Speaker 1This is the Commodity Culture Podcast, where we interview prominent investors, fund managers, analysts, and company CEOs to give you an edge when it comes to investing in the commodity space. Michael Oliver, great to have you back on Commodity Culture. I want to start by revisiting your call for $300 plus silver. Now, it looks like the metal could be staging a comeback since that significant correction we've seen after hitting new all-time highs earlier in the year. I'm wondering, at this point in time, what are you seeing ahead for silver for the remainder of 2026? Oh, wow.
Speaker 2I'm going to lift my target, and I don't mean lower it. I mean, probably lift it, and I'm not going to put a number on it. I'm just going to say that I think silver. We'll go berserk. There's multiple reasons we can get into those, but yes, and the action last week turned up our intermediate trend metrics, momentum things. Now, what I mean by that is, when you look at long-term analysis of silver and gold bull trends, like annual momentum, so forth, the break was a nice break, but it didn't break anything. It didn't break anything. It didn't break any structures on momentum, so the long-term trend remains positive. That was a negative zigzag in a positive trend, but when we go down to more intermediate technical factors, things that come and go in a matter of a couple months or several months, they turn negative. They turn negative about in March, really, prior to that war break, but since then, if you stand back and look at a silver or gold chart, go back to that day. It was a break that occurred in late January, early February. It was really about a two-day break. People don't realize. It was like two days. Bam. Silver hit a low of $63.90, and then went back up to like $90, and then came down and made another low at about $61, didn't fall apart, and then turned back up again. Teasing rally. Then came back down again, got to about $56. Right now, we're trading $65. We're back above those lows, all the lows that occurred, the sequence of lows. If you think about it, all those lows were like marginal teasers. The real low occurred two days after the high in February. Since then, you could draw a line sideways on silver and say, well, yeah, it's still under pressure, but it really isn't going down much since six months ago. Somebody's been buying that beast down there. Same with gold. Same sort of pattern of a low in early February, then another low in March, and you get the point. The upturn we just had last week, on most people's charts, say, well, it's just another rally in this nonsense range. It's no good. It's just a sell the rally. But when you look at momentum, it says, no, this one's different. This is a rally that will likely sustain and work. It's a rally that will likely sustain and work. Silver, if it's compensating for that, major error pricing error relative to anything relative to all these basket of base metals gold etc it likely will do it with speed and i suspect that when that event occurs and i think it's coming i think when we come up out of this congestion and already we have signals that we're coming up out of here okay you can wait till the new high if you want to but on the other side of this congestion zone will be something that will drop jaws um you know and be so rapid so quick that people just won't understand it but at that point in time i'm going to bet that certain other fundamental factors come into play that already are in play but have been long ignored by investors and analysts and talking heads on financial tv mainly monetary crisis you debt crisis government debt crisis we haven't had one of those a long long time okay and in 2008 the markets collapsed silver and gold went up uh 2000 to 2011 uh but the stock market went down because of what a debt crisis but it was just mortgages this time it's government bonds this is a nuclear event and it's only now marginally becoming sort of a sideline issue on financial press it's it's it's so major it should be the front headline it should have been for a year now uh the japanese went into the hole and now suddenly we're going into the hole with them in fact we're helping fund them try to get out of the hole we're printing money to support the yen so they'll continue to hold bonds like a circle there okay it's a game uh but it involves what printing money that's what moves monetary metals but that other side of that move in silver when it occurs i think it's going to be a big deal i suspect you're going to start to hear the fundamentals that really matter and i don't just mean the increasing demand industrial for silver but i'm talking about the monetary crisis and those headlines will suddenly come up to the four but silver then be 150 200 250 and all those people say oh now i understand okay that's usually the way it occurs it rarely is that all the real truth headlines come before the move occurs doesn't happen that way it usually comes later and i suspect that's when silver will look like a wet bar of soap gold has historically been one of
