The Secret Connection Between Bitcoin and Gold Prices

Welcome back to Xplor 2024 in Montreal. I’m Ernest Hoffman for Kitco Mining. Joining me now is Peter Krauth, publisher of Silver Stock Investor and author of The Great Silver Bull. Peter, thank you for being with us. It was a pleasure, Ernest.

Thanks for having me. And especially a pleasure this year maybe because uh obviously we talk to you fairly on the regular and we have seen some of the things that you’ve been uh promising or alluding to have come to pass.

So it’s an exciting time obviously for the silver producers and an exciting time to be looking at investment opportunities in the silver space. Absolutely. Um I think that it’s only going to get better. Well, let’s uh let’s see where we where we’ve gotten so far.

Silver is starting to take off. Uh we’ve been waiting for that.

Obviously, silver is often delayed, it’s a delayed reaction to uh to a gold rally. But it tends to overshoot. So we broke above uh $33 an ounce uh around October 18th.

And uh we’ve been holding holding pretty solidly above there, some retests, but uh where do you think the floor is in the short-term for silver prices right now? So 32 has been a ceiling for quite some time, uh if I think back to uh mid 2020 when we had the COVID uh pandemic panic. It shot up to about 32 and then stayed in a range for a long time. Uh didn’t test really 32 until uh what it would have been, I believe it was May of this year.

And so the range was about 20 to 32 and so we could tell if you looked at a chart, it wasn’t that uh difficult to tell that it was consolidating in that range. 32 was the new ceiling, it needed to test that a few times and then like you say, in the last month or two, we’ve broken above that.

I believe that uh 32 will now become a new floor. Uh we’ve been above it long enough, I think that we could we can probably expect that to be the case.

I was expecting that um 35 would be um reachable by the last quarter of this year. We’re in there. And I didn’t expect it would reach it that quickly. So we’ve touched 35 a few times already.

In recent weeks, we’re now uh as we speak, I think around 32 and a half. And as I say, if 32 holds, I believe uh it will become a new floor. Okay. We’ll talk about some of the upside targets a little later. Um so I wanted to kind of break down the the components of your silver bull thesis.

There there are a bunch of things that feed into this and some of them are a little bit counter-intuitive. So I wanted to kind of uh get your sense of this. So we can start with macro. Um you believe as many people do that global debt levels are unsustainable in North America and around the world, um and you believe this should be a major driver for silver prices, not just gold. Everyone understands the relationship with uh with gold as a as a hedge against uh against debt levels.

But you’re saying that uh silver is in fact going to play a role there as well. I think so.

I mean, it’s true that silver’s more volatile, um and it but it’s also true that silver is really both an industrial and a monetary metal. And that’s what makes it unique, I’m going to say amongst metals in in any case. Uh but it’s also been money actually longer than gold has. So something like 5,000 years, that’s something that I I write about in the book.

Um and some believe that uh silver has been used more as money in terms of uh if you value transactions globally historically, it’s been used more than gold has, which also makes sense because of its lower value per per weight. Uh that you would have used it more in sort of daily transactions. And so um silver is definitely money. Um there are more than 14 uh places in the world that use the word silver as money. So it’s uh there’s a lot of um history and cultural affinity to silver.

Uh and I think that uh if you look at how investment demand flows, so we’re talking about coins and bars, um when uh the demand for silver comes back on the investment side. And it does ebb and flow a lot. It was crazy in 2020 and 2021.

Um and then it had pulled back a little bit. Uh these are somewhat unpredictable, I would say, but uh when it comes, it comes roaring back. And uh I would simply just not underestimate the uh the demand uh sorry, the uh the investment side of demand for silver. Okay. So then another key component is uh obviously the the rate cycle.

So this is obviously a big driver for gold, um and so people see the the the falling rates as a driver in and of themselves because it’s the opportunity cost for holding metals goes down. But you’re also you also believe that the reason that we cut rates has a lot to do with it and you don’t think we’re necessarily out of the woods yet. So what what is your what is your sense of where we are in terms of the rate cutting cycle and the potential for um surprises on on that path?

