Will Gold Rise During Trump’s 2025 Agenda? (Uncut) 01-28-2025

How many of you are residents of the Banana Republic to the south of the border here? Not that many. Oh, I’m safe. Okay.

I was worried about having to dodge tomatoes here. Let me say, okay, let’s be very specific. How many of you think Trump is the most honest president the United States or any country has ever had? Somebody want to raise their hand.

Most honest. Never mind anything else. Most honest.

Okay. One hand. All right.

Okay. So that limits the number of tomatoes I’m going to get. I do not believe Trump is the most honest man I’ve ever met.

I have serious issues with Trump. But let me just say, I’m not actually anti-Trump agenda. I’m all in favor of cutting taxes.

I’m all in favor of cutting regulation. I would love to see Elon and Vivek get in there with Millet’s chainsaw and reduce federal spending. So I’m not hostile to this.

But I am an independent speculator and I’m trying to look at the real world and I’m trying to share the best guidance I possibly can. I’m not here to gild a lily. I’m not here to blow sunshine up your beep.

I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear. And I’m glad I’m doing this in Canada because in the United States the ratios would have been reversed and I would have to have a plastic shield up here for what I’m about to say. The bottom line here, and I am going to get to actionable ideas, but let me lay the context out here.

The Trump trade for 2025. There is a serious conflict between Trump’s overall agenda, his promise to the American people and his specific policies. If you’re going to slap universal tariffs on everything coming from this country and others tomorrow, that will have consequences.

And it won’t make anything cheaper. So if you promise to end this evil Biden inflation, fortunately Trump didn’t say he’d do this in 24 hours like end the war in Ukraine, another very credible promise. But he did say he would do it.

And his language is very much in short order. Like he’s going to get in there and he’s going to fix that bad boy. He’s going to fix everything right away.

It’s going to be great. It’s going to be the greatest. We had the worst economy in history today or yesterday and we’re going to have the best economy in history tomorrow or next week.

Maybe let’s give them a month. The 100 days honeymoon. Does anybody find this credible? Anybody want to raise their hand? That’s going to happen.

Okay. Standing room only, out in the hallway, not a single person raised their hand. You’re not idiots.

You’re right. You’re being rational. Good.

No rotten tomatoes for me today. At least not so far. This has implications.

When you over promise and under deliver, what happens? The Trump trade of 2025 is high volatility. Extreme volatility. I mean, there’s a lot we can guess about what will happen, what won’t happen.

What will these measures tomorrow be? Frankly, since Trump wants to cut inflation, it would be almost clinically insane to slap tariffs on Canadian energy, raw materials, copper, critical minerals. That would just be so counterproductive. How could you possibly do these two opposite things? We have a president-elect who’s known for chaos, so maybe possible isn’t the right word there.

But you see where I’m going with this? We don’t know. I think there’s a pretty good chance that he’s not entirely stupid and the people around him aren’t entirely stupid and he’s talking tariffs on everything. But if your goal is to protect US jobs, you’re not going to slap tariffs on the raw materials that feed into those jobs.

Maybe Canadian cars or finished products or those from China, but not raw materials. So we’ll have to see. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

Nobody’s seen the written text of this executive order that will do these tariffs. There are a lot of guesses about what those will be. There’s no knowledge.

What we do know, though, is that it’ll be exciting. There will be volatility. There will be fireworks.

This is the one sure thing about what’s coming ahead. And not to get too scary here, but I just got to put this out there because I think it’s for real. I don’t know exactly, you know, I’ve never met Trump.

I don’t know what he’s thinking. But from what he said, this I can end the war in 24 hours claim, it seems that his idea is we cut Ukraine off. We tell Zelensky, sorry, bud, you’re on your own.

No more money, no more guns, no more bombs. You better go make a deal with Putin. That would be a way that I could see in his head, Trump would say, this would end it in a day.

We could just finish this and stop all the suffering and wasting money. But if that’s the deal, if that’s the art of the deal, what on earth is the incentive to Putin to agree to that? If Putin’s enemy is being cut off at the knees, I can see him saying, I’m sending in more tanks. I’m winning.

My enemy just got cut off. Why would I negotiate for peace? Well, maybe because the U.S. will threaten and will produce more oil and will cut off your revenue. Well, Trump’s going to do that anyway.

Drill, baby, drill. I mean, how’s he going to tell Putin, no, just kidding. We’ll leave oil prices high.

Now, I’m just a rock kicker, right? I’m Doug Casey’s due diligence guy for almost 15 years, and now I do it myself. I’m not a political analyst. I’m not a military analyst.

But I got to look at the world because the mainstream media isn’t going to tell me what’s going on. And I got to think about it myself. And all I’m saying here is there’s a risk here.

