Gold & Silver Shine as Fed Targets Bondholders for Capital Losses

Money Metals President Stefan Gleason Reveals One Sleeper Precious Metal & Shares How to Avoid Rookie Mistakes


Mike Gleason Mike Gleason
Interview with: Stefan Gleason
September 4th, 2020 Comments

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Welcome to this week’s Market Wrap Podcast, I’m Mike Gleason.

Coming up we’ll hear a recent interview Money Metals president Stefan Gleason gave with Mountain West IRA (one of our preferred IRA trustees) on the ins and outs of how you can own physical precious metals inside a retirement account.

Stefan gives an overview of how self-directed IRAs work, tells you how to avoid rookie mistakes when buying precious metals, describes the process of selling your metals down the road when it’s appropriate to do so and also talks about the one sleeper precious metal that may be well worth considering right now. So, stick around for this newly released interview, coming up after this week’s market update.

As the tech-heavy stock market indexes sold off on Thursday, many investors were forced to re-think their positions.

For the past few months, mega cap technology companies like Apple, Amazon, and Tesla have led the market higher. Yesterday they led the market lower.

Now the question is: Where can investors look for leadership going forward?

As would be expected during big down days for equities, gold held up relatively better yesterday. For the week, though, gold prices are down 2.3% to bring spot prices to $1,928 per ounce.

Turning to the white metals, silver has given up 4.1% since last Friday’s close to trade at $26.52 an ounce. Platinum shows a similar weekly loss of 4.1% to come in at $905. And finally, palladium is showing tremendous relative strength, up 3.0% this week to check in now at $2,342 per ounce.

Well, palladium has certainly shown leadership within the metals space in recent years. But despite this week’s gains, palladium prices still sit below their highs from February. And despite this week’s setbacks for gold and silver, they still trade well above their levels from when the coronavirus lockdowns began.

Silver has vastly outperformed all the precious metals as well as copper and most base metals. You’d never know it from watching CNBC, but silver is also besting the stock market year to date – outperforming even the high-flying Nasdaq.

Unlike stocks, which have been going up for years and reaching overbought extremes, silver is likely still in the early stages of a bull market. As it is prone to do, silver will both rise and pull back sharply along the way.

So, the possibility of some additional downside price action in the near-term shouldn’t discourage long-term bulls. What should provide encouragement is the fact that silver and gold markets stand to benefit from negative real interest rates and a tsunami of new unbacked paper debt hitting the economy.

This week, the Congressional Budget Office projected the annual budget deficit to hit a staggering $3.3 trillion.

News Anchor: The United States hasn't seen debt like this since World War II. Officials say the national budget deficit will hit $3.3 trillion this year, more than triple that of 2019. And next year, the nation's debt will likely be bigger than the size of the entire economy. It comes as the federal government ads $2 trillion in spending to fight the coronavirus and an economic recession.

When government debt grows faster than the economy and ultimately exceeds the country’s entire GDP, that signals financial distress.

A private company that was carrying more debt than the value of its total underlying assets would be facing insolvency. Its bonds would be rated as “junk.”

U.S. Treasury bonds face no such downgrade on the horizon. It’s not necessarily that investors have confidence in the full faith and credit of the United States government itself. But they believe the Federal Reserve would step in to buy Treasuries in unlimited quantities if necessary.

The Fed’s printing press won’t save holders of Treasuries and other dollar-denominated financial assets from real losses. In fact, the Fed’s open program of raising inflation rates will ensure bondholders and savers lose purchasing power over time. It’s just a question of how much.

What person in their right mind would hold assets that are virtually guaranteed to lose value? Perhaps the fact that Federal Reserve notes are, for now, losing purchasing power at a gradual pace offers some the illusion of safety.

It’s true that precious metals markets can be volatile by comparison on a day to day basis. But that’s just noise if your time horizon is measured in years.

The major trend for gold and silver prices is up in terms of dollars. In terms of the stock market and other major asset classes, precious metals also have the potential to make gains in the months and years ahead.

