Blue Wave, Red Ink, and Gold -

Welcome to this week’s Market Wrap Podcast, I’m Mike Gleason.
Coming up don’t miss a wonderfully informative interview with Rhona O’Connell, Head of Market Analysis with StoneX Financial – a global leader when it comes to financial services, commercial hedging, foreign exchange and physical commodities. Rhona has over 40 years of experience as a commodities analyst and is a recognized authority in the precious metals sector.
Mike Maharrey and his guest this week dive into the post-U.S. election landscape and its implications on the precious metals markets and the dollar. Rhona shares some interesting comments on how a change in Congress and the pending turnover among Senate Banking Committee leadership could provide some new pressure on the Federal Reserve as they face monetary policy decisions in the months ahead, and what that may mean for Fed decisions, since, sadly, it’s always all about the Fed.
So, be sure to stick around for our exclusive interview with StoneX’s Rhona O’Connell about those topics and much more, coming up after this week’s market update. And if you enjoy this material, we would like to remind you once again to please do us a favor and like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you consume this content. We would be greatly appreciative if you would do that, thank you.
Gold and silver are attempting to regain their footing this week after a brutal October. And now, investors have something else to consider: a dramatic shift in the political landscape following Tuesday's midterm elections.
A Democratic blue wave has swept through Washington, giving the party control of both chambers of Congress and setting the stage for two years of political gridlock with President Donald Trump.
The election results initially gave precious metals a lift, with gold climbing back above $4,000 an ounce and silver recovering above $52. But whether that modest enthusiasm can translate into a sustained rally remains to be seen.
So, what does a divided Washington mean for gold and silver? And could the political shakeup actually help relieve some of the pressures weighing on precious metals? We'll get into that in a moment.
First, let's look at the markets.
Gold is trading at $4,073 an ounce, having recovered from last week's plunge below $4,000. The yellow metal is up nearly $200 since last Friday’s low close and is up 4.8% now on the week.
Silver checks in at $52.41, also bouncing off its recent lows. Poor man’s gold is up more than $2.50 this week or 5.3% with a few trading hours left in the day.
Both metals remain well below their earlier highs, and neither has convincingly broken out of its recent trading range. But after weeks of relentless selling, there are at least some signs the market may be stabilizing.
Gold's technical picture has improved somewhat. The recent decline increasingly looks like a correction rather than a complete breakdown of the longer-term trend. Gold has encountered selling pressure around $4,150, but buyers have been showing renewed interest at lower prices.
Silver's outlook is a little more complicated. The white metal continues to underperform gold, and its longer-term technical indicators remain weak. But after falling below $50, silver has shown signs of recovering some momentum here in recent days.
For now, the question is whether this is the beginning of a meaningful rebound or simply a temporary bounce in a market that remains under pressure.
And that brings us to the biggest story of the week: the midterm elections.
Democrats scored sweeping victories Tuesday, taking control of both the House and Senate. That means President Trump will face a much more hostile Congress during the final two years of his term.
We can expect plenty of investigations, political battles, and fights over spending and the debt ceiling.
But here's the interesting part for precious metals investors: Political gridlock could actually be somewhat favorable for gold and silver.
As our own Mike Maharrey explained in <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2026/11/05/what-does-the-blue-wave-mean-for-gold-and-silver-005347">an article</a> published this week, the new balance of power could make it much harder for Washington to enact additional tax cuts or major new spending initiatives.
And while that might sound like a recipe for economic restraint, nobody should expect Congress to suddenly discover fiscal responsibility.
Democrats and Republicans have both demonstrated a remarkable willingness to spend money the government doesn't have. They just disagree about where to spend it.
The national debt is already approaching $40 trillion, and annual interest expenses are consuming an increasingly large share of federal revenues.
Those obligations aren't going away because one party or the other won an election.
In fact, the next two years could bring even more uncertainty surrounding government funding and the federal debt ceiling.
And historically, uncertainty about Washington's ability to manage its finances has often encouraged investors to seek the relative safety of gold.
