Welcome to this week’s market wrap podcast, I’m Mike Gleason
Coming up shortly we’ll have another tremendous Money Metals interview, this time with Juan-Carlos Artigas, Head of Global Research at the World Gold Council. Juan-Carlos verifies the prolific central bank gold buying we’ve been seeing, and also confirms that the official data there very likely understates the full extent of how much gold countries are actually accumulating. Juan-Carlos and Mike Maharrey also discuss the growing divergence between the demand for gold in Asia as compared to the U.S.
So, be sure to stick around for an incredibly insightful interview, this week with Juan-Carlos Artigas from the World Gold Council, coming up after this week’s market update.
We’ve reported often about the strong demand for gold coming from Asia and the Middle East. Along with that, we’re seeing more and more gold market infrastructure built out that challenges the dominance of New York and London.
The latest example is the Singapore-based Abaxx Exchange. This firm just launched a physical 1-kilo gold contract that’s deliverable in Singapore, and it will be the first and only physical gold futures contract in Asia.
Abaxx Exchange reportedly wants to offer 24/7 trading, pending regulatory approval, and the startup company has raised over $100 million from investors, including BlackRock.
Abaxx Exchange CEO Josh Crumb called the gold market “dysfunctional,” with London serving as the center for physical trading and New York as the futures hub.
He argues that infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with how gold is traded and believes Asia must develop markets that are not reliant on New York and London, citing “geopolitical” risks in the U.S. and the UK.
Crumb is also pointing to the need for a more robust physical gold market in Singapore to meet the needs of commercial gold consumers, including jewelry manufacturers.
Gold consumption by emerging market economies is rapidly rising, and the majority is concentrated in Asia. Singapore’s proximity to this growing market sets the city up to become a key player in the global gold market.
Meanwhile, gold is helping unlock mysteries of the universe.
Over the last several years, the new James Webb Space Telescope has produced stunning images that are helping scientists to better understand the universe.
The telescope has now observed galaxies much earlier in time and more massive than expected. This suggests galaxy formation may have occurred faster and more efficiently than current models predict.
JWST has also identified water vapor, clouds, and haze in the atmospheres of several planets outside of our solar system, and CO2 in the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-39b. This could pave the way for identifying potential biosignatures in the future.
The power of the James Webb Space Telescope dwarfs that of its predecessor and offers unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. The telescope’s ability to “see” deep into the infrared spectrum allows it to image the distant universe as far back as the first galaxies and even the first stars.
So why on earth are we bringing this up during a precious metals podcast you ask? Well, it’s because gold helps to make all of this amazing imaging possible.
Each of the telescope’s 18 gold-coated, hexagonal mirrors has a diameter of just over 4 feet. Stitched together in a honeycomb pattern, the mirrors have a total diameter of 6.5 meters (21.5 feet). The mirrors are made of beryllium and are coated with a microscopic layer of pure gold.
Why gold?
Because the yellow metal is one of the very best materials at reflecting infrared light. A team of scientists, including my very own cousin I’m proud to say, used beryllium as the base for the telescope’s mirrors because the metal exhibits almost no thermal expansion at extremely low temperatures.
In other words, the extreme cold in space won’t cause the panels to warp. On the other hand, gold is comparatively temperature sensitive. That’s why a thin layer was put on top of the beryllium base.
Scientists say the James Webb Space Telescope has seven times the light-gathering power of the Hubble Space Telescope.
From time to time, you will hear people inexplicably say, “Gold is just a useless metal.” They claim that gold’s value is simply “a matter of faith.”
This is sheer nonsense. In fact, gold is one of the most useful metals on the planet and would probably have even more practical applications like silver does if the yellow metal was not so rare and expensive.
The truth is, gold did not become money because it wasn’t useful for anything else. Its role as money evolved because it is so valuable and has so many uses.
Gold isn’t just used in space exploration. About 80 tonnes of gold were used in industrial and tech applications in just the first quarter of this year alone.
Lastly, and before we get to this week’s interview, let’s take a look at the weekly market action.
