Will Trump Send Silver To $100? (Uncut) 01-28-2025

Will Trump Send Silver To $100? Change Is Happening Now | Gary Thompson

We’re continuing our coverage of the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference 2025. And with us now is Gary Thompson, CEO of Silver 47. Welcome back to the show.

Hey, David. Great to be here. Silver 47, 47th element on the periodic table of elements.

That’s where the name comes from. The atomic number for silver is 47. That’s right.

The plan for Silver 47, we’ll be talking about that for the rest of the year. What do you plan to achieve? What are the major milestones that’s coming up for the company? But first, let’s talk about this chart that I showed you offline, silver versus gold. Now, great year for gold, as we know, new all-time highs, record highs.

It’s up about 32% over the last 12 months. Silver is up as well. Great year, 34%.

And my question is why silver isn’t up more? Because in the past, silver has had a higher beta to gold, which means historically in bull markets, silver has dramatically outperformed. If you just take a look at this chart, there have been periods, if you scroll back, when silver has just gone, silver is this, is the bar chart here. And there have been some periods in the past when, you know, silver has just gone up a lot more.

You see 98% from 2019 to 2023 versus gold’s 62%, for example. So, you know, what’s the story here now? Why isn’t silver moving in lockstep with gold, or why isn’t it moving as much? Why isn’t it moving higher? Yeah. Well, I think a lot of silver enthusiasts would argue that it should be, and it likely will.

It is generally a smaller market compared to the gold market. I would argue that it’s, you know, easier to manage or manipulate by the short position. So there’s a lot of short positions on silver, and it’s just, you know, I think the whole mining business has become a niche in the relative capital markets.

The size of the mining industry, if you combine all the miners in the world, we’re what, a few trillion dollars. You’ve got one tech company that’s bigger than the whole mining industry, and then the banks are playing with trillions of dollars now. So I think our business has become a bit of a niche-y business, and that just opens it up for shorting positions.

I think there’s a lot of shorts that are putting pressure on not only gold, but silver too. But it also has the potential to outperform gold, as many know. When that’s going to come, how that evolves, I think that’s a challenge where basically the metals market is fighting the paper market, and there’s a lot of paper overlaying on this market.

You know, it’s interesting because you bring that up, because premiums on bullion have been going up ever since Trump announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico. So you see a big divergence between the spot market and the paper market in 2025, you think? I think so. I think if you just look at the, you know, recorded deficits, we’re going into year four of a couple hundred million plus deficits in silver.

How long can you run those kind of deficits when countries like India and China and Russia continue to absorb physical at a pretty staggering pace? So I think the appetite for physical is going to have to force the market to recalibrate into higher prices. This is silver versus copper. They’ve moved pretty much in lockstep over the last 12 months, and I believe silver is often a byproduct of copper veins, correct? Correct.

Yeah. Silver is a byproduct of, well, only 30% of silver in the world comes from primary silver mines. Most of the world’s silver is a byproduct of other metal mines, including copper, gold, base metals.

So do you expect this relationship between silver and other industrial metals to continue then? I think so, yeah. In terms of the price, that is? Yeah. Yeah.

Will it trade more like gold or copper, do you think? Well, that’s a good chart with the copper. I think we’re seeing more interest in silver for industrial demand than we’ve ever seen in solar, in AI, in battery technology. There’s never been this amount of demand for industrial purposes, and I saw a chart recently that I’ve always been using that sort of 60% industrial, 40% investment, and I saw a chart recently for 2004 numbers showing it going as high as 70% industrial purposes.

So we’re seeing a bigger demand for industrial. So while it trades a bit like it follows gold, but it also, it’s kind of in the middle now. In fact, you could argue it’s more industrial, but we’re seeing countries like China and India and Russia accumulate silver much like gold bullion, and just to have that store wealth as well as the industrial purposes.

So it’s kind of a unique metal, and from that perspective. What are some of the biggest policy changes you’re looking forward to for the next administration, which is Trump’s administration? Inauguration week is this week. How does Trump impact the silver industry? Well, let’s say the silver industry, but in mining in general.

