The $4 trillion bet: Inside Trump’s real economic play
The silver market is experiencing massive disruptions. And the timing couldn’t be worse.
In this episode, we talk with Peter St. Onge, Ph.D. to break down exactly what’s happening and why most investors are completely unprepared.
We get into:
- Trump’s trade strategy
- China’s grip on the global market
- What the data is saying
This is one of those conversations you’ll wish you heard sooner. Watch the full video right now.
Follow Monetary Metals on X: @Monetary_Metals
Follow Peter St. Onge, Ph.D. on X: @profstonge
Additional Resources
Transcript
Monetary Metals:
Welcome back to the Gold Exchange Podcast. I’m joined by Peter St. Onge, fellow at the Mises Institute, former MBA professor, and in my opinion, one of the clearest voices when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy. And if you’re not following him on X, I don’t know who you’re following. Peter, welcome back to the show.
Peter St Onge:
Thanks for having me back, Ben.
Monetary Metals:
All right, Peter, I want to start off talking about trade and tariff policy. Obviously, a big ‘T’ word in President Trump’s vocabulary has been trade and tariffs. Most specifically, where do we stand on tariff policy? Obviously, the Supreme Court struck down these tariffs. President Trump said, I’m gonna try another way. Where are we in the tariff world?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah. So he’s got about four other authorities under three laws, and some of these laws date back to 1930, the infamous Smoot Hawley tariff deal that supposedly set off the Great Depression, and it was actually banks. But anyway, so he’s got these longstanding authorities. They’ve stood the test of time. They’ve been used 100 times.
And these are things like anti-dumping, discrimination against US Commerce, national security, which of course, as you know, is infinitely, you know, extendable. So, for example, under today, before the Supreme Court, under national security, tariffs were blocking Chinese upholstered furniture, which is national security emergency if ever there was one.
So the moral of the story is that he can reimpose all these under these other authorities, and that looks like what he’s going to try to do. You know, the numbers that matter for him, when he sort of pitched the tariffs, one of them, or there were two purposes to the tariffs, and one of them was to get other countries to remove their trade barriers. And then the other was to reshore investment into America. Because if you don’t achieve those two objectives, then it’s just a tax.
Right? You’re simply taxing. Some of it is being paid by Chinese, some of it is being paid by Americans. It’s just a tax. So those were really the two pitches. And we just had new trade numbers come in. The trade deficit for December, which is the most recent number, is about 70 billion. That’s about 30% lower than than it was for the equivalent month of Biden’s last year. So up 30%.
But actually a big chunk of that was gold and silver. So, as you know, we’ve been importing massive quantities of gold and silver. Those show up as imports. But when Americans are upset about imports or when Donald Trump is upset about imports, he’s not worried about importing everybody else’s gold. Right? This is drinking their milkshake, right?
So, if you control for that, then the across the board first year of Trump’s tariffs, the trade deficit went down by about a third, by about 300 billion. So, he’s going to register that as a win.
And then the other one is the factory reshoring. So, you know, Trump likes big numbers. And so, he’s talked, you know, it was 4 trillion, 9 trillion, 18 trillion. It’s, you know, just shy of a gazillion. But at any rate, it does look like we’ve got trillions of dollars coming into reshore manufacturing here. Now, a lot of that had been strong armed by Trump in his trade deals. So he squeezed, I think 550 billion out of Japan, similar from Korea, about twice that from Europe, something like four times that out of the Middle East.
The idea being that these countries would build facilities that would build factories or oil export terminals. They would build this infrastructure in the U.S. and in return, Trump would give them a break on tariffs. And the reason he’s doing that is because general rule of thumb is a trillion dollars of investment is worth about a million jobs. Right? So that is a huge deal. Like if it’s 4 trillion, you know, the U.S. economy in a normal year only invests about 4 trillion.
The vast majority is maintaining or replacing worn out infrastructure. If you pour 4 trillion on top of that, never mind 18 trillion, you are generating millions of jobs. That’s, you know, that’s what Trump promised. He feels like that’s why people voted for him, especially blue collars.
So, in his mind, the tariffs are doing exactly what they were intended. Now, a lot of it’s not showing up in the numbers like all those factories. So far it looks like we’ve only got about 200 billion of them actually logged because factories take a long time. So, Taiwan Semiconductor, for example, is a big factory out in Arizona. $100 billion they’re putting into it that will create, you know, rule of thumb, 100,000 jobs.
However, it’s about six years from blueprint to actually putting somebody on the assembly line. So, a lot of that reshoring has not happened yet. But he wants it to continue. And he’s probably going to use those other trade authorities. In fact, it took him roughly three hours to come out and say that screw the Supreme Court. He added that their families should be embarrassed about them. And then he talked about these other trade authorities that he was gonna replace them with.
So, I think tariffs are here to stay. The other thing is that a lot of Europeans or Chinese, they might be looking at the calendar thinking Trump’s only got three years left in office. But the thing is, Biden kept almost all of Trump’s first-term tariffs.
Right? So, Democrats have loved tariffs since forever. Traditionally it was Republicans who were fighting tariffs because they were serving big business or but like working regular American. American voters love tariffs. They’re willing to pay more for stuff if it’s made in America. The crony companies, of course, absolutely love tariffs ’cause they would love to ban the opposition. So, I think, you know, however, however much bubbly they popped in champagne last week, you know, Trump’s gonna continue doing the tariffs with other authorities. And even if Trump loses in 2028, Democrats realistically are gonna continue them.
Monetary Metals:
And what do you think about this idea? I spoke with the economist Dr. Arthur Laffer, who has said, well, Trump is a free trader at heart. He’s using these terrorists as a big stick to get people to the negotiating table. If you look at his track record, he started with this tariff threat and by the end of his first term the tariffs were actually lower on average than when he started with.
He made these trade deals, USMC being a big one. Do you think that that same plan is happening? We just have Trump amnesia forgetting that hey, he said he’s gonna use tariffs and then he had lower tariffs by the end of his first term. Do you think the same exact game plan is happening in Trump’s second term?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, he definitely threatens a lot more than he than actually happens. This is the TACO trade, so called “Trump Always Chickens Out.” He cuts deals. I think that, you know, with a number of countries, he’s basically cut deals with them where he dramatically reduced the tariffs in exchange for them allowing in US goods.
