(НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ) James Anderson of SDBULLION.COM talks about US bullion industry

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, our dear viewers and let me introduce to you James Anderson of SDBullion and SilverDoctors.com. James will talk about the realities of bullion industry in the United States. This is very, very interesting for Russian viewers, because there are a lot myths and misconceptions about the situation in the bullion industry around the world. Please James tell us a little bit about yourself, your website and your company.

JAMES ANDERSON talks about himself, his company and his сareer in the bullion industry

Sure, Dmitriy, thanks for having me on your Youtube channel and for giving me the opportunity to speak to your viewers. I am a United States citizen; I am 39 years old. I have been in this industry for over 10 years, I have been working in it since before the financial crisis of 2008. I have been investing in precious metals since about 2006. I have a bachelor’s degree in finance so I have some training and background in economics and finance of the United States especially. So I have been in this industry for some time and I have been with SDBullion for about 3 years. And we are probably top 5 retail bullion dealer online. So if you search for something like “buy silver bars” you will find us on the first page of Google results.

At least it is the case in the United States. In terms of bullion demand the United States is one of the major countries in the world especially in the silver bullion industry. There are a lot of people buying silver bullion in the United States for a whole multitude of reasons I am sure we will likely get into later on. And there is plenty of people buying gold bullion. This is a bit of a background of who I am.

JAMES ANDERSON: Why I got involved in precious metals

I suppose at a really young age when I was real little at my grandfather’s farmhouse. When I was very tiny I walked around his house and searched through the closets and found a bucket of old silver coins. We used to have silver in our actual circulating coinage until 1964. And when they took silver out of the coins, a lot of the members of the old generation decided that they will keep the silver coins and keep spending the bad coins. It’s what we call Gresham’s law in monetary theory – you spend the bad money and you save the good money.

I found it very interesting as to why are people holding on to them, why are not people spending them. It was interesting and intriguing to me, it was almost like pirate money – so shiny and pretty and nice. They kind of intrigued me as a young boy and then I started studying about the economy in college and I was lucky enough to have a couple of professors who were from the Austrian school of economics, not just a Keynesian side of economics. So I got a perspective from them that was a little bit more critical of the system that we use for our monetary affairs in the United States. And it kind of gave me a perspective to question a little bit more than perhaps some people may regarding some of the foundational beliefs that we use in this country. After graduating from college I travelled and lived in Latin America for a few years and that really helped me to get a perspective beyond the United States.

Because I personally believe that we have one of the most highly propagandized culture in the world. So people who live here and only stay here don’t really have a very clear concept of the rest of the world. We are only 1 out 20 human beings on this Earth and the other 19 human beings have other perspectives that are worth understanding, that are worth trying to grasp and get a hold of. So the best way to do that is to go try and live there for some time. I was lucky enough to get to do that when I was 23, 24, 25, I got to live in Central America and even in Buenos-Aires, Argentina.

And anyone who has ever travelled to Argentina knows that it is not necessarily a pro-Yankee section of the world. They have more of a critical eye towards ther North Americans that come down there and exploit their banking system and use it as a way to enrich some of the highest elite people in that country at the expense of the masses. So getting a different perspective of some of the things that we have done financially to some countries and some of the things geopolitically definitely during the Cold War, hearing some of those stories – it shook a lot of my previous misconceptions as to the true history of the world – especially on this side of the hemisphere.

And so that was very eye-opening. And then coming back from those travels I lived in Southern California for a while. I was heavily involved in investing and researching about gold and silver. I really thought it was a very interesting topic. And I kind of went down that rabbit hole when I started getting involved with the Ron Paul campaign in 2007.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Oh, so you were with the Ron Paul campaign in 2007, that’s nice. Do you know him personally at all?

JAMES ANDERSON:

I have not actually met him personally, never talked to him. But I was definitely involved with that campaign right in the beginning in 2007 when the original Tea Party events were happening. There was a Tea Party event that I was at in Santa-Monica and that was a really interesting affair, there were thousands of people there. They were doing a Tea Party reenactment when they were throwing different boxes into the water, they were things they were against like IRS, things like Military-Industrial complex, these ridiculous wars we kept getting into…

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

IRS went first probably, right…

JAMES ANDERSON:

IRS was the one that people question and still question to this day whether or not that’s a Constitutional affair. Either way that was really what helped to kind of spur me along a little further and then eventually I was so involved that I figured I’d go ahead and start looking for some type of job opportunity or career potential in the industry. It so happens that Los-Angeles has a long legacy of coin collecting and precious metal dealers. And I was lucky enough to run into one and where that opportunity worked out, I started my career in Southern California and worked there for about five or six years. And basically from there I moved on and worked with some of the largest dealers in my career here, doing marketing and sales for various companies. So my experience is pretty broad in the precious metals industry in the United States.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Alright, very interesting. So you have been involved with this industry for a very long time, since 2006. And over the years, has the industry changed? What changes do you notice? Maybe in tastes, in preferences, in sales strategies? What is new compared to 2006?

