Fed Chairman Powell Defiant in Response to Trump Election

Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey, a reporter and analyst here at Money Metals, and I'm talking today with my good friend Peter Krauth. We're hoping third time's the charm on this particular, we've recorded this twice and then got bumped by a hurricane, so hopefully we'll have no technical problems, no recording problems. But Peter has over 20 years of experience in resource and precious metals investing, and he's the author of a fantastic book, The Great Silver Bull, which we'll talk about a little bit at the end of the show. How you doing today, Peter?

Peter Krauth: I'm doing well, Mike. I'm talking to you, so I hardly could do better.

Mike Maharrey: Well, I appreciate that. And for folks to have context, we're actually doing this interview on Election Day, so the most recent version of the most election in our lifetime is going on now, so. We won't be making any pronouncements about the election, even though you'll be listening to this after the votes have been cast. But I kind of wanted to talk, I don't want to talk about electoral politics because it makes my head hurt, but I do want to talk about silver and gold and precious metals and investing and that kind of thing. And since you've written a book on silver, I thought we'd kind of start there. And gold keeps setting these records. Right. We've had I think, I just wrote an article, I think there's been 38 or 39 record highs this year, which is the most since 1979, interestingly enough.

Peter Krauth: Exactly.

Mike Maharrey: And so everybody's all, not everybody, but I think a lot of people are at least paying attention to gold. Yet there's this perception that silver is kind of lagged. And if you look at percentage gains, silver's actually slightly ahead of gold if you actually just look at pure percentages. But I think because we're not seeing anywhere near record levels for a silver price, that the perception is, oh, silver's not doing that great. And I'm interested in kind of what your view of the silver market is. I mean, is it fair to categorize it as a laggard or maybe people missing something? How is your current view of the silver market?

Peter Krauth: So I would say yes, people do characterize it as a laggard, and I've got to say that for many extended periods it does tend to be a laggard. If you look at a number of previous bull markets for precious metals, silver has been a laggard for a good portion of that run or that cycle. However, importantly, it outperforms gold. It always outperforms gold in a precious metals bull market. It just simply tends to be back-end loaded. And so that's important. And it's also not to say that you don't get runs, which I'm going to actually be specific about, but that doesn't mean that you don't get runs during these bull markets where silver still outperforms gold, even if over sort of the longer part of it until the end, it tends to underperform.

So just to give you some numbers for this year so far, and I'm going to cherry-pick, so I'll use the bottom when both of these metals bottomed in around mid-February or so. So gold is up 38% so far this year, setting new all-time high nominal records and silver is up 46%. So that's quite a fair, I'm going to say about almost a third out performance already so far since the February lows. That's pretty strong and we've seen that spill over into the silver miners and there's been some really, really interesting activity on the silver mining space. But all that to say that yes, silver is viewed as a laggard, however you have to be, I think kind of opportunistic about it. And silver certainly does pay off long run in secular bull markets. It does outperform gold.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, yeah, we've seen that historically, and you could go back to 2011, I don't remember the exact percentages, but I think gold was in the 20 or 30% range of increase and silver was like, I don't remember. It was a lot. It was in the 100s,-

Peter Krauth: Oh, yeah.

Mike Maharrey: In terms of percent gain.

Peter Krauth: Absolutely. I think it had gone from late 08 until 2011. It peaked in April of 2011 at $50. And I'm pretty sure by sometime in late 08, and I'm just going roughly from memory here, we were probably somewhere around the 10 to $15 range. So it easily tripled in about three years. From early 2011 until the peak in April of 2011, I'm going to say it probably did something around a 60 to 70% gain. I'm just going roughly from memory. So if I have that right, it really certainly dramatically outperformed gold in that timeframe.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that kind of indicates that or that you can at least use to make a case that gold or silver is a laggard is the gold-silver ratio, which I haven't looked at it today. I think it was 83 or 84 to one a couple days ago when I was looking at it. Been consistently above 80 for quite a while now. How do you kind of view that gold-silver ratio? Because some people have kind of told me, I don't really think that that's any kind of a valid metric anymore, that it's skewed so far to be kind of wide is the norm. And so they kind of poo-pooed the whole gold-silver ratio really telling us anything. Historically, we've been closer to the 40 to 60 to one range in the modern era, so we're well above that. How do you view the gold-silver ratio? What's it kind of telling you?

