Latest / Kitco MINING / Why Physical Metals Matter More in a Digital System | Jenny Shaigec

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Why Physical Metals Matter More in a Digital System | Jenny Shaigec · Kitco MINING

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Kitco Mining on-site coverage of the Precious Metal Summit is presented by Newcore Goal.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is tokenization confiscation.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome back to Kitco Mining with me, Paul Harris, here at the 2026 Precious Metal Summit in Beaver Creek in Colorado.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Joining me now is Jenny Shagas, CEO of Sand Piper Trading.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Jenny, welcome to Kitco.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having me.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is the first time you have been on Kitco and maybe one of your first media appearances.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: So let's set the stage by talking a little bit about you and your background.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: I sort of first noticed you a couple of years ago on Twitter.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: You post a lot of interesting things under sort of Jenny Many Dots.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was impressed by the sort of deep dive research you do into some of the macro themes and also into companies and their projects.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe we can start off with um sharing a little bit of your background with us and how you came to be interested in the resource space.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a former energy trading analyst.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm from Calgary, and uh we're an oil and gas city and very boom and bust nature, and it's uh it's been tough.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: I've lived there for over 30 years and seen uh relatives or friends go to work and come home with a cardboard box in the afternoon, and they've been let go because of the cycles there.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but uh I had children and stayed home to raise them.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Got divorced, my kids got older, and I wanted to reinvent myself and uh thought I would try trading because I worked on a trading floor previously, and uh just got involved in in the junior mining sector and had a few big wins, luckily, at the beginning.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: And ever since then it's been my passion and and I'm pretty devoted to junior exploration companies.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: I thought you were gonna say you started off with a few big wins, and ever since then it's been downhill.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: More the reality of the junior mining space.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's been pretty good and pretty good experience.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: I've done fairly well.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you you put a post on tweet uh on X this morning, um, a tantalizing tweet telling people about wait until um they hear what you have to say at NOLA this year.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're talking about your participation, your keynote at the uh New Orleans Investment Conference.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully, we're gonna get a little bit of a preview of some of the themes there.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um You've shared a bit of information with me to help prepare for this because you're going into some themes that are um you know quite challenging intellectually for some people, including myself.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um Pax Silica.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Where let's start there.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: What is that and who's involved in that?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: So we had uh Pax Romana and Pax Britannica, Pax Americana, so Roman Empire, uh, British Empire, American Empire.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then in December last year, the US State Department uh launched the Pax Silica Initiative.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it's all about um building uh an economic security consensus, and they have 24 signatories on that as of now, and Canada is not one of them, interestingly.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: These are international nation-state signatories.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: Correct, yes.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: So the intent is to secure critical minerals uh for the supply chain and then partner on software, platforms, uh, network infrastructure, etc.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: So um I found it interesting just because clearly they're saying that we are entering a new era.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: And Trump appointed a very interesting young man to head that initiative.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: His name is Jacob Halberg.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: So he's written a book called The Wires of War.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: And he uh mentioned uh energy and logistics, compute, minerals.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: These aren't just commodities, they are sovereignty expressed in the physical form.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: And in my opinion, I think where we are headed is from a democracy to a new age of a technocracy.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll likely be uh governed by technological experts, scientists, and engineers that uh govern us instead of elected officials.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting that they use the sort of prefix Pax in this uh in this title because um you know you mentioned Pax Romano, Pax Britannico, etc.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: These are all effectively military constructs.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah, extended periods of peaceful times.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think we've been really fortunate that we've lived in in such a long period of stability, and I think we take that for granted that that won't change, and and I'm a little frightened that it's about to.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I want to sort of move on with some of the other material you shared with me, and let's talk about the sort of digital asset market clarity acts or or you know, the clarity acts, a proposed US law designed to establish a comprehensive federal regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and digital assets.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: How does this fit in with the what we've just been talking about, the Pax Silica?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: So the Genius Act has been passed, but the Clarity One has not as of yet.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: I believe the Democrats had 143 changes last week, and uh so it hasn't yet passed, and they're working on that still.