JAMES ANDERSON:

So what has changed the most probably in that timeframe was the internet in general, the speed and the complexity of the internet. I guess in 2006-7-8 companies that were the biggest then are not necessarily the biggest now. While the companies that were big back then were first to market they have since lost a lot of market share because they were not that good when came to using the internet to leverage and to find new customers. They did not necessarily adapt quick enough to the changing of the internet.

I mean in my industry that is kind of why some players are winning and some players are losing. In terms of the actual investors before 2008 bullion was a very small industry. I just don’t think it had as much respect or even understanding from the broader investing community. I think a lot of people looked at bullion and thought: “Well yeah, gold had its day in 1980 and that’s that”.

They really did not understand much about the fundamental picture or the larger scope of why people invest in gold, why governments and central banks hold gold. I think 1 out 5 ounces of physical gold is held by governments at the moment. I do not think people really understood the broad spectrum or the mechanics of the financial industry before the 2008 financial crisis. Once that occurred a certain segment of the population was so shaken by it that all their fundamental beliefs were called into question and they had to go and start from scratch again and relearn how the system works and to be quite honest when you learn how it works, I think it shakes a lot of your belief and your confidence in it. And I think that’s what’s happened is that certain people will never have that confidence again. It is kind of like red vs. the blue pill. They took the red pill and that’s that. They will have a concern.

When you start to learn about how our monetary system actually operates and what’s built upon, you start to have a little bit of a concern and you basically want to have some portfolio percentage in your allocation into precious metals because you never know what could happen to the economy. Especially after 2008 people I think are concerned and they feel that the economy is still fragile and what we have been told is not necessarily true. It is not if the economy has been booming ever since. It has been basically tapered over with Band-Aids and more debt supposedly. And probably some accounting machinations that masked a lot of the underlying issues that have not been dealt with. And a lot of people believe that we still have a lot issues to deal with.

And when that comes it will be helpful to have an allocation in bullion while other asset prices may drop gold and silver potentially could gain in value and offset some of the losses elsewhere.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Ok, ok, so things have changed.

JAMES ANDERSON:

They have changed in terms of psychology. I think a lot of people out there, especially the younger generation, they don’t buy a lot stuff that people say on CNBC, they don’t listen to those people as if they are gods any longer. I think a lot of people look at them and think: “What kind of fraud are you trying to pull on me now?” I think a lot of people look at banks and think that a good percentage of these people are fraudulent. There is a big critical eye when we look at some of these people we think: “How are they scamming you?” You get now with the internet the ability to learn about anything also. You can do due diligence on a lot of people quickly and that’s helpful, too.

It is hard for the internet to forget, when people are doing things that are not honest so you can find out quickly what type of person you are dealing with. And that’s been helpful, too. And in general since 2008 to now there is probably a million to a few million people out there who are buying precious metal consistently and they have not really stopped, they just treat as a checking account that they can hold.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

What about buyer’s profile? Hast it changed? Is there an inflow of new buyers, a noticeable inflow? Say, in Russia, it is 90% men over 40.

JAMES ANDERSON:

Yes, it is pretty similar. I would say 90% of males. But especially during the 2008 financial crisis and the business I was working in at the time we had a lot real estate investors who were going out of the real estate and using that capital to go into gold and silver. There was a wide variance of females that were doing it, too, it was not just males. And even to this day there is some females as well, head of households, and even the wives who have more power in the household than the husband when it comes to calling what happens with the money. It is not all males, but the vast majority is male. But then as far as what they are buying, it depends on the age a lot of the times I find. When someone towards the end of their life, when they are 55-60, they want to have probably more allocation to gold because it less volatile. They have less time in their life to wait for things to appreciate. Silver can take a decade or two before it spikes and really gets running and has a lot of appreciation and tightens its ratio to gold.

