The Gold Repatriation Trend Congress Should Notice -

Welcome to this week’s Market Wrap Podcast, I’m Mike Gleason.
Coming up don’t miss a tremendous interview with highly respected economist Daniel Lacalle, fund manager, professor of Global Economy at the IE Business School in Madrid, Spain, and author of Escape from the Central Bank Trap, among other books.
Daniel and Mike Maharrey discuss the recent European Central Bank rate hike and what that may mean the Fed and thus the markets. Daniel also boldly asserts that those who sell their gold and silver when interest rates are rising simply have it backwards and just don’t understand how the monetary system works. And he explains how when governments raise interest rates to combat higher inflation it’s a sign that you need to own more precious metals, not less.
So, stick around for an enlightening conversation with Daniel Lacalle about that and a whole lot more, coming this week’s market update. And as a reminder please download, like, rate and subscribe to this podcast wherever you consume this content.
Gold and silver have taken a pretty good beating over the past couple of days, with rising interest-rate expectations and still more turmoil in the Persian Gulf weighing on the metals.
Gold fell roughly 2% Thursday, while silver plunged more than 5%.
And the strange part is that the selloff comes as inflation appears to be heating up again.
Wholesale prices jumped 0.4% in August, and this morning’s consumer inflation report also came in somewhat hot beneath the surface. Energy prices are climbing, oil is back above $100 a barrel, and inflation remains stubbornly above the Fed’s target.
So naturally, traders sold gold and silver.
Why?
Well, because Wall Street is focused almost entirely on what the Federal Reserve might do next week.
The latest inflation numbers dramatically increased expectations for another Fed rate hike. That pushed the dollar higher and gave traders another excuse to dump precious metals in the short run.
But investors shouldn’t confuse the market’s knee-jerk reaction with the bigger picture.
Gold isn’t falling because the inflation problem has gone away. Quite the opposite.
Inflation remains elevated. Energy costs are surging amid Middle East turmoil.
Washington continues piling up debt. And the Fed is once again confronting the same ugly problem it has created for itself.
Raise rates to fight inflation, and the federal government’s enormous debt becomes even more expensive to carry. Back off, and inflation may get another lease on life.
That’s some choice.
For the moment, traders are concentrating on the first part of that equation. Higher rates can strengthen the dollar and temporarily make interest-bearing investments look more attractive relative to gold.
Silver, as usual, is taking the move even harder.
That’s just part of silver’s personality. It tends to exaggerate moves in both directions — soaring faster when metals are running up and getting smacked harder when traders head for the exits.
The $62.50 to $63 area now looks important for silver, while gold has fallen back and tested the low-$4,300s. Both metals are regaining some strength here today though, more on that in a moment.
But after the extraordinary run both metals have enjoyed late last year and early this year, a sharp correction shouldn’t exactly shock anyone.
The fundamental problems that helped drive this bull market haven’t disappeared.
America still has enormous deficits and debt. Inflation remains a problem. Geopolitical risks are intensifying. Central banks around the world continue questioning their dependence on the dollar and the Western financial system.
And that brings us to another fascinating gold story this week.
Spain is now debating whether it should bring home some gold reserves currently stored in the United States.
The Bank of Spain owns roughly 289 metric tons of gold. Most of it apparently is already held inside Spain, and exactly how much remains in New York isn’t publicly known.
But the important point isn’t the precise number of bars Spain might move.
It’s that Spain is asking the question at all.
And Spain isn’t alone.
As we reported on last week in this space, the Netherlands recently moved 86 tonnes of gold out of North America and into London, explicitly citing geopolitical uncertainty and the need to be better prepared for a crisis.
France has also completed a repatriation project involving gold that had been stored in New York.
One country moving gold might be a curiosity.
Several countries reconsidering where their gold is stored starts to look like a trend.
And frankly, their reasoning is pretty easy to understand.
If gold is supposed to be the ultimate reserve asset — the thing you rely on when currencies, governments, banking systems, or international relationships get into trouble — then where exactly do you want your gold sitting when trouble arrives?
Central banks are rediscovering an old lesson: possession matters.
And so does geography.
Which brings us directly to a problem here in the United States.
For years, America has allowed the physical infrastructure supporting our regulated gold and silver futures markets to become overwhelmingly concentrated in and around New York.
Virtually the entire COMEX delivery system for gold and silver depends on vaulting infrastructure clustered in one small part of the country.
Why?
There’s no sound risk-management reason for it.
