Mining Exec Asks Why Many of His Peers Don’t Believe in Gold & Silver

Coming up in a moment, we have an exclusive interview with Chris Ritchie, the president of SilverCrest Metals. Chris is, sadly, an unusual precious metals mining company executive in the sense that he fully believes in gold and silver!

He explains why his company has positioned itself by holding physical precious metals in reserve on the company’s balance sheet… rather than simply dumping all of its production onto the market at today’s prices.

So please stick around for this fascinating conversation with silver mining leader Chris Ritchie coming up after this week’s market update.

As hopes for rate cuts fade, metals markets are giving back some of their recent gains.

On Wednesday, minutes from the Federal Reserve’s latest policy meeting showed central bankers are frustrated by the lack of progress on inflation. After several months of official inflation readings coming in hotter than expected, the Fed has been forced to back off on previous plans to ease multiple times throughout the year.

Remarks by Fed policymakers were widely interpreted as hawkish, with some even suggesting that rate hikes might be necessary.

It’s not clear what the Fed’s next move might be or when it might occur. What is clear is that the Fed lacks credibility when it comes to inflation forecasting.

Chairman Jerome Powell failed to anticipate an inflation problem following the massive fiscal and monetary stimulus unleashed in response to the COVID pandemic. Then after consumer prices shot up rapidly, he wrongly claimed elevated inflation would be transitory.

He acted too late in raising interest rates. Then when inflation finally began to come down last year, he prematurely took a victory lap and projected it would continue to go down after the Fed stopped hiking.

But Consumer Price Index readings started inching back up this year, making rate cuts impossible under the Fed’s own policy framework. So, Jay Powell offered up a bizarre reimagining of the Fed’s longstanding 2% inflation target, declaring it could be met even if inflation stays elevated above 2%.

Now he basically admits he doesn’t know where inflation will be headed in the months ahead or what he will do about it.

In recent weeks, of course, gold and silver markets have been reflecting a lot of built-up inflation – which is just another word for currency depreciation. Gold made an all-time high in terms of fiat Federal Reserve notes, but it is pulling back here in this week’s trading.

The monetary metal is off 3.3% or about $80 since last Friday’s close to bring spot prices to $2,346 an ounce. Silver, meanwhile, shows a weekly loss of 3.7% or more than $1 to trade at $30.52 per ounce. Following an explosive move higher this spring, silver may be due for some technical consolidation before its next launch.

Platinum prices are retreating by 5.5% this week, coming in at $1,038. And finally, palladium, which has been the weakest performing metal this year, is giving up another 4.0% to trade at $1,002 as of this Friday morning recording.

In other news, the U.S. House of Representatives this week narrowly passed a bill to prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency. The CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act, as it has been named, now heads to the Senate where it faces an uncertain fate.

Democrats control the Upper Chamber. Just three lone Democrats in the House voted for the measure.

Many politicians apparently like the idea of one day replacing paper notes and physical coins with a digital dollar.

It could enable the IRS to track just about every transaction in the whole economy. That, of course, brings with it the prospect of more tax revenue for the government. It also brings with it grave privacy concerns and the risk of authoritarian controls over what people are allowed to purchase using their digital wallets.

And any new power handed over to central bankers that pushes the monetary system further away from sound money grounded in gold and silver enables larger scale depreciation of the currency.

For example, a CDBC could enable the Fed to inject so-called stimulus into the economy more rapidly by crediting the digital wallets of individuals or institutions it deems worthy.

The leading privately circulated digital token, Bitcoin, has the virtue of being limited in terms of its supply. Yet while the number of Bitcoins that can ever be mined into existence is capped, scarcity alone doesn’t guarantee that Bitcoin will retain value over time.

Since Bitcoin isn’t backed by anything and has no utility outside of its digital ecosystem, what its purchasing power will be years or decades from now is a matter of pure speculation.

True, it has seen a meteoric rise unlike anything else in the financial universe. That has drawn the ire of many in government – including some of the same politicians and bureaucrats who dream of imposing a CBDC. Congressman Brad Sherman, for one, has pushed for a total ban on Bitcoin.

If people can’t legally trade Bitcoin or it falls out of favor for whatever reason, then there could be nothing left to support it having any value at all. Physical gold and silver, by contrast, will always have value even if in the future nobody chooses to recognize or hold them as money. They have real utility to industry, to jewelers, to artisans, and more.

