremendously. We really appreciate it.

Now, Willem, without much further ado, it’s great to have you back on the program. It’s good to see you. How have you been? Have you recovered from PDAC? I recovered from PDAC.

I even recovered from a nasty cold. I’m in Switzerland now here. Well, let’s hit it off.

There’s lots to discuss. Absolutely. Gold just broke through $3,000, Willem, and we have to discuss.

How did we end up here? Maybe that’s the can opening question that we’ll take it from. So how did we end at $3,000 gold, Willem? Well, if you look at the gold equities, you would think we’re at 1,500 gold. But well, gold’s going up because demand for physical is huge out there, and especially is demand by central banks.

And that’s telling you something. There’s a lot of chaos out there. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there.

There’s a lot of geopolitical risk. And of course, we have the debasement of the currencies. So I think that that makes explains almost all.

Yeah, absolutely. We’ll have to dive a little deeper in some of the topics, of course. But if you were to single out one single reason, which one would you choose, Willem? Well, I think institutional investors and many larger investors only will touch gold when there’s a smell of war in the air.

Well, we have had war in Ukraine. We’ve had war in the Middle East. Iran is still a problem which isn’t solved.

Then you have the chaos now regarding a new Trump administration. Actually, you’re aware from the author of The Big Reset, which I wrote 10 years ago, explaining that we are in the last inning of the current dollar system. And we needed to see large changes coming to the world’s financial system around 2020, 2025.

Well, we’re here now. And I think the reset is happening as we speak. Even the Trump administration is sending out signals now that they want to start restructuring the US debt.

So we can expect many changes coming. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a very volatile environment right now.

Every morning we wake up here, my head is spinning, just trying to catch up on the news. You said institutional physical demand. And so you’re saying it’s mostly on the physical side, not in the paper market that is driving the gold price.

Because we’ve always, and we’ve discussed this before, everybody hates the paper market. It’s manipulative. It’s not backed by anything.

What’s the ratio still 210 to one or so, paper to physical? So it’s interesting that the one is actually moving the needle here, Willem. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, well, now we see these huge changes in the physical demands as shown by the numbers we’ve seen coming from London. We’ve had some official commands, even by the Bank of England, that lots of physical gold is moving from London to New York.

And this also showed, I think, is part of this larger reset. And I think the paper gold and paper silver system, which have been, well, keeping prices down, I think, for the last few decades, that’s at least my opinion, that system will be breaking down in the not too distant future. So I think the move, the rapid rise of gold and silver starts to act a bit now as well.

I think it’s only the start of a much larger revaluation of physical gold and silver. Yeah, I know we’re witnessing it firsthand here. Willem, you mentioned smell of war.

And under one of my YouTube videos, I’ve read a comment that maybe gold is being moved back to the US because of potential war in the EU. I know it’s a speculation. What are your thoughts, though? And the reason I’m asking this is triggered by that Mark Rutte is in the US right now.

That’s how I ended up with that conclusion. I figured I’d ask you because Mark Rutte is Dutch as well. So it kind of fits.

But what are your thoughts on that, especially, and I want to throw the word Poland in here as well, and what they’re doing. They just asked to have nukes stationed in Poland as well. So what do you make of that? Actually, it was a good 10 years ago that Mark Rutte phoned me on my mobile because he read my book and wanted to discuss it.

So there’s a direct line there. But I’m not that worried about war in Europe. I think that’s overplayed.

And that’s used to make people pull their wallet and pay more taxes so we can spend more military stuff. But with the Trump administration, everything we were quite sure of in the last 50, 60, 70 years is now getting questioned. And this is part of a larger, well, you could say an 80 year cycle.

Every 80 years, 80, 90 years, the system, the world seems to change. And we seem to get a new leader. If you look at the world reserve currency, on average, every 92 years, we see new reserve currency come.

So we should see this in the light of the fourth turning the thesis well explained by Neil Howe in his famous book. So I think it’s part of these bigger changes, which I call a big reset. But it might be especially important for us as gold and silver investors, because of course, gold is still highly connected to the US dollar and is still a central part of the financial system.