I don’t know that he’s a free trader 100% across the board. I think he’s closer to Reagan. Right? So, Ronald Reagan in general, he was a free trader, is very skeptical of government in general, which would imply tariffs as well. But Reagan had a lot of tariffs. He focused at the time the issue was Japan. So at this point, half of Japanese cars sold in America are made in America, which is not far from what the big three do because they’ve meanwhile offshored a lot over to Canada and Mexico.
So I think Trump is basically the same playbook as Reagan, which is he’s very, very interested in reducing trade barriers. He can be bought with American jobs. So if you ship a trillion dollars in the US and create a million jobs, he’ll look the other way on pretty much everything.
Else, I think that’s a good thing. No matter whether you’re a free trader or not, you want a president who’s willing to do what it takes to bring jobs into the country. In terms of like, is he secretly pining for zero tariff world? I think the jury’s out. I think he’s probably closer to Reagan.
Monetary Metals:
And last thing on this trade frontier, we’ve seen a big trade war threat between the Chinese and the Americans. So far that has not come to pass. What do you think about this idea that China and the US are kind of interlocked? We’re in a stalemate; we’re maybe coming towards an amicable divorce. We know it’s going to happen, but we don’t want to fight in front of the kids, I guess is the analogy.
Where do you see this China, US relations? Is this something where our economies are too intertwined to have a full-blown trade war, but each country will work on its own dependence? Or do you think that actually over time there’s going to be a split where we say, hey, we know it’s harmful for both countries, but going to split out in the open in public with a fiery battle?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, China’s a funny economy. So they have pretty much captured manufacturing for the entire world. That is an issue in every country. It’s an issue in Europe, in Latin America, it’s an issue in Japan. They talk about hollowing out how the industry has all fled to China. A lot of these countries don’t want to manufacture in China. China puts a lot of restraints on you. It threatens you. It arrests your CEOs if it doesn’t like what your home country does, it forces you to train your competitors, so called tech transfer. So a lot of countries are kind of looking for an excuse to get out of China.
They can’t get out because the cost advantage has been so massive. And you know what has happened over the past really 30 years is that China became so dominant manufacturing that there’s a lot of products where you kind of have to go to China. There was a case a couple of years ago, the city of Akron, Ohio. So they used to be the glass capital of Earth. They were like the Silicon Valley of glass back in the 1900s or something. So they wanted to have this 100 year anniversary of glass and they wanted to do this giant curved glass wall which was a process that was invented in Akron.
They were unable to find any American company who knows how to do that. They had to buy Chinese. You can be darn sure they did not want to buy Chinese and for that kind of a celebration, but they had to. So it’s an interesting situation now where you can’t, no country can divorce China tomorrow because there’s a lot of areas where nobody else frankly knows how to do it as well as China now.
And then you throw in the cost advantage that, you know, not only like, it’s not just a question of China is a poor country, has low wages, no, literally nobody else can do it. Like, there are a lot of fields where Chinese technology is the top of the world. Not Japanese, not Korean Chinese. So you cannot divorce tomorrow.
But at the same time, the US and pretty much every country, including Japan, including Europe, are looking for excuses to scale back in China. The decision makers of those are governments. The people who suffer from not being able to manufacture in China are companies. Those are different people. So there’s constant tension there where, say Japanese companies are trying to continue manufacturing in China.
They’re generally trying to scale it back because they don’t be so exposed to China, both economically and politically, especially with the trade thing. But it’s tricky for the moment. I think everybody in the world, including the US is stuck dealing with China.
Monetary Metals:
And what about this question about inflation? Obviously with globalization, we’ve seen Chinese products help with the cost of goods, whether it’s toys at Walmart, everything to steal. We’ve seen a deflationary pressure on prices because of this manufacturing powerhouse in China. If that goes away to some extent, either quickly, sharply or slowly, what’s the inflation story going forward for U.S. investors?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. I think the way to look at it is that we, so between call it 1990 and 2020, we actually inflated. We should have had much higher inflation. Should been running, I don’t know, 4 or 5%. But what happened is China was this amazing technology that could make everything for free. You know, like toasters are $9. I mean, it’s, it’s crazy.
So China could cancel a lot of that inflation. So that means that if China fell into a hole tomorrow, then those prices would, you know, essentially all of that hidden inflation would come rushing back. So that’s part of the trick here, right? If you go to Costco, for example, in the DC area, you can always find a US made version of say a coffee maker because US government organizations are compelled to buy American.
So you’ll find it. You’ll find the $9 Chinese coffee maker, you’ll find the luxury $19 coffee maker with the timer and the whole bit. And then you’ll find a $72 1970s vintage piece of garbage that was made probably in Akron, Ohio. Okay, that’s a world without China at the moment. Right? So, yes, I think that’s, that’s absolutely true.
Now that’s running up against something interesting that’s coming here, which is that Kevin Warsh, who’s, you know, Trump’s new nominee for the Fed, he’s talked about AI doing that. So he thinks that AI is going to be such a massive cost cutter. You know, to give an example, Goldman Sachs, they had a use case where they put AIs on. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but like an IPO, you have to do these massive reports for IPOs, and they put an AI on it.
And then I had a human check the final output and they said that it cut their cost by 95%. Right? So if you take 95, that’s not China. I mean, that’s much bigger than what happened with China. So if that’s true, then we get this interesting dynamic where on the one hand, this gradual separation from China could end up driving up costs because you got to make these things in America, they cost two, three times more.
But on the other hand, you could have AI doing this other thing with all the other costs, because the vast majority of costs are cubicles. Their service, their, their white collar jobs is what makes everything expensive in the economy.
Monetary Metals:
And what do you think about this Fed nominee, Kevin Warsh? Obviously there was some guessing over the machinations of who would be elected. Would Trump elect himself to be, you know, the, the head of the Fed? And yet, Kevin, beyond brand. Yeah, it would be on brand. Yes, he’d have the best rates. So Kevin Warsh is the pick. Where do we see Kevin Warsh? Is he a Trump appointee who is a lackey in the sense that he will do whatever Trump wants? Is he actually independent, saying, no, I’m going to do what’s best for the economy? As the head of the Fed, where do you see a Kevin Warsh, Fed nominee?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, he was a big surprise. So the guys that Trump was generally floating were all kind of yes men, easy money, high inflation guys. And at the last minute he had a guy, I think Rick Ryder or something, this guy, he’s got like the shirt unbuttoned to the belly button and the whole thing. And he was like, I mean, he was just a inflation dove from central casting and he was surging in the prediction markets. And then finally he comes out with this Warsh.
