B (11:38)

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A (12:37)

Inc. And by the way, you know I checked the numbers and oil production in 2025, which is the first year of drill Baby Drill because Trump became president in January, oil production in 2025 is not even 3% higher than 2024. That's it. And there's no evidence that that's attributable to Drill Baby Drill. I mean, it may have been the same even if Harris had been elected. It's not that big a move in oil production. Certainly nothing to say, oh, it's a game changer and now we're self sufficient. It's not that much more than we were producing before Trump was elected. So we're just as vulnerable. And by the way, and now this one is not on Trump, but we sold like half of our strategic petroleum reserve when Biden was president. Now Trump had an opportunity when oil was cheaper. Before he launched this war of choice in Iran, Trump could have tapped into the oil markets and refilled the Strategic petroleum reserve. So we have a greater reserve now going into this war. So that was a mistake. They talked about doing it, but they never did. Because the only thing Trump really had to hang his hat on as far as how great the economy was or that he had beaten inflation, was cheap gas prices, which, yes, they had gone down, but not nearly as much as Trump claimed. He kept talking about $1.99 somewhere in some station that nobody could find. But Trump didn't want to start buying more oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve because that would have moved up the price. Well, now the price has gone up anyway and we don't have any more. So I would say that the odds that we could tap into it again are kind of remote. So we're in a very vulnerable position where the reserves are so low and there's now a war where you got the Straits of Hormuz shut down and you got missiles going all over the Middle east because you know Iran has to attack our bases in other countries like Saudi Arabia, because America is operating from all over the Middle East. We have a presence everywhere but Iran. Now, when they retaliate, these missiles are going all over the place. And of course, this also is angering the countries that are hosting American assets. And now they have missiles going into their country. You know, some of them may miss. You know, they could hit civilian targets. There's going to be collateral damage, you know, on both sides. But this has the potential to really escalate and involve other Middle east countries and maybe even countries outside the Middle East. So I think all these Pollyanna views about how easy this is, how quick it's gonna be, I think at some point the markets are gonna start pricing in a much more realistic, which is also a much more pessimistic forecast for, for how this is gonna be disruptive to the markets, to the economy, and of course, politics. This is a big thing. And actually, I forgot to mention this on the other podcast that I just told you guys about, but it's very frustrating to see all the Republicans pretty much coming out and supporting Trump, forgetting about the fact that he promised not to do this, right? Nobody is saying, well, he broke his promise and we're having another war. But you have all the Democrats who are criticizing. Again, not all. There are some who are supporting the president, but the vast majority of Democrats oppose the president and the overwhelming majority of Republicans support him. But I guarantee you had Kamala Harris done the same thing, if the circumstances were identical, all these Republicans would be condemning this act and the Democrats would be supporting it. And in fact, there are a lot of Republicans who are supporting Trump who were opposed in the past to military intervention by the other party. So I don't like the fact that this war gets politicized and it's all about party loyalty, not about what you think is right or your conscience. Cuz I think any objective look at this would say that this was a mistake, right? And there was no imminent threat to the United States at all. And there's no way Iran was about to attack us, like the President said. But again, I already went into this in the other podcast, so make sure and check that out. But I think as the markets start to take a more realistic outlook, you're gonna start to see a bigger impact. Like in the stock market. The stock market was barely down on the week, barely down. I mean, the Dow Jones closed at around 47,500. So now we're about 2,500 below 50,000. And of course, Donald Trump was bragging about 50,000 and taking credit for it. We may end up being a lot lower than 50,000 by the time the midterm elections come around, which is. It's gonna be a big problem. I think Trump has got a huge problem. I'm gonna get into the economy in a minute, but with, with the war in Iran, I think this is gonna be an even bigger political blunder than George Herbert. Worker Bush, read my lips. No new taxes, and then hiking taxes, promising to end wars, and then starting one, criticizing