Analysts at Metals Focus believe the election results could be modestly bullish for precious metals. Their reasoning is that political gridlock may limit additional fiscal stimulus, potentially slowing economic growth and reducing the pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep raising interest rates.
That could eventually mean lower bond yields and a weaker dollar, both of which would generally be supportive of gold and silver.
But there's a catch.
The Fed is still dealing with stubborn inflation, and policymakers remain concerned that rising energy costs could keep pushing consumer prices higher. Traders are still expecting another interest-rate hike in December, and possibly another early next year.
So even with the election behind us, monetary policy remains a major obstacle for precious metals in the near term. And much of that inflation problem is tied to developments overseas.
Oil prices have retreated recently, falling about 1% Tuesday to their lowest level in nearly four weeks as investors weighed the possibility of diplomatic progress in both Ukraine and Iran.
Any meaningful progress toward ending these conflicts could help ease pressure on energy prices. And that would be welcome news for the Federal Reserve.
The war involving Iran has contributed to a major energy shock this year, driving up oil prices and making the inflation problem much harder to contain.
Ironically, geopolitical instability that might ordinarily boost demand for gold has instead been contributing to selling pressure.
That's because higher energy prices raise inflation expectations, which in turn encourage the Fed to keep interest rates elevated. And higher interest rates tend to weigh on precious metals, at least in the short run.
A lasting settlement with Iran could change that equation by reducing energy costs, easing inflation concerns, and giving the Fed more room to lower rates.
Silver could benefit especially from such a development, since lower energy costs and improved economic conditions would also support industrial demand.
Of course, there's no guarantee these diplomatic efforts will succeed. And even if the fighting ends, damaged infrastructure and disrupted supply chains won't be repaired overnight.
But the possibility of easing geopolitical tensions is one more factor investors are beginning to consider.
Meanwhile, the European Central Bank is facing its own inflation dilemma. The ECB left interest rates unchanged Thursday but signaled that another hike could be coming in December as elevated energy costs continue threatening price stability.
So, this isn't just an American problem. Central banks around the world are struggling to balance inflation risks against the economic damage caused by higher borrowing costs.
And that brings us back to the bigger picture for gold and silver.
The markets have spent the past several weeks reacting to every inflation report, every change in interest-rate expectations, and every new geopolitical headline. But the fundamental problems underlying the global monetary system haven't gone away.
Governments are deeply indebted. Deficits remain enormous. And central banks face growing pressure to keep the financial system functioning without allowing inflation to get completely out of hand.
That's an extraordinarily difficult balancing act.
The Fed may be talking about additional rate hikes today. But how long can it maintain that position if economic growth slows, financial markets stumble, or Washington's borrowing costs become even more burdensome?
That's the dilemma facing policymakers.
And it's one reason the longer-term case for owning physical gold and silver remains compelling, regardless of which political party controls Congress.
There's also an important distinction between the two metals right now.
Gold continues to benefit from central bank demand and its established role as a monetary safe haven. Silver, meanwhile, is more sensitive to industrial demand and has suffered considerably more during the recent correction.
But silver also has the potential to outperform dramatically when investment demand returns.
The gold-to-silver ratio remains elevated after silver's recent collapse, suggesting the white metal is relatively inexpensive compared with gold. That doesn't guarantee an immediate rebound. Silver's short-term technical picture remains uncertain, and additional volatility is entirely possible.
But for investors with a longer time horizon, the combination of silver's monetary appeal, industrial applications, and historically volatile price behavior remains worth watching.
The bottom line is that this week's election results may have changed the political balance of power in Washington, but they haven't fundamentally changed the country's financial predicament.
The government is still spending far more than it collects. The national debt continues growing. And the Federal Reserve remains caught between fighting inflation and supporting an increasingly debt-dependent economy.
Political gridlock may slow the pace of new legislation, but it won't make those problems disappear.
And while gold and silver investors have endured a rough stretch, the underlying reasons for owning sound money remain very much intact.
In the end, elections come and go. Political majorities rise and fall. But Washington's appetite for borrowing and spending seems to be one of the few things that never changes. And that is something precious metals investors would do well to remember.
Well now, without further delay, let’s get right to this week’s exclusive interview.
