Transcription
Hello everybody and welcome into Commodity Culture, where we break down commodities markets, sound money principles, and geopolitics, all with the goal of making you a better investor in the commodities sector. My name is Jesse Day. Today is April 3rd, 2026, and I'm thrilled to welcome Michael Oliver to the program. A veteran of the commodities sector with five decades of experience, an expert in momentum-based technical analysis, and the founder of Momentum Structural Analysis. Michael is making a bold call that silver will surge to $300 to $500 this year, a claim he backs up with both technical and fundamental drivers that he reveals in this interview. Michael is also ultra bullish on the silver mining sector, and he outlines why he expects it to outperform gold miners up ahead. And you're going to want to stick around to the end of our conversation where Michael dives into his book, Anarcho-Capitalism, and describes why this political philosophy of free markets over state rule is needed more than ever in our current era. All of this and so much more ahead in my conversation with Michael Oliver.
Michael Oliver, it is great to have you back on Commodity Culture. Last time I had you on the show was November of last year when silver was in the $40 to $50 range, and you said silver was headed to $100 plus, and that call proved to be very accurate. Of course, that begs the question, now that silver is back at $70, we've been on quite a roller coaster since then. Um, do you see us going back to triple digits potentially at some point this year?
>> Oh yeah. I think it'll go to triple, high medium level triple digits, like, uh, you know, $300 to $500. Uh, I know I'm a lunatic. Okay, there's reasons for that, technical and fundamental, but, you know, our focus is obviously the long-term technical situation. And it sounds unusual for a market to do something like that, but it's not. There have been instances in the past in other markets, which we've shown in our reports, uh, like in copper in 2005 and '06, and lead in 2007, and I could find tons of others where suddenly a market that's been asleep for decades in a little range says, "Hey, no more," boom, and it triples, quadruples in price in a matter of several quarters, and, you know what, it stays up there in a new reality. And I think silver's headed for that.
Now, why do you think both gold and silver have taken such a hit since the Iran war started? We can clearly see there's been a correlation between expectations of the war continuing and precious metals prices dropping. Most notably recently, when Trump gave a speech where he basically said the Strait of Hormuz won't be open by the US and the war is going to continue, which caused the metals to tank. Is this concept of war being a tailwind for precious metals misguided? And how do you expect both gold and silver to react if the war drags on? If, if, if we see this drag on for months, years, does that change your call for $300 to $500 silver?
>> No. No. Uh, I, I consider the war essentially irrelevant to what the metals are doing and have been doing for years. Okay? So, you know, you, anybody who buys gold based on war, uh, needs to have their head turned around. I mean, they, you go back and study the archives. Um, well, we even go back to the Ukraine situation. You know, when was that? Uh, March of 2022. You know, where gold was then? Uh, for several times it had been up over $2,000, you know, after having already doubled from $1,000 in 2015. And in 2022, it was up over $2,000 again. And they bagged it, and it went down to $1613 by, uh, September of that year. Uh, March to September, that was the war started. Soon as the war started, it went down. Commodities went down. Oil went down. Okay. All the things you'd expect to go up during war. Uh, false assumption. Um, in this situation, it's, you know, it's not going to drag on for years. It, Trump may just pull out because he doesn't want to hurt the stock market. You know, he's already done a lot of damage. Uh, whatever. But that's really, it's a nuisance headline because it distracts people from the underlying reality of why gold and silver advance in the first place. And the argument for that monetary argument, silver also has an industrial situation, uh, is simply the degradation of the money units, the yen, the euro, the pound, the dollar. Uh, the quantity of those money units, like the dollar, and you look at an M2 chart, go to the Federal Reserve site of St. Louis, look at all their lovely charts. And the M2 chart is like a parabolic, lovely place to be. Looks like a stock market going into blow-off. Okay? And what it does is, every decade, basically, if you do the math on it, and you can, you can select a point on that chart like January of 1960, January of '70, and then measure the growth, it's about 80% a decade increase in the supply of money. So, no wonder when I was a kid, a loaf of bread was 20 cents. You know, uh, I've, I've said this before. You know, your, your granddad, when he built the house, cost $4,500 bucks. Your father, $45,000. And now, if you want to build a median home price, it's $450,000. Degradation of the money unit. Okay? Now, gold, like any market, will inhale and exhale. But basically, it's an ongoing process of discounting the ongoing degradation.
