Housing Market at Risk from Delinquencies, Interest Rates, and Low Sales

Mike Maharrey: Greetings. I'm Mike Maharrey, a reporter and analyst here at Money Metals, and I'm here today with my good friend JP Cortez. He is the director of the Sound Money Defense League. How are you doing, buddy?

Jp Cortez: Hey Mike. Good to be back. Thank you for having me on. Hey, it's great to have you on.

Mike Maharrey:  There's a lot of exciting things going on in the world of sound money advocacy if we're speaking in English today, and so I'm excited to talk to you about some stuff that's going on. But before we dig into the nuts and bolts, I don't want to assume that everybody listening is familiar with the Sound Money Defense League. So if you can give the elevator pitch of what you're doing and what the organization does, that'd be great.

Jp Cortez: Absolutely. So like you mentioned, I'm the executive director of the Sound Money Defense League. We're a project primarily funded by Money Metals Exchange. We're a national public policy group leading the fight on the state and federal level to monetize gold and silver. We've been doing this since 2014. We've found that primarily the best way to monetize gold and silver is largely by removing the taxes that currently impede its use. There are currently a lot of disincentives and taxes and regulations that are imposed on the use or the sale or the purchase of precious metals. And so we go state to state and to Washington DC introducing and ultimately passing legislation that makes it easier for people to use gold and silver as money or to invest and save in gold and silver if they choose on the individual level. And then of course, we've been working on legislation, for example, to build state reserves of physical gold legislation to reaffirm legal tender status for gold and silver and so on and so forth. So this is year 11 for us. Now, last year was our most legislatively productive year that we've ever had. Seven states introduced, excuse me, seven states passed sign into law sound money legislation last year and this year we're off to a very hot start.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it's exciting. Some folks know that I work with the 10th Amendment Center as well, and we do a lot of state level policy, so we're tracking a lot of these bills as well as you, and really noticed an uptick over the last two years of the amount of legislation that's been introduced across the country. So there's a growing interest in this, and I guess some of that is probably due to the, it's gotten impossible for the government to hide the inflationary policies and the impact of monetary debasement. And really this is fundamentally about currency competition, right? If you give people the opportunity to use and have sound money, it can kind of undermine the federal monopoly and the degradation of our money that we have.

Jp Cortez: Right? And that's such an important point because the truth is, Mike, no one chose the dollar. No one woke up this morning and said, I want to transact in US Federal Reserve notes because they have the properties that I want my money to have. No one said that. And the reason is largely because no one had that choice. Everything else that could functionally or alternatively be used as money has been saddled with taxes and all of these other disincentives. So you don't really have another option. We're trapped right now.

So, to break free out of the monetary monopoly, Nobel Prize winning economist Fa Hayek talks about how money was captured in its most primitive state. The government established a monopoly on it, and since then we've seen a slow degradation of what money could be. So to reintroduce and to reestablish gold and silver to reintegrate those back into the monetary system would be profound. The money we have today is largely based on debt and credit. This is deficit spending, it's printing of money, it's living on behalf of our progeny. Our future generations are ultimately going to have to pay this. And none of us chose a policy of inflation. None of us got to vote on whether or not our dollars would be inflated away. So we need then knowing what we know about the monetary monopoly that the United States government has on the United States and the world, we need to find a clever workaround. And what we have found at the state level one, it's that doing it at the state level is what's important. You can call your congressman and they may or may not get back to you. An aid may or may not answer your call or your email. But in Nashville, Tennessee or in Lincoln, Nebraska or Salem, Oregon, Boise, Idaho, those are the places where your voice has real power. So encouraging everyone to do it at the state level and to be an active participant, but also we have found historically policy trickles upward.

Mike Maharrey: Yes!

Jp Cortez: Policy starts at the state, and of course, the incredible work that you and the 10th Amendment Center are doing, I'm sure you could speak to a million stories of this policy happens on the federal level when states, eventually enough states do something and that gets the federal level's attention.