Silver seems to be something that younger people are buying. People who are 40 and below are very confident and buy silver only. People who are 40 and older will typically buy some gold, some platinum as well. And then as we get into 60-70 range there is people who just simply buy gold. They buy it and look at it as if I may sell it at some point if it goes higher, I may sell a little bit, or maybe I will just give it out to my heirs, privately give it to them as I pass on.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Because in Russia there is a small but very active silver bug community, it is tiny, but it is really you know… You have probably noticed that silver people are activists, activists.

JAMES ANDERSON:

It runs the gamut, you can them both, you can get people who worship at the altar of gold and silver and think it is the answer to everything and then you have people who think the doomsday stuff like the world is gonna fall apart and this is what they are going to use to spend and buy groceries with.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

And they buy smaller coins – quarters or tenths of an ounce as well.

JAMES ANDERSON:

Correct. So they buy smaller allotments thinking that someday eventually it may come in handy if the dollar really goes to hell. I do not necessarily believe that, I think when you look at the spectrum of the potential outcomes of what is going on – it is kind of a Bell curve and that’s on the far left of the bell curve of potential outcomes. I think it is more in the center where you have maybe some issue politically where all of a sudden all the governments get together and decide on a new system. And in that system there is perhaps some basis in gold. And I think the next system will have to have reevaluation of real things vs. financial assets. Financial assets I don’t think have ever been as overvalued vs. real things as they currently are. Commodities are just so cheap compared to these financial assets which seem to be at the highest levels of price and value vs. commodities that I have ever seen.

If you go back in history, it is very difficult to find a time when financial assets were this overvalued vs. just regular normal things in real life, pendulum will swing back in the coming decade or so.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Yes, yes, I agree completely, that’s true. Tesla is too expensive, I am no expert on stocks, but please…

JAMES ANDERSON:

We are at a situation, too, when debt levels are so high and the governments have promised so much that in order to be able to deliver on those promises especially made by western governments and pension funds in order to deliver on that they will have to devalue the dollar, essentially. Nominally you will get you Social Security check and all that, but there is no promise as to what exactly it is going to buy. And there is already a trend here, when they are talking about a new ideology of how the Federal Reserve or how the government should finance itself. And then there is this thing called MMT (Modern monetary theory) they are talking about.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Yes, yes, we hear of that, too.

JAMES ANDERSON:

And that is coming. They are not getting all this attention for no reason. I think it is conditioning the public to get ready for a new proposal as to way the government should finance itself and it sounds to me as if it is likely going to be something that in the next few years comes to pass. Or there is going to be more experiments of financing that we have never seen before. And the question will be: can they control the confidence level of human beings, because at the moment the currency is really based on confidence, the value of it is based on confidence.

And if that confidence and I think as long as it is shaken slowly but surely is in the best interest of all these governments that promised more than they can deliver. I think they do want to devalue their currencies, but they want to do it in a controlled fashion and not in some crazy overnight manner.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

They really want to. I don’t think they will be successful in this endeavor. But they do want to have everything under control and devalue like they used to. So let’s wait and see how it works out.

So now could I ask you about the popularity of different gold and silver coins.

JAMES ANDERSON:

What is the most popular coin that people buy in the United States and what are the products that people mostly buy in bullion. I did a blog on that recently, I think it is called “Best Bullion Coins Bars Rounds TOP 10 Playlist” and I went and looked at the data for the last few years as far as overall sales volumes and what amount. And it has been this way since I got into this industry in terms of the number 1 product – it is still the gold American eagle and the silver American eagle. Those are both coins that produced by the US Mint.

I would say the silver American eagle is neck in neck with the gold American eagle and in some years I think it even outsold the gold eagle in terms of overall dollar sales. When you are talking about ounce-to-ounce, the amount of silver eagles that are sold is far outsizes the amount gold eagles that are sold year-on-year. I think at one point there was maybe 10 to 1 ounces of silver eagles that were being sold versus gold. So year on year that’s the number one product.

I’d say the next biggest product in North America that would be the gold and silver maple leaf coins. They are very popular in a sense that in the United States the people trust them, it’s our next door neighbor coin. The value of them is pretty high, they are well-regarded. And the Canadian Mint did a very good job of getting ahead of counterfeiting issues. And putting new types of patterns on the coins that help them to alleviate the issue of fakes coming out of China. They have been very, very ahead of the curve on that side of the spectrum. Canadian coins are probably second.