I think what I’m seeing, of course, we’ll see what actually happens versus some of the verbiage coming out of what he’d like to do, but I think it’s very positive for the business in general. Maybe not as aggressive as Argentina’s President Millet that took the chainsaw to the bureaucracy. I think President-elect Trump is going to try and reduce bureaucracy.

He made a statement that if you want to develop a project, you bring a billion dollars into the U.S. for development, that you’re going to have a green light on development projects. So that’s music to our ears as resource explorationists and developers. We want to see these projects get developed, and we need to see a fast track to development, and I think that coming into play is not only going to change the U.S., it’s going to change Canada and other Western countries are going to have to follow suit, or we’re going to get left behind for the timelines to develop projects.

So I would argue right now that the U.S. is the place to invest for resource development in the near term, just because of those change in policies and reduction in bureaucracy. Okay. Now, specifically, Alaska.

Tell us about that region and the jurisdiction there. Yeah, so Silver 47’s project is about 100 kilometers south of Fairbanks. We’re actually on state-managed lands, but Alaska generally is quite a favorable jurisdiction for resource development.

But under the previous administration, there’s been several projects that have been sidelined because of, again, bureaucracy, perhaps environmental reasons, but more just red tape. As much as they’re claiming they need critical minerals, they’ve been putting the kibosh on development of a lot of major projects in the U.S. But Alaska, for us, I think we benefit from the support of the state. So we’re on state-managed lands, so the federal jurisdiction is less of an issue for us.

We’ve already have a sort of a pro-mining view from the state and support from the state to fast-track these projects. So maybe less of an issue for us specifically on our project, but in general, again, it’s part of the U.S. state, so I think it’s going to be positive for Alaska in general. Now, in terms of mining and trends in the mining sector, I’ve heard that consolidation is a major theme for 2025.

Is that something that you’ve heard as well? Yeah, well, we’re seeing it happen. We’re starting to see more activity on the M&A front, just some recent transactions in the Silver space specifically. Yeah, I think that theme is going to continue.

I’m a big advocate for consolidation. I think the juniors need to get bigger. We as junior companies, collectively, are too small, and in this business raising capital, it’s all about scale, and I think the bigger you are, the easier it is to raise capital.

So it’s increasingly difficult for small companies to raise sufficient capital to do their exploration and do their work. So I think the M&A theme continuing to move will help actually generate more interest in the space, because who’s next on the takeover list? As you go down the list from companies that are probable takeovers, the list gets smaller and smaller, so that kind of feeds into more money coming into the explorers to get those assets up to that food chain, right? You bring these early-stage projects up the food chain for miners. I mean, every mining company out there needs to grow, and how do you grow? It’s either through the drill bit or through M&A, and M&A is quicker and easier to add big ounces to your bottom line.

So I think that theme is going to continue and will continue, and perhaps help to accelerate more activity in the space in general. Okay. And what’s next for your company? Major milestones.

Yeah, for Silver 47, so we just got listed in November 24, so it’s only been a few months trading. We had some good results that we put out post-listing. Some really impressive gold-silver hits, actually better recoveries, better grade than historical.

I think two and a half meters of 2,900-gram silver equivalent, so some pretty impressive hits there. Next steps for us is really to get back to drilling. So we’ve got a bit of winter road, winter trail work that we want to do that will allow us to get materials in there, because we technically can’t drive to it, so there’s a bit of work to do to get materials in there, just to help reduce our overall up costs.

So the plan for this summer, the milestones is really to… What we want to do is get enough drilling so that we can show our resource growth year over year. So we’ve got a substantial resource of 15.6 million tons at 336-gram per ton silver equivalent, so that gives us about just under 170 million silver equivalent ounces. What we’d like to see is more in that 30-million-ton, 40-million-ton resource, so if we could get a couple aggressive years on the drilling side, we could move this in toward… The goal would be to move it into a PEA stage.

Do you think you’re raising more money anytime soon? Yeah, I mean, look, we’re an exploration company. By the way, you just listed on the TSX, so congratulations for that. That’s true, yeah, we just listed.

AGA is the ticker. I mean, yeah, look, we’re always looking to raise capital. We always try and raise the capital at the best time to raise capital.

