This conversation breaks down debt, inflation, geopolitics, and the growing role of physical gold as trust in currencies weakens. If you’ve wondered why gold keeps rising — and why so many people still dismiss it — this episode explains what’s changing beneath the surface.

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Transcript

Monetary Metals:

Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. I am joined by our good friend Dana Samuelson. Dana is the President of the American Gold Exchange. Dana, we spoke a few years ago back in the New Orleans Investment Conference.

We talked all about gold, silver, what’s going on. Now we’re seeing all time high silver prices, all time high gold prices. We had to have you back on the show. Dana, welcome back.

Dana Samuelson:

Thanks, Ben. It’s great to be here with you. It’s great to see you again.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, as we started talking before we hit record, people are going gaga for gold. So what is What’s going on? What has changed?

Why are people so interested in gold all of a sudden?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, it’s a cumulative effect of several different forces, which really started the coalesce last year and then got turbocharged this year. First of all, of course, everybody knows about how much central bank gold buying there’s been underpinning the market.

Started in 2022, that really became material last year, spring of ’24, when gold got over $21, $2,200 an ounce, the cumulative effects of that doubling of central bank gold buying really started to move the market. And of course, we’ve got two wars in the world. We’ve had two wars. Now we’re back down to one with the Israeli-Iranian conflict resolved for the time being, and probably for the longer source.

But of course, Russia is still fighting Ukraine. I was on a podcast just about a year ago, and I was asked about that, and I said, Well, that will get settled on Vladimir Putin’s terms. And that looks like that’s the way it’s going be. Then, of course, we’ve had inflation’s ugly head reared up.

Two years ago, we’re still feeling the effects of that cumulatively, according to Jim Bianco. In the last, since COVID, inflation cumulative is about 27% now, despite today’s slightly lower reading, which may be a little bit wonky because of the government shutdown.

So you’ve got that. And now President Trump has thrown a monkey wrench into the world’s trade order with his tariff initiative. And we’ve seen two dramatic effects of that this year in the metals market. The first was in April, with the rollout of the reciprocal tariffs, which, of course, caused a gigantic knee jerk in the bond market, dislocated the bond market, the world’s largest credit market went sideways, which resulted in President Trump pulling back the reciprocal tariffs on everybody but China, because China stood toe to toe with us.

And ultimately, within about a week, we raised tariffs on China to 145%, and they raised them on us to 125%. And the Chinese public went on a gold buying spree during that period of time, because if you’re a Chinese businessman and you sell most of your products to the US, and now your biggest customer is basically saying,

We don’t want your products, what are you going to do? You’ve got real estate to invest in. You’ve got the stock market to invest in in China. Both have done badly since COVID, or you have precious metals. And they drove the price up $500 on their own from about 3,000 to 3,500 back in April and May.

First tariff episode of precious metals buying that was off the hook. And then about the same time, Jerome Powell said in late August in Jackson Hole, that the Fed was going to go back into an easing cycle, President Trump raised tariffs on India, 50% to penalize them for supporting the Russian war against Ukraine buying oil. And this coincided with their festival buying season of precious metals, going into Diwali, which is the second week of October.

And in September, Indians, the largest population in the world, bought gold and silver handover fist, which helped to propel the gold market and And the silver market, in particular, into dislocation in London. The London over-the-counter market basically broke on October ninth as a result of way too much demand for the available supply in London.

And I didn’t even bring up the fact that the fear over Trump tariffs have caused a huge movement of metal into the US this year, because if you’re going to tariff precious metals, theoretically, they’re worth whatever the price is, plus the and traders technically saw a loss on their books back a year ago this time because of the spike in the premium of the forward months in the COMEX.

But if they brought that metal in from London, they recaptured that premium. It’s really technical, but this is what happened. It started the movement of metal out of London into New York, and then they realized they could earn a profit on it, too. So that turbocharge that, and that brought a ton of gold, literally tons of gold in New York and silver that have dislocated the world’s supply.

So we’ve got huge amounts of gold and silver in New York still, even though gold and silver have not been tariffed, which is It dislocated the supply. So it’s just one of my trading partner friends said, we got a lot of silver in the world. It’s just in the wrong place in the wrong form. But these are strains in the marketplace, which have helped to push the price to all time highs for gold and silver, and now platinum and platinum are playing catch up.

So President Trump has really spurred the world to shun the dollar a bit and to shun our treasuries a bit over uncertainty or perhaps fear, or our debt is really starting to matter more than it ever has in the past as well, which is another major driving factor that hit critical mass this year.

And citizens around the world who have been buying gold, whether it’s governments or the public, it’s just been an amazing, amazing year for precious metals. As we come towards the very end of ’25, gold’s up about 65%, silver’s up about 120%. Platinum is now up 75 to 80%. Oh, actually, it’s 100%. And palladium is up about 85% year on year, which is nothing like we’ve seen since the late ’70s.

Monetary Metals:

It’s been an incredible year. Dana, one of the things I find really interesting as a theme is that in the past, the United States as a market was not only the reason for market action, reason for market moves, everyone was focused on what was happening in the United States market, but also the buyers, the wealth was in the United States, and that was a lot of the asset price wealth or changes were coming from inside the US.

Now, although the US is still central in terms of its stage and on the world stage, the actual buyers are coming from places like Turkey, India, China, these bricks countries or even bricks plus countries. And so while the action might start in the United States, the actual buying and the selling might happen in India for Diwali or it might happen in Turkey in the Turkish gold market.

Do you think that that is a bifurcation that will continue, where, of course, the US will be a central player on the world stage, but a lot of these assets and the pricing of assets will mainly come not on a marginal buyer inside the United States, but a marginal buyer outside the United States?