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Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey, and I'm joined today by Rhona O'Connell. She is head of market analysis covering Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia at StoneX. Excited to have you on the show today, Rona. How you doing?
Rhona O’ Connell: Excited to be here, Michael. Thank you for inviting me.
Mike Maharrey: Well, it's great to talk to you and plenty to talk about. We just had this crazy election here in the US. I'm sure that's going to have some impact on the markets. But before we dig into those things, I would like you to take an opportunity to give folks a quick idea of what StoneX does. I don't want to assume people are familiar with the company. And so if you can just describe your work, that would be great.
Rhona O’Connell: Sure. Yeah. So one of our senior economists was asked that question a couple of years ago, and he said it's probably the largest company you've never heard of, which is quite a nice way of putting it. Essentially, we have just celebrated our centenary. We started off in 1923, so actually it's more than our centenary now. And there was a gentleman by the name of Stone, Mr. F.C. Stone, and he was a door-to-door egg salesman in Chicago.
Mike Maharrey: Oh, wow.
Rhona O’Connell: Yeah. So, through over a hundred years of organic growth and acquisitions, we are now, I think we're about 5,000 strong now. The head office is New York. The largest office is London. We are number 31 in the NASDAQ 50 and 64 in the NASDAQ 500. I think that's right. I think that's right. Certain 31 in the NASDAQ 50s is correct. Our turnover revenues are in the billions, but return on investment on the fiscal year this year was, it was something like 26%. It's the best company I've ever worked for. Probably not necessarily the most important one because I think that was the first one way back in the early 1980s when I was very much a baby analyst working at Consolidated Gold Fields, which at that point was the world's second largest gold producer behind Anglo. And I was in the corporate development team in London, basically looking at the gold market the whole time.
But also my boss and I spent a year putting together a 10-year outlook for the evolution of the, or likely evolution of the silver market. And then three of us did the same thing the following year for the evolution of the Platinum Group Metals. And they were both parts of feasibility studies for advanced exploration deposits. The silver deposit, which was payable at $20 cash, and we're talking about 1982, that did not come on stream, whereas the PGM was Northern Platinum, which is still up and strong running. So my personal background comes from within the mining sector to kick off with, but I was so very, very lucky to have been at Goldfields with one of the world's greatest gold analysts ever by the name of Tim Green. And so it went on. So I've moved through the financial sector and I came to StoneX, which at that point was still called INTL FC Stone.
In 2019, the head of precious metals at that point, well the head of metals to be fair, wanted to put together a team of analysts to be based in London. I'd just been made redundant from running the GFMS team at Thomson Reuters, so the timing was perfect. So I came on board to build a team that's just the two of us. And I actually stole an analyst that I had previously hired into GFMS and trained her and she's very, very, very good. So I brought her with me six months later. Metals is one of the liquid areas of the company. There's base metals, there's precious metals. We cover practically everything in the natural resources. There's ags, there's softs, then there's energy of the exchange traded commodities, if you like. We have a global payments system, which is essentially central bank to central bank. We've got institutional prime and people who run funds or people whose clients run funds, I should say.
I've probably missed something there, but we pretty much cover everything in, and Forex of course, we pretty much cover everything in the financial sphere.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. And you guys put out fantastic analysis. And before the election, you guys put out a report looking at various scenarios depending on the outcome of the elections. And I don't know that we know completely, but we have a pretty good idea and I think that it would qualify as a wave based on the scenarios that you put out. Yes, absolutely. It looks like the Democrats will have at least a four seat advantage in the Senate, probably a couple more than that, and then very close to 100 in the House. So, not veto-proof, but a very significant majority to say the least. So, from your perspective, looking at it big picture, what do you expect that this might do in terms of impacting the gold market as we move forward with this shift in power?
Rhona O’Connell: Right. Well, obviously it's very early days and it's going to be a movable feast. And I take your point entirely about it's not veto proof, although there'll be more checks and balances that the Democrats can employ. Provided, this is something I picked up from an observation in the Financial Times this morning, it's not an original though of my own, that they actually do take the cat by the scruff of the neck and get stuck in and have good, solid, viable policies which they implement as opposed to, as the generalist referred to it as enjoying an empty victory.
