Mere Paper Promises for Gold & Silver Carry Big Risks

Coming up we’ll hear from our good friend David Morgan of The Morgan Report. David has some important advice for investors on the difference between owning physical precious metals as compared to paper derivatives such as silver and gold ETFs. Mike Maharrey and David also get into some recent dynamics in the metals markets and foreshadow how the sector is likely to perform in the near future now that the second Trump administration is under way.

So, be sure to stick around for all of that and more during another wonderful conversation with the great David Morgan, the man they call the Silver Guru, coming up after this week’s market update.

With President Donald J. Trump taking the oath of office on Monday, it's been a news-filled week of Executive Orders.

Markets are watching especially closely for proclamations on the economic policy front. Trump stated this week that he will hit Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs within a few weeks, although the specific goods that would be covered is unknown.

At the same time, Trump pounded the table this week for lower interest rates... and told world leaders that all nations need lower rates, and should follow the U.S.

Gold and silver certainly seemed to like what they heard with both metals moving up higher all week long.

At $2,789 today, gold is literally at its all-time high reached this past October. The yellow metal is up 2.7% now on the week.

Silver, meanwhile, is hovering around $31 now. It currently checks in at $31.03 as of this Friday morning recording, good for a 1.5% weekly advance. But the gold-silver ratio also touched 90-1 this week and is basically right there as of this moment, suggesting silver is extremely underpriced from a historical perspective.

In other words, silver is on sale.

The last time we saw a gold-silver ratio over 90-1 was in the early days of the pandemic lockdowns.

In the modern era, the gold-silver ratio has averaged between 40-1 and 60-1. When it rises far above that level, it tends to snap back quickly to that mean.

Although the ratio has run at a higher average since the U.S. government demonetized silver in 1964, we still see sharp returns to the mean when the gold-silver ratio gets so out of whack.

This typically happens when the price of silver rallies to close the spread. For instance, the gold-silver ratio fell to 30-1 in 2011 after having floated up to 80-1 during the 2008 financial crisis.

In a more recent example of this snap-back, the gold-silver ratio set a record of 123-1 as Covid hysteria first gripped the world and then the ratio plunged to around 60-1 as central banks around the world cranked up the money creation machine to cope with governments shutting down economies.

Meanwhile, the high prices on gold seems to have caused a cooling of demand in the U.S. retail bullion market, leading to historically low premiums on coins, bars, and rounds. That means purchasers are able to increase their cost efficiency, assuming they want to jump in here.

But the best deal may be in silver, where investors can access not only low premiums but with silver trading at prices well below its all-time highs.

While we remain bullish for gold and silver prices in 2025, Money Metals also happily will BUY your coins, bars, and rounds whenever you wish to sell. That's easy to do on our website and over the phone – and we always offer competitive bids and fast payment.

Well now, without further delay, here’s Money Metals’ Mike Maharrey’s interview with the Silver Guru, David Morgan.

Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey, a reporter and analyst here at Money Metals, and I'm joined once again by my good friend David Morgan. He's the founder and publisher of The Morgan Report, a well-known analyst in the precious metals world, and also the author of a book, the Silver Manifesto. How are you doing today, David?

David Morgan: Mike? I'm doing well, thank you.

Mike Maharrey: Well, it's a pleasure to have you on, and as we speak, it is the day after the inauguration and we had a lot of pomp and circumstances and a lot of rhetoric. But now as we move into Trump era 2.0, now we have to deal with the actual policies. And I'm curious as to just, I'm going to start off broad with you here and let you parse out. How do you see the Trump era impacting, maybe shifting things, if at all in the gold and silver markets?

David Morgan: Well, there's already been a shift because he signaled the Trump administration signaled that there will be tariffs, and it was rather vaguely defined, but the metals markets have taken action already because they fear that tariffs will be imposed on precious metals. Well, the United States imports a great deal of silver and they also import gold. And so, what you've seen is disruption in the normal flow of metals from primarily the London Bullion Management Association into the United States because they don't want to pay the tariff. And this has caused a disruption in what's called the ETE exchange for physicals EFP market. And I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. Most people really don't understand it. It's very technical and it's more than most precious metals investors need to know or understand. So, from a broad-brush perspective, metal's been flowing from London to New York because they want to get ahead of the curve. And this has basically put a bit of a squeeze on the market, even though the other side of the coin, pun intended, the retail market's been lackluster. The premiums are very, very low in the wholesale market. For example, gold coins are like half a percent under spot that hasn't been around for a very, very long time.