Speaker 1the most reliable stores of wealth but now there's a way to earn from it directly monetary metals operates the gold yield marketplace where holders of physical gold and silver can earn yield on their metal paid in ounces of gold not dollars through their platform clients can earn up to a four percent annual yield on gold paid in gold ounces that yield derives from leasing physical gold to qualified businesses in the precious metals supply chain like jewelers and refiners your gold stays in physical form and you retain title to your metal the additional yield is paid to you in gold preserving and growing your exposure to the price of gold as inflationary pressures debt concerns and macro uncertainty continue to make gold attractive as a hedge earning a yield on gold and silver adds another strategic layer to your portfolio individuals and institutions around the world have already been earning returns through monetary metals leasing program for almost a decade so go to monetary-metals.com slash commodity to find out how to put your gold to work the link is in the show notes below and now back to the interview and at a thousand dollars silver in such a world people would also counter that okay everything's going to be so expensive and expensive at that point we're going to need a real kind of collapse of the monetary system perhaps hyperinflation to to bring on a price tag that high when it comes to the silver price does something need to go disastrously wrong in the global economy and monetary system for us to get to four digits silver or is there a way there without these sort of dislocations occurring
Speaker 2it's already we're already there it's just that nobody acknowledges it right jamie diamond does he said months ago you know we got a bond crisis we're going to have to deal with it okay in other words you can't keep pushing this thing down the road every 10 20 years oh we'll take care of it again you know it's been going on for like a century now and finally it's reached a point where the japanese have suddenly you know like the prime minister over there said a year ago we're going to print print print okay and i know our current president would like to do that as well uh whatever it takes keep that stock market up okay and the fed has already begun because they they've been supporting the yen arbitrarily artificially and that has helped expand the money supply so i think those headlines will come but we already are in the crisis really what we're going to hear later is the wave effects of the crisis we're what for example at msa we're not just watching like things like ai and semiconductors although it did give a good call on the semiconductors at the top we're not far off the top we said that's it okay uh the real issue is this underlying multi-decade government debt crisis and the jeopardy of the fiat currencies not just japanese yen but us europe we all have that we're all in the same soup and it's just a matter of degree and when japanese first us second europe's going to be next but fiat currencies in a crisis like this will come into severe doubt people say well you know this has been kind of neat for last but multiple decades about a hundred years or so but it ain't working you know it's not backed by anything and uh it's out of control and all we keep doing is printing more of it and you know i probably said it on your show before that you know when your granddad built the house it was forty five hundred when your dad built one it was forty five thousand now immediate homes four hundred fifty thousand what does that mean what does that reflect okay degradation in the money unit okay uh the stock market right now s&p for example you go back to the year 2000 the dot-com high look at the multiple gain in the s&p where it is now versus then and then go back and look at an m2 chart and see where m2 money supply was in in 2000 versus now oh s&p has matched the decay in the money unit that's all it's done the s&p i can't buy more loaves of bread now than i could back in 2000 with the s&p uh gold has massively beat that stayed ahead of it it's held its value silver's lagging and that's where we get the slingshot but anyway it's going to be very interesting because there are many fundamentals out there that are all interconnected with this debt problem and the fiat currencies that will suddenly pop into play we're watching financial sector i mentioned the ai which is the the ai which everybody's watching and semis is the most watched thing but you got to watch the financials in the key banks and also the commercial real estate market etfs like rwr vnq uh there's something wrong there and you can't allow the fed can't allow any headline story to come out about a large bank no we're not going to go under because they'll print the money but you can't have a major debt story about uh-oh major credit problem here oh another one oh another one suddenly the entire view of the investor public will shift and they'll realize uh-oh they'll be ambushed in other words by a reality that's already been there
