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Here's How CROOKED Bankers Manipulate Gold Prices to Keep You POOR — Kirk Elliott Interview · Man in America Podcast

• 1:33
  Seth Holehouse: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Man in America. I'm your host, Seth Hullhouse. As you know, I've talked a lot about precious metals, gold and silver. We've been following them. We've been tracking them, but not just gold and silver.
• 1:44
  We talked about inflation, the global economy, fiat currency, how it all fits together. And if you're like me, you've probably been wondering, okay. When is this shift happening? You know, we've been talking about the the dollar and the death of the dollar as it relates to BRICS nations and then de dollarization and how what will coincide with that is the attempt to bring in this central bank digital currency, but also a sharp rise in the prices of commodities, right, which we've already seen over the past couple of years. I mean, how much is a bag of rice now versus two years ago?
• 2:18
  But something interesting has happened over the past couple of days is that gold in particular has hit literally record highs, so over $2,100 per ounce. So record highs for gold, and silver has also been really jumping. It's up over $25 an ounce. At the same time, we're seeing these discussions about Jerome Powell talking about potential emergency rate hikes. So it seems to really fit the overall narrative and understanding that as the inflation goes up and the rate hike, the rates go up even further to try to tame inflation, that eventually we get to a point where they can no longer contain the price of gold and silver.
• 2:55
  And so today, with my good friend, doctor Kirk Elliott, we're gonna be talking about what's happening with the markets, the price of these, but also actually helping folks understand how in particular they're able to manipulate the gold and silver prices, specifically using paper gold and paper silver. So folks, it'll be a very interesting show. I hope you enjoy this interview with Doctor. Kirk Elliott. Kirk, it's always good to have you on, man.
• 3:19
  How are you doing?
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: I'm doing great. It's really great to be with you.
• 3:23
  Seth Holehouse: Good. So obviously, we've talked a lot about silver and gold. And over the past couple of days, I'll I'll pull this up. Gold specifically hit literally historic record highs. Here's here's an article on zero hedge covering this.
• 3:43
  Gold spikes to record high over 2130. So it's over $2,103 per ounce. And this is pretty significant, obviously, just because of the fact that it's the first time it's it's hit this high. But there's much more to the story in terms of how does this relate to silver prices? But also, I think more importantly, how does this relate to rate hikes, to inflation, to the value of the dollar?
• 4:11
  Like, what's the bigger picture behind this?
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: Well, there's a couple of things, actually. I mean, it's I don't think it's just one stimulus that's causing gold and silver to spike. So number one, you've got Jerome Powell. He basically in this Zero Hedge article, it says that he failed to hammer the hawkish case in his fireside chat that stocks eager to take out twenty twenty three highs. I mean, basically, he's trying to build a case for a robust economy.
• 4:43
  But it's not flying. Nobody actually believes that nonsense anymore because people's wallets speak louder than than people's voices. Really. I mean, they just do and they can say whatever they want to about how they've they've tamed the inflation beast. But here's where when I have clients that call all the time, I'll just kind of tell a little story that they've heard like you and me or me just talk on various channels for like the last year of gold and silver.
• 5:13
  They're doing really well. They said, well, man, I got in at $25 an ounce and I still haven't even broken even. It's like, yeah, but you go up and you come down. You go up and you come down, right? But the trend is going up because twelve months ago, silver was at 17.97 And today, it's pushing $25 right?
• 5:31
  I mean, that's up a lot. And in any bull market, nothing goes straight up, nothing goes straight down. You're going to have two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back. But here's where now we've kind of gotten out of this sideways action, even though that's not a bad return. That's incredible.
• 5:49
  But it's not like what we've been talking about what gold and silver are ultimately going to do, which is go through the roof. So you never know when the spark that causes that is going to happen. All I know is that it always happens. We're not God. We don't control the markets.
• 6:07
  We don't control the time. But this is very interesting price action. And to me, Seth, I'm not a technical trader guy. They're the ones that are like day traders. They look at these chart points and say, oh, it's 17% overvalued or under blah, blah, blah, whatever.
• 6:24
  I don't look at chart points because to me, they don't matter. Fundamentals always trump everything, which would be what causes traditional markets to move in a positive direction? Lowering taxes, lowering interest rates, and creating jobs. Period. What causes them to go in a bad direction?
