When Official Economic Statistics & The Truth Collide

When Official Economic Statistics & The Truth Collide

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: David McAlvany

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 7/9/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to this Thursday edition of Stand in the Gap Today, and it’s also our monthly focus on economics, finance and biblical stewardship. Now, if you’ve looked at your grocery bills, and I know you have, but if you’ve looked at your grocery bills and your energy costs or your insurance premiums lately, you already know that there’s a profound disconnect in this country from what I would term to be official speak and what I’d say would be real world reality. Now we’re told day in and day out and have for a long time, not just the last few weeks, the last few months, but we’re told day in and day out by institutional leaders and talking heads that our nation’s financial foundation is strong despite a paper dollar losing value every day. We’re told that inflation is under control and the numbers are solid, but does the data that we’re handed match the reality on Main Street or are we watching a carefully choreographed illusion?

Well, today we’re going to try and pull back the curtain a bit on the metrics that shape public policy and the official narrative. The title I’ve chosen to frame our critical conversation today is simply this, when official economic statistics and the truth collide. Now today we’re going to break down how the math is manipulated, explain how and why tangible assets such as gold, silver and crude oil now are decoupling from paper markets. We’ll define all this if we get in through it. And what a brand new federal rollout program being greatly hyped at the moment called Trump Accounts, what they really mean for the next generation’s wealth. And joining us to dissect these moving parts is a leading voice in global macroeconomics and wealth preservation. David McAlvany been with me before a number of times. He is the CEO now of the McAlvany Financial Group.

And for decades, David’s helped investors navigate the monetary regime shifts, looking past the mainstream consensus to see the structural trends underneath. All of that’s required for anybody helping to guide people with proper biblical stewardship. And he’s a veteran portfolio manager as well as a frequent analytical voice on national media networks and he hosts his own program, McAlvany Weekly Commentary. And with that, David, welcome to the program. It’s great to have you back.

David McAlvany:

Sam, always a pleasure.

Sam Rohrer:

David, let’s get right into this and I’ll start here. Just days ago, July 2nd actually, the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped the latest employment report and it caught headlines by saying that 57,000 jobs were added. But as so often the case, the real story was buried in the fine print. As an example, the government quietly admitted at the same time to a massive downward correction from previous months where 74, almost 75,000 jobs were entirely removed, downsized from the April and May reports. Very interesting. So in essence, there was a net addition. But meanwhile, they tell us official inflation as well has ticked down to 4.25, four and a quarter percent. But if we strip away modern adjustments like product substitution and use the government’s original 1980 methodology like organization shadow stats employees, that would show consumer inflation sitting well into double digits, closer to 11 or 12%.

And David, I think I have shared with you, but having served as a member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly for 18 years, and I sat on the appropriations committee for 14, I saw there firsthand how the numbers are routinely twisted to form a very selected official narrative and federally. It’s even more bothersome since data like this has just been released and shaped, I’m saying, to manage perception. So that being the case, walk us through these most recent revisions and from your perspective, share the true shape of our economy and why the public feels like it’s drowning despite the official rosy data.

David McAlvany:

Well, Sam, the non-farm payrolls you’re referring to are one of the most abused and probably least reliable statistics that you can look at. They have so many revisions on a monthly basis and so many revisions at year end. It really is not much of a reference for the true jobs market. And you’ve got seasonal adjustments, you’ve got the birth death modeling, you’ve got all kinds of things that allow that number to bounce up and down constantly. And it doesn’t give you a lot of good information. It is a headline and it can drive the stock market up or down. It certainly is something that conveniently can be pointed to when it’s a great number and can be kind of quietly ignored when it’s a not so great number. So 57,000, 115 were expected. And so it was a disappointing number, probably worse than that. Were the downward revisions from previous months?

And I think that for a better look at the jobs market, you can look at initial jobless claims. And it does show that we don’t have a major uptick in unemployment. We’ve got 215 versus 217 expected pretty low in terms of those initial jobless claims, particularly when you look back to periods of real stress like 2008, 2009 where we were marching towards 650,000 initial jobless claims. Or if you wanted to look at sort of the COVID era where we had up to six million initial jobless claims. And the continuing claims are another way of looking at the employment statistics. And those would be folks that have lost a job are still tapping into that insurance component, the social safety net. And again, for reference, sitting around 1.8 million today and it’s kind of hugging the lows nowhere close to what we had back in 2009, six and a half million and obviously far more when we hit COVID.

