Welcome to this week's Market Wrap Podcast, I'm Mike Gleason.
Coming up we'll hear from Dr. Chris Martenson, renowned market commentator and trends forecaster and author of The Crash Course and a now new book, Prosper! Chris gives us his thoughts on the first interest rate hike by the Fed in almost ten years, why the Fed is completely boxed into a corner, the inherent dangers of complacency, and the role that gold and silver can serve as a part of a self-reliance plan. Don't miss another tremendous interview with Chris Martenson coming up after this week's market update.
Well the Fed's big decision on Wednesday was followed by a big reaction in the precious metals markets. After the Federal Open Market Committee announced it would raise rates for the first time since 2006, by a quarter point, gold and silver markets responded positively. The rate hike had already been priced in, and the Fed's accompanying statement struck a dovish tone. So the metals staged a rally. That was Wednesday. But on Thursday, traders seemed to have a decidedly different opinion about what the rate hikes mean. With the U.S. tightening even as Europe, Japan, and China are pursuing monetary easing policies, the path of least resistance for the U.S. dollar versus foreign currencies seems higher – at least in the near term. The U.S. Dollar Index surged Thursday, helping to drive oil and metals prices sharply lower. Both gold and silver revisited their lows for the year.
However, the whip-saw price action is continuing once again here today. As of this Friday morning the metals are seeing a nice rally. Gold prices trade at $1,068 an ounce, down 0.8% for the week. Thanks to a big advance this morning silver now shows a weekly gain of 1.4% to bring spot prices to $14.16 per ounce. As for the platinum group metals, which outperformed the money metals through Thursday in the wake of the Fed decision and they are now showing solid weekly gains thanks to this morning's advance among the entire precious metals sector. Platinum prices currently come in at $860 an ounce and are registering a 1.9% weekly gain. Palladium, meanwhile, sports a 3.1% advance this week and now trades at $563.
So can precious metals prices go even lower from here? It's certainly possible, especially if the dollar gains more upside momentum. But from a technical perspective, the gold and silver markets are in deeply oversold territory. And from a contrarian perspective, traders are collectively about as bearish as they can get.
Traders in the futures markets for gold and silver are positioning themselves at extremes. The latest Commitment of Traders report shows that large speculators have taken out their smallest net long position in over 10 years. This means that the hedge funds have been thoroughly scared out of the market and are afraid gold prices will go even lower.
On the flip side, Commercial hedgers have exited their short positions in a big way. The Commercials are down to their smallest short position in over 10 years. This means the people who actually do business in physical metal see little need to hedge additional downside risk from here. Historically, the Commercials have served as a “smart money” indicator. When they get positioned overwhelmingly on the short side, that's bearish. When they whittle down their short positions to multi-year lows, as they have recently, that's bullish. It doesn't mean prices have to go higher immediately, but it does mean that a bullish setup is in place.
The bears, of course, think the Fed has set up precious metals for further declines. It's widely believed that rate hikes are bad for gold and silver. It makes intuitive sense that if the Fed helps to boost the dollar, the metals should suffer. But the actual history of how the metals perform during rate hikes tells a surprisingly different story.
We alerted precious metals investors to that history on Thursday, with an article on our Money Metals website. We specifically dispelled some of the myths the financial media perpetuates about gold and interest rates. So now I'll read an excerpt from an article by Money Metals president Stefan Gleason:
The Fed's last rate-raising campaign occurred from June 2004 to June 2006. Over that period gold wasn't “hurt” at all. In fact, gold prices rose from under $400 an ounce in June 2004 to over $700 by May 2006.
The historic run-up in gold and silver prices during the late 1970s coincided with the most aggressive rate-hiking effort in the Federal Reserve's history. By the time gold and silver prices peaked in January 1980, the effective Federal Funds rate stood at 13.8%!
The myth of rising rates being bad for hard assets persists in spite of data that show the exact opposite is true.
During periods when the Fed tightens, the best performing asset class by far is commodities. According to Allianz Global Investors, commodities have produced average gains of more than 25% when rates were rising, based on data going back to 1983.
Those are the facts. And facts ultimately trump opinions.
Now that the Fed has embarked on a rate-raising program, investors would be wise to realize that a quarter point here, or a quarter point there down the road, won't necessarily make or break markets. Regardless of where short-term interest rates head in the near future, there are much more powerful forces building in the supply and demand fundamentals for precious metals.