prior presidents for their actions in the Middle east and then doing exactly what you criticized your predecessors for doing is not gonna go over well, especially when the economy is in the toilet, which, which it will be. But anyway, let me get to the stock market. So Dow is only down about 2% on the week. S and P held up even better, down about one and a third. And the NASDAQ was only down about half a percent. Not much of a reaction at all. Now, individual stocks, I think the financials got hit pretty hard and I think they're going to continue to get hit. But overall, the market held up. The weakest of the indexes was the Russell 2000, down 3.5% or 3.3%. But also that's the most sensitive to the U.S. economy. The dollar rose about 1%. That's not much. In times past when the bombs start dropping, there would have been a much bigger rise in the value of the dollar than 1%. And the dollar's 1% rise is one of the reasons I think that gold dropped by 3%. But I think in the scheme of things, a 1% rise in the dollar is negative for the dollar. The fact that it didn't get a bigger bid than that, and I think the bid won't last. I think the dollar is going to fall, which is going to complicate this war. But it's also going to be very bullish for gold and silver and oil. Surprisingly, bitcoin. Bitcoin was up 3% on the week. I know a lot of the bitcoiners like, aha, you see, gold was down, bitcoin is up. This is the turn we've been waiting for. This is the big rotation. You know, we're going out of gold into bitcoin. That's all wishful thinking. This is a dead cat bounce in bitcoin. It rose with risk assets after things didn't crash immediately after the war. And you got some short covering, you got some buying. The same thing happened in bitcoin. But look, bitcoin is barely above 68,000. You know, it got above I think 72,000 on this bounce, but now we're back at 68,000. Bitcoin finished the week on a down note, like the opposite of gold on an up note. And again, bitcoin is trading almost in the mirror image of gold. And so if I'm right that the war is going to be bullish for gold, it's going to be bearish for bitcoin. And the reason the war is bullish for gold is not because of the war itself, but because of the way we pay for it. The way we're going to pay for this war is by creating more inflation. And that's what's bullish for gold. We are going to run bigger deficits because of the war. Now we were going to run bigger deficits anyway because of the weakness in the economy and because of rising rates as a lot of our low yielding debt matures and it has to be rolled over at the market. So we were already on an upward trajectory. But the war is gonna weaken the economy. It's going to lead to higher long term interest rates. And by the way, bond yields rose about 14 basis point the yield on a 10 year treasury closed the week at about 413. It was just below 4% at the end of last week. So people, maybe they bought the dollar, but they didn't buy treasuries, they sold us treasuries. So Bitcoin to me at 68,000, it's just going lower. This is the same reaction that we had in the stock market as we had as Bitcoin. There wasn't nearly enough pessimism. But getting back what I was saying about the deficits and the war itself is going to be expensive. And you know that. Just look at these defense stocks. They were the strongest stocks. Plus the energy stocks. That's where I made money this week. My second biggest personal position in my portfolio is energy. And so my oil stocks did well and I think they're going to do better, more in the weeks to come. But it wasn't enough to offset the losses I had in my mining stocks because that's overwhelmingly my number one position. But I'm not concerned about that. In fact, if we're lucky enough to get a bigger drop, I might have to buy more. But I doubt it. I don't think we're going much lower. And I would recommend that people watching the video just buy, buy them on Monday, the first chance you get before reality sets in and people realize just how high the gold and silver price are going to go. And by the way, I would buy again over the weekend. It didn't work last weekend. Now it looked like it worked. The people who followed my advice last week and bought gold on Friday and Saturday morning probably thought they were geniuses when they saw the war and gold started to run. But then it turned around. But this week could be the mirror image of that. So I would go to shift gold and I would buy this week and I would not wait for Sunday night again, to me, we could be at $6,000 gold very quickly and silver could be back above $100 an ounce very quickly, as oil prices are going to be over $100 a barrel. But the other thing that's going to be driving this. Oh, I get it. I forgot. On the cost of the war, Donald Trump has already made it clear not only are we going to pay for this war. Oh, I mentioned the oil, defense stocks going up. Why are they going up? Because they're going to get a lot of orders. Because we're blowing up all the stuff that