Why Rick Rule Is Buying Gold Now: Monetary Shock Incoming

What the government is selling is telling savers uh around the world and at home is that the US midterm elections which is to say US politics are far more important than the sanctity of the dollar. Make no mistake the economy that we enjoy today is based on fraud. That chart that you show, that hyperbolic chart always scares me. >> Just in the last month alone, gold went from $4,000 to now almost 4700. Oh, actually, as we're speaking right now, $4720, uh, right above $4,700. It's moving faster than I can keep count. On Tuesday, August 25th, Bitcoin in the last week and a half alone, already moved up more than 30%. And bond yields have, especially on the long end of the curve, come down since the Treasury started intervening in the bond market in various respects. We'll talk about that. And the reawakening of gold miners and risk assets with Rick Rule, founder of Rule Media, former CEO of Spots and of course the organizer of the Rule Symposium. Great show you hosted earlier this year in July in Boca Raton. Rick, thanks for inviting me. Thanks for coming back to the show. >> David, thanks for your participation and support uh of the show. It's folks like you, but particularly you that make it work. So, I want to thank you for being there. I'm sorry illness interrupted your enjoyment of the conference, but thank you very much for your support of the conference during and before. >> It was a great conference. Um, one of my uh better experiences this year. So, uh, congratulations for putting it together. You can check out, by the way, Rick's interview with me at the rule symposium link down below. You can recap Rick's last interview with me and his views then. Back then, sentiment for gold was a lot weaker than it is now. And in fact, one of the themes we discussed during the show is why sentiment at $4,000 or just below $4,000 is so much weaker than the prior year. Despite a good turnout to your conference, I would say the overall market sentiment at the time was rather uh weak compared to what it is now. And I want to just stress that there has been a reawakening of several asset classes. precious metals, Bitcoin, tech stocks resurged following the July slump and um and gold miners as well. What happened in the last month? There must be a bigger macro story at play and there must be something that has spooked the government enough to be intervening in the bond market to this extent. >> Boy, you've asked me a lot. So, let's let's attempt to get to all of them. I would suggest that the weakening that we saw in the gold price mid year was a function of higher US interest rates. Simple as that. The higher US interest rate uh causes the US dollar relative to various asset classes including other currencies in gold to rise uh very very very simply. It also raises the cost of owning those other asset classes, be it margin debt or anything else, and increases the attractiveness as a savings asset of long-term US securities. When uh the interest rate uh at least temporarily peaked, uh that was uh difficult. The government looked at the increasing interest rates and while Worsh himself has described himself as a hawk uh high interest rates are inconvenient for the political class for many reasons not least of which is the refinancing of America's debt. Uh and as you suggest now uh two things have happened to spook the market. The first is and I think this is probably the most important uh in effect counterfeiting. The US government when they needed to assist the Japanese government in an intervention on behalf of the yen asked the Japanese government not to sell their holdings of US treasuries. The Japanese had ample money to intervene on their own, but that would have resulted in them adding market pressure to the US Treasury market. So rather than that, the US government counterfeited, that's the right phrase for it, uh, a bunch of new US currencies and loaned that money to the Japanese on extraordinarily advantageous terms so that the Japanese could intervene with counterfeited money rather than US treasuries, which they already owned. The Fed intervention in the short end of the Treasury market has gone on for quite some time. The US government has chosen to borrow from the short end of the market. And while they've been borrowing, at the same time, they've been strengthening the short end by printing or counterfeiting money and buying uh short-term debt that would otherwise be used to satisfy supply. The US government has begun to do something very different now, which is to intervene in the long-term market. You'll remember, David, that in earlier discussions I talked about the fact that while the Fed would seem to have control of short-term rates that the market was reasserting control over long-term rates and uh the differentiation in yield suggested to me at least that the bond vigilantes or the market itself was beginning to control the long rate. So despite the government's attention to uh attempt to jawbone rates down that they were rising in effect of their own valition that suggested to me that private savers looked at the underlying rate of US inflation which is different than the CPI and decided that they needed more compensation to