And Silver Eagles, that at one time were carrying a $14 premium, have dropped from $3.50 to $2.75 for the premium. So it's a bifurcated market, if I can use that word. The physical silver market or gold market, which is basically the bullion market or what comes off the exchanges, which is a hundred-ounce bars or kilo bars of gold and thousand-ounce bars in silver. Those markets, especially silver, are pretty tight. But the converse with the retail side of that market, which is a subset of a big, big market, is lackluster, for lack of a better term.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Do you think that just kind of your average investor out there who might have been buying gold and silver during the Biden years because they don't trust the trajectory of the economy with the Democrat in power, do you think maybe there's a little bit of confidence now in that mindset that, hey, we've got Trump, we're going to see some deregulation and maybe the economy will benefit. So maybe they're thinking, oh, we don't need to have this hedge or safe haven. Do you think there's some of that psychology going on?

David Morgan: I do, Mike. I think that's true, but if you look at the numbers during the Trump administration won metals did better than Biden administration. So what I think the idea that things will get better, the economy will be stronger, things will get more back to normal, maybe a dream, and it may be somewhat of a reality, but the bottom line is as many of us say, it's a math problem, not a political problem,

Mike Maharrey: Right? Yeah.

David Morgan: Continue to compound. And so it doesn't matter if Trump's in or Biden's in. The debt problem marches on and with Vivek and Elon doing this dodge thing, and they're going to come in and clean it all up, and they may mitigate it somewhat using artificial intelligence to maybe get rid of a lot of the bureaucracy and have an AI algorithm take care of some of these functions that the federal government does, might mitigate it. But I took a hard look at it, and if you took all of that away, so you had a hundred percent accuracy in mitigating those, still the lion's share comes from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the military, and that standing alone and everything else going away, you still have a deficit problem.

Mike Maharrey: Right. And I think that it does become political because I don't think there's the political will on really anywhere to get into what would be necessary to really reform those entitlements. And given the state of the world and the geopolitical tensions, I don't think anybody's going to be cutting. Military is spending any time soon. So you do have the political realities in play there.

David Morgan: Yeah, I'm going to push back on that very, very slightly. You'll understand when I finish my couple of sentences. So, like Social Security, oh, well now you can't collect your 69 and then maybe, oh, that's 70. So, I mean slight tweak. But it's like spitting in the ocean. Excuse the gross metaphor. Does it help? Yeah, okay. It delays the problem by a year or six months or something. It may be military. Well, we're going to freeze pensions at this level for the next year or so. These are, again, using my metaphor, it doesn't solve the problem. It might put a band aid on it for a little while, so I'm not pushing back on your heart, I'm just actually agreeing with you that, and I'll make a big deal. Or it could make a big deal out of it in the political press, oh, we're fixing this. We're up in the age of 72 now. And so more people will die before they're even able to collect the social security that they paid into for 30 or 40 years. What benefit is that to them and their families when they can't even collect it? But these are the kind of nonsensical political moves that could be made. I'm not trying to push back hard, but get my point.

Mike Maharrey: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's more of a kick the can down the road than a solution.

David Morgan: Yeah, exactly.

Mike Maharrey: I think a lot of people forget too that there are a whole lot of things that really aren't within the president's control. First off, you have to deal with Congress. That's the first hurdle. And then there's things like Federal Reserve policy and interest rate trajectories and things like that. I mean, Trump actually wants lower interest rates, which I would argue would be more inflationary. But those kind of things are really, that's what the Fed is doing. And I know that there's not as much political independence in the Central Bank as they would like you to think, but there is some, and I think that's important as well.

David Morgan: Well, what's funny is if you think about it, the federal government doesn't really print the money. I mean, the treasury prints the money, but it's all goes through the Fed. So the United States borrows money from an independent organization, and most people still don't get that. And so if you were the lender of last resort, and I just keep borrowing money from you and I never pay it back, the only way I pay you back if I borrow more and some of the new borrowing that I get from you, I give you like an interest payment. If I did that, there'd be a day that you said, I'm not loaning you any more money. The Fed will never do that. But it's a funny thought experiment. If the Fed says, well, wait a minute, you want to borrow this many billions this month? Nope, you borrowed enough. You're done.

