When paper currencies compete, gold and silver win

This episode explores our 2026 gold and silver outlook, where monetary competition, debt expansion, and currency debasement intensify.

Monetary Metals CEO Keith Weiner explains why gold continues to win the monetary race, how scarcity signals differ from price narratives, and what silver’s recent behavior reveals about real demand.

Watch for a grounded macro view of precious metals heading into 2026.

Follow Monetary Metals on X: @Monetary_Metals

Transcript

Monetary Metals:

Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. My name is Ben Nadelstein of Monetary Metals. I am joined by CEO Keith Weiner to talk about our Gold Outlook report for 2026.

Keith, let’s start with a broad macro outlook for the precious metals. Obviously, 2025 was a banner year for precious metals. We’re seeing an interesting bull run happening in 2026 with some slight corrections as well.

What is your broader outlook for the precious metals in 2026?

Keith Weiner:

You can’t use macro stuff to predict prices in a lot of cases because price change occurs with the margin. The macro stuff tends to be constant, or maybe slowly accelerating from year to year. You may have the general increase in the government’s debt, which is one thing, but my definition of inflation is counterfeiting of credit. When you call something a loan without a means or intent to repay, does that sound like US government? Sure does to me.

A greater and greater proportion of the debt is unpayable, not just because it’s a sheer quantity, although if you divide, was it 38 trillion dollars by the number of productive people in the private sector, you end up with close to a million dollars for every working adult, which is ludicrous in itself.

But there’s another way of thinking about what’s payable, what’s not payable, which is if you borrow money to create a good asset. I don’t know, let’s say you’re in the hamburger restaurant business, and there’s a growing town, population is increasing. You borrow a million dollars to open up a new hamburger store. That’s not an unreasonable thing to do because there’s an asset generating cash flow that will In today’s world, very little of it will actually amortize the debt, but at least service it, at least cover the interest payments on it and keep it money good.

The greater and greater proportion of what the government is calling debt doesn’t even have that. It’s only going to be paid by issuing more debt to pay the interest on the old debt. People are eyeing this stuff uneasily, and not just lunatic fringe gold bugs like us. But I mean, many interesting people are looking at this and eyeing it nervously. When you start to think about that, you think, Okay, well, what asset do I want to own that isn’t the dollar or some dollar derivative?

Then you come to this heavy metal with a four-letter word that is yellow and shiny and doesn’t tarnish. You have that going on. You have the rest of the world, people are buying gold hand over fist, mostly because they’re terrified of their own governments and their own central banks and their own currencies, but also an increasing unease with the US government and its policies, both trade policies and monetary policy. For all these reasons, not to mention little optional wars, police actions, I don’t know what the word is for Venezuela. America just swoops in and takes the President. Meanwhile, with fiery rhetoric about invading Greenland, crazy stuff was going on and people turned to gold.

It was a logical antidote. Anyway, That’s not… I mean, Greenland is new, and Venezuela is new, but most of the story is old, including the times when the gold price wasn’t rising. But that said, I think I’ll say we’re in a continued bull market in gold, which, as regular readers of my work know, is really just a mirror image of the bear market in the dollar. I don’t think you can measure the dollar in consumer prices. I don’t think you can measure the dollar in dollar derivative paper such as euros, pounds, yen, yuan.

I think you have to measure the dollar in gold. At the peak gold price a couple of weeks ago, the dollar had fallen to under 6 milligrams of gold. From 1,500 milligrams in 1913. That’s a long way down. That bear market continues for all these reasons, macro reasons that I point out.

We try to analyze the gold price, not in terms of price charts. I’m not necessarily a big believer that yesterday’s price action can always predict tomorrow’s price action. There are patterns, and sometimes they occur, but then the trend is your friend until the end.

Sometimes it doesn’t. Definitely not in terms of all the fallacies that we’ve gone over time and time again in prior year There are gold market outlook reports, the famous buyer fallacy, Hey, look, this central bank just bought gold. What about the 100,000 people who sold them the gold?

