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- [00:02]
A
All right. Good morning, Doug. We're back with questions from members of the File subscribers to Crisis Investing. So don't have much time. I'm going to go through them fast as we can. Number one, Doug, when gold miners start reporting results using today's gold price, will Explorers get as much upside as producers or do producers benefit more in terms of stock appreciation?
- [00:24]
B
Well, they say, and it's true, that the big companies are always the ones that move first because they're the ones everybody's heard about. They're the ones that get the biggest buying. Yeah. And of course, as results start coming out in the next few months and the earnings of these companies start showing, look, with these minor explorers of which there's a couple thousand, actually, what we're counting on is the public at large getting interested in them. And when they move some of them with just tiny little market caps, they can explode. So I don't know if I'm answering this question, but they all should benefit.
- [01:15]
A
But it would start with producers first, I guess, is what you're saying.
- [01:19]
B
Yeah. And then as things go on, it's the crappy little companies that will really start howling because it takes very little buying to drive them. So that's why we have a little bit of both kinds because we can't predict the future. We don't have a Magic 8 ball.
- [01:35]
A
No, we don't. No. Or Socrates. Let's see.
- [01:41]
B
Or somebody that, somebody that writes in questions telling us how brilliant we are before they ask the question every week.
- [01:48]
A
Right, Doug, next question. If, if you and I, I guess, got invited to the White House to meet Trump, Ascent and Rubio, number one, would you go? If. So, would you wear suits? And what would you tell them?
- [02:03]
B
Well, when I go, well, speaking for myself, look, it's an experience and you get, you get to meet some people that are in the public eye where you can form a hands on impression about them. So, yes, I would go.
- [02:21]
A
Okay, all right. And if you went, would you wear a suit?
- [02:26]
B
Yeah, I'd wear a suit. I certainly wouldn't want to show the bad taste of that little creep from the Ukraine wearing a, a full military T shirt.
- [02:36]
A
Yeah.
- [02:37]
B
I mean, this is somebody that doesn't, doesn't have any grip on. I'm just common courtesy. And I, one of the nice, one of the things I like about Trump, and I like things about Trump as well as disliking a lot about him was the way he called him out for dressing, dressing like, yeah, that was great.
- [02:57]
A
And what do you think? What would you Tell him.
- [03:00]
B
I wouldn't tell him anything. Would serve no useful purpose. What are you going to talk to these guys about? Where we live in a different universe? I think you ought to do this. Okay. Thanks for your opinion. So what?
- [03:14]
A
Yeah, I guess it.
- [03:15]
B
People. Look, I. I mean, I'm sure that I'm going to have an opportunity to meet Malay in Argentina sometime over the next year. There's just all kinds of indications that, yeah, you'll get invited there, but what am I going to talk to him about? I mean.
- [03:33]
A
I guess if he asked for your.
- [03:36]
B
They don't. They don't like opinions from the peanut gallery chemistry. And why should they so.
- [03:42]
A
Well, if they solicited an opinion, I guess that's one thing, but going in there with, like, an agenda.
- [03:48]
B
Yeah, that, that, that doesn't work. So, yeah, sure, if you ask me for what an honest opinion, we can have a. Hopefully a pleasant and intelligent conversation, but that's. I don't think that's the way things will work. Not with Trump, anyway. I mean, he's. Look at the people around him. They're all sycophants that are afraid to say anything that might possibly run counter to what. What Trump thinks or thinks he thinks anyway.
- [04:18]
A
Yeah, I mean, it does show he. There's a tight leash culturally where people are expected to be, you know, ingratiating to him constantly and, you know, kind of blowing smoke up his ass to some degree. So.
- [04:31]
B
Yeah, and one of the problems with Trump is that he's totally intellectually dishonest, like what he's saying about Massie, the congressman, where he's saying all these horrible things about him, which are outright lies, calling him a rhino, calling him horrible things. I can't even list all the things he's called. All of them are inaccurate and lies, just pejoratives, because Massey doesn't want to do everything that Trump wants to do, mainly his war, but I don't know what else.
- [05:06]
A
Yeah, I don't know, but I mean, you know, he says he's voted along with Republicans 97 of the time, you know, but, yeah, the MAGA people have really kind of turned on Massie because they're following Trump's lead in all this. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I could read, but I could read this. Trump's tweet about. I don't know if you saw the interaction between Pam Bondi and Massey the other day.
- [05:30]
B
I did, I did. And, you know, one thing, if we had time to talk about it, which I guess we don't today was Bondi's performance in front of that committee. I mean, on the one hand, I enjoyed watching her rank out most of these horrible congressmen, treating them like the criminals that they are. But on the other hand, she was so dishonest when. When they wanted her to explain Epstein, and she said, well, the stock market's going up. I mean, it's like she was reading from a talking point. What is. She is. She's the press secretary or the. Whatever the hell she is.