Mike Maharrey: That would be an interesting thought experiment, wouldn't it? So you mentioned tariffs, and I wanted to touch on that a little bit, and not just necessarily on precious metals, but just from a broader perspective. You hear a lot of talk about tariffs being potentially inflationary, a lot of worries about how it could disrupt the economy. How do you see just the kind of mindset being pro tariff that the new administration clearly has? How do you see that impacting the precious metals markets as we move into the next year or so?

David Morgan: Well, it'll impact them if the price is going higher, because if you've got to pay a tariff of some percent, it'd be like a value added tax. And so that will increase the price which will be passed on to the consumer. So your gold price with well sees a 10% I can do in my head. So if you're buying gold at 2,700, you add $270 to it. When you buy it, you're going to be paying for it.

The importer will pay it, but he's not going to pay for it in the long run once he sells it to a jeweler or a retail customer or an institutional investor, he's going to add on those costs. But on a broad brush, look at all of it. It disrupts the economy. I mean, if you go back to the thirties, the Great Depression became the greater depression because the Smoot Hartley Act was basically putting tariffs in, and that added cost for everyone around the world. So becoming not just a US depression, it basically spread it worldwide. So it doesn't really help anyone. It sounds good. It's like, well, you can build your cars cheaper than we can, so we're going to put a tariff on it. So you pay the same for a Chinese built car as you pay for an American built car. Well, that's fair to Americans, but is it fair to Chinese?

And as a free market thinker, basically the competitive atmosphere of capitalism is if you can do a better product with a lower cost, you win in the marketplace. Having said that, let's get down in the weeds a little bit. If you're building that car in China for a lot less, but you're subsidized by the government to get steel for half the price of the real cost because the government pays for half of it, is that fair? And the answer is no. So we really don't have a free market out there in the real world in almost any way, shape or form. There's a vestige of it here and there, but on the large scale, there really isn't, especially when get into heavy industry or manufacturing, a lot of it's subsidized or tax abated or whatever. And so it's really hard as someone that really understands the economy, and I'm not saying I'm an expert at it, but I've certainly looked at it most of my life, to really get down into the nitty gritty and analyze it from an objective perspective and see what the true costs are and who's getting freebies, let's say, and look at the bottom line.

It's really hard to state who's taking care of who, because people usually have self-interest and the Chinese have a self-interest in their production, and America has a self-interest in their production and what's fair, and there is no real ground rules for it. And so I hope I didn't go on too far, but I'm trying to explain that it's not an easy thing to unravel.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, no, that's exactly what I was driving at with the question, and I can tell you who's not getting the benefits of any of this, and that's me and probably not you either. So that's the unfortunate reality of all of these big government subsidies and regulations and taxes and all of that stuff, it helps somebody out there, but it's not generally the general public. So well, let's shift gears a little bit. I want to talk a little bit just about precious metals and dusting in general. And I think most of our listeners are going to be most acquainted with physical bullion, gold and silver coins and bars that you can hold in your hand. But there are of course, other ways that investors can expose themselves to the precious metals markets. And I was hoping that with your expertise, you could kind of touch on some of the differences in the pros and cons of maybe looking at different ways of accessing that market. And I wanted to start with the difference between physical bullying and the future's market. Can you give the pros and cons of the futures market and how that differs from holding physical metal?

David Morgan: Well, one of the pros in the futures market is for bullion dealers, coin dealers to be able to hedge their positions. So for example, if you are money metals, you have a buyer that comes in and buys X amount of silver and perhaps they don't follow through with their check, and of course that could be a legal problem, but it won't go there. So for whatever reason, but once you make that purchase, monument, metals can go into the futures market and hedge it. So it doesn't matter if the market moves up or down, they get what their business is, which is a spread between the bid and the ask. And that's how those businesses are built. So without a futures market, it'd be much more difficult in order to capture that spread on every transaction.

So that's one of the benefits of a futures market. The other side of the coin is that what does the futures market do? Well, it's really a derivative, and yet the derivative is what sets the price, which it should not. None of these derivatives in oil or cotton, cocoa, foodstuffs or whatever should really set the price. Yet almost all prices for all commodities are set by the derivatives market so vast. There's so much more paper trading than there is actual physical commodities backing them up. Whereas it should be not the tail wagging the dog, but dog wagging and tail. So this distorts the markets, all markets silver and gold happened to be probably the most distorted with oil being a close second or maybe number one depending on how you analyze it. So that's a negative. And as far as the individual investor's concerned, something over 95% of the people that are just regular people that go into the futures markets lose. The thing about the futures market is it's a zero-sum game for every winner, there's a loser. That's not true in the equity market, and it's certainly not true in the physical market. The physical market is the best place for most investors to start because you get what you pay for. The premiums vary from time to time as we outlined earlier. I mean when the market's really hot, you might be paying a higher premium than you would in a cool market or soft market, but nonetheless, in the long term, they kind of average out.

