Speaker 1: There are a lot of interesting theories out there. Ronan
Manley has done some great work on this about whether
all the actual good delivery bars were shipped out in
the late sixties supporting the London gold Pool.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Carrie Leutz's Financial Survival Network, where you
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Speaker 3: Ever, and welcome. You are listening to and watching the
Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Kerrie lutz Man. We're
all right. At the end of February, looks like everything's
hitting the fan. Is there gold in Fort Knox? I
want to know, and I want to know it now. Hey,
what about Doge? Is Doge going to just sink the economy?
Because we're credit driven economy. Once the dollars stopped flowing,
so does all economic activity at least up to now.
Maybe things are different, maybe they're not. Craig Hempke is
with us now Tfmetalsreport dot com. Make sure you go
to that site. And sign up and any questions or
comments klfkerrie Lets dot com. Craig, we got like so
much to talk about here. First thing I want to
talk to you about is Fort Knox. Man Like, I
know the gold is there because I saw the movie Goldfinger,
and it might all be radioactive, but it's definitely there, right, Uh.
Speaker 1: There's I'm sure there's gold there. You know. There are
a lot of interesting theories out there. Ronan Manley has
done some great work on this about whether all the
actual good delivery bars were shipped out in the late
sixties supporting the London gold Pool. I don't know, maybe
you know even when they the last time they had
cameras in there and did a tour was right after
Nixon closed the gold Window in nineteen seventy four. They
went in with a select group of politicians and some media.
They said, oh, look in here's here's one of the
rooms we keep it in and you could see at
the time there were bricks, not the standard whatever whatever
those things are called the trapezoidal looking London good delivery bar,
just square up, rectangle bar bricks. And the problem with
those is that a lot of that gold and Fort
Knox got there via the confiscation or the buyback or
whatever you want to call it of nineteen thirty three
where holders of gold sold their gold sold ex appropriation.
Speaker 3: I would call it.
Speaker 1: Gold to the government at twenty dollars and sixty seven
cents and then the government, Yeah, there you go. They
certainly didn't hypothecate it. But anyway, the government bought it
for twenty sixty seven then turn around a revalued at
thirty five. So anybody that held the gold didn't participate
in that. But anyways, See, you take all the gold coins,
which gold coins are rarely four nine certainly from back then,
they melt them all down and then they poured them
into these bricks that you see in the archival footage
of Fort Knox, and I'm sure that most are still there. Well,
the problem with that is they're about ninety percent gold,
where the global standard these days is ninety nine point
ninety nine percent gold. Yes, so even if you were
to go in there, drill some holes, weigh them all,
and you came up with four five hundred and thirty
three metric tons, most of it is that ninety percent goal.
So if you had to reassey it remelt it, you know,
and re refine it. You probably have closer to about
forty one hundred metric tons, So right there, you're overstated
by four hundred metric tons. Anyway, the point of all
this is, I don't know if it'll go anywhere. You know,
it kind of reached the point of media mass attention
a couple of days ago. You know, he open there,
must goes in there, you know, or a couple of
senators or even Trump and he just goes in there
and waves his arm around and with his phone says, hey,
look look at all these shining gold. What does that accomplish?
Speaker 3: So what would happen wasn't there though? If it was empty,
If the vault was empty, well.
Speaker 1: If it wasn't there, they wouldn't go there at all.
You know, they'd come up with some reason to not. Yeah,
well it's the vault door is under repair, so it
doesn't fit into the schedule right now. They'd come up
with some rationale tonight, you're never gonna They're never gonna
walk in there, crack open some door and there's just
like cobwebs and shitting from the ceiling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they would have to get Heraldo to do that
because he's exactly opening empty vaults, right, exactly.