The low prices seen in 2015 will cause supply destruction in 2016. Most mines can't produce base metals or precious metals at a profit with spot prices where they're at now. The longer prices trade below production costs, the more mines that will be shuttered, and the tighter that physical supplies will get.
Well now, for more on how you can not only survive, but also thrive in this volatile economic environment, let's get right to this week's exclusive Money Metals interview.
Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to be joined by Dr. Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity.com, and author of the newly released book Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting. Chris is the commentator on a range of important topics, such as worldwide economic and financial markets, governmental policy, precious metals and it's great as always to have him with us. Chris, welcome back and thanks for joining us again.
Chris Martenson: Mike, it's a real pleasure to be back with you.
Mike Gleason: I definitely want to ask you about the book here in a moment, but first off we had the Fed announcement yesterday, a historic announcement according to some. Setting aside the ridiculousness of how important the Fed and their policy decisions have become here for the time being, what did you make of their decision to raise the benchmark Fed funds rate by a whole quarter of a point... the first actual rate hike in nearly ten years?
Chris Martenson: Mike, it's like everything these days. All you have to do is be mildly curious, and peel back the covers one layer, and you find they didn't actually raise by a quarter point. What they did was they raised the range that they're going to allow the Fed funds to float in from 0 to .25, all the way up to .25 to .5. So in theory they could let it float at the lower end of that range and there wouldn't be much of a hike at all.
The second thing is, that this is not a traditional rate hiking, or tightening sort of move. A lot of people are mistaking it for that. Of course, what the Fed used to do, when they hiked interest rates, the Fed doesn't just dictate what the new rate is. They have to go out into the open market, remove enough liquidity out there to cause rates to go up.
This time they're trying a couple of new tricks. They're going to raise the amount of money that they're going to pay to banks that have excess reserves on balance with them, on the theory that banks would then have to decide, "Hey am I going to led the money to the Feds, or to the open market at a higher rate?" They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, which is they want rates to go up so they can say they raised rates, but they don't want any money coming out of the market, a drain of liquidity, at this point with what's happening in high yield credit, and other dislocations, with the commodity crashes, all that. I think the Feds clearly telegraph they're scared witless, they don't know what to do, and they created a window dressing, "rate hike."
Mike Gleason: Obviously, their credibility was somewhat at stake. A lot of people were talking about the fact that they just had to raise rates, because they've been talking about doing it for so long. Not that they really wanted to, or felt like the economy could handle it, but just because they needed to save face. You can't keep crying wolf, so to speak.
Chris Martenson: Absolutely, this was their last opportunity to raise rates here in 2015. They said they were going to do it a long time ago. I think they're boxed, they're boxed in. They know that they have to raise rate at some point. They don't know how to go about it. They felt like they had to do it in 2015, so they did it. Again, the way they did it is the least hikey of any rate hike I've ever seen.
Mike Gleason: Certain a lot of language in the minutes there, I believe, were quite dovish as well. What does it say about the state of things that after nearly a decade of ZIRP, zero interest rate policy, we have this much fanfare, see this much hand wringing about getting off zero, how long it took them to do it, all the discussion. What does that say about the health of the U.S. economy and debt base system, Chris?
Chris Martenson: I have a pretty deep sort of a criticism of our debt-based system, which is that it's designed to grow exponentially, it can't. What we're struggling with here, we, the Federal Reserve, and our fiscal policy makers, what we're struggling with here, is that we can't get growth like we used to have. There's a couple of reasons for that. One is related to the amount of energy that we can extract, oil in particular. Another is related to the amount of debt that's already in the system. There are a lot of very serious headwinds to the kind of growth that would support the kinds of policies we have. So what we're seeing is this growing gap between the amount of new debt and credit that's being shoved into the system on the one hand, and the amount of organic natural growth that would support that on the other hand.
What all of this is telling me, Mike, is that the Fed has created a financial Frankenstein. They need to keep that monster lurching along. They're really out of ideas, so they will do everything they can to prevent the financial markets from falling apart. But, I'm sure your listeners are in accordance with this very simple Austrian idea: the amount of money and claims and derivatives and debt in the system, all of that paper stuff, that has to exist in some relevant and proportion to real stuff which is produced in the real economy. Hey, when we wander over there, we see a lot of warning signs. That's the gap that we've got going on right now, and it's very uncomfortable.