And they have a centuries-long track record of retaining their value better than any other form of money that has ever been produced. Will Bitcoin be the one exception, the thing that really is different this time -- the “new gold” as its promoters believe?

You can speculate on that happening if you wish. But just in case it doesn’t, you’d be well served to hold onto at least some hard money in the form of physical bullion.

Well now, without further delay let’s get right to our exclusive interview with Chris Ritchie, president of SilverCrest Metals.

Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey. I'm a reporter and analyst here at Money Metals , and I'm talking today with Chris Ritchie. Chris is the president of Silvercrest Metals, a precious metals producer that's headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, up in the beautiful northern country of Canada. Chris, I really appreciate you taking a little bit of time to be on the show.

I know that you were traveling and you're probably jet lagged, so it's early for you. So thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Coffee does wonders. Yes, absolutely. So before we get into the subject at hand, I'd like to have you give listeners just kind of a brief overview of Silvercrest, your business, what you do, what the company is.

Chris Ritchie: Perfect. Thanks. Um, Silvercrest Metals has been around for about nine years now. I think 2016 was the first drill hole. Uh, typical mine takes about 16 years to get into production. We were about half that time. Uh, one of the key things that We have is fantastic. Great. So for every shovel full of dirt, we dig up, we just happen to have way more gold and silver in each shovel full.

What that translates into is lower costs per ounce, more margins per ounce, better balance sheet. And that gives us choice. You know, and a big part of what we'll be talking about today is, uh, you know, what those choices give us. So we trade on the New York stock exchange under the symbol SILV, not sure how that ticker was still available and in the Toronto stock exchange under SIL.

So again, we're about a, probably about a 1. 4 billion us market cap. Uh, just put out a quarter of the other day, you know, beat, Consensus, uh, on almost every metric, uh, we're sitting here with, you know, about 90 million, uh, on the balance sheet and about 20 million of that's in bullion. And again, I think we're probably the only company that we know of that actually is treating our product as an instrument to hold on our balance sheet because we want to give our investors exposure.

Plus, it has a functional utility to protect ourselves from the costs we're exposed to in our day to day job.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that's outstanding and I'm glad to hear you had a good quarter as a full disclosure stockholder in the company. Um, And, uh, you really just kind of hit on, on my next question. Uh, you guys do hold, uh, some of your, I guess, cash reserves in physical gold and silver.

And I'm curious, first off kind of what's the mechanism for this? How do you do it?

Chris Ritchie: Yeah, it's, um, it's, it's quite a unique proposition. When you produce an ounce, we get a door. We have to ship that Dory bar to a refinery. And most mining companies do not own refineries. And what that means is you have a contract with that refinery.

And typically the refinery gives you back a dollar equivalent for your metal. And then they get access to your metal and they participate in the

after market, all the, any additional margins and whatnot. We tend to give up at that moment of. Refining, um, because of that in the logistics, what we do is we, we sell it in that moment, but then we just do an FX transaction. So the way we look at it as instead of having this default notion that you sell a, you know, a car, toothpaste, toilet paper, whatever you sell, and you Get dollars and that default option is something we challenge So what we do is we just buy back metal in that moment We treat it like a currency like any other currency.

We just happen to want this currency Uh, we hold it in a bank account so we don't lend it out. It's not rehypothecated fully allocated to us um, and we again use that metal to To give our investors more exposure. So when prices are weak and low because we have that financial strength We want to give our investors more exposure, especially when prices are weak.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, in essence, I think a lot of people, because of the way we're programmed to think it's, it's like, Oh, they're buying a commodity, but really you're just making a currency transaction. If you consider gold and silver money, you're basically trading one kind of money dollars for what I would argue, sounder money in gold and silver.

Is that, am I on the right track there?

Chris Ritchie: Yeah, I mean, the first question we asked ourselves is, is gold and silver a better store of value than fiat currency? And we happen to operate in an industry that takes an awfully long time. I think the average is over 16 years. To build a new mind from scratch. And if you just look at the performance of fiat currency over the long run, it does not do its job of preserving purchasing power.

So we're an industry that spends large sums of money over long periods of time, but we don't maximize the benefits of our own product, uh, to preserve that purchasing power. So again, we, we have that choice. We have that flexibility. Uh, we owe it to our investors to examine what this flexibility gives us.

