You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Vince, welcome back to the show.
We're in the midst of a chaotic time in precious metals markets, Bitcoin markets, markets in general.
So I thought it was fitting to catch up with you.
Markets apocalypse.
Yeah.
Markets, silver, mageddon, Bitcoin apocalypse.
Oops. Gold. Gold NATO. I don't know. I guess we need to come up with a funny term.
Yeah. So I'm just looking at trading view right now. Yeah.
Gold hit fifty six hundred. What's it show? Thursday afternoon.
Now it's trading at forty six around forty six three eight.
Went as low as forty four hundred dollars earlier this morning.
silver similarly blow off top hit 121 76 trading at 76 was as low as 71 this morning
it quite obviously it's a 50 sell-off i mean that's you know that's that's crazy
this this i could say this as a person who's been in the market since 94 there's never and a student
in the markets, there's never been anything like this, ever, period, ever. And it's happened for
good reason. I mean, in 94, there was when Warren Buffett, when George Soros cornered silver. In 97,
there was Warren Buffett. In 93, there was the BCCI scandal. It was our very, very own Bitcoin
scandal. In 1993, silver was trading like $4. And an investment fund was found to be fraudulent
in the Middle East. And so they had to puke all their silver because they didn't have the money.
It's the opposite of not having the coins. And that made the market drop, you know, like
10%, 20% in one day. There have been all kinds of things, but nothing's like this. And the thing is,
there's so much more going on behind the scenes than we know, but it's not what we're talking
about today. What are we talking about? Well, let's start with on stage in front of the audience
and just talking about what's topical, which is the nomination of Kevin Warsh for chairman of the
Federal Reserve. Obviously, a lot of people are looking at that nomination and looking at
Kevin Warsh's perspective on markets and particularly Fed policy and identifying him
as more of a hawkish Fed chairman if he gets to the nomination process
and is thrusted to the throne of the Federal Reserve.
Many people are attributing the crash in gold, silver, and Bitcoin markets
to his hawkish nature.
We'll start there, and then we can speculate on what's happening.
Yeah, I think it's kind of interesting
because as soon as he went to the forefront, and I did a little research, he came across as
historically a policy hawk when he was with Obama. And then the pushback was, he isn't a hawk, he's
a real politic person. And then, you know, you started seeing some interviews with him
saying that he was very dovish.
And I went, okay, so this guy is basically, he goes with the flow.
And then the markets kept selling off.
And I said, well, don't they get the message?
So I guess the market doesn't believe that he's as dovish as they think.
Or maybe it's reacting to the fact that they think the Fed actually does have to hike.
I don't know.
but it certainly seems to be spreading.
It started out just as tech stocks
and now there's other stocks involved.
Bitcoin took a dip, stabilized another dip.
I bought today to be clear
just because I see big money buying
and small money selling
and I have a feeling that I might have to hold on to this
for a year as a trade
but I added to a position today.
Then you have China
what the hell is going on in China, I'm getting the impression that they're stagnating again.
All this is coming out after Japan has a rate problem because their currency is dropping.
And it just doesn't stop.
So usually, this is the alarm bell for me.
Usually, when we can't, you and I collectively can't get a handle on why something is going down,
Like, in general, the market itself is tech stocks, for example, and nothing is slowing it down.
I'm under the impression that there's something else going on that we don't see.
And I don't know what that is.
I can't see any more bad news that has to come into this market.
You know, it's, you know, the war in the Middle East is continuing.
The war in Ukraine is continuing.
Trump is in the process of backing off of tariffs.
Maybe it needs to back off of tariffs a little bit harder for this market to stabilize.
But for the life of me, I can't figure it out.
I mean, I can't figure it out.
I just don't like my reason for Bitcoin not benefiting from the disinvestment in gold.
Not that I think it should be one-to-one.
I just think there should be some money going into Bitcoin.
It's kind of like disappointing, especially with all the money flowing into Ethereum.
And Ethereum is not moving either.
So, yeah, I'm not sure if you followed the.
The event on October 10th last year in the Bitcoin and broader crypto markets, but there was.
An API problem with Binance specifically that blew up.
I mean, the story is that it blew up a number of market makers, which in turn messed up.
I did.
Yeah.
So I think there's some people that are saying that the blowback in the aftermath of October 10th is still lingering in the market in the sense that market makers haven't had the confidence to come back and bring a liquidity profile to the market.
I can see that being the case.
Yeah, I don't know.
They're not stepping into the breach?
I'm not sure what it is.
Yeah, I don't buy the micro strategy stuff.
I mean, I'm not a fan of his approach, but I don't buy that as being a problem.
I buy the problem as being a lack of liquidity.
And it sounds like indirectly we're lining up with the same ideas.
Somebody's not doing what they're supposed to do as a market maker.
And we were mentioning before we hit record, but bringing the focus back to China, there's a particular, would you say, long only fund for gold there specifically?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, this is actually very interesting.
And there's really no one that's covering this, but it's correct.
And it's why we're doing what we're doing, meaning whipping up and whipping down.
If you're reading the mainstream media, what you're going to see is truthful arguments.
What they're saying, speculators, first of all, I mean, just in case people aren't familiar with it,
silver and gold together, but silver more exaggerated, spiked to the highs last week,
and now it's getting slaughtered. And the reason it's being given is unhealthy speculation,
momentum trading, and there's truth in that if you're looking at the Chinese speculators.
But in the US, there's no speculation right now. There's very little speculation.
And what's really going on is China has a faulty market structure. Now,
Bitcoin people have to know this. I mean, Bitcoin people have seen this with faulty ETS,
with Mt. Gox and all that shit that you dealt with over the years. But it's kind of like this.
