Is Gold the LAST Haven Standing? | Silver Coin Super Sale

Mike Maharrey: Greetings, I’m Mike Maharrey, and I’m thrilled to be joined once again today by Brien Lundin. Brien serves as president and CEO of Jefferson Financial. He is the publisher and editor of the gold newsletter and host of the New Orleans Investment Conference, which is the oldest and most respected investment events of its kind. And I’m going to let him tell you about that when we get to the end of the show. But before that, we’re going to talk a little bit about precious metals. How are you today, Brien?

Brien Lundin: I’m doing wonderfully. Mike, wonderfully. Can’t complain. A lot of volatility obviously in the markets and actually in gold, lessening volatility and as we’re trading in a range. But I put something out the other day. If you look at the long term and you keep your perspective of where it should be, this thing has a long way to go. So yes, long way of saying, I’m doing fine. Thank you.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, outstanding. Well, obviously right now we’ve got the war with Iran and that’s really driving headlines right now. And of course, I know you were bullish on gold and silver before the war, and we’ve talked about those reasons. And I get the sense from what you just said, you’re still bullish on gold and silver. So I guess my question is, has your calculus on precious metals changed because of the war or is it just kind of a blip that’s creating a lot of market volatility and speculation at this point? How are you kind of reading the trajectory of this conflict?

Brien Lundin: Yeah, it’s the latter. War as hell. War is no good for anybody. But for gold, it really is a misnomer that geopolitics drives gold and geopolitical risk drives gold. It does over a few days’ time but that’s really just a trade. It’s a bet by speculators. And the Sharpies are first in and first out, and they end up handing the bag to somebody who said, “Oh, I got to buy gold because shots are being fired somewhere in the world.” The only reason to own gold, and it’s a strong enough reason, we don’t really need to look any further, is to hedge against the depreciation of your currency, your home currency’s purchasing power. It is a trend that is accelerating right now is an artifact of human nature that occurs over and over and over again throughout human history. We’re in the end game of one of those trends right now, and that’s why you see gold prices accelerating to the upside.

A slight caveat to that, in that central banks are buying now because of … I think they recognize the debt situation, et cetera, but also because of the weaponization of the US dollar, which is its basis in US hegemony and somewhat in geopolitics, but that just highlights the security of gold, the independent nature of gold, the no counterparty nature of gold, it protects wealth against jeopardations of governments, whether those come from outside the borders or inside the borders.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And to your point, Metals Focus actually did an analysis of the trajectory of gold over the last, basically since the 80s. So kind of in the modern era as far as military conflicts goes, and they found exactly the same thing that you just said, looking at the data. You tend to get a bump in the first days of the war as everybody kind of jumps into that safe haven trade, and then it tends to actually correct, which we’ve already seen. And then the trajectory of gold during a conflict usually has more to do with the other underlying dynamics like monetary policy and those types of things. So, what you said is actually proved out by the data. So, how would you advise an investor who is looking at the volatility, who sees gold go up to $5,400 an ounce when the war starts and then, all of a sudden, it’s back down to 5,200 and you see these price swings because of a headline.

We saw oil sell off the other day because Trump said the war was over. So we had these crazy swings in the markets. How do investors keep their senses and maintain an equilibrium in this kind of environment?

Brien Lundin: Well, they look for the longer-term. They recognize those trends. They look at the horizon and not at their feet. These trends aren’t going to be … I mean, if people think that because this volatility or whatever else is going on in the world, that all of a sudden we’re not going to have any more deficit spending that we’re going to grow our way with productivity out of it. We’re going to raise taxes enough to pay off the debt and we’re going to cut spending. If all of that happens, then I might be a gold bear, but I don’t think any of it’s going to happen, and therefore these trends will play out. Now that we have the Western investors in the market though, and they kind of came in force in the late summer, we’re getting more wiggles in the line. We’re getting more volatility and we’ll have to be prepared for that.

There’s good and the bad. Be careful what you ask for. We were waiting for them to come in. They drove a couple of powerful rallies last fall and January and equally steep declines. When they come in, they come in in mass, and when they leave, they leave the same way. And so we’re just going to have to get used to that.