At the very least, hard money serves as an indispensable portfolio diversifier in uncertain times. When markets gyrate and U.S. dollars depreciate, physical gold and silver provide a tangible hedge against inflation and financial insecurity.

Well now, without further delay, let’s get right to the premier of an incredibly informative interview Money Metals’ president Stefan Gleason gave on a range of topics, including some background on our company itself and how it came to be the top rated online precious metals dealer in the U.S.

Stefan Gleason

Diana: I am Diana. I am the business and marketing coordinator with Mountain West IRA. And with me today is Stefan Gleason, who is the president of Money Metals Exchange. And what they have going on over there it's really cool. It's kind of one stop shopping, but we're going to go ahead and cover some very interesting stuff with him today. So Stefan, go ahead and tell us a little bit about you and your company and the services that you offer.

Stefan Gleason: Well, thank you. It's an honor to be invited to speak to you and your customers. Some of which are our customers over the years. Money Metals Exchange has been around for 10 years. We're a national online precious metals dealer. Just a little bit about my background, I founded the company in 2010. And at the time I was involved in public policy for 15 years and then spent several years as a financial newsletter publisher. And we were involved in hard assets and privacy and tax minimization, and asset protection. So, we were dealing with the issues that a lot of our precious metals customers today are concerned with. The reason that we founded the company specifically was because at the time, we had a tremendous amount of folks who were interested in precious metals.

They're concerned about inflation; they're concerned about financial turmoil. This was right after the 2008 financial crisis, the last time precious metals really started taking off because of all of the things that were going on and the Central Bank response. And our subscribers wanted to know where to buy precious metals and what to buy. That was one of the most common questions we would get. And at the time, there really weren't many... Let me put it this way… most of the ad people that were advertising for precious metals to sell precious metals were selling the wrong kind of precious metals. They were selling the rare coins and their celebrity spokespeople. And those were the only ones who could really afford to advertise in our newsletter because they make a 50% markup, which is not good for the investor, but good for them.

So, we didn't want to actually get involved in promoting those companies to our subscribers. So, we decided let's just form our own precious metals company as an in-house offer so that we can sell the things that people should be buying, which is the bullion coins, bars and rounds, which are priced near the spot price of the metal. So, that's how we launched the business in 2010. A few years later, I sold the investment newsletter company and focused exclusively on Money Metals Exchange, because that really was my passion anyway. And my brother and my brother in law are the other two owners of the company. And we have about 60 employees today and we’re one of the largest online based precious metals dealers in the country.

In addition to being a dealer where we both buy and we sell, we're also a depository. So we formed a separate company that is one of the large precious metals depositories in the country privately managed. It's not part of a bank, it's not part of Wall Street. So it's one of these depositories that's outside of the financial system. It's based in Idaho. And it's a class three facility. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. We've been working with IRA customers for years, and Mountain West IRA being one of the very few that we like to work with, because you guys do a great job and are easy to work with.

So we do IRAs, we have a monthly savings plan, which is a great program for people that want a dollar cost average on a monthly basis, and just take some of the guesswork out of investing. And that's something that's been really popular since our beginning. And more recently, we launched a loan program. So if you're a customer that has precious metals and can offer them as collateral to be stored in our depository, we can give you a line of credit at a very low interest rate against that. But it's only for specific types of loans. We don't do consumer loans. It has to be for a commercial or investment purpose.

Diana: There are people that own the precious metals themselves personally, correct?

Stefan Gleason: Right. Or their business. And so they offer as collateral, physical metal that is the same kind of stuff that we buy and sell every day of the week, 24 hours a day. And it's very good, very liquid collateral. And so it's excellent collateral for a loan, but banks don't know how to deal with it. It's almost impossible to get a loan against precious metals. We have the best program of very very few in the country. We launched it last year. This isn't for everybody. One thing about precious metals and we'll talk about this is, there's liquidity because you can easily sell them.

