Copyright ZeroHedge
What happens when the world stops trusting the U.S. dollar? In this episode of the Gold Exchange Podcast, host Ben Nadelstein sits down with Peter Spina, CEO of GoldSeek and SilverSeek, to discuss the turning point for global money. They explore how the weaponization of the dollar, decades of debt expansion, and a massive East-West divide are setting the stage for gold’s next bull run — and potentially silver’s biggest squeeze in decades. From frozen reserves to failing currencies, Peter reveals why the market’s quiet signals are screaming louder than ever: the trust in fiat is fading. If you want to understand what’s really driving gold and silver in 2025 — and why the next phase could catch the West off-guard — this is your wake-up call. Follow Monetary Metals on X: @Monetary_Metals Follow Peter Spina on X: @Goldseek Additional Resources GoldSeek SilverSeek Transcript Monetary Metals: Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. I’m joined by my good friend, Peter Spina. Peter is the CEO of Goldseek and Silverseek and joins us today to talk all things gold, silver, and more. Peter, welcome to the show. Peter Spina: Thanks for having me on, Ben. Monetary Metals: Peter, I want to start. We’ve seen a massive run up in gold prices. Obviously, there’s going to be some level of volatility. There’s going to be some corrections. But do you think that the argument for gold has changed at all? Are we in a bull run in gold, or is something different going on? Peter Spina: Well, that’s something I like to point out a lot is, is it the gold price? Is gold going up in value? Or is the fiat currency, the US dollar, is being quoted and going down in value? I think there’s multiple components to it. Obviously, the gold price rising, it means that the dollar is losing value. It’s being challenged by the superior money, which is gold. I don’t believe the dollar is money. It’s a currency. It’s a fiat currency that’s are backed by trust and faith in the system. Also, the gold price is reflecting the trust and faith in the system. The gold price is indicating that it’s losing trust and faith in the system. Even more so, it’s There’s other trends going on. We think we’ll talk about it. But yeah, people are looking to get out of the dollar, and there’s not many good alternatives out there to choose from. Gold being the money, the historical money, the go-to safe haven asset and everything that’s reflecting it. But it’s a reflection of confidence, trust, the value of the currency. So many different inputs are coming into it from all around the world and into this market to determine this price. Monetary Metals: I want to talk about first one of these inputs, which is a weaker dollar. A lot of people said, Oh, Trump is going to weaken the dollar. This is going to change American manufacturing competitiveness. But in general, what do you think of this stance of, We need a weaker dollar in this country, and what does that mean for gold prices? Peter Spina: Well, a weaker dollar would encourage more manufacturing if it felt significantly amount to offset what the competitive cost. You look around, say, at China and these tariffs that they’re talking about, You would need a couple of hundred % tariffs, at least to start to even it out. This is not something that is that easy to do, to return all this manufacturing basis. It’s investment, capital investments, but also just being competitive in the global marketplace. So labor costs, all sorts of costs in the US are much significantly more higher than other parts of the world. To encourage this and to do this is going to take a lot of different things. I just don’t think that all the ingredients are there for this right now. At the same time, there’s other questions to be had. Say, what are you going to do if you don’t have a labor force that’s willing to work? There’s a big problem on that side as well. Boy, it’s not It’s an easy thing to do. But what made the dollar, the imperial dollar, so powerful after World War II and so on, has been this globalization trend. The more the world connects, the more the world trades, they’ve been using the US dollar, which has been the, I call it the king currency, the supreme currency at the moment, because that’s what everyone uses to trade goods and services and so on around the world. But obviously, things haven’t changed. Things have been changing for many years. This is not something the last year or two. But definitely in 2022, when the… I really consider it to be World War III, the Colder War is what some Gorbachev is talking about, calling it. The world is starting to go into a new trend. After 2022, I wouldn’t really call it a proxy war with Ukraine. It’s actually the West fighting Russia in Ukraine. This is a major superpower. The West, regardless of your views, What happened was they got their assets frozen. Their dollars were frozen. $300 billion of the central bank dollars were frozen. It’s all electronic, except for, if I recall correctly, I think they had $10, $15 billion worth of cash. They had that In the country, they can’t confiscate that. But if you’re part of the Swift system, they cut you off of that, so you can’t send money around, and then it’s all electronic, so on. That was a clear signal that all of a sudden the dollar was weaponized. If you don’t do what the US wants you to do, then they’ll use this as a weapon. That really started us to set things off. Of course, the politics came into play with the elections, with Trump coming back into power, the issue of trade and the trade wars and this trend of de-globalization. That’s just been adding to the pressures on the US dollar. Of course, there’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment with the tariffs and what’s going on with so many different things. But the underlying driving force for the gold price for many years has been not just a de-dollarization, it has been the amount of debt, the amount of unsustainable debt being added to not just the US side, but all around the world, the whole Western Europe to all around the world. There’s some countries, you look at, actually, I want to say Russia, well, they actually cut down their debt quite a bit over the last decade plus. During 2008 until 2020, Germany did an excellent job of also cutting down their debt, but recently, that’s been ballooning, and the Western countries are spending more than they’re taking in. I believe it was Milton Friedmann or someone made the comments that inflation is a direct result of spending more, the government spending more than it takes in. It’s basically got to print its way out of the money that it doesn’t have or the currency doesn’t have. We are at a point where Trump has come in and there’s been expectations. Well, okay, he’s going to stabilize things. Okay, maybe we’ll get some more manufacturing, so on. Well, the deficits aren’t coming down, really. I mean, the EC, what’s happening, the budget that was passed, that was not something that stabilized the budget. No, we have massive deficits. The deficit continues to increase. All that’s happening is hopefully that the rates are coming down because the interest payments are going through the roof. I mean, they’re over $1. 