Peter Krauth: So I mean, I do pay attention to it. It's one of the multiple sort of indicators that I follow when I look at silver to decide if I think it's cheap or not on a relative basis. And so it has value for sure, to me at least, and I continue to see it as indicating that silver is cheap and has remained cheap and, which goes back to our earlier point, that silver tends to be a laggard for some extended periods. And so this has been one of those extended periods. Despite silver outperforming gold so far this year, we've still seen that ratio stay high. So that's because gold itself has been so strong, so that's kept the ratio high. In other words, it's continued to point to a high number of silver ounces required to buy a gold ounce. But I still think that it's worthwhile watching.

And for me it helps actually, I guess support my point that silver is cheap. It's darn cheap. And if anyone thinks that they've missed the boat on silver because it's gone from say $22 or so in mid-February to like $32, I think they're completely wrong. Silver is still very, very cheap. The boat has yet to sail, you haven't missed the train or whatever other expression you want to use. Silver still is quite cheap on so many metrics. The gold-silver ratio is just one of them, but it's use, it's industrial uses, its applications, just looking at very, very fundamentally in terms of supply and demand, which we can get into. It's extremely cheap. And there are just some fantastic parallels, in fact, even with the uranium market, which I think are kind of worth pointing out in terms of how some very, very smart and accomplished and successful investors and compare the two markets. So in multiple ways, silver is still very cheap, and I think that speaks to the opportunity that it offers.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, I'm in agreement. And again, you can kind of look back at those historical cycles and just going back to the pandemic, which silver didn't quite get up to that record level, but it had a good run along with gold at the peak of the monetary malfeasance as I like to term it. And again, before that we were seeing gold-silver ratios over 100, which,-

Peter Krauth: Absolutely.

Mike Maharrey: Very rare occurrence. And that snapped back pretty quickly again, kind of at the end of that run. So I'm in agreement with you in terms of silver is still cheap and there's still opportunity out there. You kind of anticipated my next question when you mentioned supply and demand, because we've had three straight years of market deficits. So when we say market deficit, we're simply saying that there was more silver used than was supplied through mining and recycling. So they had to dip into silver reserves.

And I've really, I've been watching this supply and demand and Metals Focus put out an interesting article a couple of weeks ago about how difficult it's going to be for the miners to catch up. Even with a higher price, there's still the lag time in getting mines up and running and the fact that so many of silver mines are or so much silver is actually supplied secondarily to other metal mining. So all of that to kind of ask the question, do you see these market shortfalls becoming problematic because right now they're easily covered by existing above ground stock, but do you see as we move down the road that this might actually become more of a factor or are we going to be able to kind of continue to keep up with that deficit?

Peter Krauth: So if you don't mind, what I'll do is I'm going to read you an interesting quote and then I'll go into kind of the more specifics. So there's a group out of New York called the Gehring & Rosenzweig and Leigh Gehring used to run one of the largest commodities funds globally and very, very successful. The guy knows what he's talking about. And I came across something he said not too long ago about uranium and it really, really stuck with me, and you'll see why. So if you'll indulge me, he basically says, "Five years ago we became uranium bulls. The market had quietly slipped into a structural deficit with reactor demand outstripping mine supply. Fuel buyers used so-called secondary supplies to fill the gap."

So with that in mind, just to sum up, they saw that the uranium miners were not supplying enough to meet demand and buyers of uranium for utilities went and started to tap into these secondary supplies, but they became uranium bulls because they saw that there was going to be this, there's this big delay in terms of mine supply reaction because the buyers were able to go and buy from these stockpiles, right, and draw them down. And when that flipped, when they ran out and they saw that the miners were not going to be ready, there was going to be this screaming deficit that was going to be unmet and it was going to basically squeeze the market into and push the uranium price higher. Well, what happened? Uranium went somewhere from around $23, I guess about three years ago to about $83. So that's quite the run-up in a commodity's price in that kind of timeframe. So I look very closely daily at what's going on in silver and what the supply demand numbers are like. And I see almost perfect parallels with what I just explained in the uranium market.