Now, we have a unique situation with, with driving the monetary metals, and that is they can smell, they know that there are big troubles out there, government debt. Japan is in a bond crisis. You know, we all know about that. Think, well, that's Japan. Yeah, right. It's here too. Our bond market is sick as heck. Even the Fed's been buying it since November. Well, you know, the central government can't afford to have their bonds even be perceived as not being a place to be. And so, they've been imprinting money, buying the damn thing. You know, the Fed has. They announced it in November. Head of the Fed of New York, Williams, said the Fed's going to start buying bonds. His excuse was to provide liquidity. Okay? Anyway, if you look what bonds have done since then, they've, they've gone down in price. Yields have stayed high and gone high, uh, and they're not controlling the long end of the debt market, which is choking, you know, commercial real estate, consumer credit crisis has been mentioned lately, finally. Uh, and MSA, we follow, instead of looking at AI so closely, which will lead the way down ultimately, uh, we're watching the financials. They don't look good. The financials are anemic compared to the stock market. In fact, if you take XLF, the financial sector ETF, which is full of banks, brokers, insurance companies, credit card companies, um, and measure it versus the S&P, it's at a multi-decade low in terms of relative pricing status, relative performance. Something's wrong over there. And even some of the big banks, uh, we've been watching half a dozen of them since October, and three of the biggies have broken long-term momentum structures. Not so apparent on the price chart. That doesn't mean they're going to crash, nothing like that. I'm just saying that they've broken the kind of factors that we at MSA regard as, uh oh, negative, big negative. So, there's something behind that, and gold knows that. The central bank knows it, too.
And going back to the $300 to $500 silver call, what is, is it momentum mainly that is leading you to this conclusion? Are there fundamental reasons behind it? Is it mainly the charts that you're, um, creating that you release in, in Momentum Structural Analysis?
If you look at a gold chart going back to when they, they made it legal again in 1975, we've had, uh, that was a peak in gold. It had gone from $35 bucks to $200 before it was legalized. Then it legalized at $200. It dropped in 1976 to just above $100, 50% drop between that mid-1976 and 1980. It went up eightfold. Take that bear low price and multiply times eight, went up to $850 bucks. Okay? And then it leveled off for decades. It made a low in 2001, 2002 around $260 and went from $260 to $1920 by 2011. So, a 10-year bull market, different age, but also an eightfold move. Okay? Uh, then you go to the recent low, the bear low in 2015, $50. Well, let's say we're going to just match what the other two bull markets did. Eightfold means $8,000 plus gold, just to equal the dimensions of the last one. In fact, what we find interesting, and we've been saying that for a year or so, that's not a target, by the way. That's just saying, hey, just to match the prior two, do it again. You know, uh, JP Morgan came out with a number like above $1900 as a, as a fundamental target. That was interesting. Um, yeah, $19, yeah, nine, above, excuse me, above $9,000. $9,000. So even above the $8,000 level. So, uh, but silver during all that time, 50 years, was capped at $50. $50. Yeah. Gold to blast out the highs, blast out the highs. Silver would go up with gold, but it wouldn't get past the $50 level. Well, that changed. Uh, and we anticipated that it would. 2024, we said silver at $26 bucks, primary buy. Uh, and then in June '25, silver pushing toward $35, we said accelerations to begin. And our last buy signal, and it will be our last primary, was November last year when silver was $56, because at that point, silver broke out versus gold on a relative performance basis or technical basis, saying, "Hey, I'm going to beat you. I've been lagging you. I'm going to beat you now." And, uh, since then, well, you can see what silver's done. It was $56 bucks in November. And, yeah, right now, it was $73 on Thursday, yesterday, uh, in a pullback. But as far as the war news, again, that occurred in early March, and silver was above $90 then. But the real collapse in silver came one day at the very end of January, where you dropped down into the $60s by the first trading day of February. So, a day and a half drop, you had the full drop. The only thing silver's done since then was after rallying back up to $90 plus early this month. Then the war hit. You're right. It sold off instead of going up like people think it should, which it doesn't. We don't follow war. War is not a fundamental for gold and silver. And it came down and nipped out. Two weeks ago, we took out the February low, which is for silver like $66 something. We get down to $61.20 and immediately rocketed back up into this mid-$70s like, ho ho ho, fooled you. Okay, take it out to the February low. Gold did the same thing. Got down to the February low was $42.23. I think we went down and swept that, got to $4100, and two hours later, we rallied hundreds of dollars. After taking out that low, and gold's now, you know, we've hit $48,000 last, 40, yeah, $4,800, excuse me, last week, and I think we settled about $47 something like that. U, anyway, but war is not an issue. U, and most of the damage, the war sell-off was merely within the context of the already drop that had occurred in late January, if you get my point.