So all in all, the jobs numbers don’t look terrible, but again, it’s worth keeping in mind that some of the rosiness is, as you suggested, it’s kind of tinkered with. For instance, we had a drop in the unemployment number to 4.2%. That sounds great. Less people unemployed, except that you had over 700,000. I think it was 720,000 who left the labor force and that’s not talked about. So it’s not as if more people went to work. It’s that the way they manage the numerator and denominator, 720,000 people are no longer in the labor force. So they’re doing the math differently. And we can give a great big cheer, run a victory lap for 4.2 versus 4.3%. And again, it’s not particularly meaningful. For us, I think one of the things to keep in mind is the state of the consumer and how the consumer is doing, because that’s going to have a lot to do with where we go next in terms of GDP growth and whether or not we temp fate with a recession.

All

Sam Rohrer:

Right. And David, excellent on that. Ladies and gentlemen, stay with us because we’re going to go further and break this out the next segment. I actually want to take a look with David and talk about how you’ve heard the gold and silver. I don’t know if you own that, you understand. A lot of talk about crude oil right now. There’s the price of what it really is, what we see at the pump, yet what it is on paper. We’re going to explain that and how things are actually happening to drive prices in ways that sometimes don’t make sense.

Well, if you’re just joining us, we’re at pretty much the front end of the program here today. And today is an emphasis on economics and finance and biblical stewardship. My guest I’m glad to have back with me is David McElvaney. He’s the CEO of the McAlvany Financial Group and they have their website at mcelvany.com. And I encourage you to go there. Well, for a lot of information about investments and some help in how to analyze perhaps what you are doing and all from a biblical worldview perspective, which is so important. Now a theme today is this, when official economic statistics and the truth collide. And David, in the last segment, you illustrated and we both talked about how officially generated economic data and other statistics are routinely managed, I’m going to say, to shape a political narrative. It’s something that the government has an ability to do because the government becomes the quote unquote official issuer of things related to finance and economics.

But boy, I can say firsthand what you hear is generally not the whole story, but that being the case, that’s why we’re walking through this. That brings us here to segment two, the truth about gold, silver and crude prices. I want to segue into this because most people, I think David, who watch the daily spot price it’s called of gold or silver or now a barrel of oil and do that and we see what to hear on the evening news and all that. They assume that when they look at that spot price that what they’re looking at is, well, it’s just an extension of simple supply and demand, but that’s not necessarily true. And there’s a massive decoupling that appears taking place right now between what’s called the paper market and tangible reality. Now this is in your space so you know it better than anybody, but one of the major exchanges like the Comex or the London bullion market, the volume of paper contracts, it’s referred to traded daily in the form of futures or derivatives or digital promises of some type massively dwarfs the actual physical metal that’s actually out there sitting in a vault somewhere.

In fact, some ratios that I’ve seen show a staggering, like a 100 to one 100 paper claims to every single physical ounce of gold and/or perhaps silver. So when those of us like you particularly watch institutional players, and you can define that, but when they dump massive blocks of paper shorts it’s called, into the market at sometimes two o’clock in the morning when the markets are closed, we can watch the price of gold and silver artificially become very suppressed while at the same time the real price if you like to go out and actually try to buy it at a coin shop is selling much higher than that. And we see the exact same dynamic now happening in crude oil where Wall Street speculative capital sways energy costs regardless of what the actual physical supply is. So it makes this both an historic discussion and a really relevant one.

Would you define first, David, for those listening who may not know, what is the paper market versus the tangible market and why those two markets are actually so different at times? Why do they even exist?

David McAlvany:

Great question, Sam. So the paper market is essentially the futures and options market. And so you can buy contracts for future delivery of a product. And this is originally to help producers lock in prices in advance of being able to deliver product to the market. If you’re a grain farmer and price good today and you think there might be some volatility later in the year, you can go ahead and lock in the price now using futures market and you are now obligated to deliver that product in the future. And so you can buy or sell using the futures market. And so originally you’re talking about products that were there to hedge production. What has become over time is a place very much like Las Vegas where you can go and gamble and speculate. And so there are far more speculators than there are actual hedgers in the marketplace today.

So you see folks that have access to money that can be leveraged doing so this is hedge funds, this is private investors, major Wall Street firms, and they’ll take a paper transaction and take a huge position in a particular commodity. And that’s a great way to speculate on the price. It adds a tremendous amount of volatility and it has very little to do with the actual supply and demand in the metals. So take gold as an example. Mines produce about 3,700 tons per year. And as you said, you could have as much as 100 to one, you could have 37,000 tons in motion at any one time with paper contracts. So it really dwarfs the physical market in terms of the dollars involved and the price can be much more volatile even though the underlying supply and demand is quite stable. Just about every ton that’s produced goes someplace.