Mike Gleason: Four years ago you wrote the Crash Course where you adapted your tremendous video presentation from a few years before that which you laid out all the dangers facing us based on the inherent flaws in our monetary system. Those things you were just speaking of there, and the problems resulting from our debt laden economy. Both the book and the video are just profoundly eye-opening. You came out with the Crash Course book, and now you've released Prosper! with Adam Taggart, which you call a blueprint for taking control of and improving your destiny. Give us a background on the book, how it came about, and what you were hoping to accomplish with the message.
Chris Martenson: Sure. Great question. The Crash Course, the first book was problem definition. There we added up all the data and said hey, this is unsustainable. People read that and of course asked the follow up question, which very logically, they said, "What should I do?" So Adam and I have been giving seminars, and we've been getting a lot of people come into our website. We've made changes in our own lives to become more resilient and become more adapted to whatever future might arise.
Over time we collected, we think, some really good credible ideas for not only how to prepare for the future, but to do so in a way that you're current life is vastly improved by those same efforts. That's really what's in Prosper! is that big framing and definition around what it really means to be resilient. Then, what we do is go further and break that down into all these different forms of resilience you might have. We've broken them into these eight forms of capital, which is an idea we got form these wonderful permaculture guys. Gregory Landau and Ethan Roland, and thinking about not just our financial capital, but seven other forms to complement it, where if you were rich across all those forms of capital, Mike, you would be rich today, and you would be very resilient for whatever future comes tomorrow.
Mike Gleason: Yeah, lots of action steps in the book. That's one thing that you're sort of known for there, now with your website and also the books you're coming out with. Lots of things people can actually do... practical, real things that they can use. Is that going to be some of the take away that people would have if they read your book?
Chris Martenson: Absolutely. The book has a lot of really good framing. It really explains why you would want to build these other forms of resilience and has some concrete things you can follow. Of course, to really put everything you might do into a book, it would be a couple of encyclopedias. So we have a companion to it at the website freely downloadable called the "What Should I Do Guide," which has much more tactical things that people might do around which exact products you might buy if you were going to buy products or things that were going to increase your resilience. But the book itself really helps explain not just the physical forms of preparation you might do, but Mike, we cover what I think are actually even more important than are you physically prepared, do you physically have some gold, can you take care of your family with food, water, the basics. We talk about things like emotional capital, or your emotional resilience. You're ability to mentally weather the pace and depth of the changes that are coming, is as important as anything else you might buy or do in your life.
Mike Gleason: Yeah, definitely, that's a different take on it. A lot of people probably gloss over that whole idea. That's very good information and certainly things that people need to be considering.
Now, in the book you write about how the economic recovery of 2009 is failing, now for some folks, although primarily for those on Wall Street, there has been a recovery and they're doing quite well given all the access that they have to cheap money that they can turn around and use to speculate with. But for the average American, he really hasn't seen his standard of living improve during this so-called recovery. Talk about that, and then share with our audience some of the ideas Prosper! will give them, not only for surviving in this economic environment, but also thriving in it. I know that's what you're after here is you want people to not just survive, but also thrive.
Chris Martenson: That's exactly right. For the average person, it's no mystery why they haven't really participated in the recovery. It's because the recovery was specifically designed to exclude their participation. I know that sounds a little conspiratorial, but it's a very well understood process. It's called financial repression. It involves enforcing real negative interest rates on people, which means that you're going to slowly take their purchasing power from them. You can't give people any other outs. You can't give them any other way to not participate in that system. Gold has to remain weak, and people have to really be forced to participate in the system, which is taking everybody's purchasing power a little bits by little bit.
Unfortunately, the correlate to that is that the people who are closest to that process do extraordinarily well. This is as true today as it was in John Law's time in France way back when, or whenever else we've seen it in history. That's part one. The average person is just getting slowly gutted by this financial repression, and that's by design. The question becomes, what do you do about that?
What do you do about the fact that this financial repression isn't really working, it's still creating massive amounts of indebtedness that could never be paid back at the federal level, it's creating financial risks that are extraordinary. Is there a chance we could have another global meltdown? Absolutely. So what the book is really going to step in and do is we do spend a lot of time on financial capital. We talk about the real risks that exist in the financial system, Mike. And we say that for people that are going to have money in the system, and of course, we all are to some degree, manage that really well, make sure you're working with people who understand what the actual risks are. Not the standard broker who says stocks for the long haul. You're diversified if you own equities here and there. You're not.