Speaker 1: The bigger story, Carrie is, if you try to connect again,
there may be I may be completely chewing on a
nothing burger, me and every other analyst in the gold space,
and we may be connecting dots. My standard joke, because
I might be pulled of John Nash, remember that, yeah,
from the Beautiful Mind movie where in the end, you know,
after years of just being schizophrenic and crazy, schizophrenic and crazy,
he's got all that stuff on his wall, and he's
got all these strings. And maybe that's what I'm doing
when I try to connect all the dots of everything
that's taken place in the gold market since early December,
shortly after Trump was elected. But this talk of auditing
or trying to figure out how much gold the US
actually has is certainly a dot that you can possibly
connect to some other things to try to figure out
what's going on. We'll just see, we'll no sooner enough,
I guess.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the gold has to be there. I'm about
to write an article about that because the alternative, if
it was exposed, that would be a global meltdown, right,
I mean, instantly, all the the currencies of the world
would probably go back to their intrinsic value.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, well, they toil those things that even like
if they were to revalue gold on the books, which
there's a lot of talk about that because the US
carries it at forty two dollars and twenty two cents,
we don't know what the impact would be. You know,
if you walked in one day there's no gold, maybe
it'd be some volatility for a day, and then everything
just sail off into the distance, you know, unaffected. If
if all of a sudden they come out and say, well,
we want to try to We've got x amount of
gold and we want that to represent twenty five percent
of our debts. So we're going to now say that
that gold is worth thirty thousand dollars an ounce. Does
that mean that gold trades at thirty thousand dollars an ounce?
Not necessarily. I mean it's just a book untry on
the on the Treasury Department's balance sheet. So it depends on,
you know, a number of other factors to see how
that would all play off. They walked in there when
any goal, I don't know. What I do know, Carrie,
is that at the end of World War Two, the
US had let's just call it, twenty five thousand metric
tons of gold. They backed the dollar with it to
give the dollar people using the dollar some confidence to
rebuild the world. You know, you can convert thirty five
dollar dollars into an ounce of gold. Well, by the
time we got to late fifties, the world was you know,
beginning to uh, you know, it had gotten start again economically,
and a lot of countries had dollar reserves that they said, well,
we really don't want these out of gold. And the
US lost about seven or eight thousand of those metric
tons and it was a big I mean, it was
a like scandal and what And they had hearings in
nineteen fifty seven and fifty eight, what are we going
to do about this? Well what they did is in
the by nineteen sixty one they said, you know, we're
not going to go this alone anymore. So the US
pledged about another seven or eight thousand metric tons, along
with about seven or eight other countries. And that was
a London gold pool defending thirty five dollars, and all
of a sudden that was gone. So now all of
a sudden we got eighty one hundred and thirty three
metric tons left, and Nixon said, it's enough of that.
We're not you know, we're not converting dollars anymore. And
that's allegedly what we have left, allegedly.
Speaker 3: Interesting. Interesting, Well, uh, something's going to hap up in
here right, things like it, Carrie.
Speaker 1: You know, the standard line is that Trump's gonna, you know,
put all these tariffs on, and Gold's not gonna be
able to leave London or come in to the US
from Canada or Mexico or anything else without a big tariff.
So we got to shore up the Comax with a
bunch of physical goal kind of like what they said.
You know, we couldn't fly Gold around during COVID because
they weren't any pilots and nobody was flying, and so
we had to shore it up then. So the standard
line is that's what's been going on since early part
of December, about a month after Trump was elected.
Speaker 3: Interesting. Interesting, But if we were to.
Speaker 1: Try to connect dots, we could say, well, they're trying
to on short as much, they're trying to get as
much go back here as fast as they can. Oh
and then are talking about four Knox because they know,
they know exactly how much there is. And then let's
say you know how much there is. You know, there's
this lady. Have you ever talked to Judy Shelton? Have
you ever interviewed her or try to interview her? Carry
you know who that is?
Speaker 3: I know the name, haven't had or on.
Speaker 1: Judy Shelton was actually nominated to the Board of Governors
of the Federal Reserve in about twenty eighteen. When Trump
had a chance to replace it, you know, to nominate
a couple of people. Was shot down. She was shot down.
She's just a lunatic gold bug, you know, conspiracy theorist,
fringe tenfoilve hat person. Anyway, so Trump knows Judy obviously,
and Judy's whole thing has been we need to shift
debt and remonetize gold by issuing gold backed or gold
indexed fifty year debt. Okay, interesting idea. Who would buy
Carrie how much? If you were just a buyer, if
they were suddenly started issuing you know, they got twenty
year bonds, ten year you know notes, thirty year long bond.