So Warsh is by far the tightest guy out of the batch. He’s the closest thing to Paul Volcker 2.0 that we’ve had since the 70s. So he really shocked markets. And you know, you saw on the announcement like you could time it to the minute. Gold and silver were, you know, runaway, soaring straight to the moon. Forget Bitcoin. And then all of a sudden they crashed almost to the minute because the market interpreted Warsh as a much tighter money guy.
But Warsh is complicated because, so first off he, back in 2008, like sort of the reason why he’s seen as the tight money guy is that in 2008 we had unemployment was running like 8, 9%.
We had inflation at the time. And Warsh said, no, no, we gotta hike rates right now. That’s music to the ears of a classical liberal and Austrian economist. That is indeed how you fix a recession, is that you accelerate the purge of the mal investments, you get rid of all the garbage and then you restart with a clean slate. But that’s really, I think, why the market sees him as a hard money guy.
But there’s two caveats to that. So one of them is that for about 10 years now, Warsh has been talking about what he calls Robin Hood monetary policy, where the idea is that you cut rates for Main Street, which everybody knows raises inflation because you’re printing more money. The banks magic it out of their rear end. However, you cancel that inflation by forcing the Fed to sell these six and a half trillion dollars of assets that it’s got on its books.
The way that the Fed bought that was through so called quantitative easing, where they type a bunch of zeros in the basement, they say this is money. And then they buy everything in sight. All right, so if you sell off that six and a half trillion, you can, you’re effectively canceling six and a half trillion worth of dollars.
Well, there’s only about $20 trillion in the US economy, so that’s like 30% inflate deflation. All right, so his idea is you cut rates for Main Street. This gets small business growing, it creates jobs. Small businesses create something like five to 10 jobs per dollar of revenue compared to big business. So that’s really how you make jobs.
And then his idea is you pay for the inflation, but by squeezing Wall Street, right, by selling off all these financial assets that the Fed bought up. So that’s one point. So what that means is that in terms of inflation, he may be a hawk, but in terms of interest rates, he looks like a dove. Right? Normally we think of interest rates and inflation as being the same. Basically the same question.
Usually they are, but in this case because of that Robin Hood thing, it’s separate. The second one is that AI deflation. So that’s actually coming from him when your Fed chair is saying that you’re going to have catastrophic deflation. This suggests that however much he liked the Robin Hood thing before, he’s going to like a lot more now. So I think that markets are actually underestimating how sort of dovish he’ll be on rates, even if normally you would think that all those activities slashing rates would drive inflation.
Monetary Metals:
And Peter, in this kind of Robin Hood scenario where the Fed is cutting rates, there’s this kind of Fed rate cut stimulus, but also trying to tamper down inflation by selling off some of these assets. How should investors think about their portfolio? Obviously, low rates are a different type of environment with low inflation. If low rates have high inflation, that’s a different environment altogether. How should investors think about assets in their portfolio in a Robin Hood type scenario?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, it’s tricky. In terms of the economy, it’s a very good thing. General rule of thumb is every percent of Fed rate cut is also worth about a million jobs. So in terms of the economy, if you’re a worker, this Robin Hood thing is fantastic. It’s trickier if you’re an investor because one of the main drivers of stock prices, stock prices, asset prices, gold, housing, everything, one of the main drivers of that is liquidity that the Fed dumps into the market. And if the Fed is slashing rates, but it’s pinching, you know, it’s doing QT (quantitative tightening) by selling off all those assets, that is sort of a concentrated.
That’s like a much more concentrated hit to financial markets than the rate cuts, right? So it’s not that he’s giving one and taking back one. I think that the liquidity impact of Robin Hood is probably going to be net negative for markets. So it’s interesting in terms of specific, you know, again, if you look at these, the specific reactions to his nomination, growth stocks did get hit on that, right? Suggesting that people are aware that, you know, on net he’s going to be cutting off liquidity to financial markets.
And that’s kind of the whole point of Robin Hood, right? Help Main Street punish Wall Street. Wall Street, unfortunately, captures many of our retirement portfolios.
Monetary Metals:
And on this guy Warsh and his potential nomination, he’s only one guy, right? There’s other people on this Federal Reserve Board. How important do you think he is going to be? Is he going to be able to strong arm the rest of the board members to go along with his agenda or. Or is he going to be a lone wolf shouting from the rooftops, but really not achieving as much as maybe President Trump hopes?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, we’ve had funny dynamics in the Fed. So traditionally, the Fed kind of had this gentlemanly, we’re all going to agree with each other and we’re going to make it look like we don’t have any disagreements. And, you know, you do that to fluff up this, this image that people have kind of the Wizard of Oz, that, you know, these are all scientists and they have a consensus. So that’s been the traditional routine. And in recent decades, that’s broken more and more.
So you have more dissent, you have more sharp disagreements. And so that could bring us towards a Fed that looks more like the Supreme Court, where everybody’s sitting there tallying, you know, do we have five votes? Do we have four votes? And so, you know, Trump is still about two votes shy if we get towards that world. That’s, I think, part of the Lisa Cook thing. When he was going after Lisa Cook for mortgage fraud, he was, you know, trying to get one more seat on there.
But I think that that is what we’re headed towards. And we saw a similar dynamic in the Supreme Court. So you go back 150 years, the Supreme Court had the routine, so they would all sort of sit and try to agree on something.
They would come to a consensus. You didn’t have these real sharp splits. Now you do. I think that’s where we’re going with the Fed.
Monetary Metals:
I want to ask now if the Fed does cut rates, of course that would be helpful in terms of the interest expense on the debt being much lower. Right now, that interest expense on the debt is even higher than we’re spending on the military. But in a way, does that allow someone like a President Trump and the administration to put even more onto the debt, knowing, hey, this interest expense is no longer an issue? Where do you think about the debt question in a world of lower rates?
Peter St Onge:
Unfortunately, it does. You know, he recently floated that he wanted to bump the military budget to one and a half trillion, which we spend, like, more than everybody else in the world. These are insane numbers. But anyway, you know, by instinct, I think Trump likes cutting spending. In his first term, every single budget that he came up with, he had big cuts, like 70 or 100 billion, which is a lot of money back then. And every single time, Congress, of course, said no.