• 6:44
  Rising taxes, rising interest rates and no jobs. Right? So then when that's what we have right now. But those fundamentals that I just explained cause the inflationary pressures. Because when government revenues are down, they're forced to print to actually fund stimulus and entitlements and infrastructure and spending all across the board.
• 7:06
  Right? So now we're hitting this point of critical mass where when Jerome Powell speaks, nobody's hearing it. They're just not buying it because their wallets tell a different story. So you've got that going on. Now you've also got the for the I mean, it's very rare that a US warship would be attacked.
• 7:32
  I mean, it just doesn't happen. It's like who would be dumb enough to attack a US warship. Right? But that happened in the Persian Gulf over the weekend. Right?
• 7:39
  So the Israeli Hamas conflict is escalating. US warships are being attacked. So that wars and rumors of wars and actual conflict cause people to actually pull back the reins on what they want to invest. Because it's like, I don't know what's going to happen. There's too much confusion.
• 7:58
  There's too much chaos. There's too much uncertainty. I don't know. And war is always bad. I mean, A, you lose lives, first and foremost.
• 8:08
  B, it's misappropriation of funds because you could use the money to build infrastructure, but rather you have to use it to buy tanks and bullets. Right? So creating scarce resources into something that will, as Janet Yellen said, this war in The Ukraine is the greatest thing for the global economy ever because it's creating jobs. It's like, what? Oh, my word.
• 8:31
  Short term, that happens to be true. Medium and long term, it's a debt on society that costs a lot of money that now they have to raise taxes to get out of it. So you're looking at some of these fundamentals. And gold and silver are actually confirming what you and I have been talking about for a long time, like close to a year, which is gold and silver will soar in times of chaos, uncertainty, turbulence, turmoil, change as a flight for quality in an inflationary world. They're an amazing inflationary asset because they're a thing.
• 9:07
  So now, like what you led with, gold reached a historical high over the weekend, over $2,100 an ounce. Silver over the last couple, two to three weeks is up like $2.50. It's like, why are these things going through the roof? Because they know that Jerome Powell is on it's on the last leg. Nobody believes the rhetoric, and the inflationary pressures are gonna persist so much so that now there's talk about an emergency session or a couple of them between now and the end of the year, it's like, brother, it's December 4.
• 9:43
  There's not a lot of time between now and the end of the year to have an emergency rate hike. It's like, wait a second, I thought two weeks ago, they had tamed this inflationary beast. No, they haven't. And everybody knows that it's a lie. So if I were to give a persona to the markets, the bond market, the gold and silver market, I would say they're very smart.
• 10:10
  They're very intellectual. They look at long term trends. They look at interest rate cycles. They look at debt. They look at the unsustainability of debt.
• 10:20
  They look at revenues, right, just because they have to. The bond market controls pensions, incomes to pretty much everybody, real estate. And so those and the banks and hedge funds are very tied into the bond market, very savvy crowd. And it's a barometer for economic activity, the interest rates are. Now, gold and silver do the same thing.
• 10:45
  They're a function of supply and demand, manufacturing. They look at the barometer, the health of the global economy. They look at things like the Baltic Dry Index and how much is Sony, Samsung, LG, Tesla buying for their solar power, for their electronics, as electronics makes the world go around. Right? So they look at these very savvy investors where the stock market and I'm not talking about individual investors here.
• 11:08
  I'm not singling anybody out. But overall, the stock market's kind of a dumb investing crowd. I mean, I hate to be so blunt about it. But the reason I say that is it's very much a retail market or funded by stimulus. Stock market's a function of revenue.
• 11:25
  Stimulus money, they could care less. It's just coming from the government. It's coming from the Fed. The retail investing crowd listens to twenty second sound bites on financial news. It's like, oh, you've got to buy this stock.
• 11:37
  The earnings are going to go robust this quarter, blah, blah, blah. And without doing any research at all, people will listen to a twenty second shot and call their Schwab guy and say, okay, I to buy 80 shares of this or that. It's like, okay, what do you know about what was just said? Just because somebody says something on there doesn't mean that it's true. People don't do their research.
• 11:59
  So that's why I say the stock market is is dumb in comparison to the bond market and in comparison to the precious metals market, which I think are very savvy intellectual markets. Well, gold and silver are telling a story. They're telling us the story of they're now corresponding to the decline of the US dollar. It's now actually in accordance of what it should be. And I think that's got to have Jerome Powell shaking in his boots, Because now you've got this flight for safety investment vehicle, the best inflationary hedge against anything, gold pretty much, is now going up.