5 trillion dollars going to go to one and a half trillion dollars if these rates sustain. That’s what the market sense is. They know that this situation is unsustainable. Even if they are successful at bringing down the rates somewhat, you’re just manipulating the free market forces and eventually just breaks because we should never have gotten to this point in the first place. These are unnatural situations caused by manipulations of the system, of the free market system. Monetary Metals: I see a lot of potential drivers for a continued bull run or maybe even a sharper bull run in gold prices, whether that’s lower interest rates because of the power, the need to service debt without inflating away our currency. Gold might respond to that. It’s a monetary factor. There’s geopolitical risks as well, whether these wars break out, whether the conflict with Russia and Ukraine actually goes broader rather than dies down. So all these point in a lot of ways, whether it’s de-globalization, de-dollarization, fiscal problems, global problems, towards a stronger gold price, a weaker dollar. But what are some objections that you often hear that no, gold isn’t a bubble. Gold is just a shiny pet rock, there’s no point in owning gold. Really, these currencies are going to be turned around, and we just need to trust that, yes, gold is in a bubble, and these currencies are going to stick around. What do you think of some of his strongest arguments against gold? Peter Spina: Well, I started investing in gold as a teenager following it, so I heard the bottom of the market rhetoric, and I remember clearly listening to Jim Cramer and Kudlow on CNBC when gold was in the ‘330s, and they said, Gold will never go above $3600 an ounce. It’s a barbaric metal. T his is a new era. We have all these intelligent PhDs in the central banks around the world, and we figured it out. Unfortunately, human nature, as much as we think we are civilized, we’re very animalistic in many ways. When you are unable to even… Some of the arguments that are being made is, well, crypto now saying that’s the new version of gold, digital gold, which we can talk about that later. There’s other alternatives saying, okay, well, gold has been around, but now we have in digital age and so other things to invest in. Then the other arguments were before where, well, you have other currencies. If the dollar is going to have issues, you can go to the Euro, you can go to the Chinese bond. There’s other alternatives, but there really isn’t. There really isn’t any good alternatives. History hasn’t really shown that to be accurate way of outperforming gold because gold has outperformed all these, whether it’s holding S&P 500 companies since the year 2000 for 25 years. Gold has outperformed that. There’s an underlying problem. It’s a debasement of the value of the currency, and gold is reflecting that. It’s amazing that the gold price has been running up without creating any real problems in the system for quite a while and everything. Dollar is still a supreme currency internationally and so on. But a lot of that, things are changing. I think a lot of people are saying, Well, yeah, it’s Pax Americana, the dolly. It’s dollars. The dollar is not going to go anywhere, blah, blah, blah. There’s a lot of things happening in the world. There’s a lot of challenges taking place to the world’s superpower status. If you do travel to other parts of the world, you do see that There’s a lot of people hungry who want to also be on the top. Monetary Metals: Peter, I do want to ask you about your global perspective, your global viewpoint. You’ve been and lived in multiple different countries. You’ve seen the different attitudes towards gold and towards other currencies. What do you think something is missing when it comes to understanding gold in the United States or understanding how the rest of the world feels about the United States and their monetary policy? Peter Spina: Yeah, it’s hard to understand that unless you really start to travel and to see it from different perspectives. I’ve only been to Asia once, but it was eye-opening. You really see this energy, the growth, the hunger. The people are just hustling and bustling, and there’s entrepreneurs. It’s an energy that I actually see similarly here in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. People want a better lives. They have to work hard for it because they’re coming from difficult positions. I was born in the United States. I It was born in the ’80s where things were as easy as it gets We’ve had incredible lifestyles, but that’s been built having the US dollar as a supreme currency. We’ve been living off the world savings for a long time. Eighty, 90% of the world’s savings is going back. The world is producing all this goods. The US is producing, exporting dollars in debt, and the world takes that. That’s been going on and on and on. Well, it’s nice to be a consumer society and be able to get away this, but eventually, things get trade balances and things get really out of whack. But yeah, when you see the rest of the world is happening right now, there’s a lot of savings being produced in places like China. They’re working their butts off. They’re manufacturing and producing products for us. You say what you want about the policies of the Communist Party. Their party there. But they They are so much in so many ways, they’re so advanced and ahead of us. They’re trying hard to take away what we have in many ways. It’s a competitive nature. Even in the gold market, that’s where the gold demand is. You see it in the younger generations. The biggest consumer of gold in China is going from 25 to 35-year-olds. As soon as it’s going to be under 