So bottom line, with the big change in the balance of power, we've already seen an immediate short-term reaction with the dollar coming off, yields coming down a little bit because fiscal stimulus is likely to be constrained and brinkmanship may start because we're already in the presidential race, aren't we basically? So we would look for rates and the dollar to come off in the medium term. We've had the knee-jerk reaction. We're probably going to get some stabilization now and then maybe some further erosion. But then what happens in, let's say the first quarter of next year to rates and the dollar and so forth will be a function of what we've just been talking about in terms of how authoritative will the Democrats be in Congress? Put vetoes to one side for a moment because they will be able to constrain a certain amount of White House policy.
So, if they don't hit the ground running, then you'll probably find that uncertainty will come back into the markets and the dollar would weaken even further. Whereas if they get the job done properly and efficiently and from the get-go, then that weakening of the dollar is very unlikely to be catastrophic or even dramatic. It's probably going to be a force of interest rate differentials and so on and so forth.
A second order effect of this, I think is probably a fair way to describe it, would be the impact on the Fed because we've got a hawkish Fed, which is currently comfortable with the labor market and they're happy with unemployment sitting about 4.2, which seems to be more or less like full employment anyway. So, they're training all their gunfire on fighting inflation. So, with the Democrats in power in both chambers of Congress, that takes some of the political heat off the Fed in the first place when we're thinking about the makeup of the FOMC. But it also means that we're likely to have Elizabeth Warren as the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and she is a Fed protector in my view. So if they need to raise to… Where are we now? We're three and three quarters at four, aren't we? I think our strategy team in StoneX is looking for one hike in December.
Well, isn't everybody? And then probably another one in Q1, something like that. It may be that they need to go a little bit further or they will feel the need to go a little bit further. So at that point, I know all the arguments about forward guidance and not forward guidance, not I know, I'm aware of. I actually had the impression at the October presser, sorry, the November… Where are we? October.
Mike Maharrey: October meeting.
Rhona O’Connell: Yeah, thank you. Although Kevin Warsh did swerve forward guidance per se, there was a slightly more hawkish tone in what he said I thought than in the previous two. He was also quite forthcoming at the IMF World Bank meetings in September. So, I think we can expect at least two more rate hikes regardless. The mitigating, not the mitigating factor, the rate determining step, shall we say, is going to be what happens in the Gulf because we've got a Democrat party that will hopefully be able to, if indeed things aren't sorted out by January, the impression that I have is that they will want to get it sorted out. They're not necessarily going to give away a lot of ground, but it could be a more amicable set of meetings. So at some point, let's hope for everybody's sake that the Gulf problems get sorted out.
That does not mean if we had a ceasefire or what I'm looking for, settlement on day one, that does not mean that on day two we're going to start seeing oil prices come down and inflation weakening and so on and so forth because we've got supply chain disruption which will take time to unravel. So obviously we've got the Gulf, we've got supply chain, we've got problems not necessarily just with crudes, but with the distillates and jet fuel is a very good case in point, all of which are feeding through to the bottom line in the PPI. The question that I've been mulling over for quite some time now is that when you compare the CPI and the core CPI and the PPI, there is something like a two and a half percentage point difference between CPI and PPI. So at some stage, either the people in the middle of supply chain or the manufacturers and the semi-manufacturers are going to have to endure even more compressed margins, which some of them may not be able to do, and if they can't or won't, then that's going to come to the consumer.
So, that means that the lead time for inflation to be brought under control in the states is probably a good six months longer than some people think it is, which means that, and I'm getting there as far as gold is concerned, which means that we're probably going to have a combative Fed and we could easily see two or three hikes on that basis. But then of course the fiscal headroom problem is such that they don't want to be too restrictive. So, I wouldn't be in Kim and Walter's shoes for all the tea in China, frankly. Horrible job. But all of those uncertainties could well mean that while a weakening dollar is giving gold a bit of a boost up towards 4.2, if we end up having a semi-restrictive, let's say, Fed policy and real yields, and of course it's the bond market which counts if the Fed can call the shots, but the bond market actually fires them.