tie their money up for longer terms. This is very inconvenient to the government for a whole bunch of reasons, not least of which is the incredible amount of US debt that needs to be refinanced over the 18 months. But the long bond hurts other people who vote, too. Uh 30-year fixed mortgages are up. The cost of uh consumer debt to fund things like consumer durables is up. The prime rate of interest is up. the high yield or junk market is in disarray and so the government has been at least from their own point of view forced to intervene in the long-term market. What the government is selling is telling savers uh around the world and at home is that the US midterm elections which is to say US politics are far more important than the sanctity of the dollar. And that was all investors needed to hear to bid the gold price up from $4,000 to $4,800. >> The gold market, if we were to believe or assume that the gold market moved up on the yield story, then the gold market is telling us that the Treasury is going to succeed in capping the long end of the curve. And if it doesn't believe that, then it wouldn't have moved. Do you are you on the side of the gold market here? >> Uh I I don't agree with the thesis. uh if we observe the gold market going back uh I'm embarrassed to say when I started my career but before you were born uh if nominal yields rise but the real rates are still negative which is to say if rates don't compensate savers for inflation rates can rise and the gold price could rise we haven't that seen seen that circumstance in the market since 1981 but But I would suggest to you that we're seeing precisely that in the market now. I would suggest that the deterioration the purchasing power of the US dollar is proceeding along at 8 or 9% peranom compounded while the long bond uh has risen to 5.6 or 5.7. At 5.6 or 5.7 you are not making 56 or 57. You are losing 2.5. the same circumstance that we had in the decade of the 70s. It has been true for 40 years that the bond that the uh bond yield and the gold price have moved inversely. But there is no requirement that that happens uh in the entirety of the decade of the 70s. Uh uh the gold price moved in tandem with real after inflation yields rather than nominal published yields. Before we continue with the video, I'd like to tell you a bit about investing in the mining sector. When you buy a gold miner, you buy their costs with it. The capex, the overruns, the diesel, the labor, the grade misses. Today's sponsor built a business designed to own the gold without owning the problems. Mattala Royalty and Streaming, ticker MTA on the NYC American and TSX Venture exchanges, holds close to 100 gold, silver, and copper royalties across North America, South America, and Australia. A royalty company doesn't build mines and doesn't operate them. It holds a financial interest in production, so shareholders get leveraged exposure to the metal without the capital costs and without the operating risk. And these aren't lottery tickets. 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What would happen if no intervention were to happen and the free markets were allowed to do their thing? Would rates continue to go up? And the second part of the question, if you believe that the free markets would continue to push rates up, what would happen to the economy? >> Uh I think it depends on your point of view. Who constitutes the economy? If you are a saver, you are adequately compensated for your theft, for your thrift. You are adequately compensated for deferring um consumption now in favor of the future. If you are a spender, your spending habits just became more expensive. Almost certainly in a circumstance where the underlying purchasing power of the of the currency is declining at 8% compounded. uh if the market came to control interest rates, the interest rate would rise. Uh it is believed that for a a so-called riskless counterparty uh and I think given the amount of assets uh and income that the US government has, particularly its nuclear fleet, that they come as close as you could define a riskless party, particularly because they can counterfeit if they need to. At any rate, uh it is believed that a riskless counterparty would in a market demand o would receive 150 basis points over the real yield. If you assume that the underlying inflation rate is 8%, that would suggest a 30-year Treasury rate of uh 9 12% or 150 basis points uh over uh the deterioration the value of the purchase uh purchasing power. The 30-year uh fixed mortgage generally trades at a premium uh to the 30-year Treasury rate. That would suggest a 30-year fixed mortgage rate in the 10 and a half range. >> Uh that would be very very very hard on an economy that has come to rely on artificially low interest rates. >> Yes. >> Uh and fraud. Make no mistake, the economy that we enjoy today is based on fraud, based on innovation, based on a whole bunch of things, but importantly based on fraud. The low cost of capital that the market enjoys today is a consequence of artificially low interest rates and a consequence of savers subsidizing spenders. In a democracy, spenders are much more numerous than savers. Uh asking uh spenders rather whether savers should subsidize them is very much like four