And if you are talking about third, it really changes from year to year. Certain years it seems Austrian Mint… when I first got into the industry in 2008 Austrian Mint was really popular. At some there were issues with the US Mint they could not even keep up with demand during the financial crisis. So there was a month or two occasionally when the Austrian philarmoniker was the only coin you can get freshly struck.

And they sold millions upon millions of those coins at the time because the demand was so high and they were able meet it. So I think in that time they were definitely third, they have fallen off a little bit of late, in the last few years. I am not sure what is going on there, at their Mint. Maybe the demand is not that high, but there have been others that have come in. The Australian (Perth) Mint has done a good job with their kangaroo coin in the last couple of years. I think in 2015-2016 the situation was the same when the US Mint had to shut down for a month or two at the same time the Kangaroo was just coming out with their high volume silver bullion coin – The Australian one.

And they sold millions of those in a matter of month or two, just because the US Mint was not able to produce their silver eagle a lot people were buying the kangaroo instead. It runs from different Mints but typically the number one is the US Mint’s silver eagle and number two is the Canadian Mint’s maple leaf coin and then you talk about various other mints.

A little bit further down there is general silver rounds, they look like coins, but technically in the industry we don’t call them coins because they don’t have a legal tender face value…

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

… right, like Scottsdale…

JAMES ANDERSON:

No, Scottsdale actually does produce some coins, they do produce rounds as well, but Scottsdale gets the capability to strike some government coins, because the government gives them that authority to do so in their name and they sign off on it. So they do strike some that have legal tender face value, there is a few countries, I do not remember which. They do a couple of African countries, they do one for Caiman Islands. But the private Mint that would be really popular here is Sunshine Minting, that’s one of them. Another one is called Silvertown Mint. They produce these things that look like, and they are just a lot cheaper. So Sunshine Minting or a Silvertown round you can get it right now for about 65-75 cents over spot per ounce.

So it is a lot cheaper than Silver Eagle which is usually $2.25 or $2.50 over spot. A two-dollar difference to some people means a lot and they don’t really understand or care whether it is a government coin, they just want to get as many ounces as can but so they get the rounds. And there are people who like bars, they make bars in all sizes from tiny 1-gram gold bars all the way up to 100-ounce silver bars, 1-kilo gold bars. There is all type of different bars that are made by different mints. Depending on the size if you a millionaire investor you may get gold in just large bars, you may get it in kilo bars and store them at Brinks vault or Lumis vault, have your account with kilo bars there and that’s your gold position. That’s a very safe way for people to hold gold. Or silver, they will do 100-ounce silver bars so you can get a low premium price so they can get as many ounces as they can for their US dollars. It runs a gamut but the largest number by far, still by far is American eagle gold and silver coin.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

In Russia the situation is quite different as it turns out. In the past five years there was a noticeable switch from 917 purity coins to philarmonikers, especially 1-ounce gold philarmonikers because they are very nice for stacking. But the silver eagles are still the most popular here, that’s true.

But what is your opinion of Queen’s Beasts, you know this new British series, excellent quality.

JAMES ANDERSON:

Yes, The Royal Mint has done a really good job. That’s been a big change that I did not talk about with you recently. When I first got into this industry there were not as many options as far designs and typed of coins and bars being minted. When I first got into this industry there was probably 30 variants of products that you could depend on that were always there. Now there is 300 variants, maybe not as deep as the top 10 products, but there is a whole sway of different designs or people creating coins or bars or rounds.

There are some people here in the United States doing it in their backyard. Literally. There are hobbyists who are now pouring their own silver, pouring their own gold pieces. There is a real weird niche that’s grown up in the last 4 to 5 years. I saw a video today when someone literally bought SDBullion freedom rounds that we produce, one of the cheapest silver rounds that we sell. He had a video where he says that he’s just got these silver rounds and he clips over to what he did with them. He put them in a furnace, he melted them down and then he turned them into five-ounce brick billets that are really shiny and pretty. And he puts his own stamp on them and he sells them at his own shop – probably for a dollar or two over spot, cause they are artistic.

They are not made for high volume, they are made for collectors, for people who like to have a unique piece of this and that. So it runs a gamut from people wanting to have six figures, a million dollars of the same products so that they can easily sell them when they want to versus some people who are just collectors who want to have a thousand different pieces of all types of things, because they enjoy the beauty of it. When they want to sell or if they ever want to sell, they will just sell one piece at a time here or there. So it really is a gamut between people who are simply using it as just a hedge and they don’t care about form versus who really love the artistry of it and enjoy it more as a collectible almost.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

I’ve never heard of coins or rounds made in the backyard, that’s quite original, nothing like that in Russia, or at least I am not aware of it.