China has a very closed market structure. And so you can trade futures, but not everybody can
trade futures. You have to have your money in a futures account. Most people will look for exposure
in a stock investment, just like in the US, and they'll put it in a fund or an ETF type of product
that gives them exposure. Now, silver has been rallying for good reason,
for related to multiple reasons, but all of them are fundamental. Gold's been being bought by
central banks and silver's being bought because what's happened is gold's gone up so much that
people are looking at silver going, well, maybe that's cheap. Maybe I should buy some silver.
And what they're doing is they're piling into silver now at the same time that industrial
demand is picking up for solar panels.
The reason China is the problem, and I'm not saying this politically or geopolitically,
is because they have a product out there called the SDIC fund.
They only have one equity product for exposure into silver.
And that product is a long-only fund.
So it's not truly an ETF.
You can't short it.
So if you want to buy exposure in silver, you buy it.
Now, all that guy can do is buy futures to parallel how much money has flowed into it, not the price of it.
So if silver rallies a percentage point and you and I are the Wongs and we're out there, we're going, I want to have silver exposure, your choices are limited.
And so you throw your money into this SDIC fund and it goes up 2%.
and then it goes up.
And then so that attracts people going,
that was up even more than silver.
Maybe we should buy that.
It starts behaving like a leveraged ETF
and it has no right to do that.
Now, there's no one out there keeping a lid on it
by shorting it and buying the futures.
There's no arbitrage.
It's a long, only fund.
You can't sell it.
And so this thing, which by the way,
is the perfect vehicle to get a market higher
because the money stays in that fund.
It doesn't go out.
and it's just kind of like
bottled up critical mass.
You know what I mean?
And this thing gets out of control
and what happens,
staying focused only on China
is China,
85% of the solar panels
that go into Europe
are sold to them by China
and solar panels use silver.
And India probably does the other 15%.
But their appetite for silver has been just voracious for the last two years, going back to right after the first silver squeeze that they called it.
The second silver squeeze, I should say.
And what happened was the industrial demand was getting front run by the US ETF demand.
They usually like to buy during US hours because we're dummies and we sell it all the time, right?
Then it's going out to China.
Now you've got this long-only fund that people are going, oh, look at that.
It's going up 2%.
Let's buy it.
And so they're buying it.
And the Chinese market structure is such that there is no silver available for them locally.
So they have been depending on a lot of imported silver over the years.
And this is where it gets interesting.
While all this is going on, all this snowball effect is going on, the United States finally
figures out that its supply chains don't work, that it can't get silver or copper or anything
else it needs to build its power grid back.
So it says, wait a minute, we have to start getting raw silver.
We have to start getting finished copper.
We have raw copper.
So how do we do that?
Well, we do that by going into Latin America and saying, give us what you got.
And Latin America, for the last 10 years, has been selling it to China.
And they still have plenty of it.
But China is like their customer now.
And so what do we do?
Trump comes out with his Dunro Doctrine, Monroe Doctrine, basically.
And he says, China out of Latin America.
Now, I can confirm this.
You had Josh Farrell on last week.
And he and I have had conversations from different perspectives.
He's boots on the ground fundamentalist and I'm boots on the ground financial.
And he said to me that he was on a trip recently and he bumped into some military personnel in the Caribbean.
And they told him that they're there now to minimize Chinese influence over Latin American commerce.
And I was like, well, that makes sense.
Then I saw in the marketplace J.P. Morgan starting to take in silver concentrate, which is basically raw silver.
And when you take those two things and combine it with China, that means China is not getting its raw silver.
That means China is getting squeezed.
That means China needs to buy it if they want to sell their solar panels.
And so they started to get short-squeezed over there.
You know, their industry needs to buy it, plus they had some short funds that needed to buy it.
And then come Thanksgiving, we talked, I think, after this, but then come Thanksgiving, J.P. Morgan,
which has a bunch of silver available in the COMEX, gets it pulled by China. And JP Morgan
says, no, we're not giving it to you. So China is now making sure. The US has cut off their
supply chain. We've just gone in and basically invaded Venezuela and deposed the leader Maduro.
I think China is a little bit stressed. And so their industrial business started to buy the silver.
And there's a spread. It's kind of like when you trade Bitcoin in two different exchanges.
Back in the day, you'd have different prices on Binance versus Kraken or what have you.
Well, Shanghai is trading 110, and COMEX is trading 100, and you can't buy one on an exchange
and sell it to other because it's physical.
You've got to transfer.
It's not that easy to do.
Financials are broken down.
You're tariffing me.
I'm tariffing you.
We can't do paper arbitrage.
And before you know it, someone in China gets their ass handed to them, and it spikes.
and then it magically ends overnight.
And so now the market comes off.
They find the silver is what I said.
And the Chinese speculators who are being blamed for this
are really a function of the government having these ridiculous products out there
that are imperfect, kind of like the, what was the name of the fund,
the Grayscale Fund?
You know, that's futures.
I mean, it wasn't as obvious that that was a big problem, but same idea.
So China has pretty much gone on a buying binge of precious metals for the last three years, and they finally caught someone cheating and lying.
It's going to be just like any other scandal.
You're going to find out that people were selling silver.
They didn't have kind of like the custody and rehypothecation issues that are going on in crypto now.
Same idea.
So I think the market's done for now.
I mean, I don't want to give you a directional prediction, except to say that it's gone from being overbought to being oversold in three days.
Do I think it's going to go up from here?
No.
Do I think it's going to go down from here?
No.