coyotes in a lamb having a vote over the lunch menu. Uh obviously it's the lamb that's going to get eaten. And the market that we have uh observed and if enjoyed is the right phrase enjoyed for the last 50 years is very much uh one where savers have been politically compelled to subsidize spenders. >> Question for metals investors particularly gold investors is whether or not this environment that you've described is a bullish environment for the metal. Now let me pull up a chart here. Um you have told me at the beginning of the year in January that you thought gold was overbought and silver to that ex by extension was overbought around the start of January when gold was trading at let me just pull you up the exact price pretty much what it is now on the 20th of January right before I saw you at the VRIC gold was trading at just under $5,000 it shot up towards $5,500 in a matter of weeks a very short amount of At the time, you're already starting to think that it was frothy. Should gold retrace or return towards $5,000 again for the second time, let's assume it happens this year. I'm not saying it will, but let's assume it were to happen again this year. Would you still make the same remark that gold is overbought at $5,000 given that it's happened twice in the year? It depends, I think, on the causes for the increase. >> If the US government is successful in driving down the bond yield, uh, and if they continue with the same program of counterfeiting, uh, notice I hate calling it quantitative easing. I prefer to call it what it is, then uh, a higher gold price is absolutely warranted. uh understand that uh the nominal price of gold, the US dollar price of gold uh probably varies substantially from where it would be in a circumstance where the denominator the dollar existed in the free market. So it really depends on the nature of the buying. What I began to see in uh in uh December and January of this year was momentum buying in the middle in the middle. That's what bothered me. That chart that you show, that hyperbolic chart always scares me. Uh in my life, whenever I see a momentum driven chart uh and I'm beginning to see it in gold now, I get concerned uh for the very very very near term. But in real answer to your question, it really depends on the economic circumstance and the policy circumstance uh involved in the gold price rise. If our government continues to signal to savers like myself that the sanctity of the dollar is of no concern, I'll have no choice but to increase my level of gold savings and decrease my level of dollar savings. >> I'm going to overlay the gold chart now with some other things. This is the SMH, the uh VanX Semiconductor ETF. Uh that actually has been continuously hammered uh throughout July and hasn't really recovered much in August. That aside, I'm going to overlay this with uh Bitcoin and I'm going to overlay this with the S&P 500, which is a lot more than just semiconductors as you know. Uh the trend is that barring a few sectors within the stock market, a lot of risk on assets have started to reawaken so to speak. I'm talking about Bitcoin and other sectors within the within the S&P 500 which is denoted by the orange line here and they've all started to move around the same time. So my Rick Rick my question is if the Treasury has to intervene and presumably these things are moving on the intervention of the Treasury that to me signals weakness in the economy because why else would they have to tap their $1 trillion Treasury general account to buy back bonds if everything is going smoothly and all right I mean that's a question I asked myself but yet the market is interpreting this is very good news a little curious what do you think >> I wonder uh first of all what really constitutes weakness in the economy. >> Yeah. >> They say uh recession is when your neighbor loses his job and a depression is when you lose your job. Which is to say that all definitions are relative to the observer. >> Part of me in terms of answering this question can't do it because I have no opinion as to the real value of the S&P 500. I understand natural resources. I understand conventional financial services and I don't understand much more. Uh I would say the same thing with regards to Bitcoin and semiconductors. So while what you're saying makes sense uh which is to say that the risk on trades occur uh as uh money is becoming easier and money is probably becoming easier because of cons uh political considerations. I can't speak to the price levels and their values because I don't understand those values. Um and I'll leave it there. I mean I wish I could answer the question in more wholesome fashion. Uh, I'm just not educated enough in the other sectors that you talk about, Bitcoin technology or the broad market. Tool pine, >> I think you're being very humble. Uh, but regardless, let's move on back to the gold and gold uh uh minor sectors here. I'm going to show you now gold and the GDX overlaid with each other. And um the question is pretty straightforward. Uh which do you like more right now? right now being the 25th of August, gold miners or the gold stocks. And if I were to do a one-mon chart, okay, I don't know why my y scale is behaving this way, but you can see that the uh