Dana Samuelson:

Yeah, this is a global shift. It’s part of the whole BRICS de-dollarization movement, where really the only currency that’s available to them that’s viable outside of the dollar is gold. But it’s part of a bigger picture as well. So give me just a second, and I’ll try and elaborate without going too far down the rabbit hole. I got my start in 1980, which is 45 years ago.

And back then, the physical markets really dominated the price action or price discovery. Now, with the advent of computers in the ’90s, which enabled traders to do more with less and then multiply that as computers became more and more powerful, and we became more sophisticated as investors, the Comex market, which is leveraged 10 to 1, dominated price activity.

And paper traders, speculators, hedge funds could bully the precious metals markets around pretty easily because they could pile in at the click of a button where you can’t move metal nearly that fast in any way economically, right? But this last year or two has signaled that the physical market is actually starting to come back to the forefront, dominating the precious metals price action. And now, with the world having a little bit less trust in in the US, gold is the ultimate world’s reserve currency.

It’s been man’s reserve currency going back to ancient times until the ’30s. And we’ve gone through this fiat money experiment since 1945, which is now, what, 80 years old, and it’s starting to look a little dicey, right?

So people are going, especially when you go through an inflationary period like we’ve been through, people like tangible things. And Bitcoin has been on a wild ride. It’s a speculation. It’s become much more mainstream. And digital currencies are here to stay, but there’s nothing like gold, which has no counter party risk. It can’t be seized or sanctioned if it’s in a vault.

It’s immediately liquid and universally recognized, which was why it was man’s currency for 2,500 years before he went on to the paper money standard or paper currency standard standard because fiat currency really isn’t money. It doesn’t have intrinsic value, but gold always does.

So yes, we’re seeing the price for precious metals in particular become more and more relevant regarding the physical metals as opposed to the leveraged speculative trading platforms like the COMEX exchange.

Monetary Metals:

And I want to ask you about these BRICs countries. Obviously, in one way, you can think, wow, these guys are really in trouble with the US dollar stablecoin. Now, anyone with a phone and an Internet connection in Chechnya or Nigeria or Somalia, they don’t need to buy the local currency.

They don’t need to buy the Lira. They can just hold their wealth in an asset like the US dollar simply by having a mobile phone. And now, the actual demand for the Lira inside the country is weakened by this US dollar hegemony. On the other hand, you might say, Well, listen, people are going away from US dollars. They want to maybe trade not in Rupees, but maybe settle net balances in gold.

Do you think that on one end of the spectrum, you have dollar dominance, on the other end of the spectrum, you have gold dominance, and basically all currencies that aren’t the dollar or gold are basically doomed?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, I don’t know about doomed. They’re due for attrition, I think, is a better way to put it. And you’re right. There’s a lot of people that would, especially individual investors or business owners around the world that would prefer to hold dollars rather than local currency because of stability that the dollar offers at their local currencies don’t, most of the time.

But they don’t have access to dollars. But with stable coins, they do. And that is a game changer, which will help to cement the dollar globally for decades to come as the world’s most popular currency.

But gold is the world’s most popular money. And they’re two different things, right? They are two different of things. So it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out, to see central bankers who are the most conservative bankers in the world who shed gold from 1950 to 2010, start to buy it in earnest in 2011, and then double their buying in 2022, ’23, ’24, and come close to that this year despite record high prices. That is one of the most telling signs there is, because what they’re doing is they’re hedging their bets against their trading partners, which are other countries, right?

And the BRICS nations, in particular, they do want to be less susceptible to running politically a foul of the United States, which is why they’re turning to gold. In fact, their currency, the unit, has just been announced to be 40% backed by gold, which is another game changer that’s just really broken in the last couple of weeks.

Now, they’ve been putting all the infrastructure into place for a couple of years to get to this point. But now that they can actually trade this BRICs currency country to country, backed by gold, that’s just going to further create more and more demand for gold as time passes. And Tether, of course, is backed by gold, right? So that’s cryptocurrency.

So the demand for gold, the trends that are in place driving the value higher, are not going to change anytime soon. In fact, I would argue that they’re going to continue to drive the price higher for the next several years the way the world is going these days.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, let me push back, and I’ll give you a counterpoint. Yes, it’s great that central banks are buying gold. Yes, there’s Trump, and tariffs, and uncertainty, and inflation. All these things are generally probably good for gold.

But maybe someone will say, Well, listen, the other side or the other side of the coin of central banks buying gold is that when things are going bad for their currency or they’re seeing economic trouble, they’re going to sell this gold, and that will put selling pressure on the bid price of gold.

All of a sudden, we’re going to have a gold price collapse. If the US dollar, instead of being, backs by nothing, maybe they say, Hey, we’ll sell some of our gold to try to bolster our currency. Isn’t it dangerous that so many central banks are now purchasing gold because the flip side of purchasing it is maybe selling it?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, the value of gold, I think, relative to currencies and bonds, I don’t know the proportion of it, but it’s small. I don’t know how much they can really drive the market. Now, they can certainly bully it around. When I started the American Gold Exchange in 1998, the gold price was $300 and headed to $250 because there was uncoordinated central bank shedding of gold at that period of time, which led to the Washington Accord, which helped to bolster the gold price back up.

One of my favorite anecdotal stories is Great Britain had 1,200 tons of gold in 1968, and they sold 600 of them in 1970 at the bottom of the market. Then 10 years later, gold was up 20 times in price, and they sold another 300 tons in 1999. So if the British sells some more gold, I would be a buyer, right?

