Gold Slammed as Strong Jobs Report Revives Rate Hike Fears -

Welcome to this week’s Market Wrap Podcast, I’m Mike Gleason.
Coming up in a moment, we have an exclusive interview with Brien Lundin, editor of the Gold Newsletter and the CEO of the renowned New Orleans Investment Conference. Brien offers his tremendous insights into the current state of the gold market and warns investors who don’t own any of the yellow metal yet that they are simply playing with fire.
Mike Maharrey and Brien also discuss how rising interest rates are not necessarily a bad thing for metals and how the debasement trade is coming back into fashion, which could be a driver for higher gold prices moving forward.
So be sure to stick around for another terrific conversation with metals and financial industry insider Brien Lundin, coming up after this week’s market update. And as a reminder please download, like, rate and subscribe to this podcast wherever you consume this content.
Well, after precious metals appeared ready to finish the week on a strong note, a surprisingly strong U.S. employment report changed the picture on Friday morning.
And once again, it all comes down to expectations about what the Federal Reserve will do with interest rates.
Gold and silver were getting slammed earlier this morning, with gold falling more than 2% following the release of the August jobs report – although it has since recovered somewhat.
The Labor Department reported this morning that the U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs in August. That was nearly triple the roughly 56,000 jobs economists had expected. The unemployment rate also held steady at 4.1%.
On top of that, the government revised the previous two months higher by a combined 55,000 jobs.
Traders immediately began betting that the Fed is more likely to raise interest rates again.
Before the report, markets were putting the odds of a September rate hike at roughly 50-50. After the strong jobs numbers came out, the probability of a quarter-point hike jumped to around 60%.
Bond yields and the U.S. dollar moved higher.
And that was all traders in the highly leveraged futures markets needed to hear.
Initially, gold plunged more than 2% this morning, falling to around $4,375 an ounce in early trading. That's a remarkable reversal from Thursday, when the yellow metal surged roughly 2% and appeared to be regaining its footing.
Thursday's rally came after Fed Governor Christopher Waller suggested he could support leaving rates unchanged this month if inflation continues to cool.
Silver followed basically the same pattern. It enjoyed a strong recovery Thursday before getting caught in Friday morning's precious metals selloff.
The dramatic reversal shows just how sensitive gold and silver remain to changing expectations about interest rates.
But investors shouldn't mistake a bad day in the metals markets for a change in the long-term reasons for owning gold and silver.
The Fed is still dealing with stubborn inflation, enormous federal deficits, high borrowing costs, and now an economy that appears stronger than many economists expected.
In fact, today's employment report may make the Fed's job even harder.
Fed officials have been looking for signs that higher interest rates are slowing the economy enough to bring inflation under control. Instead, they just received evidence that employers are still hiring at a healthy pace.
That makes another rate hike more likely, which is clearly weighing on gold and silver today.
But higher interest rates create another problem. They also increase the cost of servicing the enormous federal debt. And the longer rates remain high, the more financial pressure that creates.
Meanwhile, central banks around the world are sending a very different message about gold.
They're not just watching what its price does from one day to the next. They increasingly view physical gold as a form of financial insurance.
And they're paying closer attention to where that gold is actually stored.
The latest example comes from the Netherlands.
The Dutch central bank has moved approximately 86 metric tons of gold out of North America and into London, citing growing geopolitical risks and the need to be better prepared for a potential crisis.
That's a substantial move.
Before the change, more than half of the Netherlands' gold reserves were stored in North America. About 31% was in New York and nearly 20% was in Ottawa.
Now, each location holds about 18.5% of Dutch reserves, while London's share has jumped from 18% to 32%.
And the reasoning isn't difficult to understand.
The Dutch central bank says spreading its gold among different locations reduces risk and makes the metal easier to access and use during a crisis.
Think about it this way.
You may legally own gold sitting in a vault thousands of miles away. But if there's a major financial or geopolitical crisis, suddenly the location of that gold matters.
Can you get to it? Can you move it? What government has jurisdiction over it? And what happens if transportation or financial markets are disrupted?