Yeah, it definitely is. There’s talks about 50 year gold back bonds again, just increasing in importance again, over and over, of course. Let’s talk about the US dollar.

You brought it up. It is weakening. I know you gave together with our good friend Trevor Hall, you had an hour long discussion with PDAC about de-dollarization.

How important is that trend still? I remember last summer, we talked about it ad nausea. And then it just disappeared from the headlines. Like where are we at on that topic? Well, we’ve seen almost 30 different countries, their central banks, adding to their gold reserves in the last few years.

And together, they picked up over 1000 tons of physical gold in the last three years every year. And that’s huge, because if you know, world gold mine production is only 3500 tons every year. So it shows the main buyers are the central banks and it shows that they know changes are coming.

They know the dollar system, the current dollar system is ending and we’re moving away from this unipolar to this multipolar world. And that that will bring a lot of uncertainty and it might even bring war. Although I’m not that scared about that, especially for the EU now.

But I think the confrontation between the West and the East or the US and China is more a hybrid war. It’s more a financial economic war. And gold has always played a part in that.

And I think that that’s also the reason why we see gold being and trading so strong right now. You mentioned multipolar world, of course. So there’s numerous parties to it.

The US’s influence is waning, of course. But who do you see stepping up? Who’s going to be in charge of that multipolar world? Who’s going to be leading it? Well, China has been leading this BRICS alliance for quite some time. And they do understand when they can start trading in their own currency by moving away the international trade from the dollar.

That’s highly beneficial for China because they can print the renminbi, the yuan. And other countries need to borrow them. It’s the same situation the benefit the US had since the start of the Bretton Woods system in 1944.

And even the US is now openly explaining how they want to see an end to the unipolar world. Marco Rubio has explained this in one of his very first speeches. So you could say it’s official now this move away from the unipolar world centered around the US dollar.

Does Russia have a role in this multipolar world? Because what you’re describing is almost a bipolar world, not multipolar. So you have the US and China slash BRICS, but it’s mostly China, as you said. Does Russia have a role in it? Well, I was explaining Russia’s roles like the pitbull owned by the master.

And the master is Mr. Xi in Beijing, and he’s holding the leash. And if Putin is allowed to bark and bite, so the master can stay silent in the background. But Putin understands without China, he’s gone.

So one day, Putin won’t be there. And then it will be very interesting to see what China’s plans are for Russia. I wouldn’t be surprised, but that’s very, that’s real longer term that Russia might get a huge crisis one day.

And China will scoop up everything east of the euro. Yeah, no, it’d be interesting to see how that develops, of course. Russia was leading the BRICS last year.

Now it’s Brazil. It’s gotten a little quieter around the BRICS. Like while Russia was leading it, meetings were happening in Kazan.

Everybody was a bit nervous about the new BRICS currency. You mentioned it as well. With Brazil at the helm now, how do you see the BRICS behaving this year? Well, you had this feeling in the West, and even Margaret explained it like that in Dutch Parliament some years ago, that the BRICS alliance, you should take them too serious.

Just a bunch of countries talking together. But now Trump has said that all countries choosing to drop the dollar and to move within the BRICS alliance to a new reserve currency, they could all expect 100% terrorism. That clearly shows that Trump is taking the BRICS alliance very serious.

It shows that they’re getting a bit nervous in the US, and rightly so. But it takes time to build a new alliance. It took time to build the Western alliance after the Second World War.

France was not in line with the US foreign policy for years. So I’m not that worried that countries like India choose a separate line or some of the methods being discussed within the BRICS alliance. Yeah, it seems like India is trying to appease both sides, the BRICS and the US.

They’re actually buying military components from the US while they’re also trying to appease China. Just like Turkey. Yeah, they’re somewhere in between, and they’re trying to have the best of both worlds.

We’ll see how that plays out. But the question now arises, of course, what can the US do to sort of stop that trend that we’re witnessing right now that you just described, Willem? If you have to threaten other countries, foreign countries, to get them moving into a certain direction, that’s not a behavior which shows strength, it shows weakness. And the more you threaten other countries, the more they will move away from you.