What kind of if you just were going to buy
one and carry a fifty year bond? Straight up the
way they're done. Now, what level of interest would you demand?
Speaker 3: You me, I can't even I'm mad, you know, like,
I'd want like ten twelve percent?
Speaker 1: I would think right, You would think right, because the
way the US fiscal situation is, and the destruction of
your purchasing power over time if you just simply get
your principle back. So what if, though, Carrie, the US said, Okay,
we're going to issue these bunts, but they're going to
be either redeemable at the end fifty years from now,
let somebody else deal with it, or will just index
them to gold. Your principle is index to the price
of gold for fifty years from now. So if you
knew your principle was protected or hedged or whatever you
want to put it to inflation and the price of
gold and everything else, then what level of interest would
you take?
Speaker 3: Would you take three?
Speaker 1: Or four?
Speaker 3: Five? Yeah? Maybe? I mean I don't trust the government,
so it's it's hard to knew.
Speaker 1: Well, there are enough suckers out there around the world
that probably would. So anyway, my point is that's what
Judy Shelton's always talked about. So okay, well, let's point
one more dott in here, Carrie. Remember Trump about a
month ago said he wanted to create a US Sovereign
Wealth Fund, Remember.
Speaker 3: That, right, yeah? Yeah, yeah, and quite understanding.
Speaker 1: He gotta fund that thing. Have you got to put
some cash in there? Where's it going to come for?
You can't just create I mean, we're already going to
do a two trillion dollar deficit this year. We're gonna
sell another two trillion dollars worth of bonds to fund
that thing. With two trillion bucks, then you got a
four trillion dollar and it just makes selling trailer. So
what if in the grand scheme of things, John Nash
now phoning in from wherever John Nash is these days, uh,
somewhere in heaven. I guess yeah, what if the plant
all along has been we're gonna set up the sovereign
Wealth Phone. We need to fund it somehow. Judy Shelton says,
we can fund it with some gold backed bonds. But
then we got to get the gold back here, We
got to know how much we've got. Then we got
to revalue it. Because it's forty two dollars an ounce.
That's only about seven hundred billion dollars at today's market prices.
But what if we carried it on the book said
ten thousand dollars an ounce instead, that'd give us two
and a half trillion dollars that we could see what
I'm saying, I don't know if any of that makes sense.
I have no idea if that's where they're going. But
that's one plausible scenario. And then I should further add
in what we don't know, because this has not occurred
at any time in our lifetime. If the US government,
unless we don't know, If the government, if they say
it's ten thousand dollars anounce on their books, does that
make it trade at ten thousand dollars an ounce? I
doubt it. Unless the government says we are a buyer
at ten thousand dollars an ounce, then maybe. Otherwise it
might just be an accounting gimmick. All this stuff is
something that has occupied my mind through the cold winter months.
And we'll see where we go from here.
Speaker 3: This is fascinating, man, this is fascinating. Well, so what
about what's happening with Doje? Does that give anyone any
realistic hope that this ship can be righted?
Speaker 1: I guess it gives some I mean, that was Remember
that was all part of the rationale for a ten
percent drop in the gold price right after Trump got elected.
Remember it peaked out in late October and then by
really by the at the time we got to that
FED meeting in December, it bottomed out about ten percent lower.
And it was all because Trump's going to cut spending
and he's going to be pro growth and higher interest
rates and all this kind of stuff. That was at
least the rationale that was behind why gold was going down. Well,
I thought at the time, I thought, man, I mean,
I guess they I guess what we found is that
they can try to expose things and they can say
we're not going to have a USAID anymore and all
that kind of stuff, but the government is still run
by appropriations bills and omnibus spending bills and all that
kind of It was something that just used through the
House yesterday that Thomas Massey came out and said that's
going to increase the debt by three hundred fifty billion dollars. So,
I don't know, it sounds good, looks good, it's good politically,
but whether or not it really does anything. And then
you know, to actually net net trim the deficit. We're
already about four percent of the pace from the last
fiscal year with four months in, which puts US on
a pace for about one point nine to two trillion
dollars in deficit this year. So, I mean, does an't
going to have any impact? I don't know, Carrie. I
wish it did, but I've again I've never been optimistic
that it would and I'm still not.