The Netherlands isn't the only country asking those questions.
France recently eliminated its remaining central-bank gold holdings in New York. Germany previously moved hundreds of tons of gold back home from Paris and New York, although it still keeps a significant amount at the New York Fed.
And a World Gold Council survey this year found more central banks changing where they keep their gold. Some are bringing more of it home, while others are spreading their overseas holdings among different locations.
In other words, central banks aren't just thinking about how much gold they own. They're thinking about where they own it.
And there's an interesting lesson here for the United States.
A tremendous amount of America's gold and silver trading infrastructure and physical inventory is concentrated in and around New York.
That may be convenient during normal times. But putting too much of something important in one place also creates risk.
A natural disaster, terrorist attack, major power outage, transportation shutdown, or other crisis could disrupt access to a large portion of the country's precious metals market at once.
That's why geographic diversification matters.
Central bankers understand something precious metals investors have understood for generations: Gold is supposed to protect you when the normal financial system isn't working normally.
And if that's why you own it, then where your gold is located – and whether you can actually get to it when you need it – matters.
So, Friday's strong jobs report may help determine what gold and silver do today, next week, or even next month.
But the much bigger story is what central banks are doing with physical gold for the long haul. They're continuing to treat it as strategic financial insurance – and increasingly, they're making sure they don't keep too much of that insurance in any one place.
Looking more closely now at the weekly market action before we get to this week’s interview, gold is down a slight 0.4% to check in at $4,450 an ounce as of this Friday late morning recording.
As for silver, the white metal showed a decent gain through Thursday but with today’s pullback is currently trading at $66.85, down about 20 cents or 0.3% on the week.
As for the PGMs, platinum is unchanged at $1,836, while palladium is showing a weekly decline of 2.7% to trade at $1,418 an ounce.
Well now, without further delay let’s get right to our exclusive interview with the man behind the famous New Orleans Investment Conference, Brien Lundin.
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Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Mehring. I'm joined today by Brien Lundin. Brien is the editor of the Gold Newsletter and CEO of the New Orleans Investment Conference, which I'm going to give him an opportunity to tell you about at the end of the interview here. But excited to have Brien on. He's a great analyst and an all -around good human being. How you doing, Brien?
Brien Lundin: I'm doing great, Mike. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. It appears to me that you don't know me that well, but that's okay.
Mike Maharrey: Well, impressions, stuff like that.
Brien Lundin: Yeah.
Mike Maharrey: No, I always do enjoy talking to you and you seem like a good guy to me, so we're just going to go with it. Let's go
Brien Lundin: With it. Let's go with that.
Mike Maharrey: All right. So the markets are interesting right now. I guess they're always interesting, but we had several months of doldrums with gold and silver booth kind of trading sideways, and then we had a little bit of a breakout. And then the Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, kind of slammed the prices down with his Jackson Hole speech or his open mouth operations, as I like to call him. And you said in a recent article that was published over at moneymetals.com that the misplaced view that the Fed was going to be raising rates was getting exploded much earlier than you'd expected. And that was kind of the impetus at least initially of the resumption of the gold bull market, shall we say. So I'm curious, just first off, what do you mean by misplaced? Why do you think that the notion that Warsh is going to race and hike and be all aggressive, why is that misplaced? Because he keeps telling me that he's tough on inflation.
Brien Lundin: Yeah. He keeps telling people that, and he might be sincere in that belief. And frankly, I think Warsh is the best of a not so admirable group of Federal Reserve chairman that I've seen. He talks a good game. He might be sincere, but if he's sincere in what he's saying, then he just hasn't done the math. And Bessent the same way. Bessent was a gold bug before he took office and now he's in the uncomfortable position, I believe for him as supposedly based as he is in defending the administration and really saying some ridiculous things. So, on the one hand, we have Warsh who is moving the markets by making these pronunciations that fighting inflation is now job won for the Fed, and the market believes it and then they revert back to what they were doing before after a little while, kind of wear us off.