And the irony here is, yeah, we believe in our own product.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. And it's odd that so many other mining companies don't, I mean, I've actually heard, uh, anecdotal stories about. You know, mining companies say, well, gold's not even money, you know, and it seems odd to me. And so like, why are you digging it out of the ground?

Chris Ritchie: You are, you know, preaching to the choir. I mean, we, we, we believe in that product. We think it has functional utility. And here's another aspect of it. When you think about the inflation that everybody is exposed to every company. You know, um, this isn't just a mining conversation. We did some research on General Electric, Home Depot, McDonald's, Johnson and Johnson, and we just said, Hey, let's go back 20 years and let's say, what if they put 20 percent of their free cashflow per year in gold instead of the dollar, would their balance sheet be better today?

If they had done that and we all know the track record of fiat or gold versus fiat over time We just haven't made that final leap We just haven't made that final step of actually using it

Mike Maharrey: and I would say that it goes all the way to the individual I mean if you're holding a bunch of cash It would make more sense to hold it in a more stable Money, gold and silver, as opposed to, you know, holding on to dollars in an account, you know, even if it's an interest bearing account, it's very unlikely that that interest is actually keeping up with the real pace of inflation.

You know, CPI notwithstanding, I don't think that's even a very good measure of the depreciation of the currency.

Chris Ritchie: Well, I'm sure they've done that work. We've done that work. I mean, for example, what we did is we took that 16 years to, to bring a mind from first drill hole to production. On average, we, we made a comparison to housing in Toronto.

So we went back 16 years and said, what was the average price of a home in Toronto? And it was in the neighborhood of 350,000 - 60,000. And then we just said, what is the rate of money printing of the dollar? And that happens to be about 8 percent a year. What happens to be the annual rate of inflation in the mining industry.

It happens to be 8 percent a year. It's not, I don't think there's a, a coincidence there. So then we looked at the increase of the price of a home in Toronto over the last 16 years. Guess what happens to be roughly 8 percent growth per year. Now again, so that it's not that the house has gone up in value, right?

The dollar has gone down and, and this is that, this is that hopefully light bulb moment that we had was that gold actually. You know outperformed housing, right? So if you do want to save money as an individual for the long haul for your kids or your grandkids, you know saving money In fiat currency is, is not doing the job.

We all have been deeply accustomed to the fact that fiat currency is really convenient as a medium of exchange, but it is not a store of value. Right. And that disconnect is unfortunately, uh, very prevalent.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And, um, I've seen that in my own calculations. I'm not great at math. But I can even do the math that you just did.

It's, it's not rocket science to, to understand that. And it's, you know, it's, it's really common sense when you create more of a thing, whether it's pencils or dollars or whatever it is, the value of each of the individual things gets less and less as there are more and more of them, that's just basic economics.

Chris Ritchie: Um, that's, and that's the tricky part too, is that, you know, we look at mining and mining is really risky. It's really difficult. And if we actually look at that, it means. The supply growth is really, is really small. Whereas the U S government and all fiat currencies, the supply growth is fairly unlimited.

So again, if you, if you want to store your value, do you want to store your value in an instrument where supply growth is infinite or supply growth is extremely constrained or at least constrained to the cost to get it out of the ground? Because that's also another piece of math that, um, All commodity companies are exposed to what's the true cost to get it out of the ground and when the selling price is below that You know, we shouldn't be selling our product.

Mike Maharrey: Right. What, uh, do you know off the top of your head what the annual increase percentage wise of, of mine production and, and gold stock is?

Chris Ritchie: Yeah, you know, over the last 50, 60 years, the, the increase is about one, one and a half percent per year. Okay. Uh, on the gold side, and if you look at that for the US dollar, um, it's about 8% mm-Hmm,

And then if you look at the roughly 160 currencies, fiat currencies and circulation in the world from 1960 to 2015, uh, the average supply growth of the other currencies, that one 60 is over 32% per year. So, you know, when you think about it, just in terms of like that infinite supply growth again, you know, we would rather store our wealth, uh, especially since we're a long cyclical business, we want to store it in something that's scarce.

Mike Maharrey: Right. And then, you know, every time there's a crisis, you get, you know, the money creation gets put on steroids. So, you know, during the COVID era, which was basically 18 months, the federal reserve pumped 5 trillion almost into, into the economy, just created out of thin air. And that doesn't even include the amount of currency creation you get from super low interest rates and everything else.