And so physical metal offers a lot of things. One, it's tangible wealth that you can take with you. Secondly, it provides some level of anonymity. I mean, you can pay for something with coins that are just between you and whomever you're purchasing something from.

It's really the best outside the system form of money that exists, and it's been taken as the final form of payment with no counterparty risk for thousands of years. So there's lots of benefits. That doesn't mean you need to put all of your savings or whatever. There's a right amount. It's like vitamins or cough syrup or anything else. There's a certain amount that helps you, and if you overdo it, you've overdone it. And that's one thing that I would say maybe I'm a little remiss on. I think I've been better than most that are on influencers or whatever you want to call us analysts, I prefer. But there isn't a one size fits all and people get excited when they understand how the monetary system works. I mean, if you go through Hidden Secrets of Money or some of the information on your blog that Money Metals has put out and you get a good grasp of what's really going on, it can persuade you, oh my goodness, I've been had, I got to take action and my action is to provide real money for myself that I own that has no counterparty.

It's not in the bank, but to go overboard because you get excited. And that's human nature. But I've had many people over the years call me and email me and say, you know what? I wish I would've heard your 10 rules of silver investing earlier on. I wouldn't have gone so hard so fast. I talk about starting small, finding a dealer you can trust and get into it. And then best method for almost everybody, it's a dollar cost average stack over time and make it just part of your savings plan. I mean, if you go back to the basics, the richest man in Babylon, which I probably read as a teenager, I mean the essence of that book is to save 10% of what you earn and put it away and don't touch it. In today's world, don't save 10% of what you earn and put it into precious metals because if you put it into fiat, the time you get, probably five years down the road, but certainly by the time you get 20, 30, 40 years down the road, the dollar you saved 40 years ago is not going to buy you what it did 40 years before.

Whereas if you save it in gold and silver, in all likelihood, it's going to buy you at least as much as it did 40 years ago. And that's why you save during these times in precious metals, there are times where you don't really need precious metals because the economy sound, everything's working right, and there is zero hardly any inflation. And the economy's really humming along, but we haven't seen those days in the country since probably the fifties or early sixties before we took silver out of circulation and before we took gold out of circulation.

Mike Maharrey: Right? I always tell people, gold and silver is real money, and you made a really good point just in terms of its liquidity. I can go anywhere in the world with a gold coin and then somebody's going to take it, right? I mean, it doesn't matter if you're in the most foreign remote place, people recognize that value. So that's something to consider. So there's another option that a lot of people, I think like, because it's just easier, you don't have to worry about storing metal or security or anything that's at the ETF. So can you kind of give that same, compare a contrast between an ETF and the physical metal,

David Morgan: Right? I will. But before I do that, I just want to get a little bit of foundation for everybody, and that is what is an ETF extreme traded fund and what does that mean? And here's what it means because a lot of people take for granted, but you go back to my use when I was 30 or 40, and there was no way for a stock investor to get exposure to the precious metals outside of buying mining shares. And then the idea of an exchange traded fund came about, and this was a stock, so all the section seven licensees, all your stock brokers were now able to get exposure to silver and gold

Because of ETFs. And that was a big leap forward for the precious metals using a derivative. And what it allows is people don't need to have a futures account or to buy physical or not physical to buy derivative metals. And this was huge. And so moving on from that story, what happened was a lot of wishes or wants for people to get exposure to the metals left the mining industry and moved it strictly into the ETFs. And I'll just give a story without giving a name, but a rather large hedge fund manager friend of mine from Singapore, we were having dinner after an investment conference, and he wasn't really apologizing to me, but he said, I never buy physical silver. I just strictly use the SLV because I'm moving millions of dollars in and out almost daily. And there's no way to really do that in the physical market. Plus the cost. I mean, the cost of the ETF are very small moving in and out, and this is what almost all of your fund managers do. And I'm not really against it, but it does distort the market because you're looking at a derivative, you're not looking at it. Now, I know the SLV has physical and the PSLV has physical, and I question a couple things on the ETFs. One is if you are trading that much derivatives, there's no way to match it physically

Unless there's a big overage sitting in a warehouse somewhere that you make a bookkeeping entry and settle the books by physical every night. But that isn't what happens.