Brien Lundin: So, Warsh has done this, what, two, maybe three times so far, two meetings in one Jackson Hole speech. And we've had the reaction in the markets each time. And then the previous trend resumes really for everything. Bessent said when the federal debt rolled over 40 trillion, that 40 trillion isn't a magic number and we can grow our way out of it. And I commented in this month's issue of gold newsletter that just went out and on X, that he said that for straight face, but he obviously can't believe that he's done the math. There is no way at this point where the debt, as large as it is, with the trajectory as steep as it is for us to grow our way out of it. In the newsletter, I said that if aliens landed tomorrow and gave us the secret to unlimited energy and interstellar travel, okay, maybe we could grow our way out of it.
But absent that, the numbers just don't, the math doesn't work that way. We can't grow our way out of it. And the only thing that's going to happen is the age old prescription, the remedy that's been the same in every human civilization and that's the underlying currency has to be debased and that's what's going to happen. And I think that debasement trade as Wall Street so helpfully labeled it a while back, a year or so ago, is getting back in fashion and wants to get back in fashion.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, the math doesn't math. It's a great way to put it. It's funny because I think back and I remember the 1990s pretty well. I wasn't particularly interested in what was going on, but I was at least old enough to be cognizant. And I remember the contract with America and the big Republican revolution, and it was all built around we have too much debt We have too much spending! And they were telling us then that we could grow our way out of this fiscal mess. And here we are today, trillions and trillions of dollars later. And the trajectory seems to kind of move the same.
Brien Lundin: Yeah, it's a multiple. That's a multiple, what, four times what it was back then?
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it's insane. In fact, I was just looking the other day. I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but just the amount of debt that has been added in the Biden-Trump era is pretty staggering in and of itself. You pointed out, and what kind of precipitated the most recent rally in gold before Warsh started flapping his yap in Jackson Hole was this move for the Treasury Department to buy more bonds on the long end of the yield curve. And you made the point, and I think rightfully so, that from just a technical standpoint, from a practical standpoint, not that big a deal. We have a 30 plus trillion dollar bond market. The treasury's going to intervene with what? They're doubling from two billion to $4 billion. So from that perspective, not a big deal, but the markets took it as a big deal.
Why do you think that happened? What kind of happened there in your mind?
Brien Lundin: Yeah, the markets took it, I think rightfully so, the underlying message that Bessent didn't want to deliver was that it wasn't technically yield curve control, but it was control of yields. And there is a very technical definition of yield curve control, which online everybody will quickly remind you of. But the sense decision and obvious inclination to mess with yields at one end means that he won't have any hesitation with messing with yields along the whole curve if and when he wants to. And the market took it as rightfully so again, that he was trying to jiggle the markets, can control the markets. And we all know that never works. In fact, the next day after the initial reaction, yields popped right back up to where they were beforehand. So doubling from two trillion billion to four billion went from one drop in the bucket to two drops in the bucket.
But the intent of the cent to show the treasury's determination and strength really only ended up showing the treasury's weakness.
Mike Maharrey: It kind of smacked of desperation, didn't it? It was kind of like, ‘But we're going to pretend like it wasn't desperation. No big deal, nothing to see here.’ And yet the markets I think saw something there, right?
Brien Lundin: Yeah. I mean, gold popped $180 in reaction, so that tells you everything you need to know. And what was really interesting about that day is that all of the markets popped on the reaction, stocks, bonds, the metals, et cetera. But as the day wore on, as the trading session wore on, the rally in equities kind of petered out and they still closed in the green, but far below their highs. In contrast, gold and silver just kept powering ahead all day long. So, I think that says a lot. I think that gold and bonds really are the most sensitive of the investment markets. All the investment markets are predictive mechanisms. Golden bonds I think are more sensitive than anything else. And gold and bonds are telling us that something lies ahead. They're really sniffing it out. One of the things I note in this issue of gold newsletter that I find really intriguing is that since late June, Treasury yields and treasury bond yields, in particular the 10-year Treasury yield and gold have been positively correlated for virtually that whole time.