And what we’ve seen over the last three or four years is that central banks are very interested in adding to their reserves of gold. And they’ve been doing that aggressively between 800 and 1,000 tons per year. That’s double the pace of what it was prior to 2022. And they’re now in direct competition with investors who also want a sort of ballast asset in their portfolios. I think that makes a lot of sense. But the volatility that you see in the short run, a lot of it’s driven by options and futures, not the basic supply and demand. If you’re just looking at supply and demand, take May as an example. Chinese gold imports were 163 tons in the month of May. They are up to 692 tons year to date. That’s a 76% increase year over year. And that represents roughly 18, 19% of total gold production.

The market cannot accommodate that kind of buying without price appreciation, except that when you get lots of speculators in the paper market pushing the price down, you can have both of these things and it creates a little bit of cognitive dissonance where how is it possible that supply and demand is favorable and yet the price is moving lower? That’s where the paper market is really… It’s important for investors to know that distinction. Same thing can happen in the oil market. And the reality is there is a huge push in the context of de – globalization, in the context of de – dollarization to use gold as a reserve asset, but also to use it in a system of trade which the Chinese are developing now to displace the dollar’s role as the currency for invoice settlement globally. We think about all the trade that happens on an annual basis.

The US dollar has had this prominent role for many decades and it is slowly being eroded as the Chinese want to compete directly with the US and they’re doing it very effectively. They’re bringing gold in not only as a reserve asset for their central bank and other central banks are doing the same, but they’re also wanting to use it in net settlement of trade,

Which means that the globe is interested in gold because they’re going to need it if they’re doing any transactions with the Chinese.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. David, that’s very, very helpful. Now most of our listeners understand that a piece of paper in their hand, a dollar, a $5 bill is a piece of paper. It has no value. You can put it in a fire and just burn it up. It disappears. But physical gold and/or silver has been monetary and been real money. It’s money through the Bibles. It’s all the way through history. It’s there. It’s tangible. And you’re saying the banks are buying. They are loading up. China is using it as a strategy against the dollar. We’ve talked about a little bit on this program before, but that sets it up and I want you to comment on here because very recently just occurred. I saw in the Hong Kong financial market, obviously Hong Kong’s connected to China, but it relates to gold and silver. But it appears that they and China, as you’re talking about, have been buying a lot of physical gold.

And the suspicion is that because of what they are doing, it’s going to force a change in the actual price of gold, including what is out there on paper right now. We’re talking artificially low. Gold’s right now sitting about 4,100 an ounce and silver is at about 60 an ounce. What is taking place there? And do you think what they’re doing is going to drive the price of gold and silver upward because they’re forcing it back into, I would say, more reality?

David McAlvany:

Sam, we are at a very interesting juncture in the gold market. We’ve been in a long-term structural bull market and the price has faded off of the January peaks, but what you’re describing is such an important structural shift in the world of global trade and reserve asset management. Within the next three years, gold trades over $10,000 an ounce. And this is driven by the basics of supply and demand. Regardless of what happens in the physical markets, regardless of what happens with short-term volatility, largely due to the physical markets, gold is going significantly higher. Silver is going significantly higher. Silver tends to follow gold. It’s kind of like the caboose. It follows where the engine goes. But the real driver is gold here as a monetary metal. And what you described, Hong Kong is bringing gold into their financial system. They’re launching a series of clearing houses, clearing systems, bank vaults specifically to help facilitate this.

The same thing’s happening in Singapore. Asia is preparing to be a dominant player, not only in the gold market, basically taking the leadership from London and New York, but they are doing this for a very specific reason. This the most important point I could make today. It is to dominate global trade and be able to do that in a way that does not inflate their currencies. They get to maintain their trade competitive advantage and do net settlement in gold. Hong Kong is central. Shanghai is central. Shanghai Gold Exchange has been talking about this since 2015.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. David, have to hold that ladies and gentlemen stay with us. We’re talking about right now the financial markets manipulation taking place. We’ll come back and revisit what we just talked about and go further into market. Well, David, I know you cut. I cut you short there in the end because we just simply ran out of time. Before we go into this next segment about market manipulation, it’s something that a lot of people have heard but don’t understand. We’ll explain that. Is there anything you want to say that you were not able to?