And I also wonder if any of it's pledge In other words, that physical that's sitting on the books of the SLV that's truly on the books is not used as collateral for another loan or a swap with a big user like Tiffany's or something that might be using that metal twice. And I really do believe that it is used twice. And the third thing is that some of the ETFs are allowed to use paper silver as physical on their books because they have a futures contract sitting on an exchange that's owned. It's in the, not necessarily registered, but the eligible category. So they own the metal, but that doesn't mean that that same silver or gold is sitting there. It is in again, pledged somewhere else. So it's a rather convoluted market on balance. I think it's okay, but there is no way to really determine what the honest to god price of silver or gold is. Because you're always looking at a derivative price.

And yes, it does spill over. I mean, I want an argument if I go to a coin dealer and buy silver today or gold today, I'm going to get a price. It's going to be based on the futures market. It's going to have a premium to it, and that's what I'm going to pay. I'm not arguing that point. The point I'm trying to get across is that how was that price determined and was that price determined on the real physical demand or was it determined on the demand for derivatives?

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. It's really interesting the way it all plays together. And my kind of thinking has always been I want to hold physical first because I know what it is. I know what I have and I have it. And I'll be honest, I've used ETFs. Sometimes it's an easy way to get in and out. You can play daily or weekly movements if you're so inclined. And it is a lot easier to do that on A ETF as opposed to trying to move bullying around. But I'm kind of like you. I have that little bit of wariness about it.

David Morgan: Yeah, I'll just state my statement, Mike, and that's, I'm okay with using ETFs or futures if and only if you built a physical position first. I am a free market thinker, and if ETFs work for you, then have at it. But if you think that's your primary investment, think again. That's kind of my approach. And the platinum palladium market, I mean, those are very tough markets and ETFs are pretty easy. And there's a lot of slippage in the physical markets for platinum palladium. You pay a pretty high premium going in and usually have to take a discount on the way out,

David Morgan: That's a negative to an investor, whereas an ETF is, there's very little slippage. They're all over the place. I think it's kind of just common sense. I mean, if you're thinking that by owning the SLV, you really own silver, go touch it.

Mike Maharrey: Right? Exactly. Exactly. That's my thinking. Okay. So real quick, the kind of final piece of the pie are your miners, your mining stocks. And so why would people want to consider getting into mining stocks and what's kind of the, again, pros and cons of that market?

David Morgan: Going back to earlier days where there weren't ETFs, it was one way to really get good exposure, and you get leverage in the miners. So if you get a gold price of a 10% move, usually get a 30% move in a mining stock. Now that has not been true as of late. This has been a problem for people that follow my work and others. And so why take the added risk of buying a mining company when an ETF or just owning the metal itself is superior? I mean, and the answer you shouldn't. Now, in my case, we've done some pretty hard analytics and we have got a certain subset of the mining sector that's almost exempt from the inflationary pressures that you feel across the board in any manufacturing, including digging metal out of the ground and refining it. And those companies actually were as low as close as the last year making new highs. In fact, two of our six top tier were making new highs. So that proves that if you pick stocks individually, you can outperform the averages. So the HUI and the XAU, the average for the top tier miners and the subset below that did not perform as well as the metal last year, yet a couple of our stocks did.

So that's a bit of a selfish plug, but it's also true.

Mike Maharrey: Well, that's fair.

David Morgan: But the other part that's really interesting, and I really hadn't thought about it in a long time, is one of my members brought it to my attention last month that I wrote about it for our premium service, our paid clients. He said the advantage of owning mining companies is like in the thirties, if they confiscate gold again, you still have exposure to gold. And very few people talk about could we see our gold confiscated again? And my answer is, I highly, highly doubt it. And silver, it wouldn't be worth it. I mean, if you've got all the silver in the world and collected it, what's it worth? It's worth 0.02% of the financial market. So I mean, you have to put the price up about a thousand times in order for it to have any kind of impact on the monetary system. So it's so undervalued. If you confiscate, it wouldn't help silver investors. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, why would you bother doing it? It means nothing. It's like having a stamp collection of a thousand stamps and you add one more to it, it means nothing. So anyway, back to gold. So I thought that was interesting. So I just thought it'd bring that up because will gold be confiscated? I highly doubt it, but if it were Woo baby, it'd be like the thirties where everyone will be looking for gold exposure, which means you would get into the mining share.

