This Will Blow Up the Gold Price (Uncut) 02-15-2025

‘Insiders’ Know the Plan Is in Motion – This Will Blow Up the Gold Price | Andy Schectman

Hey everyone, welcome back to Kitco News. I’m Jeremy Safran. Well, there are rumors that the Trump administration is exploring some creative and potentially controversial ideas to tackle the massive debt spiral the U.S. is looking at.

Now, one involves revaluing the country’s gold reserves, gold that’s currently valued at a mere $42 per ounce on the government’s books, when in reality it’s worth nearly $800 billion at today’s market prices. But what does this actually mean for the global gold market and gold prices? Is this a smart financial strategy or just creative accounting? Here to break it all down is Andy Sheckman. Andy, of course, is the president and owner of Miles Franklin Precious Metals.

He has three decades of experience in the precious metals sector and is very well regarded as an expert in monetary history, political economy, and also, Andy, a fan favorite here at Kitco News. Great to have you back. Great to be here, Jeremy.

Thanks for having me, brother. Appreciate it. Of course.

You know, Andy, we’ve got so much to get into. We were talking off camera. It’s just a new day of news.

It comes at us quick. And this new administration is looking at a $36 trillion crumbling, climbing debt problem and another debt ceiling stalemate coming up. And now we hear this talk about a potential gold revaluation.

I mean, some of these rumors are connected to what U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Vessant had to say at the start of February. He was heard from in the Oval Office. We have a clip.

Let’s listen to it here. Yes, sir. This is very exciting.

We’re going to stand this thing up within the next 12 months. We’re going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people. We’re going to put the assets to work.

And I think it’s going to be very exciting. We’re going to study best practices as done around the world. It’ll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people.

All right. You heard it there. I mean, some say this translates to the U.S. Treasury revaluing the 8000 plus tons of gold to market to market value, which would be normal worldwide.

Of course, hundreds of billions of dollars to the balance sheet that would bring. We know that the U.S. Treasury currently values it about forty two dollars, totaling ten billion dollars on the books. Current market rates at about eight hundred billion.

If we look at twenty nine hundred dollar gold. Talk to us, Andy. First, why does the Fed no longer hold gold but certificates? And why does the Treasury have it? And remind us again why it’s priced at forty two dollars an ounce.

Yeah, well, I mean, the gold is supposed to be there. The certificates could be redeemed for gold at any time, you know, and of course, it hasn’t been audited since nineteen fifty six, I believe, doesn’t inspire much in the way of confidence whatsoever. And, you know, I found Scott percent’s comments very interesting, because if you take a look at the balance sheet of the U.S. government, it’s it’s somewhat nauseating, if you will.

Roughly five trillion in assets, of which the largest over 40 percent being student debt. Can’t monetize that. The second largest would be military, the bases and the guns and the bullets.

You’re not going to monetize that land as number three, I suppose you could. But when you think about gold, which is held to your point at forty two, twenty two an ounce and in the rest of the world, thirty five dollars an ounce in what is called universally on central bank balance sheets. Can’t make this up, Jeremy, the gold revaluation account.

That’s the name of it. The gold revaluation account. And, you know, having the head of the Dutch National Bank for the last two years be screaming that we should revalue gold, members of the Bundesbank doing the same thing.

And closer to home, Senator Cynthia Loomis from Wyoming, who advocated for revaluing the gold that the Federal Reserve is supposedly holding on behalf of the Treasury to a level sufficient enough to provide liquidity to buy Bitcoin for the strategic Bitcoin account. And, of course, one of my favorites, the lady I just interviewed with, Judy Shelton, is advocating for issuing Treasuries pegged to gold and redeemable in gold. And so a lot of these things are coming together.

There’s a lot more that we can talk about about this. But for many, many years, gold was an afterthought in this country. And it’s not until just recently, like now, that you’re beginning to hear about it.

In fact, most of my career, Jeremy, the Federal Reserve or the United States was a net exporter of gold. And since November, I wonder if that November is ironic that that coincide with the election. We are becoming, have become net importers of gold.

And there’s a lot more to this that we’ll talk about. But the bottom line is, is that gold has kind of been usurped for central bank financial instruments. And it looks like things are starting to somewhat come full circle in an environment where the Treasuries have really lost a good deal of their luster.

And much of the world over the last few years has chosen to let those Treasuries that they were accumulating to finance our debt, roll off their balance sheet and replace them with gold. Because after all, gold is the only other tier one reserve asset as reclassified by the BIS in, BIS, there’s a Freudian slip for you, a BIS in 2019 as the world’s only other tier one reserve asset alongside of U.S. Treasuries. It’s doubled the performance of the 10-year Treasury gold has over the last 25 years, and maybe most importantly, carries no default risk, no inflation risk, and no sanction risk.

So yeah, I think we’re beginning to see gold become center stage. And I’d love to continue to pull on that thread if you want, about what’s going on right now with all of the gold coming into the country, the difficulty getting it out of the LVMA and all the things associated with it, and maybe with what Scott Bissett is feeling about remonetizing something on the asset side of the balance sheet. Yeah, yeah, well said.

Andy, we’re going to get into it all here at Kitco News, because of course, as the mainstream media has been quiet, we’ve been talking about it. And I need to get your opinion on whether or not you think that 8,000 plus tons of gold is actually there. But before we do, I want to go back to the revaluing of it, because the U.S. government hasn’t allowed the public to benefit from gold revaluations in the past.

I mean, in 93, Roosevelt confiscated gold before raising the price. And in 71, Nixon closed the gold window. Why wouldn’t they pull a similar move this time? Well, it’s a different environment altogether.