David McAlvany:

No, I just think this long-term trend of appreciation and gold and silver is really important. And it’s a little bit like a barometer telling you that things are changing. Trust is eroding. Trust is eroding amongst policymakers, country to country, even within our own country. And that’s typically what gold does. It does very little during periods of peace and it does a lot when there’s chaos in building. And I think there is a lot of that not only in the headlines, but also under the surface. And certainly when we talk about global trade, it’s not something people generally think about, but global trade and reserve management, these are things that offer structural support. Where you end up seeing fireworks in these markets is when investors finally clue in and then they compete for this limited supply of metals with the central banks. And that’s when you can see exponential price moves.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay, that’s excellent. Restate one time for those who may not have heard. You made a statement about $10,000 in ounce for gold. When do you think that could occur based on everything that’s unraveling here around the world and silver as well? What do you think it may be and then at what point?

David McAlvany:

Yeah. I think $10,000 gold made up being a conservative estimate within a three-year timeframe. And silver, you’re talking about a move probably if that’s two and a half times move in gold, you’re probably looking at a five times move in silver. And this keeps historic ratios between the metals at a very modest level, but to see silver trade between two to $300 an ounce will not come as a surprise to us in that same timeframe.

Sam Rohrer:

All right. We might come back to that. We may not, but let’s move on here at that moment because when we look at the growing gap between paper markets, we’ve already talked about that, the physical reality that applies to both gold, silver, crude and all that type of thing. It naturally leads to a word that mainstream commentators usually dismiss as well a conspiracy theory and that is called manipulation or market manipulation. But when you understand the structural mechanics, David, of modern finance, to me it becomes clear that what we’re talking about isn’t a theory. It seems to be almost standard operating procedure. To the average investor, here’s just some of my thoughts and then you can comment, but the stock and commodity markets we’re talking about now, that kind of stock and then commodity are supposed to be, well, neutral playing fields theoretically driven by honest price discovery where somebody has something that they sell to somebody else and somebody as a willing buyer buy it and you actually have a real price, not the manipulation, the paper, the tangible type thing that we’re talking about.

But behind the curtain seems to be a game heavily managed by executive and institutional forces, executive meaning governmental. Now here’s a case in point. I really wasn’t aware until I had done some further research on this, where the beginning was and where it came, but there is an existence here called the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. And it’s popularly dubbed the Plunge Protection Team. It’s not called that in law. That was actually a term that came up. The Washington Post came up with years ago. But the group is real. It wasn’t born out of a rumor. Officially established by President Ronald Reagan under executive order 12631. It was in direct response to the devastation caused by the 1987 Black Monday crash. And on that team, it’s composed of Treasury Secretary, Federal Reserve Chair, and the heads of the SEC Security Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

I found it interesting that when I actually looked at that, that the team answers only to the White House. It holds no public meetings and it keeps no public minutes. And every president, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, every one of those administrations have used this executive lever to intervene, inject liquidity and prop up declining equity during moments of crisis. And when I combine this executive intervention with high frequency trading algorithms that are now driving what’s happening, to me, it clearly means that the free market is not really free. Now let’s demystify this for our listeners, David. Break down the difference between a natural market and a heavily managed one. And how can an individual protect their capital when the game itself is rigged if by no other thing, just what I just said, this plunge team?

David McAlvany:

Yeah. Sam, you did an excellent job describing the plunge protection team, the president’s working group on financial markets and giving the history of its inception 1988 with Ronald Reagan. It is a very useful tool in the toolkit. And when there’s market chaos, this group gets together and then marching orders are given across Wall Street with liquidity provided to be able to step in. Again, the best way, the most effective way to do that is where we started the conversation today in the paper market, where you can buy futures and options and it takes a little bit of money to go a long, long way. You’ve got leveraged positions and you can really move the market effectively doing that. The justification of course is we’re going to save you from the downside losses. We don’t want another 1929 to 1932 style market crash, 81% crash. 22% is what we saw on Black Monday.

And if they had been more prepared, it wouldn’t have had to happen. Well, in fact, there is a usefulness for it, but you also have, as you said, sort of a non-accountability with the group. And there’s been rumors in the last few weeks that the Trump administration has been very keen to drive the price of oil lower in advance of the November election. The peace deal, the MOU was a part of that. And selling oil short in the futures market and using the plunge protection team, coordinating efforts to get that done would come as no surprise whatsoever. Obviously, headlines in the last few days have shifted the energy and with the straight of our moves closed again, that’s a force that you can’t really fight. It still is how many dollars are on each side of a transaction. And there’s a lot of global speculators who would say, “Well, if we don’t have supply that’s going to impact price and we want to be long oil, not short.” So this is a reality that there’s interventions that occur.