Brien Lundin: And the only time they have it is when Warsh has stepped out and said something and gold has dropped down for a day or two, but otherwise they have been positively correlated. Gold has been rising with treasury yields and that only happens when treasury yields are rising for the atypical reasons when they're rising because bond vigilantes are coming out and saying, "We see trouble ahead. We demand higher returns, higher yields if you want us to invest in your securities." And they're also obviously for that reason hedging with gold.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I've been saying for quite some time that the notion that the Fed can just willy-nilly raise rates, and that's almost how Warsh makes it sound, right? Oh, well we're going to raise rates if we have to.
And yet we have this massive national debt, $40 trillion plus. We have massive levels of consumer debt, well over a trillion dollars just in credit card debt alone. We have massive levels of corporate debt. We're starting to see some kind of rumblings and ricketiness in the private bond market, private financing. So there's all this debt. It just seems obvious to me that talking about raising rates in this environment is at least questionable. And yet nobody in the mainstream ever seems to question it. And I'm curious, this is more of a rhetorical question than anything, but I'm curious about your response. Why? Why isn't anybody paying attention to the debt in relation to what the Fed may or may not do?
Brien Lundin: Well, because the problem never seems to blow up. And frankly, I can understand it. I've been in this business for over four decades and I have seen some of the smartest people I know and some of the analysts that I respect most walk across our stage at the New Orleans conference and predict that the debt bond is finally going to blow up. And they've been doing that for 30 some odd years and it never happens. And part of me says, well, am I just getting to the point where I'm becoming a curmudgeon as well and looking at it and say, Oh, it's going to blow up now. Everything's going to hell. You youngsters get off my lawn and all this stuff. But then I look at the math and the numbers now are absolutely staggering. And of course, if you're the issuer of the world's global reserve currency, you have more leeway than other nations and you can get away with it for longer.
But when you're paying more on the interest on the national debt than you are in national defense and you are the guardian of the world, you're the policeman of the world, so you're already spending more than anybody else in that regard, you're spending more in interest. And those interest costs are about to exceed every other line item in the budget. It is just inescapable to me, irrefutable that this is a problem. Now when the debt rolled over 40 trillion, I did see some commentators on CNBC talk about that and talk about how the cost of servicing the debt was so large, et cetera, et cetera. But then they quickly moved on because it wasn't about AI. It wasn't what everybody wanted to see and wanted to see them commenting on. And so they simply moved on. And until it blows up, people will not pay attention.
And I think we are, I mean, really after 45 years of ever easier money, ever greater debts that ever easier money encourages, I think we're in the end game. But how long will that end game go? We don't know. There are people out there saying, "This is it. The next crisis will be the big one." The Peter Schiffs of the world saying, "It's done. We're toast the next crisis and there'll be a big reset and everything else." I don't know that. I don't think anybody can be smart enough to know that, but I think what we can do is recognize the trend and we are stuck firmly in that trend right now and you want to play that trend. You want to protect yourself, monetary metals, and I think mining stocks and other levers on those metals.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because you get that sense of complacency. We've been, like I just mentioned, back in the '90s, we were talking about the problem of the debt and nothing has happened. I always think of that quote that things happen slowly and then all at once. That always kind of rings in the back of my head, but I kind of get what you're saying. You do sometimes feel like a permabear. And then when something does happen, people are, "Oh yeah, there's Meharry again, broken clock right every once in a while. If you bearish long enough, you're going to hit every once in a while." But I think you're right. You look at the trajectory of things. And I think two things are most concerning to me. The first is the fact that nobody seems concerned about actually doing anything about the debt. It'd be one thing if we said, "Okay, 40 trillion, that's a lot. It's a problem. Let's address this." Nobody in politics is willing to address, and the nature of politics I think is such that it won't get addressed because everybody's short term. I care about getting elected, so I don't want to cause any pain now. If there's pain in 20 years, so be it. And then the other thing that's concerning, you mentioned the fact that the dollar is the world reserve standard, the world reserve currency. That is obviously fading. There's no question about that. We're seeing gold overtake dollars as the primary reserve currency for central banks. We're seeing these shifts. And I think that the slower movement maybe is more relevant to us today than trying to predict some type of major crash. Do you agree with that?