Concentrating critical financial infrastructure in one geographic area creates a single point of failure. That should be obvious whether we’re talking about computer servers, military installations, banking operations — or vaults containing billions of dollars in precious metals.
That’s precisely why Congress should pass the bipartisan SILVER Act.
The legislation would promote a geographically diverse network of qualified precious-metals depositories, including at least two approved facilities in each of America’s four major time zones.
It doesn’t dictate which private companies win approval.
It doesn’t tell investors where they have to store anything.
It simply recognizes something that ought to be common sense: America’s precious-metals market shouldn’t depend almost entirely on New York.
And this isn’t merely an industry talking point.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has publicly backed the legislation and acknowledged the risk created by geographic concentration.
So, consider the irony here.
European central banks are looking at the world becoming more unstable and saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t keep so much of our gold so far away.”
Meanwhile, the United States continues concentrating much of the physical infrastructure behind its own gold and silver markets in one geographic bottleneck. That makes very little sense.
A hurricane. A terrorist attack. A transportation shutdown. A communications failure. A financial crisis. Or some entirely unforeseen event.
You don’t have to predict which crisis comes next to understand why redundancy matters.
Banks understand that. Data centers understand that. The military certainly understands that. And European central banks increasingly seem to understand it too.
Congress should get the message.
The SILVER Act is straightforward, bipartisan market-structure reform. It would reduce geographic concentration risk, improve resiliency, and help ensure that America’s precious-metals markets remain functional when they are needed most.
Central banks are increasingly asking where their gold should be stored before the next crisis arrives.
Washington ought to be asking the same question about the infrastructure underpinning America’s gold and silver markets.
Congress has had ample warning.
It should stop waiting and pass the SILVER Act.
Well, finally, taking a look at the weekly price action specifics here before we get to this week’s exclusive interview. Gold is paring some of its losses from earlier in the week here with today’s bump. The yellow metal checks in now at $4,379 – down about $50 or 1.1% since last Friday’s close.
Similar story in silver, it’s moving up today to stop some of the bleeding. With today’s near $1 advance the white metal is now down just $1 for the week or 1.5% and currently trades at $65.23 an ounce.
A quick look at the PGMs shows platinum down 1.0% to trade at $1,806, while palladium is taking it on the chin – declining 4.4% this week with just a few hours left to go. The industrial metal comes in at $1,333 as of this Friday late morning recording.
Well now, without further delay, and for much more on the state of the markets, monetary policy, geopolitics and the metals, 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 economist Daniel Lecalle. Daniel is a professor at IE Business School in Madrid. He is also a fund manager and provides economic analysis for a number of organizations. He's the author of several books and a great economist and somebody I follow pretty closely. How are you doing today, Daniel? Daniel Lacalle: Doing very well. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's always a pleasure. Mike Maharrey: Oh, it's absolutely a pleasure. And we timed this really well given that the European Central Bank had a meeting and made a rate hike decision and has decided to bump up interest rates. And I saw what you posted on X, and you called it a hike “for no good reason.” Can you explain what your thinking is on this move? Daniel Lacalle: Well, let's start by analyzing monetary aggregates. When you see monetary aggregates in the Euro area, you see that loans to the private sector, credit card demand, everything that has to do with money supply growth, et cetera, are all very, very subdued. In fact, they don't show an overheated economy in any shape or form. Furthermore, most of the money supply growth that we are seeing, which is still below nominal GDP growth, is government spending. So the ECB hiking rates has no discernible impact on inflation. Let's start from that perspective. The economy is not overheated. Number two, most of the inflation that we saw in the August print was a hike, an increase of 14% in the energy component. And then the other element is that government spending and government deficits are just out of control all over the Euro area. So the private sector is not going through the roof in terms of credit, in terms of taking debt. It's actually the opposite. And the economy is not growing. It's stagnant as you know very well. So the ECB hiking rate has no impact on oil prices or on natural gas prices. Obviously, it will not deliver more barrels of oil or more molecules of natural gas. And that rate hike is going to fall entirely on the shoulders of the private sector, particularly families and small and medium enterprises. Think about this. In the Euro area, small and medium enterprises have a cost of financing that moves between seven and 12%. This is brutal. A hike of 25 basis points is not irrelevant as some of the defenders of the ECB are telling me today. They're saying, why do you care about 25 basis points? It's simply a nudge. No, it is not. For small and medium enterprises, this means going from highly expensive credit to no credit at all. A lot of banks are going to hold cash and try to maintain as much cash at the ECB, obviously higher rates, than