If we're looking at persistently high real bond yields, quite apart from what that's going to do to mortgages and so on and so forth and consumer spending, that works against gold.
I'm sort of neutral about gold at this level. At the start of this year, she says, showing off, when we were above 5,000, and I wasn't alone by any stretch of the imagination with saying, "This market is too crowded, it's too busy. We've had algos and CTAs and this, that, and the other. There is trouble ahead. This will end in tears." And I called 3,800 for year end and quite a few people told me I was an idiot. And I have to say for that of January, I felt like one. We might not see 3.8, but at the moment, and I know this is going to sound like a wide range and as if I'm ducking my responsibilities, but I'm sort of neutral between 3.8 and 4.5, something like that, because I can see that it's got tailwinds and it's got headwinds and it's not all going to be done to Congress, of course it isn't, but Congress is going to be a key driver as to how things develop over the next five, six months or so.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I think that's a really good range, and that kind of dovetails with a lot of folks that I've talked to. I've heard folks say even 3.5 is kind of a possible bottom and then that 4.5, that kind of range over the next months. And as you say, there's so much uncertainty, right? We don't know. And I guess the wild card is we still have a few months before the new Congress is seated, what happens in the interim? Does Trump do something extremely aggressive in Iran? We just don't know the answers to those questions.
Rhona O’Connell: I saw another the other day, I can't remember who… I really can't remember who it was. I think again, it might've been the Financial Times, but it did make me giggle because she said, "Will the president now be a lame duck or an angry duck?" It was just such a lovely little image because he could throw his toys out of his prime. He's done it before. But then by the same token, I thought the speed with which J.D. Vance said what he said yesterday was quite telling.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Oh yeah. Vice President Vance is definitely positioning himself and trying to position himself not quite so close to the president. And I guess the other thing that we could see just from a political standpoint, I don't want to get too deep into politics, but I would not be at all surprised if we didn't see some pretty aggressive efforts to investigate the president and even possible impeachment proceedings before the next couple of years is up. So there's going to be a lot of political turmoil. I'm curious, you mentioned the Fed and that you wouldn't want that job, and I completely agree. I wonder how much you feel like the Fed is constrained by the massive levels of debt, not only talking about the government debt that we have all across the globe, and of course 40 trillion here in the United States, but then also we have a lot of corporate debt.
Mike Maharrey: We have a lot of consumer debt, you mentioned mortgages, and it's easy to say we're going to fight inflation, but on the other hand, sometimes it can get dicey when you have an economy that is so dependent on easy money. So, how constrained do you think the Fed is?
Rhona O’Connell: I think that they're going to have problems, to be quite honest. It's 123% of GDP at the moment, I think, isn't it? And that's not a lot of headroom. We've got a similar problem in the UK, so I can empathize with this, and some of the European economies as well. The OECD submitted a written statement to the IMF World Bank meetings in September, and one of the points that they made really quite forcefully was that because of the restrictive wriggle room with respect to fiscal deficits, the potential resilience against any further exogenous shock is being and has been eroded. That would be good for gold, frankly. You'd get distressed selling first and then it would pick up again. But yeah, I think you're right. I think they do have constraints upon them because there's not a huge amount that they can do if they're going to stay within their fiscal rules.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. You look at the amount of time that the CPI here in the US has been above that mythical 2% target. It's 67 straight months, I think.
Rhona O’Connell: Yes, and he's counting.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. So, that's definitely a lot of pressure. But then on the other hand, you kind of have to think, why didn't you just hike in October? It's interesting because you can tell that they're kind of trying to walk this tight rope, aren't they?
Rhona O’Connell: He was asked that question in the press conference, and I'm plagiarizing what he said, but effectively he said something similar to what Jay Powell would say about data dependence and one swallow doesn't make a summer. And of course, September to October is one month, October to December is two, so they'll have a lot more material to work with in December, and he wants to be cautious. He doesn't want to throw things off balance, but you're talking about debt. Something which has been nagging at me for a couple of years now, and it's getting worse, is the proliferation of private credit because there is a mismatch in terms of maturity with respect to what the investors into private credit want. They might work on a three, six month time horizon, whereas the people who are actually running the private credit funds are invested for the long term.