Were those 100,000 people wrong in the central bank? That’s one fallacy. Another is, what if gold moved from one corner of the market to the other? It moved into an ETF, which means it moved out of private hordes, or it moved out of the ETF, which means it moved into private hordes, or it moved into this country, which means it moved out of the other country. There’s an ocean of gold, and the fact that a wave splashed up on a shore somewhere doesn’t really tell you about the overall sea level.

Then obviously, conspiracy manipulation. These are all the ways we don’t try to analyze gold. What we’re interested in is the gold basis. That is our measure of abundance of the metal to the market, and the co-basis is our measure of the scarcity of the metal to market. We’re really interested in how does the basis move as the price moves.

All during the dark years, we’ll call it that, of the bear market in gold, right after it hit its peak price in August of 2011, when it had almost $2,000. After that, it was sideways the down market and the gold price from then until through 2018, arguably a bit into 2019. And then that was the turn. And all during that time, every time the gold price blipped, the gold community came out and said, Rocket, take off, blast off. They had pictures of the moon, pictures of rockets and all that.

And I’d look at the gold basis, and it was a no-brainer. I mean, When you understand the basis, you see rising price along with rising basis equals non-sustainable. And why do I say that? The basis is future price behind the spot price. So it’s a spread between the two. Now, those prices are really, really, really close. A lot of people say that physical is decoupling from paper. It’s so close, you need a very, very fine instrument. It’s like the equivalent of an electron microscope. You’re going to see the difference. If you plotted the future price and the spot price on the same graph, be the same line.

You need to zoom in and zoom in and zoom in like in an electron microscope level to see it. But anyways, you have that spread. This is future prices normally higher, although that can invert. This is spot price.

If you see the overall price is moving, so these are both moving up together, but future price is moving slightly more than spot and slightly ahead of it, so this spread is widening as the price moves up, it tells you this is where the bid is. People are buying paper and driving up the price of paper, and the arbitragers will then pull up the price of metal, but with a, we’ll call it slight reluctance, a slight lag and a slight reluctance. If you see that, it’s okay. This isn’t durable.

The people that are buying paper are speculators, and they’re doing so because they think they’re front running some real action that’s going to occur. But time and time and time again, when the entire gold community was posting pictures of rockets, I was posting the same old tired comments of Aragorn saying, The day will come when gold will be more than $2,000, but today is not that day.

I was saying, This isn’t durable. I said, We can measure the half-life of every gold blip that occurs this way. They called me permabear. They felt like I hated gold going up. I was like, No, it’s not that, guys. It’s just I see the data. Then I got, I obviously hate mail. I also got people who are saying, My analysis caused the gold price to go down. I’m like, You got to be kidding.

I’ve got a few fans and followers, but the gold market is billions of people worldwide. I don’t have anyone near that influence. Nice try, but you know. You could just see it. If you got armed with this one theory, you could see none of those moves were durable. I posted time and time and time and time again. It’s not going to happen, guys.

Now, certainly post-2020, there was a change. In the In the last two years, there was another change and a greater degree. Now, very often, we’re seeing rising price with either constant basis or even falling basis, particularly in silver. We have backwardation in silver right now. Actually, the March contract is… Actually, wait a minute. No, we’re on to the May contract now.

It’s backwardated a little bit. That’s when spot is above futures, not the other way around. That’s an indication of a real scarcity. When you see rising price and the basis is stubbornly not rising or even falling, it tells you the bid is on metal. People are buying the metal, not buying the paper. Then the paper will move with the metal, but the market changes character, and you can see how it moves. For those reasons, it’s a very long winded way of saying, The bull market is still on.

Yes, we’ve had our correction after the incredible… It wasn’t even a parabola in silver. It was almost more hyperbole or tangent. It goes vertical to infinity. Then that had to correct. We’ve had that. But I don’t think anything’s fundamentally changed from where we were in the first part of January.

Monetary Metals:

Keith, now that we’ve gone through a bit of the fundamentals in gold and silver, I want to talk a bit now about the fundamentals between the currency competition happening and the monetary competition that we discuss in the Gold Outlook report.

We discuss, of course, gold and silver winning this monetary competition, as opposed to a currency competition, where we argue that the US dollar has basically dominated this currency competition. Do you think that that will continue to play out in 2026, this bifurcation between a winning currency in the US dollar and a winning monetary asset in gold and silver?