Like if Trump goes into this thing in Ukraine and it doesn’t go the way he hopes, there is a non-zero chance of this getting much, much worse. And by the way, if he succeeds and Russia wins, takes a larger chunk of Ukraine, what does that tell China? Hey, guess what? We’re not defending our friends. Go ahead and take Taiwan.

I’m not making a prediction. I’m not promising anything. I’m just saying, you know, the volatility that we’re talking about here isn’t just in, you know, you’re not going to see it in the VIX.

The volatility here is the potential here is extreme. So what do we do in a case like this? Well, it may seem obvious. You don’t need to hear me say this is not rocket science.

By the way, I think rocket science is easier than cutting the United States government spending. Like people have launched rockets. People just caught rockets.

I just saw Elon Musk catch a rocket in Texas. I was there a couple days ago. But I have never seen anybody cut the United States government spending, I mean, after World War II.

But, you know, I just, sorry, I don’t think they’re going to do it. They have no power to do it. The most power Elon and maybe Vivek and Trump can bring to bear is you go along with me or we’ll primary you, right? It’s an advisory commission, like the grace commission.

They can’t make Congress do anything. All they can do is threaten them. But you know, you threaten a guy and say you go along or we’ll primary you and what you want him to go along with is closing the big military base in his district, he’s going to lose anyway.

Again, I don’t want to get too far down this road. I just want to say the potential for volatility here is not just in the stock market or the bond market. You’re not going to see it in the VIX.

You’re going to see it in real life. Therefore, the most obvious number one thing to do is what? Buy gold. Come on.

And I’m willing to say that with gold near nominal all-time highs because I don’t see buying gold as a speculation on higher prices. I call it the gold dollar exchange ratio. Or even as an investment.

It’s because it’s savings. It’s insurance. It is real wealth that you can hold in your hand and use in case of extreme need.

And I have done this myself in my life. Okay, it was mostly silver. But I’ve had a case of extreme need where I had no other choice and boy, was I glad I had bullion that I could turn to when I needed it.

So hear what I’m saying. I’m not saying, hey, go out and buy $2,800 gold. It’s going to the moon tomorrow.

That’s not what I’m saying. It’s more like Rick Rule. I own gold because I’m afraid it may go to $10,000.

That’s my reason for saying that. Now, as far as making money, I’ve got one more thing to contribute here. And I said the only certainty is extreme volatility.

I think the next closest thing to certainty is the continuation of what Lynn Alden calls fiscal dominance. Or Michael Howell’s global liquidity theme. And this is global, not just U.S. You Canadians know a little bit about this too.

And that means more inflation. And it’s really interesting to me that we’ve got this substantial uptick in inflation in the United States. Even the headline CPI, whatever the massaging and the numbers that they bandy about back there, the target of the Fed is CPI.

They like the other measures better. But the goal is CPI. And it’s been going up since September now, last September.

This is huge. And they’ll say, oh, it’s just a bump on the road down to 2%. Well, guess what? It’s not just happening in the United States.

Well, A, it’s not just a bump on the road. You go up months, that’s a trend. And B, it’s happening around the world, global liquidity.

This is a real problem, and it’s not going away. And the Trump agenda, if you’re going to cut taxes on tips and overtime and firefighters and everybody, and you’re not, you have a plan, a hope to recommend spending cuts, but you have no power to actually do that, you’re looking at a continuation of wartime levels of deficit spending. That’s fiscal dominance.

And I think that drives inflation higher. And that has implications for all of us as resource investors. I mentioned gold as savings, that physical gold.

But I actually think that gold stocks are not a bad bet for volatility this year. I mean, if you get the scare angle and more safe haven demand for gold, that should give us leverage to at least the better stocks. The GDX didn’t do so well last year, but you all know if you look at the majors, the ones that delivered in spades and the ones that didn’t, it’s very clear that if you’re a good stock picker, or at least go with the obvious better operators, you did quite well.

You did better than gold betting on the better gold stocks last year. I think we’ll see that again this year. So even if gold doesn’t go to the moon, or even if it doesn’t hit, you know, the major Wall Street institutions are calling for 3000 plus gold, you know, that’s pretty interesting.

But I think the better stocks will deliver capital gains here. I think all real assets, including all commodities, not just monetary metals, are actually a good thing to look at in times of extreme volatility and fiscal dominance. And the one sort of more practical takeaway, I don’t give away free stock picks.

How many people are clients? So you all know, I’m not going to give away the stock picks that you paid me for. I never do that, and sometimes I get booed off the stage, but sorry. But I will give you a strategy that I’ve been talking about with the independent speculator clients, and that is, you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Extreme volatility. Things might go down, they might go up. We don’t know.

But one way to play that uncertainty is to sell puts. Now, if you’re not into options trading, this may sound arcane or whatever, but I think this is one of the four main categories of options. It’s not rocket science.