To really diversify, we advise that people take a tangible, meaningful portion of that financial capital, their total pie, let's call it 25%, and they dedicate that into building out other forms of capital. Here's one example. Chapter 6 in our book is Financial Capital. It's our longest one, very detailed. You want to take some of that financial capital, put it into chapter 7, which is called Living Capital. That's your own personal health, your living capital is your own body, and it's all the things that support us as humans on this planet, which includes the things outside of us in nature. It's clean water, it's deep soils, it's having abundant robust ecosystems.
I've taken some of my financial capital, Mike, I put that into buying compost every year. I've got a big vegetable garden. I've got a fruit orchard. I've got some bees. I got some chickens. These are things that I do, because A, I really enjoy and derive great pleasure from those activities. I eat better food that I can source and understand completely and it's organic, non GMO and wonderfully full of nutrients. More importantly, I'm building up the living capital in and around my property. Not just for myself, but for all pollinators. I've got a wide variety of birds, I've got all source of berries. It's fun, it's beautiful, it gives me a lot of enjoyment today.
Tomorrow, if it turns out there is any sort of a crisis or a disruption in the system, I now actually have like a bank in my yard that has a capital formation in it that I can draw upon to help me and my family and my neighborhood. That's just one example of where we would say you can take financial capital and truly diversify by bringing it out of your bank account and into these other accounts. We've got a chapter on Material Capital, which are the things, the tools, the implements, the systems that you might buy that could also provide similar financial benefits now and in the future as well as a certain degree of resilience as you go forward.
Mike Gleason: I don't know that there's ever been a time where complacency is more rampant than it is today in say, the American society. What kind of warning would you have for the person out there who may not be looking to act or thinking that he needs to act because some sort of catastrophic event has not happened yet. He's going to wait until that happens before he finally gets himself prepared. What kind of warning would you have for that person? I think that's resonates and is defines quite a few of us out there.
Chris Martenson: Of course. This has been a slow motion crisis that's actually been in play for actually quite a long time. I think it actually started in the mid 90s, for those paying attention. Even in the past 7 years, there has been a degree of complacency, because the federal reserve and other central banks have been pretty effective at controlling financial markets. If you just back out and you look at what's really happening in the world today when you understand really what's happening in the Middle East, where the refugee crisis came from and why it's likely to intensify over the coming years, how the European Union is really going to find itself at great risk under that experiment. When you really look at what's happening to the United States in terms of water, soil, overall indebtedness levels.
All these pieces, Mike, together, for somebody who's educated in them, a lot of us come to the same conclusion, which is, look, these are unsustainable practices and trends. Just because they haven't fallen apart today, listen, people get social security checks today that are meaningful. Small, but still meaningful. Those same checks, there's no possible mathematical way for those to be as meaningful 20 years from now. We know these things are happening.
Our advice is wake up. Really look at what's going on in the world. See the dots, connect them for what they really are, and understand that the world's undergoing an extraordinary period of change. To that complacent person, my one liner would be, you are extraordinarily exposed if your complacency has led you to the belief system that the future's going to be kind of like today. Instead we think there's both crisis and opportunity in the future for the person who's prepared... mentally they have to understanding, they've developed some skills, and they've increased their capital in a number of areas. To that person, we think that the future is actually going to be very interesting. No guarantee of it being positive for everybody, but Mike, there's some extraordinary opportunities coming, but they're just hinged on this idea that change is coming. Big, giant change. It's already started, and it's going to accelerate as we go forward.
Mike Gleason: Chris, the last 4 years have been quite frustrating in terms of the price action in the precious metals. Has that given you pause when it comes to the importance of owning and acquiring gold and silver as part of the plan to prosper, so-to-speak?
Chris Martenson: No. They're a cornerstone of my plan, I believe. Let me broaden it. I believe in real assets. Gold and silver are easy tangible assets. I still personally love both of them a lot. I just had a big 2 part report on the site, very long, where I just look at the supply and the demand issues. Where are we really with respect to mining supply, how much has China really bought, how much has India really bought? The conclusion is that there's between 1,000 and 2,000 tons per year of shortage in the West. That gold has to come from somewhere, because gold is not a printable substance. So it has been getting disgorged out of some vault in the West and heading East. That process can't continue forever.