But there is a tax implication, unless you hold it inside of an IRA when you buy and you sell. And so one of the reasons somebody might want to borrow against precious metals is say they have an investment, real estate they want to improve, and they can't get a bank loan. Maybe they don't want to sell their precious metals because there's capital gains taxes. They obviously always can do that. And it's a great... Very easy thing to sell. But they may choose to get a loan against it instead. And so we offer that service also.

Diana: Why would somebody want to invest in gold and other precious metals, although being able to loan against it, if you hold it personally is pretty good for me? But how does it usually compare to other financial assets like stock market, brokerage accounts, mutual funds, things like that?

Stefan Gleason: So precious metals are first and foremost, they're a hard asset. They're tangible. So they're actual wealth in and of itself. You actually own the metal. It's not a piece of debt. It's not a bond. It's not a stock. It’s essentially money. It's been chosen as money for 3000 years and Central Banks today still consider it money. Even though they want to denigrate it publicly, but they hold huge amounts of it as a reserve asset. One of the strengths of precious metal is it's a non-correlated asset to most other asset classes. So when the stock market is going up, it may not do as well, unless it's because of an overall inflationary boom. The stock market's going down.

Sometimes it can go down, but it often performs very well in comparison to other assets because it's a safe asset. It's a highly liquid market and people will go to it perhaps in addition to, or instead of bonds, which have their own problems, but sometimes do well in a bad market. So the thing about precious metals is virtually nobody owns them right now. At least, compared to many decades in the past. And that makes it an under loved unloved asset. It's very little participation. It's been doing extremely well really for the last 20 years. In fact, if you look at precious metals, it's outperformed the S&P 500 in the last 20 years.

The other thing is that when you include it in a portfolio, it does things that all these money managers like to say are really important, and it is important. It reduces volatility in an overall portfolio that contains gold, and it increases the real return rate of the portfolio over time. So like the last 20 years a portfolio that included precious metals would have outperformed one that did not by a reasonable margin, at least in those terms. It's important because it's a non-correlated asset. It doesn't have all the same forces on it that other things do. It's kind of a go-to asset in a panic, in an inflation.

And all those things make it an important consideration really. Everybody should have at least some of them. If you start getting into 50, 25, 50, or whatever, huge percentages, that's speculation, but having a five or 10% allocation, or even a little bit more particularly in these times, I think it's not only is it prudent, but I think it's really dangerous not to have at least some.

Diana: My grandfather regularly invested in gold, silver, and he always called it his rainy day fund.

Stefan Gleason: Right. Yeah, and he didn't necessarily ever want to sell it, but he knew that it was there, it was financial insurance. That's the key thing about it. When you get into mining stocks and other things, then that's a little bit of a different ball game. Those can be good too, but that's more of a speculation. There's a lot more risk involved. There could be a lot more upside too.

Diana: So, I know a lot of people listen to folks like Warren Buffett when they're trying to figure out which way the market's heading, what they might want to be investing in. He's usually been pretty negative about gold and silver, but I think I heard something recently about him changing his outlook on gold.

Stefan Gleason: Yeah, that was interesting. So he's been denigrating gold and silver for most of the last 20 years with one exception, we'll talk about that. But he's been actually probably on longer than tha. He talks about how, "Well, I don't understand gold. You have mining in South Africa, you spend a huge amount of money to go deep into the earth and dig this stuff up, and then you dig it up and you refine it, and then you ship it across the world. You have to line up insurance and then you put it in a new hole in the ground and you pay people to stand around guarding it."

So, he didn't understand the point. He likes to invest in companies. That's his thing. Interestingly, his dad was a big gold bug. So I'm wondering if some of this might be sort-of based on whatever, arguments they had when he was a kid. A little over 15 years ago, Berkshire Hathaway actually bought a very large amount of physical silver, and they actually held 120 million ounces. I think it was almost 130 million ounces of physical silver an advantageous price probably at $5 an ounce.