So, the battlefield then, we have to understand, is at the state level, passing this legislation to remove taxes on the metals, to make it easier for dealers to transact in a state for, make it easier for state treasurers to bolster their state funds with physical gold. All of this has to be done legislatively, mostly at the state level. And that's why I'm happy to say we're having such a big impact having done this for more than a decade. Like you said, 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, when we started this, there were very few state legislatures that were considering sound money legislation. Like this past year, it was more than 27 states that had introduced more than 65 pieces of legislation. So it's entire sea change from where we were just 10 years ago.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it's fantastic. I'm really glad you brought up that kind of strategic point because that's so important for people to understand because I think there's a lot of cynicism and kind of almost this negative view that I can't change anything because they've had that experience, right? They've called their congressman, they talked to the intern, they got the email back that had nothing to do with anything that they said. They feel like they're just banging their heads against the wall, and yet we really can have impact at the state level. And I use this anecdote often. I talked to a state rep in Kentucky, and this was a number of years ago, but it's still true today, and he told me he would go through entire legislative sessions and never have a constituent contact him about a specific piece of legislation. So when you motivate people and use the grassroots to push these bills and to call state representatives and state senators, it makes a difference. 30 or 40 phone calls is huge in their minds.

Jp Cortez: Absolutely. There are hundreds if not thousands of bills every single year that get introduced that are not even remotely considered. They do not receive a hearing. There is not an ounce of consideration given to thousands of bills throughout the country that just are printed on a piece of paper and then never thought about again. So being a participant, sending the emails, making the phone calls, mailing the postcards, as we at Sound Money Defense League and money medals make it very easy to do by signing up for our list, we give you all of the information, the key members of the committee, we give you their contact information. We even in many cases write out pre-written messages to make it very easy for people to participate in these battles. Yeah.

Mike Maharrey: It's really a fantastic grassroots driven legislative strategy and it's very, very effective. So speaking of effective, there was a pretty big victory in Wyoming, this, I guess it was last week technically. Tell us about what you got passed and what's been signed into law in Wyoming or actually it was signed into law. It was allowed to go into law.

Jp Cortez: And it was actually this week. It was late Monday night. Was it Monday? Okay, late Monday night, we received word that the government, or excuse me, that the governor, governor Gordon of Wyoming was going to let Senate file 96 become law without his signature. So little backstory on that, in some states, if a governor does not act within a certain amount of time, the bill becomes law without their signature. In other states, if a governor does not act within a certain amount of time, that is considered a pocket veto. He puts the bill in his pocket, he sits on it, and the bill dies.

That varies from state to state depending on the state's constitution. But in Wyoming's case, if the legislature passes legislation that the governor does not act on, meaning he does not affirmatively veto after a certain of days that Bill becomes law, whether the governor signs it or not. In this case, governor Gordon actually has a bit of a bone to pick with gold and silver having released a two page letter, first announcing that he was going to let the bill go into law without his signature, and then releasing a two page letter saying that the people arguing for this didn't make sense that gold is not a good investment because the only way you can make money on it is to sell it at a higher value. And he made sure to let the legislature know that if they had even dreamt about asking for a larger appropriation more than the $10 million that the Wyoming legislature approved, that he would have vetoed it.

So, he's already setting the stage for a future where the Wyoming legislature could very well decide, wait, we want more than $10 million, which is what this bill did. And there's a collision course now setting into play between the legislature and the governor should the legislature decide to increase their physical gold holdings through legislative action. But of course, we're talking about in the future, the state of play right now is incredible that Wyoming this week passed this legislation enacting a $10 million stockpile, a gold reserve for the state stored securely in the state, and Wyoming is just one of many. As we know, Utah right now currently owns just under $50 million worth of physical gold in their state, Ohio. It's paper gold. It's not the physical asset. But Ohio has exposure to gold in their teacher and their … firefighter and their police pension fund. That's about a billion dollars-worth of what they're holding there and exposure to gold.