I mean, you could in 33, when Roosevelt confiscated gold, it was a different time. And you’re right. He took the gold from the people and then devalued the dollar by 40%, making gold worth $35 from 20.

That didn’t really benefit the people other than those that hung on to gold. Now in 71, we could argue it did benefit some of the people in the respect that the market revalued the price of gold to where we are now at 2,900 from that moment when we closed the window at 35. I think this time it’s very different.

This is a time where you have half of the world looking at gold very differently. We’ve already heard from Delmarousse, the former president of Brazil, the head of the BRICS New Development Bank, that they’ve agreed in principle to a settlement token called the UNIT, which is 40% gold back and 60% BRICS Plus currencies. This isn’t for the people.

This is for the banks and the central banks. When you talk about what the BRICS are doing with the ability for the average person or B2B, it’s going to be BRICS pay, which isn’t about gold redemption. What it is is to reestablish confidence in a system that has lost all credibility and all confidence.

If the United States wants to have any chance at retaining its status as the world reserve or as the center of free trade or the pillar that it holds itself on, I think they need to find a way to marry gold and blockchain technology. This dovetails with what Zoltan Pozar has been saying for two years now, that we have entered into a system called Bretton Woods 3, which would be a system that would be identified by accumulation of commodities and transparency. If you look at what Elon has said recently, well, let’s put the government spending on a blockchain.

Well, how about put the gold holdings on a blockchain? In talking to Judy Shelton about this, to another one of your questions that you kind of asked me, I said, Judy, why hasn’t the gold been audited at Fort Knox? You want to talk about reestablishing confidence in the treasury market by pegging it to gold. Well, what about the gold that we actually own? Why hasn’t it been audited? And she says, you’re right. They give lame excuses.

It’s too much money, too logistically challenged. And I cry BS. So did she.

She said, just spend a few million dollars for the United States, for goodness sake, and get it coordinated and get it figured out. It doesn’t inspire confidence that it hasn’t been audited in a very long time, nor does the way we have behaved, not only in being the stewards of the world reserve currency, but in weaponizing the dollar and the treasury market. This is all about confidence.

And if confidence is completely and totally lost and the dollar and the treasury is no longer demanded to that degree, well, it’s really going to hurt the average person on the street. So while this might not directly benefit any of us, except for those that have hung on to gold through all of this, it will definitely benefit everyone far more than it would affect every, well, let’s put it another way. It would affect everyone a whole heck of a lot more if globally the dollar is no longer demanded and is usurped by some other settlement currency across the globe.

And I think people will realize very, very quickly the privilege it’s been of being the world reserve currency. And if that’s taken away from us, I think those effects would be magnified to the nth degree to the other side. May not benefit everyone, but that would certainly hurt all of us if we lost the world reserve currency.

Yeah, Andy, you talked a little bit about Elon there for a moment. We’re seeing what he’s doing with the Doge Group, going in, trying to find these balances, where money’s been spent, where it isn’t. You brought up Fort Knox there for a second.

Do you think the 8,000 plus tons is actually there? Part of me feels it’s not, and part of me feels that’s why they’re doing some of the things they’re doing. And I don’t want to, look, in 2019, I started talking about the BRICS when no one else was. People told me I was crazy.

Maybe I was stupid just to say it, say it out loud, de-dollarization, Saudi Arabia pivoting, the BRICS. And I said it in 4,000 YouTube videos over the last 5 years. I feel there’s something else happening right now that kind of answers that question through the back door.

I mean, it doesn’t inspire confidence that we haven’t audited it. And when guys like Ron Paul advocated for it, he was shot down. Does that mean it’s not there? I don’t know.

I think there’s, it’s a 50-50 bet at best, certainly. If it were there, why not just audit it? It belongs to the American people. It should be held in two locations, in New York Fed and Fort Knox.

If it really is there, it shouldn’t be overly burdensome to audit, especially nowadays. That certainly, I think, makes people wonder. But if you look at what they’re doing right now, there are things pointing to massive gold acquisition just since November that maybe is a stopgap for that.

Now, look, there’s a fine line between conspiracy and reality, Jeremy. And I think we’re treading that line. But just since November, since we have become net importers of gold rather than net exporters, the United States has brought in over 12.5 million ounces of gold and over 45 million ounces of silver from the London vaults into the U.S. vaults.

J.P. Morgan is set to deliver $4 billion, with a B, of gold into the COMEX for the February contract. And Blythe Masters, who used to run the trading desk for J.P., you can Google it. It’ll pop right up.

She said long ago, J.P. Morgan does not buy gold for themselves. It’s for customers. Now, I ask you, what customer’s got $4 billion in their back pocket to buy gold with? Let that one sink in for a minute.

And there are many other things related to J.P. Morgan. I might add just one more. You know, they paid a $920 million fine for manipulating the metals market and always chafed my rear end that they were allowed to continue to be allowed to be the custodian of the world’s largest silver trust, SLV.

I mean, that just didn’t make any sense to me. They paid a $920 million fine, the largest fine ever handed out by the Justice Department at that point. And yet their trading desk made a billion dollars that year.

Slap on the wrist, you walk away $80 million up and you still get control of the ETFs. HSBC Bank always controlled GLD. But guess what just happened recently? Oh, that’s right.

J.P. Morgan now controls GLD. So you have BlackRock and J.P. Morgan holding SLV and GLD. And when people have asked me over the years, do you think gold will be confiscated? I said, no, I don’t.

I think if they wanted to take the gold, if they wanted to have the lion’s share of it, all they would need to do is say, let’s take the ETFs. Now, nobody except the insiders can pull gold out of the ETFs. I’ll mention about that when I’m done.

I know I’m kind of going a little further ahead of script here, but it’s important. And so the insiders are the only ones that can take metal out of the ETFs. You and I can’t.