Gold is suffering its worst week here since just after Election Day. The yellow metal is down nearly $150, or 4.3% to come in at $3,196 an ounce. Silver has been holding up relatively better, having been essentially flat for the week through Thursday’s close. A pullback here today has silver down for the week now by 1.6% to trade at $32.40 an ounce.
Similar story in the platinum, which is off 1.4% and currently checks in at $1,005. And finally, palladium is seeing a bigger decline, down 3.6% and checks in at $986 as of this Friday morning recording.
Well now, without further delay let’s get right to our exclusive interview with a man very much in the know when it comes gold market.
Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I’m Mike Maharrey, a reporter and analyst here at Money Metals, and I’m joined today by Juan-Carlos Artis. Juan-Carlos is the head of global research for the World Gold Council and we use a lot of World Gold Council data and information, so it’s really exciting to talk to somebody from there and get some real time insights. How you doing Juan-Carlos?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Very good. Thank you so much for having me, Mike.
Mike Maharrey: Well, it’s an absolute pleasure. Like I said, I probably, in terms of sources and for my writing and work, I would say World Goal Council is probably very near the top, if not the top in terms of raw data. So I really appreciate the work that you guys are doing. And before we really dig into the gold market, I would like you just to give folks a quick overview of what you guys do at the Gold Council. What’s your mission and what’s the work that you’re doing?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Absolutely, yeah, the Work Gold Council is a membership organization actually, and we, as you can imagine, focus on gold. We champion the role that gold can play as a strategic asset, as a strategic investment across the board, and we are also integral in shaping up the future and responsible access of the gold supply chain. We focus primarily on three pillars. Our strategy focuses on three pillars. One is improving understanding, the second one is improving access, and the third one, improving trust. So we produce content, we work with the industry and various market participants and policy makers in terms of setting standards as well as developing market structure and policy as it relates to gold.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, one of the things that I think is, I dunno if it’s interesting is the right word, but I think it’s important that you guys have a global focus and I feel like, and we might get into this a little bit as we get into the interview, but I feel like a lot of times us investors, Americans in general can be kind of myopic and forget the rest of the world exists and you guys bring data in from every corner of the globe and give a really broad overview of the market and I think that’s really important and again, I really do appreciate the work that you guys do. You recently released the first quarter Gold Demand Trends report and kind of goes over all of the demand dynamics that we saw in Q1. Folks can go to your website and pull that up. I’ve also written an article that gives an overview over@moneymetals.com slash news, so I won’t go into a lot of the details. I will say that we had an increase of demand and for Q1 it was the highest level since 2016 and not really surprising given what we’ve seen with the price action, but I was curious from your perspective, was there anything in the report that really stood out to you or maybe surprised you?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Yeah, so look, and Mike, you were making a really point before. Gold is a global asset. It’s a global good. Really the market spans continents and nations and cultures and it’s very well ingrained actually in human civilization. And understanding the global dynamics is key to understanding how it performs and that’s often actually why people may of course look at variables that are linked to the US economy, like the dollar and interest rates, which are of course important to determine the price performance and the way that gold behaves. But in reality, to fully comprehend gold, you need to look at global trends. So to your point, and going back to your question, one of the things that stands out to us, number one was a fairly widespread participation from investors, especially through gold ETFs that we had not seen as much in the previous year for a variety of reasons that we can get into later.
Juan-Carlos Artigas: And of course that was not surprising, as you said, given the price performance. We also saw the acceleration in consumption in particular jewelry, but all things considered considering again, how much the price of gold increase jewelry consumption and jewelry purchases did not decrease all that much. Again, all things considered and perhaps the one thing that stood out was also recycling. Recycling is one of the sources of supply for gold, one of the forms in which gold comes back to the market and actually recycling was quite stable in this quarter. We saw basically a very small decrease only 1%, which if you consider how much the price of gold increase and the fact that typically when gold prices increase, you tend to see more recycling. It is signaling the fact that number one, people that own gold were not ready to part ways with it. So even if perhaps they were not going and buying so much jewelry, they were not selling it either. And I think that that is a testament to their perceptions towards the role that gold plays in their future savings and also the fact that at present, the global economy is not in a recession or anything like that, so they’re not pressed to do so.