So, um, that is even magnified. And there's always a crisis, right? , at least as far as government's concerned.

Chris Ritchie: I I, I saw an amazing Bloomberg headline a while ago, um, that had the Prime Minister of the UK saying that, um, claims that the UK are headed for austerity are simply unfounded, as in he knows as a politician.

He cannot get reelected if he stopped spending. Right. Right. And with demographics, the way they are with an aging population, um, and a shrinking population having to cover the tax base, there simply is not enough of a tax base to, to cover the spending. So again, it's become a political. Uh, tool as opposed to, uh, something where it's, uh, a term of preservation,

Mike Maharrey: right here in the United States, uh, about a third of all of the taxes collected right now are being spent just to pay the interest on the national debt.

So that gives you a kind of an idea of, of the trajectory of the spending. And of course, you know, you work in an industry that has a very, uh, very long time horizon. Uh, politicians operate on a very short time horizon, you know, most, most of the time, two to four years. So, well, the western ones do don't care,

Chris Ritchie: right?

Right. The western ones do. And I think that's, that's what's interesting right now with the Shanghai Gold Exchange, is that, you know, they're, they're dangling a carrot with this, you know, premium above spot. For gold and silver and that little, those crumbs that the West is jumping on to sell their gold and silver in the moment.

Um, you know, when you think about it from a longterm perspective where they must believe gold and silver are going, um, that time horizon could not be, you know, more expressed in a more dangerous way than that.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that's a really good point. I did an article just a couple of weeks ago on the movement of gold from west to east.

Uh, you see it in central bank gold buying, particularly China, uh, but other emerging markets. You see it in the investment demand in China and in Korea and other countries. So yeah, you're absolutely correct. Um, here's another question kind of from, from your perspective. I know that you must keep some cash on hand for operations.

How do you determine the ratio? Uh, cash to precious metals on your balance sheet.

Chris Ritchie: Sure. So, I mean, first and foremost, like we believe it's a better store of value. So it has utility. Uh, the second piece of math we do is what is that total cost per ounce, right? And in our industry, there's a term called all in sustaining costs.

You know, we put out a quarter, a couple of days ago, we put an all in sustaining costs of 12 and 90 cents per ounce silver equivalent. Okay. That number is anything, but All in. Okay. That number does not include the cost to buy the property, right? Does not include, you know, the seven years of exploration expense.

I think for us, it was near 130, 140 million bucks in that ballpark. It does not include the cost to build the plant. Right, right. And then when you think about the life of mine that we still have. It assumes 0 percent inflation, which is again, uh, an incorrect assumption for risk management. So for us, we did all of that math divided it by the number of ounces that we currently have and our total cost per ounce is in the 25 range.

Before tax so again When we got to production Uh, our team built the project on time on budget Um, we didn't use all of the cash we had we didn't tap into all the debt We had we paid back all of our debt in seven months So we were sitting here with a proposition to say, okay, what's next? And the board said, okay, let's look for another asset.

And I said, hold on, let's slow down for a second. Let's actually see what kind of return we're making. And at the time silver was at 17, 18, 19 bucks, right? So our realization was that if you do include every penny spent, we were going to give our shareholders a negative return. Right? So we thought it's not risky to hold the metal is actually risky to sell the metal because then you're transitioning that that ounce into a dollar.

Now you have to start that 16 year on average process all over again while you're holding an instrument that's not preserving your purchasing power, right? So for us, um, there's a few key data points we would love. So one is that if you look at, we took 400 assets, gold assets over a 31 year period of time.

And we've looked at what is the annual increase in our costs and over 400 assets over 31 years, and it was 8 percent a year. There's that 8 percent again, right? Right. So again, the inflation, the money printing is directly correlated to our costs, right? Because then we looked at, okay, what was the correlation between gold?

And our costs 0. 97. So guess what us holding gold in the equivalent ratio of our operating costs now gives us a hedge against inflation as we operate our own business, right? So that that number is very important to us. So we're working up to get to that point, right? We're trying to get there. Um, so that, that is a, a, a key point for us.

Another one that, that we factor into our thinking is, is okay. Hey, we tell retail people to own 5, 10 percent of their net worth in gold and silver, and yet our industry doesn't do it. So we want to eat our own cooking like we, we believe that we want to, you know, fight the good fight and have a call to action to really kind of put some pressure on the rest of the industry to have this conversation.

