Keith Weiner: The Future of Gold

Ben Nadelstein sits down with Monetary Metals Founder & CEO Keith Weiner to discuss how tariffs, monetary abuse, and shifting fiscal policies are reshaping the economic landscape while examining why gold remains a critical safe haven amid uncertainty. Key indicators, historical parallels, and the interplay between interest rates and gold prices are discussed to offer a comprehensive outlook for 2025

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Transcript

Benjamin Nadelstein

Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. My name is Ben Nadelstein. I am joined by the founder and CEO of Monetary Metals, Keith Weiner. Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Weiner

Good to be back.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Keith, for those who don’t know you, they might not know that you are not permanently bullish on the price of gold. Some of their analysts are always saying that gold is about to go to 5,000, 10,000, $100,000, and the dollar is going to be completely wiped out by next weekend. You’re usually a lot more patient when it comes to things like gold prices the value of the dollar. So first of all, why the change in your gold outlook report for this year, which people can get at monetary-metals. Com, and what do you see that other analysts usually miss?

Keith Weiner

I’m going to say There was many, many years, called the dark years of 2012 through 2018, where they thought I was a perma bear, actually. I got all kinds of hate mail and people attacking me online, and especially comment section. I’m a paid shell of the Fed and all these things, because every time the price of gold would blip, remember, this was the big bear market. After the price peaked in August 2011, it was basically down with a lot of zigs and zags along the way. Every time the price would blip, they would take out these little pictures of rockets taking off and whatever, and it’s going to the moon, it’s going to go to whatever, $5,000, $20,000, you name it. I could see in the data, I going to happen. So I would just say no. And anyways, I generated quite a lot of hate from that. But on the other end, a lot of people saw that I was right. Every time they said, This is it, it’s going to take off. I’m like, This is not going to be durable. Prices are going to come right back to where it was, maybe even go lower.

Keith Weiner

And so when I turned, so it wasn’t actually for this year, I turned basically post-COVID, a lot of them were saying, even Keith Weiner is bullish. I love that. He’s like, I had credibility of being the guy who wasn’t bullish during the bear market. What’s going on is that the monetary world, all you can see is more and more flaking you’re getting to be granted abuses, 360 degrees all the way to the horizon. There’s only more and more monetary abuse everywhere you look, whether it’s the Basca case countries, obviously, the Argentina’s, and Zimbabwe’s, whether it’s the so-called emerging markets, whether it’s the developed markets, all you can see is just monetary debacement, monetary abuse everywhere you look. As the Economist hours, and after this long, long, long, juice-stop artificial boom that we’ve had really post-crisis, post-2009, this boom is very long in the two, so you’d be expecting something anyway. And now with the rise of nationalism, trade wars, tariffs, that’s going to cause a lot of retrenchment, a lot of contraction. And that means a lot of debtors unable to service their debts, or at least for the moment, in a higher interest rate environment, that’s going to further put stress on that.

Keith Weiner

And sure, consumer prices may fall in that environment, but to own a dollar is to be a creditor. Who wants to be a creditor in an environment where debtors are defaulting? You got all that going on. And as I said, both on the monetary and on the fiscal side, international relations. And people turn to gold whenever there’s risk, when there’s uncertainty. You’ve got a US President, apparently threatening war against Canada? I just read a story that the French sailed a nuclear warship into Halifax Harbor to say they’re putting Canada under their protective nuclear umbrella. I mean, things are going on right now that, let’s just say, they weren’t on my 2025 bingo card. People turn to gold when there’s uncertainty. So demand every which way you look, and the data support it. When you look at the gold basis, you can see that the demand is robust for physical metal. It’s not just a small group of highly-levered speculators front running themselves, which is what happened with every blip between August 2011 and arguably 2018, 2019. This isn’t that. This is not your Uncle Fester’s, your head fake bull market. This is something quite different.

Benjamin Nadelstein

And why was it that post-2008, when there was also a lot of uncertainty, a lot of questions about stock markets, financial markets, other types of central banks, the US Fed, why was it that inflation was not as much of a problem there? We had this moderation, sometimes called the great moderation. Why did that happen and why did that affect gold prices in the way it did? Most analysts were predicting basically the exact opposite, which is that this freefall would continue, that price inflation for consumers would rise rapidly, and gold prices would, of course, shoot up, and basically the opposite happened. There was a great moderation, inflation remained low, and gold prices did nothing or stayed quite stable for a while. If those analysts were wrong post-2008, why was the COVID analysis right post-2020?