I think that when it comes to military, the border, right? There are a couple issues where he really doesn’t care how much money it’s going to take. And then Congress, of course, and everything else doesn’t care how much money it’s going to take. I think we’re sort of in terms of the debt and talking about the long term trajectory of the debt and the deficit, I think we’re sort of in a dangerous place because we just came out of a natural experiment where we had the perfect start storm, right? Small, small government, Republicans alleged controlled every branch in Washington. You had Elon with DOGE, which all the Republicans swore up and down that they supported.
Obviously that was driving the base. I mean, you know, you could probably see. But MAGA was the most energized in this second term when Doge was in the headlines. Maybe the second was the Somali leering centers. The moral of the story being they desperately want to slash government. They don’t want to cut it, they don’t want to trim it. They want to slash it like a third, a half, three quarters.
And then of course, you had Trump, who from his first term had been, you know, he was, he was generally the guy who was trying to cut the spending. He’s obviously hostile to the federal government in general. He’s skeptical of the value of government spending. So you had the perfect storm, right? You had all the pieces clicked into place and nothing happened, right? What we got out of that was that in Biden’s last year, federal spending grew about 11%. This past year grew about 2%.
Okay, so the absolute perfect storm, right? Trump was talking about getting rid of the income tax during the, I mean, he was. We’d never seen anything like this, never, never before. And boom, right? It took us from 11% to 2%.
Couldn’t even, could not cut a dime. So I think the takeaway there is that it is impossible to cut federal spending. Won’t happen. We just tried. We had everything, you know, all the stars aligned at once. Mars was in retrograde and it ain’t going to happen. What the administration has now pivoted to, like Secretary Bessant, is focusing on growth. So the idea being, all right, give up on spending.
You have to accept reality. We’re not going to cut spending. And so instead we got to grow the economy so that we can grow out of the debt. Now, if, if you’re spending an additional 2% every year, you’ve got the deficit going on top, which I think is growing at about 3%, roughly. In other words, the debt gets about 3% bigger every year. If your economy is growing at 4%, then the debt is going to shrink over time. That’s where they’ve gone to.
Now, in a sense, you could say that’s kind of a pathetic booby prize, like, you know, y’ all gave up. And so now, well, okay, next best. But, you know, the other side of it is that it’s, it’s healthy in the sense that we should be focused on growing the economy more.
Right? We should have a consensus in Washington. You know, government spending, yes, they’re parasites. Yes, it’s corrupt, okay? But the big picture here is that if you can grow the economy. So in other words, if I could shrink federal spending by 500 billion versus growing the economy by 10 trillion, I’m going to take that one. So I think it’s healthy there to focusing on that.
Which kind of brings us back to the trade thing, because when we talk about tariffs and reshoring, we wouldn’t need any of those if we had a better business environment in the U.S. like, when I look at manufacturers, you have some, like, machine tool manufacturer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. You have got to be a masochist, man. Can you imagine all of the paperwork, the regulations you got to put up with, the lawsuits that just endless.
EPA wakes up tomorrow morning and, you know, there’s some shrimp that lives in a puddle five miles down. And I don’t understand why people manufacture things in the US So you want to change that, right? You want to wipe out those regulations, reset us to, let’s say, 1950s regulations. Doesn’t have to be mad Max, but if you just went back to 1950s, you get around like 90% of the regulations.
I’d like to get rid of income tax, certainly on small business, to encourage people to switch from sort of wage slaves to starting a business. If you did those things right, if it was zero income tax to start a business in the US and if regulations were slashed 90%, then we wouldn’t need tariffs. I mean, the Chinese would be moving here anyway. The Europeans certainly would be moving here anyway.
Monetary Metals:
And what do you think in terms of not just what we would like, but actual likelihood of major changes going forward in the economy? Do you think that basically Trump in his first 100 days did the things that he’s going to do and this is basically what we’re going to see. We’re going to see Democrats take over parts of the government in the midterms, stalling President Trump’s progress, Or does he have more kind of tricks up his Sleeve.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, normally you would say that. So Democrats odds of winning the midterms about 80% at the moment. Historically, 90% of the time, the out party wins. So that’s not shocking. That’s pretty much how the game works. And in theory, that would slow Trump’s agenda because at that point he wouldn’t be able to get anything through Congress. But the thing is, he’s gotten almost nothing through Congress anyway. Almost everything that he’s doing is executive order.
And this is part of the whole death of democracy. What is it? Democracy dies in darkness. Cuz they’re all pissed off about the EOs. But fundamentally, almost everything Trump is doing is EO. And what he seems to do is he’s got a bunch of people who have their ears out and they listen to, frankly, people like you or I, people on Twitter. They listen for, you know, things like banning institutional purchase of single family homes. They listen for these things and then they adopt them.
So honestly, I think he’ll just continue doing that. I think, you know, he’ll continue going after regulation, after regulation. They just got rid of the, what is it? CO2 endangerment, which is a massive global warming regulation that I think that was NIO where he went through that.
But I mean, essentially everything outside of the big beautiful bill has been eo. I think he’s going to continue that. He’ll continue honestly just looking for ideas wherever he can, sticking them in, and then daring the Supreme Court to strike him down.
Monetary Metals:
All right, Peter, before we get to the rapid fire section, what are some ideas? We have a President Trump listening, or maybe one of his administration, and they say, wow, this guy Ben’s really smart. This guy Peter’s quite good looking. Let’s hear what they have to say. They can give us some ideas on how to increase economic growth, make the country better. Peter St. Onge, what are your ideas?
Peter St Onge:
All right. For growth, it’s easy. You got to do something about taxes and regulations. On regulations specifically, you got to fix the global warming garbage. There’s a lot of labor regulations that gunk it up. Basically you want it and then you have just general red tape on starting a business. You want it to be as easy to start a business or hire a person as it is to order something on Uber Eats. Okay? You want this to be super frictionless, super easy. All right, so that’s on the growth side.
Just kind of paint a picture here. If you slash regulations to 1950s level, you would something like double the economy. In other words, take home family pay would go from 80,000 today to like 160 as a very big deal. And this is based on Mercatus. Cato has done studies on this. They’re just absolutely massive numbers that are absorbed by paperwork. Paperwork accounts for something like one in five business minutes is farting around with government paperwork. Same deal with the income tax. If you had no income tax whatsoever. General rule of thumb on the income tax is actually from a paper published by an Obama, one of Obama’s chief economist, Christine Romer.