Keith Weiner:

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re not the only ones saying that. I mean, Brent Johnson with his dollar milkshake thesis, has been saying that.

It’s not saying price of gold is going to go down. I think he has less conviction than we do that. It’s likely to rise. Within the paper currency world, all the paper currencies are failing. That’s why gold, particularly gold, I think less so silver, is winning the overall monetary competition races, as you say. But within the currency system, there are different decks on the Titanic.

If the ship is slowly sinking, you don’t want to be on the bottom deck, you want to be on the top deck, and the top deck is the dollar. Now, something very interesting is occurring relatively recently, and that is the rise of I’d say, true global acceptance of dollar stablecoins, particularly Tether. But there’s plenty of others, and each country may have its own preference or regulation that allows one but not the other. That is going to give the masses who previously had been trapped in these horrible falling currencies an option to hold dollars. What does Tether What do they do with it while they going to buy treasuries?

Globally, we’re going to see people coming into the dollar, coming into the treasury. It doesn’t necessarily mean lower interest rates for treasuries, but it means lower local currencies against the dollar. I don’t know if 2026 is the year where this happens, but you’re going to see peripheral currencies failing, hyperinflating, going away, and then those countries will dollarize or maybe euroize. Euro is like the second highest deck on the ship after the dollar, but it’s a distant second.

The top deck has got quite a lot of height on it. Also, That’s the second one. Within the currency complex, the dollar is failing slowest and failing last. Yes, it’s going to win, if you want to call that, or maybe prefer to say lose the race to the bottom. They’re all racing to the bottom, and the dollar will be the last one, the fat boy huffing and puffing as he finally crosses the finish line after everyone else is already there.

Of course, this is the finish line to hell, so maybe you want to lose that race. But all of that said, these things What happens in this low motion. It’s really tempting to think, Okay, just because I’ve discovered this theory today, or it happens, they call it first-year medical student syndrome.

People go to medical school, and each week, they study a different disease. Then have the students in the class think, Oh, my God, that’s exactly what I have, by pure coincidence. Then the next disease, and the next, and the next. You study this and you think about it and you think, Oh, my God, this is going to happen really fast now that I know about These things play out really slowly, and it’s not going to happen instantly by any means. It’ll take a long time. That’s a good thing.

I mean, currently, collapse is a calamity. People in other countries and other times have lived through it. It’s a calamity. You can have violent socialist revolutions, fascist revolutions. A lot of people getting killed. The ones who survived were impoverished. There’s been plenty of stories out of Weimar, Germany, of people who their entire life savings went up in smoke over the course of a month or two, became worthless, not even They threw the paper in the fireplace to burn it for heat. Anyway, the point being, this is a slow motion drain rack, and don’t expect… When it finally moves, it It can move very abrupt, but it can take a long time before it does.

Monetary Metals:

I want to ask you now about the gold market. Does it matter to you who the buyers are in this gold market, whether it’s retail investors in the West, whether it’s central banks around the world, whether it’s crypto stablecoin tokens that are buying gold? Does the actual fundamental buyers or the structure of the buyers matter to this gold market maybe more than it has before?

Keith Weiner:

That’s an interesting question. Nobody’s asked me that, and I’m not sure I have read any analysis about that directly as such. I think it does because if you’re trying to figure out where the gold price is going to go next, you want to understand who the marginal seller is likely to be. I talked a lot earlier in our conversation about if the buyers are really buyers of paper, they’re buying futures.

There’s several reasons why that’s not sustainable, but anybody buying futures is a short term speculation. It’s a bet, and either you close the bet when the price goes up and you take your profits, or you close the bet when the price goes down and you hit your stop loss. It’s not a durable position. In.

And so any buying that occurs there is going to be followed by selling in short order. And that’s not going to lead to a durable price move. On the opposite extreme, as somebody who buys, let’s say, a piece of jewelry, life circumstances might change, but that’s a person whose intention is to hold for years to decades, probably similar to a Western stacker who buys gold eagles.

They’re not planning on selling it anytime soon. That’s going to disappear into a safe or buried under the floorboards or wherever it is to be able to put this stuff and not to come out. You have buying what steps up, and then no selling. So, yeah, that does matter. The thing with central banks, depending on which central bank, everybody celebrates when they buy.