Keith Weiner

The great moderation, my understanding, actually applied to the 1990s and the oughts up to 2008, when the status of new We’ve fixed the business cycle with a great motivation. So post-2008, they created massive quantities of what people call money, which was actually an irredeemable credit called the US dollar. They’re mistaken to call the quantity of it supply. Supply should really refer to flows. They created increased stocks. The mainstream theory says that the price level is some rough proportion to the quantity of dollar. So if You should double the quantity of dollars, you should double the price level. Based on blind faith in this false theory, everyone just was obvious. Prices are going to skyrocket, and they didn’t. You had a lot buying a gold right after the first of these programs was announced in late fall. The gold price had a low of $670 or something like that in October, early November of 2008. I don’t remember the exact moment when that happened. After that, it was off to the races when they announced the first of these TARP or QE or whatever it was that was announced at that moment. That fueled a bull market that took us from 670 to almost $2,000 over the course of basically 2009, 2010, and half of 2011.

Keith Weiner

But the basis for that buying was skyrocketing inflation, or as they define as consumer prices. When the skyrocketing inflation, so-called, didn’t happen, then when people realized the whole basis for their trade was wrong, the whole thesis was wrong, then everyone sold and got out of it, and then nobody, that crowd didn’t want to touch gold after that. It was a long way down from 2000 to, what did we hit, 1040 or $1080 as a low point. Interestingly, the low post that run was the high of pre-2008 crisis, was a thousand bucks. Then that Obviously, that was the floor, and it’s risen rapidly since then. Now, post-COVID, most people think that the cause of skyrocketing consumer prices during COVID and post-COVID was the increase in the quantity of dollars. Because Milton Friedmann famously said, and wrongly said, Inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. He makes it clear, even though Milton Friedmann would be the first guy to get to dance, it can tell you that inflation isn’t the increase in prices, it’s the increase in quantity. In that quote, he’s referring to the increase in prices, and he’s saying that always and everywhere is the outcome of an increase in quantity, and the only thing that can cause a sustained and increase in the general price levels is an increase in quantity.

Keith Weiner

So again, And armed with this false theory, everyone was certain that prices were going to rise. Excuse me, that the price… I don’t know that people predicted that beforehand, but in the week of all the policies of COVID, prices did skyrocket, and everyone says, Well, obviously, this is why. Now, the first policy they did was lockdown. Now, you can’t ship and distribute goods. In a lot of cases, you couldn’t produce goods. They were shutting down meat packing plants all over the place. I remember writing an article that on the one side, you have farmers that are slaughtering animals that are ready for a market. They don’t want to keep paying to feed them. They were slaughtering them and then basically burying them in a giant pit because they couldn’t be… The meat packing plants were closed because when one guy working in a meat packing plant, when his cousin’s brother’s friend got COVID, they have to shut down this whole section of the plant. Those plants were closed. So you had a widening spread. The price paid to farmers for heads of cattle was lower than normal, and the price, obviously, offered to consumers for beef package in the grocery store was a lot higher because of lockdown, not because there’s anything to do with the quantity of dollars.

Keith Weiner

So it interrupted production, it interrupted distribution, it interrupted retailing. Then later, they had all kinds of fiscal policies. They were allowing people to stay in their apartments rent-free. You couldn’t evict. It was a moratorium. So people had more spending money. Then finally, when we unlocked, it was a whiplash that hit the supply chain, which still hasn’t really recovered. When you look at delays for certain kinds of orders of industrial goods, it’s much, much longer now than it was in 2019. So totally hosed the supply blockchain, all kinds of things. We also have more green energy restrictions now, and now we have a rapid increase in not only tariffs, but other trade war things where companies outlive in an environment of fear, uncertainty, They may have to write off their investments in factories in Asia, open factories here, big capital investments, big write offs, all these things driving consumer prices up with nothing to do with the quantity of dollars. That’s the difference today. But Most of that effect is probably already in. I now see that the Trump administration is boasting that consumer prices are softening again. We’ll see. But it’s not a quantity of money thing, it’s something else.

Benjamin Nadelstein

How How should investors think about this threat of tariffs? Should they bundle it under the idea of tariffs bring uncertainty to business, and therefore uncertainty is usually good for the gold price, bad for the dollar? Or is there an actual specific way that investors should think about when they hear the word tariff?