I mean, there there’s always a potential for surprises. I mean, the you know, the the Fed market sometimes has a hard time pricing in what actually plays out. The Fed themselves have probably the worst record of predicting how things will play out in terms of rate cuts and what inflation will look like or what uh economic predictions uh projections should be. So I I do think that we’re going to see more cuts. I think they will continue, they will ebb and flow.

We’ll probably see that continue through till maybe mid to end of next year. Um I I still think that a recession is in the cards.

And if you look at when the uh the Fed starts to cut rates, the last two rate cutting cycles on average, were about three to four months before uh a recession would hit. So the first big cut came in September. If history repeats, that would mean sometime maybe in early Q1 next year. We could be officially in a recession. And um there’s talk about there’s always been talk about how that affects silver.

And it’s true that if you look at how silver reacts, um it doesn’t react as well as gold does in a recession. There are things that may counterbalance that a little bit this time around, which we can get into. But um history has also shown in the last three rate cutting cycles that silver performs exceedingly well. Uh there were some research by uh the Angle We Trust report group uh Incrementum.

And they um they showed that if you look at how silver reacts in the last three rate cutting cycles, silver was up 32% from the within the first 24 months after the last three rate cutting cycles started. And that’s in a two-year period. How long is that? That that varied actually. That could have taken anywhere from about a year to two years.

But that’s still a tremendous return. Right? It did correct as as well after peaking because it’s volatile and it over and it over uh rallied, I suppose you could call it.

And then there was some uh uh rationalization of that uh of that run up. But uh that spells real opportunity for what the silver price can do.

So, um you know, it’s out there. Uh I’m not making it up.

You can go and look at the numbers. That’s that’s how silver performed. And uh I don’t see why, you know, anywhere from maybe 100 to 150% uh if it averaged 300% the last three times, uh would be unrealistic this time around.

Okay. Well, that’s that’s very encouraging.

So I guess what you’re saying is that um gold has its drivers in when we enter a recession. Silver comes off a little bit, in this case, likely because industrial demand goes down in a recession.

Industrial demand isn’t as much of a driver for gold, but then silver overshoots for monetary and presumably industrial reasons coming out of that. Exactly. So, you know, the same group Incrementum did some really good research.

They looked, they took recessions, multiple historic recessions and split it up into sort of five time periods. Uh pre-recession, early recession, mid, late and then post-recession. And silver outperformed gold pre-recession and post-recession. Um so I I think we’ll see something similar potentially happen again this time around. Where I do see a potential for, you know, the market may be getting it wrong.

Is that I think that so much of the energy transition is mandated now. And um we’ve we saw it in the great financial crisis. We saw it during COVID. Uh governments like to come back and I and I honestly believe that one of the big reasons they’re cutting now is so that they can um stimulate uh again. So that so that they’re sorry, so that they’re stimulating now.

One of the reasons the big reasons that they’re cutting back on their balance sheets at central banks is that they have room to to expand their balance sheets once again, which I think they will absolutely do um when once we hit recession. So allowing for this room, allowing to stimulate, um means the Treasury is going to spend.

And for the Treasury to spend, they have to do things that are palatable for uh for voters. And one of the most palatable things is infrastructure. So, um you know, because people will argue that uh everyone benefits from spending on infrastructure.

We saw that in the great financial crisis coming out of it. We saw that coming out of COVID.

And I think we’ll see it in the next recession as well. So that’s very, very positive for the green transition, uh things like EVs, things like solar, things like wind, uh even uh state uh charging stations for EVs, for example. Now we’ve got uh improving solid state batteries, we’ve got all sorts of things going on. Silver is key to all of these things and that’s why I think that we may be underestimating how silver will will perform in a in a future recession.

Right, because the the exact things that the governments will choose to stimulate will be silver intensive. Exactly. All right, well, let’s let’s get into that demand picture then. So, obviously, the story for the last several years has been decarbonization and the rise of solar. As a as a massive growth area in terms of silver demand.