And they got rid of that sometime around 2010, I believe. And so they made a nice return. But yes. Just in the last few weeks it was disclosed that Berkshire Hathaway had made a major investment in Barrick Gold, which is one of the largest precious metals mining companies in the world. I think it's the number two. They made a half billion dollar investment over the last few months. The importance of that is, I mean, first of all, the reversal was interesting because he'd been so negative publicly. And so that should say something in and of itself, about what he thinks about what's happening now.

But the other thing that's interesting is that, of course he's, he's followed by many, so on Wall Street, you're not going to get fired for recommending gold. If Warren Buffet just bought, maybe you're behind the curve a little bit. So I think that's really helpful in bringing a recognition and bringing more people in, even in the more of the mainstream investment community.

Diana: What are some of the drivers of price performance with precious metals?

Stefan Gleason: Gold is a little bit different than the others. Gold is almost entirely a monetary asset; it's held as savings around the world by banks, by individuals. There's a little bit jewelry demand. There is some interesting supply constraints emerging in gold, as well as silver and platinum. Supply is not growing very much and in some cases it's rolling over, even as demand is picking up and that's why prices are rising. A lot of work goes into mining and a lot of expense, a lot of labor, there's lots of regulatory things. There's political risk and there's capital costs, and 20, 30 years sometimes to build a mine from the exploration to development, all that.

A lot of work goes into creating an ounce of goal that you can hold. So demand is picking up both on the monetary side. And then even on the industrial side, particularly with silver, which is a really interesting metal for that reason, because it has both the monetary demand coming in from investment.

But then it also has grown uses in industry and electronics and solar and medical applications. And so it's a very special metal that way. And it has its foot in both the monetary and industrial side. And both of those are bullish for the most part. A little bit question on the industrial side for maybe the platinum group metals in the last few months and years, but silver seems to be holding up really well in terms of its demand, even during this coronavirus downturn.

Geopolitical risk is another factor that impacts precious metals prices. Central Bank activity. What's happening right now with the printing of money and creation of money by the federal reserve and the banks all over the world, Central Banks is just unbelievable and at a scale never seen before. And I think that's why the Warren Buffet's of the world, and others are rethinking what their position is on gold. And in fact, even Bank of America, which is not necessarily a pro gold institution and they're a major bank and they have their biases and have had their biases, they believe that gold is going to be at $3,000 an ounce within the next 18 months.

You can't print gold. And that's what kind of the point is. Central Banks are printing money like crazy to bail out the economy. And that's why gold and silver are responding the way they are. So that's one of the major reasons right now in particular.

Diana: So besides gold and silver, if we're talking specifically like inside of your IRA or even holding it personally, there's also platinum and palladium. What do you think about the prospects for those precious metals?

Stefan Gleason: Palladium and platinum are used primarily in auto catalysts. They're precious metals, they're used in jewelry. They're more rare than gold and silver, in terms of the supply. And they both have supply issues, particularly palladium. Palladium has just skyrocketed actually in the last few years. It's way out performed the other precious metals, rhodium has done even more. That's another one we didn't mention, but 5% at most of our customers buy those metals; I look at it as more of a diversification. If you already own gold and silver, that's what you should focus on first. Gold and silver, if you have a longer term horizon, maybe more silver than gold, because silver probably has more upside, but it's more volatile. But, after you cover those bases, I would suggest people look at platinum right now.

Palladium's kind of expensive. It's already gone up eight fold in the last five years. It's gone up a lot, tremendously. Whereas platinum is trading at half of the price of gold, which is a historical anomaly. It almost never trades at this level. And it's usually in a premium to gold. So, the reason platinum is doing that is primarily the last few years that the whole diesel emission scandal caused platinum, which was used in catalytic converters to go down because of fallout from that with Volkswagen. And it's probably the major use. But now there's a substitution potential because palladium has gotten so high, you can convert over palladium catalysts to platinum. And so I look at platinum as probably sort-of the sweeper of the metals right now that hasn't really participated. So, it's something to look at, but I definitely think people should focus on gold and silver first.