And the question about counterfeits in gold. Is it a real threat in your view, I mean investment gold, not in numismatics. And cash or card? What’s the tendency? Do people buy with cash still or mostly card?

JAMES ANDERSON:

So on the counterfeit side there is a few different threats depending if you are buying really large gold bars. A couple of years back in the jewelry district in New York there was a couple of large gold bars, I think they were ten-ounce gold bars that had tungsten inserted inside of them. These were professionally done; you could tell that whoever did that they knew what they were doing and they did a really good job of creating counterfeits, they probably made out of China.

And that is a concern in the industry, it is not found very often, this happened 4 or 5 years ago and I have not seen something like that since. But it is enough that every dealer now when they buy any type of large amount of precious metal from a non-mint, from a place where it is not brand new, when it is a secondary product, they have to do their work to make sure that it is legitimate. So there are different options for being able to figure that out, we have a few different methodologies that we use to ensure that everything we buy from our customers is exactly what we think it is. We want to ensure that we never buy a counterfeit product and then sell it accidentally, because the most important thing for us is our brand name. That would be the last thing we ever do is want to ruin that. Trust in this industry is paramount, it is the most important part of your success, for your potential to be successful you have to trustworthy. Without that everything else falls apart.

As far as the counterfeits on a person to person lever are concerned, there is a lot of counterfeits that are made typically in China. It is basically a spot over there. There are whole small towns that run on counterfeit tourism. You go to that town and you can buy counterfeits of everything – from counterfeit DVDs to counterfeit gold and silver products, counterfeit this and that. Basically a culture sport in China. The problem is that internet and companies like Ali-Baba, they claim on their website that they don’t sell counterfeits, but yet if you look hard enough you will find them. A lot of people in the United States who don’t have the best intentions sometimes would get them from China and then go around and sell them on smaller websites like Craigslist or no little forums here or there. And how they find people… usually what they use is greed, usually they use the tactic: “Oh hey, I got some gold here and I got to sell it right away”.

They would have some story that they would tell the investor and they would say: “I would sell it to you at spot or would sell it to you even below spot if you got cash”. And they would give the investor the idea that he would get a great deal because this dumb-dumb does not know what he owns. So a lot of times they would do that and maybe a day or two the guy would figure it out or even years later they would go to a coinshop to sell it and they will find out that they were taken with a fake coin or a fake bar.

So on a person to person level the counterfeit threat is very real, it is less risky to someone who is pulling that do it on a person to person basis. If someone tried to pull that on us as a company, we would contact the local police and authorities and they would get tracked down or they would have people coming after them. But if you do it on a person to person basis they feel like they have a better opportunity to get away with it. But with we need information from you if ever engage, we need addresses, phone numbers, names, e-mails, IP address, etc. We are gonna have to have all that information and if you ever end up pulling something like that we are gonna come after you. It’s much riskier to pull that on a professional vs. someone online who is just trying to do a trade person to person.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

So don’t buy on eBay, basically.

JAMES ANDERSON:

No, you can. On eBay there is some dealers. We do a lot of deals on eBay. You just have to make sure that the dealer you are working with is a professional and has been in this industry long enough so that they know how to make sure that they are not selling to you something that is fake and they have a long track record of being honest and being good servicemen. So yes, if there are new sellers on eBay, I would be very wary of that, but if someone has a really good honest track record you can probably trust in it. The nice thing about eBay is that they are middlemen so if there is counterfeit or issues typically they will side with the buyer and the seller will be the one who gets in trouble. Just be careful and you always have got to know who you are working with that’s the main key, that you buy from the people who are trust worthy.

You also asked about cash or card, what is the tendency in the United States for payment? It depends. There are two tiers, two different sides to this industry. We are on the high volume online bullion side, so people can just log in to their computer, put their order in, lock in their price, then they make their payments. Online bullion dealers like ourselves, we don’t really take cash equivalents which is basically a bank check or something like that. Anything like that as long as it is not up to $10K, anything below $10K. There is a couple of exceptions, but usually we allow people to do that. But once you hit that $10K mark, it starts to become a money laundering issue. And we don’t want ever to be in trouble where it looks like we are helping people to launder money.