• 12:41
  They don't want it to go up. They really don't want it to go up because that's a slap in the face of everything that they're trying to say. So to me, that's like the the siren song. It's it's the death song to the US dollar when now you've got rising interest rates, rising taxes, lowering wages, inflationary pressures, and gold and silver are going through the roof. See, what me being on the front lines of talking to people allocating into markets, there's been a hesitancy for people.
• 13:13
  I mean, I'm not saying that people aren't investing in gold, so we're busier than we've ever been. I mean, it's insane. Right? But there's this hesitancy for people to want to go into tangible assets because the stock market is at like a yearly high. It's like, why would I sell something that's going up to go into something that's going up?
• 13:31
  So now that I think the stock market has seen its better days and it's going to start coming down, I think you're going to see gold and silver doing what gold and silver are now doing, responding to the fundamentals, going up like crazy to historical highs on gold. And people say, well, Kirk, did I miss the boat? Why would I invest in something if it's at a historical high? Well, because it's going to go higher. Right?
• 13:58
  If the fundamentals have changed that caused that growth up to this point, like all of a sudden wages go up, the economy is stable, there's no more wars or rumors of wars, there's a global peace, well then, yeah, don't invest in precious metals. We don't have that, which means it's just going to keep going up and up and up. Fundamentally, technically, there's no reason why it shouldn't. And again, I say that with the caveat of I'm not God. I don't control the markets.
• 14:27
  We never know exactly what's going to happen. But boy, the odds are certainly in our favor that gold and silver absolutely cruise up from this level because the fundamentals that caused their growth to this point are still there. This is why the zero hedge article that you're talking about, Jerome Powell, he's got to be scared because he now sees this confirmation of metals being an attack to what he's doing. And it's the death watch to the dollar and for fiat currencies in general. This isn't just a Fed based issue.
• 15:06
  This is global. Fiat based money creation has reached its, I think, its endpoint. And now the rest of the world is clamoring towards something that's real, something that's got stability, something that has accountability like gold and silver. And last week, I can't remember if we covered this before our last show, if it happened right after, because we missed a week in there. But the Dutch Central Bank basically is now saying they're ready for an international gold standard.
• 15:38
  They're ready because central banks around the world have been amassing gold by the thousands of tons, Seth. Thousands. China has over 5,000 tons of gold. That's just what they're reporting. We all know that they underreport everything.
• 15:53
  They're never to show their whole hand. So the estimates are it could be let's see, if they're saying they have 5,000, the last time they measured, it was in 02/2009, they had 2,000 tons. It could be 10 times more than that. So they might have 20,000 tons. They might have four times the level that they're reporting.
• 16:15
  At that level, they're bigger than The US and the European Union, the European Central Bank and the Fed combined. That's just China. Now you add all the other BRICS nations into it, like Turkey that's got like 400 tons of gold, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan who have a couple hundred tons of gold that are wanting to be part of this. India, Russia that has a thousand tons of gold. India has like 600 tons of gold.
• 16:41
  It's like they're way bigger than the Western financial world that they're trying to destroy. They've got way more backing of gold. And the Dutch Central Bank exposed their play. They exposed the move, saying we're ready for a gold backed currency. We're ready for it.
• 16:59
  Seth Holehouse: Yeah. And we did cover that, which I thought was was really interesting. It was odd timing to have them publicly admit that. One question that I have is because I follow follow a lot of different, you know, Twitters or, know, know, kind of handles or blogs, and they're talking about like the breakout, right? You know, gold breaking out and and, but there's also a lot of discussion about the suppression of gold.
• 17:23
  And this is that, you know, I've talked to you with you about. I've had other guests on. Basically, how the bankers and, you know, the elites or whoever it is, but how they've been able to really keep gold and silver prices suppressed, you know, through various you know, they have all kinds of tricks up their sleeve, right, to do that. And so it seemed to be, you know, my assessment that the silver sorry, gold at at 2,000 mark. Right?
• 17:51
  The gold at 2,000, that going above 2,000 and breaking out 2,000 was a significant, like, a significant part of the timing. So why do you think that gold is now able to jump out of 2,000? Is there some aspect of their control mechanism that has been weakened, or why do you think it's now opening up this way?