But more than anything, I think that is also balancing this perspective that people are preferred to keep their gold as means to preserve wealth and to maintain their income.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the jewelry, I thought that was interesting as well, and what kind of struck me is if you look at the tonnage terms, you look at the volume of gold jewelry that was down looking at it quarter by quarter and whatnot, but if you look at the value of that gold jewelry, it was actually up a little bit in a lot of markets. So it wasn’t that people weren’t buying gold jewelry, they’re kind of keeping that spending level, but with the price being higher, they’re not as able to buy as maybe as large a pieces and stuff. And I thought that was kind of interesting because when you hear that jewelry demand is down, you get this impression that people aren’t buying jewelry and that’s not really the case, is it?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Absolutely. And again, when we’re talking about demand, demand, people are still buying is you’re making the comparison on, especially from a jewelry perspective, seasonally from Q1 in 2025 versus Q1 in 2024, and some of the conditions change, but you’re making a really important point, which is people are still spending quite a bit of money in jewelry, so the share of wallet is still relevant. It’s just of course as the gold price increases, you may not be able to buy as many large pieces as you may have done in the past. The other interesting perspective from is that in particular jewelry markets that are quite large include India and China and the Middle East and in particular in India as well as in China, we saw an increase in bar and coin demand. I know that we may get to it later, but the point is that again, people may be buying, so they may not have chosen to buy gold in the form of jewelry for a variety of reasons, but they still are buying in other ways, including bars and coins.
Mike Maharrey: Right, right. Yeah, that’s a very good point. I’m really kind of curious about how you guys come up with some of the numbers. It’s not like you can just go count jewelry sold or whatnot. How do you guys come up with some of this data? What are some of the methodologies that are used to come up with the numbers of say, bar and coin demand or jewelry volume? Where do those numbers come from?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Very good point. Global market, really large market. There are so many moving parts and there are various sources of information, but primarily we are sourcing the estimation of demand and supply for most sectors of the gold market to metals focused data. Metals focused data is a consultancy that basically focus on estimating demand on supply for precious metals, but certainly very much in particular gold. And they have a very robust methodology that includes modeling based on publicly available information as well as a team of people that just like the war World Council is spread out around the world and having conversations with many of the participants throughout the supply chain and understanding some of those figures and trends and translating the hard data that they may get from either imports or sales that are reported and so on and so forth. Their purchases, again, reported purchases and so on.
With a combination of anecdotal and consistent surveying of key participants in the gold supply chain. There are other sources, for example, for gold back ETFs, physically backed gold ETFs where you can actually rely on very consistent and frequent publications from these funds. So these are regulated funds and therefore those are the ones that we can actually check almost on a daily basis because of their structure. So that’s the part of the market that is perhaps a bit more programmatic. It is still important to have conversations with the participants in those markets to get anecdotal perspectives and color about what may be behind some of those trends. But in terms of hard data that one of the reasons why people tend to look at physically backed gold ETFs as means of gauging sentiment is just because it’s easier to get higher frequency data. While when we look at the bar and coin market or the jewelry market or the technology market, we do tend to look at quarterly figures. Again, there are some sources that may give us or allow us to check the pulses of the market on maybe a monthly basis or slightly higher frequencies, but generally speaking, most of the market is we receive estimates on a quarterly basis via metal’s focus.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it’s interesting. I didn’t realize until recently how much surveying conversations that go into this process that it’s not just about the raw numbers, but there’s a lot of effort being put into finding out the hows and whys and what’s going through people’s minds that are out there on the ground in the industry. And I think that’s an interesting part of the dynamic that probably gets lost. We tend to look at it, but we’ve got these numbers here, but there’s human action behind this numbers and there is a lot of effort that goes into helping to parse that out, which I think is a very important thing.