Every dollar collected in income tax destroys 2 to $3 of economic output because it dissuades, you know, like if you’re facing a 50% tax rate, you’re not going to work as much. Right? You’re not going to take risks on your business, you’re not going to try to expand it because if it doesn’t work out, government’s not footing the bill. If it does work out, they’re going to take half.
So, you put those two together and regulations and income, getting rid of the income tax altogether, ideally those two things together, you would literally triple the economy. Household family income would be a quarter million. A lot of these problems wouldn’t exist anymore. All right, so that’s on the growth side, on the expense side, the big ones for Americans are of course, healthcare, housing, energy and food. And on energy and food, he’s doing pretty good.
You know, a lot of the, again, has to do with regulations and energy. A lot of that’s permitting. It’s also global warming stuff in food. A lot of that is, is regulations on farms. And absolutely, they’re focused on those because Trump sees those as his people. He sees farmers as people in terms of, you know, housing.
He’s been, I mean like every week he’s got a new EO on it. So, you know, he’s got what he had, the 50 year mortgages, he wanted to sell off federal land. I mean, it’s just an endless stream. He had Fannie Mae buy 200 billion in bonds, which lowers mortgage rates.
So he’s been just nonstop on housing. He’s trying everything. Congress actually has a bill that they’re currently debating on housing. I got a video coming out on it where they are hitting all the right notes. So, you know, they’re talking about deregulation, about smaller small dollar mortgages which, which banks typically neglect. But those are important for young families. So they are hitting the right notes on housing and then health care. So, you know, again, Trump’s been trying his EOs.
Congress has characteristically done absolutely nothing is specifically what he’s got the most favored nation where, you know, pharma makes all their profit in the US and then they give it away to Canada and their socialized medicine. And so he says, enough of that, you know, you got to charge us same price. So he’s trying to tweak what he can at the edges.
He’s also talked about, what, sending dollars to individuals instead of insurance companies. But really the big lifting there has to happen from Congress. Fundamentally, what you need to do in healthcare is that the way that our current system works, it’s like if you bought car insurance that included the gasoline, right? And every dollar that you insure costs twice as much because you got this army of people have to get the paperwork and the compliance.
And so that would be a dumb way to do it, right? The way that you do with the car is you only insure things that you cannot handle, right? You don’t. So in other words, you don’t insure doctor’s visits, you don’t insure the 80% of health care dollars that go for routine stuff. You just pay it out of pocket. And in terms of catastrophic stuff, even there, there’s gotta be some kind of cost sharing.
Like in Singapore, for example, if you go into a, to a public hospital, the government’s gonna cover 80% of it. But if you want a private room, the government coverage shops to like 20%. The idea being if you’re rich, you can handle it, right?
If you’re not rich, you still have to have skin in the game. Because today, you know, like for example, pharmacy costs for a prescription, they can be two to three times different. I mean, like from different Walmarts in the same city, it can be two to three times different. I didn’t know that. I don’t think most people know that because who cares, right? Your insurance company is paying hospitals, right?
Again, you can have a 10x difference between, you know, going to the E, like the mini ER or going to the emergency room, but you don’t care because you’re not actually paying for it. So hospitals have lobbied for this system where you have full coverage. It sounds grand, but what that means is that, no, the customer, the person who’s deciding where to go, does not care what it costs.
So you have to have some kind of skin in the game is going to be 5%. It’s got to be something in there in order for customers to care. So of course, you know, is that going to happen? No, because there’s so much money, right? You take the lobbying money of pharma insurers, hospital agencies, the ama.
Those lobbying dollars outweigh Wall Street. So the realistically, the only way that’s going to happen is executive orders. Because Trump is very hostile to the, you know, to the health industry in general. He blames him for mucking around with the vaccine, timing, waiting until after the election. There’s a lot of bad blood under that bridge.
So I think Trump, in terms of EOs, I can absolutely see him doing a lot of those things. Some of them, of course, are tricky, right? If you try to convince voters to pay 5% of their hip replacement, they’re not going to be thrilled about that. But those are fundamentally the ways that you reduce costs. And I would put the odds of Congress doing that voluntarily at roughly zero.
Monetary Metals:
Peter before we get to gold, I want to do a rapid fire section with you where we’ll hit topics from all over the map. You can answer as short or as long as you’d like. Let’s start with the idea of modern monetary theory. This was obviously quite big back in the day when Covid happened and inflation struck, most people thought maybe this idea is not so good. Where does modern monetary theory stand in your eyes? Is the idea dead or is it just waiting for another comeback?
Peter St Onge:
I think it is 100% waiting for a comeback. It’s like locusts. They never actually die. They just wait until the timing is right and come out again. You know, inflationism has been a thing for a very long time. And the fundamental problem with inflation is that you can print money today and it doesn’t show up in prices for a while. Right?
That’s, you know, there’s a variety of reasons. The Cantillon Effect, where it’s being distributed to the rich people, the rich get richer. There’s a bunch of reasons for that, but typically there’s a delay. It could be 12, 18 months, could be longer, depending on whether people save it or not. And so it’s, I think Deirdre McCloskey has a metaphor where, you know, it’s like drinking radiator fluid. It tastes very good. I highly recommend it as a cocktail, but you shouldn’t do it. Right?
And so this is inflation in general, the idea. And when MMT was booming during COVID it was booming before Bidenflation. And they were saying, oh, my God, it’s a free lunch. Look, we printed all this money and prices are still going down. Well, yeah, because it takes time for it to transmit.
And then once you got Bideninflation, they all found something else to occupy their time. So sadly it will always be back. It’s a permanent fixture. It’s the job of people who know economics to warn everybody that this is radiator fluid.
Monetary Metals:
Next one for you. Let’s talk about AI briefly. Obviously there’s some claims AI is a big bubble. None of these companies are making any money. They’re all subsidizing crazy losses. The capex just doesn’t make sense on paper there’s no cash flow. And on the other side you have these 95% efficiency gains. People are coding, creating new genetic variations that have never been done before. Where is AI? Is it both a bubble and not a bubble at the same time? Where is the AI story to Peter St Onge?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, so I think AI is dot com on steroids. Depending on the metric, it’s twice dot com or ten times dot com. if you look at the dominance in venture capital, for example, I think dot com is at its peak was something like a quarter of venture capital is biotech and materials and all kinds of things. AI is like 80%. I mean it’s, it’s insane how dominant it is. It is much, much bigger than dot com. And if you look at the money going into it, the sort of crazy money going into dotcom was fiber optic.