I don't know how long it can continue. I've got some ideas. We can all scratch numbers down, but the gold market's very opaque. We don't really know how much central banks hold. We don't know where the gold that apparently disappeared from Libya and Iraq went. I have some theories. We don't know how long the West is going to tolerate losing its gold to the East. It can't be forever. I'm very comfortable with gold on a fundamental basis. And silver, very much so on an industrial basis, for the same reason. I'm a big fan of oil, even though it's been plummeting a lot. Both silver and oil have to turn around, because they are currently priced well below their marginal cost of new production. No commodity stays there forever. They can't.
I think that there's an enormous currency war and an enormous currency crisis coming. I's taken longer than I thought to develop. When it does come, it's going to have a lot of potential energy baked into it, and it's going to be, again, no guarantee that gold will necessarily be perfect protection. Lot of things governments could do, outlawing it, pretending that only terrorists own gold. Who knows. The so-called confiscation, seizure ideas. I'm comfortable with this, I'm comfortable that we have to be flexible. We have to understand what the risks are, and we have to know that the government's going to change the rules as necessary to protect its status quo. These are all things we know about. So, that's why we recommend gold and silver are the cornerstones of a portfolio, but that portfolio really has to include a much more diversified approach, because we don't know A, what the future's going to bring, or B, how the government's going to respond to those two things. We can make some educated guesses.
Mike Gleason: One thing that I've sort of been thinking about here recently is the idea that if China continues to purchase all this gold from Western vaults, and then all of a sudden, that gold can't be delivered upon, what would happen in that scenario if all of a sudden we either tell China, "We don't have any gold for you," or we default on something that they've asked for. What would you think would happen in that sort of hypothetical scenario?
Chris Martenson: Mike, there are only two ways to balance a gold market that's out of balance. One is through price, and the other is by just shutting the market down. One of those would be legitimate, and the other would be illegitimate. It was Winston Churchill said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they've exhausted all the other opportunities." I'm expecting at some point, obviously it would be appropriate to allow the price mechanism to allow gold to rise to a point that the Chinese demand and the Western supply would balance each other out at some presumably higher price, because the demand is quite high in China.
The illegitimate way would be to just sort of default, say we can't honor those agreements. If that happens, that would just be adding a tremendous amount of geopolitical friction to an already increasingly, I think, tenuous geopolitical environment across the globe. China and the U.S. are already at odds a little bit around the Spratly's. Of course, we've been doing the cyber-spying and trade war stuff more aggressively. Recently, we've watched China get itself included in the FDR of the IMF, that basket of drawing rights. We've also seen China start to devalue its currency pretty heavily which is part of exporting that deflation to the rest of the world. There's a big battle looming, and I think that if the United States reneged on the gold market and tried to stiff China over that, that would be received very badly by China. How they respond, anybody's guess. Of course, the right way to do this would be to allow the gold market to resettle itself by price. I'm hoping, fingers crossed hoping, that that's the path we choose.
Mike Gleason: Certainly does seem somewhat unsustainable. The amount of demand that we're getting from over there in the East and the supply in the West. It should be very interesting to watch that play out. What do you see happening with precious metals and the economy in 2016, Chris? Do you have any predictions for us here?
Chris Martenson: For a long time I've been expecting that the Fed is going to lose its battle. They're just propping up asset prices. That's all fine and good. They hoped that that was going to create a wealth effect and everybody would feel wealthy and they would start spending. What they failed to account for is that all that wealth went into the hands of such a small select crew who can't really increase the demand by all that much, because they're already spending like drunken rich people.
So the propped up asset prices that attempt to wag the dog using the tail, hasn't worked, it's not going to work. Our prediction at Peak Prosperity is that we're going to see a deflationary wave. It's going to come, it's going to swamp a few things. We might see sovereign defaults. I've got a few favorite emerging market sovereign defaults I think might come up. Or, it might be another big gigantic series of corporate defaults. Maybe on the commodity side. Maybe it's Glencore plus Rio Tinto plus somebody else. Who knows.