I just reiterate what Josh said Between 50 and 150 or more likely between 60 and 110 I don think it going to go back up to 110
But the fundamental problem isn't solved yet.
They still don't have the silver that they need in the future,
and America has pretty much started hoarding it with the critical mineral status.
And the result of that will be, as Josh had said, nine months out,
there's no silver for Europe. And I checked the Bloomberg forward rates and nine months out,
the forward rates for gold and silver are higher. So there's people that are worried about future
supply. It'll be almost like if the having didn't happen. They're dependent on that supply and it's
not there. So that's the long-winded version, but hopefully that helps. Yeah, definitely paints
a better picture.
I mean, you have the mechanical side
of the issue, which you just described.
But then even last week,
the social side was really
beginning to send alarm bells to me.
I mean, just both charts were parabolas.
And then you have people in line.
I had a buddy in the Bitcoin space.
He's an Australian.
He wrote a tweet thread about.
He was like, okay, I've hit my target.
So I'm going to take my risk off the table
and went to a physical dealer shop to sell some of his silver,
and the line was out the door,
and people were talking about how they were up 100%
on the trades they made three weeks before.
Oh, yeah.
He had the mania aspect of it, lean in full bore.
You guys joke about the boomers finally making money in silver.
That meme is real.
Silver had $50, and gray-haired guys were lining up.
But I was getting calls.
How about this?
I was getting calls when silver was trading $70 on the way up.
And dealers were calling me up saying, I just got a bunch of junk.
And for those of you that aren't familiar with junk, junk is pre-1965 coins, which are 90% silver.
And they trade at 90% of the silver weight.
And we're talking about $400 in quarters that's worth thousands of dollars, like tens of thousands of dollars.
So a quarter is worth $70.
At one point, it was like that because it was almost an ounce or a little bit less than an ounce, 90% of $70.
When I was trading $100, a 1964 quarter was worth $70.
That's insane.
insane. And you and I look at it, we go, that's insane. But meanwhile, it happened that it
persisted for a little period of time. Well, during that timeframe, everyone over the age of 60,
over the age of 70, with bags of coins in their basement, were going through them and bringing
them and dumping them on the lap of all these dealers. Here, what will you give me for this?
And they were buying it like $10 on their spot because these are older people. They're getting
advantage taken of them. Maybe they don't know. And I started getting calls during this time.
Hey, Vince, are you in the market for silver? I'm like, nope, not buying right now. I'm trading it.
I'm long it, but I'm not buying physical right here. Well, I got some junk coins. I'm like,
yeah, okay. I don't want junk coins. I don't own a refinery. But I understand the merit of them.
He goes, well, I'll give it to you at $3 on your spot. And I'm like, whoa, that's cheap. I'm like,
all right, fine, I'll take some. Then the next day, Silver's trading 95. And I go,
do you still have any of those coins left? He goes, yeah, I do. I'm like, really? Why isn't
anyone buying these? And he said it to me. He said, because they won't stop coming in the door.
All these old people are coming and going, here's my quarters. Can I have some cash? Can I have some
cash? If only they were young enough to buy Bitcoin, I guess, right? But they're selling
it like the meme is real it's real and and but then something weird happened and i almost i almost
got frothy myself um it broke 105 and i called the guy up i go you still have those coins
no i mean what happened he goes everybody cleaned him out just yesterday and i went
so at that point he said to me i didn't say it to him he said to me we are in the fomo stage now
We are in the froth now because when people are calling him up,
because I call up a check, he's like, people were calling me up going,
buy more, buy more. He goes, they thought it was over a hundred dollars.
It's never going to go back down again. And sure enough, he was right.
That was the top. His name was Brian. That was the top.
He was right about that. Brian Kuzma. So anyway,
it's a shit show. It's like, it's like any other media, you know?
that's funny that you had
all the silver influencers
on X saying we're going to 150
we're going to 200 we're getting back to the
gold silver ratio of years past
so it's at least got to go to 500
eventually
and I don't know gravity
looking at the chart it's like gravity has to
set in at some point
oh yeah
I mean
the
the argument
of silver going to $500, I don't buy into because I haven't really heard an argument. I just heard a
price prediction. The argument of silver going to $200 or $300, I do buy into, but not tomorrow.
And the reason I buy into it is real simple. If you go back and you look at what happens to
any mineral when the US puts it on a critical minerals list, using lithium and uranium as the
examples, when they get put on the list within five years, they triple in value. And when silver
was put on the critical mineral list, it was worth $40. But it triples in five years. This tripled
essentially in five months, right? What's that, August, September, October, November, December,
five months. I mean, that's insane, right? So for me, as a trader who says, I actually
handicapped this. I said, silver should go to $143 within 50 months. That was my math. As soon
as they made it critical minerals, I went, all right, lithium is the home run. Uranium is a
little bit less of a home run. I'll average the home runs. $143 in 50 months. So I bought it.
And then it goes to $80 in three months. And I go, okay, maybe it's going to shoot to 200,
and then back down to $140.
But this is goofy.
Goes up to $120, and that's the end of it.
That's the complete end of it.
And so if you say to me, do you think it'd go to $200, $300 over the next five years?
I'm like, yeah, absolutely.
Do I think it's going to happen in the next five minutes?
No, this market is ridiculously overbought.
And everybody's so smart about that now.
But I have a lot of subscribers that wanted it to go even higher.
And I kept saying to them, don't buy it anymore.
Take profits. Don't sell your physical. Sell paper if you have to. Don't buy it. And, you know,
it turned out to be wrong for two weeks. But when it's right, man, it's horrible. You know how it is.