Mike Maharrey: Yep.

Peter Krauth: That's why,-

Mike Maharrey: I can see it too. Yeah.

Peter Krauth: Exactly. That's why I'm so excited. When I saw that, I thought, wow, that perfectly describes the setup that we have in silver right now. So let's get to it. I mean, again, let's just start with sort of a higher overview. Give some straightforward, easy numbers. The silver market is about a billion ounces a year in terms of supply. 85% of that comes from mining and 15% of that comes from recycling. However, the silver demand is 1.2 billion ounces, so there's 20% demand more than there is mine or recycling supply every year. So these buyers, the consumers of silver are getting silver somewhere because they're not just saying, well, I'd like to buy some silver, but I'm not getting it, so I'm just going to forget about it.

Mike Maharrey: Right.

Peter Krauth: They're still getting it. And I think the stickiest buying comes from industrial users because they can't do without it. This goes into electronics, it goes into solar panels, it goes into EVs, it goes into all sorts of medical applications. There was some interesting research from Sprott investment management that said that next to oil, silver has the single most applications globally, something like 10,000 different applications for silver. And almost at least on a monthly, if not weekly basis, we hear about some new patent that requires silver.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah.

Peter Krauth: So the industrial demand is not only very steady, but it's growing. And to give you some numbers, industrial demand overall a couple of years ago was somewhere around 50% of the overall market. And when I say 50%, I'm talking about not pure demand, but demand versus, that percentage versus the supply, which we know is short versus demand. Today or the forecast by The Silver Institute or Metals Focus, which does the research for The Silver Institute, is that in 2024, industrial demand alone is going to represent 70%,-

Mike Maharrey: Wow.

Peter Krauth: Of supply. So that shrinks the portion available for investment demand, which we can get into later. So if industrial demand is really strong and continues to grow very steadily, and a lot of that does not have much sway. Silver in many of its industrial applications is really what you'd call irreplaceable.

Ultimately, perhaps we'll find other ways, other technologies that will allow us to replace some of those applications, but has so many incredible qualities that you just simply cannot replace silver. And so I see the industrial demand really providing what I call a steady rising floor under the silver price, and it's the investment demand that ebbs and flows, that comes in, and when it come in really, really strongly and surprise the market, I think that's sort of the wild card. That's when you get these huge squeezes in the silver price. But if we back up a little bit to what I was saying earlier in the comparison with uranium. So I've shown that the supply of silver is about a billion ounces a year. The demand is 1.2 billion ounces. So that 200 million ounces, that 20% demand or supply shortfall from demand is being met from above ground supplies. And these supplies are in what we can quantify at the futures exchanges, the LBMA, the COMEX, and the Shanghai.

And then you've got what we can't really quantify, which is in private ownership. So what we've seen is if you can, I've done the research, you can go and you can dig up these charts and you'll see the inventories at these futures exchanges. And starting when they peaked in early 2021, they've been very, very steadily drawn down. And it varies but anywhere from about, I'd say 40 to 70% drop in those inventories. So I started saying this, I said it publicly back in March, that this was how I thought that the market was finding the silver that it needed. And the reason that it wasn't pushing on the silver price pressing it higher because of this excess demand over supply was because the big consumers were able to go to this above ground stockpile and draw it down and they could buy the silver at spot prices.

And they weren't pressuring demand that was hard to meet. They weren't pressuring miners to try to turn up their mine supply and bring more silver to market. They could draw down on these secondary supplies. Well I believe that we have maybe 12 to 18 months of that game left. These supplies are going to run out and the only thing that can happen is that, well, two things can happen. One is that you'll get some of the other secondary supplies privately held to come to market. So owners of silver will say, well, I'm willing to start parting with some of my silver and supplicates, but that's going to be at much higher silver prices. I don't see them doing it. They're not really doing it now. So I see them doing it much higher silver prices.