Diana: Are there types of precious metal investments that people should specifically avoid?

Stefan Gleason: The one thing in particular that I really want to mention is the pitfalls of the rare coin and proof coin market. You really want to be careful. I would strongly encourage people to avoid anything that is encased in a plastic hologram slabbed container, unless you are a true expert in collecting and want to put in the time and energy, and really know what you're doing. Most of what's being sold as a collectible is really not collectible at all. It may be a nice thing for our gift.

But, at the end of the day, many of these things that people are being sold on at 50 to 100% or even more over the price of gold or silver are worth barely more than the bullion version of it, or the same. As I think I alluded to earlier, that's part of the reason that we formed the company is because so many people were getting suckered into these bait and switch schemes. And unfortunately, they're very prevalent. A lot of times it's the ones that are on TV with the celebrity spokespeople. Charlton Heston or Pat Boone. These folks have the right message: You need to buy gold.

Here's why, and all the reasons we talked about. And then when you call them up, you call up these companies that have this approach, and you usually end up in a boiler room, phone operation, high commission, high pressure sales people, and they're selling you on a collectible. And if you know what you're doing great, but for 95% of the folks just avoid it completely. And the key is you want to look at, what is the melt value of what you're buying. Gold prices are very transparent globally. You know what it's worth, an ounce of gold is worth right now a little over $1,900 and the premium should be relatively, over the melt value. And so that's the key thing: avoid collectibles, avoid proof coins, unless it's just a one off for as a gift with your true investment money. Stay away from that stuff, stick with the bullion.

Diana: If you're investing inside of your IRA, of course, you cannot have collectibles inside of your IRA. They're very specific as to what you can and cannot have when it comes to precious metals inside your IRA. You can give us a call and we'll walk you right through what you can and can't have.

So if someone's buying precious metals, there are lots of options like these online retailers, local coin shops, how should someone choose where they're going to buy their precious metals?

Stefan Gleason: Some people like to deal with a local dealer and that's certainly... Fine, there's many of those. We're a national online dealer. So, we deal with people primarily through the mail and through UPS and online and over the phone. We do some local business, but for the most part it's all over the country and we're in one location. So some people like to go in and walk in and walk out with the metal. We work with a lot of those local dealers where we supply a lot of them. I would say that a national online dealer typically will have more inventory, better pricing, be able to pay you more when you sell back, but that's not always the case.

Do some due diligence, look up whoever you're dealing with on BBB, look at the complaints, look at the compliments, the reviews. I think you should give people maybe a try and then monitor very carefully. Like in our case, a lot of folks will do a test order and just see how the service is, see how quick we deliver. And then they become more reassured. Whenever you see somebody who's not meeting their commitments, you've got to take that very seriously. We've seen many dealers. Some of them have gone down in huge scandals where there were lots of warning signs in advance. We do a lot of writing on this subject as part of our overall content and education.

So, check BBB, check reviews, delivery delays, bad service. And then if you had experienced that, obviously take that seriously. It's kind of a warning sign. Some of these businesses have failed and unless there's a really good reason for there to be a delivery delay, that's one of your biggest warning signs. If you're waiting weeks and weeks to get your metal, that's a problem… in most cases.

Lately, there's been some tightness on certain products, but even then a dealer like us, it's going to tell you, "Hey, there's a three week delay on this product, but these are available right now." So look at the communication. Make sure that they meet their commitments. And in our case, I think we distinguish ourselves on the service, the pricing, the overall offerings, but also on the content. So when you deal with Money Metals Exchange, you're getting a lot of educational content as an added value about the markets, about investing.

Diana: So, what in your opinion is more important, choosing the right product or getting something for the lowest price?

Stefan Gleason: So as long as you stay away from the rare coins, you're probably going to be fine. You want to go for a good price obviously. We have great prices. We also offer a very high price when you sell to us also.