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Yeah. Now, what about the narrative out there that this war is going to lead to a devastating global recession? Um, it's hard to figure out what's true and what's not, especially with social media being so hyperbolic these days. But a number of analysts have come out and say we could be facing one of the most serious energy crises that we've ever seen in modern history. Um, food shortages, all these sorts of things. We have seen certain countries already in pretty dire straits, uh, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Australia, etc. Um, what are your thoughts there? Do you think that's being overexaggerated? Is that real? And could that impact the demand side for silver ultimately due to reduced industrial demand should such a scenario play out?
Well, it's going to take a lot to cut the demand side because the solar demand for silver is extraordinary. And, you know, China produces most of the solar cells and photovoltaic cells that go in the solar panels, like 80, 90% of global production of that, and it's in great demand. You know, particularly as oil goes up. And, by the way, oil going up does not hurt the monetary metals. There have been plenty of times when oil has exploded and monetary metals have exploded during recession as well. Okay, late '70s. Okay, people say, "Well, if you have higher oil prices, that is going to cause a recession. Therefore, that'll cause gold and silver to go down." No, the central banks go ape when you enter a recession. And the money never flows where they want it to go, which is the stock market bubble that is already breaking. And therefore, the bad data points that they're trying to save us from, the money flows elsewhere, and it's almost always gold and silver. Used to be T-bonds, too. Not anymore. So you're left with one alternative right now. Um, so that's as far as the global issue of oil prices. Oil is still cheap at $100 plus. Look at its old highs. Go back, you know, 2008, 2022, and so forth. $150, $140, $130, you know, that kind of thing. So gold at $110 is just sort of getting up to the old nominal price. Remember the degradation of the money unit. You know, if, if you degrade the money unit by 80% a decade in terms of increasing its quantity, uh, over time, then the price is something that decades ago, if you factored in the monetary degradation, should be quite a bit higher, just to reflect the decay and piece of paper you're using to measure it by. Uh, gold does that, and oil has done that. Silver is now finally doing that. Uh, but no, I don't think oil is going to cause a recession. We think there's a recession or worse coming anyway. And we think that's been built into the, the factors, and it's a stock market bubble that we're sitting on and looking at. And if you want to know why we have a stock market bubble, look at an M2 chart and then look at a Fed funds rate chart going back three-quarters of a century. You can get one on the Fed site of St. Louis. Get an M2 chart and a Fed funds rate chart. And even with the rate rises that we've seen since 2009, 10 of those years was zero rates, and then they had some rises up to like 5%. Okay? Even that level is dirt cheap historically speaking. If you go back and look at 75 years of Fed funds, so the Fed has kept money cheap and almost free for 16 years or so. And therefore, it's a drug-induced bull market because you've got massive liquidity flows, cheap money, and people make investment decisions based on that factor, which is falsely fed to them by the central bank. In other words, if you had a free market pricing of money, I doubt it would be free. Okay? Uh, you know, anyway, uh, so you've built into the stock market bubble, and we are exemplary leader of that right now, the US is, Europe to some extent. Japan is also a bubble. Um, when that bubble breaks, that's when you're going to get to all the dark data points again. And, you know what the central bank will do at that point? What they're already doing? They're going to panic and they're going to print more in various ways. And gold knows this. So that's what's going on. In other words, that's not the war.
>> What are your thoughts on the gold and silver miners here? They still feel very undervalued compared to the metals themselves, particularly silver miners. If we look at the SIL and the SILJ ETF year to date, they're barely outperforming the metal, basically just keeping pace with the silver price itself.