So in a way, Trump is helping the de-dollarization trend by his obnoxious behavior. I call this bully politics. And I think most countries, whether it’s Canada or Brazil or China, most countries are fed up with it.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the messaging is always the problem here as well. I think he’s trying to achieve the right thing at some point, but it’s the messaging that we often struggle with, especially looking over from the EU or from Europe.

Let’s zoom in on the US a little bit. We have to talk about the debt situation. The US is the most important market globally still, despite what we just discussed.

So we do have to take a look. 1.1 trillion dollar deficit already this year. It’s only mid-March as we’re recording this, Willem.

How stable is the US economy? Well, if your own administration is starting to cut expenses by an axe and a chainsaw, it clearly shows that we’ve reached the end of the road. And the US understands that a national debt of over 36 trillion and a budget deficit of over two billion, you can’t keep going on like that. And that’s why it stopped.

And I’ve been explaining that for the last 10, 15 years in my books, that we will reach a point around 2020 that this couldn’t go on. And now we’re in this huge reset, in which the US itself clearly shows that we reached the end of the road. And now it gets very interesting.

And let’s see where we what happens next. Did you see the US solving its debt problem at all? Is there any way they can solve that? No, they will try to bully their allies with tariffs and the potential loss of security guarantees into accepting a reconstruction of the US treasury holdings. And we’ll see that playing out in the next 12 to 18 months.

But that will be a tough sell for Trump. Because, well, he has to convince his creditor nations to accept a loss on their treasury holdings. Yeah, well, the Southern debt crisis is the buzzword here.

And the US has to refinance a lot this year as well. I think it’s around $7 trillion, not billion, trillion dollars this year. How does Trump or the US government in general instill confidence in potential buyers of that debt? There has to be a Southern component to it.

Great question. And I think bullying them, bullying your friends isn’t the best way to convince them to comply. And he might need to call the Federal Reserve that the Federal Reserve needs to buy more.

But then you’re in the primarization of the US fiscal situation. And that will mean even larger debasement of currency and that will bring higher inflation and maybe loss of confidence for the dollar at one point. And actually, gold is signaling all this.

Gold is the flashing light warning you about a very unstable monetary situation around the US dollar. Yeah, yields of the 10-year have been coming down, which is an indicator, of course, that there’s something amiss because people run to safe haven. We’ve seen a bit of sector rotation or money rotation of the tech stocks into bonds potentially just the last 10 days.

But we have to talk about yields because one way to entice your potential debtors is higher yields, of course. And how interesting are 4.2% or 4% on a 10-year if you have a default risk here? Well, I’m hearing signals coming from the new administration that they want to offer 100-year zero coupon bonds so that those bonds won’t bring any yields. So it’s a very messy situation.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to see more volatility on financial markets because markets will start to get very nervous pretty soon, probably. Well, I think they are. VIX has kicked up this week quite a bit.

It’s not in a territory where we should all get nervous, but volatility has dramatically increased, of course. The valuations are still quite high and that’s why a broader correction is probably in the cards. But we might first have a last run, a retest of the record highs.

So I’m in the Hunter camp, so to say, and then we could have a much larger correction there. Yeah, no, we had Dave Hunter on last week or no, actually this week, just a couple of days ago. Oh, yeah, fantastic.

Yeah, no, he said, well, the correction was actually stronger than he expected, but he sees a bounce back in the markets. And I’m curious how that’s going to play out because where is that strength supposed to come from? How does Nvidia, Nvidia has to like double or triple to push the S&P 500 to those high levels that he suggests. I’m curious how that will play out.

But I quickly want to come back to the confidence topic, Willem. And Judy Shelton has been suggesting, and I think others have been jumping on that train as well, a 50-year gold-backed bond, like back something with a real asset. And of course, gold, one tier one asset.

What are your thoughts on that? Is that even feasible? To make a gold-backed bond, you first need the gold. And maybe these huge moves of physical gold from London to the US is a sign of things to come. Nobody really knows.