Mike Maharrey: One of the things that struck me was I followed the Central Bank gold buying really closely because I think it’s a very interesting dynamic that we’re seeing in the world right now, and we’ve seen three years of really robust central bank gold buying. And the thing that kind of struck me when I was reading the report, it talks about the fact that purchases only accounted for 22% of central bank demand implying widespread buying interest beyond what is captured by the IMF data. And so if I’m understanding that correctly, there’s actually more central bank buying apparently going on than what is being captured in the data. First off, am I understanding that correctly?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: What I would say is that our estimate of central bank buying and central bank is a short handle for central bank and official institutions. So that may include other parts of government sovereign wealth funds and so on and so forth. So we are using central banks for short to make it easier, but our estimate, which again as I mentioned earlier, is based in part from metal’s focus, data intelligence and their methodology and so on and so forth. We believe this is a fair representation of what is actually happening in the market. Now, to your point, central banks specifically report data in terms of purchases and sales to the IMF usually on a monthly basis with a lag, and that is specifically as it pertains to monetary gold. And so what you are referring to, I’m assuming, is the fact that if you look at the IMF data specifically and what is reported tends to be lower, let’s say in a quarter than what our estimate of central bank and official institution purchases are. And look, that tends to happen, and it may be partly because of lags in data. So central banks may report with a lag or there may be purchases that are happening at the sovereign level that may not necessarily be specific to gold foreign reserves.
Mike Maharrey: Right. Is there any type of regulation that requires banks to report this data or is it kind of on a voluntary basis? I really have no idea.
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Yeah, so I mean all of these reports are voluntary. Obviously the IMF encourages participation and full disclosure, it’s important part of the health of the financial monetary system to have as accurate information as possible. But all of these are sovereign nations and the IMF is, it’s an organization that tries to collect this data and everything is to a degree voluntary. Again, I think that is very common for many central banks to produce this information. And reporting comes with a lot of benefits in terms of the relationship with IMF and many of the other things that may come along with it. But the reality again is that it’s important to understand that oftentimes there might be lags on this information. So as we look back in history, you may see purchases at some level that eventually are disclosed further and you catch up to what may be estimated. What we believe again is that the methodology that metals focus uses, which combines a lot of sources of information is a fair representation of what is happening in the official sector.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I like that term ‘a fair representation.’ I think that’s a really good descriptive term of what you’ve got. So, let’s talk a little bit about the investment demand. You’ve already mentioned golden bar demand and it was really strong, particularly in China. I think it was the second strongest maybe on record, if I’m remembering my remembering my talking points correctly. And so really not surprising. Again, we’ve seen a strong price surge, and so that gets people interested in investing. The thing that was interesting to me though is that we saw this very strong demand in China, and you can go through most of the Asian countries and you see this 20, 30% increases in borrow and coin demand, and then we go to the United States and it was the lowest level in five years. Do you have any sense in why hasn’t America caught up with or American investors, or maybe the other possibility I guess is they’re more focused on the ETFs and whatnot, maybe that’s part of it, but how do you view this kind of divergence between the United States and really the east and to some degree, the rest of the world?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Yeah, no, and look, you’re making a really good point, and you’re absolutely right. It was the second highest on the third highest is very close to last quarter. The highest figure actually occurred in 2013 in terms of Chinese barman in particular. And the reason why I bring this up is because it’s making an important point about the way that gold behaves. So in 2013, it was a period when actually the gold price was coming down, if you may remember from after obviously not only the global financial crisis but the European sovereign crisis. And as things started to normalize and we saw gold prices come down. Now during that period as prices were going down, there was a huge amount of individual investor and retail consumption of gold. And again, in particular during that period, Chinese demand double, right? So it was a significant amount of compared to previous quarter in Bargo, it was a really, really significant contribution and overall demand.