25-year-olds. Two out of three Chinese who are under 25 on gold. Generation Z in the US, it’s 16%, which is higher than the average, which is 11%. There is a little bit of shift in the younger generation. You don’t really think you would see that, but there is a bit of a shift there, a little bit in the West. But for the most part, you see the traditions and the history that these people come from. For my parents, they escape the communist system. They understand what the black markets about, how the currency was manipulated, how you would go here. If you had dollars, you could get a much better exchange rate than if you use the official system. Then you go back, next door is Germany, the Weimar Republic. People lost everything. Hyperinflation, you had nearby. Serbia, Yugoslavia, I mean, in the ’90s, that was even more vicious. You blinked in the morning. Things were two, three times as much in the evening by the time you went to the grocery store. It was just living in the best country, one of the best countries in the world, the United States, you think, Oh, everything is fine. Everything is good. We’ve moved beyond these issues. We’ve learned from the past and so on, but unfortunately, I don’t think we have. The rest of the world is hungry. It wants to compete with us. Gold is a global… Everyone around the world understands gold. There’s 4,000 or 5,000 The culture is in India, and they all have affinity for gold. Chinese see gold as multi-generational wealth. They hand it down to next generation. It’s not a short-term speculative investment for them. This is the way you store your wealth long terms. So there’s a lot. And these are the economies that are growing, and you see the demand coming not just to gold and to silver. That’s where the energy is. That’s where the money is. That’s what’s starting to set the price more and more. So I think It’s beyond a wake-up call at this point for the West that we need to change our ways and fix things because the route we’re heading, it’s not looking so great. Monetary Metals: What do you think is going to be one of those wake-up call moments for the West? Is it that maybe a treasury auction goes where, listen, they can print the money, but they basically default, or maybe they change the rules of what it means to own a treasury. Yeah, instead of paying in one year, maybe we’ll pay in two years, right? What do you think is that specific moment that might happen, whether it’s a spike in inflation, whether it’s Powell being fired? Is there some specific moment that you think will make people in the West go, You know what? I know it’s a shiny pet rock, but it’s worked for 5,000 years. Or do you think that it’s going to be a multiplicity of factors where Powell steps down, there’s higher inflation, a treasury bond goes awkward, Bessent quits. Do you think it’s a multifactorial issue that’ll get people to wake up to gold and it’ll happen slowly over time, more gradually? Or do you think there’s some specific shock to the system that makes people in the West go, I think it’s time to check out gold again. Peter Spina: Well, there’s a little bit of that shock going on right now, but for the average person, right now, the average Bank of America client has 0. 5% of their portfolio invested in gold. It’s nothing compared to the rest of the I think when the price of bread and circuses go up, when inflation hits the consumer where they’re most focused on right now, they’re going to start to revolt. I see more and more talking with family back home, talking with friends and family. Last year or two, the discussion has mostly been about how expensive things are, that they can’t even go out to a restaurant today. Family of four, it’s going to cost hundreds of dollars. The cost of going on vacation, traveling, everything, it’s getting I personally don’t understand how most people afford things anymore. On even a $7,500 salary for a family, that just seems almost… And depending, obviously, what part of the country you’re in, it’s getting more and more difficult. So at first, when they printed all this money, everyone felt wealthy. All this money was circulating around, and the price of the assets continued to rise, and the bubbles kept going. Everyone felt rich. Well, that was short term because eventually the truth also shows up in the price of things that you need, not the things that you want, the things that you need to survive on, and food inflation, and other insurance, and all these things. They’re eating away at the bottom line. People are starting to ask questions. I think Trump is a reflection of this. They don’t understand exactly what’s going on, but they’re getting angry. They’re revolting politically like this. But yeah, for them to fully understand it, it’s going to take an economic crisis at this point. The education in the universities. We had just talked before this about your experience, my experience back in Colorado with the university professors, they laughed at gold. They said this is a barbaric medal as well. These are the good times. Things are changed. Nothing can go wrong. Their view, their perception just has to change, and I think it’s underway. Definitely an economic crisis is going to wake more people up. They’re starting to see what the gold price itself is starting to wake people up. I was shocked. I was talking about this for the last few years. The gold price last year, when it was starting to really break past that $2,000 defined level, it got no price coverage. We broke past $2,100 a ounce. That was what a decade plus long high, 11, 12 year high to break past. Technically, that’s huge. No press, no press, no press. So not until we broke past about $4,000. Okay, what’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on? This has been a stealth gold bull market move. The West has been absent. The Western investor has been chasing so many other AI digital stuff. And this has been driven by other markets around the world. Now, this is where… I mentioned this about a year and a half, two years ago. The second the Western investor joins the rest of the world in this bull market, then you’re going to start to get shortages. You’re going to start to get price bidding wars because the inventories are getting very tight, especially at those price levels were gold. Obviously, gold doesn’t have… There’s no shortage of gold. There’s tons of gold out there, but it just depends on what price you’re willing to sell it. In certain