A lot of people in the gold space may not know. Central banks also sell sometimes. But the gold bugs don’t trumpet the news that such and such central bank is selling. These central banks are buying and selling for a variety of reasons. And it can be to manage liquidity, it could be managed. They think the gold price is going to go up. There’s 100 reasons of what it could be. And in some cases, it’s a very durable purchase. In other cases, it’s not. And then if it isn’t, then it didn’t really help you.

Monetary Metals:

And, Keith, I also want to ask you about the difference between central banks owning gold as a reserve asset, something to try to maybe buy their currency in times of crisis, retain wealth or retain value for their maybe sovereign wealth fund, versus a settlement asset where countries trade between each other. Maybe they have tariffs against one or the other.

Instead of settling in the dollar or some other currency, they want to settle their balances net in gold. Do you see gold transitioning from just a reserve asset for these central banks to a more settlement-based asset for these central banks?

Keith Weiner:

I think settlement is one of those things where nobody wants it, but they’re going to end up there nevertheless. There’s all kinds of stuff written about game theory and how to look at the dollar and the world and all these things. There’s no other paper currency that really works. Amongst the bricks, everyone talks to a bricks currency, but the bricks have even less in common than the European countries.

You talk to a Frenchman, you talk to a German, you talk to an Italian, there’s no such thing as a European. They don’t think of themselves as Europeans. The Frenchman say I’m French, the German say I’m German, the Italian would say I’m Venetian, or Roman, or Milanian.

Even within Italy, they don’t necessarily think of it as I’m Italian. When they have tried, like Russia and India, India would buy oil from Russia and then pay in rubies, and Russia played along with it, probably for the publicity value, because they want to show that they’re hurting the dollar. Then the finance minister of Russia came out, and this is already what, three or four, five years old, maybe when this happened, came out and said, We’re going to stop that.

We don’t want to accumulate a pile of useless Rupees. That was his way of putting it. These currencies, these capital controls, which means there is no market for Rupees outside of India. The marginal utility of a Rupee is nothing compared to the marginal utility of a dollar. Dollars it is, and they have a low-paid relationship with it. They crave the dollars for what it does for them, and they despise it. Russia obviously despises the dollar because they’re very angry with the US right now, and that’s how it goes.

They would love another paper currency given to work, but no other paper currency works. Some of them may realize that I meant and they must behind closed doors. It’s pretty obvious. Then what do you turn to? You can’t settle in bipartisan trade. Nobody wants the rupee, nobody wants a Ruble, nobody wants to Taiwan. I mean, the Chinese people are desperately trying to dump the Taiwan, so they impose capital controls that lock their people in because otherwise, they would all flee. What do you turn to? Well, the thing is, all these central bankers, they’ve all gone the same economics schools, whether it’s Harvard, MIT, et cetera, et cetera, or Cambridge, Oxford.

They’ve gone to the same places. They’ve gotten the same Keynesian propaganda or monetary propaganda, which is all that different in my book. They don’t really think gold should be anything. They don’t want it to be anything. And yet if buyer were offered to pay gold to the seller, it will be accepted, no questions asked. I think we are moving towards a place where they’re going to hold gold because you can say we’re paying in Rupees all you want, but if there isn’t redeemability, if that’s not going to really be a gold payment at the end of the day, then nobody wants the Rupees.

If you say that we’ll redeem it for you, the foreign central bank, at this fixed rate of Rupees to gold, They’ll do that as long as you’re honoring your word. And if you don’t, then it’s like, okay, you know what? Screw the Rupee. Just put the gold right here on the barrel head and we’ll have a deal. And so, yeah, I do think that’s going to happen, but nobody wants it.

Monetary Metals:

Keith, now I want to ask you about silver as compared to gold. Central banks generally don’t buy silver as a reserve asset, and yet silver has seen quite a bull run in 2025 as well as 2026. Talk to us about the difference between gold and silver. Obviously, silver might have more of an industrial component to it, but yet is still a monetary metal. Where does CEO Keith Wiener see the silver story compared to gold going forward?