And Tennessee too has affirmatively passed legislation to empower their state treasurer to invest in physical gold. So we hear, when we think about the macro state of the world right now, there's a lot of talk about de dollarization. There's a lot of talk about bricks countries. There's a lot of talk about gold-backed currencies. And yes, of course this is a trend that should be examined on the global level, but if you look inward and you zoom in a little closer, you'll find that it's not just adversaries of the United States. United States themselves are actively dollarizing. They're saying we have too much exposure to dollar denominated debt, much of which has real negative rates of return because of the high inflation rate. So states themselves are saying, wait, it's not that the United States federal government sanctioned us. It's not that the United States government is kicking us out of SWIFT systems, but I'm looking around and states are looking around just like every country in the world, and saying, “Wow, the Federal Reserve note is highly politicized, and at a whim, politicians could decide to cut me off of the global financial mechanism. So, maybe we need a money without counterparty risk.”

A money that is immune, or at least acts as a hedge against inflation, money that can be politicized or perverted to fight wars across the world or to grow a bloated bureaucracy. So states themselves are stockpiling gold. They're seeing the value in gold as a piece of their portfolio on their balance sheet, and also as a sound money hedge with the understanding that paper money on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of all paper money drops to zero. There is no paper money that has succeeded forever. Every single experiment in paper money has failed and states are mitigating themselves against that risk.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. Just a couple of weeks ago, president Trump ordered the US mint to quit creating pennies. And this really is a kind of a microcosm, or I guess more a symptom is a better word for it, of what the government has done to our money. The penny has become so worthless, it's not even worth having them anymore. I actually did, I looked up the math on it. If you go back to the 1970s when I was a kid, I used to take a penny and put it in a gumball machine and I'd get me a little handful of gumballs that would cost 8 cents today. So you can see just that from that, the impact that they're having on the money. Of course, of course you want to hold gold if you're going to hold money, you don't want to hold dollars when you're losing three, four, 5%, and that's the official number every single year. So, when the governor of Wyoming says it doesn't make sense, it's like what planet is he even living on to make a crazy statement like that?

Jp Cortez: Absolutely. And honestly, it's not just the governor of Wyoming. I'm sad to say to be sure there are treasurer's offices and governors across the country who are supportive of sound money, but there are other states where treasurers and governors are actively against this. In the case of Governor Gordon being one, in the case of, for example, in we actually in Wyoming introduced a legislation to do something like this, something that would've created a gold reserve for the state. And that was back in 2019, shortly after the passage of the original Wyoming Legal Tender Act that we helped pass in 2018. And back then when gold was $1,200 an ounce, we were laughed out of rooms. There were state treasurers and people in these Department of Revenues and Department of Finances in the state laughing at us. Why would we do this? This is a ridiculous wing nut thing. The government doesn't need to own gold. The government we're chasing returns doing this and that. So to own gold would be to misallocate our funds and look at them. Now with gold approaching $3,000 an ounce, people had a fiduciary duty to their state, to the people of their state, and they completely missed an opportunity to not only protect the state from inflation, but to have the state's balance sheet grow because of the immense growth when priced in dollars that the price of gold has experienced. So there's a lot of blaming that can happen if we wanted to go state to state and look at these legislators that scoffed or chose to ignore or just simply chose to vote down on these policies, but that may have been the case when we were just getting started eight or nine years ago, that's not the case anymore, where legislators themselves are the ones reaching out to me saying, Hey, I heard what you did in Wyoming or in Tennessee or in Wisconsin, and I want to bring that to our state. How can we do that? So, the entire approach, the psychology around sound money legislation like policies that affect sound money, but also an understanding of what money is and asking those questions for the first time in maybe decades about what is money, what makes a good money, what kind of properties do I want my money ideally to have? And those are questions that are now being asked in ways and with frequency that they haven't been prior to this moment.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. I have to point out that so many of these people who are the scoffers, these treasurers who turn their nose up, they're the same ones that are overseeing state pension systems that are bankrupt. So their performance review isn't necessarily so great.

So, Wyoming, that was a big win. What are some other states where you're seeing some progress and you think, Hey, we've got some legislation here that might be passed. Where are some optimism and some things that are moving forward and in those states, how can people help push them forward?