And the other thing is that we could see demand sort of fall back. That's a potential. I think highly unlikely. A lot of the demand is industrial demand. I've just shown that it's gone from 50 to 70% of mine and recycling supply. And a lot of it's mandated. Governments around the world have said, we're going to move into this green, this renewable energy. We're in this transition. A lot of that, I mean now we're at a point where over 20% of silver consumption every year is for solar panels alone. So the single largest industrial use of silver is in solar panels. And we know that a lot of that solar power is mandated.

So I think that should we go into recession, I don't see, I mean, we could see early on perhaps the impression from the market is that, oh, this is going to hurt demand. I think that may actually just be temporary. I think a lot of that will be very much maintained. And so demand of silver is unlikely to back off by much. The pressure will stay there and people will only part with their silver at I think much higher prices. And given the kind of environment that we're in, even that would I think, take much, much higher silver prices for any kind of meaningful supply to come to market from those suppliers.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I had a visual as you were talking. I eat oatmeal. Okay, so I've got the big tub of oatmeal, right?

Peter Krauth: Yep.

Mike Maharrey: And right now I've got a lot of oatmeal in my tub and every day I take a half a cup out and eventually you take enough half a cups out, the little carton is empty. And I think people forget that. It's almost like, well, we've got this above ground stock and they're pulling from that and everything's fine. And you forget that it might not be fast, but what's the old saying? Things happen slowly and then all at once.

Peter Krauth: Exactly, exactly right. And I think that what was interesting is when I started saying this in terms of my thesis about how the market was being supplied, where the silver was coming from, why it was not pressuring the silver price to move higher was in March. And then about a month later, someone sent me a report from TD commodity research, and it was basically saying the exact same thing. So I thought that was kind of interesting in terms of the timing, the same conclusions, the amount of time they thought that this could go on for was all about the same as what I thought. So it was just sort of nice to see that kind of confirmation, I guess.

Mike Maharrey: So you kind of touched on this. I'm kind of a contrarian. I think I certainly am with the mainstream because I think the consensus is still we're going to have a soft landing. At worst, a very minor slowdown in the economy. I'm of the opinion that we still haven't paid the piper for, again, the monetary malfeasance during the pandemic. In fact, I would argue that we haven't even paid the piper for the monetary malfeasance in 2008 because when they started to try to unwind that in about 2018, we saw a stock market crash. We saw the economy get shaky, we saw the Fed go back to quantitative easing in 2019, even before the pandemic. So they've managed to kick that can down the road. I still think that we've got an economic crisis coming in. The conventional wisdom would be, as you kind of alluded to, is if we have a deep recession that will actually put a tailwind or a headwind on silver and that demand will drop. How do you kind of see a scenario playing out if we do get into a more difficult economic situation?

Peter Krauth: Well, if you look at what the Fed's been doing with its balance sheet, it's certainly been trying to shrink it as much as it could since it reached whatever it was, 9 trillion or something. And you've got to ask yourself, they're good at increasing their balance sheet. It's much harder to shrink it. Why are they so adamant about shrinking it? And I'm convinced it's that they know they're going to have to,-

Mike Maharrey: Raise it back up. Yeah.

Peter Krauth: Right. Exactly. So the more they can get that done now, the more room they give themselves to be able to increase it again, and I'm convinced that will be necessary. The Treasury is going to issue bonds. They're going to call on the Fed to create this money for them. And so we saw it in the financial crisis. It was really interesting to me both in the financial crisis and then it really became, I guess in some ways more obvious during Covid that when stimulus came, the government has to look for things that are palatable. And you could, I think fairly argue that anything that is infrastructure related is quite palatable because who's going to say, I'm not benefiting from this. Everyone benefits from it.

Mike Maharrey: It's the roads.

Peter Krauth: Exactly. It's the roads, it's the power,-

Mike Maharrey: Bridges.