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's very complex.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: If if you try and follow um what's in the bill, it tends to lead you to older ones like the 1933, I think it's the Banking Secrecy Act.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's really difficult to follow, but I think the important takeaway from it is if you think it's just about crypto, it is not.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's about digital assets as well.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I can see confiscation of assets in the future.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that's something definitely that I think everybody should be watching, not just whether or not you own crypto, you need to watch the Clarity Act and what it involves.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So what what are the implications or the potential implications of that, Jenny?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're we're in a society where we're moving towards you know the greater use of blockchain for everything, you know, cryptocurrencies you mentioned or we specifically mentioned in the title there, but more and more things are sort of going on the blockchain.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um housing registers, you know, pretty much all asset registers are gradually migrating towards that.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, um is the potential there then that once everything's on the blockchain, a a government can either sort of tax it or take it?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, absolutely.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: So um there are a number of programs that now they're actually in use, but one of them that I think people should be aware of is Chainlink.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: And uh JP Morgan has a program, Connexis.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh a lot of people are probably seeing that uh portfolios are offering you to have AI agentic trading.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: And it's JP Morgan's Connexus that uh they discussed this and the tokenization of real-world assets, which would include homeownership, even your car, everything you own basically can be put on the blockchain.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: But there's an organization called Breedacom, and it was a creation.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um China is largely behind it, their Belt and Road Initiative, but the United Nations is as well, and the EU.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a global tax authority.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_02: So if we had to a global governance with a global taxation system, it would be done through this Breedacom.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot to digest there.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh on the tokenization aspects in this sector, in this industry, um, part of the narrative or growing narrative in recent years has been the tokenization of gold, the digitization of gold.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the World Gold Council, for example, has been a real advocate for that, working towards that, pushing towards that so people can hold their gold in a tokenized way and fractionating it to be able to use it for various different things.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, the tokenization of mineral deposits, the the minerals that are actually in the ground, tokenizing them to be able to um create financial instruments against them while they're still in the ground.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: So um the nefarious element of this or possibility of this uh it can be quite uh far-reaching.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where I think it's very important to look back at the history of these institutions that are behind these pilot projects and uh will be regulating these CBDCs where we're headed.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, I think it's important people look at the history uh of these institutions.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: And uh they also have complete immunity if if it's a um a branch of the United Nations, for example, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, they have complete immunity in their role there.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: They can um transfer money without any monitoring, any regulation.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: And somebody that was in a role for the United Nations under the UN Convention, they can't be investigated or prosecuted for anything.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think there's some behavior there that uh people don't necessarily, first of all, we don't pay attention to, and there's not much that can be done about it, but the fact that the IMF has this immunity as well.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I listened to Rick Rule talk about separating the wheat from the chaff, and uh I'm of that view too, where I I look for the best management teams, and I don't think any of us would invest in a management team that has a history of uh embezzlement, money laundering, all kinds of fraudulent activities.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Jenny, you are new to the uh junior mining investment space.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's true.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: But uh yes, I you know, the IMF, I looked at the managing directors for the last several decades, and that's their history.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: Christine Lagarde, uh, prior to the current IMF managing director, she was convicted in 2016 of public mis or misuse of public funds.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: And uh prior to that it was Dominique Strauss-Kant, who has a lengthy list of uh he actually resigned from a jail cell from at his role at the IMF.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I can't believe that we're allowing the international monetary system to be monitored and regulated by people that have that kind of a background, and then they have full immunity.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: As a journalist, one of the sort of key tenets is follow the money, and uh you've you've done a good tracking job there.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: What what what do you think is the ultimate end game here?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um humanity, the the history of humanity is the fight for power and control.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Control of money and deployment of money is obviously a key factor, it goes hand in hand with that.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: What what's the end game here, do you think?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: I believe that they're looking to have uh, well, right now the Bank for International Settlements, it's the central bank for central bankers.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I think that is where the monetary system is headed, that we will have one global governing institution and a centralization of wealth.