Jp Cortez: I think there are several really exciting prospects for the passage of Sound Money legislation here in 2025 moving forward. Again, we already talked about Wyoming having already passed that on that same issue on the Gold Reserve issue. More and more states are considering this in ways that they haven't previously, and the passage of Wyoming's only further incentivizes and encourages states to move forward with this. North Dakota currently is actively considering legislation just like this. In Wyoming's case, Wyoming's bill called for $10 million across state funds. In North Dakota's case they call for 1% of all state funds, which actually turns out to be a little bit above $10 million. Anyway, so the numbers are close, but Wyoming is, or excuse me, North Dakota is considering this legislation, and we had a great hearing there two weeks ago where the treasurer came out and said, yes, we can absorb a 1% hit. We haven't done this before. The reason is largely because we haven't been asked to, but this is a good idea. I'm not against the idea. So, in North Dakota it's very promising, and honestly, North Dakota is starting to blossom as a sound money state in the sense that not only are they considering this reserves bill, and not only do they not have a state tax, a state sales tax, so there is no sales tax on the purchase of metals, but they're actively at this very moment considering legislation to eliminate all tax liability on the metals as well. Primarily, that would affect capital gains tax people that would be subject to capital gains tax in the state if they enjoyed a gain. But as we know, sales tax and capital gains tax are the two primary taxes that impede use as money for gold and silver on the state level, and then the federal capital gains tax. Well, so North Dakota is actively considering multiple pieces of sound money legislation. Montana is as well. They're not considering a reserve right now, but they are considering removing all taxes of the metals.

In Maine, there was the policy drama of the year two years ago. You might remember that, Mike. It was a total novella with backroom dealings and a true struggle of power between Maine Democrats and the members of the party. And ultimately, a bill to end the sales tax on purchases of precious metals in Maine was killed by one vote. It failed by one vote last year, or excuse me, two years ago this year, the bill has been reintroduced. We had a great hearing before the taxation committee last week. I flew out to Augusta, Maine to participate in that hearing, and it looks like we have support there that we didn't have before. Unfortunately, a lot of times, and it shouldn't be this way, but a lot of times sound money policy happens along party lines.

In cases like New Jersey for example, that's obviously not true. In Wisconsin, that's not true. We've had success in chambers in places like Hawaii. So it's not entirely like that. But in the case of Maine, it tended to be a party line vote. However, this year after years now of talking to members of Democratic leadership, key members of the committees, Democrats in Maine, we've found that we have more support. People are more understanding. And I think a big part of it too is we have started tailoring the argument, at least in Maine to highlight the fact that gold and silver are not, it's not an asset bought by the wealthy fat cats.

If Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos wants to buy gold or silver, they're not walking into their local coin shop. They're probably going to their app, their E-Trade or their Schwab app and buying it electronically. There are tax advantage ways to do this and electronic ways to do this that the wealthy have access to. But people of low means, people of more humble means. These are people who don't necessarily know what a Roth IRA is who don't necessarily know what a required distribution is, but they do know what gold and silver is. And so to impose a sales tax on these people who simply want to preserve some of their wealth is regressive in that it affects the least fortunate among them financially. But it's also generally bad public policy. Maine, for example, is surrounded by states that have passed pro sound money legislation or have policies that promote sound money or at least don't impose regulations on sound money. So, Maine is another great example.

Kentucky is a great example where bills are being introduced to eliminate the sales tax to create a reserve and to sue the governor. You might remember from last year another great drama that unfolded on the sound money policy front where the legislature in Kentucky passed legislation to remove sales tax on purchases of precious metals. And then the governor said, I don't care. I will unconstitutionally veto this one item in the bill. Despite the attorney general coming out and saying that veto is unconstitutional, it is not valid. And the governors said, despite that he directed the agencies to continue taxing, continue electing the tax upon penalty or with penalty of legal action or financial penalties for not complying. So this year in Kentucky, we reintroduced the sales tax. We're going to reenact, we're going to repeal the bill we passed last year and reenact it, other legislation to create gold money, gold reserves for the state and other legislation that incentivizes taxpayers to sue the governor and his offices for a wrongful payment of taxes.

So, there's, on the sound money front in Kentucky, there's a lot of exciting energy there. In Alabama, there's a bill to reestablish or reaffirm gold and silver as legal tender for voluntary use. Alabama has long been a sound money state having passed now three pieces of sound money legislation since 2019.