I think in China, when you account for everything, it was like 50% higher point being when you think about gold, while it’s important to monitor the investment side, it is also important to understand the contributions that consumers will bring into this question. Now, again, going back to your question, what is happening right now and why you may see differences in terms of trends in the east and trends in the west are very much in particular, specifically in the US because European demand also increase and a few things can explain that. Again, there are multiple ways to buy gold, whether it is through bars and coins, gold back TFS and futures and so on and so forth. Investors may choose different instruments depending on certain circumstances. So interestingly enough, people think that when you buy gold, you only buy it in one way. And actually when we have done a lot of market survey, many investors, especially those who have gold, may have it in multiple ways.
So again, it’s a combination of all the aspects of the man. Now, what happened in the US I would say specifically is also that we are looking at Q1 in total, so we’re looking at Q1 in aggregate. And so in January and ferry maybe it was purchases were not as strong, but it started to pick up and actually even April marked a significant increase, at least from some of the partial data that we get from the US mid. Now, all in all, also something that is interesting and we released a report talking about these last year, is that generally speaking, during Republican presidencies, you do tend to see a reduction in barr coin demand in the US specifically called Barr coin demand. It’s very consistent for a variety of reasons. Again, there’s still positive demand, people are still buying, but you may not necessarily see the same magnitude.
Juan-Carlos Artigas: We have seen anecdotally that this has picked up partly just because of uncertainty and perspectives of current geoeconomics and geopolitics, but that to a degree explains some of the rationale. It is also a perception on risk. I mean risk changes in different ways. I’ll give you a concrete example. When interest rates were increasing a couple of, as they were going up like 2022 and so on and so forth, and part of 2023 you saw a more direct reaction in purchases or in this case sales of go back ETFs in the US and Europe, even though Asia was accumulating. And it was partly due to that dynamic regional dynamics affect regional demand. But when you look at the gold market in total, you need to think about again, global trends.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And this brings me to more of, I guess a meta question. I’ve often heard it said that people in the east, particularly Asia, China, Japan, Korea, view gold differently than Americans, and I kind of get that, but I was wondering if from your kind of more of a higher view and a global perspective, can you articulate some of the differences in thinking that you see from an eastern investor as opposed to somebody in the United States or maybe even in Europe?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: That’s a really good question and a really interesting one. I mean, look, we’ve done a lot of market research trying to understand why investors and consumers buy gold. I actually think that there’s more similarities and differences. I think that people do see gold as a store of value over time and as means to preserve wealth and so on, and also an asset that tends to perform well in periods of crisis, and that is fairly common. I think that it’s also just a matter of accessibility and options that people have. So in the us, and actually this is even true, if you compare the US to European markets or European countries, many investors have brokerage accounts. It’s very common to have a wider access to financial instruments and products, and you may have stocks and bonds and this and that. So you have a wider set of options.
Let’s say you still have gold exposure. And actually look, if you look at the US market, the US market is still the third largest gold market in the world. I mean, it’s smaller than India and China, comparatively speaking, but it’s still fairly large or fairly present, sorry. But it may be just the fact that investors tend to have well diversified portfolios, gold maybe one of the options or choices, but they also have other things. When you look at Asian markets and developing economies in general, gold is one of the options that is not only traditionally and historically fairly tangible, it’s also fairly accessible. And if you look at a place like India where a good portion of the demand is actually in jewelry form, about 70% of the demand is actually linked to jewelry between 70 and 80 or so.