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: Well, I think there's more manipulation on silver than there is on gold just because it's it's easier to manipulate. It's very short supply, and you can issue naked shorts on it at a thousand ounces of contract. Right? And then what what happens?
• 18:30
  Seth Holehouse: Hey, folks. I have a quick message for you. Thank you so much for watching and listening to this interview. I have one small request. If you're enjoying what you're listening to, could you please share this interview with one person?
• 18:43
  Just one person. Because of censorship and shadow banning, it's so hard to get this content out to more people. And the only way we can really do it is when you help by sharing it. So if you like what you're listening to, hit pause, share it with one person. It helps so much.
• 18:56
  Thank you so much.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: So they can out buy physical silver to fund the silver ETF. Right? So that's this vicious game that's been going on for a long time.
• 19:05
  Seth Holehouse: So could you repeat that one more time? For some reason, you cut out briefly during that. So so how is it that they they affect the silver prices?
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: So JPMorgan is the custodian of physical silver for BlackRock's silver ETF, SLB. So whenever BlackRock gives JPMorgan an order saying, hey, we need 10,000,000 ounces of silver because we sold this many shares today. What would JPMorgan do if you had the ability to do so? If you're a business owner, you don't want high cost of goods. You want low.
• 19:36
  So they issue naked shorts, drives the price down. They buy silver at the lower price. Then that buying silver causes demand for silver, the price goes up, then they get another order from BlackRock and say, okay, well, we've got to drive the price down. Let's issue more naked shorts, drives the price down, they buy more physical silver. So even with that manipulation, silver's gone from $17.97 dollars to basically $25 an ounce in the last year.
• 20:04
  Imagine what it would be if there were no manipulation. Right? It would be a lot. But still, nobody's going to complain over a 40% return over that span of time. I mean, that's a great return.
• 20:18
  Now, on the other hand, it's a little bit harder to manipulate. But it's because you're actually nobody's really shorting. They're buying it. So China, for example, is the largest manufacturer, the largest mining gold country on the planet. They're also the largest purchaser of gold on the planet.
• 20:44
  How much do they sell? None. They're not selling any of it. So there and other central banks that are in opposition to the Western central banks are amassing gold by the hundreds or thousands of tons. I don't there used to be a lot of manipulation on gold.
• 21:03
  But since the emergence of the Shanghai Gold Exchange, a lot of that insidious underbelly has been torn away. Because the Shanghai Gold Exchange doesn't allow for contracts of gold that people don't own. So you just have to buy ounce for ounce. It's dollar per ounce, right? There's no manipulation on it.
• 21:25
  So they're so big that that's causing the London Gold Exchange and other ones to actually say, wait a second, our games are over. It's over. So I think that the manipulation in gold isn't going to happen as much, and it might just diminish to almost nothing. Remember the people that did the short squeeze on AMC theaters and Nokia and GameStop, they basically send out to all their masses of tens of millions of followers, we're going to short silver. How are they doing it?
• 21:56
  Because the manufacturers are going to need it. If there's no physical supply because we're buying all of it, that's going to cause a short squeeze. So they truly wanted transparency in the markets like what Shanghai is wanting in the gold market. We've got individual private actors wanting the same thing for silver for investors. And see, it's almost like how do I equate it to?
• 22:19
  Almost like a jihad, like a holy war. I don't think some of these Reddit and Wall Street Bets people care if they make a huge profit on it. They want to fix a broken system. They're more ideologically based. It's like we've got to have transparency for investing.
• 22:36
  The investor gets out of their investment everything that they thought they were going to get without manipulation by the big boys that are causing these problems. Right? So I think that the manipulation game is about to be over. Take that with a grain of salt because there still is manipulation, there's still short selling, but the returns aren't bad. It's not like people are not making huge profits.
• 22:59
  But you look at usdebtclock.org, that tells you what the price of silver should be without manipulation. Right? Because when you look at the paper to silver ratio, it puts silver at over $1,000 an ounce. With the amount of money in circulating, it's over on the right hand side there on that chart, there's a five year number and a ten year number. That is based on the average of how much money has been created.
• 23:29
  You see over the last five years, the dollar to silver ratio, it should be $15.56 dollars an ounce. If you look at the ten year money supply increases, it should be $11.20 dollars per ounce. What is it? 24 and something. So to me, that difference, that delta, is the cost of manipulation.