Speaker 1so if silver is going to enter a new reality what is that going to do to the silver mining space because we've seen both gold and silver miners uh take quite a hit post iran war kicking off including some wacky stuff like the big gold producers reporting record quarterly earnings and then dropping in the aftermath seems there's a real disconnect between price and reality at this point when it comes to the silver miners specifically is is that a sector you're particularly bullish on given your outlook for the silver price
Speaker 2oh yes i'm rampantly bullish on the silver miners my own personal investments which are disclosed at the end of each report disclaimer uh are heavily in silver bullion equivalents and silver miners i also own some gdx as etf of gold miners though has 20 silver miners in it too uh but there's a there's an event there that is extremely important all of the primary entry points to go long silver that we have recommended are well below the market so in other words if you're buying silver now yes you're you're probably doing the right thing but on the other hand you've really missed the opportunities that came starting in 24 25 and then late 25 there were three buy signals the average price of those three buys was 38 bucks okay but there is another technical that's about to snap into place we argue and when it does the temper and tone and verticality of the gold the monetary sector especially the miners will go absolutely crazy on the upside and i'm going to argue that probably when that occurs that's when you're going to start to hear the stuff that motivates your average late comer investor into saying gosh i gotta own some of that. And it's like a wet bar of soap time. Grab that thing. The spread relationship, the relative valuation relationship of miners to an ounce of gold, you could plot that thing. We go back and use XAU index, gold and silver miners index, Philadelphia, because it goes back to the 1980s. So we got a lot of history there. And when you plot it, you'll see that if you divided the price of the XAU index into the ounce of gold, that during the 1980s, 90s, 2000, up through 2008, the average was 25%, meaning that XAU was at least 25% of an ounce of gold. It went up to 35 at one point and got as low as about 17, 18%, but it lived in a range for decades, the average of which was 25%. Okay. And the bear market, that ended in 2015, that spread collapsed to 4%. I mean, okay. Average 25%, it went to four. I mean, what do you think? We don't need gold miners anymore or silver miners? We'll go to 4%. It's like free. I mean, what do you want? Okay. It lived in a range for the past 12 years between that 4% low, never went back there again. The lows after that were, I think, 45% to about 8.5% on the XAU divided into gold. So, you had this huge collapse and then this dozen year wide, perfect little range that when you plot it on a chart, you say, oh boy, break out of that and I'm going to buy it. Okay. You're pushing up toward the top end of that again. You were there in February and then the miners pull back relative to gold and in net price. And now they're quickly asserting themselves back up. Now, when we run GDX, which is the more popular gold ETF, its top end of its 12-year range is 2.2%. Okay. Divided into an ounce of gold. Right now, it's back above 2% charging toward the 2.2. If you get a monthly close on those spreads above the top of that 12-year wide range, there is a technical void in that chart where you could double the price relative valuation of the miners to gold. So, you're going to have to double the price relative valuation of the miners to gold. So, just to bump the bottom end of the prior multi-decade range. In other words, go back to the old lows, okay, is what I'm saying. You would more than double the relative value. Now, there's another fact in that spread, and this is important. This is why it's net price important, not just relative performance important. Whenever the miners are beating gold, even during the swings within that little 12-year-wide range, especially with upswings and downswings, whenever it goes up, it means also that the net price of both is going up as well. It's never the case that the miners beat gold in a down market. So when that spread breaks out, it's also telling us not only are the miners going to revalue themselves rapidly and large, but they're likely to do it with extreme speed. So all this fits into what we were talking about before, about an acceleration of catch-up new reality for silver. The same is going to be true with the miners. So while gold is the mama and silver does move with gold, people say, no, it's not, it doesn't move. Silver does not correlate to the commodity index. It correlates to gold swings. So that's an error on their part. But anyway, I think that's the stick of dynamite you got to watch right now, is the breakout of the miners on a relative basis, spread basis, versus gold. When that occurs, I think it's helmet time. And you'll see a lot of late comers suddenly rushing in. They'll start hearing the headlines that we already know exist. The earnings are off the page. The profits are off the page for the miners, and yet it's been ignored.