Jewelry is also more closely priced to the actual gold price. So when you go and buy jewelry, you’re not paying, I don’t know, a hundred percent markup of 50% markup of 200% markup that you may pay when you’re buying jewelry in western markets that is associated with the brand that you’re buying as opposed to just the content of the metal. So it feels more like a direct investment and that changes perceptions. There’s also religious significance, cultural significance, and a market that is relatively easy to come and buy and sell. So it’s just the accessibility that it has. But I think that in terms of perceptions, perceptions of gold are fairly universal, the positive perception in terms of the role that gold can play in portfolios.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I’d never thought about the accessibility aspect to it, and it’s true here in the United States, we all have 401Ks, you’ve got much more access to that. And in rural India, I mean you don’t have a whole lot of options. So gold is going to be your go-to because it is accessible, you can go to the dealer and it’s tangible and it’s right there. That’s a really good point. I appreciate that insight. One of the things that’s also interesting is looking at the Asian market, we saw this huge explosion and really in the last couple of months, especially in ETFs, especially in China, and typically that market tends to be more physical gold. Is there a shift going on or is it just more accessibility? How do you kind of account for the sudden surge in ETF investing in both China and India?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Accessibility and the growth of these financial markets, as we said, I mean they’re nascent, but they are growing. So India, you’re making a good example. India has been also increasing, and even though ETFs are a small portion, relatively speaking of overall demand, they have been gaining traction. There were also changes to taxation in long-term capital gains that had a positive effect, the growth of the market. But equally in China, we have been seeing a lot of interest in gold in all of its forms. So foreign coin demand for sure, physically backed gold ETFs as well, as well as physical gold. And in China in particular, you have the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which is physical gold exchange. It’s basically the only, the first and only physical exchange in the world. So for them, there are many ways, but you have seen just more adoption overall of financial products as their financial markets develop.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, yeah, makes sense. So looking at the, I’m going to make you get out your crystal ball here and I’ll give you the out of, we all know none of us can read the future, things change so quickly in this day and age, but just kind of looking at the trends that we’re seeing, we are really probably 18 months, two years into a really strong bull cycle for gold. We’ve seen prices generally upward. We’ve seen some corrections here and there, but we got to $3,000 surprisingly fast, I think for a lot of folks. Do you see looking ahead at the big picture that the fundamental dynamics are in place for this kind of strong demand and strong upward price pressure to continue? Or are there some things maybe that are shifting that can maybe slow that down a little bit? I know today we’re looking at a pretty strong sell off just because all of a sudden everybody in the United States thinks the trade war is over, which we can debate whether that’s a fact or not, but kind of trying to look beyond the day-to-day headlines, how do you see the overall market playing out in the next year to two years?
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Good question. And look, we don’t forecast the price of gold directly because we’re a member organization. We have developed a lot of tools actually for all investors for your audience can visit our website, gold hub.com, and they will see a huge amount of information and insights and we have developed tools that allow us to understand how gold may perform in various macroeconomic environments. So I’ll use that to address your question. Again, just emphasizing the fact that we don’t forecast directly.
Mike Maharrey: I don’t forecast it either. I think anybody that’s really trying to forecast is probably you’re getting into deep water really fast with that kind of thing, but we can see trends and kind of see how markets are progressing.
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Exactly. And to that point, actually last week we released one of our reports, our gold market commentary, and we were talking about the fact that we estimate that maybe between 10 and 15% of gold price performance so far this year, and it’s up about 20 odd percent. They’re indirectly related to uncertainty, whether it is trade wars or just generally geoeconomics, right? We don’t think that that risk induced premium is going to completely go away. Again, we may see, as you mentioned, some pullbacks, some price volatility for various reasons. But we have also seen that many of the flows that have come in over the past couple of months, many of them are likely going to be a bit more sticky, partly because investors are trying to ensure that they are managing against potential continued market uncertainty overall. The other interesting thing is that at present, we are more likely going to see lower interest rates than higher interest rates.
Again, there’s a possibility that interest rates remain where they are for a bit and even there’s a possibility that they could go up to a degree. But again, what we think is that because the upside on interest rates, meaning interest rates are not going to go up as much, even if they do and if they are going up is because of inflation concerns, which again may support gold investment. So in all the fact that we may see either stable to potentially lower interest rates in the US and in Europe, that actually tends to be positive for gold. And if you want positive for gold investment very much in particular, and if you combine it with geopolitical and economic uncertainty, that is creating these more robust, I think, set of conditions for gold investment. As we were saying before, it is also important to understand what effect this has on consumers.