When’s the best time? When silver goes to 50 bucks? Yeah, of course, when you see a window, and what we’ve seen is the window of opportunity to raise capital, they’re narrow. So when you see a bit of a rally in the commodity price, investors tend to get excited about it, and there’s more investors available to tap that, so you’ve got to kind of pick your windows of opportunity to raise the capital. One of the common themes of this conference that we’re attending in Vancouver is why the mining companies, a lot of the junior ones, any of the major ones, have not been keeping up with the underlying commodities, right? Gold and silver up about 34% over the last 12 months, and we haven’t seen that performance across the board for all mining companies.

Why not? Yeah, you know, it’s a good question, and we get that a lot in general. My sense is that, you know, it’s an old business, been around forever. Investors tend to like new shiny things.

You’ve got a tech sector that’s been on fire the last number of years, where you can put money into these major companies, they’re trillion-dollar companies, and they move like junior mining companies should move. So there’s been a competition for capital. You’ve got a ton of money going into cryptocurrencies, trillions of dollars now into cryptocurrencies.

So that’s taking money away that would normally historically go into miners and exploration development companies. So it’s a bit of a technical challenge, I think, for a lot of investors to understand what it takes to make a good mining company or maybe an exploration company even tougher when you don’t have a resource. Those are tougher nuts to crack.

But what is the thesis for buying a junior explorer versus just buying silver itself? Well, it’s the torque on the equity. So you’re going to have… The good thing about gold and silver in your vault or in your safe box is that you have that security against inflation. That’s metal that’s going to show to gain value over time.

What equity does for you, similarly, you have exposure to gold and silver through equities, but you get that torque on a market that can be quite volatile to the upside. So people buy these things in anticipation that we’re going to see a move, a higher move in metal prices, thus a higher move in equities. That’s the whole reason you buy it.

Or you buy it on a spec play that perhaps they’re the next takeover target. Or you just want exposure to the metal and you sit there long term on a major company that sort of creeps up over time as they generate a lot of cash in their operations. These big companies are generating a lot of cash.

What are you going to do with all that cash? So that cash has to go somewhere, either to M&A or perhaps deploying it back into the ground into other junior companies, perhaps. Have you noticed M&A premiums change this year versus last year, for example? In other words, if someone were to offer you a takeout bid today, would that premium be higher or lower than, let’s say, two years ago? Yeah, I think it’s variable. I would say that the premiums are getting better, higher premiums.

I don’t have the stats on that, what are the actual premiums, but just kind of looking at some of the transactions recently, they seem to be fairly positive, i.e. not takeover at market takeovers. I think there’s more premiums, especially for the high caliber opportunities to get them. What you don’t want is to put in a stinker bid and then have somebody come over the top and outbid you.

So I think your bids have to be sufficient enough to thwart any potential competitor takeover guys that would come in. Would there be any preferences for partners that you would work with in terms of where they operate, where the type of business model that they have? That we would prefer? Yeah. For where we are, yeah, I mean, we do have open pit underground potential.

I think just good operators that are efficient operators. Not specifically anyone that I would isolate and name, but there certainly are some good operators out there. I mean, our goal is to move this thing along the development curves ourselves.

I mean, I’d love to see this project go into a development scenario. And I’m an explorationist, so I can’t sit here to say that I built a mine, but I can certainly bring in the talent that have built mines and we can move it along the curve. So our objective really is to unlock the value.

I mean, we’re sitting at a $30 million market cap company. So unlock the value through expansion on our resource. We have the grade.

We’ve got good, you know, we’ve got grade. We have scale. We’ve got a massive project with 60 kilometers of trend.

Tell us about your grade. Yeah, so the resource grade, this 15.6 million tons is coming in at 336 silver equivalent grade. So that’s equivalent to four grams of gold on a gold equivalency basis, just for easy numbers for people.

And you can do the math on that. That’s like $300 to $350 rock. So good value rock.

When your underground mining costs are in that $120 per ton underground mine, open pits are in that sort of $20 to $30 range. So you can see the potential for quite good margins here. And so we just need to get it bigger and get it to a point where we could see a path for maybe 5,000, 10,000 ton a day operation.