Peter Krauth: Right. Bridges, transportation, you name it. Power period.

Mike Maharrey: Right.

Peter Krauth: And so part of this recovery from the financial crisis, and they stepped their game up, I think during Covid, was to stimulate towards this renewable energy green transition approach. And so that's also quite palatable for a lot of voters. So I don't see that going away. I think we saw it happen in the financial crisis. It stepped up in my view in Covid. I would see the same or another step up in the next sort of recession or crisis.

So there's some interesting research by a group called Incrementum. They put out an annual, I mean to me it's a bible for precious metals field. It's called the In Gold We Trust Report, and they do fantastic research, gold, silver, and beyond. And they looked at how gold and how silver react around recessions. And silver tends to outperform gold prior to recession, underperform just as we enter and during, and then it outperforms gold again on the backside when we come out of recession. And so that's interesting to know. I mean, and I think that it's pretty obvious that that relates to silver's industrial characteristics. Right. So even if on a pure numbers basis the demand doesn't slow, I think just the expectation that it will, will cause people to perhaps sell it down.

Mike Maharrey: Buy the rumor.

Peter Krauth: Exactly.

Mike Maharrey: Or sell the rumor, I guess.

Peter Krauth: Exactly. And I think though that, I'm not saying that this time will be so different or whatever, but given the kind of reaction we've seen from governments to stimulate their way out of recession, I think that we're going to see that and maybe we're going to see it to an even higher degree the next time around. And that's very, very supportive. And if you just look at the one aspect of silver applications being solar, I think that it's almost a clear given. And solar, as I said, is over 20% of the entire demand for silver. And we're seeing all kinds of, as I say, growing demand for it. We know in many countries around the world, it's the cheapest form of electricity now. According to the International Energy Energy Agency in I think 2027, solar will surpass coal for the first time ever as the highest or the source of energy that produces the most energy of all sources of energy.

And that's two and a half years away. And then there's India. We know China is obviously a big energy consumer, and its demand for electricity has been sort of off the charts. We know that Western Europe and North America has been sort of stagnating. And what we see is India and India's chart is starting to actually rise quite steadily, and they've gone and made all kinds of inroads in terms of trying to move themselves towards renewable energy. Certainly there's a lot of sun shining on India. So solar is sort of a natural for India, and they've started to actually ramp up their solar panel production themselves. So China dominates this market to the tune of about 80% globally. I mean, India's still a very small player, but when you see the forecast, it's really going to rise quite quickly over the next several years. They're still only at about 5% globally, whereas I say China is about 80%.

But that's becoming I think, a bigger and bigger play. And for I think different reasons, probably a bit of both, industrially and for investment reasons, India has been a huge player this year alone. Some research looks at what the imports of silver were this year. Different things that are at play, but first of all, early this year, they announced that they were going to develop the world's largest, sorry, not the world's largest. They're going to develop a massive renewable energy park in Gujarat state in India. Now this thing's going to be five times the size of Paris.

Mike Maharrey: Wow.

Peter Krauth: It's renewable energy, and a small part of it is wind, but the vast majority of it is solar. So interestingly enough, if you look at silver imports into India, they absolutely spiked in the month of February this year. And the first, I think it was the first quarter of this year alone was 64% of 2023's imports. If you look at what happened since then, well, India decided, I believe it was in July, to cut, dramatically cut their import duties.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, basically halved it.

Peter Krauth: Exactly, exactly. And then imports spiked again. And the third quarter of this year, Indian imports of silver were over five times what they were in their third quarter of last year. So I think that this is a market that's being missed in terms of its implications for the silver market. And I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago in New York, and someone showed a chart of the growth of silver funds like silver ETFs for example, in India, and just maybe three years ago they were nonexistent.

Mike Maharrey: Right.