• 23:50
  To me, that's what that number reflects. So as this manipulation game, it doesn't even have to be 100% successful. It's just that exposure of it. I mean, you could go to $50 an ounce, dollars 100 an ounce, dollars 200 an ounce. We're still not even coming close to what it should be, But we're starting at such a low point that those returns are very significant.
• 24:13
  And it all has to do with this money supply and the ability to manipulate the markets becoming way too expensive because in a digital world, they can't hide behind opaqueness. There's a lot of transparency, and that's what we're starting to see.
• 24:31
  Seth Holehouse: I see. I see. And so with what you said earlier about how, you know, you know, you you and I have been talking with this for about a year now, at least, and how basically that gold and silver are now starting to show the reality of the dollar. Right? So and then at the same time, as the article, Zira hedge article talked about, and as you you've all you mentioned that there's these these rumors of emergency rate hikes, right?
• 24:59
  That they haven't they haven't tamed inflation. And so if you look at that combination actually, this is a really interesting graphic to look at. Right? This, you know, dollar to gold ratio, which was $0. Right?
• 25:13
  It was saying before or actually, it was in 1913. Right? It's $26, you know, per ounce of gold per per you know, sorry. $20.28 dollars per ounce was the dollar to gold ratio, then silver being just under $3. So by them saying here that the dollar to silver ratio of five years is $1,500, as you as you mentioned that, like, that's reflective of how much money has been printed.
• 25:41
  Right?
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: Correct.
• 25:41
  Seth Holehouse: So where it's kind of like if if like a house, for instance, so we you know, a house in 1913, maybe it was $10,000. A house is now $500,000, your average house. So obviously, there's been some disconnect with the price of silver, the price of gold, and the price of other commodities and other goods, which is I think that's where a lot of suppression comes in. And so but that's also this indicator of inflation showing that this is how much excess money has been printed compared to how much gold and silver has been also put onto the market. It's been exponential.
• 26:18
  And so I guess what you're what you're kind of painting the picture of is that we're entering into this stage where with gold reaching record highs, and a lot of experts, including yourself saying, look, it's going to continue. It's going to continue. And though it seems like, wow to come in and we want to buy in at 2,100. Well, yeah, if it's thirty one hundred six months from now, or forty one hundred, you know, twelve months from now, it's like, it all makes sense. But basically, this this spiral now is that there's some their their control mechanism is now breaking.
• 26:52
  And with that break, we're gonna see a higher higher and higher rates, increasingly higher, you know, rates we're gonna see, which is indicative of a lower and lower value of the dollar. Right? You know, inflation, inflationary, you know, changes in the dollar. And then substantively, we're gonna see an increase in price of commodities. Right?
• 27:14
  Which is also with gold and silver, obviously, but other things. And so is that is that kind of a so it seems like it's like this downward spiral that will then start to accelerate until the system breaks. So I guess that's how I look at it.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: It's how I look at it too. And if you could go back to that that US debt clock page, scroll down just a little bit because see where it says paper to silver ratio now?
• 27:40
  Seth Holehouse: Yes. Where it says So
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: that tells us for every one ounce of deliverable silver, physical silver, there's a 91 ounces in paper contracts. For gold, it's one to 131 ounces in paper contracts. So this is how I know that we're ripe for a short squeeze, because as those paper contracts unravel and they require physical delivery, there's only one ounce for every 191 in paper silver on the markets. It doesn't take very much to run out when they have to cover the flip side of those short contracts. That's what a short squeeze is all about.
• 28:23
  So when you see all this massive amount of paper futures contracts that are so it's not one to one. It's 191 to one. I mean, it is so out of whack. And that's probably why you scroll up there a little bit. It's like, yeah, gold and silver should silver should be $1,100 an ounce.
• 28:47
  Gold should be $12,000 an ounce. But it's not. But here's the thing. Within the transparency that comes from digital knowledge, right? It's like these are all there.
• 29:00
  You can't hide in the shadows. You can't hide under a whole room full of paper contracts that nobody knows is there. Everything's digital. It's all known. That should bring efficiency into the markets, right?