Other countries will see how it goes. But, yeah, they could certainly shed some to raise capital or cash if necessary. But the way the world is becoming more and more on a gold standard, they might just settle debts or trade with gold instead of actually putting it on the open market, which would help to Bowie the gold price or hold it up instead of being pressured lower.

But, yeah, you’re right, fundamentally, there potentially becomes more sellers. But this is gold moving into strong hands, not weak hands.

Monetary Metals:

One of the things I find interesting about this announced, BRICS unit, it was also called the R5, which is, of course, Ruble, Rael, Reminbi, and Rands to try to say, Hey, all of us, of the block members of this core region, all have a say. But what I found most interesting was, of course, well, if they’re saying there should be some gold in it, it’s sportive an admission that these currencies aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be, and the gold is there to bolster the legitimacy because it’s a neutral reserve asset.

So do you see gold as becoming this neutral reserve where everyone admits, Hey, we got to pound our chest and tout our own currency. But privately, they think, maybe we should stock up on some gold just in case.

Dana Samuelson:

Well, the fundamental reasons why the dollar is accepted as the world’s reserve currency are three or fourfold. Number one, we have transparency of markets. Number two, we have rule of law. Number three, we have free flow of currency over borders. Number four, we have free flow pricing, so it’s market value pricing. Number five, we have the world’s largest credit market, the bond market underpinning that. Now, we’re the only country that has all those things in scale.

The Euro has most of those, but they’re smaller. Japan has some of those, but on a smaller level. The BRICS countries don’t have these other fundamental factors that would make them attractive to have their currency by itself be so universally accepted, which is why gold is necessary for them, because it gives them the credibility and the backing that they lack through not having either one or a couple or all of those elements.

China is never going to let the Taiwan float freely. There’s no free flow of money over their borders. They don’t have a big bond market underlying it. Then the rule of law is the rule of one. Gold is a necessary component to give transparency to a degree, but more so trust to the value of the unit.

And China is rumored to have, on the books, they have what, 2,400 tons of gold? We have 8,300, I think, 8,250. But it’s rumored that they have 12,000, 14,000, 20,000 tons of gold because gold is a one-way street into China and never comes out. All the mines to produce gold in China, those ounces stay in China. Now, I’ve always thought that China would tell us how much gold they had when they wanted us to know about it, when they wanted the Taiwan to rival the dollar.

But with the unit being backed by gold, that’s a partial admission that they’ve got enough to really try and make this work, or the BRICs countries have enough to really try and make the unit a viable currency alternative?

Monetary Metals:

I’ll just talk about China for a second. Obviously, a lot of gold buying has been happening in China, in part because, A, their stock market has had some pretty poor returns over the last decade. Also because their real estate The United States sector, which, of course, if you want to say, full on trashed or has been quite poor in recent years as well.

Then, of course, their currency is quite weak. There are capital controls, meaning they can’t buy in other countries, and it’s difficult to move money out of the country And so if you’re a Chinese investor with some amount of wealth, you look around, you see financial repression, and you think, Well, the only thing they’re really letting me buy is gold.

So in a way, do you think the Chinese story is something that will happen in more countries, where more countries They say, Hey, there’s going to be financial oppression. The stock market’s going to look weak. The real estate sector might not be so attractive.

Do you think that that same type of story happening in China will play out in other places? And of course, how will that affect gold?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, I look at it a bit more generally. Which is we don’t have a precious metals culture in our country because the dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since the ’40s. We’ve got three generations now that are used to having paper currency and not gold money. But if virtually every other country around the world has a precious metals culture inherent in their culture. And the way I explain it is if you’ve had war on your shores or if your currency has failed in the last 100 years, then you have a precious metals culture. But we don’t have that.

We’ve been in two world wars and a few others, but never on our shores. That’s why Japan has a precious metals culture, India, China, China, Europe. Many banks in Europe have a precious metals desk inside the bank. If you walk into a bank with an ounce of gold in the United States, the tellers that are probably 25 years old and got about three years’ worth of experience don’t know what to do, even if you bring them an old silver coin that’s still US currency, whether it’s a silver dollar from the ’20s or the 1880s or a silver dime or quarter, they don’t know what it is.

But because we haven’t taught, Or we haven’t had those experiences. My brother got me into this business. He got started in 1975. His first job in the industry was going to Arkansas to a Vietnamese relocation camp where individual citizens fleeing Vietnam had sewn gold bars like bookmarks into their clothing. That’s how they fled the country with their wealth. And his job was to buy the gold from them, give them so they can get a start here in the US.

And that’s what I mean by having a gold culture, especially if you’re having problems in your country. But we don’t have that. But every other country does, which is why it’s easy for them to appreciate gold and go to gold in the environment that we live in now, especially with President Trump, as I said, throwing a monkey wrench in the world trade order this year over tariffs and the uncertainty and the potential inflation that they create.

Monetary Metals:

What is it going to take for people in America who have never seen a hyperinflation, they never see a war on their shores? What is it going to take for them to get more interested in gold? Obviously, we’ve heard some, Hey, maybe change the portfolio from ’60, ’40 to ’60, ’20, money.

Hey, Ray Dalio says, add some gold. Maybe on the margin, that’ll add some new gold buyers who maybe otherwise wouldn’t.

But what is it going to take for people in the United States to start thinking of gold as money, or are they really going to be left behind in the rest of the world is going to have this gold-centric or gold-centric culture and economy?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, it’s a combination of things. Number one, most Americans are going to be left behind because they don’t understand, they’re not paying enough attention, or they’re too trusting of paper assets. As I said, we don’t have a gold culture in our country. Now, we’ve trained people to buy gold through two financial episodes this century. First, the great financial crisis. It took us two or three years to train a small percentage of the public how to buy gold.