Juan-Carlos Artigas: So, the gold market is not just about investment, it’s also about consumption. Higher prices have slowed down consumption as we were discussing before, jewelry demand in particular, and also an effect on other parts of the consumer market. But part of the reason is also because the gold price has increased rapidly. I understand exactly. So consumers do need time to adapt to higher prices. So actually a pullback in the gold price, some stability and some stabilization could actually be beneficial for gold longer term because otherwise you do have one portion of the market, in particular the consumer side that may be more reluctant to come in when the gold price is moving up a lot when there’s a lot of volatility and so on and forth. So the point being is that we do see some supporting factors in particular for the investment side of demand.
We are monitoring, of course, how the consumers around the world are behaving and are reacting to the environment. A recession can be negative for consumption as well and so on, as well as central banks. We were talking about central banks earlier and the fact that you mentioned over the past three years, they have been a really important contributor to demand. Actually they have been buying gold for the past 17 years. We’re entering the 17th year to 2025. But when the price of gold increases quite a bit, again, they tend to pause or slow down purchases. They come back oftentimes later on. But that does tend to have an effect, and we are monitoring all of that to understand the inter dynamics. But I think that overall compared to periods or earlier periods when interest rates were going up and other conditions were different, that may not necessarily be as supportive for Western investment. That is changing to a degree. So we are slowly monitoring this. It is likely that we will see, we will continue to see price volatility and some potential pullbacks and whatnot, but we do think that at least from an investment side, there are robust underlying factors.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned that kind of psychological aspect of the price going up so fast. I see that in my own mind. It’s still hard for me sometimes to wrap my head around $3,000 gold. It’s like really? Because again, it was so quick. So it does take time for folks to kind of acclimate to the current conditions of the market. So that’s an interesting dynamic in that. The other thing that kind of struck me as you’re talking is that people need to understand this is a very complex market. You can’t necessarily pull one factor out and say this is the driver, because there’s so many things that are interplaying there, and that’s why it’s important to have folks like you that are doing the work that kind of dig into all of the numbers and give us that bigger picture. So I appreciate that work. I’m going to go ahead and get you out, but I do want you to let folks know where they can find World Goal Council stuff and kind of give us a tease if there’s anything that you’re working on now that’s going to be coming out here in the next month or so.
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Absolutely. So thank you so much again for having me, Mike. It’s a great pleasure talking to you. And yeah, I just want to mention something that you were referring to before. We do think that actually gold is very intuitive. So there are moving parts, but it’s intuitive. You just need to think about the different components. So to understand that there’s a consumer side, an investment side, and once you look at both sides, they start to become quite intuitive. And that’s what our models and insights are trying to convey. And to your point, we have a website called goal hub.com,
So, it’s easy to remember, easy to access. It’s completely open. So people just need to register and they would have access to data and reports and so on. One of the things that we do every year is that we actually survey central banks. So earlier we were talking about hard data, so reports that come from various sources, but there’s also the perceptions and the uses and so on. So we’ve been doing this survey for many years now, seven years. I think that this is going to be the eighth if my memory doesn’t fail, but that will be released around June. It’s really interesting because it tells you more about why from central bank’s perspective they use gold, the rationale, how they access it and so on. So I would keep an eye on that as well as our midyear outlook that will be ready towards the middle of the year.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, yeah, the central bank, that’s a really good report. I use that quite a bit and it, it gives you a lot of insights into how they’re thinking. Not only, yeah, we know that the Indian Central Bank has added X tons of gold, but gives you some insight into YI and it does helps you even project because you get a sense of the psychology that’s going on. Well, I really appreciate, again, you taking the time out of your day. I know you’re a busy man and really appreciate your insights and have been wanting to talk to somebody from the World Gold Council for a while and just hadn’t gotten around to it. So I’m glad we finally did that. Like I said, I use data and reports and information almost on a daily basis from you guys, so really glad you’re out there and appreciate the work that you’re doing. And again, thank you for your time.
Juan-Carlos Artigas: Thank you so much for having me. Pleasure talking to you.
Mike Maharrey: Alright, thank you.
Another great interview there and I hope you enjoyed that as I did.
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Until next time, this has been Mike Gleason with https://www.moneymetals.com/">Money Metals Exchange, thanks for listening and have a wonderful weekend everybody.