The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Silver Melt-up

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now, in this episode, I had promised to do something else,

00:00:27.620 and I hadn't forgotten about that, and I will come back to it, my sort of thinking about how to

00:00:32.380 reconstruct the political and economic landscape purely from first principles and see what that

00:00:38.640 tells us about the current world. However, I did a live Brokernomics a couple of weeks back,

00:00:43.920 and somebody asked very nicely if I could take a look at silver, and I thought, well, yes, why not?

00:00:48.920 So let's talk about silver and what's going on with metals at the moment, because it is getting

00:00:53.880 quite interesting. And also, there are quite a lot of takes on Twitter that I would love to be true,

00:01:01.220 but they're just really not. So that needs calling out as well. So yeah, gold and silver. So I mean,

00:01:08.800 they weren't chosen as money in the first place because of any sort of great mysticism or anything.

00:01:13.180 They emerged organically, because what they did is they solved a hard coordination problem

00:01:17.900 in early economies. If you need to be able to ship value over long distance, and in the early world,

00:01:24.540 I mean, when you had supply chains that went from Cornwall to supplying tin down into bloody Egypt, 0.74

00:01:32.040 because it was Bronze Age, and you needed tin, and you couldn't get tin from very many places.

00:01:37.020 So it's long been an issue that you need to transport value over long distance. And actually,

00:01:42.780 at that time, it was largely copper. And you kind of got into a phase after that,

00:01:50.600 basically for the rest of history, where gold was your sort of state level money. This is your palace

00:01:58.760 money. Silver is effectively your middle class money, sort of daily commerce, that kind of thing.

00:02:05.700 And, you know, lesser metals like copper or bronze might be used as your street level, you know,

00:02:12.660 buying a bloody loaf of bread or something like that. And none of this was sort of planned or

00:02:19.180 ideological, it was just practical. You know, metals are a, they're scarce, and they're valuable,

00:02:25.220 and they're perfectly useful for everyday transactions. Gold is a little bit too big,

00:02:31.520 though. So silver kind of fills the gap. In between them, you get into what we had for most

00:02:35.600 of history, which is this, by metalism, whatever they call it, standard, where you had gold and

00:02:41.120 silver as money for a high, long time. And, you know, gold was high level money, and silver was

00:02:47.460 working money, effectively. And, you know, that carried on for, well, like I say, most of history.

00:02:54.140 And then by the 19th century, industrialization and global trade had started to expose a bit of

00:02:59.440 flaw in this, because you had a fixed exchange rate between gold and silver. And it increasingly

00:03:06.840 became unstable as supply and demand shifted unevenly between those two metals. And so states

00:03:12.860 increasingly chose gold alone as the anchor that they wanted for this system, to simplify settlement

00:03:20.240 and reduce volatility for their point of view. And so silver was gradually demonetized in the,

00:03:26.720 in the sort of 19th century, not because it failed, but because managing two different

00:03:32.680 fixed price points became administratively and increasingly so, well, difficult. So silver

00:03:40.880 didn't fail as money, it was kind of abandoned as money. And the decisive shift was in the 20th

00:03:47.640 century. You know, gold became, at that point, the explicit reserve asset. Silver became coinage,

00:03:56.580 and then increasingly not even that, just an industrial metal. Gold maintained its monetary

00:04:03.500 prestige, and silver, you know, at best you could say, oscillated between money and commodity,

00:04:08.980 and increasingly commodity. So 1971 is the first kind of big touchstone we need to hit upon if we're

00:04:16.660 going to do the history of, well, the recent history of these two metals. 1971, the system was anchored

00:04:22.520 to gold, which was lovely, because this placed hard constraints on politician spending. However,

00:04:29.800 politicians were like, yes, sod that, I want power, so I'm going to make all of these promises,

00:04:34.120 and it doesn't matter if I can't back them up. This came to hit hard in the US in 1971,

00:04:39.440 when basically, it just, it just didn't have enough gold to meet the promises. And this is 1971,

00:04:46.200 one mind. Imagine the size of the US state in 1971 compared to where it is today. Even by 1971,

00:04:52.720 the state had basically run out of money because politicians kept making promises in order to get

00:04:59.120 elected, but they couldn't then deliver on. So Nixon broke the conversion into, from US dollars into gold.