to take the risk of lending. So all these elements show that what they're going to do is engineer a private sector recession in a sector that is already burdened by inflation. And more importantly, the real cause of inflation that you and I know very well, which is massive government spending, huge printing, et cetera, all of that continues. All of the liquidity facilities that allow governments in the Euro area to borrow at completely insanely low rates compared with their solvency remain. Therefore, it's yet again a measure that is going to hurt families and businesses and that will have no impact on what really causes inflation and zero impact on energy prices. Mike Maharrey: Very well put. So, coming across the pond to the US, the Federal Reserve is going to meet in September, and I think most people are kind of thinking that the Fed is going to hike rates. Do you think this move by the ECB kind of adds to that hiking expectation? And would you make the same type of analysis when it comes to US interest rates? Daniel Lacalle: I would make the same analysis in terms of the fact that a rate hike in the United States will have zero impact on energy prices and will have no impact whatsoever on government spending and deficit. Therefore, it will only hurt small businesses and families. But in the United States, there's an additional element that needs to be considered, which is full employment. The Fed has a double mandate. It's stable prices and full employment. The Fed is not going to bring down the price of oil or the price of natural gas, and obviously hiking rates would be completely useless as a tool in that front. But in terms of employment, it is going to be absolutely brutal because 90% of the job creation in the United States as in the Euro area or any developed economy comes from small and medium enterprises. We have already seen that job creation is significantly less robust than other macro indicators, and that comes mostly from the very aggressive levels of financing costs that small and medium enterprises suffer in the United States. In the United States, the cost of financing of small and medium enterprises is not as monstrous as the one I mentioned in the Euro area, but it's also very high, 6.5% to 8.5%. And that would again mean that they would have no access to credit. So in terms of job creation, it would be hugely negative and they know it. By the way, there is a paper published by the New York Fed that shows that being above the neutral rate in the average Fed funds tends to destroy about a million jobs every year. So once we look at all those things, the Fed, considering that it has a double mandate, has even less reasons than the ECB to hike rates. And I think that those elements need to be considered. It would be hugely detrimental for the US economy. Mike Maharrey: Yeah. You've hit on something, and this is one of my big bugaboos. And I talk about this constantly because it frustrates me so much. And that's the conflation of price inflation with monetary inflation. We just use the same word for all of that. And Ludwig von Mises warned us about this many, many years ago that this was going to be a problem. And so I'm wondering if you maybe can explain to the audience better than I can, because I really seem to struggle with this, how monetary inflation and price shocks like oil shocks aren't the same thing and can't be approached in the same manner, which is what the policymakers seem to want to do. Daniel Lacalle: Exactly. Policymakers and Keynesian economists always try to bring you to the argument of individual prices. Oil prices are up, therefore inflation is up. No, that's not true. If that was the case in 2022, 2023 and 2024, we would've had deflation. So, we need to differentiate between individual prices and aggregate prices. For the same amount of money, if oil prices go up due to an energy shock, whatever it is, et cetera, the amount of money in the system to purchase the remaining goods and services is lower. Therefore, high oil prices don't mean higher inflation because for the same amount of money, you would have less units of currency to purchase other goods and services. Therefore, the price of other goods and services would remain stable or come down. A lot of people say a war is inflationary. Oil prices are inflationary. No, they're not. They are disinflationary. Daniel Lacalle: The only thing that makes oil prices go up, remain high and continue to go up, abate at a lower rate, that is monetary inflation. That is the destruction of the purchasing power of a currency. Excuse me. So what citizens need to understand is that what they feel, which is very, very emotional and very true, is monetary inflation, which is, okay, they're telling me that CPI is 3.5%, but housing prices are through the roof. I cannot afford the college of my kids. I cannot purchase the same goods and services that I used to purchase on a monthly basis even with a higher salary and even with some savings. That is monetary inflation. CPI, the one that and PCE, the baskets that the Fed uses to conduct monetary policy and that every central bank in the world uses to conduct monetary policies are baskets of goods and services that are taking a number of assumptions. But for example, if I am a middle low class person, I am going to have a higher percentage of my purchases coming from food and energy. Therefore, CPI doesn't mean anything to me because to me, the fact that gas prices and food prices are higher is much more relevant. If I am richer, I may use more leisure technology, things like that. Those are disinflationary, and therefore I may be able to even forget about the fact that gas prices and that food prices are going up. Monetary inflation is so difficult to understand by people because they think that the currency that they're using remains stable in value and stable in purchasing