Um and so that’s obviously happening in Europe, happening in North America with stimulus, but it’s happening uh in Asia and the developing world, perhaps even more because there are massive financial incentives just to be able to provide electricity in areas where it doesn’t where you’re not on a major grid. Or people investing uh of their own accord. But and so let’s I guess we can start with China. So China had very bold projections for their own solar build out. And they seem to have they seem to have already achieved some of those.

So where where are we at in China and has silver fully priced in the real demand curve for what we’re seeing in China? Because we’ve up those numbers uh more than once. Yeah.

So I mean, it they’ve had very, very aggressive growth in terms of uh both solar manufacturing capability. They dominate globally at at about 80% uh of manufacturing for solar panels and and parts for solar panels. Um and you’re right, they are getting close or have or are getting close to achieving their goals in terms of uh in terms of uh solar solar energy supply from solar. And so the the uh we have to be careful about projections because uh at some point things will obviously change.

But I saw some very interesting statistics recently that showed that projections uh five-year projections on um on solar uh adoption were historically um very, very under uh underestimated. So they were always higher than than uh had been estimated when you looked five years out, like considerably uh underestimated. And so, you know, that and these any five-year period before the present day is already much less invested in, much less as much less momentum than what we’re seeing now. That’s right.

That’s right. And that’s why, you know, it’s it’s I I think the the outlook remains very bullish. I do think that to some extent we could see thing not not the rate of growth stop, but at least slow somewhat. So ongoing growth, but perhaps less aggressive growth in uh in China, for example, in terms of manufacturing capacity, in terms of installations. Uh but I think we need to start looking at India, their neighbor.

And they have a similar population. Um the International Energy Agency has said that India is expected to have the largest energy demand growth of any country over the next 30 years. India has uh has said that they’re they’re going, they’re building out um the world’s largest renewable energy park in Gujarat State.

It’s going to be five times the size of Paris. It’s going to consist of solar as well as wind, but the vast majority of it is going to be solar.

And um we’re starting to see numbers for India’s solar manufacturing capacity start to ramp up a lot. Now, they’re nowhere close to what China is. They’re probably somewhere around maybe 5% of what China is and China’s 80%. So it’s still very, very early days. But um given the kinds of plans that they have and uh the kind of roll out that we’re seeing in solar in India, I think that they’re really starting to become a big player in this uh in this area.

And so uh you know, we’ve started to see and for a couple of reasons, we started to see imports of silver in India absolutely take off. So you could argue now what happened in the middle of the year this year was they cut back on import duties on silver. Silver buying took off. It absolutely exploded. Uh I think it was a mix of both investment and and uh and jewelry as well as industrial.

But in February of this year, there was an absolute explosion of imports into India for silver. It was something like 64% of all of 2023’s um import numbers took place in February alone of this year.

Now, more recent numbers, if you look at Q3 imports into India for silver, they are 500% what they were Q3 of 2023. So, I mean, the the numbers are really almost literally off the charts. Um it’s very impressive to see the amount of silver that uh that India is consuming right now. And I believe it is a a true mix of both investment and I I lump investment and and jewelry into the same investment category and industrial as the other category, so to speak.

And uh I believe it’s really a a fair mix of both. Okay.

And that’s true in India, if if it’s true anywhere, that uh that silver is is uh a cheaper gold in in monetary terms, in value preservation. Uh India has that place.

So it it also makes sense potentially that when gold prices reach these these lofty highs. And uh it becomes we saw we saw gold demand come off in China.

It’s possible that at those prices, uh silver demand can pick up a lot of that slack. Absolutely.

And in fact, just sort of anecdotally, I was reading that uh there’s starting to be increasing demand not only for silver versus gold jewelry, but also gold plated silver jewelry. So they’re getting they’re kind of getting the the, you know, a mix of both, paying less because it’s mostly silver, but getting the look because it’s gold plated. So, um yeah, that these are developments that we’re seeing in India for sure. All right.

And then another interesting wrinkle, which uh which I wasn’t expecting, but I guess it makes sense when you think about it. Is we talk a lot about solar decarbonization, but one of the other massive areas of investment, which is the solar solar is also about there are environmental drivers and there are policy drivers that that are a little bit more dependent on who’s in power, uh government priorities. One thing everyone seems to be on board with is AI. AI being the future.