Keith Weiner:

Ever since the founding of this company, silver has been going down against gold. We hit a low in silver of, what was it, 126 to one of gold against a long term, say, post-World War II average, or something like 52, I think. Silver worth less than half as much against gold as it had been, and therefore the question… You have to think about the question, is silver effectively demonetized? Not because the government declares it. Government doesn’t have the power to make money into non-money. They can prohibit you from using money, but they can’t make something into what it isn’t.

But because did the market demonetize it? You had to grapple with that question. If not in 2012, when Monetary Metals was founded, 2016, 2017, 2018, you had to grapple with that question. Like, okay, the price action is showing maybe something, right? Then, boy, did it come back with a vengeance in the latter part of 2025 and the first part of January in 2026, Kim screaming for vengeance. Speaking of 126, it hit about 126, not 126 to one on the gold-silver ratio, but the price of $126. And even though that has crashed, it’s $80 as of today that we’re having this conversation.

I don’t think it’s been demonetized, but I guess this is a partial answer to your earlier question, what if it isn’t central bank buying? Does that invalidate it or whatever? No, because this is a lot of other people buying. Now, at the moment, I don’t believe… Now, post-crash, I think it may be different, but up until the crash, It was not Western stackers for a variety of reasons. I mean, in general, I think silver stackers are working people, right? I mean, if you’re a skilled tradesman, let’s say you’re the shop foreman in a machine shop, and your wage is 50, $60,000, I don’t exactly know what the wage is.

I’m sure somebody’s going to send a hang mail saying, That’s wrong. It’s at least $71,000 or whatever. But you want to take 10% of your weekly wage. You’re putting between $100 and $130 into metal. It’s not efficient to do that with gold. It’s such a small amount of gold that’s a premium on a per ounce basis. It’s off the charts. It’s not 5%, it could be 40%. There’s a huge loss. When you go to sell it, you’re going to forfeit all that premium because that’s going back to the melt.

So Silver is a lot more efficient economically. If you want to buy a hundred bucks worth of silver. Up until in January, that was a small handful of coins, and a silver coin is a decent size chunk of metal. Of course, that little fleck of gold would be a gram floating in a little window in a plastic card with a little plastic window in it, and then that chip of gold would be floating in that window.

Not very emotionally satisfying. It’s hard to say you’re stacking, really, when you basically get these credit card-size things and put them in slots in a shoe box or something, you can’t touch the metal. It’s hard to even see it. You need to find detail on it. And so those people turn to silver.

And I’ve been saying for years that working people in the West have been under a lot of pressure, downward pressure for jobs, downward pressure for wages. It has not been what they call the K-shaped economy. People that have the asset owning class and the laptop warrior class done pretty good, and people that drive trucks and bend things out of steel or cut things out of wood or whatever for poor concrete, not so much.

For the other reason is that the West was really sitting on the sidelines for the last year and a half of this incredible bull market in metals. They just weren’t in Gold as well weren’t really buying it. Now, into the second half of 2025, I’d say institutions were increasingly buying it, but not the retail stackers. They were really sitting on the sidelines.

Now, who was buying silver? Well, we know, because we talk to our customers, that there’s a substitution effect in India.

A lot of Indians, as the gold price goes up, and the wage is not going up in the last level in India, which means they can afford less and less gold for the same pile of Rupees, or even if they had dollars, they’re getting less and less gold. To some degree, the jewelers compensate by having smaller pieces of jewelry that are also more hollow and thinner is one way to deal with it. But even that has a finite limit, and you can’t make it any thinner than a certain amount. It crumples like foil. There’s a substitution of silver. And now you can go back to a full, chunky, heavy piece of jewelry.

It’s not gold, but if you’re working for $5 a day, the silver might be what you get because you can’t afford the gold anymore. And so I think that’s going on. And I think in other parts of the world, the outlet is buying a silver as a substitute for gold for a variety of reasons.

Monetary Metals:

And what about this argument that silver is really going to become an industrial metal over time as things like gold tokenization, make fractional gold more realistic with smaller spreads, and maybe the argument for having silver as a monetary metal as opposed to an industrial metal?

What would we have to see for that to be true?