power over time. And that prices, instead of reflecting the loss of purchasing power of the currency, what they are reflecting is the decisions of entrepreneurs, of businesses. So that's why people blame high prices on the one that puts the sign at the door. They see the sign at the door, they say bread, one and a half dollars, a small loaf of bread. They say, "What the hell? These people are crazy." But they blame the guy that's putting the sign, not the one that has debased the currency, and that's the government. And that's why it's so easy for socialists to present themselves as the solution to affordability printing money, because when they create much higher inflation than what we are seeing today, which they would, what they do is to blame the ones that give the signs, that put the signs on the door. Mike Maharrey: Yeah. And that's exactly what we're seeing in the political rhetoric here in the United States now. We're seeing this kind of resurgence of "democratic socialism." And it's that this has failed us, so therefore these people can fix it because. And again, as you point out, they're blaming the wrong thing. These people are actually going to make it worse. Daniel Lacalle: Yeah, that's the thing is that people don't seem to understand that the problems created by big government and huge money printing are not going to be solved by bigger government and much higher money printing, rather the opposite. Mike Maharrey: Yeah, exactly. So I'm curious about this. Looking at the debt, and we've talked a little bit about the amount of debt that we see in the system. Recently, the US has been in the news, the Treasury Department, the bond buybacks and stuff has kind of created a lot of speculation and talk about debt. You actually said that we're worried about the wrong country when we're focused on all this in the US. Who should we be worried about? Where's the big problem in your view? Daniel Lacalle: Every time that you read a lot of headlines about the US debt, they don't mean that the things that they're talking about are wrong, but they're always trying to disguise a much bigger problem elsewhere in countries that are less, let's say, favored by the media in terms of creating headlines. It is a much larger problem in France, in the Euro area, in Japan or the UK. Not because the US debt problem is not a problem, but because in those countries on top of the high debt, high deficit and high borrowing costs, what you see is that the unfinanced committed liabilities are rising much faster. Every time that people talk about debt, they talk about issued debt. There's 40 trillion issued debt. I don't care about 40. And I think it was the Secretary of State of the Treasury, Mr. Bessent, that said, "I don't know why people talk about 30 trillion or 40 trillion. That's just a number." Well, I don't care about the 40 trillion because it's already in the asset base of investors. I care about the not finance, the unfinanced committed liabilities. This, if you think of an iceberg, I call it the part of the iceberg that you don't see that's below the water. In the case of France, that is about 500%, 450% of GDP. Case of Germany, it's about 350% of GDP. This is on top of governments that refuse to reduce their public spending and that refuse to reduce their deficit spending. It's very, very clear. So the United States has one benefit. The race of global debt is not a race to see who wins, but who loses first. Why? Because if you think about monetary and fiscal policy, there are two sides of the same coin. Debt and currency are the same thing. The US is the world reserve currency. When other countries copy the US but don't have the world reserve currency, they're doing two things. One is accelerating and strengthening the role of the US dollar as the fiat reserve currency and weakening their position as a contender. And I think that this is super important because people don't understand. People think, "Oh, the deficit in the United States is unsustainable." It is, we agree on that. But when you talk about global debt, the problem is not the United States. The United States debt is still the asset that moves the entire financial system. That is not the case with the Euro area debt, with Japanese debt, or with UK debt. And that's why every time that we have a huge scare in markets, it's always led by Japan or the UK followed by France, and then all of the media talks about the United States, which I come back to the point. I'm not denying that the United States has a debt problem, but it's not the same debt problem and unfinanced committed liability problem of the comparable nations. So, when you look at the fiat world, what that is doing is that instead of de-dollarization, what we are seeing is re-dollarization, is that the world is, yes, reducing the amount of sovereign debt from developed economies in their asset basis. Absolutely they are. And that's why bond yields of all sovereign debt, all OECD big, big economies is rising in tandem. But the United States is not the one that's rising fastest. Rising yields have been much higher with the UK, with the French economy and with Japan. And it's very important coming back, if you allow me to extend myself, with this idea of democratic socialism. It's an oxymoron. Democratic socialism doesn't exist. It's a way of tricking you to accept a system of serfdom. But to think about this, if all those people that are saying that the United States debt is a disaster, at the same time are saying that the United States should have the same policies, the same government spending and the same taxation as France, the UK, Germany, or Japan, and they're in much worse position, then obviously the solution is not more government, more taxes and more levels of intervention. Because if you think about it, if government intervention, massive regulation, immigration, high taxes, and