I think by all accounts looking back in hindsight, Nobody thinks that Amazon.com spent too much on its website. Okay? The concern for.com was specifically fiber. And fiber got overbuilt and then it was dark for like 10 years and it took time for it to fill in. But even so, if you look at the quantities involved as a percent of GDP, AI is something like 10 times bigger. It is absolutely massive and like dot com early on. So you can go back to 1995, 1997, you can find all these articles talking about how nobody has figured out any way to make money on the Internet.
So there’s an article that complained that Yahoo shouldn’t be worth anything because the basic business plan is like you build a space in Manhattan and people walk in and look at ads and you give them a glass of water while they watch the ads. And this is goofy. Like what’s the business here? And of course Yahoo begat Google. I mean it got competed out by Google. But Google is worth how many trillions? So the dot com, if you look at the fiber, it obviously overbuilt.
If you look at valuations of Amazon or Google circa 1998, which was kind of the peak of people complaining about the dot com bubble, they were too low. They were way too low, right? Because if you look at what they are today, they’re much, much higher than that. The CAGR was astronomical between the bubble period and what they are today. And so the question is, is AI, is it Internet content where even during the height of the bubble it was still undervalued, or is it pipes? And the question there is, what can AI do? So, you know, there was a recent report, I think it was, I want to say it was Microsoft.
But anyway, it found that something like 95% of AI projects don’t turn a profit. Okay. But again, going back to 1997, there was an article that was talking about how it was complaining that. And there’s like in CNBC how CEOs are all talking about their Internet strategy, but nobody’s actually making money on it. So this is just fashion so CEOs can look like they’re with it. Okay, so in retrospect, the idea that your business didn’t really need the Internet, this is goofy to have a website, it’s dumb, right?
Because early on, most Internet projects didn’t make money because they weren’t integrated into the business yet. AI, the early projects right now are generally pilots, so they’re certainly not making money, but those are going to be integrated. That takes time. And that then leads us to the question of, you know, one of the biggest concerns on AI is jobs. And in the numbers, AI has not shown up in jobs yet. The closest that you’ve come to is, for example, Amazon talked about how it was planning to hire 600,000 people in future, and it’s no longer planning to do that because it’s automating its factories.
So there are some areas where it’s showing up, but in terms of like layoffs, job losses, it’s really not showing up very much in the numbers. And this is contra predictions. You can go back five, eight years ago and. And there were these predictions from outfits like Gardner that by now we were supposed to lose like 30 or 70 million jobs. Just goofy numbers. So the AI jobs thing is overhyped AI installation. I think it’s gone slower than people expected. And the main reason is the hallucinations.
So I, I don’t think even AI engineers expected that degree of hallucination where I just confidently make stuff up because it wants to make you happy. At one point, you know, a couple of years ago, those were running about 50% hallucination rate. That’s now down below a percent. You have to be a lot lower than that in order to actually use AI for Customer service. So it doesn’t, you know, promise, you know, a free Lamborghini to your customer. You need that to be close to zero. But AI is getting very close technically to the point where it can be mass deployed. At that point, I think the profitability on it will absolutely skyrocket.
I mentioned earlier the Goldman study. 95% cost reduction in entry level finance work. You’re going to see that in IT body shops, these sort of Indian low end outfits, they’re going to be looking at 95% cost reductions. You’re seeing sort of industry by industry. Right? There was a couple weeks ago a video of, I think it’s Tom Cruise was having a fight with, you know,
Monetary Metals:
Joe Rogan.
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, yeah. They were like having a fistfight. And people were, you know, were like, wow, you know, AI is capable of AI quality movies. And so that sort of created the scare in Hollywood that, you know, actors don’t have any value anymore. I think you’re going to keep seeing that where specific industries are going to be shocked. Sort of the AI displacement trade. Just last week there was a blog post, somebody was had like showed that Claude AI is good at COBOL programming.
And that hit IBM stock for 12% was like $30 billion. I think that you’re going to continue to see individual sort of labor niches and individual companies getting hit by AI commoditization. But yeah, I mean, in terms of big picture, if you go back to the dot com era, everything, everybody lost money on the Internet in the very beginning. That’s how it works. You give it a couple years and I think it’s going to start turning massive profits.
Monetary Metals:
All right, last in the rapid fire section, let’s talk about gold versus silver in 2025 before we do a deeper dive on the precious metals. Where do you think is going to outperform gold or silver? Obviously gold and silver had massive banner years in 2025, starting 2026 as well. Where do you see the gold and silver picture going forward into 2026?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah. So silver in general, of course, it tends to do whatever gold does, but do more of it. Right? So it’s like a gold on steroids. So if gold goes up, then I would confidently predict that silver will go up more. If gold goes down, silver go down more. But having said, there’s this big extra boost that silver is getting right now because it is a key input into AI data centers, EVs, solar robots. Okay?
Because when you have high value electronics, you want to use the absolute best conductor which happens to be silver and it’s non corrosive. It is the best conductor when you’re dealing with, you know, $7 toys. You can put other substitutes in there, but you need silver for these things. They’re so high. Dollar like a single chip from Nvidia I think is like $14,000 or something. You’re not going to skimp, you know, using cheap metals. So there is tremendous demand for silver right now.
I think that’s really what’s driven it. But you’ve seen backwardation over the past couple of months in both gold and silver and that’s something that used to happen like once a generation and this has happened multiple times and it’s happened with gold as well.
So it’s not just the AI trade pumping silver. I think there is a huge, I mean fundamentally I think what happened there is the debasement trade with that natural experiment where when DOGE failed, when unified Republican control failed, a lot of bond investors concluded that there is no hope at this point, the train is going off the cliff. So they had such parabolic runs that it would not be shocking if they ended the year flat or down from here. But I think that the long term trend on both of them is up, I think particularly in silver with those industrial applications.
Monetary Metals:
In our 2026 Gold Outlook Report we discuss of course the currency competition between the US dollar and other currencies and of course the monetary competition, gold and silver versus cryptos and of course the US dollar. So where do you see this currency competition? Do you still see the dollar as the king of the currencies and gold and silver is the king of the monies? Where do you see this competition between currencies versus money?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, I think that captures it. The dollar has recently actually gained share against other currencies. As bad as the dollar is, the thing is you want to keep in mind how bad everything else is. So if you look at the euro, the EU is dysfunctional in many ways that we can’t even imagine. Japan of course is a crap show. Even China’s rough. China’s added more debt than we have. So they’re essentially to the extent they’re growing, which they’re not growing very Fast, they’re about 5%, which is not big.