Speaker 1Yeah, you're echoing some sentiments that Rick Rule said on this show recently, because he was pointing out, you don't even need to go out on the risk ladder and get into the explorers and the developers. The biggest and the best producers, producers and royalty streaming companies are trading, in his opinion, at prices that he called a gift to God for, for investors. He talked about Agnico Eagle. He talked about Wheaton Precious Metals, Franco, Nevada. I mean, at this point, can someone just buy the GDX ETF and still capture that kind of outperformance of the market as a whole, right?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's one way to approach it. You know, you could basically just sort of throw a dart at the sector and say, I don't know which ones are going to do better. Now, we do, in fact, every month sift through the miners to try to find the outperformers, the ones that are beating the sector ETF. But you could probably just throw a dart at it and buy an ETF like GDX, which is only 20% silver miners, or SIL, S-I-L, Global X Silver Miners ETF, which is focused on silver miners. And you will vastly beat gold. Now, I don't know they're going to beat silver, but gold, while it's the mama monitor, very metal, and it's going up big, these guys are going to go up a lot more. Now, it's an issue about where's gold going, the mama, okay? I've said this before, but you go back to the history of gold since it was, quote, legalized in the U.S. It was a bear low in 76. It went up to a high in 1980, and it was an eight-fold move. Price of the bear low to the bull high, eight times, okay? Different duration bull market. From 2001 to 2011, gold had another eight-fold move from a bear low to a bull high. Where's gold right now? Well, the bear low is 1,050 in 2015. We're four-fold. So, if gold even just said, oh, I'm going to do it again, have yet another eight-fold dimension move, then you're talking $8,000 to $9,000 gold just to match the dimensionality of those two prior moves. What if gold goes further? Which I think it likely will because I think we're facing something we've never faced before. When gold's got up due to the monetary expansion, inflation, et cetera, et cetera, inflation is defined by money growth, okay? This time, we have a monster, a nuclear event with the government debt market because when they have to print to keep that house from burning down, it'll go off the page. And people will then say, well, goodness gracious, I thought, you know, it was 60% stocks, 40% bonds. It was a balanced portfolio. Well, that's right. The CIO of Morgan Stanley about six months ago said, no, it's 60%, 20, 20 bonds, gold. He brought gold into the equation. I don't agree with his percentages, but his recognition of the reality was very bold. Gold must be in your portfolio. But what if bonds don't work? You know, what? If the stock market's topping, as we argue it is, and it won't take much to really get it going on the downside, like, you know, a 10% drop will sense that it's topped, I think that will occur. That will further motivate the Fed into printing. But then when you say, well, I'm going to go to the alternative that usually is a safe place to be, it isn't. T-bonds. They're horrible looking. Look at the price chart. Look at the yield charts. And they've just begun. We're entering what probably is going to be a bond market panic. And of course, we know what the Fed's going to do during that time. There'll be no limit to what they do. And that leaves you with what alternative?
Speaker 1Money. Gold. When it comes to the broad market, do you think that it might be able to stay afloat far longer than people realize simply because of the different factors today versus previous major drawdowns? I guess the last big one would have been the GFC. The fact that there's so much passive inflows into GFC. These index-based ETFs. The fact that the U.S. government now seems willing to take an actual stake in companies. What's to stop them from taking a big stake in the Magnificent Seven, for example, to kind of keep valuations elevated for longer? Obviously, it can't go on forever. But do you think there's an argument to be made that this extend and pretend that they've been doing with the debt can kind of also be applied to the stock market?
Speaker 2No, I think it'll be. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. We could go to a Weimar Republic. Why not? You know, everything goes up. Loaf or bread doubles every week or whatever. You know, the stock market. That then become the issue won't become whether it's going up, but what's going up more. In other words, on a spread basis, where should I be? And gold is already beating the S&P and nobody acknowledges it. It's higher than it was over the last 10, 15 years. Gold is. And yes, it's had a pullback recently, but it's starting to reassert itself. And I think it's going. A lot higher gold relative to the stock market. But the fact that government enters to try to support something doesn't help. History proves that. Let's go back to dot com high. They've been raising rates. People think raising rates is bad for the market. Lowering rates is good. It's totally opposite. Almost. They were raising rates in ninety nine to two thousand and the market was going up. They quit raising rates and I think it was early two thousand. And the market. Has been started the top. Dot com went down first. Internet. Nasdaq one hundred, for example, as a piece. in there who are starting to see that spread break now, by the way. In 2001, two times in the first month, January 2001, the Fed cut rates and cut rates. They cut rates all the way down, yet the market dropped 82% in the NASDAQ and 50% in the S&P. They cut rates all the way down. So cutting rates isn't necessarily good for the market, right? Okay. Same story back in 2007. So people say, well, the Fed, if they do this, that does that. Okay. Well, they're usually totally wrong, that assumption. They cut rates in October, excuse me, mid-September of 2007. S&P was near its highs. First rate cut in a long time. It shot up for about three weeks into October 2007 and peaked. We had a target zone right in our target zone where it peaked. They even did a QE in November of 2008. The market still went down to March 2009. 