Only, I think, some insiders within the administration know what plans are being built now. But it’s also interesting to see the Bitcoin reserve being started now. That could be a game changer.

And I’m afraid most of the people still don’t understand how revolutionary this new administration is. So much will change over, well, relative little time. Yeah, it’s not just a Bitcoin, it’s a crypto reserve.

So there’s a whole basket of crypto currencies that are going to be included. Will be mainly Bitcoin. It has to be.

And I’m no expert on that. So I’m talking way out of my knowledge base here. So we’ll move that.

But Willem, we have to talk about now the mining space as well and how that is all reflected. And no, wait, before we do that, before we talk mining, I quickly want to talk geopolitics because I want to talk about Greenland, Canada, and Panama Canal to a degree, but mostly coming from a mining and minerals side. Tell us about it.

What’s the plan here of the new administration? Is there even a chance that Greenland will become the 51st or if Canada is the 51st and the 52nd state of the US? Well, I think that’s the negotiation style of Mr. Trump. He always starts at 100 percent and then he can come down. There were elections in Greenland this week.

And I think one of the winners of that election was a political party which is looking for quite independent position for Greenland. So away from Denmark. And I think an independent Greenland would be great for Trump to do business with.

He could do a great deal with Greenland. So I don’t think he’s looking to take over. He understands you just can’t take over Canada or take over Greenland.

But you can make deals. And he’s quite serious. So he will make deals, especially with countries which have this very important location for the US from a geopolitical point of view.

Absolutely. But we need to also discuss what he’s after. One thing, of course, is security in the it’s been dominating headlines, which is great for our sector, critical minerals in general or minerals and resources, of course.

Is it even worth it? Is that even a main topic? And what’s in Greenland, for example, that he’d be chasing? Well, we both know that Canada and Greenland host many very interesting and valuable natural resources and critical metals and even uranium. So I understand where he’s coming from. I understand why he’s interested in Panama, because Panama Canal is such an important piece of infrastructure as well.

So I know what he’s trying to achieve. But it will be very interesting to see what route he will choose over the next few years and what the outcome will be. But one thing is certain.

Like I said before, so much will change. And we really see the collapse of structures which have been working quite well for the US in the last 70 to 80 years. And this is truly reset stuff.

I know it’s a bit of speculation asking the following question here, Willem, but what will it do to commodity prices if he gets his way? Even if Greenland has a partnership? I’m just curious, trying to put a frame around it, framework for the investors out there, what that actually means. I think this all brings a perfect storm for the world of commodities and being a fund manager for a commodity discovery fund. I think times will get very, very interesting now for funds like ourselves, because you have this geopolitical shift, you have the debasement of currencies, you can expect more inflation, you have this de-dollarization trend.

But on top of this all, don’t forget that we are entering an era of shortages. Many metals will see physical shortages. It starts with production deficits, then you’ll get some physical shortages in the market and higher prices will be the result.

So if you look at the current valuation, we’ve been looking for the most interesting and significant mining projects worldwide which haven’t been developed yet for the last 15 years and valuations are still so low. So I feel like a kid in a candy store and these valuations need to go up over time. I think we’re in the early innings of this process and you see some of the developers starting to make strong moves already, look at what’s Gregland Gold, a London listed company with a great asset in Australia.

You see more of these movements in our portfolio on a daily basis. There’s always one or two shares which has started to jump 10-15% on a daily basis. Absolutely.

When I look at my portfolio, I always feel like I’m under-owning the sector, but I’ve been in it for 14 years. I always feel like I’m missing out on something because there’s always activity right now. I’m glad our holdings have a total value of over CAD$150 million and owning all these assets at a rock-bottom valuation just ahead of all these significant changes.

I must say that that’s a wonderful position to be in and that’s totally different from the last 10-15 years where we had this awful bear market. Actually, since the start of the fund, most people who work in our fund, they arrived in 2011 or after and they only experienced a bear market. You know when we started Soar Financial? March 2011.

I know exactly what you’re talking about, Willem. I know exactly what you’re talking about. You don’t look too unhappy.

The next 10-20 years will be wonderful. I’m 62 now. I don’t have any plans to retire.