We run spreads on that, meaning we measure, uh, the miners versus gold, silver miners versus the gold miners. And the silver miners have actually technically broken out. They broke out a half dozen months ago relative to the gold miners on a spread basis. In other words, if you, you take the price of SIL and divide it into GDX, express the answer as a percent and plot that month-to-month. There was a breakout six months ago or so, before this year started. And sure enough, SIL has surged more than the gold miners GDX. It's gone up more year to date, even with the recent drop. Uh, we put a, a simple graph chart out in the weekend report and showed that year-to-date performance of silver, gold, GDX, and SIL, and the S&P. And everybody thinks, well, we're following the S&P. Well, the S&P is down six, seven percent on the year as of March's close. And silver's up almost seven. Gold's up a bit more than seven. Uh, GDX is up a bit more than gold. And SIL is up more than all the three prior ones, silver, gold, and gold miners, net year-to-date December close to March 31st close, which most people can't believe, but it is. And yes, technically, we do prefer, in my own personal portfolio, I'm doing this, the silver side of the equation, either silver and or its miners. And I'm pretty heavily into the miners themselves with a focus on silver miners, uh, relative to gold miners. I think they will outpace, just like I think silver is going to outpace gold going forward.
Now, going back to Trump's recent address to the nation where he said opening Strait of Hormuz, not, not really a plan here. Um, we've seen oil respond, uh, now $110, $111 a barrel for WTI crude. Do you think that this is a long-term trend? Cuz I spoke with you on the VIC channel when I had you and Alistair McLeod on a while back, and you said oil was already headed in this direction. This, this closure of the Strait of Hormuz just gave it a shot in the arm. Now that Trump has kind of come out and said, you know what, if you want the Strait of Hormuz open, go and do it yourselves. We're not going to do it. Are, are we going to see these longer-term plus $100 oil prices in your view? And would you be speculating in the oil markets at this point, or, or do you think it's just too chaotic when a single tweet from the president can send markets moving one way or the other? Would, would you be sitting on the sidelines here waiting for a potential pullback, or do you think, hey, it's, it's game on for energy. We're just going higher from here?
Yeah, it's game on for energy. But that didn't begin with the war. It began with our work said, and we announced this ahead of time. You said, we said, if you close January out above a certain price level, which we did, our price level was $63.01. You needed to close a month above that. You did in January. February is a good month. And then March, the event happened, and you exploded. The reason for the breakout in oil, we argued, if you wanted a fundamental reason, was simply underpricing. You look at its price, it was in the $50s and $60s. Go back historically, and that's dirt cheap. Okay? At that, already, the Bloomberg Commodity Index, a broad metric, by the way, which oil does swing with, okay? Not month-to-month necessarily, but in general, the broad swings up and down. It's in sync with the broad commodity complex. Uh, Bloomberg broke out in October by our metrics at a price of $106.50, getting above that on a monthly close. It's since traded over $140. But much of that rally since October occurred before the war happened. Most of that advance. It wasn't the war that took you up that much. You'd already, you already gone, I think, to $130 before the war even unleashed. So you can't say, well, the Bloomberg went up because oil went up and because of the war. No, it was already headed up. In fact, many subcomponents of the Bloomberg, no, no, were already quite strong. Base metals, grains, you know, you name it. They're crossing levels that we determined is positive. So that's what I think is going on with oil. And we had a major momentum breakout signal as of January. And it's of long-term nature, meaning that signal is highly likely to render upside for several years. And I'm not gonna try, I don't have a target except to say that when you plot oil, a spread chart versus the S&P, it's like free. You see the chart, it's like off the page cheap. You plot it versus gold, off the page cheap. Plot it versus Bloomberg, it's in the middle of its multi-decade range. It's not high. So oil is cheap by its own metrics, its own price history, and it's cheap measured to other assets. And the real issue for asset pricing, I think, is ultimately the money flows created by the central bank. And the public does not always put them only in the stock market. Because when the stock market gets overdone, smart money starts to get suspicious. They perceive less, less the more risk, less gain. They start to move their money. And I think you've seen that already in the gold miners over the last year or so. They've gone vertical compared to the stock market. Somebody's moved money now. Wait till the public gets the same mindset. Whoa. And that's what I think you'll see. And I think we'll see that by let's say this summer. I think we'll see a lot of acceleration where people will look at the price charts and say, "Golly, that's unheard of." Uh, anyway, but oil is merely part of that package, commodity assets.