50% drop. It didn't help. What did it help? Gold. Gold was going up from 2000 to 2011. Yeah, there was a stumble in 2008, but it basically was a massive bull market. Fed was printing. Didn't help the stock market. So the question is now, well, can they do that again and maybe have different results? Well, if they go crazy, maybe it can. But there's a point at which even the investment public, which is usually lagged reality, says, I've had enough of this. The risk reward is sort of depleted on this one. I'm going to move over someplace that looks better, that's been doing better. And if the bonds don't work, then if they listen to the CIO of Morgan Stanley, they say, well, I guess I better buy some gold. So I'm not so sure that even if they did that, and by the way, buying into companies, I hate to get into this, pardon me. I'm not blaming Trump because a lot of presidents have done this before, like bail out General Motors, et cetera, et cetera, where the government spends your taxpayer money to invest in a company. This is Mussolini's version of socialism. Instead of taking over the company and seizing its assets like the Marxists would do, he said, no, no, we're just going to. Sort of partner with them and tell them what to do, but not really own them. And we're going to control them in many different ways. And yet it still will be, quote, private. And so government taking your money and putting it into a stock, don't bet on it working. Where they put their money doesn't always work. Like 2000 to 2002 stock market, 2007 to 2009 stock market. They put money in with cutting interest rates. Flooding the market with cash. It didn't help. So no, I wouldn't count on that working.
Speaker 1Well, I think that's a great segue into touching once again on your book, which we've talked about on this show before, Anarcho-Capitalism. It's essentially a thesis on running a country without a government. Very insightful read. I'm going to put a link in the description below. I really recommend people pick it up. Very, very easy to read as well. Very clear the way it lays out the thesis. Now, given how everything is playing out right now across the world, societally, economically, politically, some would throw spiritually into that mix. Are we getting any closer to an anarcho-capitalist world where government can actually be taken out of the
Speaker 2picture? First off, that book, which was, according to Murray Rothbard, who died in mid-1990s, is the father of modern libertarianism. I knew him personally, and we communicated, I met him one time personally and interviewed him in a paper I was running, but also by letters. And he told me that my work would be the first one on the subject of anarcho-capitalism, attempt to define it from bottom to top, not just an essay on certain, and written in 1972. So it's a long time. I'm not active as a libertarian. I'm not active in the movement. The book has a life of its own. The concepts are there. But we've seen recently, the question is, will it emerge? I don't know. We know that man gropes for truths throughout history. And he builds institutions, and they last for a century or a thousand years, and then they, for some reason, they're dismissed because they don't work right, and man evolves to something else. And this is a constant process. So change is constant, okay? And so people who sit back now and say, well, certain institutions are just here forever, like the founding fathers defined what the U.S. would be, well, as if that's been followed, presume, okay, it hasn't. But things come and go. And now with information transmitted so rapidly, supposed to, a couple hundred years ago, you want to find out what's going on, a ship has to carry the newspaper across the ocean before you know it, you know, wasn't even telegraphed, okay? But now we communicate rapidly. So everything is instant knowledge, good knowledge, bad knowledge. But anyway, it's instant. Therefore, things that go wrong quickly get identified. Now, they may not know the real cause of it going wrong, but there's a focus on it. So things can shift more quickly now than they used to. And there's a book I've not read, but I understand some of the basic thesis of the fourth turning, okay? To some extent, that's what. I argue in anarcho-capitalism, libertarianism, the new libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, is that ultimately, if ideas are wrong, and institutions are built on ideas that are not correct, or they're somewhat dysfunctional, over time, you'll find that out. And then man will hopefully, in a positive evolutionary direction, say, oh, let's get rid of that institution. That can happen. But now we're in a speedier world where these kind of things can happen far more quickly than over the span of decades. They can happen in a year or two. And particularly when we have not localized, but we have the entire, what we call the Western world, including Japan, okay? All our allies. We have great government debt off the page, no way to pay for it except print. And obviously, it's an error, and it creates all kinds of problems. It creates. It is inflation. CPI is a secondary measure of inflation. Inflation is the increase in the money supply, the degradation in the money unit. Well, that's universal now in those countries. And that has wave effects that hurt people, cost of food. It's not just the war in Iran. In fact, oil is