No one seems to be disputing that. No one seems to be uh doubting the the the investment curve on AI. And and you believe that AI is going to need a lot of silver as well.

I do. Um if you look at uh the demand from now, AI is a driver in a couple of ways. I think sort of on the technology side, uh these uh these uh computer chips, microchips, uh need need silver uh to actually to function and uh it’s very effective in them. Uh the other side of it is in storage indirectly because storage requires energy to run storage, uh data storage centers. And uh I believe that, okay, so we’ve got to be that the the um 800 pound gorilla is nuclear.

If you look at what’s been happening in the last few weeks, in fact, very impressive to see that, you know, almost one after the other, almost one week after the other, you had Microsoft, you had Google and you had Meta, all say that they’re going to tap into nuclear power to help um supply energy for their data centers. So data is just going off the charts. Um believe if I have this uh stat right.

The amount of data that will be generated in 2025 will be 50% more than all the data globally between 2010 and 2016. So it’s just incredible and and AI is feeding into this.

AI an AI, a chat GPT search takes 10 times as much energy as a Google search. So we need the energy.

So it makes sense that. these big uh these you know these big uh players have tapped into nuclear.

What does it mean to tap into nuclear? Is it the small modular reactors or is it pressuring governments to build massive nuclear installations?

Yeah, so here’s the interesting part is that I believe that this is almost a one-off, almost a one-off kind of thing because they’re huge players. Not only do they have the cash, they’re connected, they can make things happen, and from what I’ve seen is that they’re tapping into unused nuclear.

Like uh dormant capacity or capacity that can be restarted. So if I have this right, Microsoft was three-mile Island and it was to restart three-mile Island. So these things, you know, nuclear is not something that you permit overnight, um, nuclear fuel, as we know uranium has now tripled in price in the last few years, we can talk about that, I see some amazing parallels with silver actually.

Um, so as I say, these are kind of one-off things, I think, they have the ability to tap into nuclear, it’s amazing, uh, low emission, base load power, so it’s fantastic for them. But how long does it take to get a nuclear power plant built, permitted, etcetera, right?

The great thing about it is that, as I say, low emissions, small footprint. The difference is that for others who who really are also going to need a lot of, um, a lot of power to to power their nuclear, sorry, to power their data centers, I think solar becomes the obvious sort of other choice.

Um, yes, it does have a bigger footprint, it needs large slices of land to build the solar parks, however, you can permit them much more quickly, and you can uh draw the power from it quite easily, and you can, you know, this could be almost self-contained, right? You could have, if you have the the the land to build a data center, um, where you’ve got also land to have a solar park next to it, you’re you’re basically off the grid, so to speak, right?

You the solar park is right there next to you and it’s supplying your data center, so you depend on no one. And and when demand really goes up or when your machines get more efficient, you feed back into the grid. So there’s a potential upside, you’re now an energy producer. Exactly.

Exactly. Very interesting.

And and even if, even though, as you’re saying, the wind the the the build out for nuclear restarting or uh new builds is is years and years. Uh, it it just represents how much demand they expect there to be, how long they expect that build out to last, you don’t talk about that, you don’t talk about something with a 10, 15 year, uh, um, development process unless you’re expecting a 25, 30 year build out on what you need. And then it’s worth actually having the 10-year regulatory investment conversation, advocacy, whatever it is.

It’s worth having that conversation, so that that again reinforces just the silver demand for the chips themselves, the silver demand for the data centers, if the data centers need nuclear 15 years from now, what does that mean for silver for the next 15 years? Exactly.

Very interesting, very interesting. Um, so yeah, I wanted to just get a sense from you a couple of other things because I when I notice silver things, I kind of keep them in the back of my mind for for when I see you.

One is this idea, of course, silver is a monetary metal in the sense that in parts of the world, uh, silver is the cheaper gold, silver holds value or silver is a physical portable representation of value like gold, and so you have places in predominantly in Asia, but other parts of the world as well. Where it works that way, could it also be a monetary metal in you could say the Western sense, to what degree we because we’ve seen we’ve seen um suggestions from Russia.