And then when COVID hit, they all jumped in at the same time and went crazy. I mean, our business just exploded in March of 2020 when COVID hit, because all those people that we trained to buy gold knew how to do it. Where it was a three or four year period, 2008 to 2012, it was a three week period in 2020.

Now we’ve got complacency again, though, right? We saw a lot of those people that bought gold for the great financial crisis shed it in 2017, ’18, ’19, because the economy was doing well. They didn’t need that gold anymore. The crisis was over. Then COVID hit. They come rushing back in again, right? Now we’re going through what is in my lifetime or in anyone’s lifetime, the fourth major bull market of precious metals.

It was in the ’70s, the great financial crisis, and COVID. And now we’ve got another major bull run here in 2024 and ’25. But what don’t we have that the first three did have, which is a crisis in the US? We had an economic crisis during COVID and the great financial crisis. We had rampant high inflation and a crisis of confidence in the US in the late ’70s.

American buyers are driven by fear. First. That’s when they emotionally runish into gold and shun other assets. This whole market that we’re in has doubled, basically, in the last two years, absent fear in the United States market. Stocks have been hitting record highs. President Trump is reelected. Most investors like President Trump because he’s pro-business friendly, deregulation. But one man can’t do everything.

And I I really appreciate what he’s trying to do, but I don’t really appreciate the knee jerky way he’s tariffs on, tariffs off, they’re up, they’re down. There’s no certainty about what’s really going to happen. And it’s been knee jerky, right? Which is part of the uncertainty. So my question is, what happens if we get fear in the US market? How much will that really turbocharge the environment we’re already in?

Because If the metals markets today feel hair-triggery to me, right? We’re in a set up, but we haven’t seen something, an external catalyst, really drive the market, which a weaker US economy, a If we’re going to lower Fed funds rates, which we’re going to get next year when President Trump puts in the Fed share that he wants to put in, we’re going to get lower rates. That’s good for gold. That’s a tailwind for gold. That’s to help to weaken the dollar.

But if we had a real crisis where we got to drop rates to zero or, God forbid, print money out of thin air like QE, then you’re going to see $7,000, $8,000, $9,000 gold quickly, because we’re already in a a very gold-centric setup, especially silver, too, where the supplies are tight and there’s just not enough metal to go around. That’s why these prices are as high as they already are. Now, what happens if a demand wave from the biggest market in the world, the US, hits, which we don’t have right now. In fact, US investors have been more sellers than buyers for the last two years, as you’re aware of, right?

They’re taking advantage of these high prices to go into other assets, which I don’t think makes any sense to sell at all. I mean, maybe you spread your money out and diversify, but don’t sell your gold. I mean, that’s the wrong thing to do in this world right now. You want more of it.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, let’s talk about some of the potential catalysts to what could scare or add fear to the US market, which so far, a lot of them are actually selling gold on that rather than buying gold on that. So what about this AI boom? Is this maybe one of the areas that you’re seeing? No, actually, this is actually a healthy market. Ai is going to help the economy.

That’s why stocks are an all-time high. Is it wrong valuations where you’re looking at price to earnings or case Schiller and go, What the heck is going on here? What is it? Is it tariff uncertainty? Is it Trump? Is it maybe Trump losing the elections or the midterms? What is it in your eyes that could be the next catalyst for a crisis inside the United States?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, we’re already We’re seeing a weaker labor market, right? And that may become problematic. It’s not yet. There’s a lot of talk about the fact that we don’t need as many jobs to support the economy because we don’t have as many people coming into the country because we’ve stopped immigration, basically, right? So if the public isn’t growing, the number of people in the country isn’t growing, then we don’t need to grow jobs as much to just stay neutral, stay even.

Jim Bianca is a big proponent of that theory that maybe we only need 20,000 jobs a month to be positive. It won’t be great, but it won’t be bad. But I do think the labor market, which is the consumer, supporting the consumer, which is 70 % of our economy is critical. So we’re watching that closely, number one. Number two, we don’t have a crisis of confidence. I don’t think we’re going to get one of those, but you never know. I do think the next The real fear, though, potential, is the midterm elections.

Because if President Trump doesn’t have something he can sell as a positive advancement of everything he’s trying to do in these big changes he’s making If he can’t sell something to the electorate a year from now, the Democrats will take control of the Congress one way or the other, and then we’ll go into gridlock, and we’ll get the job about a third to a halfway done, and then it’ll stop.

So we will have gone through the pain to get the gain, but then we won’t get the gain that’s coming behind it. And that’s exactly what that speech he gave last night, as we’re taping this, was all about. He’s trying to sell to the public. He’s, Look, I’m trying.

I’m doing everything I can to make things better. But what he’s really saying is, Look, give me some time because it’s going to take time for you to feel that. And you don’t reshore manufacturing capacity in this country that we shed for 20 years in a year or two. It’s a three, four, five, six, seven year process.

And he talks about $18 trillion worth of new economic development. But a lot of that’s just pledged. It’s not happening yet. It’s starting to happen. But the tip of the iceberg is really what we’re talking about out of that $18 trillion in real terms. So we’ll see how it goes. But inflation could also be a wild card right now. We’ll just have to see how that plays out.

The public, certainly, though, is not happy with the way things are going with his approval rating. And with the elections that we’ve just seen, we’ve had Socialists elected in three or four different places, including the mayor of Miami, right?