But the long-term trend will remain. And one of the patterns we’ve seen over this now two year old bull market is that we really haven’t had too many true technical corrections. We’ve just had one a little while back, we had one in January, late January. But other than that, we only had two 10% drawdowns over the entire period because of the support of central bank buying. I think that pattern, generally speaking, is going to continue and that we tend to trade sideways more and cure price excesses through time rather than price. And we’re in one of those periods right now. Now we’re talking about volatility, but in fact, if you look at gold’s Ballinger bands, the gap width continues to fall. So indicating actually a drop in volatility and the fact that we’re in one of those sideways patterns right now. So, I think we’re going to break out looking at it, the wet finger and the wind, nobody can really tell what the timing is, but I think we probably have two or three more weeks of the sideways trading before we can really look at the next breakout.

Mike Maharrey: And when we had the last gold correction, we kind of saw the same thing. We traded sideways for several months and then broke to the high side once again. It’s really interesting though, we talked about the fact that historically wars haven’t really moved the needle in the precious metals markets over the long term, but in that metals focus analysis, and I thought this was an interesting point, they did point out a few things that they thought might actually have some longer range implications. And one of those was the fact that it could drive inflation a bit higher. And I think saying it’ll drive inflation a bit higher is probably an understatement. Do you agree with that? Because typically wars … I mean, when you said something about lowering the deficit, I almost laughed out loud because we all know that’s not a thing that’s not happening, right? And in fact, I would argue that the war would probably increase that. So do you actually see if this war continues to play out at actually increasing inflationary pressures?

Brien Lundin: Well, it’ll increase price pressures. I’m more of the classic Austrian economist.

Mike Maharrey: I’m glad you said that because I just did something that I hate. I conflated price inflation and actual inflation. I meant actual inflation. We know that there’s going to be some price volatility. We can probably anticipate an oil price shock, but I’m talking about real inflation, which comes from money creation, which is the fruit of borrowing and spending. So, I should have been clear on that.

Brien Lundin: And that might be a knock-on effect of it all and probably will, because I was just commenting the other day to somebody that the interest on the federal debt, just the debt service costs on the debt now exceed what we spend in national defense. Now we’re going to have to replace a lot of missiles. So maybe national defense is going to rise above debt service costs temporarily, but that’s just another sign that deficit spending is growing and we’re going to have to pay for this. So those dollars will then have to be created out of thin air. And there’s a lot of really smart people, a lot of really smart people that speak in my conference every year and they talk about how the Fed insulates that and sterilizes this debt and brings it into the Fed balance sheet and it’s not loaned out in the public.

So, it doesn’t have quite the multiplier effect, but the thing that they ignore is that money spent. Debt is money spent in federal debt. So it’s already gone through the economy at least once, one roundabout trip and had whatever knock on effects it’s going to have and whatever multiplier effects. So it’s already happened and debt is money that has to be created somehow. And we’re going to have more of that. There’s no sign that’s going to abate anytime soon.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. And the fact of the matter is the Fed stealthily restarted quantitative easing in December. Now they’re never going to use the term quantitative easing. And if you ask them that, they would say, ‘It’s not happening.’ But they are buying treasuries and injecting that new money into the economy. And we are seeing a modest, but an increase in the Fed balance sheet. This was before the war.

Brien Lundin: And you’ll remember they did the precise same thing in September of 2019. And I’m not saying they knew COVID was coming, but they did have some problems there that had to be … And they denied that it was quantitative easing because it wasn’t across the entire curve. Well, who cares?

Mike Maharrey: Right. Right. It’s like if you have an albino duck, well, that’s not really a duck because it’s white.

Brien Lundin: Right, because of swan-like.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I was perusing a few of your newsletters and I came across something that I thought was interesting. So, I’m just going to throw this at you and let you expound on it because I think people will find this fascinating. And it really goes to the underlying dynamics that we’re talking about in the economy that war or no war is going to continue unabated. And this is what you said. One of the craziest things that happened is that the major stock indexes ended 2025 at an all- time high and a 12-year low at the same time. Okay. How’s that possible?

Brien Lundin: Yeah, actually that’s quoting my friend Bob Pretcher of Elliot Watchers who’s one of the smartest and nicest guys you’ll find in the business. He has some wonderful insights. Whatever you’ve used on Elliot Wave, the use of, well, Bob’s views on long-term economic trends and the role of gold is really unparalleled, unsurpassed, at least in the industry. And what Bob was pointing out is that when you measure things in gold, you see that gold prices don’t really fluctuate, but everything else fluctuates around gold. So yeah, it’s a long-term low. When you look at the stock market as measured in gold, when you look at it as measured in dollars, which have depreciated, it’s a lot more dollars around then it’s made a high. There’s a great website that does a wonderful job of illustrating this called pricedingold.com. And if you look at that, and I use the charts on that all the time in my presentations, you’ll see that the S&P 500 is trading today at about the same level as the 1930s and 1940s, priced in gold.