So that's, that's another part of it we look at. And then if you examine mining companies versus let's say royalty companies, for example, you know, a royalty companies, they're typically valued much, much, much higher than a producing company. Why? Because they're giving their investors more exposure to the metal while they've handed off the production risk to the companies they've financed.

Right. So they're giving their investors more exposure to the metal with less exposure to risk. Every ounce we hold on our balance sheet, We're giving our investors more exposure to the metal and less exposure to risk. So if you look at the mining industry over the last 20 years or so, gold's up about 500%.

If you look at the performance of the mining stocks, they're up about 20%. So it's something in how our industry allocates capital, which has not worked out. So the irony is, yeah, most of these companies are selling their product below the cost to get it out of the ground. Just as whole dollars to then start all over again.

So that the final part of this conversation that really, you know, knocked at home for us was. Let's say we are making a really strong return today, right? And it's something our investors would love. You're making 20, 30, 40 percent. Okay, great. If we sell that ounce for a dollar, what's the cost to replace it?

Right. Right. If it is 15, 20 years from now with political risk heating up, a lot of these commodities are in countries that are quite challenging to operate within. Taxes are increasing. ESG risks are increasing. No one's a proud parent of someone going to mining school. There's, there's, you know, we're running out of, of highly qualified workers, which means you're going to get wage inflation.

So we don't think we're making an appropriate return today. And we don't necessarily think that, uh, we can replace that ounce at a lower cost than today. So those are the, the frameworks under which we look at it. You know, we want to, we want to give our investors more exposure. We want to give them more leverage because again, that ounce that we hold on the balance sheet, there's no additional costs.

You get all of the upside for the investors, right? Not all of the upside. I'm going to talk a little bit about the mining industry and what we're trying to do in the mining industry, which is we're trying to make sure that we're reducing the cost of mining, minus the increase in costs, right? So it's a weird thing in the mining industry where people assume high cost and bad balance sheet equals more leverage, where, ironically, when you hold an ounce above the ground, you get all the leverage.

And we've reduced risk at the same time. So we're trying to make sure that conversation gets had.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, from a layman's perspective, all of this makes perfect sense. That leads to the 64, 000 question. Why don't more mining companies do this? And I guess you could extend that to, to other, as you mentioned, other companies as well.

Chris Ritchie: I mean, again, we're very blessed with a high quality asset that gives us margin. You know, our, our operating margins are in the neighborhood of 60 percent for the last five or six quarters. So again, We have choice, right? We have flexibility. Uh, most companies do not. Right. And that's the sort of treadmill we're on.

We're living hand to mouth, you know, we're, we're selling ounces to pay bills, right. And then we're just, we're squeaking to get by. Right. And ironically, uh, we would be a lot healthier if everybody just started, you know, holding at lower levels. Right, and drawing a line in the sand. Um, so part of what we're trying to do is, you know, we're very open to share all of the data we have, our process, our framework, uh, because what we believe is that if we get rewarded If Silvercrest gets rewarded for fighting the fight, really for, for showing the utility and relevance of our product and how it can make our company better, how it can make the industry better.

If we get rewarded by, you know, the retail investor and the broader investor group, we think that will encourage other people to, to have that conversation with us. Right. Because if the whole industry starts to do that, I think with the industry itself can regain some relevance. Because right now, my view is that our industry is not very relevant.

People aren't aware of how good this product is. And unfortunately, it's some of the behaviors of the mining industry is, is putting a bit of a bad spin or bad name on the metal itself. And so we want to separate out where we say, Hey, it's the product we want. We don't necessarily want more exposure to mining, but because mining so hard supports how good the product is.

Mike Maharrey: Right. Right. Makes sense. Um, do you think that if You can communicate the success of this. And if you start to see adoption in the broader mining industry, could it potentially even spill over bigger picture into kind of the broader public consciousness of, Hey, this is sound money. And, and maybe. Kind of help reset the entire monetary system, which I would argue is, is on a downward death spiral.

Chris Ritchie: I mean, absolutely. The way I look at it as every board of directors of every company has a fiduciary obligation to manage their balance sheet. If you're going to have a 20, 30, 40 year view and you're going to be building factories and toll roads and hospitals and whatever your business is, if you have a long term time horizon, managing inflation is a core risk management function, right?