So if indeed they were to close those two accounts, be sitting on this massive stockpile of gold, where right now in the two vaults that J.P. Morgan owns, one in London, one in New York, they possess more gold than over half of the dang G20 countries because of this custodianship. They could close those programs, look the world in the face and say, what? We didn’t break any laws or infringe any civil liberties. We have the right to do this.

We’re closing the fund. The money that people had invested in gold is now in their money market accounts Monday morning. They’re free to go buy physical gold and silver.

It would give them the ability to have their cake and eat it too. Now, am I extrapolating? Yes. Do I know that this would happen? No, but it’s a little bit uncanny.

And along those same lines, since gold has been on this wild tear, right? It’s a little weird that 16 tons have come out of GLD just recently fallen out. In other words, the conventional wisdom as well, it’s a strong dollar, it’s high interest rates, it’s profit taking. I call BS again.

It’s the insiders redeeming their shares for the physical metal and pulling it out to have strategic control of it before whatever happens, happens. So you put it all together, a tier one asset, the massive repatriation, net importers, 4 billion from JP Morgan, all of these millions of ounces pouring in of gold into the New York COMEX market. All of this stuff happening, JP controlling GLD and SLV, I mean, under the guise of tariffs.

Now, he’s not going to tariff silver. He won’t. It’s a structural deficit.

It will blow up our industry. Is he going to tariff gold? Or is he just saying that to get it all home quietly under the guise of potential tariffs playing this spread between London and New York profit? Or is it something much bigger? Is it what Scott Pescent is talking about to monetize the balance sheet? It’s what Judy Shelton is talking about to issue treasuries colored to gold. Well, if the gold isn’t there, how do you get it? Oh, I know.

Here it is. And so I would simply say, everything inside of me is screaming. Yeah.

This is all hell of a lot bigger than just Trump tariffs. And it almost seems like it’s connected to, I mean, to your point, Sum on X even floated the idea that the U.S. government has a plan to, you know, as you mentioned, repatriate physical gold, you know, audit the physical gold, monetize U.S. physical gold use via these U.S. Treasury gold bonds. Connect the dots for us, Andy.

What does it all point to here? It all points to revaluing the price of gold, which is held in the gold revaluation account. Every $1,000, $4,000 increase in the price of gold gives the Treasury general account $1 trillion free and clear. President Trump would tell Scott Pescent, tell Jerome Powell to revalue the gold, please.

Doesn’t even require congressional approval. It’s in his prerogative to do so. It would allow treasuries, which are losing demand, to once again be perhaps in demand.

It would inspire confidence. It would inspire transparency, especially if put on a blockchain like Elon is talking about. It would give us the ability to start to pay down our debt at the same time.

What does rising gold do to the dollar? Oh, it weakens the dollar. The dollar falls in comparison to a rising dollar. That’s what Trump wants.

And so, look, I think that it’s an option. My mentor, Richard Russell, used to say the Fed has but two options 15, 20 years ago, and they’re way more indebted than they were then. He said they have two options, but to inflate their default.

Well, maybe option number three would be to revalue the price of gold, which indeed would inflate the dollar, but would get us on a pathway perhaps to reigniting the confidence that stands behind our Treasury market, would give us the ability to start to pay down. Now, you want to take it way out into the stratosphere, but in a world where Bitcoin is $100,000, Jeremy, I remember 2017, it was $400. In a world where Bitcoin is $100,000, just what if, just what if, I’m just saying for what if, what if they make gold $140,000, just like that, and they say, we will pay $140,000 to any sovereign nation who wishes to deliver their gold to the New York Fed or to Fort Knox, and we’ll pay it.

Now, I’m not saying they’re going to, but if they did, the $36 trillion debt would be completely wiped out. Are they going to do it? Probably not, but my point is, even at $10,000 an ounce, as guys like Jim Sinclair have said, hey, you got James Rickard, who’s been on your show before, he says $24,000 ounce is his number. You put gold at $24,000, that means you just gave $6 trillion free and clear to the Treasury General Account to work its way out of this debt burden, to inspire confidence, to peg it to the Treasuries.

And Judy Shelton said to me, Andy, you know, I was very close with Trump in his first administration. She was the Federal Reserve nominee for Trump, wasn’t confirmed, but she said that they discussed issuing these Treasuries long and hard, and says it is her belief, and I believe she’ll be on the Federal Reserve Board this time around, but it is her belief that he will issue Treasuries backed by gold on July 4th, 2026, the 250th year anniversary. She told me that.

She told me she believes Fort Knox will be audited, and she told me not so many words, but more or less agreed that gold will be revalued to a much higher level to do this. Now, if it really was going to be in 2026, you have to have all the pieces in place before you say, here’s our new gold-backed Treasury. These pieces, you know, you look at all the dots, you look at all the facts, Jeremy, and I mean, in and of themselves, they’re all pretty significant.

Put them together, and it’s like, man, could this be the picture that I’m seeing? Could it be? Maybe I’m stupid enough, or maybe I’m on to something, to say it out loud. My feeling is that they are planning something much bigger for gold than we are all letting on, have been let on to believe, that it’s just repatriating it to take advantage of the spread between London and New York, or to backfill in case of, for these naked contracts that need to have gold backing, if they’re those that stand for delivery. Now, I think it’s way deeper than that, Jeremy.

I think there’s something in store for gold, which is what? The only other tier one reserve asset in the world that all the central banks are buying hand over fist. It would benefit them all, all of the central banks, and maybe that’s what the plan has been all along. Not sure, but why else would the most powerful bank on the planet, the most powerful, the BIS, reclassify gold as the world’s only other tier one? I’ll let your listeners think about that and decide for themselves.