GDX has outperformed gold uh dramatically since gold started recovering, which makes sense. Um so, um while I fixed my y-axis, I'll let you explain whether or not you like the miners more or the bullion more. I think that depends on who you are. But for me, I like the miners more. I'm willing to do the work. I'm willing to understand it. I'm willing to take company risk. And as a consequence of that, the leveraged return on miners that you get uh as a consequence of rising gold prices, increasing their earnings faster than the increase in the gold price attracts me. But I think it really depends on who you are. They're very different asset classes, albeit related from my point of view. I save in gold. Uh I regard gold as wealth itself and liquidity. I invest in gold stocks and I speculate in small gold stocks. For me, those are three different buckets. So when you're asking me the question, you need to ask me the question on behalf of whom? For Rick Rule, uh, somebody who is willing to work hard and has the psychological durability to be a speculator, uh, I probably like the GDXJ. >> For investors, people who are willing to take company risk and endure more volatility, they probably like the GDX. For savers, they should like gold. when you see an environment in which gold is running up 20 15% in a matter of weeks and the GDX has moved up from uh a low of $70 a share to now the 105 in a matter of 3 weeks. Do you ask yourself who's been driving this momentum and if it's mostly speculation is it time to sell? >> Uh the second part of the question that depends on for whom? If you are someone like me with between 18 and 20% of their portfolio in gold stocks, this might be a time to sell to sell some. Uh you should note, however, David, that the North American mean market share of precious metals and precious metals equities relative to other savings and investment classes is still less than 1/ half of 1%. Most market participants grievously underown gold and gold securities. So for a pro uh or for somebody who loaded up on speculations uh in a harder part of the market, this may be a time to take some profits. Uh I have a couple of speculative positions that are up in 3 months over 100%. and I have the ability myself to sell half those positions and get the rest for free because make no mistake other than the gold price, nothing much materially changed with those companies. >> Mhm. >> Uh it is arguable that if nothing has changed in a company and the company stock has gone from a dollar to $2, it's precisely half as attractive, right, >> as it was before the price doubled. Uh so I will be t trimming a couple of my speculative positions which I added only very recently >> unless we can say that if a stock moves from a dollar to $2 in a very short amount of time and that has prompted the uh miners in question to raise capital in productive ways and deploy that capital in again high RII productive ways then you can make the argument that this type of bull rally albeit the fact that it happened in a very short amount of time is value adding even in the long term as it provides the liquidity and capital miners need to return value to shareholders through more drilling or perhaps expansion. Do you agree? >> I absolutely would agree with that. I would caution you however that at least in the junior space uh probably only 10 or 15% of the listings are capable of doing that. the vast majority of them when they raise money will spend it on GNA and waste it. So it's very important taking into account what you just said that you qualify that uh with the statement that most of the issuers are less virtuous than those that you describe in your example. >> Okay. How long typically does it take for a bull market to work its way into the strategy of a minor for both uh producers and the juniors? In other words, is this rally long enough to make a difference in the market overall? >> Yeah. I mean, most of the promoters that you and I meet, David, are perpetual optimists. And to the extent that they have any reason to smile and add some lift to their story, uh I would suspect that the time from the moment that they realize the opportunity to the time that they begin to affect that opportunity is measured in seconds. And I think that capital markets as they're constructed today uh are constructed to serve issuers and generate fees for investment bankers. So uh I think as soon as the optimism expressed in a market is felt by investors which is to say as soon as the hand to wallet reflex is stimulated that the promoters and the investment bankers turn that they monetize that sentiment very very very quickly. You will note too that even during the tough times of the market that we experienced this year, uh the highquality juniors were able to raise money uh during periods of time when people were were complaining in interviews to me that there was no cash in the system. Uh I was participating in financings and getting cut back and they weren't offering me any warrants. >> Yeah. So even in the tough times, the so-called tough times this year for virtuous um issuers, times were not so tough. Times are becoming generous for everybody again. And I my suspicion is if the market keeps going like this, uh that October could be a