we bought from them in the past and now we have to buy new stuff so we could blow that up. So the military industrial complex is going to make a ton of money off of this war. They always do. And that means the US Government is going to be out a ton of money. We're going to have to pay for the war. Where are we going to get the money? Trump is not going to say, you know, we got to raise taxes. We need a wartime tax to pay for the war. Of course not. They're just going to run bigger deficits. Where's the money going to come from? The Fed. Fed is going to crank up the presses. That's why wars are bullish for gold, because they're financed with inflation. Because the politicians don't want the public to have to pay for the war, then they really won't support it. They want them to think they get the war for free, but it's going to cause more inflation. But not only do we have to pay to destroy Iran, we now have to pay to rebuild it. Donald Trump has now committed that we're going to fight until we get unconditional surrender from Iran so that we can come in there and take over the country, and then we're going to rebuild it. Make Iran great again. At one point it was great, I guess a long time ago, but now we got to make Iran great again. What's that going to cost us? How much money are we going to Spend building Iran. I mean, I guess we're going to build it better than it was. So how much is that going to cost? Where is that money going to come from? I mean, we're talking about hundreds of billions, probably in excess of a trillion dollars to destroy and rebuild Iran. So this is very inflationary. So it's bullish for gold, is bullish for silver. It is bearish for the dollar. But the other thing that's bearish is the economy. The economy was already weakening, and we got more data today to prove that. And this may be one of the reasons, again, for this war I mentioned at the other podcast. Kind of like Wag the Dog, that movie. But it's a distraction. It's an excuse. Trump knows that. He even thought that Obama might have used a war with Iran, started a war with Iran, because he was in trouble politically and he needed a distraction. He needed something. And obviously Trump needed something not just because the Epstein files, but the economy was weakening. He had a big loss in the Supreme Court with the tariffs. So everything was kind of falling apart. And this whole idea that we had this hot economy was about to blow up because the numbers don't bear it out. The economy was weakening, inflation was strengthening before we launched a war against Iran. But now Donald Trump will be able to blame all this bad stuff that would have happened anyway. Yeah, now it's gonna happen even worse. But it was gonna happen, and it was gonna be bad. But now Trump can say, well, it's because of the war. Like, everything was great, but unfortunately, my back was to a wall because Iran was about to attack us. I had no choice. So we had a preempt, you know, we had to go first. And now we're stuck in this war, this noble war that was, we have to fight. And so the cost of this freedom is gonna be, well, we're gonna have to have a recession, we're gonna have to have some higher inflation, but it's gonna be worth it in the long run. Then everything is gonna be great. Right? It's just another excuse that could be a scapegoat for problems. 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B (28:53)

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A (30:16)

So let's look at the jobs numbers. We got the February jobs number that came out today. And again, I don't even put any stock in these numbers because we know they're going to get revised lower once, twice, three times over the course of the next year. It's usually the initial estimate that is the highest and then it just goes down from there. Which is particularly bad news considering how bad the initial estimate was. So the consensus was for 60,000 jobs to be created and the prior month was 130,000 jobs. So they were looking for a slowdown and 130,000 jobs is nothing to write home about. It's not a big number. That was revised down to 126,000 jobs, but the February number came out at 92,000, minus a loss of 92,000 jobs. Nobody expected that. The range of estimates went from plus 35,000 to plus 125,000. Minus 92,000. This is the worst initial report that the Labor Department has put out in like five years. So you have to go back to the prior Trump administration. So at no point when Biden was president did we get a jobs number this week. Now, as it turns out, it's not the weakest in five years because they revised the October number so many times, October 2025, that the October number is actually weaker than this number. We had a bigger job loss in October 2025. Now, of course, we haven't finished the revisions. I'm sure by the time they revise the, the February number, it's going to be bigger than the number that we got in, in October. But that number, and I'm scrolling through, because I put it, I posted it on X when I initially