>> You bring up an interesting point. You've brought it up a couple times now about oil's price not being that expensive when adjusted for inflation. We're seeing all over social media, if oil goes to, I've heard as low as $115, that will break the back of the global economy. If it goes to $150, it's game over. Forget about it. That there's no way that the economy can survive or people can can live day-to-day with oil at those prices. But if we adjust for inflation, you're, you're saying that's not necessarily some massive number that's going to destroy the global economy.
>> Yeah. Oil price, um, we did a study, for example. There's a myth out there that, well, oil prices, of course, that's a key factor for miners, okay, energy, okay, that's their key negative. And so oil prices is going up, well, that means, you know, their costs go up, cost of production. But if you do it as a percent of the price of gold, for example, and go back when oil was, was $2008, it was $150 bucks or so, and then the other peak in 2022, and you go back and measure what was the price of oil as a percent of the price of gold. In other words, gold going up helps the miners. Oil going up hurts them because production costs. But what percent is that production cost increase compared to the price the metal they're getting out of the ground? It's gone from like 6% of the price of gold to two. And so even at the current price levels, oil is dirt cheap compared to where it was to gold going back a decade or two decades. So it, it's not the same negative. Nominal prices don't mean too much when the money is decaying that rapidly. And especially when you start to break the stock market, and that creates additional money flows into something that's been doing better, monetary metals, uh, and the central bank therefore creates more credit, more liquidity flows to try to save those assets, they want to artificially support stock market debt markets. But it doesn't go there because investors don't put the money where the Fed hopes they will put it. Instead, they put it into safe places. Used to be T-bonds and gold. Now it's pretty much left with gold and related. So that's what's really going on. And, u, no, I don't regard oil as a, you know, a threat to the economy. The threat to the economy is what's already occurred over the last 16 years or so, the monetary degradation and the investment distortions that it has created that were false based on false essential economic premise. Anytime you commit money to something, you're a company, you're a state government, you're an individual, one of the key factors is what's the cost of money? What does it cost me to borrow money? Well, if you can get it for free and all of a sudden now the rates are through the roof, long-term rates especially, uh, uhoh, you've been fooled. You know, you're screaming. So that's the problem.
Now, you mentioned oil is only part of a, of a broader trend of commodities going higher. I spoke with Bob Moriarty recently. He said if you can drop it on your foot, then it's going to be going higher up ahead. Um, are you of the same mind in terms of the commodities complex? Are we just looking at, you know, across the board, any hard assets, whether it's agriculture, base metals, uranium, etc. The, the list obviously goes on. Um, are there any particular areas that you're more bullish on than others, or do you just think across the board we're, we're going higher?
>> Monetary metals more bullish. They are a subcomponent of Bloomberg. Not a heavily weighted one. They're just in there. You know, they're good balance in the Bloomberg. Uh, but copper, base metals look good. We've run, my son runs reports on sector ETFs that deal with base metals, uh, uranium, uh, you name it, you know, energy stocks, and basically, I think you could throw a dart at the commodity complex and say that's a good place to be. Now, I don't regard it as a place that's going to go parabolic like silver will. U, but it is a place that looks like one. It's low. It's only just begun to turn up. It's still, historically, look at the Bloomberg right now, $130 plus, $135, I think last, uh, its high in 2008 was $230 something. Okay? So we're, you know, we're headed there, but we're in the middle quadrant of the past. You know, go back to 2008, and it was a high at $230 something. 