If you price an Ivy League college education in gold, it costs the same in gold today as it did in the 1930s. The Big Mac is cheaper in gold now than it was as prices actually dropped since the 1980s across a number of currencies if you price it in gold. So, gold is the standard, and it’s not that the price of gold varies, but that the prices of everything else revolve around gold as a standard. And once you understand that, it’s like if Copernicus and the whole heliocentric model of the sun is the center of the solar system, once you realize that gold is the center of the financial system, the monetary system, at least, and everything else revolves around it, then you truly understand its role. You understand that currencies always depreciate against that standard because of human nature, and sometimes that depreciation accelerates and gold stands as your only protection against that.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. That’s fascinating too. And I think it goes to another point that we kind of swerved into by accident a few minutes ago, that inflation when properly defined, and you and I, as classic Austrian economists, when we say inflation, what we mean is an increase in the supply of money and credit. And then you have price inflation, which is a symptom of that monetary inflation. We live in a world now where they’ve switched those definitions. So, when people say inflation, they just mean price increases. And so in the 2008, when they were doing all of that QE and there was all this money printing going on and people were saying, “Oh my gosh, there’s going to be inflation.” And then consumer prices really didn’t go up all that much. People said, “Oh, well, there was no inflation.” Well, all of it went into the stock market, right?

We can look at that stock market and when you price it in gold, you see that effect. Whereas if you are pricing in Fiat, you just feel like you’re getting richer when really you’re not.

Brien Lundin: Yeah. Instead of retail or consumer price inflation, and this is something we’ve seen really throughout the century, the 2000s, we’ve had asset value inflation rather than classic price inflation. But you bring up another great point, when they came in with all that liquidity and the rescue operations post- COVID, and those rescue operations were multiples of what they did after the GFC in 2008, and had to be because they had to have the shock and awe, the markets had grown tolerant to the drug. So anyway, they came in with all that liquidity and those rescue efforts, and gold doubled in price very quickly. And then there was no real retail price inflation. And then later, 18 months later, there was tremendous retail price inflation, and everybody said, “Well, gold’s not responding. It’s not an inflation edge.” No, no. Gold shot up because it predicted all investments, all assets are predictive mechanisms.

Gold probably more sensitive than any other one out there. And gold predicted the repercussions of that liquidity coming down the road. So gold had already responded to the inflation. It doesn’t respond tick for tick, but it anticipates and predicts what is coming down the road, and it did so incredibly accurately.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I hadn’t actually thought about that. So, kind of thinking about the war, for me, the impact on gold is pretty simple. I’m kind of ignoring the war, other than maybe the fact that the war could accelerate de-dollarization, could accelerate money printing. Silver to me is a little bit more complicated because I think you do have the potential with a, especially if the war runs longer, you do have the potential for some economic contraction in the global economy. And given that silver has a high percentage of industrial demand, that makes the calculus there a little bit more difficult, at least it does in my mind. So do you think that silver is also going to get a booster? Is there some potential pitfalls there if we do go into a deep recession with the economy contracting?

Brien Lundin: Yeah. If we get into a recession, the Fed is going, and all other central banks around the world are going to come through with liquidity and everything will get turned … All risk assets will soar again, including the metals. And of course, there may be along the way some sharp corrections, some sharp sell off a liquidity vacuum that sends everything out, the baby of the bath water and the metals would get hit, but again, things will quickly recover as we saw post 2008. So yeah, I think that’ll happen. The real risk of these geopolitical flashpoints like this is that they obscure the underlying reasons to own gold, and they get the public thinking that it’s just a geopolitical thing. And then when peace breaks out, as it eventually does, they think, “Oh, there’s no longer any reason to buy gold to own gold and the traders sell it, the momentum, you get downward momentum and the underlying trend is obscured.” We saw that happen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Gold shot up as soon as they invaded. A few weeks later, it went to the back pages, no longer the front pages, gold sold off and established a downtrend when in fact the base for the new bull market was being built right then and there with all the central banks saying, “Whoa, this dollar gun can be pointed at us as well, so let’s start buying gold.” So, it obscured what was going on.