spectacular month indeed for financings. But going like this in in the sense that it will continue to rally or gold just simply has to stay at the current level. >> Uh if it stays at this current level, uh I think the financing window will be wide open. >> Okay. >> There's a lot a lot a lot of liquidity on the sidelines. >> Do you think there's more skepticism about bull markets overall from investors today than maybe a couple years ago? In other words, investors need a little more confirmation that this bull market is here to stay before writing out checks to miners. >> Uh, no, I don't. I think if the markets stay at this level that there is adequate uh adequate interest. I point out too that although we have had some generalist participation in this market uh November, December and of last year and January of this year being examples, there is still very very little generalist participation in this market. If you start to see the generalist participation in this if you start to see generalist participation in this market uh which is to say uh if participation broadens uh uh then and I'm not saying it's going to happen but if it does happen uh then you'll see the market get underway in earnest. It has been my experience by the way that one of the best indicators of generalist participation in precious metals markets is when the silver price begins to outpace the gold price. >> Yes. >> Uh I have noticed over 40 years and I don't know why this is perhaps it's the lower unit price of silver. But when the gold prices moved enough that the narrative, the precious metals narrative is justified for generalists and they come into the space that silver begins to outpace gold. Whenever I begin to see silver uh substantially outpace gold, uh I get concerned about overly broad participation in the market. >> All right, I'm going to show you one more chart. I know the visuals are a little bit messy. Please bear with me. I've overlaid gold with a um few other things in the metals complex here along with oil. So um uh WTI here is a bar chart. Platinum, silver, uh gold is the orange line and I have here also silver as well. Have any of these things moved in a way that surprised you this year? If I were to, let's say, go back in time and talk to Rick Rule in December 2025 and I asked Rule to give an outline or prediction on how things would move. Um, and if I were to tell you at the time, let's say I were to tell you at the time, the US and Israel would attack Iran, the straight of moves be closed, and make a prediction of how markets would react. Fast forward to August 2025, uh, 2026 rather. Have any of these things surprised you? Well, certainly in view of the way you asked the question, uh, including the Straits of Fort Moose, I would be surprised the oil price was this low. >> Um, I think I underestimated I think the market underestimated the amount of floating inventory that existed and the amount of uh inventory uh that existed in strategic and economic stockpiles. The fact that the while the supply disruptions haven't been total and well we haven't had supply disruptions in North America at all. The fact that the interruption of uh energy molecules through the straits of Hormuse has only impacted the oil market to the extent it has is a surprise. I think a second surprise to me is that the impact of higher oil prices, although they're less muted than I expected they would be, uh should have been felt more in the broad economy. Higher oil prices work in effect as attacks. Uh although they don't necessarily go to governments and I would have expected more economic weakness as a consequence of higher energy prices than has occurred. >> Mhm. Um the fact uh and by the way I've made mistakes in a couple interviews that you and I have done this year David uh where I said that I expected the increase in copper price in the copper price to be moderated by what I saw as a weakening economy. That hasn't happened. Um I was just dead wrong. I know I'm jumping all over the page but that's in that's in response to the that's in the response to the inputs on this graph which are numerous. >> That's that's right. And um can you just explain why silver, platinum, palladium, which is the um purple line here, platinum is the turquoise line, silver being the green, and gold being the blue move together. I can understand silver and gold. Why platinum and palladium especially this year? >> I think that platinum and palladium may again be added to in investors minds the precious metals complex. Uh I often think of platinum and palladium in an investment context as being related to the autoc catalyst market. But it's important to note in a lot of cultures, particularly East Asian cultures, that uh the platinum group metals have traditionally been regarded as precious metals. And I note that when precious metals run, the influxes of capital into things like the Sprat Physical Platinum and Palladium Trust increase. So it could be that in the minds of a subset of investors, platinum and palladium are being reintroduced into the precious metals matrix. I don't know enough about that to comment. I haven't studied the platinum market other than the supply side of the platinum market since I left SPRAT. >> Um and on copper, you mentioned