Brien Lundin: Yeah. People do move on. It's human nature. And I just get back to one of the truisms of my life is that complacency kills and eventually the unthinkable or the sometimes in the future becomes thinkable. And today, a little over 20 years ago, I used to jog just about every morning down to the Lake Pontchartrain where I lived. I lived down here around New Orleans, and I would jog along the levee there by Lake Potcha train. And one year, early in the summer, they went and dumped a bunch of dirt on top of it. Just didn't try and build up the levee, just added foot and a half of dirt on the top of it. So the next police cruiser after they did that, that road along the levee just smashed all that dirt and it went tumbling down the levee. And I thought to myself, I really should write a letter to the paper saying if they don't really address these levees properly, it's going to be absolutely catastrophic.
A few months later, Katrina hits and floods the city and I think, damn, I would've looked really smart at the time, but it was exactly that. It was complacency. Nothing had hit for 40 years, almost 40 years. We never had a big hurricane that really threatened the city. So people got complacent. And coincidentally, that's about the same kind of timeframe that we're looking at since the late '70s and the early '80s and that crisis.
When you needed a Paul Volcker to come in and really just throw a deluge of water on the fire of inflation, now they can't do that because back then, of course, Volcker was in a situation where the debt was 35% of GDP. Now it's closer to 135% of GDP, and you just don't have the toolbox. You can't raise rates anywhere near those levels, even to normalized levels because of the cost of servicing the debt once you do that, and the tremendous leverage of rate increases to the debt. So yeah, I think Warsh could and might do one quarter point hike to show face with Trump's approval, but a campaign of rate hikes, it's just impossible now.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I agree completely. And you talk about complacency. I remember back 2006, 2007, that's exactly what we saw. Everything's fine. Subprime is contained. No problem, nothing to see here. Even in 2008, people were saying that kind of stuff, and of course we all know how that panned out. I've got an investment question that gets thrown at me a lot, and I'm curious of how you would respond to people who say this, because I think this is kind of the conventional thinking. Interest rates are clearly going up. The bond market is struggling. We have yields going up on the long end of the curve. Higher yields are negative for gold because gold is a non-yielding asset. So therefore, anytime we think that inflation may increase, the Fed may increase interest rates. We're going to sell our gold and silver because interest rates are going to be higher and we want to have bonds.
What is wrong with this conventional thinking in this day and age in your opinion, if anything?
Maybe that's the right move. I don't think so.
Brien Lundin: Yeah. Well, it's wrong in any day and age. I mean, you look at some of the periods when gold rose much the strongest, some of the strongest bull market runs of gold since really the gold market began in 1971 as an investible asset in ‘74 in the US. You look at some of the strongest runs that gold went on, and they were typically during a period of rising interest rates, rising yields. In the '70s, it was because yields were rising to combat inflation, but yields couldn't keep up with inflation, and therefore gold rose with inflation until the rate increases finally killed it off. Today, you see yields and gold rising for the same reasons, because debt and deficits are starting to matter. They've gotten so large, so ominous that in the crisis is now seemingly so much nearer that bond vigilantes are gold bucks today and they're buying for the same reasons.
So, that is higher yields typically events either economic strength and/or tighter monetary policy to whatever extent the Fed can actually control or influence the longer end of the curve. Today, they can't raise rates for those reasons, but rates are rising in a free market environment because of the problem with the debt and deficits. So yeah, it is not rising or yields aren't rising for the same reason as we've seen often in the past. And what's interesting is that it's not just the US. You look at sovereign bond yields across the world and without exception, they're all going from lower left to upper right in a very steep fashion. So it is not just… and I've never been one to say it's the dollar, the dollar, the dollar. It is all fiat currencies. We're all in the same boat. All the currencies are racing to the bottom of the hill at varying rates.