For me, there’s a plan in motion that the insiders, the central banks, have known about for a long time. We’re just finding out as it progresses. Yeah, they’re starting to front run it, and they have been, to your point, a very long time.

Let’s go back here for a moment, because we touched about it just briefly, but you were obviously seeing these countries rush to repatriate their gold. That is on top of massive amounts of gold moving from London to U.S. We had somebody on to talk about this, but I’m curious about your opinion. Give us the latest moves here.

What are you seeing on the ground? In terms of repatriation? Yeah, and gold moving. Yeah, well, it started in 2017. I mean, you could go back to 2012.

The Bundesbank said, give us back our damn gold. It took five years. By 2017, they were furious, and you saw articles in the Wall Street Journal, give us back our gold.

We did. Shortly after that, the Bank of Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Austria, the Czech National Bank, the Dutch National Bank, they all repatriated their gold from the New York Fed and the Bank of England. Just in the past very short period of time, I will ramble off just some names, and this would just be a quick Google search.

Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Argentina, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Belgium, Egypt, Senegal, Romania, Nigeria, Poland, Ghana, India, Turkey, Serbia, France, Venezuela, Algeria, Cameroon, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, and others. They all brought their gold back from the New York Fed and Bank of England. The New York Fed and the Bank of England have been holding everyone’s gold to give access to the LBMA and to the COMEX.

The Bank of India just brought back 100 metric tons and hold nearly all of the gold that they’ve been leaving at the Bank of England. And so this is about, I don’t trust you anymore. This is about if gold really is revalued, and they do know it’s coming.

And the BIS, like, when you look at what these banks did in 2017, all bringing back their gold, 2018, those same banks that I mentioned, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Czech, Dutch, Austria, they all had been net sellers of gold leading up to that moment. In 2018, those banks bought more as a group than they did in the 60 years previously combined. 2019, that number was doubled, and then somehow, miraculously, the BIS said, by the way, guys, gold’s tier one.

Are you telling me that they weren’t told this was coming? And it’s the exact same thing we’re seeing now. Something is happening. When you see the London Bullion Metals Association, which is a T plus one market, I make my trade, that’s T plus one is a day to settle, and I get my metal.

It’s now T plus six to eight weeks. Really? Where’s my damn metal? T plus eight weeks wasn’t what I signed up for. That’s basically a default.

Everyone is rushing to get their stuff. It’s as if there is an acceleration of a realization that things are about to happen by the people on the inside. Central banks have known this for a very, very long time, and maybe now that Trump is in office, the previous administration allowed metals to be suppressed.

I don’t care what people say. Let’s just get it out there. For the longest period of time, gold and silver have been manipulated and suppressed.

The evidence is overwhelming. And they allowed it to happen. And what has happened is that the BRICS nations, largely, many of them, have become coordinated, sophisticated, motivated, and wealthy.

And they’re playing, we’re playing right into their hand over the last several years by allowing the suppressed price to be delivered. The delivery option off of the COMEX and the LBMA is something people rarely, countries or big institutions, rarely exploited. It was a cash settle.

It was a speculation. It was hedging risk. It wasn’t standing for delivery.

And now they’re all standing for delivery. And doing so, I mean, look around the world. China says that they didn’t buy gold for six months and then started doing it again since November.

Yet, that’s nonsense. The import-export numbers busted them and said, nah, we see. In fact, there are articles saying they’ve been buying 10 times as much.

They’re flying all around Latin America, in particular, Peru, all around South America, and buying up dory and concentrate right from the miners. I’ve validated this myself in talking to several of the mining executives. And yeah, they’re buying the crudely refined dory and the concentrate sludge, sending it back to China and disintermediating the market.

But if the People’s Liberation Army buys gold, not the PBOC, they don’t have any obligation to report it to the IMF. If they buy gold that’s sludge or concentrate that’s not 999 pure, that being the PBOC, they don’t need to report that if a proxy bank or a sovereign wealth fund does it. They don’t need to report it.

And it’s not just China. Saudi Arabia got busted too. No, we didn’t find it, really.

What’s the import-export number saying here? You did. Sorry, we must have made a mistake. We’re seeing it everywhere.

And it’s to the same degree, why hasn’t the U.S. shown how much gold we have? If we know that ultimately we’re going to move towards some sort of revaluation or revision in the price of gold, which is held in the gold revaluation account, you can’t make it up. It would do no one any service to tell the world how aggressively they are accumulating gold. So to me, it’s not just the massive accumulation, it’s the repatriation, to your point, that is vital to understanding this, that, you know, John Newenhouse, Chan Newenhouse, and I hope I didn’t butcher his name, but he’s done a great job in showing over the last few years how all of the Western European banks have been importing gold, but their gold to GDP ratio is almost identical across every one of the countries as if they too know something is coming and are planning for a gold revaluation.

After all, the head of the Dutch National Bank and many members of the Bundesbank have been screaming about this. It’s common, in my opinion, and it’s a perfect way to offset liabilities in an era of massive debt accumulation, fiscal and monetary irresponsibility, and suppressed interest rates that created all these problems. This is one way, a much more benign way out of the problem, or at least the beginnings of fixing the problem than outright default or hyperinflation.

Yeah, yeah, well said. And lots to unpack. I want to get into China.

I want to get into India’s lease rates because you’re crazy right now. But before we do that, you brought up, you know, the derivatives and what have you. When we look at the spread and this, you know, this so-called kind of crunch that’s happening now, is the paper gold system breaking down? I mean, banks use derivatives to suppress gold prices for decades, but is this finally starting to unravel? That’s what it looks like.

I mean, let’s talk the LBMA for a moment. I mentioned they’re a T plus one settlement, but now they’re T plus eight weeks. That’s not right.