saw these jobs numbers. And yeah, so it was 105,000 loss in October. That was pretty big. But that was also under Trump. In fact, today they went back and they revised December 2025 from an initial report of plus 48,000 jobs to a loss of 17,000 jobs. So now if you look at the last five jobs reports, three of them were negative. We lost jobs in three. This labor market is a disaster. Right. There's no way that we have the hottest economy in history and the coldest labor market at the same time. Now a lot of people are just saying, well, it's because there's a productivity boom because of AI. No, there's not. I mean, maybe there will be in the future, but companies are not that much more productive now because of AI. What's happening is we're having a massive investment in building out AI. That's what's goosing the GDP numbers. It's not that we're so productive from using AI. We haven't even really rolled it out yet. I mean, yes, I use it and people are using it, but it hasn't moved the needle significantly yet. I mean, it's moved it a little bit, and I think it will move it a lot over time. But right now we're just making the investment and then we're counting that as the gdp. But we actually have a weak economy. And I expect a lot of these GDP numbers are going to get revised lower and a lot of the rosy forecasts are not going to pan out. So I think the labor market is weak because the economy is weak. It's not weak because of strong productivity. But it was not just the headline of this number that was weak. Look, beneath the surface, private sector accounted for 86,000 job losses of the 92, that's 93.5% of the jobs we lost were in the private sector. It's not government jobs we're losing. I mean, we lost some of those, so that's good news. But most of the jobs that we lost were private sector jobs. And a lot more jobs are going away. Manufacturing had a bad month. We lost 12,000 more manufacturing jobs. So add those to the total and listen to labor force participation, which had been improving slightly, tanked all the way back down to 62 from 62 and a half. That is a big move. That is a mass exodus of people out of the labor force. So that is a weak economy. And then we got some other economic news. We got retail sales, which were down, and again, they're not adjusted for inflation. They were down 0.2%. Now they were looking for a down 0.4. So I guess it wasn't as bad as they thought, but it's still a decline. And the prior month was unchanged. So retail sales are weak, especially when you consider prices are up. By the way, a couple of days ago, we did get the import export prices. I think it was January, and we got the year over year numbers that came out, and import prices or export prices were up about 3, 3.3%. And import prices were slightly negative year over year by about 0.2%. And what that does is confirms exactly what I've been saying, and that is that Americans pay the tariffs. The foreign producers are not paying the tariffs, because there's only one way that foreign producers could absorb the tariffs, because they don't actually pay them. Right. They get paid by the importer. The U.S. importer writes the check to the government, not the foreign producer. But the idea that was thrown around by Trump's economic advisers was that in order to maintain their market share and keep their American customers happy, foreigners were going to slash their prices so that they sold us the stuff at a lower price, so that when you add the tariff to the lower price, it would end up being the same. And that's how foreigners were going to eat it. And it was going to be a combination of price cuts and currency debasement. So their currencies would go down, that would offset some, and then they would rate prices. But the net effect of a strong dollar and price cuts internationally would mean that our import prices would go way down. And so even though we paid a tariff, we'd be paying it on lower prices, and it would be our trading partners that would end up eating it. They would have Lower profits in order to continue to do business with America. Well, the fact that prices, import prices are basically the same as they were before the tariffs means that that didn't happen. We're paying the same price and we're paying the tariffs on top of it. Now. I think what did happen is prices might have gone up and maybe some of the foreign trading partners were reluctant to jack prices up given the tariffs, so they held off a bit. And so it is probably true that but for these tariffs, import prices would have gone up maybe by about the same as our export prices. So maybe they would have gone up 3% or so, and instead they, they were flat. So we probably did get foreigners to pick up some of the tariffs indirectly, you know, in that way. But that's not going to continue. They're not, you know, they're, they're going to push it all through. They're going to start raising prices, especially now with costs going up, energy costs are going up. But that data proves that it was always a lie.