So we're already starting to see stresses whereby, generally speaking, when people come up to their three-month limit and they want to take monies out, they're being restricted to 5%, generally speaking, of what they've got, not necessarily what they want, but what they've got. And this puts me in mind of subprime in 2007. One of the reasons why it stays with me is because I, and again, I wasn't alone, I did not see the significance of the subprime problems in 2007, and it still hurts.
But with the banks rolling out, it's like a quasi-securitization in some sorts of ways, banks taking that credit off their own balance sheets and parking it with somebody else so that they can then recapitalize and go out and make hay second time around into a non-regulated system where you've got these maturity mismatches. I'm not comfortable with that at all. I'm not, by any shift of the imagination, saying that we're going to see GFC 2.0 because the authorities are with it and we've had Dodd-Frank and all the other odds and ends. But the fact that it's not regulated, I know it's in the feds cross hairs and the European central bank's got their eyes on it too. So hopefully, all will be well, but it's just rumbling underneath the surface and I don't like it very much. And again, that's the tailwind to gold.
Mike Maharrey: There's a lot of things that are kind of rumbling like that. I did an article last week or the week before about the subprime automobile market. They've done the same thing with auto loans that they've done with or that they did with housing back in the early 2000s. Obviously, the auto market's not nearly as big and doesn't have the same potential to pull down the entire financial system, but it's just kind of those things that are percolating under the surface that you have to keep your eyes on. I'm curious as somebody who lives overseas, you're in England, and I'm curious your perception as not an American, how badly has America's reputation and trust factor been damaged over the last couple of years in your view? And do you think that Congress could maybe restore some of that trust and maybe roll back the debasement trade a bit?
Or has America kind of, I don't know, put itself in a position where maybe it's going to be hard to get that trust back?
Rhona O’Connell: Right. Great question. Glad you asked it. Over the past couple of years, quite a few of us, certainly in the financial sector, because we're exposed to it, not financially, I don't mean necessarily, but just in terms of what we watch and what we have to analyze and what we need to respond to. A lot of us have had our heads in our hands thinking this is sleepwalking, taking a long walk off a short plank. But it's not the American people here, it's just a few bad actors. And the reaction in the British press, when I turned on my radio at six o'clock yesterday morning, I though the BBC man was going to explode. He just said, "We've had a blowout in the States." And I thought, "Oh, here we go." And I got into the office and it was big smiles all around. And I said to someone, and again, I wasn't the only one, the best thing that's come out of this is the reaction of the American people.
And they had spoken, and I know I was talking to a skeptic who actually lives in South Africa, so he is entitled to be skeptical, I suppose, but he was concerned last week about whether the American people would actually go for it the way they have. So the reputation for integrity of the man in the street in the States at the moment has taken a huge jump, huge.
Mike Maharrey: That's interesting. Yeah, I never really thought about it from that perspective, but I guess that is kind of heartening to see that kind of response. It's not surprising to me at all here in the United States knowing American politics. We're used to these big swings, and of course there's downsides for both parties in my opinion, but it is interesting. I feel like from my perspective, I'm a political conservative in the United States. I guess that's what I would be considered. I'm very much a constitutionalist. I'm very much believe in division of powers. I think the biggest problem that we've seen in the Trump era is the fact that we've had this executive overreach and executive -
Rhona O’Connell: Sorry, I can't tell you how many times I've written about Lisa Cook.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. So this kind of overreach, it happens in every administration, but it's just been magnified over the last couple of years. And so my hope is that maybe Congress will reassert itself as that check and balance because we've had no checks and balance for a number of years.
Rhona O’Connell: Exactly. Which goes back to what the journalist that I referred to earlier about basically they've been handed the baton, now they've got to run with it.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, exactly. So before we go, is there anything that you're kind of watching and that has your attention that maybe is not related to the war and the Fed? What is something maybe that could impact the gold and silver market that is getting buried in the headline noise?