You can do this on a free Schwab account. If you sell puts, that means you’re offering to buy at a lower price in the future. You’re committing to buy at a lower price in the future if it gets hit.

So if you sell puts on something you’d want to own anyway, let’s say you love one of the big gold royalty companies, but it’s not cheap anymore. It’s gone way up. But extreme volatility just whacks it hard for no good reason.

Like, gold went down when Trump won the election. Let’s say something happens next week or next month that does something similar, and the very best gold royalty company in the world, or the most, you know, high margin gold producer in the world goes on sale 30, 40, 50%. If you sell a put and you get put on that, then you get a chance to buy that stock at a very low price.

That’s a good thing. That’s making volatility your friend, as Doug Casey likes to say. And if it doesn’t happen, it’s not like, you know, a call option where you spend money and then if it doesn’t come in, then you lose your money.

If you sell the put and nothing happens, you still make the money from selling the put. Right? There’s a long for your short. Somebody paid you for the chance to be able to sell you these stocks in the future.

So this is a win-win way to play volatility. If you sell a put, not on just anything, it has to be something that’s, I wouldn’t do it on a single asset company, because if, you know, the legendary endangered mosquito is discovered on their main property and it goes to zero, you don’t want to be put that stock. It has to be something that you have high confidence isn’t going away.

It has to be something that you want to own anyway, or maybe own more of. Like, this is just the cat’s meow in your eye and it’s got away from you or it’s not trading cheap. So sell puts.

You get paid no matter what. And if volatility, if I’m right about extreme volatility, you might actually be able to get shares in that at a terrific price that you would love to pay. So, the Trump trade for 2025 is extreme volatility, look for ways to make volatility your friend, seek security in bullion, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you guys that, but consider this put option.

There’s a way to get paid even if things don’t go the way we expect. And if you get a terrific opportunity, then remember the formula for successful speculation is buy low, sell high. It’s not buy high and hope to sell higher.

So those are my remarks. I have time for a few more questions. Yes, sir.

The question is what about antimony? As long as that lasts, that’s investable. The problem is that it exists by political fiat. And suppose Trump and Xi make a deal and China just says tomorrow or the day after, oh, antimony’s fine again.

So I’m not saying it’s a bad bet. I’m saying it’s not a structural thing. It’s not like there’s not going to be enough copper over the next decades.

It exists by political fiat and that can go away tomorrow. So that makes me nervous. Okay.

By the way, that applies to rare earths and a whole lot of anything like that where the opportunity exists by political fiat. I see that more as a gamble than a disciplined speculation. Yes, sir.

Oh, is the hard landing call off? Yeah. So one of the things about fiscal dominance is my call for 2024, by the way, my highest conviction trade in 23 was uranium. That worked out really well.

My highest conviction trade in 24 was gold. That worked out really well. But my reason for it was undeniable recession by the end of 2024.

That did not work out well. Now, you could argue that there has been recession in commodities and transportation and in very various sectors. Manufacturing is still in recession.

But that’s not what I said. I said undeniable recession by the end of 2024. So I just need to fess up and say that that didn’t happen.

But the reasons there, I just saw an interview of Lizanne Saunders from Charles Schwab. And I don’t remember who did the interview, but if you Google it or search for it on YouTube, you’ll be able to find it. And she really walks through the case that, you know, no, recessions aren’t necessarily a thing of the past.

But basically, you know, Lindahl’s fiscal dominance means that they don’t look the way they used to. You know, the powers that be. So my call was for undeniable recession by the end of 2024, but not, you know, soup lines around the block for years.

My call was that then the money helicopters would fly and we’d see a rebound in commodities prices. And so I think what I got wrong on the fiscal dominance side is that the money helicopters never stopped flying. I mean, since 2020, since the COVID lockdowns, they’re still in the air.

We are still looking at trillion, multi-trillion dollar deficits. Of course, that’s propping up asset prices and even employment in the real economy for as long as it lasts, though that’s showing signs. So I’ve walked that back.

I’m no longer saying undeniable recession or hard landing. I see no reason to believe that fiscal dominance will change under the new administration. So you could call it a soft landing if you want.

I think of it as more like a masked recession. You know, parts of the economy in recession, parts not. But the bottom line, though, is the money helicopters are there.

They’re in the air now. And Trump wants to launch more of them. So that’s bullish for commodities.

I got 25 seconds. The one thing I would say, just remember, the last time Trump started this with China in 2017, copper took it on the chin. Mining stocks writ large went down for like six months.

It took a while to recover from the initial salvos of the trade war. So even though everything I’ve said I think is ultimately bullish for commodities, beware of the near-term Trump shock. And that’s why I’m talking selling puts and taking advantage of volatility.

All right. That’s it. Thank you very much.