That they that they want to have uh start maintaining a strategic silver reserve, now to what degree is that for industrial reasons, uh, the way you would treat it as a critical metal, to what degree could we potentially be seeing uh a resurgence of silver as a monetary, a proper monetary metal in the in the Western sense of. Uh some kind of reserve, some kind of monetary hedge against uh fiat currencies.

You know, I can only assume that uh for them it’s possibly both, uh, I just feel like because uh we see the the importance of the monetary side. They’re very well aware of that because we see the now emerging importance on a strategic side, it’s it’s a it’s a win-win for them either way to just start building up silver reserves.

And um, I think that they’re they’re seeing things like what has what have happened in the last say 10 or 15 years, uh, China having dominated uh critical minerals and elements, for example. Uh, pushing up import duties when they needed to put pressure on the West, uh, and and now, of course, you know, relations have soured between the East and the West, uh, you’ve got the BRICS uh sort of cabal developing.

You’ve got um embargoes by the by the US on Russia because of the Russia-Ukraine war. So they’re they’re turning more towards the East, they’re wanting to trade more and more uh with each other, they’re looking at ways that they can pay each other in in each other’s currencies and avoid the US dollar. I just think that um, you know, they see what we see, which is that we’ve had including this year, four consecutive years of deficits in silver.

Russia produces a fair amount of silver, and they must be thinking, there’s plenty of demand from our uh friendly partners, why don’t we build up reserves, and if anything, we can supply it to them. China’s already willing to pay, and I know this I was told by a large silver producer that uh produces only silver, which is a rarity, and uh sells about half to the West, the other half to China.

And China comes to them and says, we really, really, really want our silver. We are prepared to pay you $2 over spot, we’ll pay you two weeks in advance of delivery. And uh, just lock up the silver supply. We we need it badly, we’re prepared to pay more and we’ll we’ll take everything we can get. And so, I believe that we’re going to see the silver price, the true silver price pricing start to shift East from West.

Um, where their um their markets, their their futures markets are uh are meant for delivery as opposed to ours that are just meant to to trade, right? And all sorts of potential shenanigans going on there.

So I think it’s uh that’s probably going to be healthier for the silver market as we move forward. But I think that uh physical demand.

Absolutely. Exactly. That’s interesting. Well, I guess that transitions us nicely into supply. Um, we’ve been hearing about this massive looming supply deficit for a few years now.

Um, it hasn’t necessarily fully kicked in, so what’s the latest on taking everything we’ve just spoken about about about demand. And the upping of demand in in key areas, key key regions, what what does that what what’s your latest projections or the best available projections. On this uh on this um supply deficit.

So back in March, um, for the first time, I had started saying publicly what I thought was happening in the silver market in terms of why the price looked like it was capped while we saw three consecutive years, and then four including this year, of silver deficits. Now, when we say silver deficits, let’s just look at broad numbers for viewers, the silver market is a billion ounces a year.

About 80 supply, about 85% of that is from mining and about 15% comes from recycling. However, demand is 1.2 billion ounces now, and it’s been growing to 1.2 billion ounces over the last few years.

And if you add up the forecast deficit for this year with uh to the last three years, we’re probably going to be at somewhere around 740 million ounces uh for the last these past four years. That’s three quarters of one year’s supply of deficit uh across four years.

So we so I started looking at how how is it possible that if we’ve got these ongoing deficits, um, especially industrial users that need their silver, we know, we see that they’re hungry for it, they’ve been getting their silver somehow, the market’s not, you know, the demand’s not going unmet. So I figured there has to be some kind of supply that that are allowing them to tap into without pressuring miners to produce more because mine supply, by the way, has total supply has been flat for a decade.

The Silver Institute not only believes it’ll remain flat, but it also think it’s going to actually fall this year by 1%, and that’s with demand at 20% above supply. So it’s just wild numbers, and so this this pressure for from demand is not enough to push supply up, so that’s really very telling.