copper somewhat surprised you. Let me pull up another chart. Uh, I've heard the opinion that copper has been moving as basically a puppet to the AI buildout story. Those were the words that I've heard from some other analysts and economists. If you overlay the copper price, which I've done here, um, admittedly, that's not really the right unit for copper, but the the the the um price movement still remain consistent. And anyway, copper and the S&P move together and this relationship is stronger than copper versus gold if you were to chart both of them together. Um, is copper really just a play on the AI story? Now, >> I don't believe that. Uh, okay. There are physical costs to holding copper. Uh, copper is an industrial material and though it's forward-looking, it's not thinking that far in the future. uh higher interest rates should penalize copper because holding copper in inventory uh on commodity traders books uh is very interest rate sensitive. Very often those traders are using 90% margin. One would expect higher nominal interest rates uh to adversely affect the willingness of traders to maintain copper inventories. And it's extremely economic economically sensitive. The buildout of data centers and the buildout of electrical facilities necessary to power those generators is a two-year forward or threeear forward or 5year forward phenomenon. The copper quote is weekly. >> Mhm. If we were experiencing the decline, as an example, in consumer durable purchases, white goods and automobiles that I would have expected to happen in 2026, you would have experienced realtime decline in copper demand, not decline in forecasted demand. I suspect that the investment case around the copper miners uh the ability to produce marketable amounts of copper 3 years from now, four years from now, 5 years from now is very much impacted by the forecasted demand from uh uh AI center buildouts. In other words, I think the narrative uh is very very similar. I think the reality with copper though is that the economy, the underlying economy around the world is substantially stronger than I thought it would be. Uh, in a time of war, in a time of higher interest rates, >> uh, in a time of threatened trade wars, uh, I I'm at a loss to explain the economic strength that we're enjoying. And I'm at a loss to explain how the government can conjure this as a bad economy, one that needs lower interest rates. On the lower interest rates front, um what is your expectation for the yield curve? I know you run Battle Bank and financials are dependent partly on the direction of the yield curve for profitability. In theory, if the yield curve flattens, net profit margins for banks, all else being equal, should be lower because banks typically borrow on the short end of the curve and lend on the long end. And so, um any changes to your operations? Yeah, please. what you say describes the banking industry as a whole. >> Okay. >> Which is why I've always been able to out compete the banking industry. Uh the idea that I'm going to play chicken with interest rates, uh particularly with a 10% equity slice is wrong. >> At Battle Bank, uh we borrow at a variable rate and we lend at a variable rate. the idea that I'm going to repeat the failings of the US Savings and Loan Industry or Silicon Valley Bank or Republic Bank, uh, Republic National, I'm sorry, and, uh, lend long-term and fixed rates and borrow short-term and floating rates and expose myself to an interest rate rise is something that's absolutely positively not going to happen. I've been in the banking business for 50 years now and I'm tolerant of small mistakes. I have no tolerance whatsoever, not a shred of tolerance for big avoidable mistakes. So, >> can you just describe in layman terms how what you've just said mechanically is different from a traditional big bank borrowing and lending at variable rates instead of fixed? >> The the bankers look at the yield curve that you described, the fact that short-term rates are low and long-term rates are high, and they seek to arbitrage those two rates. They seek to borrow money from their depositors at three and lend that money out to the borrowers at 8 or 8 and a half. Uh against uh collateral that has traditionally been stable like 30-year fixed mortgages as an example. Uh the banks will even lend at 6 and 3/4 or 7 because the historic default rates have been low. The difficulty particularly in things like a six and six and 3/4 rate uh 30-year loan is if your cost of if the interest rate rises, you're funding that 30-year fixed loan with overnight deposits that you have that you're paying three and three/4ers or four on. If all of a sudden you aren't paying three and three/4ers, you're paying six or seven. >> Mhm. uh that loan after your GNA uh and particularly with loan losses goes away. Um Battle Bank will absolutely positively make you a 30-year fixed rate loan. And as soon as you've made three payments on that loan, as soon as the loan is considered to be uh performing, we will sell it uh to somebody who wants to own 30-year fixed 6 12% paper, an insurance company or a big bank that believes their funding source is secure enough. That is nothing uh borrowing short and lending long that me or my shareholders want to engage