- [06:10]
A
She's Attorney General. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was. It was embarrassing. Okay, next question is, what advice would Doug give? Well, this is a private company that. To go from impressive prototypes. It's a company's called Jet Op. JetDop Terra. I guess it is to go from impressive prototypes to full production. Essentially, they have this new whiz bang drone technology, more or less, but it's a private company that did raise a couple million dollars from, like, a crowdfunding campaign. So what do you take to attract. To go from impressive prototypes to full production and attract the big jump in investment that usually comes along with that last step?
- [06:54]
B
Yeah. Well, look, being a minority shareholder in a private company means that you really don't have anything unless you get lucky. So you're. You're gambling. And I've actually been involved in some of these deals, and the odds of them actually working out and going into production, which is one thing, and making money, which is something else, again, are actually surprisingly slim. So, yeah, maybe you'll have the next Apple Computer, but chances of that are about as good as winning a lottery.
- [07:29]
A
Yeah, and the problem is, being a minority shareholder is you're not entitled to. Well, you don't get liquidity. You can't get out of it if, you know, if it's not going well and you're not even. You have no ability to influence the company to get them to do regular reporting on anything. So you don't even know for maybe years at a time how it's doing. So it's. It's a bad place to be as an investor in a private minority shareholder in a private company.
- [07:56]
B
It's like buying a lottery ticket. And yeah, no reason you shouldn't do it if it amuses you.
- [08:01]
A
Yeah. Okay, let's see. Is keeping about 20% of your portfolio in cash a smart move right now to buy dips?
- [08:14]
B
Well, I'm not mechanical about this. The number 20%, or should it be 50% because the market's so high? I don't. I don't know. But it is a good idea. To keep some dollar cash because that's the cost of liquidity and the fact that your dollars are losing value at 5%, who knows, maybe 10% per year. That's probably a price you have to pay in a highly inflationary economy such as we now have. Yeah.
- [08:46]
A
And the markets are increasingly more volatile, it seems. So it does create more opportunities, I guess. And the other thing, for me it's always a matter of whether or not I can sleep at night. And you know, if, if I'm, if there's a certain amount of cash that always makes, that makes it so I don't really care what happens in the markets in the short term at all. And when I get above that, you know, when I get over invested, then you start, you notice you start paying too much attention to the markets.
- [09:12]
B
Yeah, yeah. So keep a bit of cash around. But you don't wanna, you know, you want, the golden mean is where you want to be. Not, not too much and not too little. But, but wait a minute, what's too much and too little? That's the question. Hard to ask.
- [09:30]
A
Very subjective. That to me is a sleep at night thing. It's sleep of what makes you so you can sleep at night.
- [09:36]
B
Yeah.
- [09:38]
A
Let's see. Doug Eris, mining, one of the companies in the, in our crisis investing port, making a move to the nyse. Is that meaningful and that it might increase investor attention and you know, create a kind of re rating of a stock in some way?
- [09:56]
B
Well, yes, to some degree because there are going to be people. Yes, more people will see it than not. It might attract potential buying institutions. Some types of institutions can only buy things on major stock exchanges, not minor ones. So yeah, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. Will it have a big effect? Questionable, but it'll have an effect. It'll be favorable. But yeah.
- [10:24]
A
And, and when, when you get a lot of investor interest in the sector, it is in a position to take advantage of that interest by being in the, you know, in the US markets and not just exclusively Canadian markets. Right.
- [10:37]
B
Yeah. Anyway, ERIS has been a very, very good stock to own and I think it will continue to be and get better. And the NYSE listing does not hurt.
- [10:50]
A
Okay. Are we already living through a great taking in slow motion through inflation, the cantillion effects, K shaped economy, market rigging, fractional reserve banking, weaker property rights and government overreach, you know, Is that already the great taking?
- [11:06]
B
Yeah, it's been going on slowly, slowly for I would say since the days of Roosevelt anyway. And Accelerating. But I guess the great taking is referring to.
- [11:22]
A
David Rogers Webb's. Yeah, like this essentially loss of real, of assets because they're not titled to you properly, like stocks.
- [11:31]
B
Yeah. And if, if that happens, it's going to be a really big deal. Catastrophic and not slow anymore, but all of a sudden. So is question is, is it going to happen? Open question.
- [11:45]
A
It's an open question.
- [11:47]
B
Yeah.
- [11:47]
A
I think what we're experiencing is more like the greater depression, you know, in slow motion, you know, that you've been talking about for a long time.
- [11:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's not it. In other words, everybody says, wait a minute, how can you be talking about a greater depression? We know that the last depression started on with the stock market crash of 1929. Blah, blah, blah. All right, well, history never repeats, Right?
- [12:13]
A
Okay, so where would Doug park a large amount of liquid cash right now? Inside a brokerage cash account like Fidelity or in a traditional bank like Wells Fargo?
- [12:26]
B
I would think I would probably put it in short term treasury securities if you want to leave it in cash in the most secure form. I mean, that's a standard answer, but I think it's probably the correct one if you want to stay in cash.