Some surge into the lead, some fall back, some are gaining the lead. That's why the dollar index to me, for my purposes, is meaningless. It's the dollar gold index to me, the price of gold that really tells the story.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. All the dollar index tells you is which fiat currency is the cleanest dirty shirt in the laundry. I'll take some nice shiny clean gold over any of those dollar paper currency, not dollar paper currencies, but fiat paper currencies anytime of the day. I saw an analyst the other day that in effect, he called for or forecast a forever market in gold. Now he didn't say that. What he said was that he thought we'd be in a bull market in gold until governments get their debt situation and their spending under control. And I read that and said, "Oh, that's forever because that's not going to happen." Do you think that's a reasonable way to put it or is that crazy talk?
Brien Lundin: No, I don't think it's crazy talk. I think there'll be an underlying macro trend that will be supportive of gold, but the technical definition of a gold bull market, I don't think we'll be so fortunate to enjoy the kind of market we had for the first 18 months of this market where central banks were buying hand over fists of Western investors and the algos weren't really involved. So our only corrections were resolved in terms of time and not price. We just traded sideways and then bammo! it took off again. That was a real luxury at the time. So, I don't think we're going to enjoy that. I think now that Western investors are playing in our sandbox again and the Algos are taking control, they're going to read Federal Reserve statements, they're going to look at what Warsh says. And if he mentions he took a hike in the woods, they're going to sell everything.
Mike Maharrey: He's on a hike!
Brien Lundin: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we're going to have the wiggles on the line. We will have technical corrections, but I completely agree with the sentiment that until there's a resolution of the Fiat currency problem or human nature after a million years or so suddenly changes, then yeah, we're going to have a wind beneath our wings for gold and silver and the associated assets.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I agree with you. And of course, in any bull market, it never goes up in a straight line anyway. There's always corrections and ups and downs. And I agree also that we could see significantly more volatility as we go down the road because of exactly what you say. We're so headline driven, right? Every time somebody blows a kiss in the desert in Iran or something, the markets move on that. But looking at that long-term trend, and I say this all the time, one thing we can count on, we can't count on a lot in the world, especially when it comes to economics and finance, but one thing we can count on is that next year the dollar will be worth less than it was at the beginning of the year. That's just the reality. That's the plan, right? 2% inflation, that means devalue the currency by at least 2% every single year.
So, I think people forget that sometimes.
Brien Lundin: Yeah, you're exactly right. And 2% is still significant, and we know that it's more than that underlying. And that's why people ask me, should I buy gold? After this big run, can I afford to buy gold right now? And I ask them if I don't know what their personal situation is, I say, "Well, do you own precious metals? Do you have a significant portion of your wealth in physical metals?" And if they say no, then I say, "Well, the question at that point is, can you afford not to?" Because if you have dollars sitting in a bank, you have to expect that those dollars are going to be in three years’ worth 10, 20, maybe 30% less than they are today. Whereas gold over broad swaths of history has always protected against that kind of depreciation. Now you can cherry-pick your endpoints along the line to try and disprove that, but over long periods of history, gold and silver have always protected against that.
But there are other things. If you invested in the mining stocks, you have to recognize you're in a bull trend. But when you're in a bull market, there are a few lessons you need to remember. And the first is buy the dips. If you're in a bull market, buy the dips. And concurrently, when the market gets really frothy like it did in January, you need to skim some of that froth off of the market and remember to do that. I mean, in gold newsletter, we have so many multi-baggers in our portfolio. And this issue, we had a 20 bagger that I'm telling people, listen, I have to tell you, I think in a year or two it's going to be trading much higher, but you got to take some froth off the market. You really do.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it makes sense. It really requires kind of a calm your mind, look objectively, look at the long term, look at the underlying dynamics. And it's hard in this world where we are so headline driven. And again, just the slightest movement of some headline on X can move markets and you have to have the discipline to resist those knee-jerk reactions and instead focus on that plan and on those fundamental things. Yeah,
Brien Lundin: Absolutely.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Is there anything, we talked about the interest rate in the feds, that's obvious things, and of course the war headlines. Are there anything else right now that has particularly got your attention relating to the gold market that you're kind of watching that maybe folks that are paying more attention to Fox Business or CNBC maybe are missing?