• 29:14
  But it also should bring fear to those that are manipulating the markets, know that their game is going to be over at some point because everything is known. Right? So use that logic in a central bank digital currency world, too, which is why we've been shouting from the rooftops for a long time. Full knowledge, full transparency. Everything that you ever buy, your ideology can now be measured.
• 29:37
  See, this transparency is good for the financial markets. It's bad when it comes to money. Because now your privacy is gone. Your economic freedom is gone. When you have the powers that be that say, we don't like how you spend your money.
• 29:59
  Therefore, we're going to cut you off from it. Now, if you were a globalist and on the left, you're going to be celebrating that kind of technology. But if you're a freedom loving patriot that loves God, that doesn't want a mark of the beast type of a technology that can cut you off from buying or selling, if your ideology doesn't match up, then you should hate it. Right? So this is where on the money freedom side, that kind of digital transparency is bad.
• 30:28
  On the financial market side, it's actually quite good because in a snapshot, we can tell what low risk, high return investments might be based on these numbers. And that's why we're so heavily allocated into tangible, not paper, tangible silver, tangible gold. But I'm at silver because of where the ratio is between gold and silver. It's all pointing towards silver in its physical form.
• 30:57
  Seth Holehouse: I see. Okay. That makes sense. Especially I'll pull up one more time just because this was particularly helpful for me when you explained that paper to silver ratio, the paper to gold ratio. Because that to me, if you have something like silver and and say that that paper doesn't exist.
• 31:16
  Right? An ounce of silver is an ounce of silver. It's worth what somebody's gonna pay for it. But if a lot of people want to purchase silver, let's just say tomorrow, a million people all went out and they bought 10 ounces of silver each. If each person bought 10 ounces of physical silver, they took delivery of it.
• 31:35
  Right? And so you had 10,000,000 ounces that sold all of a sudden, you'd probably see the price of silver skyrocket. Right? Supply demand. But if they instead went out and they went to their local, say, silver dealer, right, that was said, okay.
• 31:49
  Well, how about I'll sell you instead of, you know, taking this the physical silver, I'll sell sell you each 10 paper ounces. So I'll sell you each a piece of paper that says you own 10 ounces. Kinda like our deposits in our bank. It says there's a thousand dollars in the bank. It doesn't mean it's actually in the bank.
• 32:06
  So what that means is that they can actually control demand. And so if if there's a spike in demand for silver, they can just sell more silver. And so so while that right now, it says that the ratio is one ninety one, you know, paper silver to, you know, to one, one ninety one to one, if they increase it to two ninety one to one, it's not gonna actually change the price of silver in the market. So that's how they can basically, even though there's been a lot more demand, that's how they manipulate the prices and keep those prices suppressed. But I imagine it's a similar equation to what you and I have talked about in terms of what happens when there's a bank run.
• 32:50
  Whereas the bank can tell you all day long that you're FDIC insured and that your your thousand dollars is your thousand dollars. If everyone if if half the bank customers at once go try to collect their thousand dollars, it breaks the system. You see what's the the curtain covering up Oz is is is ripped off. And it's like this little old man there screwing everybody over. Similar to silver, whereas if more people I'm guessing at least if more of those people that have been buying those that silver paper, then want to take delivery of the physical, that because it's at that ratio of 191 to one that if even a small percentage of them do that, they're not going to actually be able to deliver.
• 33:32
  And you'll see the silver votes vaults drained, like, to zero overnight. And then my guess is that you'd have silver to skyrocket. Is that is my understanding correct there?
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: Spot on. I mean, that that's exactly right. And, you know, you you were talking about about banks and not wanting everybody to withdraw at the same time, right? Well, is the problem with banks. They're very illiquid.
• 33:59
  They don't have a lot of capital on hand. And what causes a bank to fail? More withdrawals than deposits, and their investments are bad. What do banks invest in? Same thing you and I would.
• 34:10
  Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate companies, right? More withdrawals than we have deposits because they have a very low liquidity right now. So I was digging around this weekend, went to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency website, OCC.gov. They come up with a weekly bulletin. I'd never been to this website before.
• 34:33
  It's official government website, the Comptroller of the Currency. Every week they come up with a weekly bulletin. So I just clicked on the one from eleventwenty five. It shows every branch in America that closes during that week. So top of the list, eleventwenty one Wells Fargo Bank, Asheville main office in Asheville, North Carolina.