Getting the lowest price is not everything is my point. There's plenty of good pricing out there on our site and other sites. And you want to go for the lower pricing in general, but it's not the end all-be-all.

Diana: Lower prices are great, but if metals never show up, you didn't get what you paid for. So if someone wanted to place an order with Money Metals Exchange, how would they go about that?

Stefan Gleason: So, we are online 24/7. You can buy online at moneymetals.com. We also deal over the phone Monday through Friday 7:00 AM to 5:30 PM Mountain Time. And the way it works online, you shop around, you put it in the cart, and you check out, you get a confirmation right away. You get to choose your payment method. We accept payment by wire, by ACH, by check, by credit card, by PayPal. We're actually the most sort of enabled on cryptocurrencies as well. So we deal in about seven or eight cryptocurrencies. You can pay us in Bitcoin cash if you want, not that many people do that, but it's just another thing we offer.

Just call us; we'll hold your hand. Now with an IRA of course, that's something where it involves Mountain West as the trustee. So that's a little bit of a different process. Not much more complicated, but slightly different steps.

Diana: How does someone sell their precious metals? I mean, if they have them for awhile and they're thinking, "I want to get rid of these now." How do they know when it might be a good time and how would they go about it?

Stefan Gleason: You want to be able to sell these, and any time you need to be comfortable. You have an exit strategy, know how to do it. It may be a little bit mysterious, just like buying in the first place is mysterious for people, but it's really not difficult. And really, it's just a matter of, if you own it at home, there's really two options. You can sell it to a local coin shop, walk in, get paid, walk out, or you can deal with Money Metals Exchange or another online dealer and arrange to sell it and then ship it and then get paid when it arrives. So in our case, if you have it at our depository, you can literally do it right online. You can sell from your depository account. You can get paid almost immediately, and it gets processed out.

A couple clicks of the mouse, very easy. In the case of an IRA, it's essentially just as easy because it's already stored in a depository like ours. In the case of having it at home, you would lock a price with us. We would commit to sell at a certain price. We would agree, "Here's the price we're paying you." Nobody can cancel that transaction.

You then ship it to us. And as soon as it's received, we send you an ACH or a wire and pay you. Some dealers won't lock pricing in advance, so they'll want you to ship it to them first, before they lock pricing. We commit to an actual price that's based on the premium and the spot price at the time. And that works well for people. They want to know that with certainty before they ship it off. You have to insure it. You really should insure it. You don't have to because it's your risk in that situation. But you should probably through postal service registered mail. Everything is insured by us when we ship out to our customers. When you shipped into us, it's your responsibility.

Diana: Now I know that you guys are also a depository. Obviously clients who have precious metals inside of their IRAs, a depository must hold your metals because you cannot hold them yourselves because they're inside of your IRA. But a depository is actually oftentimes a really good idea for those who buy the metals personally as well. Can you tell us a little bit about your depository and how a depository in general works?

Stefan Gleason: Oh, and let me just mention one other thing about when to sell. I wouldn't be selling right now unless you need the money for some specific reason. This is the perfect storm for precious metals. People should be buying right now. And they are, frankly, at unbelievable higher rates than before. If you have an outbreak in peace in the stock market, lack of volatility and you don't have a federal reserve that's printing trillions of dollars every year in new money supply, and you have fiscal responsibility in Congress and those things, those would be the signs, it's probably time to sell your precious metals or at least some of them. But right now, we don't have any of those signs. That said, if you need the money, of course, it's yours and it's liquid.

So, on depository, we are a class three vault. So that's the highest rating Under Writers Laboratory. It's a UL class three vault, and we are fully integrated with the rest of our company. And that's a big advantage compared to our competitors, who deal with third parties, some of which have been vaulting for a long time, but it's surprisingly difficult sometimes to work with some of these companies. And part of it is because you're dealing with lots of parties and they are talking to each other. And that's one of the reasons why, in your case, we worked so well with you because we have good communication and we're all sort of onboarded with each other. So it's very smooth. In the case of some of these third party depositories, you're calling the depository, you're calling the dealer, you're coordinating between the two.