2011 made a high at $170 something. So even the Bloomberg broadly speaking is not expensive. And when you factor it versus real money, there was the degradation in the money unit, let's say, then the Bloomberg should easily be above the 2008 high just to catch up with the degradation in the money unit. And I think when the money flows, it probably will be broad. Yes, there will be some sectors within Bloomberg that will do better than others. Uh, oil, for example, back in the 2020 to 2022 surge in commodities, Bloomberg went from like 60 something to 140, that was prior to the war in Ukraine. Um, oil was one of the leaders. This time, oil is one of the laggards. In fact, it only just engaged in January, whereas the Bloomberg gave us a signal back in October. Um, now, if I were looking at oil right now, I think I would do this. Twiddling my thumbs a bit. Because it got overdone because of this silly headline. And I call it a silly headline. I can tell you why in a second. Uh, but specs came in and bought it. Probably most of them bought it $90 on up, you know, and chased chased the news. And I suspect that war will abate at some point. There may be, I still think this is going to happen, but so far it hasn't. A week or so ago, we put out a report saying, don't shrug off the notion of a street up of an uprising. We know the population is heavily against the government. In fact, everything I can read currently says that even with our bombing of Tehran and Iran, the population still hates the government, doesn't blame us. In fact, is cheering the bombing because it weakens the government. And therefore, the, you know, the issue is what sparks them to finally get in the street? Because when that happens, that government's gone in 48 hours, because this time, instead of the riots being easily suppressed, they won't be so easily suppressed. Uh, the government's weakened. Uh, it's probably largely more dysfunctional inside than we think, and the population has a sense of, we're there. Okay? In which case, the whole issue could disappear. Now, here's another example of a false headline. Not a false headline, but one that distorts your, what's really going on. Back last year in January, we put out a sell signal on the S&P. It had made a high in February at just about 6200. Heck, we got down to 6300 a week ago. Okay. Almost, almost came back to that high, but that was in February. February started to break. March, then April collapsed. Why? Because of a headline that had not been a factor for the stock market until Trump got elected. So it wasn't a factor between 2009 and 2024. But suddenly tariffs became, oh, that's all that matters. And so the public was sold based on the assumption that's all that matters instead of the underlying realities. A headline news, bare markets hardly ever start with a headline story. Uh, and when you try to take a, even a market that's justified in going down to hit it with a headline right at the high, I find historically that doesn't work. It's going to come back up. Sure enough, we came back up because in mid-April, what did Trump do? He waved the wand and said, 90-day pause, and the buyers said, "Oh boy, game on." And they took the market to a new high. Now, a new headline is hit again that it's going to end the world. Okay? Right. Uh, and that's the justification for taking the market down. No, there's a bigger broader justification that's underlying. You can see it reflected in the financial sector. And that negativeness that we can measure technically in the financial sector occurred months ago, ongoing. It didn't occur just in March. And so it's been our assessment based on short-term technicals over the prior month that the S&P is due for another rally. And I think we're starting to see that, a rally that probably will get some headlines that people say, "Oh, it's over. Thank goodness." Recall tariffs. That was the focus last year. When did you don't hear tariffs talked about much in the first quarter of this year. It's sort of abated as an issue. And then we got the war news, and that's the new dark cloud. I think it'll dissipate just like the tariff issue. And then you'll be left with everybody smiling because one, oh, the Strait is opened again. They've overthrown the government, or, you know, this, that, or the other happens that I can't predict. Uh, and they say, "Oh boy, it's over. Great. We could go long again." They get their little rally, and then when you roll over without a headline, that's when you pay attention.
Now, I want to stray a little bit from financial markets here and turn to your book. I see you've got a copy back there. I've got my copy right here. Very interesting. One time we had a conversation off camera after we did an interview, and I talked about my exit from the country of Canada and, um, why I left because of government overreach, and that led you to talk about your book, um, which I read and was actually blown away by because it aligned with a lot of thoughts I had in my own mind, which was this creeping suspicion that government just can't work, regardless of the form it can take. It just, it doesn't work because you end up with corruption, no matter what you do. Because ultimately, when you give power to a select group of people, it's almost impossible for that not to be corrupted. But then the question arose in my mind, well, then how do you convict people of crimes? How do you, you know, build infrastructure? Surely the government or the, the public sector is needed for certain things. Um, and this book kind of answers all of those questions based on an essay or thesis I believe you wrote in the 1970s, and it holds just as true today as it did then. Um, walk us through what anarcho-capitalism means and how it could make the world a better place.