But let’s just look at silver. It’s easiest to understand. The LBMA has 800 million ounces of silver in their vaults, of which they tell us that the ETFs, like SLV, have 500 of those 800 million ounces.

So that leaves 300 million ounces available, called the float. The float is 300 million. Now the LBMA will tell you that they trade 290 million ounces per day, every day, the entire float, every day.

However, they also will tell you that those numbers are at least 10 times undervalued because they own underreported, because they only report the final settlement numbers at the end of the day, not all the trades that went in to get it there. So if they’re 10 times understated, that means they’re trading 2.9 billion ounces of silver per day off of a 300 million ounce float. That’s three and a half times annual global mine supply per day, of which 90 plus percent of those contracts are paper, naked paper, nothing standing behind it.

On COMEX, silver is rehypothecated and gold rehypothecated, meaning everyone owns this one contract, but I sell it to 20 people, the same one. No one’s going to know, right? That’s like Bernie Madoff. Until someone says, no, I’m going to stand for delivery.

Now that’s the theory behind the rush to get all this stuff back. That’s one of the theories. Well, we got naked contracts.

If people stand for delivery, we’re screwed. What do we do? Let’s get the gold here before the tariffs are enacted. Well, that’s one of the covers or one of the stories that I don’t particularly believe, but that’s just it.

We are seeing deliveries. To give you an example of what I mean by deliveries, like I said at the onset, you’re talking the biggest deliveries that we have ever seen in the history of the COMEX market. 59,296 contracts stood for delivery on the February gold contract at 100 ounces apiece.

The previous record was in June 2020, 47,132. That’s 12,134 contracts at 100 ounces apiece. More stood for delivery this February than the largest delivery in the history of the COMEX market.

Now that’s 5,929,600 ounces. Where did that come from? Who’s got that kind of money? Is it maybe the government? Could it be they’re bringing all this gold home? JP Morgan delivering 4 billion in gold, not to them, to a customer. Who’s the customer? I mean, and so these questions should be asked a lot more, but in my opinion, there’s something much bigger behind it.

Now, you want to blow up the price of gold and maybe that is what they want to do. After all, that would devalue the dollar. That would immediately reliquify the Treasury General account, expose the fractional scam that is either one of these exchanges, and watch what happens to the price of gold.

Have a delivery failure by one of the big commercial banks like Bank of America, who Ted Butler, God rest his soul, said before he died that they had over a billion ounces short in paper on the OTC market and over 40 million ounces short in gold. Could it be something like that were to happen to trigger this daisy chain? Look, there’s a lot of fact out there. A lot of what I’ve just told you is fact.

Connecting the dots? Well, that’s the supposition. That’s the, ah, should I take that leap of faith? I’m not saying I’m right. I’m not saying this is going to happen, but what I am saying is that they’re putting themselves in position to blow up this paper scheme.

They’re putting themselves in position to revalue gold, to repatriate it, to become a net importer. These are things that never happen. Never.

And all of a sudden, like that, since November, it’s like someone flipped the switch, and there’s a different script that everyone is going off of, Jeremy. Yeah. Andy, it’s fascinating to watch because, as you mentioned, and we’ve been talking about it, we also have these major delays across the globe when it comes to getting your hands on physical gold.

The wait time in the Bank of England is now around two months. We saw several Chinese banks saying that we’ve sold out their gold products after that surge in demand. And then I think we’ve got these latest reports, too, out of South Korea.

Their mint has temporarily suspended sales of gold bars, noting signs of widespread tightness across the markets. So, I mean, you just kind of explained what’s going on here, possibly governments front running this, but if that’s the case, who’s winning the race? Well, I mean, you could argue for the last several years that it’s been China and the BRICS nations who have certainly gotten out to a massive head start. And maybe that’s why you’re seeing such enormous amounts.

I mean, Trump doesn’t do anything small now, does he? And maybe that’s why you’re seeing such an enormous race since November. I mean, if they took a look and said, do you understand what… Trump was talking about the BRICS and losing the World Reserve status on his campaign trail and said this would be worse than any lost war. He’s right.

And he saw what they were doing. And maybe that’s why he brought in whose largest holding is gold. And maybe that’s why since November, not since he took office, but since November, the insiders were alerted and start repatriating their gold.

I mean, we have a long way to catch up, but I would argue that in my mind, look, the Chinese are the largest producers of gold in the world. Pretty dang close to the largest producers of silver also. It’s arguable a first or second.

They’re net importers of both. They hardly sell an ounce ever. They became net importers of silver recently.

They were net exporters. They’re flying around the world buying Dore and Concentrate. They’re buying up with their Belt Road Initiative, all of the countries that they’re associating with are massively resource rich and underdeveloped.

So they help them build roads and bridges and maritime channels and railroads and gold and silver mines and refineries for a piece of it and industrialize their countries and bring those resources to the market. They get a piece of it. They understand.

You see, the difference is the Chinese think in terms of decades, we think in terms of days, and that’s a problem. They have been very methodical in their accumulation and in their production. And their numbers stood at 1200 tons half of my career.

And everyone said, I call BS. That’s not true. They never update their numbers.

Everyone always said, you can’t believe the numbers that they say. They have way more. If you just take the 300 to 500 metric tons a year since 2000 that they’ve been mining, they have way more than we do.

Alistair McLeod, one of the smartest dudes I’ve ever met, two years ago said they have 38,000 metric tons, 20 by the state and 18 by the people, probably a whole hell of a lot more now. So China’s way out in front. But it seems, if I’m seeing this correctly, that moves are being made, if you will, Jeremy, to narrow that gap by the United States.