So, we're very hopeful across the board, be it taxes, be it reserves, be it legal, tender status, whatever it is, there's so much more excitement around these pieces of legislation. And I think a big part of that is the work, the Sound Money Defense League is doing with the backing and help of Money Metals Exchange. But a big part of it is, I think is introducing a way for the grassroots to really get involved in a way that makes it easy for them in a way that lets them take control and really take ownership over this issue in a way that affects their lives.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's an important thing to emphasize, that really human action is the key to all of this. We can help facilitate policy changes. We can make a better playing field. We can take down the barriers that help maintain this Federal Reserve monopoly on money, but ultimately it's up to people. We need people to first get involved at their state level and find out what bills are being introduced and make those phone calls, send those emails. And again, that's how Money Defense League facilitates that. And that's fantastic. And then once those barriers are dropped, people need to start using gold and silver, start buying it, start investing in it, take advantage of that better playing field. And it's interesting because there's a law quote law that is called Gresham's Law, and it's the idea that bad money drives out good money in an economy.

And we saw this when the federal government took the silver out of quarters and dimes and half dollars silver dollars. And what happened was is that people hoarded that good money because it increases in value and then they spend the garbage money. I think we could actually reverse that Gresham if people started using sound money and started ignoring the Federal Reserve notes that are devaluing in their bank account and their wallets every single day. So I really want to emphasize that that aspect of human action to folks who are listening, as you have these policies put into place, take advantage of them and use them and hopefully as states, as they have the opportunity to expand and build gold and silver reserves, hopefully they'll see the value of that and then expand that as we move. And another point that I think it's important to make for folks that are listening is that that of the kind of step-by-step and plank by plank strategy that is going on in places like Alabama and Utah where we see these smaller steps that build on each other.

In Alabama, first they repealed the sales attacks, and then last year they got rid of the state capital gains tax. And this year there's new legislation to build on top of that. And people sometimes get discouraged because they want to see let's do it all and this one bill. And that's not necessarily the best approach. And that's one of the things I really appreciate about the way that you've approached this, is that you're willing to take those smaller victories and then build on them over time. And that's really important. So good job on the strategy. So when we get to the end, we will let people know how they can get involved with that. But before we close out the show, I want to talk about something that's going on at the national level, and that actually does involve gold reserves. We're talking about states that are establishing gold reserves, and that's fantastic. The US Government Treasury Department has gold reserves or so we think in Fort Knox, the US actually on paper has the largest gold reserves in the entire world, over 8,000 tons of gold. But there have been issues and questions about the, is the gold really there? Has the auditing process really been up to par and you have gotten involved in that issue and all of a sudden there seems to be some momentum in that direction. Can you talk a little bit about auditing the Fort Knox gold?

Jp Cortez: Absolutely. So this is actually an issue that the Sound Money Defense League has been a participant in for as long as our existence. So more than a decade now, we have championed this idea of auditing America's gold. There are very legitimate, credible questions, very legitimate questions being posed by very credible people about the condition and the status of America's gold holdings. To that end, as far as what we've done, we worked in 2019 and in 2021 with Congressman Alex Mooney from West Virginia on the Gold Reserve Transparency Act. This was a template that we created building on Dr. Ron Paul's former bill, I believe from the nineties. We took that bill and then we beefed it up. We improved it in places where it needed to be improved, and we created a bill that truly calls for a proper audit of America's gold holdings, something that hasn't happened credibly or comprehensively since at least the seventies.

And even then, you could argue that that was a made for TV movie. This is a theatric showing where they bring in a couple members of Congress in the media, they choose preselected pre-selected bars out of pre-approved boxes. They show them in front of the camera, and then they go on with their day believing or concluding that all of the gold is there, but that's not what we're looking for. Despite all that theatric, there was not a single assay. There was not a weighing, there was not a serial number matching. This was not in any way a true audit the way private deposit depositories would be subject to. So this bill that we have with Congressman Mooney previously was a great bill that created a great template, but any bill moving forward that is reintroduced needs to go further because of course, it's important to, we need to physically inventory the bill, the bars, we need to make sure they're all there.