markets, there are certain questions. There’s been some shorts in certain markets, especially now we’re seeing that in silver. So there’s other factors of play that can influence the price. But overall, the rush in the gold is just starting in the West. They are so, so far behind. They just do not understand. It’s not taught to us in school. It’s not told to us in the media. Usually, when you do hear on front page of CNBC, you start to be cautious short term, which is what we should have been doing the last few weeks. But I do not believe that this is a sign of the top at all. It’s just a short term, just crowd rushing in, pushing up the price too much. You’ve got some big players there too. They’re shorting this stuff. They’re sitting on huge losses, but they know that at the right time, they can come in. In a short term, there’s some games that you can play in the paper markets, wipe out some of the speculators, which the leverage holders right now, they’re going to learn a bit less than what it’s like to play with margin in the precious metal sector. It’s very volatile at times. Be careful. Don’t play with leverage, accumulate, buy physical, and then you don’t have to worry about this short term volatility because it can get, especially with the silver side and the gold and silver stocks, the volatility can be quite extreme. It’s a lot more challenging market than other markets if you’re a new time, first time investor, But the best thing to do, first thing to do is always have physical, and then you venture into the other stuff, to the mining stocks if you want. But this is not something that… Right now, we’re talking when there’s a big price pull I do not think people are already calling in tops. Well, these are the same people that couldn’t even call the bull market when it was starting to happen. So they’re clueless to the bigger dynamics that are at play. And I’ll join them in calling the price top in gold if we saw some major changes, if we saw the budget get under control, we saw some political sanity, we saw Americans being able to talk to each other, maybe once again, that might be a good sign. It’s a very contentious period right now, and it’s very unfortunate because the gold price is reflecting a lot of issues at hand. Until we see some resolution, I don’t think this trend stops. Monetary Metals: Well, what’s interesting is at $4,000, I have a lot a lot of reporters in my inbox saying, Could you please give a quote about gold? Where there was impossible to find a reporter. You would think they all left the planet at $2,000, which for a lot of people in the gold community was a big, nice round number. And one of the things they were asking, Do you think it’s possible that gold prices could hit $5,000? And one of the things I said to them was, Listen, I don’t make price predictions. I’m not in it for the price. I’m in it for a different thing. But one thing I will say is that there’s no logical stopping point for the devaluation of the dollar. It’s not as If all of a sudden, Oh, well, a $5,000 gold, it really bottoms out for the dollar. And that’s the way we should be looking at this. What is the value of a dollar? Well, right now it’s a certain milligram of gold, and 99 % of the dollar’s value has been lost compared to gold. And so when you frame it that way, what’s the logical stopping point at a nice big round number in gold? Really nothing. And so I guess my question for you is, what do you think of these arguments? Well, we’re going to use AI to grow our way out of this, or we’re going to use crypto to get rid of the debt. Do you think there’s any credence in any of these arguments, which could be a boon for the dollar and hard for gold? Peter Spina: Yeah, the crypto argument, that’s just… It’s quite amazing. Some of the extreme predictions being made about how we’re going to get out of US international death. What is interesting is I got into crypto. I got into Bitcoin early on. I really believed in it in 2014, ’15, and ’16, ’17, but then it didn’t really turn into a threat or a competitor to the US to fiat currencies. It doesn’t function well on a high active basis. The network gets clogged up, so on. Then the marketing changed to digital gold, so on. But what’s interesting about it now is after the original core group of people I was with, by the way, we were just a hardcore libertarians, anarchists. I was in Prague when I came here in 2015. I spent a year in the Crypto Anarchist Institute. Everything was done in Bitcoin and Litecoin. Every transaction, all these projects. It was pretty neat. Let’s build something to fight the system, right? Well, what is it now? It It’s part of the system. You take your dollars, you go buy your crypto, so you buy some digital dollar, and those digital dollars then go and buy you as treasuries. They’re funding it. So that’s why the system loves it right now. They found a way, a new source to buy US treasuries. I think Tether holds $125, $125, $530 billion with US treasuries. So now they found a way to pump it. It’s not a threat to the dollar, by the way, Bitcoin. It’s a derivative the dollar. There’s so much leverage in it, too. It could be the the black swan event if crypto had a huge Bitcoin just dropped 70, 80%. Yes, so much leverage in it. It’s in everyone’s portfolios in the West. The treasury market, everything is just embedded more and more and more. It’s interesting to see how that’s now… When I was telling people to buy Bitcoin, to fight the system, those people were laughing at me. Now, those same people are telling you to buy Bitcoin because now we’re fighting the system, blah, blah. I was like, No, no, no, no. You’re just gambling now. You’re just gambling on the hope that this becomes a future standard, that it actually will be used. We’re not seeing the fundamental support behind this. We’re not seeing daily use of Bitcoin. You can’t even use it. You have to use another network off chain and then bring it back to settle it because it’s seven transactions a second. It’s not competitive. It’s interesting. It’s a payment network. It’s not digital gold. I call it digital pie, right? Because to try to get people to take their gold and buy, dump it and buy Bitcoin. Are you kidding me? That phrase, a fool and his money are easily departed. That’s what the casino does to you. To me, if you’re going to touch that, use speculative money, just like you would with an exploration stock. I’m not going to put my retirement account