Peter Krauth: And it's absolutely in the last year or two, it is absolutely, you've got this almost hockey stick rise in the amount of assets under management in India for silver. So they're finding gold, they have this huge affinity to gold. Anyone who follows this knows that they absolutely love gold. That's been the case forever. They're also very big silver buyers. And now with gold, at such high prices, they're bargain hunters. And so they're starting to actually buy a lot of silver, especially for jewelry. And they're also starting to buy gold-plated silver jewelry. So they're getting the look and they're paying the silver price. So a lot, I think if you want to see what's happening in this market and be sensitive to some of the, sort of the more influential trends, you've got to watch what's happening in India.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. What did you make of the Russians announcing that they were going to include silver in their wealth fund?

Peter Krauth: So I think that's a smart move. I'll be honest, and I think that they're clever. So I would think that they make that kind of announcement after they started doing it.

Mike Maharrey: Probably. Yeah.

Peter Krauth: Right. Accumulate cheap and then say, you're going to do this.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Krauth: Let me make the price run up to top your book and push the price up for something that you already own. So my suspicion is they've already started doing it. I can't say I'm completely surprised. I mean, you never know when these kinds of things come out. But looking back, I can't say I'm really completely surprised. They do produce a fair amount of the silver globally. It's not huge compared to Mexico, Peru, China, but there's still relatively significant, and there are a number of countries around the world that consider silver to be a critical metal given its industrial, its military application, etc.

So with all of these sanctions on them, you've got to think that they're thinking quite broadly and that they see the importance of silver. So they for the first time started to add that to their stockpiles of gold and platinum and palladium, all of which have in maybe certain ways, strategic applications. So I think it's smart. I can't say I'm completely surprised. And as I say, all they do is sort of keep the silver that they produce at home, maybe offer it to their own manufacturers that need it or even their own consumers that want it for investment purposes, that's still a restriction of sorts. And it actually reminded me of what China did. I think it's about maybe eight or nine years ago with critical metals.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah.

Peter Krauth: They started to, the relations with the US were kind of frosty, and so they decided to put quotas on a bunch of critical metals. Their prices shot up and they were taken to the World Trade Organization. They were challenged on all of this. But the point was that the mission was accomplished anyways. Those prices stayed up. I think that it eventually got overturned, but in the meantime, they managed to keep selling this stuff, which was absolutely required by lots of outside users. And I think that the Russians are probably looking at silver in a similar way right now. So given, as I say, the pressure on them from the West, in a sense, it's really not all that surprising.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. It's interesting too. You mentioned just holding your own metal for your domestic use. We're seeing that a lot in Africa with gold. There's a number of African countries that are requiring miners to sell 20, 30% of their gold output to the central bank. And that's kind of the way they're accumulating gold. They're not going out on the global market, they're just making it at home. So that makes sense. I'm going to get you out on this one and make you get out your crystal ball. I mentioned that today is Election Day, and again on Friday when people are listening to this, they might have some idea of who is going to win, but I doubt it. But regardless, I'd be curious just to kind of get very broad strokes very quickly, how do you see the precious metals markets reacting to a Harris presidency and a Trump presidency? Would there be any difference and which would you see being more positive for metals?

Peter Krauth: So I think, I don't actually think there would be all that much difference for the precious metals, I think in terms of outcome. So they're both going higher, gold and silver are going higher no matter who wins. That's my view. But I think if anything, for some of the same reasons in one case and different reasons in the other, I think we talked about this prior to the interview starting off, like you say, they're both going to spend more. We're going to see more financial crises or events. That I don't think is going to change. The debt's going to be higher. So that's all going to be push the precious metals prices higher. I think if it's Harris win, what we're going to see is that that's going to be helpful on the push towards, I think the renewable energy side of things.

So certainly positive for silver, solar applications, EVs all that side of it. And I think that if it's a Trump win, I think it's going to be positive and that it's going to help the miners a lot because he's all about allowing access to resources, whether that's oil and gas or mining, etc. So I think that that's going to be a positive on that side. So the metals will be higher and certain things will drive maybe different aspects of the sub-markets each for different reasons. That's how I guess I would characterize it.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I think that's, I'm totally in agreement with you. I think a lot of people have an outsourced view of how important a president is. I mean, I would certainly argue that the president has far more power than anybody that in the founding generation ever thought. But that being said, still primarily your policies coming out of Congress and the bipartisan bickering sometimes makes it hard to get stuff done. So I'm kind of with you, and again, as you say, there's certain things that we know are going to be true. Right. We know that the spending is going to increase. We know Trump. I mean, he had a track record. He was on track for a trillion dollar deficit, supposedly in a great economy even before the pandemic. And of course, we know Democrats always like to spend money. They just argue about what they're going to spend it on.