relatively cheap still to its own history. But the overall rise in cost of living, rents, a home, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, that hurts people, but it's not caused by one war event. It's caused by the degradation of the money. The question then is, well, what do we do about it? Well, I'm not arguing that it's going to happen, but there is one instance that it has. Argentina used to be the seventh biggest economy in the world, you know, 50, 70 years ago. And then he devolved into a statist society where high inflation. High inflation, high unemployment, great levels of poverty, huge government debt, very stagnant economy. You'd call it a third world almost, you know, developing economy. Javier Millet got elected president when it was two and a half years ago, maybe longer than that. He declared himself. He's an intellectual, by the way. He's not a politician. Young guy with hair looks like a rock star. Anyway, the youth vote went for it because they wanted something to. Something to change. And he said, I'm going to change things. It's no longer going to be this established party and that established party just competing about how much socialism we're going to have. So Argentina had extremely high inflation, extremely high government deficit, extreme poverty, housing costs were off the page. And since he is an academician who defines himself as an anarcho-capitalist, it's a mental effort because you didn't just say I'm a libertarian. I'm an anarcho-capitalist. Some of the data points I wrote down the other day that are even acknowledged by the mainstream press, there was an article by Newsweek a year or so ago, online Newsweek, that cited the dramatic change he's made in the housing costs in Argentina for the poor people. First off, poverty in Argentina dropped from 54% to 28%. Since he's become president. The housing market was originally controlled by the government that's out to protect you. They had rent controls. Well, they had an extreme shortage of housing and very high priced. In the last couple of years, that has collapsed. Housing prices have collapsed and the quantity of rental homes has exploded because he's taken the restraints off that industry. And so the average guy can now afford an apartment or a home. The inflation rate went from 100% down to 32 since he's been here in two years okay um poverty rate 54 to 28 uh and the budget to the government budget has been in deficit for like a century it's now positive okay so nobody notices this and yet it's one of the kind of things that man might say well hey you know that old stuff didn't work let's try something new and he may be we'll see over time people may turn their heads and say what's this guy done how did he do that i don't know i'm not not advocating uh we're analyzing markets and frankly we i do not let my political philosophy influence my timing and trend assessment of gold for example yeah gold goes up all the time during degradation of money units but it does it in waves and we like to avoid some of those sustainable waves so in 2011 we uh 2012 right after the 2011 high we turned bearish and stayed bearish till 2015 so despite the fact that we i love gold okay um but anyway so i don't let that influence so don't listeners don't don't confuse my thoughts on that subject with our analysis but yeah we could end up with that kind of thing who knows what's going to happen
Speaker 1yeah some great thoughts you've laid out there and that also segues perfectly into structural analysis and what it is you do uh what why don't you tell us about that and how people can sign up for the
Speaker 2service well we look at all the major asset categories especially today it's important because you can't just say i'm gonna own gold and look at it only or silver whatever you've got to look at these other waves that are generated out there because they're going to impact gold one way or another mostly positive by the way uh so we analyze the stock markets not just ours but china europe etc uh we analyze the government bond markets especially important today especially important we analyze sectors within the stock market like you know everybody's looking at ai and tech i'm looking at financials you can't those those guys can't stumble if they stumble the game changes central bank they don't care about ai they care about financials okay uh we also look at the the bond market and forex we look at forex markets as well so and commodities broadly commodities that by the way which is a an investment grade arena to consider for the next several years i know it's not going to be as hot as gold and silver but it looks like it has great percentage gain over the next several years and it's broad it's not just because the oil goes up or in fact the oil is a laggard within that category right now or grains go up it's because the entire basket of commodities is basically rising in other words money is flowing into that cheap category uh probably some of it coming out of the stock market and more so once if the stock market breaks more then that flow will go somewhere else and right now that is a basic asset category that it looks good especially the stocks that are related to the commodity production grain related oil related base metal related anyway that's what msa does great well i'm going to put
Speaker 1a link in the description below um to momentum structural analysis so people can check it out sign up for the service michael as always amazing conversation thank you so much for coming on thank you jesse thank you for joining us today on commodity culture earn up to a four percent annual yield on your physical gold paid in gold ounces through monetary metals go to monetary dash metals dot com slash commodity to find out how to put your gold to work for you link is in the show notes below
PodcastTranscript AI