But for that deflationary wave, if it gets started, it really scares everybody. We could really see a lot of things do some very bizarre pricing that would not surprise me to see gold and silver and other commodities go even lower. It would not surprise me to see a lot of volatility erupt in all the financial markets. But then what we're expecting fully is that as that forms and really scares the central banks, they have to go to part 2 of this story, where they actually print more money, but they've got to get it into the hands of the people this time, not the hands of the big banks. That didn't really work. They'll do a little more of that to make sure the Citi Bank doesn't go under or whatever big bank needs rescuing. They'll do that. In addition, I'm expecting, Mike, to see some printing that goes to you and me and everybody listening to this. A tax holiday. We'll see checks from the federal reserve. It doesn't matter.
One way or the other, money gets printed, gets distributed to main street. That's when we're advising our readers and listeners to run, don't walk, to buy anything that isn't nailed down. Because then we'll be getting into part 2 of this story, which is where we see a dramatic loss of confidence in the currency itself, and we get into the second part of this story. Look, when you're this far over the cliff when it comes to the amount of debt that's out there, there's only 2 ways to make it go away. One is you default on it, and the second is you inflate it away.
Either way, we're trying to answer the same question, which is who's going to eat the losses? In a default, what happens is the losses are concentrated on the holders of the debt. Those are the extremely well connected, those are the big institutions, those are the pensions. Those are things like that. These players are not interested in having themselves be that concentrated source of eating all the losses. That leaves us the only other option which is to inflate it away. That means everybody who holds money or has an asset shares in that loss.
So we believe that when push comes to shove, the Fed will do whatever is necessary to create losses through inflation, as much as they can. They're doing that now, with financial repression where you get 0% on your money in the bank, but inflation is 2, 3, or 4%, depending on how you count and who you talk to. You lose money by keeping money in the bank. Where did that money purchasing power go? Well, it's transferred. It's transferred slowly and easily over to the government and other large institutions. That's all fine and well and nobody really understands how it works so nobody really squawks about it, but with this deflationary impulse that we believe is coming, that we think we're already seeing signaled in cooper, iron ore, coal, oil, and precious metals, that that deflationary wave comes, scares the central banks, causes them to go into another mode where they really, really accelerate inflation by printing money, giving it to everybody listening to this plus you and me, and then we're off to the races.
Mike Gleason: We see much the same way. Just cannot envision any scenario where they're going to stick all of those losses with those they give such preferential treatment to right now. I completely agree. Well Chris, thanks very much for your time and your wonderful insights. Best of success with the book. We're big fans of yours, and hope you can get Prosper! in the hands of as many people as possible, because it's full of stuff that folks need to be thinking about. So before we close here, if you could please tell people a little bit about the Peak Prosperity site, and then obviously let people know how they can get their hands on the new book, Prosper!
Chris Martenson: Absolutely, be glad to. PeakProsperity.com is the site. We've got a wonderful community of people there. We discuss what's going on in the world. We have a subscription service for people who like to go a little deeper and understand really what's happening with more context. We believe education is essential at this particular moment. Information's important. Amazon is carrying our book, as our most book sellers at this point in time. As well, people could come by the website, order it directly from us, then you get a signed copy. Any way people want to find it, it's pretty easy to get, and on Amazon. We invested this time, and of course we've got the e-book, and an audio book which I recorded, as well as the traditional hard copy. However people like to consume it, we've got it.
Mike Gleason: Definitely a good idea there to maybe get the audio book and listen to that in the car while you're traveling to see family here over these next several weeks. Maybe a real good idea for people to get that book. Well great stuff, Chris. Thanks again for coming on. We look forward to following up with you sometime in the new year, and hope you and your family have a great holiday season, and of course a prosperous 2016. Take care.
Chris Martenson: Likewise, Mike. Thank you so much.
Mike Gleason: That will do it for this week. Thanks again to Dr. Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity.com and author of the new book, Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting. For more information, just go to PeakProsperity.com or Amazon.com and we'll also have a link to it on our podcast page as well.
And don't forget to check back with us next week for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. Until then, this has been Mike Gleason with Money Metals Exchange. Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend everybody.
About the Author:
Mike Gleason is a Director with Money Metals Exchange, a precious metals dealer recently named "Best in the USA" by an independent global ratings group. Gleason is a hard money advocate and a strong proponent of personal liberty, limited government and the Austrian School of Economics. A graduate of the University of Florida, Gleason has extensive experience in management, sales and logistics as well as precious metals investing. He also puts his longtime broadcasting background to good use, hosting a weekly precious metals podcast since 2011, a program listened to by tens of thousands each week.