into an exploration stock. I might put a small percentage into it, but I know that that thing could go down 50, 90, even 100%. People who buy Bitcoin now, no, it’s digital gold. It’s fine. Oh, boy, there’s been already multiple huge draw-down events. This thing is highly centralized in its ability to be pumped up in price and so on. So be careful with that. It is not digital gold. It’s definitely the narrative is being pumped by CNBC, all these mainstream media in the West, mostly, where the rest of the world, They’re buying gold. They know that this is a Western game. And when things come down to it, I don’t think real-world producers, commodity exporters, are going to take Bitcoin as payment. The thing is volatile. There’s nothing backing it. I could even get deeper into some of my views where I don’t even think it’s an asset. It’s an IOU. The only thing Bitcoin can do is give you access to the future use of the network. To use Bitcoin, the network, you need Bitcoin. But if you buy Bitcoin, do you own any part of the network? No. Do you get a vote on the network changes, on the code changes? No, the miners do. All you have is a digital IOU token, which even more so bothers me is that all these people believe that they’re buying something to fight the system when you’re using it. On top of that, every transaction goes into a centralized public database. You are inputting your whole privacy into that. My view is, put the government on the blockchain, force the government institutions, force transparency on them, financial privacy and security. That belongs to the individual. We deserve privacy. To me, dollars, cash is more private than anonymous than Bitcoin. Everything With metadata and all the information with your wallets being rich, it’s not hard to figure out who’s who. Then governments are going to have access to that. Corporations are going to have access to that. I don’t want all my connections, no. Especially with a tyrannical government in charge. Can you imagine if Trudeau had that access, something like that during the truckers rally. Here, he cut off their bank account. On one hand, I get it. Having some networks or decentralized networks are good. But to me, Bitcoin isn’t the one that protects your privacy and security. So obviously, there’s a lot of debate around that. And again, here’s just another example. Is Bitcoin the one that’s going to take the lead, or is there going to be something else? Is there going to be Monero? I don’t think the system will allow stuff like that because they want to control and really big brother wants to know everything that’s going on. So the real threats to the system are not really being pushed. It’s the ones that are part of it. So I don’t say the AI bubble. Yeah, the West, there’s been so much… I get it. It’s new technology. Everyone wants to be part of it. Yeah, the Western investor has been chasing bubbles. I think the AI revolution There’s definitely some interesting parts of it. It’s going to change or transform our lives. It’s going to increase productivity and help out. But there’s a lot of excess, and there’s going to be a nasty washout crash coming. A lot of people are going to get taken for it. Just like with the dot-com bubble in the late ’90s, was at the end of the dot com? No, it was a nice opportunity to get rid of the excess. That’s what’s needed in any healthy economy, and we never get that in general. The central banks, they come in. Okay, let’s, in 2008, let’s deal with the excesses. No, let’s just make them bigger. It’s nuts. It’s absolutely nuts. We are led by children. We’re led by lunatics. This is not normal behavior. We have a problem, and they make the problem bigger. There’s no political will. I think it was Doug Casey said, democracy is mob, rule, dress up in a dress jacket or something. It’s just mob mentality. It’s people trying to vote themselves as much as they can out of the treasury. Today, the people’s mentality and the voters and so on, I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of hope. So the Western investors chasing all this stuff. They’re totally oblivious to what gold is saying. It’s becoming a bit of a warning signal. It’s flashing red. Now, these prices are saying something is really off. So what’s coming next? That’s what I think people need to prepare for. And obviously, Obviously, there’s a lot of debt out there. There’s a lot of leverage. There’s a lot of misallocation of capital. There’s a lot of froth and excess that hasn’t been dealt with over many cycles. I don’t know how much longer you keep kicking the can down, but it seems like we’re getting to a breaking point when things really start to get difficult, which asset class, where do you go for refuge? Obviously, gold and silver at the top of that pair of it. Monetary Metals: Peter, I want to ask you about silver now. We’ve discussed a lot about gold, but silver is a slightly story. Obviously, central banks, they don’t tend to own silver. If almost nobody in the West owns gold, they definitely don’t own silver. So what do you think is this relationship now between gold and silver? There’s a historic ratio between gold prices and silver prices that has in some ways broken down or has come out of whack. What do you think about this relationship between gold and silver? Do you still think that they’re both monetary metals? We should think about gold and silver in the same way as money. Or do you think that slowly gold and silver coming apart and they’re going to have a different story going forward? Peter Spina: Well, a lot of people, even in the gold realm, have suggested silver is no longer money, but there’s a lot of people around the world that still believe so. It’s a challenge of beliefs and culture. There’s a lot of people who won’t go for it, but it’s still a very scarce precious metal. It has monetary attributes. It has been money before. It is money to a lot of people. As the price of gold goes a lot higher, all of a sudden, just like we have seen in history, you want to go for the thing that still hasn’t gone up in value. It’s cheap, that’s scarce, that’s precious. That’s what’s happening with silver. The price, the ratio has been extremely interesting. Silver is a different market. I don’t know where we’re at now. 60 to 70% of it, probably closer to 70% is industrial use. It isn’t like gold, where most of the gold mine is still above ground. A lot of silver is lost once it’s consumed. There isn’t huge stockpiles