Andy, stay on the east there for a second too, because obviously we’ve been talking about how China has been the top consumer on the gold front. But now we’re learning that they also have insurers that will be allowed to buy gold for the first time, which could unlock billions of dollars of investment. Talk about BRICS nations.

What are the latest developments that you’re paying attention to right now? Are there more gold connections that you’re watching foster here? Well, your point to China, their insurance industry is allowing them to put 1% of their $4.3 trillion insurance industry, which is 43 billion into gold investments. I mean, that’s not chump change. We just saw Indonesia become a full member of the BRICS, which has the largest in-ground hoard of nickel on the planet.

Their president, Wadudu, has called for an OPEC style cartel of rare earths. Over 25 countries or so have formally applied. Look, what happened to the BRICS a few months ago is right out of a James Bond movie, Jeremy, and they’re pissed off and they’re not going to be as forthright and open about what they’re going to do now.

For four years, the BIS innovation hub had said that, yeah, we’re going to help develop Enbridge with China, Hong Kong, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, most of which are in the BRICS. For four years, they worked on developing it. Enbridge is the cross-border payment system that’s operational, and it’s mostly Chinese technology.

But it enables countries to trade central bank digital currencies across the bridge unaffected by SWIFT. It would allow them to have full autonomy of trading with one another without having to go through the SWIFT intermediary system without having the risk of sanctions. In fact, there were two trades done in 2023, both of them using digital yuan with United Arab Emirates, one buying gold, one buying oil.

It works. And then, as I mentioned, Delmaroussa came out, not in the meeting in Kazan, but the one before that in Novigrad, and she said, look, I had a meeting on the sideline with Putin and, what’s his name, his name, let me just, I have it, Sergei Glazyev, who is the architect of all this, and said, we’ve agreed in principle to a new settlement currency traded over Enbridge called the unit, not a common currency, but a settlement currency, 40% gold back, 60% BRICS plus countries. And then at the 12th hour, right at the meeting, basically, in Kazan, the big one, well, the BIS comes out this moron named Augustus Karstens, the general director who’s on his way out.

He says, you know, the BIS has decided we can’t be a part of any project where one of the members is being sanctioned by the West. Really, Augustus, so you’re telling me over the last four years, you didn’t realize that Russia was the R in BRICS. So they more or less developed the technology, got them to the finish line, and then said, no, we’re out and pulled out, which is really dirty.

And that’s a Western institution. And I think it crystallized their distrust in the West. I think it will crystallize more countries, a rallying cry, wanting to join the BRICS.

And they’ve changed the name of it from Enbridge to the BRICS. And they’ll continue to de-dollarize trade in local currencies and settle any imbalances in gold until they come out with a formal settlement currency, not a full currency, but a trade settlement currency. So yes, I think there’s a lot happening with the BRICS.

25 or so countries have formally applied. We’ll find out more as time goes on, but I don’t blame them for being mum is the word, not only with what happened with the BIS, but also with the new White House administration. I think it’s better for them just to kind of fade off a little bit.

See what’s happening. And let things happen a little bit more quietly. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, what does it mean for the US at the end of the day? Because at the start of this year, Fitch warned that even with a Republican controlled government, the US debt ceiling debate is far from being resolved. I think the ratings agency is skeptical that Congress will reach a quick agreement. And as part of the 2023 budget deal, the debt ceiling was temporarily lifted until January 1st of 2025.

But that means lawmakers will have to revisit the issue this year to avoid a potential default while the US Treasury still has months of flexibility. The clock is ticking here, Andy, to your point. Fitch downgraded the US credit rating back in 2023 after this debt ceiling standoff said that if it expects further delays, maybe it could be the same.

Let’s talk about this. How disruptive is this debt and this ceiling? I mean, what are we going to do here next? No one talks about the real problem. You know, I mean, a debt 36 trillion, that sucks.

How about 99 trillion in unfunded liabilities in Medicare Part B, 22 in Part D, 77 in Social Security, military and government pensions. I mean, you’re talking 200 trillion. And, you know, Jeremy, most people, if they work a lifetime, will have made a million dollars.

They probably don’t save it. But a million is a number that is now achievable if you work hard and for a long period of time, you’ll make a million bucks, probably, or darn close to it if you have a job and go work till retirement. So it doesn’t sound like a lot, trillion, but let’s just frame it for reference.

A trillion seconds ago was 31,688 years ago. So if you made a machine that printed dollars every second, one, two, three, without stopping to reload ink or change paper, it would take nearly 32,000 years to print one trillion. So we’re nearly 200 trillion in debt.

How about the fact that over the next three years, by 2028, 28 trillion, 28 trillion in U.S. government bonds will mature. Now, you mentioned that doesn’t even take into account the one or two trillion dollar deficit spending each year where we have to print more bonds just to get ahead. And a lot of these bonds, that’s why they’re maturing by 2028 are short term.

That’s what Janet did. She transferred everything to the front end of the bond yield or the bond market. So you have all of this short term debt that is coming due in 2028.

And all of this, you look at the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan group in Washington says by 2031, 100% of tax revenue would go to pay just the interest on the debt and mandatory entitlement spending that he won’t touch. And it’s all off balance sheet, like Medicare, like Social Security. He won’t touch it.

He’s already said as much. So how does the United States retain supremacy, not only financially, but militarily, when everything like military spending, which is discretional, will have to be borrowed? We are well past the Rubicon, if you will, of doing anything conventional. So maybe that is why they’re thinking of revaluing gold, because you can inflate as they always do.

You can default. I talked about finding a villain over the last several years. And then the current administration won that villain what has shown itself, I think, in the BRICS nations, in Xi Jinping, in Putin, in OPEC, in ditching the dollar and the madness that we saw the last four years.