in. So bottom line is you've managed to make a system that allows your margins to stay relatively consistent regardless of where the yield curve goes. Is that correct? >> That's correct. Uh we punish near-term earnings in favor of long-term solveny. >> Okay. Uh final question. Of all the um assets and commodities that we've discussed today, would there be anything that you're currently adding your position to? Uh I am adding to my position in physical gold >> because that's what I do. Uh as an example, I just came off a very successful conference. Put in layman terms, that means the conference made a lot of money. >> Mhm. >> Uh some of that money I'm going to save and most of what I save I'll save in gold. Uh and I'm fairly price insensitive. Would I have preferred to buy it at $4,000? Yes. Will I buy it at 4700? Yes. >> Okay. >> Uh >> so you don't dollar cost average your gold holdings. You just buy whenever you >> there are there are some circumstances like >> right >> December and January this year where there was a hyperbolic up chart in gold. >> Yeah. >> They said you know what I got to hold off uh I I don't want to participate in this. In fact as you know I sold 80% of my physical silver. >> Mhm. But mostly uh I'm a systematic saver. I've been a systematic saver since I was 16 years of age. Uh and I save in whatever asset class at the time feels uh most advantageous to me. It might be as an example when uh the amount of economic surplus generated by the conference is is actually very clear to me. It may be at that point in time that I overallocate to short-term US treasuries for eventual redeployment in gold. Um that really will depend on the amount of liquidity available to me and the relative attractiveness of various assets. My hope is that there will be investment classes which are attractive enough to me that I move money from my savings uh to the investment account which is to say I hope there are asset classes that become cheap enough that I'm willing to have less held as savings less held as liquidity and more invested directly. >> Did you ever buy back your silver positions by the way that you sold? No, >> I have not. Uh, silver occupied a speculative part of my account and I bought silver because it was hated. Uh, I bought most of it below $20. >> Uh, silver, as you know, ceased to be hated. And when the reason that you own something goes away, uh, I believe that you need to at least reconsider your investment thesis. And in January when I sold my silver, I needed to decide whether it was still the most attractive harbor for speculative capital uh or not. When I decided it wasn't, I sold it and I put it in buckets that I considered to be more appropriate at the time. >> Yeah, I remember we talked about that. Well, silver at $68. Uh I I I I would argue and please correct me if you've seen other um contradictory evidence, but I would argue that silver and gold throughout the summer have become hated. Again, this was before the runup that we saw in now August. Um right around the time of this real symposium, going back to what I talked about earlier in the introduction, the sentiment was very gloomy, especially around miners. That's because the prices of silver and gold and the miners have been coming down all year, despite the fact that if you look at the one-year trend, it's still up since it was still up since a year ago, and it was still up considerably since 2 years ago. I guess people are short-term focused. Anyway, the point is silver is still much lower than its all-time highs earlier in the year. Do you think it's still hated today? >> I don't think it's hated. I don't think it was hated. Uh if you dial yourself back five years or six years, uh the comments that would have accompanied this interview uh online would have been overwhelmingly negative. >> Okay, >> the silver market's dead. It'll always be dead. Uh people who participated in the silver squeeze, which didn't squeeze, >> they weren't bored by silver. They despised silver. They regarded silver as a jilted lover. >> Uh probably 15 of 20 social media uh comments were anti-s. People are bored of silver right now. Some silver holders are afraid of silver. But to describe it as hated, I would suggest more it's less loved. And uh my final question today before we close off, you save in many things including gold. I wonder why silver isn't a savings vehicle for you given that well you said silver is a speculative investment for you. But if you take a look at this chart for example, yes, silver and gold tend to move together, but over the long term, one can make the argument that silver has had similar savings properties as gold if you look at it from a 40 to 50 year time horizon. >> I agree. uh and I think partly it's a bad habit formed of age. Uh >> okay, >> I I came to regard in the 70s uh gold as a mechanism for maintaining my purchasing power uh and silver uh as more of a trading vehicle. Uh if you look back at the o outperformance of silver to gold in the decade of the 70s, you'll see that although although both of them outperformed almost every other asset class on the planet >> Mhm. >> that the price rise in silver from, if my memory serves me well, sort of a buck and a half in 1970 to 50 in 1981. That's just an