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it out. We're shifting this back to the geopolitics of the day. I think that's the big question. I'm
pulling Warsh into this, the Monroe Doctrine, the Don Rowe Doctrine as well. I think Warsh
is a particularly interesting pick considering the fact that he's basically an understudy of
Stan Druckenmiller, who Secretary of Assent has worked with as well in the past. And obviously,
we've had this for saber-addling from Trump for two years about consolidating Treasury and Fed
policy. And it seems like Kevin Warsh is the guy that will go affect that policy since him and
Scott Besson are very close and have the same sort of market teacher in their careers.
And it seems like we're going to have a consolidated front between the Fed and the Treasury, which will have geopolitical implications.
And I think Scott Besson said it publicly a few weeks ago, what was the most surprising part of taking the Treasury job.
And it was national security, which geopolitics plays into.
So what's your view on how things are being set up on the geopolitical side of things right now?
That's well, starting with your your your your savvy comment about the whole Soros Druckenmiller relationship.
It's like Druckenmiller's got his his buddies in there now, you know, Warsh and Besson.
Geopolitically, as it manifests locally, there's a very clear thread about the point you brought up there.
And that is the world is deglobalizing.
And because the world is deglobalizing, without getting into the minutiae of it, when the world was globalized, the Fed was the most important part because monetary policy allowed us to reach out into other countries.
Fiscal policy is tax and spend at home.
The fiscal policy is essentially tax and spend.
The monetary policy is print and distribute.
So monetary policy is the network.
Fiscal policy is the money.
So as the world deglobalizes, and you can see this in the personalities of the leaders being hired.
They're regional leaders.
They're nationalistic.
They're more conservative.
They're less worried about kumbaya all over the world.
They're more interested in their own national priorities.
Well, as that happens, all these countries we all know are fixing their supply chains.
Fine.
But what we don't talk about is they're fixing their money chains, which is their payment
rails, which is their payment chains.
And those are equally important for a different reason.
So I'm a country in Europe.
Italy is a good example.
Italy's got fragile supply chains.
It depended on China.
It depended on Europe.
It depended on Africa.
dependent on the U.S.
And so they're working on those,
getting those fixed up.
You know, we need to get our
this from there,
energy from there,
energy from there.
But also monetarily,
they recognize that
they have to build
their own military.
They have to build
their own infrastructure.
And you don't do that
with monetary policy.
You do that with fiscal policy.
You raise taxes
or what have you.
But when you do that,
you make your investment,
you make your central banker
less important.
And in fact, they've gotten so adamant in this that they've said to their central bank,
that gold that you're holding, they hold on to their gold at the central bank level.
We don't do that here.
That gold that you're holding on to, that's ours, give it back.
So essentially, their treasury said to the central bank, give us the gold back.
In the US, as you rightly bring up, the subordination of the Fed to the treasury is happening.
The Fed will either fold into the treasury or, you know what?
Now that I'm thinking about this, yeah, this is a good point.
I mean, this is a good point because of what you brought up.
If the Fed gets subordinated to the Treasury, becomes more dependent on it, becomes more
beholden to it, then the Fed becomes the break.
You know, the fiscal side is we're going to print money, but we're going to give it to
this industry and that industry and this industry and that industry, as opposed to the Fed printing
money and just raining money on everyone in QA.
So what you have now is you have Besset saying we need to print money, it needs to go to that industry, defense, infrastructure, power grids, things like that, as opposed to the Fed just printing money and saying it goes where it goes.
So the subordination of the Fed to the Treasury is a symptom of the geopolitical changes that are coming on.
And that is monetary policy doesn't matter.
we can't influence people's economies with monetary policy as much anymore,
and we've got to take care of home.
So I think it's possible, coming back to your point,
it's quite possible that the market is looking at this saying the punch bowl is really over.
Maybe Warsh isn't a hawk, but if Besson's in control, maybe we're going to be raising rates.
So I think that's a valid argument that we should think about.
Maybe the party is over.
I've recorded a recap episode of the fund.
I'm a partner at 1031.
One of our principals there, John Arnold, he writes a weekly recap, and this week was focused on the Warsh nomination and dissecting his views on Fed policy and what he would do.
and he's explicitly said, hey, I would like to bring rates down lower,
but I don't want to expand the monetary base.
And I think that's all well and good to think about,
but structurally, is it actually possible?
Is John Arnold on your board?
No, it's not. It's the real John Arnold.
It's not John Arnold from the John Arnold Foundation,
the billionaire commodities trader.
It's another one.
No, I say that because I could have given you a John Arnold story about how he picked my pocket for $2 million.
Well, take it here. It's not the John Arnold I'm talking about.
All right. I'm referring to John Arnold.
I mean, this is actually a pretty funny story because this is a nightmare for me that I survived.
So I'll give you a trading story here.
During the early O's, 01, 02, there were natural gas problems.
There was hurricane season, there was winter coming up,
and the October contract and the March contract
are the two contracts that get the most volatile.
And there were these very exotic options
called spread options.
So March versus April the spread itself can be very volatile And I was the market maker I was the designated market maker in this product on the NYMEX floor And they were extremely complex and very difficult to trade
It'd be like trading options on crack spreads. It'd be like trading options on two commodities,
like crack spreads, you know, heating oil versus gasoline and what have you.
But the two months that this customer picked, I didn't know who the customer was at the time.
This customer picked was March, April.
And these months are typically very dangerous.
March is the end of the winter.
And if it's a cold winter, March explodes.
And April's the beginning of the summer.
And nobody ever wants April.
So there's a seasonality like March, April.
Nobody cares about it.
And at the time, March and April were kind of like right here.
Nothing was going on.