Keith Weiner

What tariff really does at its heart, and this is going to be politically controversial, I famously infamously try to not get involved in You know, Red tribe versus blue tribe, the European version of left versus right. A tariff is like a partial blockade imposed by country against itself to restrict, to reduce, or to make prohibitively expensive imported goods, depending on whether it’s 2%, 25%, 250% tariff. Problem number one is the uncertainty. Nobody knows what tariffs are coming. This is now blown up in the gold world massively with what that’s done to certain spreads of the gold world. But the same thing, it can be true with lumber and steel and aluminum. They’re talking about French wines now. Number one, as you have the uncertainty, you don’t know what’s coming next. How can you make an investment, whether you’re a company or whether you’re a retail investor, if you don’t know what the policy is going to be? Once you know what the policy is, as evil as that policy may be, at least it’s known. Now you know who the winners and losers are going to be. But until the policy actually descends, how can you make a rational investment?

Keith Weiner

People are going to tend to prefer cash. Ironically, that could boost the dollar relative to the other currencies, and people turn to gold, again, for reasons of uncertainty. I don’t know if I’m really giving advice more just to simply making the observation and offering a bit of a diagnosis, but that’s what people have to do until the tariff actually hit. So if there’s going to be a 250% tariff, or I hope not, on Canadian lumber, it might be a good investment to invest in US forest lands, provided you can find a place where the environmentalist will actually allow you to cut that timber. If you’re buying trees in a place where it’s just basically illegal or impossible to cut them, that’s going to be a useless investment.

Benjamin Nadelstein

So, Keith, an astute listener might notice that we are barely, if ever, We’re talking about central banks, and when we are, we’re basically saying they’re very impotent. This quantitative easing, it really doesn’t do what most people think it does. Where do central banks stand in your picture? Some people see central banks are buying gold, others see central banks are cutting rates. Do central banks matter in your picture, or are they really something off to the side that investors don’t need to worry as much about?

Keith Weiner

They definitely matter a lot, and especially to all the rest of your investments, because the price an income-generating asset is essentially inverse to the interest rate. If you really think interest rates are going up, you really want to reconsider at least the price that you’re going to pay, whether it’s a software company, whether it’s an industrial manufacturing company, whether it’s Timberland, that has some expected future cash flow that it generates. You have to discount all those future cash flows to the present. If I say, Here’s a dollar today, what’s that worth? It’s worth $1. If I say, I’m going to pay you a dollar in one year. What’s that worth? Well, something less than a dollar, you’re going to discount it, and you discount it by the rate of interest. If the interest rate is 10%, a dollar I’m going to give you a year from now is worth 90 cents today. So the longer the duration of the asset, if you have some factory or some Timberland that are going to generate cash flow for, let’s say, 30 years, it’s extremely sensitive to changes in interest rate. So what the central banks do is absolutely going to affect, and we see it right now with real estate, They hiked interest rates.

Keith Weiner

A lot of people said, not going to affect the price of real estate because there’s a shortage and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah In a 5% interest rate environment, you can’t sustain housing prices that were set in a 0% interest rate environment. We’re now seeing the volume of houses has fallen off a cliff, and usually, price follows volume. So yes, you absolutely have to pay attention to that. But my point is, it’s not necessarily true that consumer prices are going to follow the quantity of dollars, and it’s not true. We’ve done graphs in past Gold Outlook reports where we compare the gold price to various things that people always suppose, and over and over and over again, gold analysts, and all mainstream analysts as well, assume that there’s a There’s a correlation between the gold price and interest rates, whether real or nominal. They assume there’s a correlation between the gold price and CPI inflation. They assume there’s a correlation between whatever and there isn’t. One of the things that makes gold so great in the portfolio, it doesn’t correlate. It doesn’t correlate to your S&P stocks. It doesn’t correlate to your bonds. It doesn’t correlate to your real estate.

Keith Weiner

It doesn’t correlate to if you have whiskey or wine, to artwork or antique Ferraris that you own. Gold doesn’t correlate these things. That’s just the math of it, and there’s obviously reasons why. So yeah, central banks matter. They don’t have a linear and direct effect on the gold price that is often supposed.

Benjamin Nadelstein

So Keith, if gold doesn’t generally correlate with stocks or bonds or real estate or almost any of these other asset classes, how is it possible that analysts can look at the gold price and say, Oh, I think in 2025, there are some bullish factors that investors should be aware of?