Silver is interesting. When we get back to the uptrend, a monetarily based uptrend, silver will outperform gold. The very deep analytical reason for that is because it always has, and it’s probably going to do it again, as simple as that. Silver’s really interesting to me these days, because you may remember in some of our earlier talks that I usually dismissed the industrial demand for silver because of my belief that the monetary cachet of silver and its attachment to gold validates the vast majority of silver’s value.

Well, this is interesting right now, this current situation and that industrial demand for silver is finally having an impact because the above ground supplies have been eaten away. In the past, and even back in the time when you had photographic usages for silver, there’s plenty of silver around for industry. You had these spikes in value for monetary demand, but industry never had a problem getting the silver needed. This is the first time that I can know of, that I can think of in history where industry has to bid against investment demand to get silver supplies. And industry has to have the silver. It’s not a choice. It’s mandatory for industry and it’s not an obligation for investors. So, investors really have industry by the you know what, and they can spite the price of whatever, industry needs that silver and it needs it now. It needs supplies, it needs security of supplies.

So, we see that the paper silver markets, the futures and options are now being used by industry, instead of a way to bet on the direction of silver prices, they’re using it as a mechanism for obtaining physical silver. So, everything’s turned upside down in the silver market and all of these developments point toward an ever more tightening silver market and ever higher prices. It will be interesting though when we get to about 125, 135 or so. A number of reports that I’ve seen is that’s when it’s going to start affecting solar panel costs or production costs. I know intimately that it’s very difficult to innovate around silver in solar panels. And so it’s going to be interesting.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. That’s a really good point that you make in terms of the physical supply of silver, because that’s really the crux of it, right? I mean, we can talk about the paper trading and all of that all day, but the bottom line is if there’s not enough silver, that’s a problem.

And, it’s interesting because the silver institute is projecting a slight dip in industrial demand this year, and yet they believe that that’s going to be compensated for, and then some by investment demand. So that really kind of confirms what you’re saying in terms of what’s going on in the market. And I’ve said this over and over again, look at those physical supplies, look at those physical deficits because that’s the bottom line. And as you say, the paper traders, they can do what they can do, but the guy that needs the silver to put in the solar panel, he’s got to do it, right?

Brien Lundin: Right. He’s got to pay up. He can’t buy copper.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. So, you mentioned the fact that there’s these underlying dynamics that are supporting in precious metals markets, and it is easy to have them obscured when you have something like a war going on. What is probably, what is one of the top things that you think is going to drive the gold and silver markets as we move forward in the next year or so that people are missing right now, that it’s kind of flying under the radar?

Brien Lundin: I don’t know if people are missing it, but I think they’re underappreciating it or not giving it as just due. And that’s the rotation effect. Throughout the 2000s, even the early 2000s, and especially at the great financial crisis, we’ve seen just tremendous amounts of liquidity created. There’s probably more investible funds, probably about three times as much investible funds sloshing around the world’s markets, looking for a home than there was in 2008. And all of that money, all that huge masses of liquidity sloshing around is starting to slosh into this little lagoon we have of metals and miners, and it’s going to have an outside effects going to be like a tsunami of liquidity coming into the markets. And it’s not that big funds out there and institutions are putting 20% of their investable assets into metals and miners, but they might be putting 1% or 2%.

In fact, they can’t show their investors that they are not invested in the sector that has gained the much the most over the last quarter, two quarters, year, two years, five years. Oh, we don’t have any of that stuff. They can’t do that. So, you’re seeing a rotation into the sector of from zero to 1%, from a half percent to one and a half. And in the aggregate, that makes a huge difference to this sector. And it’s all part of the great debasement trade. This is the stuff that you and I have been talking about for years and years. I’ve been talking about it since the … Well, earnestly talking about it since the great financial crisis, but now Wall Street has slapped this marketing moniker on it, the debasement trade. Why didn’t I think of that?

Mike Maharrey: I know, right?

Brien Lundin: That’s beautiful. And so, it’s become a thematic, a mematic investment for Wall Street, and now they’re coming out with HALO, hard asset, low obsolescence. This is beautiful. All the guys out there in their Land’s End vests and stuff on Wall Street are now talking about this over lunch and cocktail parties, and we’re seeing the result of that in rotations into the sector. And I think that along with continued central bank buying is the real elephant in the room that’s really driving this market.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Part of me feels vindicated by that. And then part of me is a little bit resentful because these same people were calling me a weirdo a few years ago when I was talking about the debasement of trade.