Speaker 3: So it's just a pr deal, is that it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I think so. I mean, I think Trump is
building political capital with people besides putting doze out there
and running these headlines and people you know, seeing the
waste and definitely exposing the corruption, right. I mean, you
know how these politicians all got, you know, became millionaires
is by serving on the board of you know, some
random foundation that gets fifty million dollars a year from
the government. So, uh, that's good political points. All the
other executive orders that he signed that you know, like
immediately or ten or twenty that have it like an
eighty percent approval rate that he just puts out, even
like getting rid of plastic straws whatever or paper straws, okay,
or getting bringing back the incandescent light bulb, you know,
that kind of stuff. That's all stuff that again has
a massive approval rating. And then he did it and
again makes headlines make people think, yeah, this guy's really
doing the stuff. I like to give him some political capital,
you know, for the tough stuff you are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the big pr show, is that it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, well for sure. Yeah. And again it's just
building up some political capital for what's going to be
some really tough decisions ahead, you know, and you're going
to have to navigate himself through. But this this idea
of the sovereign wealth or whatever reason you might revalue
the gold on the balance sheet. We'll see if they do.
I don't, And again I have no idea what I
really because we don't. You can't say, well, the last
time they did this carry and they took it from
forty two up to two thousand, gold immediately went to
two thousand.
Speaker 3: Well they didn't.
Speaker 1: This would be the first time in our lifetimes they've
ever done this, So we don't. I don't know what
the impact would be.
Speaker 3: Interesting, interesting, man, Yeah, this is a fascinating conundrum, that's
for sure. And you just got to wonder where it's
going to end. So we got to we're heading for
a disaster this year, you think, is that what you're thinking?
Speaker 1: Well, Carrie, you may recall when the last time we
spoke was right after I published my forecast for this year,
and yeah, I think I do every year, and I've
put it out in January, and this year was called
inversion reversion, and the theme behind that was that the
inverted yield curve, you know, where short rates are higher
yielding than you know, like the two year note is
a higher yield than the ten year note. It shouldn't
be that way, but that inverted yield curve means that,
I mean, you're signaling that a recession is coming. History
is taught from the last six or seven times that's happened.
The recession actually begins once the yield curve flips back
to a positive slope, once the ten year note once
again is a higher yield than a two year note.
Well that happened in about September of last year. So
I thought, well, okay, well, now look what's I mean.
Even the last couple of weeks, look at how I
mean this story, this idea of an economic slowdown is
catching on the Secretary of Treasury was talking about it yesterday.
You cut any government spending, that's going to impact and
that nominal GDP growth as well. Labor market's going to
start to kind of slow down. You know, I don't
know we shall see even rate cut odds which just
as of a couple of weeks go carry, you had
to go all the way out September before you found
at least a fifty to fifty chance of a rate cut.
Now all of a sudden, it's about two chances in three.
You get one by June. So there's a recognition going
on here that we're tipping over, and that's not unusually
a lot of times that happens in the first year
of a presidential cycle.
Speaker 3: So here we are, all right, So what do you
do here? Is gold gonna keep going higher?
Speaker 1: Here?
Speaker 3: They don't seem to want it to go over three
thousand do that?
Speaker 1: Yes, it has been there seems to be on a
line of the sandrawn just below that price around twenty
nine sixty or seventy on the futures it gets above there, Well,
you know what will happen when it gets to three
thousand carry, I mean, there'll be all kinds of headlines,
all kinds of news. Oh, it's three thousand, and it'll
move a little bit past three thousand and then go
right back down under and then people will say that's it.
I ran into resistance. Remember two thousand was like that
back in twenty twenty. So it'll get there at some point.
My forecast this year I said, probably get all the
way to thirty one hundred before settling a little bit lower.