00:05:10.800 And basically, after that, money became pieces of paper, which were unbacked by anything other than

00:05:18.120 the promises of politicians. And obviously, that didn't work well. So since that time, you know,

00:05:23.360 gold prices have really signaled something. They've signaled confidence in the monetary regime itself.

00:05:31.540 And indeed, I think it was one of the Federal Reserves, Alan Greenspan, he said that every morning,

00:05:37.260 the first thing when he walked into his office, he wanted to know was what was the gold price.

00:05:40.800 Because he wanted to know if his paper money maintained credibility. And he knew if the

00:05:46.360 gold price went too high, that meant that his paper money was losing credibility and they needed to

00:05:50.960 back off a bit. So gold conveyed confidence in the monetary regime. And silver, the price of silver,

00:05:59.560 it kind of amplified the stress and growth cycles. I'll explain what I mean more when I come into that.

00:06:05.640 I mean, effectively, after 1971, gold measured trust in money and silver managed or signaled stress

00:06:14.200 in the money or stress in the system as a whole. Okay, so why this matters now, why I bring this up

00:06:20.400 on a discussion about what's currently happening in gold and silver, is that most modern commentators,

00:06:28.340 most of what you see on Twitter and all the rest of it, they're treating gold and silver as similar

00:06:33.380 assets with different levels of volatility. Now, historically, that has been wrong.

00:06:39.340 Gold is about reserves and settlement and silver is about throughput and industry and marginal demand.

00:06:45.960 But when both of these things are moving together, well, that kind of indicates that something

00:06:50.520 structural is happening and going on here. I mean, a quick take, let's quickly go through the, you know,

00:06:58.920 the major inflection points on the history of this, because I think it is instructive. So history is full

00:07:05.960 of gold and silver rallies. And honestly, very few of them ever matters. So most metal spikes or precious

00:07:14.280 metal spikes, they're going to be, you know, cyclical because of inflation scares, or they're going to be

00:07:18.260 crisis hedge, something like that. But a regime change is different, because it permanently alters

00:07:24.180 how metals are used and priced. So big moves are common, regime changes are rare. Which one are we in

00:07:30.560 at the moment? So 1930s, the state, or the US, reimposed or repriced gold. So, you know, it didn't move

00:07:44.860 because of markets, it's because the state repriced the fixed exchange into dollars. And it mattered

00:07:51.000 because it proved something fairly fundamental, that in stress, gold is not discovered by markets,

00:07:56.560 it's reasserted its power. Because ultimately, money actually really is gold, not these pieces of

00:08:05.500 paper. And silver didn't play in that, but gold did. So that's 1930s. Bretton Woods is probably the next

00:08:11.480 one, this kind of regime that lasted effectively between 1944, the end of the war, 1971, which I've

00:08:18.920 already talked about. So gold sat kind of quietly behind the curtain, and currencies were pegged to

00:08:23.720 it, and volatility was suppressed, all looked good. But like I say, the politicians couldn't maintain

00:08:29.380 the discipline. So that all broke down. The post-1971 period, so the 70s, you know, up to about the 80s,

00:08:37.420 when gold conversion had ended, trust moved from metal to policy, which is mad, now you think about

00:08:45.160 it. But markets really did respect that trust, they really did believe in the pieces of paper.

00:08:52.160 So the 1970s metal move was not about inflation alone, it was about whether fiat could function

00:08:57.380 without an anchor. And gold did reprice upwards, silver overshot violently at that time. If you in 1970,

00:09:06.700 you should have bought gold and silver, especially silver. And because it was a genuine regime shock

00:09:12.420 that had taken place. And I mean, I suppose the key takeaway on that would be that when monetary

00:09:18.540 credibility breaks, you know, metals don't hedge it, they just revalue. And maybe that's what's going

00:09:25.180 on at the moment. So let's go from, I don't know, 1980 to maybe 2000. You know, credibility was largely

00:09:32.720 restored. Volcker, he managed to instill, which is a different episode, getting into all that. But

00:09:39.880 Paul Volcker, he restored confidence in the system, high real rates, fiscal discipline,

00:09:47.480 political will to get inflation under control. And during that period, gold and silver didn't really

00:09:53.140 need to be manipulated, because they were suppressed by the belief of everybody acting within the system.