In any case, if you look back, I believe what’s happened is that over the last four years, and when I looked at uh what I call secondary supplies, and this is what’s held by uh the Comex, it’s held by the LBMA, the Shanghai futures, and then you’ve also got uh the uh the silver ETFs. That have considerable amounts, hundreds of millions of ounces, if not up to billions of ounces of silver as well.

And if you look at the charts, which you can find, they’re available online. All of them have seen their their inventories peak around early of 2021, and ever since then, their inventories have been dropping anywhere from on uh it varies, but anywhere from about 40 to 70% down in the last three years, four years. So this is the supply that could theoretically step in when you when you have uh Exactly.

And I believe that’s what’s been happening. So you’ve you’ve got this demand that has been well above supply. But you’ve also got this secondary inventory, secondary supplies that are just sitting there. I think that the especially industrial users have said, oh, well, there’s this supply, why don’t we just go and buy into that, drain those supplies?

We don’t need to push miners to get the to give us the silver, we can just go and drain these secondary supplies, and that’s not going to affect the silver price because silver’s trading at X dollars. We’re going to buy it at spot, whatever that is, and it varies, and we can draw down. I believe that game is almost over. Um, and so I was saying this back in March, interestingly enough, about a month later, um, someone in the industry emails me a report by TD saying essentially the same thing.

That we’re maxing out the what we can be pulling out of these supplies. Exactly.

Inventories are being drawn down. Uh, we’ve got I I was saying at the time 12 to 18 months, they thought 12 to 24 months, that was more than six months ago. At this point, we’ve maybe got 12 months, maybe still 18 months left. And then game is over.

The game’s over. I think that the market started to realize that probably in the second quarter of this year, and I think that’s why silver prices started to move up, and now we’re at the top end and above the range we’ve been at for four years. And um, and miners are starting to make some money, right? And it’s starting to be reflected in their uh in their share prices, they’ve all moved up, many of them are up 50%, some are up 50% in the last few weeks.

Many are up 50% in the last few months. Um, it’s been a good time this year. Silver has outpaced gold this year. Silver is up about, I think it’s 44, 45%. Gold is up a little over 30%.

It’s been a tremendous year for silver. Well, that gets us to uh, I don’t want to keep you forever, so, but I wanted a couple more things that I like to get from you when we see you. Uh, first of all, you mentioned you mentioned the stocks, some of the stock prices of some of the miners, and you’re drilling down into the silver sector a little more than uh than most.

So, would you have any uh specific recommendations for our viewers of uh of uh miners you’ve been looking at that you think are poised to make some of those types of gains? Absolutely. So, um, one of the ones I I like a lot. It’s a rarity in the space because they produce only silver right now, Aya, gold and silver, which is actually a Montreal-based company. And uh, they uh produce in Morocco.

They um, not only are they about to quadruple their production, which is phenomenal and rare in the space, um, they also have um exploration and expansion uh potential through um other projects, also Morocco. That are turning out to just be um elephants, polymetallic elephants with a very large silver component.

So I think that their future, their silver future is very attractive and very promising. And actually, uh, my subscribers uh about a month or so ago.

Uh, managed to get a double in that stock. Uh, took about a year and a half, I think, but uh, did very well with it. And so I still like it very much.

I think that it’s very attractive. Um, so that’s on a sort of a mid mid-tier cap uh size.

And uh, another one that is uh also a Quebec company is uh Cerro de Pasco, which is very interestingly more than a mining play. Uh, it’s still mining and it’s going to produce a lot of silver. It’s actually, if you look at what they’re going to do, it’s more of a more of a uh of a remediation play. So, they have the rights to a tailings and stock pile of it’s actually one of the world’s largest above ground metals inventories.

So a rarity in its own way, um, they’re advancing this. Sprott is very, very big in this play.

And uh, very excited about it. I was at a conference uh just uh last week.

We have probably about 400 million ounces of silver equivalent, which is a behemoth in its own. About, if you look at the silver and gold components of that, so that’s silver equivalent, if you look at actual silver and gold. It’s about, I believe, 38% is just precious metals.