And so here I am selling these calls to some guy.
Some guy, you know, on the floor.
but I'm like, I'm 80% of the liquidity. And he's got a huge position. And then don't you know it,
cold snap, market rallies. Now I'm losing my ass. Okay. I don't know it's John Arnold yet,
but it is John Arnold. I'm losing my ass. He was running Centaurus at the time and he had just
crushed Brian Hunter at Amaranth. I knew people at Amaranth as well. Anyway, so natural gas starts
to rip. I panic, the good panic, and I cover my risk. I still have these stupid options on.
You can't get out of them. They're like a roach motel. And I knew who John Arne was. He was
respected. He was legitimate, and he was an ethical, massive trader in natural gas.
and you always wanted to know if you traded with him because he was going to be right and you better
overhedge. But I didn't know I traded with him. So the market's on the highs. I actually turn a
profit, a big profit, easily seven figures, let's put it that way. And I decide to get out of half
of my risk, which means I need to go back to that customer and get him to give me the other half of
my risk. So I turned to the broker. This is the floor at the time. I turned to the broker and I go,
hey, that customer of yours that bought all those March, April calls from me,
calls, they were bullish calls. I go, call him up. I want to buy them back. They're worth us
at this point. They already done their work. Call him up. I want them back. Guy calls him up.
Vince, I got him on the phone. He says he doesn't want to get rid of him.
now I'm kind of panicking I'm like why why he goes because he turned them into puts which meant he's
now bearish and so my apparently they say my face turned green and then white I'm like who's your
customer and he went well I shouldn't say who it is but it's the guy named after the bakery
Arnold Bread and I go and I looked at him I said Centaurus he goes yeah I go I turned around and I
went into the ring and I panicked. I bought everything that I had to get back to cover my
position. And I lost everything that week, everything. I completely lost everything that
week because the market went down and he actually said on the phone, this is a nice guy he is. He
was just, sorry, but he really needs them. And you know what? I know that he meant that. He probably
was screwing me over a little bit too, but that's okay. He's a good trader and I respected that.
Anyway, so they carried me out on a stretcher a week later because of John Arnold. So
when you said his name, I immediately had PTSD flashbacks. I'm like, John Arnold. Anyway,
that's it. I just wanted to mention that to you. It's a good story. It's a funny story because
I'm still alive to talk about it. But I lost seven figures that I had made and then lost
seven figures. So I went from, let's say, I'll make a number up, up 2 million to down 1 million
in three days. It was a complete disaster.
That's a whipsaw. I almost died.
I mean, a lesson in survivability, too, in the short term. I mean, maybe some lessons for people out there
just got wiped out this week, whether it's in Bitcoin, gold or silver.
It's long. I know, right? I mean, I got lucky.
I got lucky to survive that, but I'll never forget that because I knew
who he was. And I'm like,
and I'm like he's not a dick if he's not selling him to me then maybe he's he means it and I went
all right I'll go in the ring I'll start covering what's Vince know what's he know like people were
freaking out what does he know I'll tell you what I know I'm gonna lose my ass if I don't do this
and of course I lost my ass anyway so yeah our John Arnold has a good uh a good story
too he used to work at Citadel uh for Ken Griffin he's told this publicly so I think he's
comfortable with me sharing it, but he gets an email one day from Ken Griffin's
executive assistant, like, Hey, Ken wants to talk to you. And at the time he's like a low level
analyst, lower level analyst at Citadel. And he's like, Oh God, the big boss wants to talk to me.
And like, ask the executive assistant, like, are you sure? He's like, yeah, he wants to talk to
John Arnold. Um, here's his number, give him a call. So he calls him up and Ken Griffin's like,
hey, John, what do you think about this gala next week?
And our John Arnold's doing research, trying to answer.
On the go, and then 30 seconds into the call,
Ken realizes it's not the John Arnold that you were telling a story about
and says, oh, I got to guess.
Oh, my God, that's funny.
He probably gets a big name, Michael Jordan.
Yeah, I have an uncle.
That's a similar situation.
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What's up, freaks?
I've been seeing a lot of YouTube comments.
Marty, your skin looks so good.
You're looking fit these days.
How are you doing it?
Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more.
Trying to get my swell on.
Trying to be a good example for my young son to fit.
Healthy dad.
But part of that is having a good regimen, particularly staying hydrated, making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body.
That is why I use salt of the earth.
I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt of the earth.
I'm liking the pink lemonade right now.
It's my flavor of choice.
This is their creatine.
I've added this to my regimen.
They have it in these packets as well.
Makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling.
You want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through TSA.
It's very, very nerve wracking at times.
You have to explain hates.
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It's creatine.
I'm trying to get my swell on.
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Bringing this back to Warsh and what John Arnold and I were discussing this morning is I think Warsh has publicly said he'd like to do interest rate, lower interest rates, but restrict the expansion of the balance sheet, not only restrict it, but begin or continue to unwind the Fed balance sheet.
And we were discussing that.
I think the probability of being able to execute on that is very low.
And John was.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I was going to say, John was explaining there.
You could get QE via another route, which is you push all that treasury buying onto the commercial banking system by changing the SLR and other stuff.
Right.
Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, when you phrase it that way, you're John Arnold.
Sounds like he might be onto something. Simply put, we had started, we just started something
that's called RMB, but it's really QA. Basically, the Fed is going out and buying
three-year treasuries instead of selling 10-year treasuries like it should.
And so now we have a little bit of this yield curve control concept of QE coming.
Maybe Walsh is going to kill that at lower rates.
Maybe the market is telling him that's a bad idea.
So I think that's actually a good point.