Mike Maharrey: Right? Right. I think you make a good point. They are companies, and as with any kind of industry, you're can have good companies, well run companies, and you're going to have bad companies and poorly run companies even though they're in the same industry. So there is a lot more homework to do if you're interested in mining. And that's where somebody like you comes in where folks could benefit from your knowledge, because I don't know about most people out there, but I don't have time to research a bunch of mining companies and find the good and the bad.

David Morgan: Yeah. The last thing, I'm sorry to interrupt, but the advantage also of the mining shares, you pick some really strong good ones, some blue chips, which is what I've emphasized from day one in the mortgage report, you can actually generate income pretty easily. And that's by what I call renting your stock. You write covered calls, so you have no risk. You're selling something in the future that you own. So it's not like you're making up a naked short or something and then you're paid a premium for that and you collect those premiums. The average return on writing covered calls is about 17% a year, which is far above what you get in the T-bills, even a tenure or a six month note. And that's something that I do talk about. I do it myself. I don't do it as often as I probably should, but my people are aware of it. So there are some advantages, but I think it's knowledge. I mean, you start with precious metals first, the real thing.

And then I only advocate the derivative stuff really for hedging. If you want to get in and go long with it, that's fine. It's up to you. And then the mining shares, if you get a two or three of the top tiers and to buy and hold and know that these are the best of the best, and you can write some options. If we get a little bit ahead of ourselves, which we did last year, I mean the perfect time to write options was probably the last three or four months where they're just going sideways and you could collect those premiums. And the beta on gold stocks is still high, which means you get a higher premium for time value because they are volatile. So I just want to throw that out there, Mike, because there's a lot of, I don't know, knowledge in his head. There's certainly a lot of experience that's proven by my age and trying to pass that on to everybody so that they could come to their own best way to invest in this market because there isn't one size fits all. And that's why I never became a money manager.

I didn't want to be responsible for your money. I'll show you what I do. I'll teach you what all I do. I'll tell you which stocks I pick. I'll tell you why I picked them. I'll tell you why I'm selling them. I'll tell you when I sell them. And I'll tell you when I'm going to use the options market to gain income and all that's from stuff that I've learned and done for over four decades. And do I get it right a hundred percent of the time? No. But I do it in a manner that keeps you safe. When I do what I call the penny, the junior stocks, I bet money I don't invest. I bet.

Mike Maharrey: Right, right. Well, where can folks go to tap into this vast wealth of experience and knowledge? Where would you send folks?

David Morgan: Yeah, I'd just go to the landing page, TheMorganReport.com, and a selfless plug is almost done with the documentary. All the filming's been done. We're editing now. And that's at Silver sunrise.tv. And once the documentary is out, I will be letting everyone know, certainly would like Money Metals to watch it and evaluate it. And maybe I could reverse roles and interview you or one of the founders of Money Metals and say, look, here's what I thought. What do you think? And what would you do differently than what I proposed? Because I'm looking for solutions. I'm looking for an honest system for honest people where we all can kind of breathe in and out a sigh of relief that the money system is fixed. I'm not sure it ever will be, but certainly that's been my life's work. My big goal is in stacking gold and silver, it's really stacking truth, honesty, integrity, and giving freedom back to everyone.

And that's the most important thing, is our right to be free. And unfortunately, that's been usually hand in hand with honest money. Usually when you have an honest money system, you have freedom and the more corrupt the political system becomes and the more in bed with the banking system, it becomes the more corruption there is, and the senators and Congress are paid off and they do what the elites tell them to do. And you just have this kind of veneer of idealism that the people have a say in the government when the reality is we basically have very little to say.

Mike Maharrey: I agree with you 100%, and I very, very much appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to chat with me. Appreciate your wisdom. We'll definitely have you back on again in the not too distant future as we see how things unwind as we move into kind of a new era or maybe the repeat era. Who knows? Who knows. But we'll definitely be here to talk about it. So again, thank you so much.

David Morgan: Well, my pleasure, Mike. Thank you.

Always enjoy hearing from David Morgan, good stuff there as always.

Well, that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. Don’t forget to tune in as well to the Money Metals Midweek Memo, hosted by Mike Maharrey and released each Wednesday. To catch any of our weekly audio programs just go to MoneyMetals.com/podcasts or find those on whatever podcast platform you prefer.

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