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they've done that before in history, just on smaller scales.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, if you look at the Federal Reserve System, it was designed in a similar way, but this will be uh in a global manner.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: And Mark Carney was chair of the Financial Stability Board, and he designed back in 2011 there was um these regional consultative groups, there's six of them, and that's actually it was mentioned yesterday in the Globe and Mail that he is looking at basically a global currency similar to the IMF special drawing rights, where there's a basket of these currencies.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so my view is that that's where we're headed.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: We'll have this central bank and we'll have a global digital currency based on the basket of those regional consultative groups that Mark Kearney designed.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I'm gonna be very glib and perhaps willfully stupid here.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: It seems that uh if if that is the intent, it seems that people have learned nothing from the Euro, the uh the construct of the euro is.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so the Euro over time has grown, the EU region that they're all included in, and it's going to be similar here, where it's accomplished first via these regions.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And personally, I don't think that you know it's a coincidence that Trump now has named Lake Ontario Lake America, and the Gulf of Mexico uh is the Gulf of America, because I believe we're headed towards having an Amero, which will include North and South America.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I think it was Vincente Fox, the former president of Mexico.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was actually on the news in 2011 talking about this.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: He mentioned the Amero.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: And there's also a paper on the Canadian government's website talking about the benefits of a North American Union under an Amero.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I don't know how to come back to that, Jenny, but um I know in terms of the Eurozone, the political, social, financial gymnastics of the nation states to make it work have been and continue to be tremendous.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And these are nations that are you know more developed, more advanced, more sophisticated perhaps than some of the nation states in in the Western hemisphere.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So the the financial, political, social gymnastics for Central and South America to um comply or be part of the Amero would be absolutely astounding.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I agree.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: So there was a recent uh panel, it was posted July 3rd, and I'd recommend people watch that, it's very telling, on the BIS YouTube channel.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a two-hour panel about stable coins and the future of this um digital currency.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: And and they did mention some of what you said is you know, the United States with the Genius Act and stable coins, they really want to have the rest of the uh Western hemisphere included in this.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so what they'll do, um they they mocked the stablecoin initiative basically and the Genius Act for that reason, and said, if it's auditable in the United States, which this act makes it that way, and not in somewhere like Brazil, how do they expect Brazil to accept this currency?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: But the panel, and there was a Harvard economist, he was the chief economist at the IMF, and he mentioned exactly this and um basically said that the end goal in this panel, he said the end goal is to have a global governing body, a unitary government that would regulate this.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so he didn't seem to think that the US stablecoin would be a lasting option.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um in your opinion, Jenny, what can or should people do if if this the Amero or whatever is is a food it's seemed to be another sort of bullish signal for owning physical gold?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, I know.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um definitely I believe we should all own physical metals, but uh I am concerned about confiscation that's been done in the past, and now if you were to own, you know, a digital form of bold or you have it stored in another location, they are able to track it and trace it.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: And if um there's a video on the World Gold Council's website talking about this, they went to the Canadian Mint and discussed how they trace gold all the way from the mine to the vault and to ownership.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's important that people diversify and are careful where they store their gold.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm actually myself a little partial to silver because I believe that we will have initially a gold-backed basket of currencies, and then eventually they will make it a bimetallic standard.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I say that because the IMF has this gentleman named Johannes Baigand, and he has written extensively about this going to a gold standard and then bimetallic in the future.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: So long term, I think it's wise to own silver.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Are we gonna go back in in time 2,000 years?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Again, another Pax Romano reference.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, every every quarter there seems to be a coin hoard, a silver coin hoard discovered somewhere in Europe.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: So is that the future?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you've got to not be traceable, you people are gonna dig holes in the ground and bury it there.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: I I think so too.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh because uh myself, I it's been a really tough decision um where to store physical metals because I just don't feel safe having anyone else have custody of it.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Jenny, this has been absolutely fascinating.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Jenny Shagris, thank you very much for joining me today.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Paul.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: We have a lot more to come from the 2026 Precious Metal Summit here in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: So stay tuned and hit that subscribe button.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Paul Harris, and this is KitGo Mining.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: KitGo Mining on site coverage of the Precious Metal Summit is presented by Newcore Gold.