In China, that’s about half what they used to grow. And even that is being bought. So if you look and then every other currency, Switzerland may keep its house cleaned, but it’s only so big. Plus the Swiss government has illustrated that they do not want to be a reserve Currency during the European Crisis Back in 2012, a lot of people started selling euros and piling into the Swiss franc. And the Swiss government just dumped metric. I think it was like 280 billion, which is a huge amount for Switzerland, it’s size of Kentucky. So they dumped all this money out to try to counter that and to weaken the Swiss franc.
So you really don’t have any other currency havens. Which means that it’s down to gold, silver to a certain extent, bitcoin. Although bitcoin has gone absolutely nowhere in the past year, which is kind of fascinating because for years and years bitcoin tracked gold and silver. But in this past stretch here, bitcoin has collapsed down 50% while gold and silver have soared. But yeah, so I think the dollar will. I think essentially if you sort of zoom out here, it’s about the monetary competition.
So gold and silver are crowding in. They’re grabbing market share from paper currencies. We just saw recently, central banks now hold more gold than they hold US dollars. I think eventually they’re going to be holding more gold than they hold all paper currencies. So I think that, you know, and then in terms of the sort of inter currency competition between paper currencies, I think honestly as the end comes close, I think the US dollar actually gets stronger, that it gobbles up the corpses of weaker currencies on the way down.
Because these other guys go down first. They don’t have the depth, they don’t have the liquidity benefits that the US dollar has for like the New Zealand dollar.
Monetary Metals:
And where do you see this stablecoin question here? Because a lot of people have said these stablecoins have given a second life to the US dollar. There’s now more demand for US Treasuries in this form of stablecoins. This genius act of course helped banks keep their share of the pie while letting stablecoins join in on the treasury fund. Do you see the stablecoin question going forward?
Peter St Onge:
Yeah, the GENIUS Act was actually interesting. The banks are really upset now because what the stablecoin issuers are doing is sort of giving little side benefits like all right, so specifically the genius act allowed stablecoins to function like a bank account. And banks hate that because stablecoins have to be backed, right? Whereas banks don’t, right? You have fractional reserve.
And so banks are afraid that they’ll lose deposits. Stablecoins. And so banks inserted this clause in there saying that stablecoins could not pay interest. But then the stablecoin issuers are finding all these creative ways to pay interest. And so they are taking stuff away from the banks. That’s setting up this kind of boss battle where you’ve got the deep pocketed stablecoin lobby against the very deep pocketed Wall Street lobby. They’re kind of having a fight in the background.
Of course, I’m rooting for the stablecoins because they’re not fractional reserve. So if Wall Street would like to convert itself into full reserve banking, that I can get behind them. But for the moment, in terms of the US Dollar, stablecoins mildly boost the dollar because you have to back a stable coin. Generally they’re backed with bonds, which is helpful for the treasury market.
It’s also helpful for dollars. But in terms of incremental demand on the US Dollar, it’s a very small amount. If they’re taking share from traditional banks, those traditional banks are banked even more by dollars because they’re, you know, fractional reserve. So I don’t see it having a big impact on the dollar. At best, it stops a process that was already occurring where US dollar demand was drifting off into stablecoins, which may or may not have been backed.
Right? That was part of the genius act, was to put backing on stablecoins that they don’t collapse, which makes everybody embarrassed in the regulatory world. So, yeah, I think stablecoins are going to keep growing. I’m very interested in the resolution of that boss battle with Wall Street to see who wins that one. And the best you could say is they stopped the US Dollar from dying earlier.
Monetary Metals:
Peter, I want to end here on gold. Obviously, we’ve discussed some of the perfect storm dynamics for gold when it comes to debt, of course, some of the fiscal issues as well. Where do you see the bullish narrative for gold going forward and what is the bearish case for gold going forward?
Peter St Onge:
So the bullish case is government deficits continue to be out of control, which is almost guaranteed. You know, that got interrupted by Warsh because he was not as dovish as people expected. The bearish case for gold is exactly that. And there’s two ways that government deficits could get under control. So one of them is that you could have responsible leadership, which sounds ridiculous, but we did have it in 1990s.
It actually involved gridlock where Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton hated Each other, they couldn’t make any deal. And so they sort of deadlocked. Countries like Canada have had periods again in the 1990s where Canada substantially cut the deficit. It is possible, I think given what we just saw, it’s almost certainly not going to happen. But if government suddenly woke up and started getting fiscally responsible, then that would take gold down a notch. Now, historically, that only happens in a crisis.
In a crisis, of course, would drive gold up, right? So, you know, you could see sort of a, sort of an up down dynamic where we have a financial crisis somewhere. When we look back to 2008, that’s initially going to hit gold.
Because in a financial crisis everybody sells everything and people mentally anchor the dollar. So they’ll get rid of their AI options, but they’ll also get rid of gold. They shouldn’t, but that’s just the psychology of it. And then like in 2008, we would see gold soar because the modern response to any sort of crisis is to ratchet up the deficits. If you look at the deficit trend since 1970, when Nixon broke the gold standard or finished off the gold standard, every single crisis ratchets up the deficit. So it doubles and then it goes back. It generally goes back about half of what it went up, right?
So, you know, 100 becomes 200, goes to 150, 300, you know, 250 and so on. So if we do have a crisis, then that actually, I think accelerate near term it could hit gold. But I think that actually accelerates the, the gold run. The only way that gold in the long run, I think, comes down is if governments across the world get fiscal sanity, which I think almost certainly not going to happen. The benefits are too high, right? The fact that you can print the money today, you can buy the votes today, and you don’t get the inflation until tomorrow, that’s insurmountable.
It’s a fundamental flaw. I think that’s why you ultimately need a hard money standard.
Monetary Metals:
Peter, what is a hidden risk that you think maybe investors aren’t paying attention to? Obviously we look at the debt, we look at the Federal Reserve, we look at inflation. But what’s a hidden risk that maybe most investors aren’t thinking about? Is it fertility? Is it demographics? Is it AI? Is it something else entirely? What’s the hidden risk to Peter St. Onge?