Keith Weiner:

You’d have to see the price of silver being below marginal cost of production. Then, forget all the reports of this many ounces of silver produced and this much consumed. If the price is below, then you know it’s being consumed and not being replaced. Now, silver is a little bit more difficult to analyze in that way because most silver produced as a byproduct of something else.

We financed a mine called Bunker Hill, and silver is produced as a byproduct of lead and zinc production. That’s not uncommon. Those metals are silver. It’s coincident with a lot of other metals. You should see the market devaluing it, which means all the people that are holding it are just selling it, and they’re not selling it to another person who’s demanding it as money. They’re selling it to an industry who’s going to consume it.

If that happens and continues to happen, then it’s being demonetized. I’m sure to some degree that happened during those dark years. But now, as I say, it’s come back with a vengeance. Just imagine if you’re an engineer at a solar a small company, or you’re an engineer making automated relay switches for washing machines, or you’re an engineer at a antimicrobial countertop company, and you’re putting X amount of silver into the countertops.

You’ve just been called to a meeting. You’re like, Oh, I don’t normally get invited to the boardroom. The board is going to meet with me. The directive is, Can we still produce the same product but cut the amount of silver by 25%? This is thrifting in economics, where the cost of the ingredient goes up, the engineers are told, Reduce the amount. Exactly what should happen.

The price goes up, and demand falls, and supply rises. The marginal silver mine will come online and supply more silver, and the marginal consumer of silver will reduce your consumption, and then you find a new balance, obviously, at a higher price. I don’t think it’s been done at Z monetized.

One thing I can say is that I gave a talk a few years ago, talking about some theoretical point, probably. Then one of the co-panelists was Philip Newman of Metal Focus, a friend of mine, incidentally. He was looking at silver and saying, Okay, how do you analyze silver? If it’s an industrial ingredient, let’s try to compare silver to to crude oil and to iron ore and even copper. Let’s see what the correlation is. He had a series of slides that showed not really correlated, just isn’t.

Now, let’s look at it compared to gold. Dings. Highly, highly correlated to gold. So yeah, there’s a ratio of gold and silver that can move up and down. It’s like your basis can move up and down, but spot and futures move together in almost lock-stepped.

And gold and silver move together, all the big moves are both of them, especially over longer time periods. It’s not within a day, but within a couple of years. And so, again, if it’s trading like gold and not trading like copper or aluminum, industrial or monetary. Obviously, monetary.

Monetary Metals:

Keith, now I want to get into a rapid fire section with you. I’ll ask you questions from all over the map. You can answer with just one in a word or as long as you’d like.

What headlines should investors be most suspicious of in the gold and silver space in 2026?

Keith Weiner:

Sun’s going to rise in the east, therefore gold’s going to go up. And equally, sun’s going to switch and rise in the west, and therefore gold’s going to go up. So all the headlines that say gold’s going to go up, and then you look at it and you’re like, well, either the claim of fact is not true or the alleged logical connection between the two. So we’ve looked at if gold moves from one corner of the market to another, does that make gold go up?

We’ve looked at consumer prices going up or down. We’ve looked at the quantity of money, M₀, M₂. We’ve looked at interest rates, Fed funds rate, 10-year treasury, real interest rates, like tips. GDP, we’ve looked at all these various statistics, they don’t correlate with the gold price over long periods of time.

They can get into a trend where they’re moving together. There’s been times when the stock market goes up, the gold price goes up. Then there’s been times when the stock market goes up, the gold price goes down, and vice versa. But they’re not durable. You look over a 20, 30-year period, it’s just not true.

Be very careful of statistical flight of hand, where somebody shows you a graph, and look, these two numbers are going together. Yeah, but they chose the start point of the graph, and presumably it’s through present day. But they chose the start point of the graph to cherry-pick that moment when these two things are moving together. If you looked at the previous 30 years, you find uncorrelated. Be really wary of that stuff.

Monetary Metals:

Next one for you, Keith. How important is the new Fed chair going to be for gold prices? Obviously, Fed independence has been a big story in the news in terms of gold prices.

How important do you think the new Fed chair is going to be to the gold market overall in 2026?