big spending were the solutions to the global economy, France today would be the leader in terms of economic growth, in terms of productivity, in terms of job creation, and would have very solid finances. And it is absolutely the opposite. Mike Maharrey: It's interesting that you mention UK. I was just looking at the ETF data from last month, and the UK had the second largest gold inflows in their gold-backed ETF funds ever in the last month. So obviously, the folks in UK know that something's up. I'm curious if you think that the situation with the debt and the fiscal malfeasance in the Eurozone and in Japan as well, is that something that could spread like a contagion throughout the financial system and create a global crisis or are we waiting for the US to lead the way on that? How do you see that playing out? Daniel Lacalle: I don't think it would create a financial crisis because ultimately what happens is that the entire system is built on the fact that sovereign debt is sort of the cushion of the system. The problem is that when sovereign debt stops being the reserve asset of first decision for central banks and stops being the reserve quality asset that gives you a real return in periods of crisis or low economic growth, then what happens is what you get is not a financial crisis. What you get is stagnation. And that's why people like Stiglitz, people like Piketty say, "Ah, high debt is not a problem. High debt is not a problem as long as you borrow at a cheap rate that is something that you can continue to add forever." No, no, it is a problem because once governments have exceeded the economic limit, the fiscal limit and the inflationary limit, what happens is that the economy, the entire economy moves upside down. The central bank and the banking system is built basically just to perpetuate the sovereign debt bubble and lending to the real economy, the productive economy gets a second-best option or third best option in fact. And that obviously leads to stagnation, low productivity growth, low real wages therefore, and persistent inflation. So that is basically when you have a real estate bubble, the bubble breaks and you get a slump in prices, then everything reprices, corrects itself and then goes back to growth. However, when you have a sovereign debt bubble, everything just boom, just stagnates. And that's the problem. The problem is that, and the trick as well, obviously, because by then it is very, very difficult for any government to go out and say, "Oh, what we need to do is to implement a big government spending plan." Why? Because you implement a big government spending plan that does not even start to scratch interest on the debt of every year, and then they blame you for the cuts. And at the same time, debt continues to rise because interest expenses are rising. Mike Maharrey: Yeah. It's a kind of a nasty self-perpetuating cycle – as my friend Scott Horton likes to say a self-licking ice cream cone. Daniel Lacalle: Yeah, absolutely right. That's a very good analogy. Mike Maharrey: So, I kind of wanted you to touch on this. You just mentioned it, but I'd like for you to kind of emphasize it. There's a crowding out effect of all of this government spending on the private economy, right? That's one of the things that I don't think people pay a lot of attention to. We look at the cost of the debt and those kind of things, but in a very real way, when you have all of these governments spending all this money, it's crowding out private sector investment, right? Daniel Lacalle: Of course it is. And it's very easy to see. When people have a credit card and the interest rate on the credit card goes to 23, 24%, that in itself is the fact that you are subsidizing the cost of borrowing that the government would've had if it was issuing debt according to its solvency and real ability to pay ratios. When you think that governments don't crowd out investment, think about the following. Go to a bank and ask for credit, how difficult it is to get credit in a bank these days and how easy it is, not easy, how absolutely no problem it is for governments to reissue and refinance debt even in periods in which there is, for example, a government shutdown. When you had a government shutdown, US demand for US treasuries rose. So, people need to understand that every time that the government is borrowing, the amount of liquidity in the system is being hoarded by a part of the economy that is not producing anything, that is just administering. So the part that is producing is receiving less. The people that say that there is no crowding out say, "Oh no, no, no, no. There's ample liquidity for everybody else." But if they don't want to take credit, no, no, no, no, no, no, my friend. If the government is borrowing at 5% for 10 years and you have to borrow at 20%, there's a huge difference because you and I are generating productive investments while the government is simply regurgitating current spending. No? Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And you talk about the government administering, it doesn't seem to administer very well either. Daniel Lacalle: It doesn't administer actually. Yeah, you're right. Mike Maharrey: Personally, I would like a little less administering in my life. So, the majority of the audience here are interested in gold and silver. They're typically gold and silver investors. And all of this talk about rising interest rates, the Fed hiking rates, the ECB hiking rates, all of this tends to be negative for precious metals in the markets. At least you watch the tickers and if you see expectations of a rate hike, then you'll see a gold and silver bus selling off. And of course it's because gold and silver are non-yielding assets. And so we're entering into, it appears, a bond market or a bear market in bonds, and a number of analysts think this could be a long-term bond