I hope to enter like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett being in my 90s and explaining how this bull market unfolded in the last 30 years. In the opera house in Amsterdam once a year, everybody will come to see the Oracle of Amsterdam. One thing we have to talk about real quick, we touched on it a little bit, but it’s really deregulation potentially in the US as well.

Dig Baby Dig was a headline of a Financial Times article because it was talking about timelines to get a mine into production. 29 years is the number they used. It’s somewhere in between there, between 20 and 30 years, I guess, but long, long permitting timelines.

Trump and his administration are supposed to present some plans, especially in light of the critical minerals discussion that we had, to help deregulate and potentially bring some of that production back home. Resolution Mine comes to mind here in Arizona. How do you look at this and how does that play into how you’re also allocating funds? Like I explained earlier in this interview, we really used the last 15 years to tour the world, to scout the world.

We know exactly where the 10 best undeveloped copper projects can be found. We know exactly where the 10 best uranium or lithium projects can be found. Actually, we invested in most of the top 10 of best undeveloped projects because that’s the reason we are here and that’s why it’s called a Commodity Discovery Fund.

I’m afraid that all changes being made now in the West and we are contacted even by the guys who run this in Brussels. I’m afraid that everything the West can do now is a bit too little too late because you can’t compete with China. China has been in charge of supplying the world with natural resources in the last 10, 20, 30 years and it’s very difficult to compete with China.

Look what happened with Norfolk in the Scandix. We tried to build our own EV batteries and it was a failure. 60 billion down the drain.

As you said, too little too late, but the US, could use some copper production. That line alone could supply one quarter of the US’s copper supply needs. That’s why we invested in Arizona.

That’s why we own 5% of this new copper district in Idaho being discovered by Hercules Metals and Scout Discoveries. So we like these changes. They will benefit of the coming changes.

A lot of red tape will be cut by the US but I still think it’s too little too late for the overall picture for commodities. If you look at the supply and demand studies we’ve done in-house, we need so much more. You need to find six Escondidas every year now to have enough copper coming on stream.

Escondida is a very large mine and we don’t find six of them every year. We don’t even find one of them every year. Yeah, exactly.

You used Hercules Metals as an example. That discovery was made in 2023. So if we assume a 29-year permitting timeline, we won’t see it come into production before 2050 at best.

So that’s exactly it. We might even miss this cycle, the next, and maybe the cycle after. So way behind here.

Absolutely. Will, maybe one last question. We talked about PDAC.

Sentiment was really bullish right after Precious Metals in Beaver Creek in September. The question now is how is sentiment at PDAC and how do you see that developing over the rest of the year? Well, I think PDAC was pretty good, although you still have over 1,000 companies in exploration space who are still trying to survive. So the bull market is only starting and producers of precious metals, they have a license to print money now.

And we see this trickling down to the development stage companies and the exploration companies. But many of the weaker exploration companies won’t be able to benefit from this new bull market until a much later date, I think. Fantastic.

Willem, what a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time here on a Friday before the long weekend. Or is it a long weekend? It’s just a week.

I’m just happy it’s Friday. It’s been a long week. That’s what I meant to say.

Really appreciate you taking the time. Where can we follow some of your work? Because I know you’re publicly quite visible. Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter.

I have my own Patreon account where I charge a little for the real inside stuff on the latest reset developments. I publish a story there almost every day. And of course, you can visit our Commodity Discovery Fund.

We’re based in the Netherlands, but we accept investors from almost everywhere in the world. Fantastic. Awesome.

Willem, thank you so much for your time. It was great to catch up with you and everybody else. Thank you so much for tuning in.

We just witnessed history today as we record this interview. Gold broke through $3,000. Willem and I, we discussed what really led to this price breakthrough, price rally, of course.

So much going on behind the scenes that we’re not aware of, that we need to make sense of. And I think Willem’s done a fantastic job. If you enjoyed this conversation, please put a comment down below, leave a like, and of course, subscribe to our channel.

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We’ll be back with lots more here on SOAR financially. Thank you.