So maybe this reinstalls our culture and some confidence in the system. This new administration doesn’t really address at all the fiscal and monetary problems. In fact, they’re going to continue to grow.

So what is the option? That’s why I keep coming back to revaluing gold as being the most benign option. I think it wouldn’t surprise me one bit at all to see that happen. But you’re right.

The debt problem is something that must be addressed. I look at it as Andy Dufresne crawling through the two-mile tube of crap in the Shawshank Redemption to get to the other side. There is reason to be optimistic.

Look, all of what Trump is trying to do, and if I’m right, planning on doing, I think ultimately makes us a better country for our kids and our grandkids. But you still got that tube to crawl through. When you have messed with the world reserve currency, suppressed interest rates, and created all of these distortions, misallocations of resources and capital, and incentivized massive indebtedness, you got a tube of crap to crawl through to get to the other side.

There’s no way around it. I think that is something that people need to understand, that yes, we should be optimistic for what lies ahead, many years ahead perhaps. But in order to get to that benefit, we have to suffer with a little bit of short-term pain.

And I’m concerned about it. I think most people should. But I will say this, you look at what the smartest, most well-informed, not just well-funded, most well-informed traders in the globe are doing, and they’re gobbling up all of the world’s commodities, and in particular right now, gold and silver.

So don’t do as I say. Do what the central bankers are doing, and if anything, they know the script. Just like they front-ran the tier one revision, just like they always front-run the information.

Like Paul Pelosi, you tell him he’s that good of an investor, or did he front-run some information he knew? The people inside front-run, and that’s what the central bankers are doing right now. That’s the playbook, if you ask me. Yeah, yeah.

I’m glad to get back in the gold conversation, and it’ll kind of wrap us up here. Where do you see the gold price at the end of the year? And I know it’s crazy, but the end of the decade, and I know there are two different timelines, but I was reading this post on X from Luke Grohman, and we’ll show it here. It says, quote, as impressive as the rally in gold is, the market value of US official gold is only holding back 9% of foreign-held USTs.

Now, we have to get to 20%, 6,300, just to get back to their 1989 levels when the US unipolar moment began, a 40%, $12,600 just to get back to the LT average. Let’s watch. What are your thoughts on these targets? That’s exactly what I’m saying.

I mean, Luke is one of the smartest guys on the planet. No question. The dude is outrageously brilliant, and in essence, what he’s saying is gold would need to be 12,600 to get to that.

Well, James Rickard says 24,000. James Sinclair said 10,000. Now, these are all numbers that would require some form of a revaluation.

If we just looked at history as an example, the last 25 years, gold has averaged 9.9% per year on average. It was up 30% last year. It’s up way over that just in the few months.

So to put a number on it would be nothing other than guessing because there’s so many things that could change that. An easy answer would be 10% higher. That’s what it’s average on par on average for 30 years.

But I have a feeling something big is happening. And I will tell you, in 35 years of doing this, Jeremy, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening right now. Never, ever.

So my guess would be higher than people think possible. And I will tell you, in 35 years, when I started in this industry, the Dow Jones was 2,100, and the Nikkei was about 30,000. And I went to a conference in 1990 as a 20-year-old starting this company with my father.

And guy says, the Dow Jones is going to go to 10,000. He was literally booed and laughed off the stage. And it went four times that high.

At the same time, Japan back then owned, and the Nikkei was about 40,000. They owned Rockefeller Center, Pebble Beach Golf Courses, casinos in Vegas, ski resorts in Colorado, anything with an engine or a motherboard they made better. They were taking over the world.

And it just recently, let’s look at it right now, but I know it just recently, for the first time in 35 years, came back to where it was when I was in this industry. Right now, it’s 39,000. So here we are, 35 years later, and it’s just back to where it was when I started in this industry.

It took a whole generation to get that high. So what I’m getting at is that markets will always fall farther than anyone ever thinks possible to the downside, and they’ll always go higher than anyone thinks possible to the downside. I will tell you this.

Most of my career, gold was probably $400 or less. If you would have told me we’d be knocking on the door of 3,000 and the public, you hear them? No, neither do I. They’re sleeping. The public in this country has been misdirected into shiny things on the risk-on trade in NVIDIA and Bitcoin and Apple, and has completely missed this rally to 3,000 to where the product inventory, you can ask the operations at Kitco.

They’ll tell you the product inventory that they’re holding, that we’re holding, that all the main distributors are holding, they’re drowning in right now because the public’s asleep. And if you would have told me that was happening, I would have said, you’re out of your damn mind. I’ll bet you anything.

Now, you put it in conjunction with the biggest scramble at the upper levels by the central banks to accumulate metal and repatriate it. It’s the greatest contrarian indicator I’ve ever seen. And you ask legendary investors like Rick Rule, Rick, how’d you make the most money? He’d say, buying when no one else was.

And this is as contrarian as anything I’ve ever seen. Now, there are people buying, the people that know the playbook, but the retail investor, they’re missing this one, Jeremy. They’re missing it completely and totally.

So- Do you think it’s just entry points? I think it’s a whole lot higher than people are prepared to accept. And when it gets to that level, they’ll say, geez, did we miss this? Looks like we missed it. And you could say a lot of people said the same thing about Bitcoin.

I’m not opining on Bitcoin. I’m just simply saying it can run away really fast. And by the looks of it, things are setting up for that to happen.

Now, I’m not saying it’s gonna, but I will tell you everything I see would certainly be the steps that I would see happen in order for it to jettison. And I want it to be very clearly understood. When I talk about gold and silver, to me, it’s wealth.