• 34:54
  Eleventwenty 1 Wells Fargo Bank, Holly Hill branch in Holly Hill, Florida. 11 20 1 Wells Fargo Bank, Hartsdale, New York. And then it goes on. And then you get to Millpass and Mason. You get to Bank of America.
• 35:10
  You get to some of the other banks. I mean, these why do branches fail? Well, look at it like a business person. Why would Microsoft or Amazon or anybody lay off employees? They're cutting down expenses.
• 35:26
  But it's not anything that would really hit the news. This is why I'm so glad I stumbled across this this weekend, because a bank failure like Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, something of that sizzle story. Everyone's talking about the big bank failures, right? Nobody talks about the branches closing, nor would you or your wife. You and your wife are walking down the street and you're going out for coffee, whatever.
• 35:52
  And you walk past, I'm just making up a story here for the sake of illustration, PNC Bank, which happens to be where you bank on the corner. And the next week you go down, same thing, going to get some coffee and it's all boarded up and it's closed. What do you say? Almost nothing other than this branch is closed. It's all boarded up.
• 36:12
  That's a bummer because now we have to go to the other PNC branch. It's like three miles away, and it's inconvenient at best. Doesn't really even register as anything real important other than an inconvenience. But here's where this story that's not being told is a huge story. It's not a bank failure, it's branches closing.
• 36:33
  But last year, there were over 3,100 branches that closed from different various banks, almost 900 new openings. That's over 2,000 net loss. The year before, over 2,000 branch closings. The year before that, over 2,000 branch closings. In three years, we've had over 6,000 branches close.
• 36:55
  That's a big deal. Now that actually is a story that's not being told. Because why do banks close branches? Because they have to cut expenses, because the revenues are not there. And the bank presidents or whatever are being a little bit more forward thinking, thinking, oh, man, with rising interest rates, delinquencies that come from rising interest rates, people making late payments.
• 37:18
  What comes after delinquencies? Defaults. People are having to default on their loans. What comes after defaults? Bankruptcies.
• 37:25
  Right? So this is the trend that's happening. It's bank closings because people aren't making their payments on time. They're defaulting, followed by bankruptcies, personal and corporate. This is the trend line that we're on as a nation.
• 37:41
  That's not a good trend line. And yet you have Biden blasting out nonsense, saying Bidenomics is so good and we're creating jobs and we're amazing for America. Boy, you can't really blame us for this bad economy. We inherited it from Trump. Whatever the press secretary is saying last week, it's like, what a bunch of garbage.
• 38:07
  Like, seriously, you're blaming Trump that you inherited a bad economy from him and no wonder it's still bad. But yet people believe that nonsense because it was said on mainstream media. It's like that I shouldn't say people overall. The people watching those dumb shows believe it. None of the people watching this show would believe even an ounce of any of that to be true because it's not.
• 38:33
  But they have to clamor on to something during an election year coming up. And so here we go. After four years of Bidenomics, they're blaming Trump for the bad economy. Of course they would because they can't stand on their own. But here's the thing.
• 38:51
  What we have is what we've got. It's a bad economy. We can thrive during it. You just have to allocate properly. You're going to see all kinds of nonsense, all kinds of rhetoric.
• 39:02
  But numbers ultimately don't lie. A person can lie about the numbers, but the numbers themselves don't lie. We're trying to give you the truth about the numbers and what they actually mean for the economy. If they were good, I'd be bragging about them. When they're bad, I'm telling you that they're bad.
• 39:21
  And right now, they happen to be really bad.
• 39:25
  Seth Holehouse: Exactly. Well, in closing, Kirk, as we you know, we've gone over before on different shows, if folks do want to work with you, if they want to allocate into precious metals, the URL is goldwithseth.com or they can call (720) 605-3900. You're someone I trust. I'm someone I personally recommend. And as you mentioned, it's like it looks like even though that, you know, metals are hitting these record highs, I think that we're gonna see new record highs and new record highs and new record highs.
• 39:56
  So, Kirk, it's it's always good to have you on. I appreciate you making the time to do this. I get a lot of feedback from people in the audience. They say, gosh, I love your Kirk Elliott shows. Thank you.
• 40:06
  Like, they've helped me so much and just wanna, you know, extend it to you because you've been, you know, you've been a good guiding voice for a lot of people, and I I really appreciate it.
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your kind words.
• 40:18
  Seth Holehouse: Well, thank you, Kirk. Take