Peter St Onge:
I mean, you know, most of the risks helpfully are front and center, you know, so Congress could do something stupid, which they will. Governments could spend more, which they will. So most of the risks, I think are front and center. A lot of these longer term issues, I think generally trend towards the positive. Like if we take the fertility issue, for example, people aren’t having as many kids. I think that we’re actually at the nadir right now. I think things are going to get better in the future.
For me, this may sound stupid, but I think that because of AI, I think that we’re coming much closer to what’s called actuarial escape velocity, where human lifespans get dramatically longer. And this may sound dumb, but keep in mind Japan right now has average lifespans in the mid-80s. That was science fiction when I was a kid. For the average person to be alive in their 80s, I think that we could be looking at that kind of thing. If we are, then it kind of flips the demographic thing because at that point you’re not having as many kids, but people stop dying. And people dying is extraordinarily expensive.
When somebody dies, they take all that human capital with them. I mean, of course it’s a human tragedy, but as an economist, you know, all of that capital, all those things they know, all that education, all that experience, they take all that with them. So, if we move towards an economy where people have average lifespans of 90 or 100 or 120, that is a tremendous, I mean, trillions per year, that would roughly double our rate of economic, of wealth growth. It wouldn’t necessarily be counted gdp, but in wealth growth.
So I’m looking forward to that. I think also with AI, I think people, there’s a tendency to love the scary story, But I think the closest analog to AI, okay, first of all, AI could be a joke and it could come out to nothing, in which case, fine, false alarm, go back to what you were doing before. But if AI does what sort of the doomsayers say, it replaces 95% of jobs and it cuts prices to zero. Okay, if that happens, we have a perfect analog of that, which is the Industrial Revolution. And what happened in the Industrial Revolution is that essentially it’s an escalator, the automation is an escalator.
But you got to take one step down every 10 years or so. Which, by the way, Americans already change careers about every 10 years or so. I’ve changed careers like five times. But anyway, so if you look back to the Industrial Revolution, what happened was you had a great job bailing hay on a farm, and then a tractor came along and stole your job. All right? So what you had to do was take the next best thing, which was some service job, right? Working at a store, sweeping out the store or something.
Okay, so you had no longer was your physical, hard, strong labor that was devalued. You had to take the next best thing, which was a service job. But lo and behold, the tractors and the rest of the industrial revolution were so efficient that a service job pays 20 times more than it did baling hay.
I think what’s going to happen with AI here is it’s going to be an almost mirror image where like the industrial revolution, 90% of jobs were either in farming or then later they were in manufacturing. And those were replacing the industrial revolution. What we’re going to do now is the 75 or 80% of jobs that are service jobs, specifically cubicle, white collar jobs.
Those are going to be obliterated and we’re going to bounce back. So we’re going to go into service jobs. So being a personal trainer, being a pet groomer, being a know therapist, a teacher, a babysitter, okay, we’re going to move into either service jobs, we’re going to move into trades jobs. Because robots are going to be much, much slower than AI. The reason is that you need one AI for 8 billion people, but you need five robots for every McDonald’s. So robots go much like 30 years slower.
All right, so I think in the near term you’re going to, people are no longer going to work in cubicles. They’re going to be bartenders, they’re going to be service workers, they are going to be trades workers, they’re going to be creators, right? So they’re going to make videos on YouTube. They can make handmade furniture, right? Consider that today handmade products are worth a lot more than machine made. Even though you make more mistakes, a machine, you make the machine perfect. It doesn’t make mistakes. If you hand make a chair, you have like 20 little flaws in there. If you made the chair, you know it’s there.
Nobody else knows, but they’re worth like 5, 10, you know, a lot more. There’s a guy who was making, he was making steampunk, steampunk keyboards, custom made steampunk keyboard. He was charging $1,500 for that. Could you make that in a Chinese factory for $7? Absolutely. He was charging 1500. That’s the future. So these. Excuse me. I think it’s basically the movie office space, right? Where people are working in soul crushing cubicle jobs. They don’t, most people don’t understand how bad their jobs are. Like most people hate their jobs.
That shouldn’t be like we shouldn’t Accept that we shouldn’t want that, right? In the movie, he quits his job and he goes out and digs ditches, right? And he’s standing there in the sun and enjoying and he’s breathing the outdoors. I think that’s what happens. That jobs we, the cubicle jobs. If AI turns out the way that they say cubicle jobs are going to be wiped out and instead we’re going to much more human jobs is going to be service jobs, they’re going to be the trades and they’re going to be creation, either creating physical things, creating, you know, digital content. Already today you see, like people hate audiences, hate AI slop, right?
There is a massive value that consumers attach to something being created by a human, whether it’s a babysitter, whether it’s a teacher. So, I think that that’s finally what happens. The automation itself provides the dollars. That’s what makes us rich. It increases quality of life and the humanness, right? The future jobs are going to be more human jobs.
At the end of this process, 30, 40 years, people are going to look back, you know, as they go in for their personal chef job where they, you know, create new things today that people have never tried before. And they’re gonna, they’re gonna be amazed that people actually cared about these horrible cubicle jobs that people are locked in.
Monetary Metals:
Well, Peter, when you go back to being a bartender, I’ll be your barback for sure.
Peter St Onge:
That’s the subtext is really what I want. I want to go back to being a bartender. It was my favorite job. Man, a fantastic way to waste your 20s.
Monetary Metals:
Peter, final question for you. What’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange Podcast?
Peter St Onge:
Ask them about the bartender thing. Yeah, I think it’s important for analysts. The kind of people that you interview are generally people who have big picture. They have a lot of historical knowledge. They can kind of see the big trends. And I think that’s fascinating for people listening. I know when I’m listening to a podcast, I really want to know, where does this fit, right? Like, you know, not just reporting like news, like, you know, yesterday this happened and you know, what, what, where, when. But like, where does this fit in the bigger picture? What are the trends going on here? What can people expect?
Monetary Metals:
Peter, I’m sure people are gonna love this episode. If they have arguments, they can fight us in the comments. Peter, where can people find more?
Peter St Onge:
I put out daily videos, little three and a half minute videos on X. The artist informally known as Twitter. So, Prof. St. Onge, P-R-O-F-S-T-O-N-G-E, and then I also do a daily newsletter where I go in depth on something deeper.
Monetary Metals:
For those looking to get the 2026 Gold Outlook Report, they can get that in the link in the description. Peter, thanks so much.
Peter St Onge:
Thanks for having me on, Ben.