sitting around in vaults. It’s quite interesting from that perspective. But this is where I love silver. From the golden perspective, the ratio is screaming. Silver is an absolute huge buy here. But fundamentally, the silver market has been going under four years. It’s going to be the fifth year soon of structural supply deficits. This is something we’ve been watching 10 years ago develop and saying, Okay, look at this. Silver is going to finally get going. We’re getting close to it, close to it. We We get to 2021, 2022. The deficit is getting larger, larger, larger. The vaults, the inventories are going down, and the price isn’t really reflecting the situation. But now the amount of available inventory is starting to get really tight. The gold price is flying through the roof. Silver demand is starting to kick back on. And a big feature of the silver market was the amount of sellers over the last year. So a lot of people that I knew in silver went into crypto, went into Bitcoin a decade ago. I also sold some gold and silver weight back in 13, 14 to get into it, and then I reversed it and went 100% back into precious metals. But I don’t think that’s the case with most of them. They’re still stuck in the crypto casino. A lot of that former silver investor demand has been diverted into other markets. We saw silver three, four years ago. It ran up to 30. It got smashed. It It’s just such a discouraging investment. People just gave up on it, even though the investment thesis, the points were there that silver should be rising. People gave up, which is a traditional aspect of the bottom of a bear market. Just lost faith. Even until the last year, so it’s just like, Silver, it can’t even keep up with gold. It’s falling behind the gold rise. What’s happening? Supply deficit, so on. So yeah, one of the big features over the last… What are we now? Over the last several months, it’s I think 2001, 2002, we’ve been seeing just net selling of silver from the silver ETFs. You talk to bullion dealers, seven, eight out of their clients that are calling it our sellers. There’s no buyers. They’re selling silver below spot. People don’t care about it. So the Western silver investor just went totally dead, even with the gold price starting to break out and just slow, slow, slow. And it wasn’t really until the last weeks, it seemed like that started to finally change as we hit $50 an ounce. But that’s That’s not the case in all parts of the world, which is even more interesting because in today’s world, where you have this really small, tiny silver market with all that money floating around, it doesn’t take a lot to squeeze a market in tight supply. So what It appears to have happened now was in this last run-up, spike in silver price. Well, it wasn’t much of a spike. It ran aggressively. I think if you’re going to talk about a spike, we’re going to be talking about silver going to $100, $200 an ounce. This is just the start of a spike, in my view. The silver price got noticed how cheap it was in India. Social media influencer saying the same thing like all us gold bugs here in the West, Look at silver, 100 to 191 ratio. It’s so cheap, so cheap. Then you started to see huge imports coming to India in the spring. It started to hit some pretty big numbers. Also for the manufacturing side, for solar panel use and so on. China has just been sucking up all that silver for that use. But now the investor component coming into the market, which has a record industrial demand. Oh, boy, that’s a component for a real silver squeeze. That’s how the last couple of weeks developed. Silver ETF buying in India just went through the roof. All this flood of retail investors started to develop, developed for the last several months, and then with the gold price now, it got more attention, and then there was a rush into silver. So they ran out of silver in India. They had to cut off investors from the silver ETF. There’s been no access. They had to suspend some silver ETFs. And the other part was the silver, one of their major refinery for the first time ever in their history had no silver available. So it was a total rush for the silver inventory. They couldn’t get any bars in London. There was no silver for the rest of October or something available for delivery. Not that there was a shortage yet of silver, but the silver is sitting in New York now. Here in London, it’s dwindling down quickly. I don’t know, it’s around 150 million ounces left. It may be And most of that may have been spoken for. So they’re trying to fly silver back over on cargo flights, which is just becoming chaotic, which is telling us the market is stressed. It cannot manage both a record industrial demand and a rush of silver investors. And the longer that this ratio stays down here, and today, the ratio we’re at 86, 87 right now. We were at under 80 last week. Boys, it just continues. If $49, $50 ounce silver looks extremely cheap. That’s obviously historically a pretty big number. We hit that in 1980 and again in 2011. Now, breaking it for the third time, sure, we may get down to a consolidation phase after this run up in gold and silver down to the 44, 45, maybe a dip below. But I think this is a process that’s playing out. We’re getting more and more investment from the West now into silver and gold, and this is just going to add more and more pressures. India is on holiday this week. They come back next week. Watch out. I don’t see any reason at all to sell any silver. You asked me five, six, seven years ago, I had my limit at what price I would buy silver in the low 30s. Well, I bought some silver low 40s recently for my son’s, their longer term holdings. So it’s starting to… Even from my view, which I know when silver ran up in 2011 from to almost $50 an ounce. I saw anything beyond 30 at that point as being a bit dangerous because the risk-reward wasn’t there, it wasn’t as favorable. The production costs were still down in the low teens. Today, the production costs around $25, $3, around $25 an ounce. It’s rising. There’s a bit of a cushion there, so it could come back. But I don’t think that’s going to be the case. With the inventory so tight, with record industrial demand, it’s the greenest precious metals out there. It’s mandated green energy. It’s a mandated green energy precious metal. You see how China and the rest of the world with their solar panel manufacturing and investor demand and other, silver is used in so many different applications. I’m