It’s not an entirely free market. And it’s one of the reasons why you’ve got to do some solid fundamental analysis to figure out what the themes are that are driving particular asset classes. And once you figure that out, price is good to keep track of, but can be secondary in nature because ultimately prices will land where they should be. And again, we talk about gold and silver being significantly higher. I think supply and demand fundamentals for oil will take the price back above $100, not because of what’s happening in the Middle East, but because we have a rollover in US shale and we have been 90% of growth in oil production for the last decade. So as our wells become less productive, that is less supply. We’re not going to be running at 13.7 million barrels a day. And as we move into 2027, I think we move in the direction of 12 million barrels a day and it’s very supportive for the price of oil.

So right now and prior to the November election, you’ve got a window. If there’s weakness in price, let’s jump on it. Let’s push the price even lower. Let’s make inflation look better than it is according to the statistics, CPI, PPI, PCE, and let’s make sure that we don’t lose control in Washington. I mean, there is an agenda afoot and that is

Sam Rohrer:

Operable right now. Well, let me ask you this quickly here in remaining moments. You mentioned that at one point, I mean, this is a good tool, plunge team is a good tool in the box. And to that I would say yeah, it’s a good tool in the box unless the tool becomes a mechanism for distortion and manipulation. The president has talked much about as proof that policies are working is that the market is above 45,000 or the market’s above 50,000, sitting now at 52,000. How much of that is real versus how much is there because it’s artificially manipulated upward? And that’s a matter of to me, trust and integrity that has a long-term consequence perhaps.

David McAlvany:

Well, Sam, what you’re getting at is that trust matters, that integrity matters, that truth matters. And when I describe this as a tool, it is effective for perception management. And if you want people to come to a particular conclusion and you’re kind of trying to define the course of human behavior and human action and sort of corral investors in a particular direction, action, it can be an effective tool, but you’re asking, I think, the more important question. Does it reflect reality? That’s where truth matters. And you’d say, no, actually these are tools that distort reality and allow for the public to come to conclusions which are perhaps not consistent with reality. So you look at what we have in the stock market today and you’re talking about valuations which have only been seen once in US history. We are in the realm or the nosebleed section, if you will, in terms of high valuations.

And one time, maybe twice have stocks been more expensive in all of US stock market history. That’s not something that Trump wants to talk about because he wants to be able to tell the narrative.

Sam Rohrer:

All right. I got to jump off, Dave. I got to jump off. Ladies and gentlemen, stay with us. We’re talking about truth, all these things, market manipulation, what’s it mean? We’ll come back and we’ll conclude. Well, as we go into our final segment here today, again, thanks for being with us. I would hope that you’ve appreciated what you have heard today. I know I’ve heard from multiple of you listening in regard to this focus and David McAlvany, my guest being with me on this program. This area of economics and finance, it’s very difficult to make sense of what is happening because what we hear, I’m going to just put this out here from my perspective. When you have a government and a society that is more concerned about money and than bringing glory to God or understanding or thinking that they can take with them when they die, they can somehow take all of their wealth with them, which we know cannot be done, rather than stewardship and using those funds for the glory of God as we as believers biblical worldview understand, everything becomes about money and greed.

And whoever has the most is more important. And the whole political landscape of what we see and have been seeing for some time is all driven around money. Not a wonder that those in office who do not know the Lord will try to point you to numbers, economic statistics or other things as proof that what they’re doing is good. Even though as we’ve tried to talk about here today, they’re greatly manipulated. Well, because the economic part of it is one evidence from God of his blessing when there’s obedience by people in a nation and God says you’ll bless them. And that’s in Dude Army 28 and beyond. But you understand what I’m saying? If that is the focus rather than God is the focus, then things are really off and people love to distort and manipulate. And numbers are a great place to do that.

And that’s why we’ve kind of chosen this theme here today when official economic statistics and the truth collide because in fact they do. Now David, we’ve looked at all these things we’ve talked about today, true state of the economy. We’ve talked about gold, silver, paper markets, tangible markets. We’ve talked about why there’s a difference, why that even exists. We’ve talked about how the markets are manipulated. President’s plunge team, which actually started under President Reagan, been used by every president since then, but it all offers an ability to play around and to game the system. And in reality, it’s not real. Now that being the case, there was just recently pursuant to President Trump’s one big, beautiful bill act that he called it, a new tax deferred plan that’s now being marketed as a revolutionary way to ostensibly build wealth for the next generation. Under the law, any US citizen born between 2025 and 2028 are eligible for a one-time $1,000 seed deposit directly issued from the US Treasury.