Brien Lundin: Yeah. What I've been telling people is that that market in January and then even it recovered and then later in February, that market was so frothy that it was going to trip over itself at some point. We were going to have a correction driven by speculation by the Algos and other Western traders. But that said, that fairly long correction, the longest and the first world serious one that we've had in this bull market, gold was kept in check for two reasons. One being the supposedly hawkish stance of the Fed under Warsh, and two, the war with Iran. And both of those in my mind are temporary. They're going to go away. So that's why I was very bullish over the longer term, even in the midst of that correction. The other thing that over the last month or so that I'm thinking is something I really don't know what it is, but that gold and again bonds seem to be sniffing out something ahead.
Something that's going to precipitate the next big crisis that's going to bring the central banks led by the Fed in another massive rescue effort with huge, huge doses of liquidity and easing. And I don't know what that is. Typically, these things come out of left field. The bubbles are easy to see, in this case, the US stock market assuredly, but the pins that pop those bubbles tend to come out of left field and something we really weren't considering and not very many people were considering. But again, timing, the fact that it seems like something's coming up, that gold and bonds are seeing that the situation is getting pretty extreme. I think that's a signal we really need to listen to.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Yeah. I think you make a really good point. I always think back to 2018, 2019, which is a little slice of financial history that I don't think a lot of people really remember or made much of a big deal out of it because it was overwhelmed by COVID just a few months later. But if you'll recall, and folks listening might recall, in October of 2018, there was a big stock market crash. The Fed that December announced that they were done with their tightening and they actually went back to quantitative easing and cut rates I think three times in 2019 before COVID. So it was kind of the same thing. It was like the markets are sniffing something out here. Now, I don't think it was. Obviously they didn't know a pandemic was coming ostensibly, but the markets did know that there was shakiness, and I think that was the result of all the monetary malfeasance from 2008 that was kind of coming to a head. And in a way, I think COVID was a little bit of a reprieve for the central bankers because they were able to double down, triple down on quantitative easing, on liquidity and kind of rescue the economy proactively from the 2008 malfeasance.
Brien Lundin: Yeah, and blame it on some…
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, go ahead.
Brien Lundin: And shift the blame on something out of their control when the situation was in fact largely resulting from the bubbles that they themselves blew up through their rescue efforts. Yeah, in the very last day or so of August and going into September of 2019, the Fed began another episode of quantitative easing and they vehement They denied it was quantitative easing because they weren't buying all across the curve. So, they left one or two points of the curve untouched. But it was, they did about $500 billion worth of QE in September of that year. And they weren't predicting COVID, but I think you make a good point. They saw shakiness in the market in that situation, the repo market. They needed to add some liquidity to the markets because things had gotten a bit extreme. And in their eyes, as you imply, thank God for COVID because we can blame somebody else on that.
Mike Maharrey: And here's a dirty little secret that I've been harping on for a while now. The Fed is running quantitative easing now. Shhhh. Don't tell anybody. Of course they won't call it that, but go look at the balance sheet folks, you will see that the balance sheet is increasing. They are buying bonds and they're buying them with money created out of thin air. You can call it whatever you want. I think they like to term it is we're just keeping the plumbing of the financial system clean. So Drano, but don't drink the Drano because it'll kill you.
Brien Lundin: Stanley Druckenmiller made the point very well in that now infamous Wall Street Journal op-ed when he criticized Bessant for his actions and they are trying to control the market. They're not providing liquidity. There was ample liquidity. And in fact, that was costing the treasury more because they were buying back bonds at lower interest rates than they were immediately reissuing to the market at higher rates. So, it really did not make any sense whatsoever and was again sending a signal of desperation to the markets and a signal that they were inclined and willing to fiddle around along the curve on yields.
Mike Maharrey: So we've got all of this craziness going on. I would say this would be a really good time to educate yourself and a great place to do that would be the New Orleans Investment Conference, which is coming up in less than two months. Tell us about that, Brien.
Brien Lundin: Well, coincidentally, Mike, I agree with you completely on that.