Keith Weiner

Well, it all depends on the analyst and what The fact that I cite is bullish. If they say, Well, M2 money supply is going to go up by X, that’s not a factor that they should be thinking about. If they say that Indian imports are going to go up by this or mine production is going to go down by 3% next year. These are not factors. We’ve written many articles, How not to think about gold. We have a report on how not to think about gold that covers these things. But there’s other things you can look at. I’m talking about just basic monetary abuse, monetary fraud, monetary counterfeiting, where it’s not just that the quantity of dollars is going up, although it is, but that the quality of the asset that’s backing it is declining, and that’s causing people to reconsider how much dollars they want to own. Now, as the US government continues to abuse not only its credit, but also its trust, which is closely related, a lot of people commented that by seizing Russian treasury bonds in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that the rest of the world, you can’t trust US government.

Keith Weiner

I think that play was overstated. It certainly does wake people up to maybe there is a risk. But now, when you look at the threats that are coming out of the White House almost every day against other countries, especially friendly countries, formerly friendly countries, perhaps. But everyone has to reassess the risk. When there’s a reassessing of risks, there’s a rebalancing of asset mix, and gold tends to go up. I think that is a factor. Now, obviously, the data we love to look at is the basis. When we see rising price and rising basis, that means it’s not durable. Every time the price blipped from 2012 to 2018, you could see that pattern. I was like, This is not a good pattern. Now we see rising price and either flat basis or falling basis That says, yeah, there’s something durable here. So between that and just looking around at the macro picture, yeah, there are factors you can look at. It’s like, this is bullish. People have more reasons to buy gold and less and less reasons to hold the dollar.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Keith, there is a camp called higher for longer, which believe that interest rates will remain elevated. You seem to be going against that camp in the Gold Outlook report, saying you actually think that interest rates will fall lower and even potentially fast. So why the difference and why do you think you’re right?

Keith Weiner

Most people think a close corollary with the quantity theory of money, which is that if you double the quantity of money, you should double the price level. Close correlation of that is investors are going to demand higher interest rates if there’s higher inflation. Now, the first problem with this is that actually investors have been disenfranchised. They may want higher interest rates, but they actually don’t have a choice. It feels like sometimes I stand alone against the entire economics world with my thesis, but I’ll happily defend and die on this hill. People have been disenfranchised since 1933. You may not like the interest rate, but to hold a money balance, to hold a dollar in various forms is to finance the bond market. You can either buy dollar bills, like the physical paper printed notes. Those are Federal Reserve notes. That is a credit issued by the Fed. That is their liability to fund their asset, which is treasury bonds. If you’re holding paper cash, you’re financing treasury bonds, whether you realize it or not.

Benjamin Nadelstein

We’re going to break that one down. The Federal Reserve, they have these liabilities, which you and I call cash. They’re called Federal Reserve notes. They use those liabilities to buy bonds. That’s supporting the bond market. Even if all the cash itself is supporting- What any bank does is it issues liabilities to fund the purchase of portfolio of assets.

Keith Weiner

In the case of the Fed, the assets are generally treasury bonds. The more cash that people want to hold, the more the Fed gets this credit, and they plow it right into the bond market. You are financing treasury bonds indirectly through the balance sheet of the Fed, but your You’re absolutely buying T-bills and T-bonds. Or you could buy T-bills or T-bonds directly. The government has done a very effective advertising campaign on treasuriedirect. Com. Anybody can go and open an account and buy treasury securities directly. In that case, at least people realize that they’re financing the bond market. Then thirdly, people can have a deposit in bank account. Now, if you deposit in the bank, what does the bank do? Again, the bank is issuing that liability, which is your savings bank account or your checking bank account. What do they do? What does that liability fund? Bonds. So no matter how you hold dollars, if you hold dollars, They’re coming back to the treasury bond market. And so the interest rate is not set by the preference of the savers. That’s just not been mechanically possible. I’m not saying that people don’t believe that interest rates should be higher.

Keith Weiner

I’m saying the mechanism of the market doesn’t work that way. It’s like you’re watching an F1 race and you happen to be holding a toy Xbox racing control. You got the steering wheel, you got the pedals on the floor, and you think that the F1 driver is it into that curve a little too fast, and you press your toy break pedal thinking it’s going to slow down the car you’re watching live on TV. It’s not wired that way. It doesn’t work that way, even if you believe that it does. Now, nobody believes that about Xbox controllers, but everybody believes that about treasury markets. I don’t think that’s the case. I look at it and say there’s a number of factors of how the interest rate is set, but one of them is the demand for credit at higher interest rates. If you look at the business world, the corporate bond issuers, which are the mainstay of the broader bond market, it’s not just treasury bonds, but there’s a much broader bond market, where’s the demand for credit? Who wants to borrow more money to open more hamburger restaurants or more manufacturing plants at higher rates.