market. How would you talk to a gold and silver investor that might be thinking, "Well, if interest rates are going to go up, maybe I should sell my gold." Is this the time to sell gold or do we still need that hedge? Daniel Lacalle: No. If you think about it, you need to understand that gold and silver are not going to go up in unison and in a straight line, that there will be some periods of volatility. But if you sell silver and gold because there is a rate hike, then it's because you don't understand money. Because a rate hike is the evidence that the solvency of governments is being less and less credible. It's also the evidence of persistent inflation. Persistent inflation means that the government is spending way too more, way more than what the private sector demands, and that it's generating more units of currency. So when you think about gold and silver, you're absolutely right. There are non-yielding assets, but to think that it is better to buy the bond of an insolvent nation that gives you 5% relative to something that has proven to be a reserve of value unit of measure and generalized method of payment, i.e. Real money as gold is. In reality, what you should see is that if rate hikes are coming, it's basically because the government is not going to give you real economic returns on it on their debt. So you may get a 5%, but guess what happens with the currency and guess what happens with the underlying asset, i.e. You don't get real economic returns. That's why the sovereign debt market has been in a recession since 2022. It has not recovered from the 2021 highs. So, selling silver and gold, because there's a rate hike, means that you don't understand money, means that you don't understand what is happening in terms of the monetary debasement. And what you need to think is the following. If there's a correction in gold and silver, it is coming from a paper market that exceeds at least by 30 times the physical market. And I'm being conservative if I'm not wrong. The paper market is basically just selling and buying ETFs, which are just financial products that are linked to the price of gold and the price of silver not having any underlying gold or silver. So once you understand that, it is logical that there are some elements of volatility, but you need to use those elements of volatility not to sell, but to buy. Every time you see those kinds of V-shaped moves in gold and silver, there's certainly opportunities to add to a position not to sell. Mike Maharrey: I couldn't have said that better myself. And I emphasize all the time too, you look at just inflation, and when I say inflation, I mean monetary inflation. 2% is the plan, right? They plan to debase our money. We know that. And of course the debasement is always worse than the plan. So if for no other reason, if I'm going to try to preserve my wealth over a long period of time, I need, as you say, real money. So very well said. So before I let you go, I do want you to have an opportunity to let folks know where they can follow you. I know you're active on X. You've got your own blog and website. You've got fantastic articles and you're one of my favorite posters on X. You always have meaty posts, so let folks know where they can find you. Daniel Lacalle: Okay. I think it's very easy to find me. If you Google Daniel Lacalle, you can find me very, very easily. My only recommendation to every one of you is that when you find me, there's always a Spanish and an English account. So look a little bit and make sure that you subscribe to my X English account, which is Daniel Lacaye official@dlacaye_ia. And you also subscribe to my YouTube channel in English, and you can also subscribe or follow my website, dlacaye.com/en. But basically just key in my name and always remember that if the first thing that you see is a Spanish language account, you will have also a separate English one. Mike Maharrey: Absolutely. And do you have any projects you're working on right now? Are you writing any books? What have you got on your plate right now? Daniel Lacalle: I'm working on new book, which is about the global energy battle that we are seeing right now. Everything that has to do, not just technology, but what is happening with renewables, why fossil fuels are coming back with a vengeance, everything that is happening between China and the United States. So it's a little bit about the big battle in energy. I will let you know when it's out. Mike Maharrey: Absolutely. When that comes out, we'll have to definitely have you on to talk about it. That sounds like a fascinating subject and glad your mind is on it. So we'll look forward to that. Thank you so much for coming on. I know it's getting late in the evening over there where you are in Europe, so thank you so much for working your schedule to hang out with me. I really appreciate it, and we'll definitely have you back on as things continue to unwind or evolve in the days and weeks ahead. Daniel Lacalle: Always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Mike Maharrey: Thank you.
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Really good stuff there and I especially like the way Daniel put it in terms of why rising interest rates should drive folks to buy more metals, not less – great points there from Mr. Lacalle.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview as I did, and 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" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MoneyMetals.com/podcasts</a> or find them on places like Spotify, Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts, and other popular podcast platforms. 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/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Money Metals Exchange</a>, thanks for listening and have a wonderful weekend everybody.

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