- [12:41]
A
Yeah. Okay. And see, what are the pros and cons of retiring in Boquete, Panama?
- [12:49]
B
Well, I like Panama. Our friend Michael Yan isn't so crazy about Panama, but Boquete is kind of a, kind of a mountain community. Pleasant, fair number of gringos there with all the good things and bad things that that implies. So I think it's a reasonable choice. And Panama City is a very convenient major place that's, you know, reachable easily enough. So not a bad choice.
- [13:21]
A
Yeah, pretty, pretty easy on, you know, when you go down the spectrum of, of, you know, exotic locations you could retire to. I guess it's probably one of the easy ones.
- [13:32]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, our. I was involved in the Rancho Santana deal with Bill Bar and Mark Ford. It must have been 20 years ago we got into that thing together. And of course, Nicaragua is one of the nasty dictatorships in South America run by. Who's that? Who's that fool that runs, has run.
- [13:58]
A
Ortega.
- [13:59]
B
Ortega, right. And, you know, even though the politics of Nicaragua are terrible and, but being a gringo living at Rancho Santana, it, I don't think it affects you at all, quite frankly.
- [14:16]
A
It's a nice place.
- [14:18]
B
Yeah, nice place. So listen, you can live in Cuba. Well, not any, not anymore because they don't have anything and the place is falling apart. But it used to be during the Castro days, if you were a gringo that wanted to get a place and live in Cuba in one of their resorts, because I've been down there four times, it was very pleasant. The fact that it was a dictatorship, basically meaningless to you as a rich foreigner. That's usually the way it is.
- [14:51]
A
Right. Okay, let's see. Is Vizsla Silver still a reasonable crisis portfolio? Silverbet, given its single asset and targeting production in 2027 in Sinaloa, Mexico, with serious recent security incidents, or does jurisdiction, security risk outweigh the upside even if silver stays above $40?
- [15:17]
B
Well, you guys probably heard that they had 10 employees kidnapped and apparently four or five of them have already turned up dead. So why did that happen? It's unclear as far as I can tell. But Mexico is perhaps not as stable as a lot of people would like to believe. And a very old friend of ours, Morgan Pollikan, who runs the Almaden companies, had a property confiscated. And he's a very straight, honest guy, actually, by the Mexicans. So maybe Mexico is not. What is this about the Mexican parliament having invited in?
- [16:10]
A
Yeah, the. Let's see. Sheinbaum and her Senate just chose to allow US Troops to be on Mexican soil in order to conduct full military operations against the Mexican cartels and Chinese triad gangs.
- [16:25]
B
Yeah, that's interesting. That's kind of like admitting that they're the government, we're the government, but we can't control these people. So you gringos can come down here and of course, the gringos have always come down to Mexico and, And rousted the place. But this is the first time they've been invited to do so, apparently.
- [16:46]
A
Right. Okay, just a couple more questions, Doug. Just got a couple more minutes. So what do you make of Uruguay's President Orsi recent visit to China?
- [16:56]
B
I don't. I wouldn't read anything into it at all. You know, he. It makes all the sense in the world for a little country like Uruguay to get some benefits. Who knows what they are, but they're going to be benefits from China. And perhaps he can use it as a negotiating ploy to get some benefits from the U.S. you know, it's like that old Mad, Mad, Mad magazine cartoon where they had Nasser, this is back in the 50s. And so Nasser calls up the US embassy and says, give me a million dollars or I will go to the Russians. Then he calls up the Russian embassy, he says, give me a million dollars or I'll go to the Americans. And this Arab, sleazy looking Arab, says to him, ah, Gamal Abdel, you are so smart. It's the same kind of drill, you know, so I don't see a problem with it.
- [17:57]
A
Okay. All right, last question, Doug. If. If your metals are stored in the, in a US Based vault run by an offshore company, does that really protect you from possible US Gold confiscation, or is it smarter to pay to move the metals to an offshore vault?
- [18:12]
B
Well, this. This first came up when Roosevelt confiscated gold back in 19. Was it 33 or 34? Anyway, it doesn't matter. People that have their gold physically offshore, not in the US could legally continue to hold it. I'm not saying it'll be a repeat of that at all, but some physical distance can only be a good thing. So I think the answer to the question is, yeah, you want some gold in your own physical, clammy hands, but you also want some gold outside of the political boundary of the U.S. so you want both.
- [18:52]
A
Okay.
- [18:52]
B
But it's not, it's not going to help you this time. Probably, but who knows? You can't predict what, what, what the regulations and the laws will say if they confiscate gold. Will they? I don't know. Trump is a, is a, is a schizophrenic. He's capable of doing anything for any kind of reason that he fabricates.
- [19:12]
A
It really is. Okay, Doug, sorry we have to wrap it up here, but thank you very much. And we'll be back next week with more.
- [19:19]
B
Thanks, Matt.