So we have various rules for payments that you can and cannot use, cash equivalents. So typically most people pay online dealers with check. Over the past couple of years there is been a great push towards ACH, which has become even more convenient. ACH is just an electronic check, where you log in, you place the order and you say I’ll pay with ACH. And then you put in some checking information for your bank account and then it automatically withdraws funds. It is much faster, you don’t have to wait for the mail, you don’t have to wait a long holding period that of the check require. So it made the process a). convenient and b). faster and even more secure than some of the checks were. The other way people pay when they start to get into larger orders, they will just pay with bank wire transfer. That’s typical for the orders that are six figures or higher, people will just wire the money. And a lot of times you can just wire straight from your bank and sometimes you have to go physically to the bank. It really depends on the size of your bank and how good their website is.

And then as well there are a lot brick and mortar coin shops in the United States, places where you can just drive up in your car and you want to turn say $1,200 or $1,500 cash into silver, you can just walk right in and buy it right there – cash on the barrel, you just buy the bullion right there and you walk out. A lot of people like that because in their minds it feels more private, because there is no name, there is no information that, say, a federal agent can go find. They would have to drive and track you down at your house, it’s just more private. People don’t like the idea of having any information that could ever be traced back to them. They want to keep so private.

There are privacy issues depending … if you go to a coin shop like that, it’s fine. Just make sure you do about four different routes on the way home so you can make sure you are not getting tracked. If you are paranoid you can make a case about everything. You have to be diligent, I suppose, about where you hold what and at what volume. It is risky, there had been people who had been robbed at gunpoint at their house if they are not careful about who knows what they have where. So you have to be intelligent about the way you do this. You can’t be careless, because it is risky in a sense that if your gold and silver is taken it is virtually impossible to track. You are putting yourself at risk if you are not careful with what you are doing.

In terms of cash, Dmitriy, to answer the question, you can’t move massive amounts of cash into bullion because it starts to cross money laundering lines. So if someone walked into a coin shop saying: “Yeah, I have $20K of cash to buy gold with”. The coin shop dealer if he wants to stay in business he is gonna tell that guy to hit the road. “I don’t want your drug money”. You know what I mean, that’s basically what he is gonna have to tell the guy, because if he turns out to be a federal agent that coin shop dealer is going to either get fined out of business or go to prison. You have to be very careful when you are dealing with large volumes of cash within the United States or pretty much in any western democracy, in general.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

And in some authoritarian countries back East, too…

JAMES ANDERSON:

Ok, makes sense. The powers that be just wanna know who has what, that’s just the way it works.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Yes, they do, that they do, for sure. Everywhere. To finish our very, very interesting conversation for our Russian viewers especially, our Russian listeners – it is going to be very informative. What’s your advice for Russian or Americans.

JAMES ANDERSON:

My advice, I think is to understand that not all things stay the same. So when you look back 30-40 years the US dollar has been the reserve currency of the world and it’s been the main currency you can go to when there were crises. And a lot of times during crises the US dollar actually appreciates in value vs. other currencies. That may not always be the case. As your Russian listeners probably know Russia has been a lot of gold officially in the last decade or so. The same has been happening with China although officially it has only been going up a little. I think unofficially it is probably along the lines of the speed at which Russia has been doing so. It is just hasn’t been official yet. My hunch is Russia and China and a few other eastern countries will eventually have their own system of monetary affairs. So we may end up with a system in the world where you have a Western block of currencies and an Eastern block of currencies with variations as to what the values are versus one another. And my hunch is that during that timeframe gold will value much higher than it is now. So my suggestion would be to be prudent about the way you allocate your investments. I would not put all my eggs in a dollar basket, or all my eggs in a euro basket, or all my eggs in a gold basket. I would have a portion in each. You want to have a prudent allocation, not everything in one place.

And in gold and in silver we publish studies on our website: from 1968 to the end of 2016, if you look at gold it always made sense throughout that 40-odd year history, 50-year history, it always made sense that you would about 20% allocation to gold vs. US stocks or US bonds. So having an allocation in gold made a lot of sense and I think it would make sense, too, in the decade to come because we are still on the fiat monetary system. And so that changes and gold should appreciate in value over the long haul and be a good place to store wealth.

DMITRIY BALKOVSKIY:

Excellent, excellent advice. So thank you, thank you, James. We really wish well in your personal life, in your business and in your effort to educate the populace, it is very important, very worthwhile.