Keith Weiner

To have a theory that rates are going to be rising and it’s going to continue to rise durably, that means that as rates go up, the demand increases and rates go up again, and demand increases yet again all the way up. Now, that’s what happened from World War II to 1981, but not for the reasons that most people suppose. When people say that’s going to happen again now, they’re not taking into account that after 40 years of falling rates, marginal returns on capital to push down to near zero, there’s no demand for that credit as rates go up. In fact, demand for credit itself. Look at the ads for new cars. All the new car companies are saying, I shouldn’t say all, but many of them are still saying 0% interest for 72 months, even in an environment where T-bills are paying 4. 7%. This is costing them a fortune to make a subsidy. Why are they offering that subsidy? Because the volume of cars they would sell if they had to charge the market made of credit, the volume will fall off a cliff, and that would be a bigger loss to them than the loss they’re taking on the finance.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Keith, what historical financial period do you think mirrors what we might be seeing in 2025? Or do you think that’s really not a helpful framing? Instead, investors should say, Forget the past. I got to look at my portfolio today, look at the factors today. Or is there something that can say, You know what? In the 1970s, this happened, or in 2008, this happened, and here’s how I should position going forward.

Keith Weiner

But I definitely see analogies to 2008. But there’s all the and finance circles that history doesn’t repeat, but it rimes. You can see rimes of 2008. I mean, there’s too much debt. There’s too many debtors that can’t pay. In fact, that was the problem in 2008. How do we fix it? By forcing even more credit into the market. We’ve only made the problem worse, although we temporarily forestalled the crisis that was incipient at the time. There’s certain analogies to 1929, and now with tariff, boy, that’s a big analogous factor. Now, Taras didn’t happen in ’21. It was Smoot-Hawaii. It was 1931. It came a little bit later. You may see some analogies to that period. It’s going to be a rough economy. Whether the price of gold hits 3,500 or 4,000 or 5,000, maybe it’s beta ball, but I think we’re headed for a rough economy, and most people are going to find their standard of living is going to decline perhaps quite a lot.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Keith, a lot of people will say, No, what you don’t understand is that the federal government is working on pushing out waste, fraud, and abuse. This will actually lower the deficit. There will be some great increases in the strength of the dollar of our country because the economy will really kick in the high gear after we get rid of all this waste, fraud, and abuse. What do you say to that argument that you don’t understand actually standards of living are going to rise? Yes, there might be tariffs, but this is going to be greatly offset by efficiencies made in the government.

Keith Weiner

In a certain sense, who could be opposed to cutting waste, fraud, and abuse? Okay, it was just waste, fraud, and abuse. Yes, please cut that. Great. The question is, what’s the magnitude of that and what’s the magnitude of the tariff? Take lumber. Let’s suppose it’s a 25% tariff, leaving aside 250% as, Oh, my God, nobody’s that dumb. Twenty-five %, that means that, let’s say, you want to hire a builder that you have a piece of land that you want to build a house on, and you want to hire a builder. I think the lumber package, because you have the framing, which is 2 by fours and two by sixes, and you have the glue lams and other things for door headers and whatever, and then you have the roof truss package, and then even you have the plywood or the OSB seizing, all of which is reliant a number, if that goes up by 25%, that is a big chunk of the price of the cost of building that house. At the same time, the monthly payment has gone up massively because of higher interest rates. I mean, that’s going to decimate the building industry to the extent they’re already not being decimated by your higher interest rates.

Keith Weiner

You could see a lot of layoffs from all of the… Everybody related to new housing. That goes from the the architects, the civil engineers that design the subdivisions, all the way through the site foremen, the various crews that work for the subcontractors, and all the way through to the furniture stores and homes that store and all that, everybody is going to see this big drop in. Appliance makers who also are going to be facing tariffs not on lumber, but on steel and aluminum. That’s your dishwashers, your refrigerators, washer dryers, where it’s all aluminum and steel. How do you compare the magnitude of the damage caused by that to the good created by eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse? Anybody who offers a FASA, well, this is obviously greater than that. I took it a little disingenuous because I think you’re really going to do the analysis. Keep in your mind one thing. When people point to rising GDP, I always point this out. Gdp includes destruction Production plus production. Government fraud, waste, and abuse is additive to GDP. If you’re going to eliminate those things, you’re actually reducing GDP, at least in the short term. If the government were to spend substantially less, of which I’m skeptical.