B (38:29)

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A (38:44)

So that is the other problem, and that's going to be very bullish for gold and silver, is you're going to be looking at a landslide victory for Democrats in the midterm elections because what is the US economy going to look like come November 2026? Well, we may still be at war with Iran and believe me, the war is going to be a lot more unpopular if we're still fighting it in November of this year. But if the war is still going on in, in November of this year, where oil prices going to be 125, $150 a barrel easily. You think we're not going to be in recession if oil prices are that high, given how weak the economy already was before we even started the war when oil prices were still low? No, we're going to be in a recession. A lot more unemployment, the cost of living crisis affordability is going to be much worse. Real estate is going to be in the tank. Real estate prices will probably be a lot lower if the war continues. Stock market will be a lot lower. So Americans are going to be a lot poorer because their stocks are going to be down, their real estate is going to be down. If they got crypto, that's going to be down. So they're going to be poorer, but everything they need to buy is going to be a lot more expensive and a lot more people are going to be unemployed. So who do you think they're going to vote for? They're going to feel very betrayed by Trump, who promised to lower the cost of living. Instead, it skyrocketed. He promised to end wars, instead, he started one. I guess the guys over at the Nobel Prize Committee, I guess they feel pretty good now that they didn't give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, that he was so upset that he didn't win it. They probably would have asked for it back if they had given it to him. Although I don't know if he started the war out of spite of. Because, remember, he was saying that one of the reasons he was thinking about invading Greenland was because he didn't win the Nobel Prize. What Greenland had to do with it, I don't know, but that's what he said. But maybe this is really out of spite, that I'll show them. They don't give me the Peace Prize, I'm gonna go start a war then, right? Who the hell knows with Trump? But the voters are going to be very upset. And the only way that they can take it out on Trump because he's not gonna be on the ballot, is to take it out on all the Republicans who are. So normally, the party that's in power loses some seats in Congress in the midterms, but I think this could be one of the worst on record. I think there's no question that the Democrats are going to take back the House, but it looks now likely that they're going to take back the Senate. I don't know how you unscramble this egg. I don't know how Trump's gonna get out of this unless he can get a quick victory, which, you know, again, as an American, as a human being, I hope the war is over quickly. I hope we could win it whatever the hell winning means. But, you know, history is not on our side for that. I just don't see any precedent in that. And, you know, the government lies to us all the time. I'm sure they're lying to us about the war. Remember, they lied to get us into the Iraq war with the weapons of mass destruction. They lie about the economy. The government lies about everything. So why should they be honest about the war? You know, they're not. I'm sure we're getting misinformation there. I'm sure they're lying to us about why the War started and they're gonna be lying to us about how great it's going now. I don't know. I mean, I hope it is, but I just don't trust it. And so all of this, you know, having the Democrats get back in is going to be bearish, especially if it lays the, the foundation for the Democrats to win in 2028, which is my forecast. My forecast is we get a Democratic president in 2028 with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, the worst possible situation. And so if you thought the government was spending a lot of money when the Republicans controlled it and you were right because they are, it's going to be even worse when, when the Democrats control it. And if you thought the multi trillion dollar deficits that are going to hit all time record highs, Trump is gonna break the record again. He's gonna have more debt than any other president in history. You know, first term and then his second term. He's gonna beat Obama, he's gonna beat Biden, but the Democrat that follows Trump is gonna beat Trump. That record will not stand. Trump will set it and the next Democratic president will, will break it. But who knows where gold and silver are going to be by then? Up in the stratosphere. People will look back at these low prices, you know, $5200 gold or $85 silver, whatever, 82. Now these prices are going to look cheap when you have the Democrats controlling everything. So I would just be loading up on it now. Unfortunately you can hope for the best, but you better be prepared for the worst because our track record is pretty clear as to how this is likely to unfold. So in the meantime, go to the Shift Gold website, buy yourself some gold and silver and take advantage, take advantage of the big sell off in gold and silver mining stocks. Go to my EuroPAC website, Europack.com you can get information there on setting up a separately managed account. We have accounts that specialize in mining stocks, but we also have broader strategies. The emerging markets also got hit this week pretty hard. They have been doing well this year, but I think emerging markets are going to be some of the biggest winners from the de dollarization trade which is going to continue in earnest as this war progresses. So you can look into those strategies, our foreign dividend payer strategies. Other than our mining stocks, a lot of our stocks held up pretty well despite the fact that the markets were lower and the dollar was higher. So I think we're going to start to see more capital fleeing US financial assets, moving into the overseas assets. So you can talk to the representatives at Euro Pacific Asset Management. I have five mutual funds that can be bought no load at most of these discount brokerage firms so you can get all the information on my gold fund, my emerging market fund, my foreign bond fund and my foreign value and dividend payers funds. All the information is on the website@europact.com the tickers are there and make sure if you buy them through your discount broker make sure and buy the institutional share class which is the one that has a no load up front no 12B1 fee so you pay lower fees on the way in you pay lower management fees so that's the way to do it if you're not working with a full service broker. Anyway have a great weekend. Don't forget tell your friends about this podcast about Shift Gold Friday market wrap. Get them to start subscribing, start listening and more important start investing in gold and silver and getting out of dollars while the getting is still good bye for.