>> Okay, I'll see. I'll try to fit it with today's events. Um, first off, I wrote it in '72, and I graduated. I got a master's. It was a master's thesis, political philosophy, and I communicated then with Dr. Murray Rothbard, who died in 1995, but he was the founder, the father of modern libertarianism. Uh, I, I also went up and and spent some time with him in New York. So we knew each other fairly well. This is back before really the libertarian movement even had a name, hardly. Uh, the Libertarian Party, I think, which is iffy, and I've never been involved with them, uh, they started late '71. And, but the concept of the libertarian movement really was formed by Murray Rothbard. And now there is the Mises Institute in Alabama, which is a think tank, and is considered fairly high in the rankings of influential think tanks, uh, and they're based primarily on Rothbard. But anyway, I wrote this thesis and I sat at the Rothbard and asked his permission if I could quote from him, and he said, sure, because the reason I asked for permission is I'm going to publish it at some point. I didn't get around to publishing until 2013. So the book is quite old. I'm not actively involved. I don't think there's a need to be. I think if bad ideas prevail, ultimately reality wins, and you don't have to go campaigning in the street to make a point. Uh, if something is decadent, doesn't function well, then it takes a while, but finally people on the receiving end of that realize, hey, yeah, this isn't working. And, you know, it's not always this type of government or that kind. It may be just the concept of a monopoly power of force in a given territory, whether it's a king or an elected body, uh, you know, or whatever. Uh, still, it's a monopoly control over so many aspects of your life. And if you think that's correct and works, then everything should be great. But if everything's not great, then people start to doubt. And right now, we're in one of those points in history, I think. I'm going to give you an example. Argentina, for decades, it used to be like the seventh biggest economy in the world when I was a kid, okay? Argentina. And over the decades, it decayed economically, politically. And it had two major parties, a two-party system competing for power, but basically both were socialist in effect. U, and the population wasn't real happy with it. They didn't know quite what to do. But the young generation, like this guy named Javier Milei, who's an economist, he's an intellectual, actually. He looks like a rock star, black hair. Ever seen a picture of Javier Milei? He's cool. Uh, he ran for president a couple years ago down there, really without a party structure, in, in a sense. It didn't have a big party or anything, and he won. Beat both parties. And even since then, there's been like a congressional type election, and he's reinforced his vote in the legislature with the people that are sympathetic with him. But he declares himself to be an anarcho-capitalist. And in fact, he's named one of his dogs after Murray Rothbard. He's a fan of, anyway. He has begun to sort of dismantle government. This piece here, this piece here, such as like, for instance, rent controls. You know, we have to protect people from the gougers, right? Okay. Well, the government rent controls down there really translated into much higher rent costs, such that people who couldn't afford to buy a home, they were choking on the rental costs because of all the regulations and so forth that were employed by the government. He abolished that agency, and rental prices have since collapsed meaningfully. So is inflation in that country. Uh, and he's doing it in a piecemeal way. He's not going in saying, "We're going to burn it all down." Nothing like that. He just said, "This is dysfunctional. Let's get rid of it." And he was doing it piecemeal, and the population supporting him. So, it's an interesting thing because what caused that to happen? Now, admittedly, he's sort of like a rock and roll guy, you know, you want to cheer him, you know, uh, but it's, it's the idea that he said, hands up in the air, the population had their hands up in the air saying, "What's going to work? This stuff hasn't been working. My parents have been working, but they're suffering day-to-day. They're not, not getting any wealth." So the kids revolted and voted for Javier. That's a micro example of conditions worldwide where statism has entered the economy in so many different ways and interfered in this, that, the other way, more so than they ever have. It's an ongoing thing. I, I often thought to picture this as a totem pole with two snakes wrapped around it that writhe up the pole, Democrat party, Republican party. And over the decades, this, you know, since let's say Hoover onward, uh, the government grown, the totem pole has risen, and the two parties are still vying for power, and yet the growth in the government has not stopped. And I think we're at a point now where factors on both sides of the normal Democrat-Republican spectrum are really not happy either way. Right now, they're swinging against Trump. I know that even, even the two-party system as we know it, I think is, is now reaching a point of fragmentation where Trump has an intellectual base that is abandoning him. The old Reaganites and Goldwaterites within the Republican party don't like the way Trump is going. Okay, so the party's split. That used to be the intellectual base of the GOP. And the Democrat party right now doesn't know whether to go radical left or moderate, meaning sort of, let's replicate something that the Republicans say, but stay moderate, you know, or go radical left. So