Keith Weiner

I’ll wait to see if that happens. But if the government were to spend substantially less, that means lower GDP and all those contractors and vendors and employees of the contractor for vendors suddenly stressed to make their payments on their business loans, their truck, their house. Maybe they have to cancel cable TV. You need to have restaurants less, which now means restaurants find it harder and harder to surface their debt. But there’s a ripple effect to all this. And all this was great fun on the way up, and then on the way down, it’s great deal of pain. So I’d be careful with making those facile assumptions.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Keith, I want to take us into a lightning round. I’ll ask you some questions about overrated or underrated. I’ll ask you some questions that you can either answer as long as you want or you can even answer with one word. You ready to start? Okay. Overrated or underrated, which is the Fed’s ability to control consumer price inflation in 2025.

Keith Weiner

Overrated.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Next one. Who do you think might outperform in 2025, gold or silver?

Keith Weiner

Gold.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Next one. Another overrated or underrated. Do you see the role of central banks in moving gold prices as overrated or underrated?

Keith Weiner

Overrated.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Next one, which would potentially be worse for the price of gold in 2025? Low consumer price inflation or higher interest rates?

Keith Weiner

Neither. I don’t see them as having a big effect one way or the other.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Next one. New York, Dubai, or London, which gold market do you think is going to be the most important in 2025 and beyond?

Keith Weiner

Well, if we have a tariff on imported gold, that’s going to destroy the New York market. I wouldn’t necessarily answer that. Again, we were saying uncertainty earlier. Now I have to make a prediction based on predicting whether or not Trump is going to tariff imported gold. I got no way to make that prediction. Anybody watching this, your guess is as good as mine, so whether that’s going to happen or not. But with that cloud hanging over, that certainly can’t be good for increasing the adoption rate of the New York market. London is obviously historically where it’s been at, and it’s that way for a century or more than that. Dubai is rising in importance. London is probably winning.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Next one for you, which is overrated or underrated, the effects of AI on gold investing?

Keith Weiner

I don’t know that a lot of people They’re rating it highly, but as they were, it’s overrated.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Okay, next one, Keith. Fed cutting rates early or late, which do you think would be more bullish for gold?

Keith Weiner

I think when the Fed kept rates, that’s going to give a shot to gold, but how much that is going to really be a blip of noise versus just contributing to the overall trend. And five years later, you look back, you wouldn’t be able to tell from the graph. Where did that exactly happen? Yeah, it’s going to spur people. There’s an opportunity cost of gold, not with monetary metals, because we’re paying 4% right now. But if T-bills are paying 4% and you’re looking at buying gold and gold doesn’t pay a return, most famously, that 4% is tempting to people. When it’s zero, you lose that temptation. So yeah, you’ll probably get a little more gold buying at zero rates, at least an initial shot, and then it reaches a new equilibrium.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Next one for you. Overrated or underrated Bitcoin as a competitor to gold in 2025?

Keith Weiner

I can’t even say overrated, but that’s saying how many people think of it as a competitor. And I think the number of people who see it as a competitor is declining precipitously. So So maybe I say a little bit overrated, but I don’t think there’s that many people who think that anymore.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Last one in the rapid fire.

Keith Weiner

I had to run, but it’s scratched off lottery ticket.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Keith, in this Gold Outlook report, we have the macroeconomic outlook. We talk about Trump, we talk about useless ingredients, we talk about the debt, we talk about rate cuts, rate hikes, and of course, your gold and silver price predictions. So final question for you here. For someone who is reading the Gold Outlook report, they’re reading about debt, they’re reading about interest rate hikes. There’s a lot to see in this report. What’s, in your opinion, the most important indicator, if they could only watch one, that investors should be watching?

Keith Weiner

We’re looking to the gold price, the gold basis, which we give away for free every day on our website. Just click to see the graph.

Benjamin Nadelstein

Keith, final question for you. What’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange podcast?

Keith Weiner

What do you think drives the price of gold?

Benjamin Nadelstein

Founder and CEO of Monetary Metals, Keith Weiner. Thank you so much for coming on the show. For those interested in getting the 2025 Gold Outlook report directly into their inbox, head to monetary-metals. Com. Keith, thanks so much.