On top of that, you also need a full accounting of the gold, any transaction that America's gold has been involved in for the last several decades, if that gold is there, to me, more interesting than whether or not the gold is physically there, is who owns it? Does the United States own it? If so, has it been swapped or leased or pledged or otherwise encumbered or entangled in another financial transaction? Does the IMF own it? The Bank of International Settlements, the World Bank, the Vatican, even? There is so much. There are so many legitimate questions surrounding gold holdings. Of course, they're seals. There are questions about whether the seals have been broken, whether the gold itself has been physically moved. And of course, Jan Newhouse is a gold analyst for money metals who has spent the last several years on this very topic.

And so, it's important. He wrote this great piece recently that was on money metals about making sure that Trump, president Trump, while we appreciate his newfound interest, he cannot be fooled by one of these fake audits like what happened in the seventies. And us as supporters of sound money and people who are sincerely interested in knowing what's behind those vault doors, we cannot suffice for even Trump's word saying, the gold is all there. Don't worry. I've seen it because at this point there's so much mystery and questions surrounding this that no amount of, Hey buddy, don't worry. It's there. I promise I've seen it. We'll, suffice from President Trump or otherwise. I think another big thing about the gold, whether or not it's there, and then questions on claims of the gold, is that the gold itself is probably not very high quality. A lot of that gold in America's vaults are coin bars.

These are coins that were seized and then melted down into giant bars that are largely unpure. These are 90 to 92% unpure. They're not meeting the global standards for gold. They're useless in the global market. They're not liquid. So any bill that comes forward in the future, it would be wise to include a purity requirement, a refining process over the next couple of years so that America's gold is of high quality, and in the case of America ever wanting to sell it or use it or pledge it or reestablish a money based in it, they would know they have high quality premium gold.

So, there are a ton of questions around this, and the truth is bars can sit in the same spot and change owners. There are people in this space who are saying, well, look, the America has done these little funny audits, as I like to call them for years, but is an audit of the seal, not of the asset within the box. If we were just auditing seals, then what's the point in even opening the vault door? The point is to audit the actual asset within the box. So there are people in the space clamoring over this gold has been audited credibly for many years, and that is absolutely not the case. Auditing the seals is not the same as auditing the metals. The assets supposedly purportedly in the box. And so we're very excited that Donald Trump, president Trump and Elon Musk and senators Ron Paul and Mike Lee have joined in the fray, have talked about how it's important that America know what's inside its vaults.

This is our gold as American taxpayers, that gold belongs to us, and we have a right to know that it's there and what quality it's in and who lays claim to it. So it's an exciting time on this audit issue. And I think that whether there's a lot of talk about revaluing gold to $8,000 an ounce, $10,000 an ounce, whatever it is, and on the other side, there's a lot of talk. You have a sitting congresswoman talking about selling America's gold holdings to buy Bitcoin, but the truth is whether you want to revalue the asset so as to monetize America's balance sheet or if you want to monetize the assets so that you can then sell it to pay down America's debt, whatever your goals are, the first step has to be a full and comprehensive audit. We do not know what's in there. We cannot base a future money off of questions and mystery. We have to know what's in those vaults.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. I have an accounting background, and so I know a little bit about auditing processes and what blows my mind. Again, there are these, I can't think of any other word, it's not a very kind word, but government shills that say, oh no, it's been audited. We don't need to audit it again, blah, blah, blah. This is like any standard auditing program is ongoing and it's comprehensive, and there's multiple layers to it. You don't just go look at it one time and then say everything's fine, and then 20 years Later you're like, no, we don't need, we look 20 years ago, it's still there. We're good. Jp Cortez: Right?

Mike Maharrey: It's incomprehensible. Yeah. The assumption in auditing always is that there's a problem, right? And you're seeking to prove that there's not, and there's this weird backward mindset that, oh, everything's fine, and it's incumbent on you to prove why we need to. That's just not how accounting and auditing is done in the private sector. Why do you think that there is this resistance to actually doing an audit? I mean, in my view, even if you're skeptical, you think, oh, all the gold's there. I'm sure everything's fine. What is the problem with going to check and look? Why is there this resistance?