that party is split as well. And I think this is all part of a potential intellectual fragmentation of the norms. And I think it fits very well with the bubble economic situation that we're sitting on with the stock market as a representative of sitting on top of the bubble. And I think when it breaks, and I think it will, I think it's, it may have already seen its high, the stock market, although I'm looking for that rally. I think the S&P, which is, you know, 6,500 area, might see 6,800 or something this month. Uh, maybe even a new high, but at least have a rally. But when it does roll over and the economic data points then go south in a big way, which is usually how it happens. You don't get all the economic dark points and then the stock market goes down. It's usually the other way around. Then, then you look back a year off the high and say, "Golly, now I understand why it collapsed." You know, instead of the headline at first. But when that happens, that will create even more emotion and intellectual doubting among academicians and so forth. There's even academicians out there who have been pro-statism all their life and are suddenly wondering, you know, these guys are not quite so functional. You know, I disagree with them and so forth. So, there's doubt rising in all kinds of areas. And if you throw into the mix sudden pain when your retirement account drops 30% and you're already hurting because consumer prices, and it doesn't seem to matter who becomes president because it doesn't change it. You get the point. So subtly, it's like hands in the air type of emotion, not only among the average guy, but also even academicians are wondering, yeah, these, these ideas aren't working. And so it, it could be a tabula rasa time, and you don't need to have somebody up there explaining why or whatever. I think Rand and Dr. Murray Rothbard combined, which is what I did in the book. Uh, they knew each other and were somewhat estranged from each other intellectually. But I married Rand's basic core philosophy, took off her politics, which was basically Founding Fathers' conservatism, uh, and replaced it with Rothbard's libertarianism and his economics. And so that's what the, the small book does, is condense all that. And, uh, anyway, Rothbard told me when I, when he saw finally saw a copy of it, he says, "Yours, yours is the first." He'd come up with the term anarcho-capitalism, I think, in a paper he'd written, but not, not written a thesis on it. And, so anyway, but I'm not active. I think you, you almost don't need to be, because reality always wins. And if, if a bad idea exists, then sooner or later, sometimes later, with pain, it goes by the way because it's dysfunctional. You know, look at Argentina, the micro example of a population that's pissed off at prevailing decades of back and forth, didn't work, and suddenly this guy comes in, tabula rasa-ing, and says, "Hey, let's change things." Anyway, uh, and that happens to fit with our macro-technical view. And I'd never allow, by the way, my philosophical view to interfere with my analysis because there have been times we've been major bearish on gold, for example. 2012, and January, we turned major bearish and didn't turn bullish again till early 2016. So, even though I love gold and I love what it is, and over time ultimately, it does protect your money. It is, in fact, it is money. Uh, I don't allow philosophy to get involved in that. But it just so happens right now, I think we're at one of those points where we've got a maxed-out crisis economically, marketwise, and the consequences of that beginning to fracture could create with speed the kind of stuff we're talking about, change.
Well, fantastic conversation, Michael. I'm going to put a link to this book in the description below. Trust me, like when I started reading it, it just spoke to me right away. I was hooked instantly. Um, it's very easy to read. The, the concepts are very clearly explained, and I highly recommend people check it out. Um, of course, we also want to hear about Momentum Structural Analysis and, and what it is you do there.
>> Well, we, we've been doing it since '92. Initially, we only had institutional clients up through 2015, and then we opened to retail subscribers. We cover in our all-asset category subscription, um, all four major key categories: the debt markets, foreign exchange, stock markets, including foreign markets, and commodities, with an emphasis on gold and silver. We put out a monthly commodity report where we look at everything, you know, uranium, corn, you name it, cotton. Okay? Uh, and so you get a full view of, you know, what are these categories doing? Because frankly, in this day and age, if you're in the stock market, you should not just look at the S&P and say, "Well, that's what the stock market's doing." You need to look at, uh, other asset categories like the bond market. What's gold doing? How is the stock market performing relative to other assets? You know, you can have an asset go up and you say, "Oh, see, it's going up," but it's going up, you know, one-tenth as much as something else. And so we, we also study that, where's the better place to be? And as you mentioned a while ago, the new emerging place is commodities, you know, as an investment, therefore commodity stocks. So anyway, that's what we look at. Uh, it's a broad view.
Well, I'm going to put a link in the description below to Momentum Structural Analysis for people who want to check that out. Michael, as always, it's, it's been an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for coming on.
>> Thank you, Jesse.
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