It's not so much that Walsh is a hawk.
It's so much that he wants to stop the QE at lower rates, which might be an error, at least to how the market is looking at it.
But you're saying that he could do a different type of QE or a different manifestation of QE?
What does Sean say?
You just do QE via another means, which is you go through the commercial banking system and basically set up like shell QE.
And you change the reserve requirements for treasuries and you highly encourage the commercial banking system to issue credit to the industrial policy.
Right, right.
lower reserve requirements, let them lever up, give them a free toaster,
tell them to go for it.
We'll be here when things blow up.
That's right.
That makes sense.
That might be what we're looking at.
So what do you think the next six months looks like in terms of how all this shakes out?
What are you looking for?
What are the big dominoes to fall or headlines you're looking for in the geopolitical sense?
Well, starting with metals, assuming there's no geopolitical news, I would say I think metals need to go sideways.
I'd like to see them go sideways for three months as opposed to dive or re-rally.
I mean, believe me, I want it to re-rally, but I don't want it to do anything right now.
I want it to just kind of figure itself out and let the fundamentals reassert themselves.
But geopolitically, it's actually pretty digital for me geopolitically.
It's, you know, if you read Michael Hartnett, the CIO at Bank of America, he's been pretty good with this lately.
And he's of the opinion that Trump domestic policies must mirror what he's dealing with overseas.
So because of his overseas difficulties, he's essentially adopted Nixon's model.
It doesn't look like Nixon's model, but it is.
The first thing is Nixon, Richard Nixon, spent a lot of money domestically.
And that's what Trump is doing.
He did that.
Nixon was basically a liberal Republican.
Then what Nixon did was he put in price caps.
Now, Trump hasn't put in price caps.
He's not going around saying he can't raise prices.
He's going around to each industry saying he can't raise prices.
Lower your prices to the drug industry.
Lower your prices to the utilities.
He's going around industry by industry, and in a populist sort of way, getting prices controlled.
Trying to, anyway.
And the third way is, well, Nixon was constantly trying to get rates lowered.
So he's Nixon, as far as I'm concerned.
Good or bad, he's Nixon.
Now, the problem with this is for Trump to do this, he's trying to raise money with tariffs.
And I think he's going to run into a brick wall, and he's going to realize that as long as tariffs
are in play, and he can't get rates lower, or at least with QE, he's going to hurt the economy at
some point. And so I think he's going to have to walk back the tariffs again, taco, if you will.
And he's going to have to, he's going to cave on tariffs. That's my opinion. That's my opinion.
Behaviorally, he's going to cave or compromise on tariffs. And so that's my geopolitical comment.
And that will be done to rescue the domestic popularity. Now, what can save him is if we do
actually get peace in the Middle East, but we do get peace in Ukraine. So I'm looking at it that
way. I'm looking at he has something he has to do that's not going to be good for the market,
but bad for him. He needs something good for him that's also good for the market.
So my position is the next six months, I'd like to see the markets go nowhere. And I think the Fed
would like to see the markets go nowhere as well, sideways, just transition to something different.
and let's see what the midterms bring so we can see if Trump is a lame duck.
He's a lame duck, but so we can see if he has influence anymore.
But going into the midterms, do not be surprised if we see a tariff compromise
because it'll pop the markets and get him his votes back for his midterm electorate.
So that's where I'm geopolitically.
I think there's going to be a war.
I think the big problem coming on the horizon is us getting China out of Latin America,
believe it or not, makes Taiwan a bigger risk.
The moment that Trump said Monroe Doctrine, China put out a paper.
And the paper said, it used to say, we like Latin America, we like Latin America,
we like Latin America, and we also own Taiwan.
That's their paper, right?
But this new paper that came out when Trump made his point was Taiwan is ours.
We love Latin America.
Taiwan is ours.
And so the rhetoric changed and the order changed.
So what they're saying is, you know, it's kind of almost like a meme now.
But what they're saying is if you can go in and you can take Maduro out, we'll do it in Taiwan.
So that's the wild card.
The wild card is if Trump doesn't give in on tariffs and China struggles a little bit, maybe they do a little bit of their own domestic flexing to look powerful.
So my wild card is my black swan is Taiwan.
My done deal is tariffs easing.
And my hope for the economy is a war ending over the next six months.
I mean, not very exciting to talk about today, but I think we're all kind of tired from everything that's going on.
Exhaustive.
Well, that's – I certainly am.
But as you're explaining that, and obviously the last two days,
everybody has been hyper-focused on markets, on gold and silver particularly.
But if you just look at the last three weeks, you have the ice riots in Minneapolis,
this Claudebot thing hitting the market, everybody going crazy over the AI,
obviously Venezuela from a few weeks ago.
Oh, Claudebot, yeah.
Nobody is talking about it in my neck of the woods.
But you're right.
That a big deal Yeah It a big deal But it just like this whipsawing of narratives Like I woke up today i like what are people saying about ice in minneapolis and nobody talking about it online you have the epstein files getting released everybody focused on those right now um
i know i feel like i'm getting chewed up by the news yeah well it's like that's why i like
talking to people like you because you focus on the long-term signal and you're diving into uh
research and literature that is relatively under the radar that people aren't focusing on,
but you get these signals and bringing it back to China, Taiwan.
I think Venezuela was a very bold move.
As an American, I think it actually makes sense to make that move.
But to your point, it was humiliating for the Chinese.
The Chinese had a delegation there.
That day got no warning.
Yeah, but...
Let me ask you a question.
Do you think it was truly humiliating or do you think – I mean it was humiliating.
Let's not lie about that.
It was humiliating.