Brien Lundin: Well, I said a while back, I said that gold has gone from tinfoil to Tina. There’s no alternative, and they used to laugh at us for investing in the sector. And I think they’re still embarrassed about it. If you look on CNBC, you look at the price bugs of all the asset classes. Bitcoin is now up there all day long in its own little price bug, and gold sometimes has not shown at all.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Well, I got tickled when we had the little post-invasion correction, which I think … So I shouldn’t say invasion. I don’t guess we’ve actually invaded Iran, but the military operations, they started on a Friday night, if I remember correctly. And then it was, I think, on Tuesday of the next week that everything kind of sold off. It’s like, oh my gosh, there really is a war. And there was a headline on CNBC, and it talked about how the momentum trades of gold and silver were unraveling. They didn’t mention the fact that the stock market was selling off, bonds were selling off. Literally everything was selling off. Yeah. They focused right in on gold and silver, which I thought was a little bit ridiculous, but that just kind of tells you where the mainstream’s head is. So it is what it is, right?

Brien Lundin: I agree.

Mike Maharrey: All right. So before we go, I told you that I would give you an opportunity to tell people about the New Orleans Financial Conference, and I want you to do that. I know we’re like, what, still eight months out, but I bet you have some things in the works already. And so first off, tell folks what it is who might not be familiar, and then make your pitch. I want to try to make it out there this year because it’s-

Brien Lundin: Oh, you need to come, Mike. It is unique in the industry, and I’m comfortable in saying that. I know I’m talking to my own book, but talk to anybody who’s been, and they’ll tell you it’s really the best thing going. And the reason, quite frankly, is that we focus on quality. We bring the best minds out there. If there’s one thing I’ll give myself credit for is that over decades in this business, I know who really makes good arguments. Sometimes arguments I don’t agree with, but well-founded sound arguments that we need to consider one way or the other. And we bring all of these people, the best minds out there on social media, on X, on YouTube, and we bring them there. They’ll say things they’re not saying anywhere else. You’ll hear it live in person, you’ll get to meet these people, you get to rub shoulders with them, ask them your questions.

It’s an opportunity that’s unparalleled, both in degree and in scope. We have more of these speakers. You can find three or four of the speakers at one of my events at other conferences, but you’re not going to find 40. That’s what we bring to the table. And the conference is the oldest, longest running investment event in the world. Jim Blanchard, who started everything that I do, held his first event in 1974 after he was successful, or while actually he was being successful and getting gold legalized in the US. So we’ve got that longstanding foundation in precious metals and mining stocks and the like. So you’ll see a lot of that there, but you’re also going to get in- depth discussions of macroeconomics, the markets and every asset class out there by some of the top experts in the world. And you’re going to meet a lot of fellow investors who buy their very attendance at this event, have demonstrated that they’re among the smartest and most successful investors out there.

So, it’s a great gathering, and it’s in New Orleans, so it’s a lot of fun and interesting as well.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. It’s an opportunity to enjoy yourself and get smarter at the same time.

Brien Lundin: Yep.

Mike Maharrey: By the way, I misspoke. It is the New Orleans Investment Conference. I think I said financial.

Brien Lundin: It’s been called everything in the book, but we don’t care as long as you come.

Mike Maharrey: It’s the thing in New Orleans.

Brien Lundin: That thing in New Orleans. Yeah. Great!

Mike Maharrey: So, have you set the dates for 2026?

Brien Lundin: Yeah. It’s October 28th to 31st this year. So we do end on Halloween. For those of you who don’t trick or treat at home, you can enjoy Halloween in New Orleans, which is something to check off.

Mike Maharrey: Yes.

Brien Lundin: It is a bucket list item, but we’re also adjusting the agenda. So, if you need to leave early to get home for Halloween, You won’t miss as much as you would in previous years and everything is recorded and you have full access to all of it.

Mike Maharrey: See, a good conference and smart planning too. I mean, what more could you ask for?

Brien Lundin: That’s it.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Well, Brien, I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing a little bit of your wisdom with us and your insights. Always appreciate hearing what you have to say and appreciate the work that you do out there. You’re a benefit to humanity in my opinion. So thank you for that. And be interesting to see how things play out over the next few months. And I’m sure we’ll have you back on the show again in the near future to-

Brien Lundin: Well, I appreciate the opportunity, Mike, and I feel similarly for you and your team, what you all do. We’re all in it together and it’s our time right now.

Mike Maharrey: Indeed. Well, thanks a lot and we’ll talk again soon.

Brien Lundin: All righty. Take care.