We've gotten a head start on that. The key to
it all, really, besides all this other stuff that we've
been talking about and the gold moving from London and
Switzerland into the US, the key is continued and persistent
global central bank demand. Ever since the US slapped all
those sanctions on Russia in twenty in about this time
of the year in twenty twenty two, three years ago,
kicked him out of Swift, froze there foreign currency reserves.
Ever since then, the global central bank demand for gold
has soared. Twenty twenty two was a record going all
the way back to nineteen sixty eight, twenty three, and
twenty four, all three of those years greater than the
thousand metric tons of net demand. Sure looks like it's
not stopping this year. I think that is something that
under pins price. It keeps that physical demand prohibits deep
corrections in the paper price. And so yeah, it's not
straight up. We've been up every week so far this year.
Every week this year, Carrie has been a green candle
on the weekly charge. They're not going to be fifty
two of those babies, so it'll continue to move up
in stage as it always does. But I sure wouldn't
get freaked out and scared off just because suddenly the
price starts with a three. One day it'll start with
a four too.
Speaker 3: So what about bitcoin? It's not been doing too good here.
Speaker 1: Now, you know. In't that funny, Carrie? I mean, just
the well, there are a number of reasons for it,
you know. I still think and I go look and look.
I was saying this at eighteen thousand. I sold one
of my basically three bitcoin at eighteen thousand because that
was when they instituted a bitcoin futures in twenty seventeen
or eighteen, and I was like, well that's it for
that man. Now the banks got their claws into it. Well, okay,
we know what's happened since I've kind of five times.
But I do think that now that there's kind of
synthetic bitcoin with all this futures and you know, and
all this other jazz what's funny carries. It seemed like
it was such a layup.
Speaker 3: Yeah, didn't it time we say this about gold?
Speaker 1: If you're trading gold, and anytime it looks great, oh man,
we're this man, everything's in our favor. You've got to
be prepared to sell some because everybody's on the same
side of the boat. And it's almost universally true. And
you go back to after Trump got elected and we
got into December and there's ETF and Trump's going to
start a national Bitcoin Reserve, and there's all blah blah
blah blah. Oh my god, this is the easiest trade
you're ever gonna see. Yeah, right, it goes down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we love how that works out right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just, you know, almost universally true. Everybody gets
on one side of the boat. Everybody's bought, everybody's bullish.
The opposite happens. That's what's called being a contraurion. So yeah,
now it's broken down through that ninety thousand level, will
probably bang up. Try to get back above there. You
might pull back even further. But yeah, fundamentals are still
prop fundamentals. It's an interchant way to put it, but
they the supply demand fundamental is a physical bitcoiner still
compelling and always will be so maybe in another period
of pullback and sideways for a while, but we'll probably
I gotta imagine, you know, the general thesis has changed.
Speaker 3: So so, in other words, the situation is hopeless but
never serious.
Speaker 1: That's what we p Well, the opposite is true too.
Like I said, when everybody's all excited and everything looks
like wow, I mean, we are in great shape here,
you've got to be prepared to sell some of just
about anything. The opposite of that is also true when
everybody's full of despair is going to zero.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Hey, but Buffett like is sitting on more cash
than he's ever sat on before. What does Warren Buffett
know that the rest of you out there don't.
Speaker 1: I that's a good question. That's a good question. You
could certainly. I mean we again, let me preface this.
I have predicted ten of the last one market pullbacks, So.
Speaker 3: I got you twenty.
Speaker 1: Great, you might be up for twenty. So there have
been reasons to question the valuations of the stock market
for quite a while here, though, I will say, you know,
that market is subject to liquidity concerns. That money supply
is growing again, that's interesting, but that reverse repo account
has been wiped out. Remember it was like two and
a half trillion dollars, it's now like sixty billion. Yeah,
and the FED is still tapering and all that kind
of stuff.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 1: There may be like a little mini liquidity crisis at
Bruised that could, you know, cause a stock market to
pull back ten or fifteen percent or something like that.
And at that point, again, everybody'd be like, oh, oh, yeah,
here it comes. You know, the SMP is going to
fall fifty percent, and then you know.