And the mayor of New York. And what’s the biggest word on everyone’s lips as they’re being pulled coming out of the electoral booth, the election booth? Affordability, right? And President Trump is trying to say, Hey, you know what you’re talking about?

Well, he’s not the guy on the street at the grocery store, right? I buy groceries for our family. I’m paying 50 to 75, sometimes 100 % more these days than I was paying two years ago for groceries for the same stuff, depending on what you’re buying. And we’re not extravagant.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, now I want to ask you about the debt situation because obviously, President Trump, a big part of his pitch was, Hey, I’m going to get this DOGE commission in. We’re going to have Elon Musk. He’s the smartest man in the entire world.

If he can’t fix a debt, nobody can. Well, he didn’t fix a debt. And the DOGE commission, I don’t know if it’s defunct or still working, but it fizzled out. And the amount of gains that they really got were in the billions and really not in the trillions, which is when we would have needed to actually have a matter.

Of course, the big beautiful bill adds to all this deficit spending. Yeah, maybe the economy will grow a bit more, but in terms of trajectory, the debt continues to grow basically exponentially. So does this debt problem really matter? I mean, is there going to be a point where, oh, it’s 37 trillion or it’s 40 trillion, or 300 trillion?

Are we going to become like Japan, where there’s a lost decade, where we have a lot of debt, the government buys all the bonds to service it, and the economy trickles along?

Or do you think there’s actually something that’s going to have to happen here, either positive or negative on the debt side?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, this is the first year where it seems like our debt really has started to matter to the public at large. We’ve been worried about the way we’ve been going. I have for years, but nobody else has really seemed to care. And I was meeting a group of stock investors in January 2020, just before COVID hit. And there was a really old guy who was very wise in this stock group that I was trying to talk to them about gold, and they weren’t really listening. They let me come talk to him, but they weren’t really listening. And I brought up the debt.

And this old gentleman who was very wise said, As long as you can service the debt, debt doesn’t really matter. But we’re getting to the point where the servicing of the debt in the United States really does start to matter because now our interest expense payment on now $38 trillion of debt is $1. 2 trillion this year. It’s tripled what it was two years ago.

And the debt, as you’re saying, just keeps going up exponentially. Our debt in 2008, let me get this right, in 2005 was seven trillion.

In 2015, it was 15 trillion. Ten years later, double. Now it’s another 10 years, and it’s more than doubled again. So we’re going to be $70 trillion in debt in 2035, and our interest expense could be three trillion. Well, that doesn’t really work if you only have a… If you have to print the money to pay the interest expense. And Right now, our expenses are about seven and a half trillion a year.

Or let me see. Our expenses are seven and a half trillion as a government, and our taxes are about five and a half trillion. So we have a two trillion dollar deficit every year, right? And that used to be 500 billion. We haven’t had a balanced budget since 2001 and 2000. And that’s when gold bottomed, right?

So gold is going to continue to look good But as long as this government debt explosion continues, and it’s not just us, it’s around the world. So the debt will continue to be a problem until something breaks.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, now I want to ask you a bit about silver. Obviously, a monetary metals be focused on gold as well as silver. Silver has, like you said, seen a massive run-up. It’s even actually outperformed gold this year. What is the silver story to you?

Obviously, there is an industrial component to silver that’s maybe not as there it comes to gold. Gold is really mostly a monetary metal where silver has this almost industrial commodity side to it. And yet, silver has seen a massive run-up in crisis. So what’s the silver story to Dana Samuelson?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, you’re right. Gold is about 90 % monetary metal and 10 % commodity metal. Silver is about 50/50. Structurally, we have a supply deficit in the silver market that we’ve had now for five years in a row, where the world consumes more silver than the mines produce produce on an annual basis. So we’re continuing to eat into that above-ground supply.

And through the green revolution, that amount of demand for physical silver continues to grow at a bit quicker rate through photovoltaic cells and EVs and other things. So fundamentally, the setup for silver is pretty good, number one. Number two, silver is one of the most affordable precious metals in the world, right?

And India, in particular, this year, helped to propel the silver price breakout because they were buying silver instead of gold for Diwali for the festival. One of their influencers, who has the three and a half million And followers said, Hey, this year, send me gold, give silver. And that’s what they’ve done. And that helped to put the squeeze on in the London over the counter market through demand. But there are also ETFs for physical precious metals. And there are silver ETFs.

And investors around the world are trading now silver ETFs. It’s not just in the US. So there are two of the big ETFs are in India, and they took a lot of silver to demand. So there’s just been a squeeze in the market that’s been exacerbated by all that metal that got moved into New York earlier this year.

We normally have about 200 million ounces of silver in the COMEX or less, and that got up to 431 million ounces at the peak just a couple of months ago. It’s back down to about 380 million ounces now. So some of it’s starting to go back out. But that has taken a lot of physical silver that normally would be available and put it in New York vaults. And it’s going back out again.

But the world likes silver as an investment, and it’s also needed in industry because it is the most conductive metal there is for electricity and for temperature. You can take an ounce of silver like this Canadian maple, if I’ve got on my desk. You hold it between your fingers like this, and you get an ice cube, and you can cut through that ice cube like that, just through the heat in your fingers transferring to the metal.

It’ll take five seconds, seven seconds, but you can literally cut an ice cube. That’s how conductive silver is, just through the warmth of your fingers. So the demand for silver is going to look great. There’s been a rotation of some investment money out of gold once it peaked in March and April, and then again as it peaked recently. And we’ve seen some of that precious metals money that wants to be in the markets, likes gold, but says, Hey, maybe there’s a better opportunity elsewhere.