Mike Maharrey: That was a pretty smooth transition too, you have to admit.
Brien Lundin: That was a big fat ball right over the plate and I appreciate that. I hope I can now hit it out of the park, but I won't go through our speaker list because I'm going to forget somebody and I don't have it in front of me, but our business model is provide value that far exceeds anything else you're going to get in the market. If you look at our speaker list, I tell people you might see three or four of our speakers at some other conference, but you're not going to find 40. And that's exactly what you get here at this event. So we provide tremendous value by far the best you'll find anywhere out in any other conference. It's really a lot of fun to come to New Orleans for this event. It's an intellectual ambiance that is unmatched, that has to be experienced to be understood.
And I really urge people to go to our website and check out our speaker list because it's the speakers, it's the attendees that share their ideas that are really, really smart people. If they weren't really smart, they wouldn't be coming to this event. And it's the timing. If in this kind of a market, in this kind of a metals and mining bull market that I believe is going to eventually be the best we've ever experienced, the most rewarding for those positioned in it, you really can't afford not to be in New Orleans. I mean, we have five decades of history that show that if you go to New Orleans in a market like this, well, you're going to be really, really happy over the next year because all of the biggest winners in junior mining, not all, but the vast majority of the biggest winners are going to be in our exhibit hall at this conference.
Brien Lundin: And that's a tremendous opportunity as well. Our exhibit hall sold out, our hotel will be sold out. It's a matter of time and it's going to be much sooner this year than ever before. And registrations are flowing in at a faster pace than we've seen in decades. So I would advise people to not only check it out, but also act very quickly to reserve your place because it's coming up soon. It's hurtling toward me as I speak. And it will be in a situation this year where if you don't get in soon, you may not be able to attend at all or at least not attend conveniently. So please check out our website and register. And you also save hundreds of dollars right now from the cost of as we get closer to the event.
Mike Maharrey: What's that website?
Brien Lundin: NewOrleansconference.com. Very easy.
Mike Maharrey: And it's Halloween weekend this year, which New Orleans Halloween weekend, that's kind of fun in and of itself.
Brien Lundin: Yeah, it is a bucket list experience. And I do want to comfort people that if everything is recorded, every presentation, every panel, every workshop is video recorded, you'll have full access to everything. And we're adjusting our schedule this year. We usually end with a big flourish with some really bigger name speakers, but we're moving them earlier in the schedule this year. And so if you have to leave early to go trick or treating with your kids or grandkids, you won't miss as much and you can get it all on video. And we're also going to close with a metals and mining masquerade ball. So we encourage costuming. And New Orleans on Halloween is, again, something that you really want to experience at least once in your life.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that'd be a blast. Before I go, let folks know where they can find the newsletter and follow you and avail themselves to the information that you provide on a regular basis.
Brien Lundin: Goldnewsletter.com and neworleansconference.com. And you can follow me on X at Brien, B-R-I-E-N_Lundin, L-U-N-D-I-N.
Mike Maharrey: That is outstanding and I appreciate you. I know that the conference is hurtling as you said, so I appreciate you taking a little time out of your day. I'm glad we got to have you on before the conference so folks can be reminded if they haven't already signed up. Well, we really encourage you to consider going. It's a great experience and you'll have the opportunity to rub shoulders with, as you said, a lot of really smart people and hopefully you'll go home smarter too. So thanks for being on the show today and hanging out with me, and we'll definitely have you back on again, and we appreciate all that you do.
Brien Lundin: Always a pleasure, Mike. Anytime.
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Wonderful insights from Brien Lundin and we thoroughly enjoyed having him back on, and we hope folks will plan to attend the New Orleans Investment Conference, coming up at the end of next month. For information there again just go to <a href="https://neworleansconference.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noopner">NewOrleansConference.com</a>.
Well, that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. And don’t miss our second weekly podcast, the Money Metals Midweek Memo available each Wednesday. To check out any of our audio programs just visit <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/podcasts">MoneyMetals.com/podcasts</a> or find them on places like Spotify, Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts or 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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