So to get that, you need 30, 40 million tons of material of those kind of grades. And I think you’ve got a really good opportunity to generate high margins for 10-year mine life kind of thing. Can you comment on the geology overall of the area that you’re operating and how it differs from, let’s say, another part of the US, Nevada, for example, or South America that’s rich in silver? Yeah, so where we are, we’re in Devonian Age sediments and volcanic rocks that are obviously we’re flat lying.

So we’re dealing with a volcanogenic mass of sulfide. These are volcanic vents that form on the ocean floor that spew out sulfides. And then they get layered down.

So they form in these layered formations. They start in mounds and then kind of a layer cake scenario. And there’s some folding because they’ve now been thrusted up onto land.

So there’s a little bit of folding, but they’re gentle folds. So they’re rather continuous strata. So our West Tundra flat zone is pretty much a flat horizon that continues.

We think it’s about a kilometer by kilometer and a half zone that’s wide open. We don’t know where the limits of this thing are, but it’s rather layer cake material, whereas the Dry Creek has a bit of a moderate steeply dip to the zone. So there’s been some folding that has caused it to go a little bit steeper.

So it is volcanogenic mass of sulfide. It is zinc forward. We have the uniqueness of precious and base metals.

So gold, silver, and zinc, and lead, and copper, polymetallic. It’s about 50% zinc on their actual resource, and about 40% precious metals, and then some copper and lead in there as well. So our mission is to focus in on the precious metal part of the system, because some of these VMSs can be quite rich in precious metals and can have a lot of gold and silver in them.

While there’s been a lot of work historically on the project, there’s still lots of room to find new deposits and for new discoveries. We have a 60 kilometer trend, and most of the drilling has been focused on the 39,000 meters that have been drilled to date, mostly by other operators, has been focused on the two resource areas that we have under a resource now. What are some of the pros and cons of an open pit mine that you are? Well, open pit is generally a lower cost.

But the con for an open pit is that, what do you do with the waste rock? So you end up having to have a tailings pile. And you’ve seen some situations over the last few years where these tailings dams have breached, so they cause some potential environmental harm there. Whereas underground, you tend to be more isolated on the zone.

They’re a little bit higher cost for an underground operation, but you can isolate the material. Is this usually a management choice, or are you limited by the rock? It’s usually a cost benefit analysis you do on engineering, on what’s the optimum scenario, whether it’s open pit or underground. Most people go with open pit just because it’s cheaper.

But there is another relatively new bulk underground mining called block cave, which if you have the right situation where it’s a lot of material deep underground, which is now becoming cost competitive to open pit for a large scale underground operation. But I don’t see us block caving on this target. But some of our zones so far now are up to 25, 30 meters in width.

So they can get quite wide. So we have some very concentrated material, and that’s sort of 2, 3, 5, 6 meter wide zones of pretty much metal, massive sulfide. And then we have a broader zone of intermixed with massive sulfide and semi-massive sulfide to get the broader horizon.

Let’s finish off in the silver markets. What are… If you had to give the investors watching this show right now one message about what would move the silver markets this year, what would those drivers be? I think it’s just physical demand is going to basically strip the available silver that’s out there. So demand from increased industrial uses seems to be driving it more perhaps than the… I don’t know, the precious metal aspect of it.

It’s hard to say one thing that’s going to drive it. I think it’s a culmination of all these factors that are going to put pressure on the limited supply of silver that’s out there. There’s a finite amount of silver and as demand, it’s just a supply-demand situation.

So it’s going to be driven by that demand and that’s ultimately going to push it higher. What’s the longer term, I guess, reason to hold silver? Gold has breached new all-time highs, broken new records. Silver has not done that this cycle.

You know, we’re looking at… Are we looking at two completely different assets here? It kind of looks like there’s a divergence there for sure. What I’m impressed by is the sheer number of uses for silver continuing to increase down to the microbiology scale, nanoscale technology, AI, all these uses that we never had, we never talked about before that are now in play. So I think the uses for silver are pretty amazing.

I think long term, I don’t necessarily think we’re running out of silver. I’ve heard people talk about there’s no more silver. I think it just comes down to a price has to go higher to get more silver.

And it is becoming, you know, it is a finite resource ultimately. And the thing with silver, because it’s such a high component of silver uses in industrial purposes, a lot of that silver is gone. It’s not like there’s warehouses like the gold bullion warehouses full of silver as much.