We’ve seen that that go into silver and also into platinum. So that has helped to push the silver price to all time highs, and now the platinum price, too. Now, silver is traditionally very fickle.

You can get a big run and then get a big correction. But this, I’m going to say the words that you never want to say, but this really does feel different to me this time because of the world’s demand for metals and the safety and security that precious metals offer that no other paper assets do. I’ve been doing this a long, long time, and this really feels like this is something different going on because of the global participation on many, many levels, from the guy on the street to the hedge fund, to the ETFs, to the central banks.

And now, silver has been declared a strategic mineral by the United States as well. And whether that plays into the hands of the government and that stockpile that we have in New York, both of gold and silver, I I would like to see that metal stay in the country, but it’s in the hands of some private bankers, bullion banks, primarily. I do think J. P. Morgan Chase does some of the government’s bidding in the precious metals markets. That’s just me. I don’t have any evidence to prove that.

But I do think that if the government wants something done in the precious metals markets, that’s who they lean on. So maybe we’ll see if some of that metal will actually stay here or not. But if it does, that’ll help to reduce the available supply, which was only going to be good for pricing as time passes.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, what about the gold to silver ratio? So in the past, there’s been a ratio between gold prices and silver prices. And historically, it’s been a certain number. Recently, it’s been a certain number.

Do you think about the gold to silver ratio? Does it matter to you at all, or is it just a historical anomaly that’s interesting for historians to look at?

Dana Samuelson:

No, no. It’s a great way to measure relative value of gold to silver. And for most of man’s time, the ratio was 20 to one, 20 parts silver equals one part gold, because that’s how it was easily found in the ground. And that’s what most of the gold and silver coin valuations were based on from ancient times all the way till the 1930s. Right now, in the modern era, the ratio has been more like 40 to one, 50 to one.

And as we’ve gone into this turbocharge environment with more and more wealth creation in the last 20 years, talking about computers helping people become wealthier, the ratio has gotten to 80 to one or even a little bit higher. We’ve had a couple of episodes where during COVID, it got to 122 to one.

And earlier this year, it broke 100 to one because gold was leading and silver was lagging. And that 100 to one ratio in April and May is one of the reasons that Indian influencer told people in India to buy silver this year instead of gold, because it’s just so much cheaper. So there are practical uses for the gold to silver ratio.

I have In a chart that goes back 25 years, above 82. 5 to one, gold’s more valuable relative to silver at about 62 to one. They’re in equilibrium at about 40 to one. Silver is more valuable relative to gold. The way they’ve traded over the last 25 years. For most of the last four or five years, that has been 80 to 90 to one, which is historically high.

Now is silver taking off and playing catch up with a vengeance, as I I said it has the possibility to do. Now it’s done that, the ratio is what about 67 to one or 68 to one now. It’s not even quite to equilibrium, which I would say is 62 to one. So silver could easily go up another 10 bucks with gold doing nothing, which would get that ratio closer to 62 to one.

But that’s still equilibrium over the last 25 years. So it’s a great way to measure relative value and to tell you, I use it when people want to invest money who’ve never bought before. Should I buy gold or should I buy silver? Well, we look at the ratio and say, well, which one looks more undervalued relative to the other right now?

What are you trying to accomplish? Pure profit. So it’s good and useful in that regard. But you have to be patient because these things don’t make big moves like this very often. We just haven’t been in one of those big moves right now.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, I want to get into a rapid fire section with you. It’s a lightning round. I’ll ask you questions from all over the map. You can answer as long as you want, but you can also answer in just one word if you’d like. So let’s start. Who do you think should be the next Fed chair, and who do you think would be the best for gold prices?

Dana Samuelson:

Oh, I’m not qualified for that. I do think that whoever President Trump picks, they will do his bidding, and we will have lower interest rates and substantially lower interest rates with the Fed committee, going along, hopefully.

And that’s going to be good for gold. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, whether it’s going to be Kevin Hasset or Kevin Warsh. It doesn’t really matter that much to me. I do think both of them will do his bidding. So lower rates, higher gold.

Monetary Metals:

Next one for you. In 2026, what do you think is going to outperform, gold or silver?

Dana Samuelson:

I still think silver could double much more easily from here than gold could. So I would lean towards silver.

Monetary Metals:

Next one, in terms of a bull market in gold prices or a bull market in silver prices, what are some of the indicators that you personally watch?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, the debt, inflation, interest rates, all these geopolitical events have come to the forefront more in the last couple of years than anything. So these are the main drivers. Now, it’s unusual to have more than one or two of these in the market at the same time. When we’ve got four or five of them in the market now, and we’ve had them for years, a couple of years now, which is why we’re getting record highs. So I look at the big picture and just try and determine what’s really happening.

Getting a real handle on what’s going on around the world in some of these more smaller and more private markets is harder. So I really think that that’s an area that I’ll focus more on next year, trying to get under the hood on what’s really happening in some of the Asian countries or what the bricks are really doing, which is more than I’ve been forced to look recently, because it’s a newer development that’s going to be meaningful.

Monetary Metals:

Okay, now onto the bricks in our rapid fire section. If you had to long one of the countries in the BRICS and go short one of the countries, which would you choose?

Dana Samuelson:

That’s a tough one. I really don’t know the answer to that question. India, China, no.

I think China has become a manufacturing behemoth and a shipping and distribution behemoth, and they’re underperforming right now. If I wanted to invest somewhere, I think that that would probably be the best place to try and do it, but with a grain of salt, because you’re not going to get full transparency and the way the rule of law is, things could change. But they’ve created a manufacturing behemoth that’ll be hard for us to replicate in a short amount of time.