Keith Weiner:

That’s an interesting question. In general, the Fed has less power, even over the dollar, than most people assume. It sets up a dynamic, a resident system with positive feedback loops. That drives all sorts of crazy behaviors. But the Fed isn’t directly, day to day, in control over that stuff.

Even number two, we’re in a long-term downward trend in interest rates. Interest rates are falling, falling, falling. Every once in a while, the Fed, for whatever reasons, decides they’re going to try to pretend that’s not so and hike interest rates, and they hold it up until they see unmistakable signs of, Forget recession.

Fed doesn’t care about GDP as such. It cares about the solvency of the banking system. When the Fed starts to see defaults rising, it starts to threaten Banks, that’s when the Fed will jump in and act. The only way to act is to lower that interest rate back to where it needs to be. Whether you have an old chairman or new chairman, which new chairman you have, isn’t going to change the fact that the trend is down. It may change what science he’s looking for before he’s reversing it, how to…

I mean, the Fed is going to react too late, probably, but when it reacts too late, how much too late, depending on which chairman you have, that thing. But Psychologically, it can be a factor in the market, and that is… I like to put it this way. The idea of an irredeemable currency that’s borrowed into existence by a central bank is like the third worst monetary system you could possibly come up with.

The second worst would be one where the borrowing is controlled by the legislature rather than the central bank. The first one as one that’s that way printed by the chief executive. If people think that the chief executive is now directly in control of the Fed, that can accelerate essentially the decline of the dollar and the substitution of gold, at least when it comes to savings.

The dollar is still the transactional medium because that’s what’s financing the most productive enterprise. If you’re a factory, if you’re a farmer, and you’re debt off your eyeballs in dollars, you must produce as much of your product as you possibly can, dump it on the dollar bid to get as much dollars as you can to service your debts.

That’s not going to change, regardless of who’s chairman, whether people think that The President’s now directing the printing press. Not going to change, but price has changed. It’s a margin. It’s the marginal saver who says, You know what? I’m going to buy some gold because I don’t like the fact the President.

Even if you like Trump, you got to think, Is it really good for the President to be able to direct the printing press? To what purposes might that power be directed? Would that have a tendency to be overused? It’s like Lord of the Rings, my favorite movie, the quote. Denethor, clearly lusting after the Ring.

He says, It should be brought the Gondor and we’ll put it deep in the vaults as if shallow in the vaults was any different. Not to be used except at the utmost end of need. Brilliant screenwriting and brilliant acting by, I forgot what the guy’s name is, played Denethor. Giving the President the power to print is… Although he would say he would only use it at the utmost end of need, when you watch Lord of the Rings, you know what Denethor means. What he means is at the absolute first instant, That ring is going on his finger.

I mean, no doubt that he’s becoming a race, and he’s going to hand the whole thing over to Césaron. If people perceive that. I don’t think it really changes the monetary policy too much in the short term, but the fear that could get a lot of people to buy gold who weren’t otherwise gold people.

Monetary Metals:

Next one for you, Keith. Let’s talk about the BRICS countries. I want you to tell me, in your opinion, you get to go short one country and long another country.

In the BRICS, who would you short and who do you short and who do you long?

Keith Weiner:

I think I would long Brazil is the obvious one, I think. And then who do you short? Russia and India would be the no-brainers. South Africa might be the no-brainer. So therefore, I’m going to be on short China.

Monetary Metals:

Okay, Keith, next rapid fire question for you.

Keith Weiner:

I could just see this. This is going to come back. My arch enemy is on Twitter 10 years from now, we’re going to have this little clip of this video, and they’re going to be like, that you at @realkeithweiner?

Because whatever Brazil went down, the China went up. But yeah, there it is.

Monetary Metals:

Yeah. Follow us on Twitter @realkeithweiner, @monetary_metals. Okay, next quick rapid fire question for you. Let’s talk about debt levels and debt service cost.

How important do you think this is going to be in 2026, the level of debt in the United States, and of course, the service cost of that debt in the United States?

Keith Weiner:

I mean, there’s this saying, it’s funny. All the Bitcoiners call me a boomer with my shiny rock, and I’m like, It’s not a rock, it’s a metal. I’m not a boomer, I’m Gen-X. But there’s a boomer saying that has always rubbed me the wrong way, but it’s very popular among boomers, and that is, It’s not a problem until it’s a problem. That describes the debt level, I think, in a nutshell, is no one’s focused on it, and therefore, it’s not a problem.