not worried about it. I think pullbacks are great right now. I can buy some more cheap physical. But for me, even the bigger opportunity, I think silver is a bigger opportunity than gold, and gold still has a great opportunity. But the stocks, the gold and silver stocks, are even more interesting at this point. So I tend to find myself putting more capital into that right now. Monetary Metals: Peter, as we come towards the end of our interview, I want to hit you with a rapid fire round. So I’ll ask you questions from all over the map, and you can answer as short or as quick as you want. So let’s start here. What do you think something the Eastern world can teach the Western world when it comes to investing, and then vice versa? What’s something you think the Western world could teach the Eastern world about investing? Peter Spina: Well, okay, sure. The Eastern world can share their more conservative nature and thinking longer term. I think that’s something in the West we’re to instant gratification now. I want returns in three weeks, three months, six months. Things take time to play out. Even when you recognize a good investment opportunity, it can take a long time. You got to be able to have that patience, and you got to have longer term thinking. It depends, I guess, the culture. I got to say one thing that I love about the West, about the United States, particularly, versus some cultures like here in Europe, what America still has, and that needs to be adapted by other cultures and countries around the world, is this, entrepreneurs are regarded as wonderful people in the West. You take a risk and you fail. You took that risk and you’re admired and respected for that. You go to a place like Germany, you took a risk and failed, they’re going to mock you for it. It’s really… One thing that the culture in the West, in America, particularly, has going forward is that people really want to build things still. There is that energy to be an entrepreneur. As long as we don’t lose that, that’s something that the rest of the world needs to understand and learn from more? Because I see that actually here in the Czech culture more, too. But it’s not the same. In America, it’s an amazing aspect of it. It’s something that the rest of the world should take note of. Monetary Metals: All right, here’s another one for you, a similar angle. Lots of young investors now are interested in cryptocurrencies. They’re interested in this whole crypto universe. While a lot of older investors in general are more conservative, they might own gold and Silver. What do you think the Gold and Silver people can learn from the crypto peeps? And what can our friends in crypto teach us boomers in Gold and Silver? Peter Spina: Well, I got to correct you on that because I believe that was the case. Then actually this morning, I looked up what was the average age of a Bitcoin investor? Because I’ve noticed more and more on Bitcoin Twitter, retirement age individuals. The average buyer of Bitcoin in the last 2025 was around 45 years old, whereas the average gold and silver buyer is actually a lot younger. There is a narrative shift. There is that belief that gold and silver is for the older generations. That’s definitely not true in Asia, and that’s changing also in the West. I think what’s happening now is When I got into crypto and all that stuff, there was no… Anyone over 50, 60 years old wasn’t in that until maybe five, six years ago. They started to get more introduced to it, and the ETFs came around, and then you have Michael Saylor and these guys that are pushing it. It sounds so wonderful when you describe the moon and how far away it is and how much fun it is going to be to get there. But it’s not all that easy. If making money was that easy. Everyone would be a billionaire. So everyone’s looking to the past as they’re looking to rear view mirror saying, Oh, look, I can make all this money in crypto and Bitcoin. Well, that’s not the case. There’s cycles. And to me, when I see, and I know that from experience. I lost a lot of money in altcoins. I invest in so many different projects with this idealism belief that these things could change things. Well, these things, a lot of them, they don’t have business models. They don’t know how to generate revenue or cash. There’s a lot of poor management and outright scammers. There’s a lot of shysters there. I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of that. Not that you don’t find that in any market, everywhere, but there’s a higher concentration in that because it’s new technology. I see also an exploration site in gold stocks. It’s like something that people can’t understand technically. It’s easy to market to them. They don’t want to miss out, so they want to get involved. You really shouldn’t be investing in things you don’t understand. Just don’t take some crypto marketing and put all your money into it thinking, well, they understand what they’re saying. Having been involved with this, most of these people, they’re diluted by… Their opinions reflect the price, the price. I would be very careful right now. The markets have had a huge run up. Bitcoin could double. I’m not saying that it can’t keep running. Obviously, having the support of the President and other big players, it’s helpful. But the fact is also that the Bitcoin price has not outperformed the gold price in almost five years. Since 2021, the Bitcoin to gold ratio has been just hitting a peak. We’ve hit it like three, four times. And then the last week, the uptrend from 2023 broke down. Bitcoin does not look very good to me at this moment. So to those who say, sell your gold and silver and go speculate in Bitcoin, I don’t think this is time. I think this is time to reduce your risks. And it could be a warning sign, too. I think Bitcoin is interesting as a liquidity indicator in the markets. It seems to be more correlated to the Nasdaq and NVIDIA and that side. And if that’s indicating things are starting to get serious and we see the price of Bitcoin to really start falling, it could be a leading indicator that the general markets are going to start really falling hard. I would be careful because I could also translate. If we have a liquidity event and there’s people rushing for dollars in cash, That can easily spill over into precious metals. You may get a deflationary, about a deflationary phase before the money printers come in or the currency printers come back in and central banks