They’ve been working on it for 20 years now. And shipping and receiving. I just read in an article today that they’ve got six spaceports now, where they can launch vehicles into space from six different places.

We have two, right? I mean, they’re physically bigger, but we’ve got two, and they’ve got six. I remember seven, eight years ago, Dennis Gartman at the New Orleans Investment Conference was saying, China will never challenge us. They have one aircraft carrier. We have eight. They’ve got more now. I don’t know how many. They’ve got three or four. They’re coming on.

So I would pick China, I think. Not Russia, not South Africa, not Brazil, India, maybe, Russia. But I wouldn’t do it with a smile on my face.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, next one, maybe that it will put a smile on your face. Let’s talk about tokenized gold. So do you think tokenized gold the same way that gold ETFs brought a lot of new investors into the gold market?

Do you think tokenized gold will add more investor demand into the gold market as well as add some benefits, 24/7 trading, loans against your gold, the benefits of the blockchain in crypto.

But with gold, of course, maybe that could add to the younger generation who likes crypto, but maybe wants some real assets. Where do you see the tokenized gold front going forward?

Dana Samuelson:

To me, it’s a conundrum because part of why you want gold is so you don’t have any counter party risk. But as soon as you tokenize it, you introduce counter party risk into the equation, which is something I don’t It’s like, right? That’s why you have gold to avoid that.

I do think it’ll create a bigger base for gold, especially as the price continues to go higher. I see a great need for tokenization in real estate transactions, or if you want to own a or Rembrandts or fine pieces of art or even rare US coins. We’ve got about 150 US vintage coins now that are trading more than a million dollars a piece.

Now, very few people can own one of those, but I’d love to own a piece of one, right, through tokenization. But then you’ve got other issues, custodianship, transparency, liquidity, when the time comes. I think tokenization of gold is going to happen. It’s already happening. But I’d rather have a little gold coin or a little silver coin in my pocket than a tokenized gold unit on my phone.

Monetary Metals:

Now I want to ask you about the physical gold market, because obviously you are a total expert when it comes to that. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people making when it comes to either their first gold purchase or maybe they’re an expert, but, hey, maybe you want to think about this.

So obviously, you’ve been in the gold world for decades now and you are an expert. What are some of the main issues you see when people come when they want to buy physical gold?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, we have a modest but growing problem with Chinese counterfeits. They’ve been knocking off Gucci bags and Rolex watches for decades, and they started to get into the precious metals markets about 10 years ago. I was President of the Professional Numismitus Guild, which is the leading organization of rare coin dealers in 2016, when it came to our attention that the Chinese were knocking off silver maple leaves and gold bars and other things.

So I helped to conceive of and establish the industry anti counterfeiting task force that today works with Homeland Security and Secret Service to interdict spurious shipments of metal coming into the country, primarily from China.

And the biggest problem are in refinery made gold bars. All of the mints, the sovereign mints around the world, the US mint, Canadian mint, British Royal mint, Austrian mint, Australian mint, have added my newt picture design elements, tiny little things into this picture that’s stamped on the round bar. We call them coins, but they’re really round bars made by these mints to make it harder for the Chinese to counterfeit them. But the refinery made bars have much plainer designs, and they’re easier for the Chinese to replicate and pass off as good.

They take tungsten, and they plate it with gold, and it has almost the same density. So the size is almost exactly what it should be. The weights are right. And if you use some of the testing devices that don’t go all the way through the metal, they’ll test right because it’s good gold on the outside.

So I think that if novice investors are getting started, they should go with sovereign minted one ounce gold coins or just round bars made by the US mint, the Canadian mint, the Austrian mint, British Royal mint, Australian mint, for ease of salability when you want to sell in the future. I recently had a linebacker from one of the famous football teams come to me with 14 kilo bars of gold. He wanted to sell them.

One of them, the color didn’t look right. It tested right, it weighed right, it sounded right, because when you hit them with each other, they make a harmonic pitch. But it didn’t look right. I think somebody hit it with brass or something to change the color on the outside of it a little bit. And he was a really big guy. He was very intimidating.

And I said, Look, I think this is right. And this is when gold was $2,000 an ounce, not $4,000 an ounce. But I want to drill this bar. I want to put a drill through it to make sure it’s not something other than gold on the inside.

And I’ll still buy it at the same price that I’m paying you for the others, even though when I’m done, it’s going to have a hole in it. But if I drill it and we find that there’s something not gold in the middle of it, you’re going to have an unsellable bar to somebody else, and I will take it.

Or I’ll refine I’ll send it to a refinery for you and get you what’s really in it, whatever you want to do. And now he was confident in who he got it from, and I knew who he got it from, so I thought it was okay. But this is what I needed to do to make myself satisfied. So I literally drilled it.

And this is like the oldest test in the books, to drill a bar. And that’s what we’re finding. Some of these fake Chinese bars, if you get a pair of wire snips, like a one ounce more and snipp it, you’re going to find something other than on the inside.

And the problem is growing. And you don’t want it to be your problem. So don’t go to just the absolute cheapest, lowest priced item you can get your hands on because you’re going to might save yourself 5, 10, 20 bucks an ounce, and cost yourself 500, a thousand, 2000 an ounce in the long run.

Go for the widely traded, competitively priced, sovereign minted products like Gold Eagles or Canadian Mapleleafs. Those are the two most popular in the US. And you’ll avoid 99. 9% of the potential problems you could run into.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, absolutely fascinating. And if you will want to know what happened when you drilled that gold bar, they’re going to have to call up Dana and American Gold Exchange.