Jp Cortez: I think for some people, the resistance stems from a reflexive acceptance of anything the government says. So, if a government audit says that this is the case, then this is the case, and these people aren't willing to do any second order thinking or anything past what is put in their face. So, I think that's part of it. I think that another reason for why someone might be against it is the reality that this could potentially expose that the United States emperor has no clothes. It's possible. And whether or not, I don't know. I have a hard time foreseeing a situation where Trump would allow that to happen, that the doors to be opened on camera and it to be exposed, that if there isn't any gold there that be exposed. But I think that that's a very real concern among people who are hesitant about whether or not we should open the vault doors.

But like I mentioned at this point, the toothpaste is out of the tube, the public confidence in the dollar and the American economy is shaking. You have done great reporting on the state of the American consumer drowning in credit card debt. If this country were to reestablish itself as a global leader, then opening those vault doors and showing that the sound money is in fact there, that America holds the greatest largest stockpile of the greatest monetary asset that has ever existed. If they open the doors and that is proven, then this could usher in a new age of public confidence in America's money, a complete pivot away from deficit spending and hyper Keynesianism to a more sound money or Austrian or free market perspective. So there are benefits to opening these doors. It, it's not all bad, but whether it's good or bad for the bankers or the financiers or even the people of America globally, this information has to come out.

There are countries all over the world, Americans here in the States that are making decisions based on this information, and that information has to come out and has to come out honestly. And then from there, when the dust settles, America can continue its path to continuing to make America great again and can do global dominance and can reestablish the US Federal Reserve note as a strong currency worldwide. Or they'll open those doors and they'll find that what was purported to be there is not there. And the fallout then would be probably tremendous. There's implications on gold prices, implications on gold miners, the entire industry. So certainly there are a myriad of possibilities that come from opening that door, literally opening that vault door. But one of sound money's most best qualities is its honesty. Its inability to be counterfeited or rather the difficulty for it to be counterfeited. A monetary system based in gold or sound money is one that's built in honest weights and measures. That's entirely the point. So answering these questions is crucial.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, very, very said. I really appreciate that. So where can folks go to find out about the work that is going on over at the Sound Money Defense League and even maybe get involved in their own state to find out maybe what legislation is pending in their states and maybe get involved in the grassroots work of getting this stuff passed?

Jp Cortez: So, you can find us at www.soundmoneydefense.org. You can find my contact information, my X is on there. If you live in one of these states where there are sound money policies that need to come and it need to happen in your state, please feel free to reach out. If you're looking for where your state ranks among the 50 states on Money Metals Exchange's website, they host something that we publish every year called the Sound Money Index, where we rank all 50 states by their sound money policies. So I encourage everyone to check that out on Money Metals as website, and if you see that your state is one of the states towards the bottom, please feel free to reach out. There have been projects, a number of projects that have been successfully passed that began with someone in the state reaching out and saying, Hey, I would like to bring this to my state. What can we do?

And then, of course, I encourage everyone to please sign up for our list on the Sound Money Defense League site. We ask for your email address and your zip code. The reason for that is because in our system, we segment every email by zip code so that when there is a legislative battle happening in your state, you will receive key information of crucial key members, the hearing times, the committee, the contact information, all of that. And all of that is dependent on what state you're in. So for example, we wouldn't send you action alerts for legislation happening in Tennessee if you live in Montana. So we're very direct. We make it very easy to participate. We encourage everyone to sign up for that list there.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. So there's your action item listeners! Go get on that email list, and you're not going to get spammed with a bunch of stuff. I mean, this is good information that you're going to want to have, that you can take action on and make your state, and ultimately the entire United States a place of sound money, and it is really what we need. It's like you said, it's honest money. And if nothing else, if you're a free market person, you say, I believe in free markets. There's nothing more important to a free market economy than having a free market in money and having sound honest money. So I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing and the strategies that you've taken. It's effective and appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day during legislative session to chat a little bit about what's going on, and hopefully we can get back together here in a couple of months and talk about some more victories on the sound money front.

Jp Cortez: That sounds great, Mike. Thank you very much for having me on. It's always good talking to you.

Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again.