Peter Krauth: That's right.

Mike Maharrey: So that's a given. And as you say, I think that other things would kind of balance each other out in terms of give or take. Trump certainly has somewhat of a instinct toward deregulation, which is a positive, as you say, for miners and whatnot. And then when you've got the EV side of it. So yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. Before you go, I want to make sure that people can find you and pitch your book also real quick, because it's a fantastic book and anybody who's interested in precious metals investing, particularly silver needs to read it. But I'll let you make your pitch for it.

Peter Krauth: Okay. Well thanks, Mike. So the book is The Great Silver Bull. You can find that on Amazon. It's in print, Kindle, and in audio version as well. And really the way I like to explain it is to say that it explains the opportunity in silver, which in my view is what I consider a generational opportunity, given where the price is, where I think it's going, and how it's behaved in the past and what drives silver and ultimately silver miners as well.

So it's a great, I think, overview. And I've written it purposely in a simple way. I didn't want to be too academic. It's very, very short chapters. So you can feel like you've grasped a bunch of different concepts, which I think are key to understanding the economics in general, the economics around silver, and then the opportunities ultimately, how to build a portfolio and ultimately how to sell it, because I believe we'll reach at some point, I'm not saying you'd necessarily want to sell all of your silver necessarily even ever, but you may want to sell a good portion of it at some point when we reach the top of the cycle.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah.

Peter Krauth: And so some explanations and ideas of how to deal with that aspect of it. So that's the book. And then I write a newsletter called Silver Stock Investor, which is all about how to invest in everything from physical silver, opportunities or options in physical silver and then all the way down from, I'm going to say some silver ETFs at the top, which is for your viewers, ETFs are holdings that are kind of like a fund that holds a bunch of silver miners within that fund. So you could buy one stock and be instantly diversified. So silver ETFs, and then some large silver miners and royalty companies, large silver producers, and then everything down from there, mid-sized producers, developing companies, and then the higher risk juniors.

And so I cover that whole space. It's the only silver newsletter, investment newsletter that I know of. And so you can find that at silverstockinvestor.com. That's the easiest way to see what I do. And I feel like that's more of what I call a real time view of what goes on in the silver market. And I do a lot of proprietary research. I talk about different companies and different aspects of the silver market to analyze it. And so yeah, that's published on a bi-monthly basis. Other than that, I'm very active on Twitter, so you can follow me @peter_krauth, and I'm also on LinkedIn at Peter Krauth. So yeah, these are the ways to reach and follow me.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, do it folks. Peter's fantastic. And one of the things I really like about the book is the way you organized it. You mentioned the short chapters, and you can almost use it as a handbook. It's not the kind of thing where you've got to pick it up and start on page one and read to the end. You can kind of find the particulars that you want to reference and go right to that and devour that section. Not to say that you might not want to read it from cover to cover, but it is really well organized, and I think it's useful that way beyond just something you're going to read one time and then throw on your bookshelf. So highly recommend. I really do appreciate you coming on the show and taking a little bit of time out of your day again. Again, we mentioned it at the top, but for folks who might be wondering, what are they talking about? We had first, we had operator error on my part, and then we had technical difficulties on Zoom's part, and then we had hurricane. So this one's going up though danggonit.

Peter Krauth: No matter what. Exactly.

Mike Maharrey: So I appreciate you and I appreciate your patience, Peter.

Peter Krauth: Not at all, Michael. It's been a pleasure as always, and I'm glad to be here.

Mike Maharrey: All right. Well, you have a great day.

Peter Krauth: You too.