Dana, tell us a bit more about American Gold Exchange, what you guys do and what you offer.

Dana Samuelson:

Well, we’re a national physical precious metals dealership, and a vintage US gold and European gold coin dealership. So we buy and sell the most widely traded, competitively priced, and easily sellable bullion products from the mints I just described.

I’m also a Vintage US Gold Coin expert. Being part of the professional Numismatist’s guild, I’ve been buying and selling Vintage US $20, $10, $5, $2. 5 gold pieces for 40 years. So I’m an expert appraiser on those as well.

And we do some business in some of the European gold coins that were made to be currency from about the 1850s to the 1930s before gold coins went out of circulation around the world. And those are attractive in this market because we don’t have to pay anybody to make them. They still survive in mint condition today.

But you’re not paying a minting fee like you would pay the US mint 10 % for a 10-pound gold piece just to make it. These trade for a lot less than that. So it’s a good alternative. Plus, these are all pieces of history. So we buy and sell these products. We have an office in Austin, Texas. We’re a national mail order company.

We try and help people in the physical arena. I’ve painted myself into a golden in the corner, this is all I really do well. Just ask my wife, and she’ll reiterate that for you. So that’s what we do.

We just try and make a market to the people that’s very fair, transparent, straightforward. And we just try and help people in this space to the best of our ability because our clients are our best asset.

Monetary Metals:

What’s the coolest coin you’ve ever actually had the ability to see or touch? What’s something that’s so interesting that’s come across your desk?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, I’ve got my first First job in the business in 1981, 82. I was working in a vault, counting shipping and weighing. And my boss at the time bought one of the 1804 silver dollars, of which there are 14 known in the world. Now there’s 15. A 15th was came to market this year.

He paid $250,000 for it in 1981, and I got to hold that coin in my hand, not in a PCGS or NGC certified holder.

I literally got to hold it and look at it. It was the Dexter Bariford It’s got a little D stamped into one of the clouds on the back. It’s a true piece of American history. A new one just came out of a famous old-time dealers’ collection that we didn’t know about, and it just sold for six million dollars, literally two weeks ago.

So that’s one of the most valuable US coins I’ve ever actually had in my hand. We’ve handled some other rarities over the years, not quite as marquee as an 1804 dollar, but I got a lot of coin nerd stories I could I’ll go on and on for hours about if you were interested.

Monetary Metals:

Well, if you have some cool coins at home, you absolutely have to call Dana. Maybe he’ll get to touch your cool coin, and maybe it’ll be more than $6 million.

Dana, as we come to the end of the interview, I always ask my guests, what’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange podcast?

Dana Samuelson:

Why don’t more Americans have an interest in precious metals?

Monetary Metals:

Dana, I’m going to turn it back on you. Why don’t more Americans have an interest in precious metals?

Dana Samuelson:

Well, we don’t have a precious metals culture because we have the world’s reserve currency. When you have the world’s reserve currency, you have what’s called exorbitant privilege.

We’ve been the benefactor of having assets priced in dollars since the ’40s. So commodities in particular, oil, grains, the stuff of life, steel, they’re priced in dollars. If you’re outside of the dollar, you have price fluctuations in the commodity, but then your currency’s price fluctuations against the dollar as well. So if your currency is weak, you get a double whammy if the price of the commodity is going up and your currency is dropping.

And that’s the benefit that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency has insulated us from a whole second level of price shock. The dollar has literally absorbed half of that volatility for us, which is why we’re complacent and why I said, look, if your currency’s failed or you’ve had war on your shores, you have a precious metal sculpture. I don’t think our currency is going to fail. I do think it’s going to continue to buy less and less as time passes. But it’s only just recently that you’ve got any of these big financial TV programs talking about gold at all.

They didn’t care three years ago, two years ago. That’s all they’re talking about this year. Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold. Why? Because it’s hitting all time highs. Silver.

But they still don’t quite get why it’s doing that. Because they’re not drilling down. And it’s all short attention span theater. It’s all click bait information. People really need to study history. And you mentioned Ray Dalio earlier.

He’s really hit the nail on the head. He understands big debt cycles in governments and countries going back centuries. I would urge you to look at some of his books. I’ve got one on my desk over here, his latest one. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve read some of his other stuff. You need to understand what happens when you get towards the end of an empire and the dominant currency starts to lose status to other currencies, like the British War Empire went through that same phase in the 1920s.

We’re in that phase now. That’s what this is all really about. And that’s why the world is going to gold, because there isn’t a viable alternative yet. The Chinese Taiwan could be it in the future, but they’ve got a long ways to go.

And these things don’t happen fast. They take time. But when we fight more with each other, Like we’re doing right now as a country, Democrats against Republicans, red against blue, us against them. That’s a classic end stage symptom of a waning empire.

And if we lose the world’s reserve of currency status to Bitcoin or gold or anything, the people in this country are going to be in for a rude awakening. I’ve never felt this more this way than I do right now. I’m a Patriot. I love this country. I truly do. I could never do what I’m doing anywhere else as I’ve had a lifestyle here for 40 years, 45 years in the precious metals business. So that’s my advice. Learn about history and waning dominant societies.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, where can people find more you and more American Gold Exchange?

Dana Samuelson:

We’re located at amergold.com. That’s our website. Phone number, 800-613-9323.

Monetary Metals:

Dana, it’s been absolutely fascinating getting the drill down into gold bars and of course, the history of gold, past, present, and future. We’re going to have to have you back on again soon. Thanks again.

Dana Samuelson:

Thanks, Ben. I appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks for having me.