But like Wily Coyote running off the edge of a cliff. Until he looks down, it’s not a problem. That’s like cartoon physics. I used to develop video games. I should talk about that one of these days. There’s all kinds of wacky things that happen cartoon physics that are not real. One of which is, if you don’t look down, you can run on thin air, at least in the Wily coyote universe. I think that was true for Bugs Bunny, too. Anyways, it’s not a problem until it’s a problem. That service is the thing everybody’s focused on. I always say the same thing, which is, Oh, don’t worry. The interest rate is going to resume crashing again.

As the interest rate goes back to zero, then that service will no longer be a problem No, I don’t think debt service is going to be an issue. The overall debt level absolutely is an issue, but it’s not an issue until it’s an issue. I don’t think 2026 is the year. Yes, that will be an issue one day, but today is not that day.

Monetary Metals:

Keith, thanks for that rapid fire answer. Next one for you. I want to talk about central banks in different countries. Which do you think is going to be the most important country to the gold story in 2026?

Keith Weiner:

Monumentary Metals has a a lot of activity going on in UEE. Partly, I’m cheering for UEE, but I don’t have any specific knowledge to say that, yeah, it will. I think this is like What’s the old adage about it? It’s not the watch pot is the one that doesn’t boil, but it’s going to come out of that field. It’s going to be a country that you’re not really thinking about right now.

Suddenly, they’re going to do something like, Holy cow, they just did what? I don’t mean opening up a government-owned depository. I don’t mean passing some parliamentary measure that says, Okay, are we now going to withdraw our 17 tons of gold from the US Fed and repatriate it.

That’s not a move to the gold standard. For anything, it’s a move away from it because you’re removing the utility of that gold and you’re storing it in your country that has no liquidity and no gold market, you know what I’m speaking of. It could very well be an African country, keeping my theme of countries that people aren’t looking at. The reason is, amidst the corruption, which is absolutely lamentable, and amidst the brain drain that they all face, and just heaps of domestic problems, some of them are trying to find something that works.

I mean, while the populations are generally given smartphones, and on your smartphones, you can run apps using whatever. It may very well be that one or more of them ends up adopting gold through something like that, a gold fable coin, perhaps, or some gold pseudo monetary system like M-Pesa did for paper currencies.

It could be something like that because the need is so great. In the US, for all that we put down the Fed, we put down the dollar, and the dollar is deflating constantly or inflating, whatever you want to call it, the dollar works very well as a transaction medium because it’s basically frictionless, and it works okay as a savings vehicle. You don’t just keep it in a bank account, you have to put it into something.

But if you do that, people that save in dollars have something after 30 years. That’s not true in Rupees, that’s not true in Lira, that’s not true in Kenyan shellings and Ghana, Sedi, and Papua New Guinea, what is it called? The Kina, I think. It just isn’t.

It’ll be in some place where the problem is so desperately, horribly bad that they’ll try gold because what the hell.

Monetary Metals:

For those who are interested in reading the full Gold Outlook report for 2026, they can get that in the description below. Keith, last word for you.

What’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange podcast?

Keith Weiner:

I was talking on another podcast about this question. People are pretty angry that COMEX increased margin requirements. The reason why I bring this up is that people say that the demand for metal is strong, and on the futures exchange, they call it the climax, I think is their term for it, because that’s where all this paper shorting is going on.

If that were true, and the use of the futures market was to suppress the metals price somehow, and now the COMEX makes it harder to have a futures position, it forces a lot of people to close their futures positions.

You’d be forcing all the shorts to close, which would cause the price to rise. Number one, are you curious about that? Then number two, are you curious that everybody who says that it’s the crime accident is used to short are also at the same time angry about the increase in margin requirements?

People aren’t curious about these things. I guess my question is, are you curious about this? What do you make of these things?

Monetary Metals:

Keith Weiner, thank you so much for joining the podcast. Again, for those interested in getting the full Gold Outlook report in their inbox, check out the link in the description below. Thanks again.