astonishing move. >> Yeah. uh most of it without me by the way. Uh I have to say uh they exceeded every level of greed I had even as a young man relatively early in that trade. But the lesson wasn't lost on me. Uh I I had a sense when I began to save systematically in gold which was in the year 2000 >> that there would be times when silver would outperform it. But uh in terms of my own psychology that silver was a more speculative asset class and gold was uh more of a savings asset. The chart that you just showed me showed me that over my lifetime I'm probably wrong. >> Well hindsight though it's 2020. You could have also bought Nvidia stock and one could have argued that you know was a savings vehicle in itself. Um Rick, thank you so much for your time today. I I really appreciate um any any do you ever look back at um just in the last year and I know everybody has regrets over their investing life, but just in the last year, were there any regrets in moves that you've made or perhaps didn't make? >> I don't think so. Uh you know, I'm pretty tolerant of my own mistakes now, having made a lot of them. Mhm. >> Um perhaps I spent uh too long in my buy the best trade. Uh you'll recall that couple years ago in our interviews I said that for most people if they bought Franco Weeden and Ago uh and spent the time that they would have studying the juniors with their children or grandchildren or gardening >> that they'd be a hit. Uh I also said that those people who were willing to work and take risk would do better coming down the value chain. Uh I am one of those who was willing to work and I probably should have uh shifted my for my focus down market to the speculations sooner than I did. But the truth is if your greatest sin is making a little less money than you otherwise could have that's not as great a sin as losing money. So on balance uh you know I'm I'm not unsatisfied with what I did. Uh I I I mean a minor criticism of myself. I know a lot about the community banking business and the community banking sector in United States is cheap uh really cheap and it will continue to consolidate as older owners die and sell their institutions to bigger institutions. Uh there are a number of community banks in the US with great franchises, small banks that are selling at uh substantial discounts to book value that earn 10% after tax on book. uh which is to say there are numerous opportunities in the United States to buy companies based on your purchase with a 15% after tax earnings yield that are able to reinvest that after tax earnings yield to grow um and probably uh I should go back to work in my roots and allocate more of my money to a sector that's very attractively priced that I know about. Uh I've been having more fun, however, with rural media and the rural classroom. Uh and they've used up enough of my time that most of my activity in banking is confined to building my own bank, Battle Bank. >> Okay. Well, if we'd like to follow you, reach out to you, and read more of your work, where do we go? >> Well, the easiest way to reach me is ruleinvestmentmedia.com. uh go to that website, list your natural resource stocks, and I will for free uh uh rank those stocks one to 10. One being best, 10 being worst. Please, by the way, no crypto, no pot stocks, no tech stocks. Leave an old guy to do what he does well. Uh a little bit deeper relationship, but still free, can be found at the rule classroom. 26,000 people now enjoy hundreds of hours of free programming. uh free Thursday questions and answer sessions with myself. Um that's ruleclassroom.com. >> Uh more detailed uh the investment conference, the rural natural resources investment symposium which you just attended uh has the recordings on sale. We've sold over 300 copies of the recordings for those people who couldn't be there themselves. ruclassroom.com. If you buy the recording, uh, just like if you bought a live seat and you're uncomfortable with the value proposition, we have an ironclad money back guarantee. If you buy the recordings, listen to them, and don't think you got your money's worth, email me. I'll give you your money back. ruleclassroom.com. Finally, if for any reason whatsoever, your listeners are unsatisfied with their relationship with their current bank. Maybe, as an example, they don't get paid interest on their checking accounts, or maybe the bank won't lend them money secured by their physical gold and silver, or maybe they want to save in some currency outside the US dollar or the Canadian dollar. They should check out Battle Bank. We'll do all those things for you. We'll pay you interest on your checking account. We'll allow you to save in 20 currencies. we will allow you to set up a credit line secured by your gold and silver. If your bank won't try battlebank.com, >> okay, we'll put the links down below. So, please do make sure to follow Rick and his work there. Thank you, Rick. Appreciate your time as always. We'll see you next time. >> Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity and thanks again for your support of the conference. >> Yes, and thank you for inviting me. Good to have you on the show again following the conference. Thank you for watching. Please do like and subscribe and follow Rick. Links down below.