So when the silver is used in industrial purposes, some of it can be recycled, but a lot of that silver is gone out of the market. So we need to continue to bring more silver into the market. So I think silver has a bright future.

I think we’re going to see much higher prices. It’s hard to put a price on it. But I was surprised we didn’t hit $40 silver back in October last year.

So I think silver is going to do another run for $40, $45 perhaps. I think in the near term, it could be this year, yeah. I think in the near term, we’ll see it break the all-time $50 plus high.

That’s going to get… And I, again, when we chatted last time, I’m moving into the triple-digit camp just simply because the uses for silver are remarkable. And at some point, you know, the demand… At what point did you think to yourself, look, I was in a single or double-digit camp, and now I’m moving to the triple-digit camp? Yeah, it’s just all these new uses for silver that we never had 5, 10 years ago. There weren’t really an issue or it wasn’t considered a big enough change in the market.

Now with AI, with all these other technologies that are coming on, they all need silver. They’ve used silver before, but not in as much as we’re seeing the pressures for that demand. And there’s more people in the world.

More people, more demand for metals, ultimately. Okay. More people, more demand for metals.

That makes a lot of sense. But what about the supply side? Are we going to get a huge surge in production because of changing regulations that we talked about because of this demand? You know, the equilibrium price goes up. There’s more incentive for people to start drilling and exploring and producing more.

Well, let’s hope so because we’re in the business of exploring and finding these things and generating value for shareholders by making those discoveries. So let’s hope that’s the case. Let me give you a hypothetical, Gary.

One of the constraints that I’ve gotten a lot from executives is that permitting times in North America and around the world, but North America specifically, it’s just way too long. And so suppose the governments were to somehow reduce that to only a couple of years versus over a decade. Would that fix a supply issue? Yeah, I guess I could bring it into some rebalance.

That’s a good point. But even if you take the permitting equation out, here’s a big pile of money, David. Let’s go find a silver mine.

1. Wow. OK, now you’ve got to start looking.

You’ve got to do the work. So it just literally takes time. Besides the permitting issue, everybody likes to gripe about the permitting issue because it is an issue and it bogs people down, especially when you’re at that stage to build something.

Now you’ve got to wait for a decade to get it permitted. But if you and I wanted to go find a silver mine and build one today, just the time it takes to do that work is a long time. So if you have one that’s close to development, that’s going to get a premium in the market in a good jurisdiction.

So depending on how big our pile of money is, maybe we move up the curve a lot closer. Why are you, final question, why are you personally into silver business? I mean, if it were me, I don’t think I’d have the patience to go find, deposit, and deal with all this that you talked about, take your process before we see an ROI. Like, why are you doing this? I know, it’s crazy.

What am I, crazy? I know. Hey, why would you do that? Why would you put yourself through that abuse? Because it’s fun, ultimately. I mean, the art of discovery is actually really exciting.

Going into an area that, you know, for some people might think as moose pasture and actually finding an economic deposit. I mean, that’s pretty remarkable to take something from nothing. And that’s, I think, the beauty of our business is for, even for an independent with not a lot of money, can go out and with a prospect and find a, have a good idea with not a lot of money and actually go out and find something.

And then it could grow, if you’re lucky, could grow into a really exciting economic deposit. So, it’s the art of discovery. It’s taking something from nothing.

Making, you know, creating wealth from what some might look at as just a mountain of dirt and creating something exciting and something that contributes to, you know, our economic society, really. I think mining is essential to human civilization and we need to foster that and grow that and do it right, do it sustainably. So, I’m not for getting out there and making a mess.

I think we have the right to clean water and clean air. But I think we can mine sustainably. And it’s a real, it’s a real fun business when it’s good.

It’s, we talk about the challenges in it because it’s been, it’s a challenging space, but it’s also a lot of fun. Okay. Thanks very much, Gary.

Good to see you again. Pleasure. Congratulations on your listing once more.

And where can we learn more from your company? Yeah, so silver47.ca is our website. Yeah. And you can follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and X and I guess X is Twitter.

Okay. Twitter is X. We’ll put the links down below. Thanks for watching.

Don’t forget to like and subscribe and stay tuned for more.