And, um, they’re going to, um, they’re going to probably start producing in about a year and a half, uh, but, uh, they’re moving this thing forward very quickly. This is a mine that goes back about 100 years, it’s been in continuous production for almost 4 or 500 years. Uh, in the early 1900s, JP Morgan, um, was highly invested in this mine. He actually brought it on the New York Stock Exchange, and, um, it was the place to work for anybody in mining.

So, it has a long history, uh, it’s it’s up in the Andes, it’s surrounded by the city of Cerro de Pasco. There are 67,000 people that live around there, they’re chomping at the bit to get this mine back in production.

It will mean a lot for the for the city. And so there’s a lot of support, uh, they spent four years getting access to drilling in this mine. They had to get the government to agree to what they call an easement. And so it was four years and many millions of dollars, um, to get that to happen.

They got that earlier this year, so now they have access, they’ve been drilling. I think it was something like 40 holes, they’re almost done drilling 40 holes. Um, and then next year, they’ve raised a bunch of money. Next year, they’re going to do something like 200 holes, uh, to to potentially define a resource. And, uh, this is going to be a real, real cash cow.

We’re talking about probably a cash flow of over $100 million a year. Potentially a lot more than that if you look if you do it at spot prices for the metals. It’s as I say polymetallic, there’s some lead, zinc and copper in there as well. That’s a really exciting play, I think people should look at that. It sounds like.

Now, very last thing, because I can’t let you go without asking. Um, where are silver prices at the end of this year?

Where are silver prices at the end of 2025? So I I’m going to say I think silver prices will at least be above 32 this year. Uh, pretty sure of that, pretty comfortable saying that. I think they probably will be closer to 35. And I think for next year, 40 is is uh is a is a very likely.

And potentially as much as at least touching the $45 level sometime next year. Uh, I just think we’re in this wave of, uh, you know.

There’s so many things that are supporting silver. And, um, both industrial demand.

Uh, same conference I was at last week. Uh, some of your your viewers may know. Uh, someone who is very, very accomplished in the silver space.

Guy by the name Tom Kaplan, who’s behind the Electrum Group, brought multiple companies. Uh, silver companies, silver producers to market. Manages money in the space, they were one of the world’s largest private.

Um, minerals rights holders globally. At one point in their history. This guy knows what he’s talking about and he’s a true silver bull.

I asked him, um, where he thought silver was going. And he said in this cycle, triple digits, no problem. So, yes, he’s a bull, so, you know, take that with a grain of salt. But I I’m fully on board with that. I like to say kind of one last thing.

Um, which I alluded to earlier. Uh, there’s a group out of uh New York called Garing and Rosenwag. And uh, Lay Garing used to manage the world’s largest commodities fund several years back.

He thinks silver is going to $500. But more importantly, uh, I I came across. Something they he said about uh, or they said about uh, the uranium market. Not not that long ago. And so, and when I saw it, I thought, oh my goodness, this is a perfect parallel for what’s going on with silver.

So they said, we became uranium bulls five years ago. We saw that the market had quietly slipped into a deficit uh position.

And that utilities were starting to tap into secondary supplies. And we knew that those supplies were finite and that uranium would have to start moving in a considerable way. So if you look at what happened in uranium in the last few years. been talking about in the last sort of 30 minutes or so in terms of what where the silver market is in terms of structural deficit, in terms of secondary supplies that we can tap into to meet this excess demand and the finiteness of these secondary supplies. This is a perfect parallel with uranium.

And I’ve said, uh, silver is the next uranium. Except, well, I shouldn’t say except. Uranium has gone to $80, has maintained those levels, has been very steady. I think we’re going to see a tremendous sustainable run up in the silver price and we’re going to it’s going to be the new floor is going to be a lot higher. I think it’s going to be probably somewhere above $50, which has been its all-time high for, you know, for 50 years or so.

And uh, that would parallel what we’re seeing in gold, where the all-time high becomes a floor and people just have to start making projections off that. That’s great.

Well, this has been uh, as always, very enlightening and uh, very encouraging, um, because some of the things we have been talking about have begun and other things are we can say we are closer to the middle in terms of the momentum so thank you as always for joining us.