Speaker 3: I will just go back. You know, I've been doing
this fourteen years now. You got me beat by a
few years. I started interviewing Martin Armstrong and the Dow
was just under twelve thousand, and he said it's going
up to thirty five, forty two, forty five, all right,
and then in eighteen he said it would hit forty
five somewhere between twenty two and twenty four. Right, it's
just the Dow, I mean, that's not really a representative
basket of the market, but it's still a noteworthy index.
He's been right all along. He's saying sixty five thousand
by thirty two.
Speaker 1: Okay, Hey, I will sure, why not? You know, if
the Fed sets his liquidity issue and they need to
start pumping the cash and they stop taper and they
start QI again and all of a sudden, interest rates
get out of control, and then they go to the
yield curve control and they're just are you going to
make all kinds of reasons as to why you could
get a fifty percent out of the stock market? Sure?
Why not? What? Hey? You know what what nobody ever
talks about? You go back again. Anybody can cherry pick dates,
but you know, the total gaining gold since the year
two thousand or two thousand and one or whatever is
above the S and P. So I think a blended,
balanced portfolio is always a way to go. And you
work some gold into your portfolio is probably a good idea. Hey.
Speaker 3: You know, remember Will Rogers said invest in inflation, it's
the only thing going up, right, And that was.
Speaker 1: Just Oklahoma, Yes, for sure.
Speaker 3: In the twenties. That was so even then. You know,
I do think inflation's inevitable. It should be death taxes
and inflation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, right, And I've thought since about June of
twenty twenty, I think was when I first started talking
about stagflation being the ultimate outcome of all this seventies
level stagflation where again inflation but very little growth in
the economy. And I as we get deeper into this year,
that that term that you know, you see those charts
sometimes of Google searches, you know, like in washingt d C.
People searching for how do you bleach bit and all
that kind of stuff for a couple.
Speaker 3: Of weeks, countries without extradition treaties exactly wiring wiring money, and.
Speaker 1: Right, you know, people searching, people searching. Stagflation is going
to grow as we go through the year too. And
again what the parallels to the seventies will be negative
real interest rates, you know, where the Fed will be
forced to yield curve control and be doing QWI and
say we're buying all treasuries above whatever four percent. But
the inflation isn't going to be at five or six
or seven or something like that because they have to.
And just like the seventies, it's going to be a
very beneficial time for all commodities, not just Golden Solar.
Speaker 3: Agreed, agreed, no question about it. And well, it's definitely
exciting times here. And man, when we have this discussion
again in a few months, it's going to be totally
different that I know, and you know, it's a it's
a brave new world out there. Hey, so you got
to go over to TF Metals Report dot com and
sign up. I think I think you're lagging the price
of a latte here, Craig. I think the price at
the inflation cafe is going up faster than your subscription fees.
Speaker 1: I I've a loss. I had something I can heard
it to a couple of weeks ago, and I thought, well,
that was pretty good. Iice you remember that.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I can't remember what it was because I'm now pushing
sixty hard. But yeah, I think for you know, for all, oh,
I know what it was. I got my bill. I'm
looking through my visa bill and all of a sudden,
two cars for XM Radio is fifty bucks a month,
twenty five bucks a month just to drive around and
listen to the YouTube channels college sports, and I'm like,
what the hell, I'm only charging fifteen I think that's
a pretty better bargain than satellite radio. So yeah, I
think it's worth it. I don't know if anybody else cause,
but I think it's worth it. So please check us out,
like you said, TF metals Report dot com.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, excellent. Hey you got a question for
Craig myself Klatcarrieleuts dot com. Send the email. We'll get
you an answer quick and we have a link to
craig site TF metals Report dot com in the show
notes to this interview on Financial Survival Network dot com.
When you go there, just sign up for your free newsletter.
Over seventy thousand I think seventy five thousand of you
have so far. The numbers have just been escalating like
crazy lately for some reason. Maybe that's a indicator in itself. Greg.
We will talk to you again real soon and then.
Speaker 1: Always by to talk Carrie.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to carry Letz's Financial Survival Network, your
solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to
Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than
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