You don't have to deal with that with us. It's a separate company and it's separately held, physically from our inventory, but it's all integrated. So it's seamless and you don't have to worry about it. But, basically we do segregated storage, which is the gold standard, if you will, in storage. Segregated means your metals are not commingled with anyone else's metals. It's literally its own physical container. It's a sealed container. It's all done under camera. Everything is documented. There's dual controls and everything that's handled, no metal moves even across the room in our building, in our depository, or even outside in other parts of our fulfillment operation, without two people signing off on any thing that happens.

We do independent audits. Externally we have internal audits. You can even have a showing of your metals remotely via Skype. We've done that for folks. The strong advantage we have is, aside from our controls and our depository storage fees, which are probably the lowest, is the ease of working with us. Particularly if you're using us as a dealer to buy or sell.

Diana: They can buy it from you and store it right there.

Stefan Gleason: And we have thousands and thousands of storage customers. We built that depository in 2017. And there's already an issue coming in a couple of years in terms of space. 95% of folks that we deal with do want physical possession, unless it's an IRA where they can't. They buy precious metals because they want to have it in their hands. They want to know it's real. They want to have some in their possession, in case the worst happens. And we think everybody should have at least some in their possession. But for those that want to use storage, which again is a smaller percentage, I think we have the best offer out there.

One of our secrets really is, we are in the same building as the County Sheriff and City Police. We have about half the building. They have the other half. And so it's kind of this neat opportunity. We have police cars all over the place and that kind of thing. And not that we rely on them for security because we have our own security, but it's a nice, psychological added benefit of Money Metals Depository.

Diana: Let's talk about how people can get ahold of you. Obviously you have the website, you also have an email where people can send questions or inquiries and its [email protected]. I like that. And then of course you have an 800 number that people can call. Interesting times that we live in and I've noticed that, that's usually when it's a really good idea to start looking at precious metals, hang onto those for awhile because they're just a really good hedge against the uncertainty and everything that's kind of going on right now.

And if you look at them over time, they have always, always gone up even with a little bit, a dip here and there with a little bit of volatility. But for the most part, if you look back and look now, it just keeps going up, kind of like real estate. Real estate does the same thing. It'll occasionally have its dips and valleys, but [inaudible] straightened out that line. That line is still a hill going up.

Stefan Gleason: It appears to be going up, but a lot of the reason real estate and precious metals are going up is because the Federal Reserve Note is going down. And that's why tangible assets are such an important aspect of your asset mix and your asset protection. It's especially in this environment where they can literally, there's no restraint whatsoever on the creation of currency and they are bailing everything out and that's basically our financial system. And that environment, you want to own things that are real and precious metals, real estate in many cases, not every, of course.

Stefan Gleason: But there are ups and downs. And again, we talked about silver, it's more of a wild ride. So if you're more squeamish about volatility, maybe favor gold more than silver, longterm silver probably will do a lot more in terms of appreciation, but both are great. And then if you get beyond that, go to platinum and palladium, but just a little bit of that.

Diana: Thank you, so very much for coming on today. If you have any questions, go ahead and call Money Metals. They'd be happy to answer your questions and thank you so very much for joining you; You guys have a great day.

Stefan Gleason: Thank you.

And check back here next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. Until then, this has been Mike Gleason with Money Metals Exchange. Thanks for listening and have a great weekend everybody.

Mike Gleason

About the Author:

Mike Gleason is a Director with Money Metals Exchange, a precious metals dealer recently named "Best in the USA" by an independent global ratings group. Gleason is a hard money advocate and a strong proponent of personal liberty, limited government and the Austrian School of Economics. A graduate of the University of Florida, Gleason has extensive experience in management, sales and logistics as well as precious metals investing. He also puts his longtime broadcasting background to good use, hosting a weekly precious metals podcast since 2011, a program listened to by tens of thousands each week.