Rhona O’Connell: Well, there's lots of things going on in the background. One element which is intriguing me at the moment, I couldn't go to the London Bullion Market Association annual conference this year because I'd had an accident and couldn't get out of the house, let alone out the country, which is a shame. But the reason I mentioned that is that I was at the Asia Pacific Precious Metal Conference, which is Singapore in June. And at the moment we've got Singapore and Hong Kong both vying for poll position as the Asian hub for the precious metals markets. Now, the interesting thing about that and why I mentioned the APPMC conference is that one of the recurring themes at APPMC was a bemoaning of the fragmentation of the market. I was thinking to myself, "Well, hang on a minute, this isn't making any sense because you've got Hong Kong on one hand and Singapore on the other." I'm told that at the LBMA conference, they were all lovey-dovey in saying it can all work together, blah, blah, blah.
So, I'm not necessarily espousing this particular view, I'm quoting somebody else in Singapore who referred to the unseen hand behind Hong Kong. So there's obviously concerns about whether China is exerting too much influence. Singapore is obviously much more of a free trade position or free trade post and so on and so forth. If it's handled properly, they can probably bring complimentary expertise and resources to the table and work hand in hand. Whether that will actually happen, I'm a bit of a skeptic about human nature. One or other is going to want supremacy, I suspect. Asia obviously is very important for the physical gold market, has been for years. So it's a question of expediting flows and not going for supremacy, but trying to make it holistic. It's been on the horizon for quite some time, but it's now starting to make the specialist headlines at any rate.
So that, I think, is probably one of the most important things about how the markets evolve and maintain their fluidity.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it'll be very interesting. I've been writing quite a bit about just the nuts and bolts of what's going on, a lot of additional vaulting space, new products. So it is interesting and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out and integrates. So let folks know where they can find StoneX and what they might find over there.
Rhona O’Connell: Well, the website is easy enough. It's stonex.com, S-T-O-N-E-X. There's masses of stuff inside the website. You can be guided into any of the different sectors that we work in. There's the market intelligence, which is my forte. We've got loads of analysts, but we've got stacks of analysts on the ground for eggs and softs, particularly in Latin America and in North America. Over dairy, I forgot to mention that one. Yeah, there's just masses to see. We've got something like 50,000 corporate clients and over a quarter of a million retail, so we've got quite a reach.
Mike Maharrey: Yep. I see your guys' stuff pop up all the time out there in the mainstream. You do fantastic work. Helps me do my job, and I very much appreciate all of the great analysis, and I appreciate you taking time out of your day. You're already getting ready to wrap up your workday, and I'm just getting started. That's the -
Rhona O’Connell: I've got another three hours to go yet, but I'm closer to a cocktail than you are.
Mike Maharrey: I feel like I just woke up, but it's been enjoyable. It's worth getting up to talk to you, so I really appreciate your insights.
Rhona O’Connell: Very gracious of you. Thank you. It's a great pleasure. I always enjoy it.
Mike Maharrey: Absolutely. Well, we'll have you back again as we move forward. It'll be interesting to talk again in a few months and see how things are unfolding, because right now it's a lot of uncertainty, so we'll just roll with it, right?
Rhona O’Connell: Okay. Well, thanks very much, Michael. Lovely to talk to you.
Mike Maharrey: Thank you. Bye-bye.
Rhona O’Connell: Bye-bye.
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Wonderful to have Rhona back on the podcast and to get her thoughts. Having met her personally at several conferences and rubbing shoulders with people she’s known in the metals industry, some of them for decades now, I can tell you she is incredibly well-respected amongst her peers and in this space. So again, it was great to have her join us for a second time now during this highly tumultuous year in the metals markets.
Well, that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. And to check out any of our audio programs, including our second podcast, the Money Metals Midweek Memo, just visit <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/podcasts">MoneyMetals.com/podcasts</a> or find them wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And as a big help to us we would ask you to please like, subscribe, download and rate our podcasts. Doing so helps us extend the reach of this material.
Until next time, this has been Mike Gleason with <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/">Money Metals Exchange</a>, thanks for listening and have a wonderful weekend everybody.

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