Therefore you should be examining which instruments can I hold that serve this function, right? And the data is, could not be more conclusive. That gold and silver serves that function. I think the challenge today, or the problem today is our attention spans are about the length of a Twitter post and our financial community operates on quarters, not, not even, you know, barely years, let alone decades.

Right. But again, it's the, it's the lens in which we view this problem is too short to really grasp the impact of this money printing. So again, the U. S. dollars lost about 97 percent of its value versus gold in the last 50 years or so. So it's impossible to take data like that and not apply that to every industry.

So yeah, we want this conversation to be had and I think it's the showcasing the utility for every individual. As well as every company That can then lead into you know more positive communication and conversations about it being sound money

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. You hit my one of my soap boxes on the short attention span I would argue that you know when it comes to the markets It's almost hour by hour, you know I mean yesterday we saw a big jump in the price of gold because the uh, The CPI came in what was perceived as cooler than expected.

It really wasn't a great CPI report if you actually look at the data, but everybody got all giddy and, you know, we had record highs in the Dow record highs in NASDAQ, just based on one data point. And, you know, tomorrow it'll change and we might see a big sell off for that, for whatever reason comes up.

And it's kind of crazy. I tell people all the time, you've got to look past the minute, the quarter, even the year to kind of plan ahead and understand what's coming down the pike. And it sounds like Silvercrest is doing a fantastic job of, of looking past that, you know, I guess, uh, uh, some people might call it the, uh, the, the, uh, You know, quick and easy, uh, satisfaction and looking down the road to the long term.

Chris Ritchie: Well, there's, there's a great book. It's, it's a little dry at times, but thinking fast, thinking slow with Daniel Kahneman, he won the Nobel prize for that. And they've done studies. And, you know, we all maybe know that marshmallow experiment, you know, you put a marshmallow in front of a kid and tell them if you can hold off 15, 20 minutes, he'll get two.

You know, and see which toddler can actually hold off and understand that instant gratification versus delayed gratification, but they've connected people's ability to grasp delayed gratification with intelligence. And, you know, again, the longer the time horizon we can step out, the data becomes more and more clear.

It's just, you know, how do you, how do you not get caught up in the day to day noise? Right, right.

Mike Maharrey: Well, I mean, you know, again, we're a microwave society. We're used to everything being 32nd bits. So, uh, it's, it's heartening to have a discussion like this, that looks to the long term. And, and I really appreciate what your company is doing, you know, as somebody that's interested in precious metals and more broadly interested in, in seeing some sanity restored to the monetary system in the United States and Canada and globally, because, uh, ultimately this is just hurting.

People benefits politicians, but doesn't do us a whole lot of good at all. So I appreciate you having this conversation before we go, I would like you to just kind of let people know where, where can they find out more about, uh, Silvercrest and what you're doing, you know, people, maybe you're interested in investing, uh, in, in the company, uh, where can they find more information about what you all are doing?

Chris Ritchie: Well, reach out to us, right? You know, our IR team, it's on our website. I mean, we, we want to have this conversation, you know, and like we said, we want people to appreciate the fight we're fighting. And again, if people do believe in the same things we do, um, you know, we don't need people to put their life savings in, but again, it's, it's, it's the call to action or what we call it as a vote.

Right. If there's a vote of people saying, Hey, I like what you're doing. I'll put a couple of bucks in. If other people see this, I think it's going to peak curiosity and again, force that conversation to be had, which again, we think is going to contribute to a really, a much healthier society.

Mike Maharrey: Absolutely.

And that's the, that's the really big picture that we're talking about here. I hope, I hope that's been communicated to folks because that's really what I hope people walk away with, you know, that, that we do have options. It doesn't have to be all doom and gloom. Uh, there are, there are ways to, to kind of remedy the mess that politicians seem to be making.

So, well, I really appreciate you taking the time again. I know that you're, you're out of your time zone, so you're probably, uh, probably half asleep. I would be. But I really again really appreciate you taking the time. Hey, I really appreciate you having me. All right. Well, thank you Thank you

Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview, and that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. And of course, you’ll want to check in to the Money Metals Midweek Memo each Wednesday, hosted by Mike Maharrey.

To listen to any of our audio programs just go to MoneyMetals.com/podcasts or find them on whatever podcast platform you prefer.

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