Parents and employers could then chip in thousands more annually with the promise that these funds, and I’m reading, this is what they say, these funds will compound into massive nest eggs by the time the child reaches adulthood. All right, there’s some things about it. I’m not going to get into all the other details, but let’s close the loop here. When the federal government incentivizes citizens to hook the next generation’s foundational wealth, which is the way it’s described, directly into a heavily managed, manipulated financial market, who really wins? So walk us through the mechanics here and the long-term, I want to say risks of these new accounts or benefits and what’s the truth about the new Trump accounts?

David McAlvany:

Yeah. Well, let’s start with the truth about the Trump accounts. We’ve got a $1,000 seed deposit coming from the US Treasury and we’re talking about an organization that can’t manage their own household and now they’re having kids suggest that they can manage their own with money that’s created of nothing. We’ve got $40 trillion in debt, Sam. And to say that we’ve got an extra $1,000 for every child in the country, it just suggests that they don’t care about the value of our currency and they don’t recognize how broke they already are. Where’s the money coming from? The treasury doesn’t have it. Of course, they can conjure it out of nothing, but there’s inflationary implications to that. What’s annoying to me about this is that I think it plays very well as a PR stunt, but it’s not something that is going to enable the next generation to accumulate wealth.

If you wanted to do that, you would inspire entrepreneurship. You would enable the free markets and you would allow children to see the fruits of their labor. That I think is more important than feeding an account with $1,000. Again, where’s the money coming from? The only money that the treasury has is from us, the taxpayer, and they don’t have enough in taxes coming in to even pay their own bills. So it seems like a bit of a ruse to me and certainly a PR stunt. And so do I like the idea of kids saving? Yes, absolutely. But again, inspire entrepreneurship, enable the free markets and allow those kids to harness natural human motivation and energy to be creative, to be dynamic, and then encourage a savings program. And maybe you incentivize their savings in a way that doesn’t require the treasury to spend more money that they don’t

Sam Rohrer:

Have. All right, excellent. We’re about at the end. Any final comments, David, and recommendations for, I’m going to say, God-fearing people who are listening today who are concerned about wisely and biblically stewarding the assets and the wealth that we all who know him have been granted or loaned by the Lord. What final comments would you have?

David McAlvany:

Yeah. At a high level, I think it’s worth remembering that the widow’s mites were of greater value to the Lord than any vast fortune. God cares about the heart and the heart of the steward recognizes that all God gives you is not just for you. So creating a spirit of generosity and demonstrating that for your kids to see, I think that is such an important aspect of wealth stewardship. From a practical standpoint, I do think that when you look at the metals markets, you have a market gift being given to you. You’ve got an established bull market. We’ve got the prices trending lower in a very normal and healthy correction. If you’re accumulating gold between 3,600 and 4,100, silver between 50 and 57, I think over the next several years there’s huge benefit to those kinds of allocations. We’ve been helping folks with that for over 54 years.

We actually helped get gold legalized again back in January 1st, 75, working with Senator Jesse Helm’s office to do so. So we’re very established in that space. But on a practical basis, limit your exposure to equities. They’re way overpriced and we’re likely to see significant corrections. That is what the administration is hoping we will avoid. And they want to see the wealth effect. We talked about the consumer earlier and just how important the consumer is to the economy. They make up 68% of GDP, of the entire economic activity. If the consumer is benefiting from a wealth effect, then they’re going to get out and spend. And that’s what the administration is hoping for is to maintain this wealth effect, keep equities high so that there is this follow through from consumers. I don’t think that they can hold that together. Markets do run in cycles.

We’re at the top end of a cycle. Minimize your risk, increase your cash percentage in a portfolio, add to a metals position while prices are in this contraction phase. I would note seasonality is very important for gold. The lowest price you typically see during a year is in between June and July and prices pick up in August and September because of the Indian wedding season.

Sam Rohrer:

All right, David, we have to go. Thank you so much for being with us. Ladies and gentlemen, go to their website, mcalvany.com. And if you go back to Stand in the Gap, you will get contacted by them and you’ll be able to walk through the process of perhaps considering what you have in light of some of the principles that David just shared. Go to our website, pick up the transcript from this program, read it and follow it through it again. I think it’ll be of great benefit. Thank