But do you think that China knew about it and had to go along with it?
You know what I mean?
I don't know.
I mean I'm assuming they didn't.
Can you imagine just going in there and saying, oh, China's there?
Let's do it because China's there to really stick it to them.
I mean that's pretty embarrassing.
You know, we just went right in there and did that with sounds weapons or whatever the hell.
Yeah, the discombobulator.
No, it's like you're telling a line like to do that and then to expect China not to do anything.
That's a that's a very bold calculus.
So maybe they won't do anything.
Maybe China is the paper tiger that people some people have been talking about for years.
You know.
Maybe, maybe.
be. I mean, look, I mean, I'm not an expert in this area, but I've talked to people that
understand a lot more than I do. Like, you know, a land war in China is one thing. A land war in
Asia is one thing. But an ocean war with the U.S., apparently China doesn't even really have a deep
water port or what they call a blue water port. So that's difficult. I mean, they have the artillery,
but they don't have the access.
Like we have California.
California is a deep, long water port.
China doesn't have that.
So they're limited in their ocean projection.
So maybe they are the paper tiger that you're talking about.
Paper dragon, I guess, maybe.
Is that what they would be?
But I mean, to your point,
and I'm not sure if you've seen the reports of them retrofitting,
shipping
shipping boats
with military equipment.
They're like
putting like missile systems in
like large shipping container ships.
They're repurposing
like freight ships.
Is that a sign of weakness?
I don't know.
Sign of a
yeah. Interesting.
Head is wild.
Yeah, this year started off hot, real hot.
Like bringing it back to midterms.
Well, we've had a good year in the last month.
Right?
I mean, every January has been crazy for the last four years.
It's just, you know, in war.
Well, then again, it is Trump.
It is Trump.
You know, you got to have, you got to respect Trump's chaos.
That's what he's all about.
And so I guess we could really end by focusing in on the monetary order side of things.
If we're in a bit of a reprieve, metals cooling off, Bitcoin cooling off, people catching their breath.
But I mean, based off my conversation with Josh, it seems like people are, some countries are dashing for physical on the back end.
And obviously, the last time we talked, we talked about the gold and a warrant.
with the Shanghai exchange and sort of that need to create that.
Oh, yeah, the gold on what? You want to talk about that again?
It seems like things have progressed.
That's, yeah, that's actually, you know what? Yeah, we should talk about that.
China, I mean, last time we talked, China was taking the gold in their vaults and putting it aside on warrants.
And nobody knows on warrants for what.
But since then, since we talked last time about this, we went into the whole big thing that was picked up by that YouTuber.
So thank you for that exposure, by the way.
Since that has happened, Marty, since that has happened, Hong Kong has announced that they're doing a joint venture with Shanghai to produce a cross-collateral product.
So your gold in Shanghai can be used as collateral in Hong Kong with all the risks involved with that.
And so it's kind of like the vaults.
Look, we talked about this.
We told this Fred Flintstone blockchain.
That's what we called it.
Is that what we called it, I think?
It's Hong Kong.
It's Shanghai.
It's Saudi Arabia.
And it's maybe two or three other places.
And your gold is there.
Your gold is there.
My gold is there.
And so they're connecting these with this blockchain type of product, whether it be, I think it's Cardano that they're leaning towards right now.
Yeah, they're leaning towards Cardano.
And then they're creating this basket called the unit.
And the unit basically is a basket of gold plus currencies.
And so you're over in Saudi Arabia and I'm over in India.
And I have a vault with my gold in it.
You have a vault with your gold in it.
And we have this token that goes back and forth that says the gold's there, the gold's there, and so we trade.
Well, the reason that that's not a fallacy, not just a fantasy anymore, is because Hong Kong said they're connecting with Shanghai.
Now, it may seem like they should obviously connect because they're both Chinese, but the reality of it is Hong Kong's a different jurisdiction.
And so Shanghai is purely China, and Hong Kong is a gateway to the Western world.
So you've got, this is coming from reliable sources, you know.
I've been working on this for about the last six months, and Eric Young, King Kong on Twitter, or X, I should say, he provides his own perspective.
And that is gold is going to be used as collateral for financing developing nations' economies.
So right now, the US will say, you have a treasury, I'll give you money against it.
China is saying, you don't need a treasury, you can do it with gold.
And so the gold in China and the gold in Hong Kong are going to be the first node that operates.
So this warrants in China thing, this is, I mean, I don't want to get too bubbly about it.
This is happening.
The dollar is going to be directly competed with by gold as a collateral, not as a currency.
It's not a currency.
It's a collateral asset.
It's gold.
It's a pet rock.
It sits there.
It doesn't do anything.
Great.
We know what it is today.
We know what it is tomorrow.
They're not ready for immutable ledgers.
They need to be involved in it.
They're ready for, oh, yeah, I think that's worth something.
You think that's worth something.
We know it's worth more than a treasury because the U.S. can't be trusted.
Let's use it.
Let's use silver too.
No, no, no, no.
Stay with gold, all right?
Nobody uses it.
It's useless.
It's pretty.
And so my gold is in my vault.
Your gold is in your vault.
We have a token that says that my gold's here.
You have a token that says your gold's there.
I buy some wheat from you.
You buy some oil from me.
We settle the trade in gold.
And that's what the Hong Kong Shanghai is going to be.
It's a big, big, big fucking deal, Marty.
And like, it's going to happen soon.
And maybe that's why everybody's freaking out about metals right now.
Maybe you've got to get your collateral.
You know, like if Bitcoin were collateral, they'd be like, I need it tomorrow.
And Bitcoin will eventually be collateral, you know, but that's the point.