start to pump the system up. There are signs that liquidity is getting tighter. There’s a lot of triggers out there. There’s going to be a credit crisis. There’s going to be something that triggers another big event. There’s a lot of black swans out there. So, boy, it’s not an easy thing to navigate through. I do not believe I believe gold investors should be looking at crypto and Bitcoin people to help manage their views. Let’s have a nice discussion if so on, maybe. We’re not very good at discussing. Both sides are yelling at each other. That’s not good, too, because there’s a lot of similarity of beliefs. It’s just one side sees this as being the future, the other side isn’t. I think to be conservative and say, if you go with what history shows you to be the safe haven. I wrote before that you don’t buy gold to make money, you buy gold to prevent losing money. You save your wealth in there. When there’s a fiat currency crisis, which is inevitable, the evaluation trend continues under these circumstances. Gold and silver are the easiest ways to deal with that. I’m not looking to take on a lot of risks. I take exploration stocks and gold stocks on for higher risk reward and to make money, but gold and silver are there to protect me, and I don’t think anything else can match that. Monetary Metals: Okay, next rapid fire question for you. Why do you think there’s been recently a disconnect between mining stocks or mining equities and the straight up gold price or the straight up spot price of silver? There’s been some catch up, but in some points it feels like gold prices in a bull market and the miners are looking around like, Oh, yeah, gold prices going up. Why do you think there’s been such a disconnect? Peter Spina: Well, I like to look at the gold-silver ratio to see what the gold-silver stocks enthusiasm looks like. When you see the Gold Silver Ratio this week, it represents the retail crowd and the investment side into the gold and silver stock. They’re weak. There’s not a lot of interest. Like I said earlier, the vast majority of people calling their bullying dealers last year were net sellers. So they haven’t noticed how much money these gold miners are making. We’ve got Newmont later this week reporting profits. They’re going to be huge. They’re going to be monstrous profits. So, yeah, it’s discouraging. It’s volatile, but it’s to me, it’s like getting some of the gold miners now, it’s like buying gold at $2,000 an ounce. You’re getting in before the run-up. I mean, they have run-up, so you have to be careful, obviously, on short-term pullbacks. But overall, as far as the amount of money they’re generating, the gold price to their share ratios, it is looking extremely cheap. They are going to get noticed more and more. And as I think we see the silver price break well past 50 bucks an ounce and that excitement coming in from the Western investor, they’re going to jump into gold and silver stocks as well. And at the same time, you just give the coming three, four, five, two, three quarters of earnings to pass, and you’ll see the analyst, banking analyst, they’ll be upgrading their targets big time. Monetary Metals: Okay, next question for you. You have young kids. What’s a lesson that you would hope that you can teach them that they’ll remember, whether it’s about life or investing in general? Peter Spina: Well, nothing is for free in life. You have to work for it. I know that there’s a cultural thing, just give me, give me, hand out mentality. But what’s going to make you succeed and happy in life is working hard, working for something and not just getting things, pushing, trying to get things for free, to be conservative, to invest for the long term, and not to abandon your values. I think in today’s world, a lot of people like to abandon their old, their traditional values. That traditionally happens when you’re in and you’re getting diluted by all the easy money and easy credit floating around you. So learn from your history. It doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it does rhyme. And listen to your parents a little bit more. Monetary Metals: Well, I think they’re a bit too young to watch the Gold Exchange podcast, but when they can, can’t wait for them to watch this episode. Okay, Peter, last question for you. What’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange podcast? Peter Spina: Oh, boy. Well, that’s a good question. What would change your view about gold? What would make you actually look at gold and say, Hey, this thing is overvalued, or did we actually become civilized to the point where we don’t eat gold? At what point did we become a civilized world? I do always question my own beliefs. I don’t like to get stuck in it because I used to be 100% gold bug, and then it got into the Bitcoin thing, and then I thought that was the future, and then I had to just really question things again and realize that wasn’t it. It’s an important question. I guess for the gold guys, it’s like, what could subvert all this? At what point do people have enough of gold and we fix our problems? At what point do we move on? At what price level do you just take profits or exchange your gold for something else? Because you do want to, I think I’ll always pass down some of it into the future, but if the gold price were to go absurd, and it’s all about racial, it’s all about relative, as they said. If the gold price is relative to Houses or something. At what point do you exit the market? Because it’s not always huddling for life, as they say in Bitcoin. It’s not about always huddling. It’s about finding opportunities where the markets are disconnected and out of whack. At what point does the gold market become overvalued? Because I think we’ve been through decades of it being undervalued. At what point does it become overvalued? At what point do you start to exit or reduce your exposure? That’s just off top of my head. Monetary Metals: Peter, where can people find more of you and more of your work? Peter Spina: Well, goldseek.com, silverseek.com. I’m active on Twitter or X, sorry. Sometimes I go to the gold conferences, so I’ll be in Zurich in a couple of weeks at the Precious Metals Summit, and then at the big Vancouver conference in January, the Cambridge house. So hopefully I can see some of you there. Monetary Metals: Peter, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you, and we’ll hope to have you back on soon. Peter Spina: Thank you, Ben. Likewise.