It’s not an investment. It’s been wealth for 5,000 years through two world wars, German hyperinflation, the Great Depression, every pandemic, and everything the world’s thrown at it. And through all of that, 5,000 years later, what do we see? Well, it’s now the only other tier one asset and the central banks can’t get ahold of it fast enough or bring it home fast enough.

And they’re not doing that with anything else, including Bitcoin. Do what they’re doing. Don’t listen to the noise.

That’s the best advice I could give someone, not from me, but from what the insiders are doing. And they always know the playbook and they always position before the people figure it out. Even the people who are very, very well read on the mainstream, financial mainstream, they’re just, most of them reading the wrong stuff and are being misdirected into the wrong place and allowing the central banks to pickpocket all of the available institutional-sized bars up above.

That’ll bleed its way down here. And very quickly, what is a massive overhang in supply, just like that, disappears. I’ve seen it many times, but the backdrop we see right now is 10 times anything I’ve ever seen.

Yeah. And that’s where the generational wealth happens too. And to your point, I mean, before I let you go here, Andy, we’re just giving the whole thesis there.

I mean, central banks front running, and they have been for an entire year. Now we have this squeeze. Why is the retail market not coming in? Is it just because it’s too high of an entry point? I mean, I always get asked covering this topic.

They always say things like, okay, you’re talking about a shortage, but if demand is so high, why isn’t the price moving up faster? We’re up 15% year to date, and it’s the middle of February. It’s moving up. And it’s moved up continuously, but we have a whole generation of investors where that ain’t sexy, right? You’re supposed to instant gratification.

It’s not fast enough, I need it faster now, yesterday. And if you don’t make triple digit gains in a period of a couple of weeks, well, that’s stupid. I’ll just create my own meme coin, or I’ll buy a crypto, or look at Nvidia, and that has created FOMO.

And it’s a dopamine rush, really, when you’re making all that money and you figure you’re a genius. But look what happened in Nvidia when the AI program from China came out, fell 20% in a week, or in a day, rather. You don’t see that with gold.

What you basically see is that you have a whole, well, and I guess there’s one other point with that too, at least right now, and that is that, I mean, 2021, 2022, 2023 was insane, business-wise. And it’s still good right now, but the public is not part of it, largely. And after what we lived through in the last four years, I was very vocal.

I come from nothing, man, nothing. My dad, his middle name is Miles, and his best friend who lent us 60 grand to start this business in an office the size of a closet, before the internet, his middle name was Franklin. We’re the least likely cast of characters to have ever succeeded.

I outworked people in athletics, in finance, in business, always have, and no one gave me anything. And when we went to this world away from merit-based qualities to lifestyle-based and all of the problems with the judicial system, the electoral system, the immigration, the lawlessness in the cities, this wokeness, this craziness, I mean, I looked at it with disdain, far more disdain than anything I saw fiscal and monetary-related. And I was very vocal about it.

And I think a lot of people deep down felt the same way. And you get Trump in who’s quickly re-establishing the ideals of what it has always meant, the meritocracy. And I’ve done two interviews with Cash Patel, might be the smartest dude I’ve ever met in my life.

He looks right through your soul when he looks at you, re-establish credibility in the FBI, in the Justice Department, with immigration, with elections, he wants to do the digital ID. All of these things, people are thrilled. Yeah, we’re getting our culture back.

And you know what? Hope springs eternal. Let’s go out and buy. This is going to keep going.

Let’s go. Let’s buy tech. Let’s buy Apple.

Let’s buy Nvidia, Bitcoin. He’s a Bitcoin president. Everyone is buying the risk on trade.

And it’s interesting that the most knowledgeable investors in the world are buying gold, that being the central banks. So it’s misdirection. It’s the art of war.

Sun Tzu, misdirect your opponent, win the battle without throwing a punch. That’s what’s happening right now. So I don’t know why they’re missing it.

And I’ll tell you, if it weren’t for naked shorting on COMEX and the LBMA, prices would be a whole hell of a lot higher. And we don’t know what the real price is. Maybe we’ll find out.

But those who are saying gold didn’t do anything, I will remind them that over the last 30 years, it has outpaced every single traditional investment on the planet. It has averaged 9.9% per year. It’s up about 900%.

And it’s beaten the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested. It’s doubled the 10-year treasury. But it’s the tortoise, not the heron.

No one noticed the tortoise the whole way until the finish line. And maybe there were a tortoise. Why aren’t you seeing the tortoise? He’s over there.

All they see is the hare running by. And I think in the end, that will bear truth. My mentor Richard Russell said, if you make 7% per year, you’re a rock star.

You will go down as a legendary investor. That ain’t cool anymore. That ain’t sexy.

But in the end, what goes around comes around. And I think that what Richard said will be proven to be true. This is an anomaly in terms of historical context of markets.

Things don’t move like this. And people have ignored gold because it just isn’t sexy enough. Yeah.

Well, we’ll see about the next moves over the next few months here. Andy Checkman is the president and owner of Miles Precious Metals. Thank you so much, Andy.

So much to think about. And again, we got 5,000 years of this metal. We got some history to look back at.

Yeah, man. I mean, if we’re comparing it to just about anything else, there’s really nothing else that has stood the test of time and has not only retained its purchasing power. But here we are, 5,000 years later, and the most knowledgeable investors in the world are still scrambling for it.

It has to mean something. Yeah. Well said.

Thanks, Andy. Appreciate it. We’ll get you on soon, OK? Pleasure is mine.

I always love coming on your show. And I hope you and everyone else out there stays well. But thanks for having me on.

Thanks, Bob. Appreciate it, as always. What do you think about all this? Leave a comment below.

And be sure to hit the subscribe button. I’m Jeremy Safran. For all of us here at KeepCode News, thanks for watching.

We’ll see you soon.