Everyone, I mean, I know you don't need to focus on Bitcoin, but I really think it's
important to juxtapose Bitcoin with gold here.
If you think central banks are going to say, let's use Bitcoin now, they're not going to
say it.
They all have gold.
They're not going to throw it out.
They're going to use what they have.
And then they're going to say, wait a minute, I have too much gold.
Maybe I should buy some Bitcoin.
So that's the evolution for immutable ledgers.
It's like once you realize that, it's just a brick.
You don't need a brick.
You can just use a ledger.
So anyway, gold is going to be the bridge off of treasuries and onto a more appropriate,
perfect money.
Whether it's Bitcoin or something else, I don't know.
But it's gold's turn.
It's gold's turn.
That's it.
Well, it's interesting. You mentioned this node topography between China and Hong Kong and the fact they're starting this.
I'm not sure if you caught up, but Tether has launched a gold-backed digital currency as well, Tether Gold.
And so you have this sort of east-west-west.
They own as much as like a central bank now.
Oh, yeah. They own something like 14 tons or something like that.
140 tons.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I did it right up on it.
That's interesting.
I completely spaced on that, but that's really important.
Now, this is a different product.
I mean, not different product, but I want to get your thoughts on that.
I'm thinking that I got from a reliable source.
Not only Tether is doing it, but Tether's major competitors are doing it.
Two of them are.
And in Saudi Arabia, someone's doing it with silver.
I don't know.
Not Saudi Arabia.
Dubai.
I'm like, that makes sense.
Dubai, blockchain, crypto, tax-free haven.
If you're going to make a product, you want to make it in Dubai.
Dubai is where you want to be.
And so I think if you look at it from the normies or normal people that are looking at the United States,
you've got Trump, he's a gold bug, right?
You're going, well, in February, IRAs can now have gold in them.
And we do need to buy more gold because China's using it.
How can we get more gold in the country without distracting from the dollar?
Well, first, let's get Bitcoin under control.
We got that?
Okay, we got that under control.
Now let's start buying gold through Tether.
I mean, I'm not outright saying it, but if I were Tether, and isn't the CEO of Tether
a former government official?
Of Tether USA, Bo Hines, yes.
He was working under David Sachs, as the cryptos are.
Yeah.
So, I mean, Tether buys gold, whether it's for the United States or not, they're going to create a product.
And when the United States says, OK, you can put gold in your 401k and all the boomers and Generation X people like myself are like, OK, I'll do that.
Well, it's like, well, here's the stablecoin Tether to give you.
It's kind of like it's new, it's hip, but it's still gold.
It's, you know, the whole world is going to start using gold somehow because they're not happy with treasuries anymore.
And eventually they'll use something else.
But right now it's gold.
That's a good point.
I forgot all about it.
Well, yeah, as you were describing the China-Hong Kong gold relationship, it just made me think like, huh, it is interesting that Tether launched Tether Gold in last year and they've accumulated so much.
Like, is that like some, not that I'm a big believer in 3D or 4D chess.
Behind the scenes, which does make you a conspiratorial mind, and you wonder, did they see all this gold at the Shanghai Exchange getting called a warrant and say, all right, we need to counterposition this.
So Tether, we need you to launch this as well.
Right. Well, you know, three years ago, HSBC created a product.
And this ties into Tether. HSBC created a product three years ago that would be a gold backed stablecoin.
Now, they're trying to launch it for retail in Asia, you know, Thailand, Indonesia, those areas around there.
And I don't know that it's caught on yet, but Tether just hired HSBC's best traders.
Duh. It's all happening.
You're right. That's a good point.
Look at us solving the problems.
We got it.
So Tether's going to launch a product.
We got a good education, you know.
We were able to think clearly about this stuff.
Yeah, we went to a pretty decent high school.
I know that, right?
Wait, where'd you go to university?
DePaul University in Chicago.
Oh, okay.
I went to St. Joe's University.
You're a trader.
but you went to de paul so that's pretty good were you when you were telling that arnold story
where you'd see bot or um were you trading new york no i was i was in new york uh natural gas
options are new york exchange so i was i'm a new york floor guy chicago floor guys are actually
better trader than new york floor guys but uh we don't we don't we don't tell them that but yeah
Yeah, I worked at a Manitutra.
Were you in Chicago doing that too?
I was in Chicago like 2009 to 2014.
But I worked at a Manitutra's fund, which was a bunch of ex-CBOT guys,
and they had incredible war stories from the floor.
Oh, yeah, there's all kinds of good stories.
Chicago is a very bizarre place for the trading on the floor.
New York is smaller in terms of trading, and there's more colorful stories.
But Chicago, if you look at the trading pit from the observation deck, it was like an ocean.
It was – and every corner of it was – it was like Where's Waldo?
Really fascinating stuff.
Anyway.
It was – I was – I mean, by the time I had gotten into the industry, it was all servers,
and there was a bunch of nostalgia for the old days of screaming on the floor and throwing the signs.
Yep.
Yeah. Yeah. I hear you.
Well, Vince, appreciate your time this afternoon. I think it's a good update.
Things are cooling off. It's good to recalibrate, figure out where where things are, where they may go and catch your breath every once in a while.
It's funny. It's funny because, you know, here we are being relatively mellow and I'm going, yeah, but you know what?
Tomorrow it's probably going to shit.
Something's going to shit.
Something's going to hit the fan.
And you and I will be like, no break for us now.
But anyway, Beach Digging Ditches.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you, Vince.
Go join the Gold Fix, Substack Freaks.
It's a great read.
Peace and love.
Okay.
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Okay.
Thank you.