00:09:58.060 And so that period taught markets kind of the wrong lesson. It taught them that precious metals were

00:10:04.140 obsolete. And quite frankly, you don't need suppression when confidence is doing the job for

00:10:08.280 you. Because if everybody believes that these pieces of paper are good, then why do you need

00:10:14.780 precious metals? 2008, that's probably the next big junction point. The great financial crisis,

00:10:21.000 it produced a strong metals rally. Quantitative easing, bailouts, fear of collapse. But the system did

00:10:31.180 survive, hollowed, rotten, but it did survive. And confidence was bruised, not broken. This is when

00:10:38.180 I got into precious metals in 2008. In fact, a little bit before 2008, because I was, you know how

00:10:46.320 standard economists always say nobody saw the great financial crisis coming. Well, yeah, basically

00:10:53.360 everybody who's an Austrian economist saw it coming. And being an Austrian economist of that bent, then I

00:11:00.100 obviously saw it coming as well. So I was buying gold and physical gold and silvers, the coins and the bars.

00:11:05.800 But yeah, so silver did spike, and then it crashed. I seem to remember now that it went up to $50 per

00:11:15.920 ounce, and then it came off quite hard. But my takeaway from that was, okay, am I wrong? Or is the system

00:11:23.560 belief thing just kicking back in? And I came to the conclusion, this is fundamentally unstable,

00:11:28.560 clearly. And yes, okay, people have decided to trust the whole banking system again, but I'm just

00:11:36.640 going to carry on buying silver. And so yes, I bought silver on the way up to 50. And then when it came

00:11:42.180 down the other side, I didn't freak out, I just carried on buying silver. And actually, I was quite

00:11:46.580 happy that for the years after that, I was able to buy silver at sometimes, you know, like $15 an ounce

00:11:51.760 is like, fantastic. I'll just keep doing that then. But nevertheless, it does indicate that most

00:11:58.540 crises don't reorder the system. Most of these crises are actually just absorbed. And just because

00:12:07.340 a system is built on bad foundations doesn't mean it won't last your entire lifetime. So you need to

00:12:13.420 be aware of that. 2020, 22, well, somewhere in that region anyway, maybe 2020, that was a kind of

00:12:21.740 quiet structural break. And this is where things changed. Well, fiscal and monetary policy fused

00:12:27.860 permanently. And I don't think that one is ever going to unfuse now, not until there's a major

00:12:32.480 system shock or something fundamentally changes in the system. Oh, and the other thing is that

00:12:38.160 reserves were weaponised via things like sanctions. Now, at this point, all around the world states

00:12:45.600 that their buying of gold accelerates and by quite a lot, because at this point, trust has

00:12:51.140 fractured along geopolitical lines. And it wasn't loud and, you know, it wasn't a big spectacle,

00:12:57.460 but it was structural. And states and central banks around the world, they understood it.

00:13:04.000 And so kind of quietly, they just start buying a lot more gold regularly. So what's actually

00:13:10.880 happening now? Gold and silver are rising together, perhaps for different reasons.

00:13:16.340 And this is unusual. And I think it does matter. So gold and silver often move together directionally,

00:13:24.420 but rarely for the same underlying reasons at the same time. And when that happens, it usually signals

00:13:30.600 something a bit deeper than just a trade or something happening in the cycle. You know, right now, gold is

00:13:37.260 rising steadily and persistently and silver is rising faster, more violently and with more visible stress.

00:13:47.740 The divergence in behaviour is the signal here, I think. You know, when gold and silver rise together

00:13:55.780 but behave differently, the system is under strain. So gold's move is, I think, a reclassification,

00:14:03.940 not necessarily a panic. I don't think it is that. It isn't spiking and then collapsing. It isn't

00:14:11.780 reacting cleanly to yields, government yields. It isn't selling off when, you know, fear recesses a bit.

00:14:20.500 Instead, it appears to have been reclassified from, you know, a, well, perhaps an insurance asset to a

00:14:27.780 strategic reserve asset, thus the central bank and the state buying. And it's driven by, you know, this persistent

00:14:35.700 central bank accumulation, and it's driven by the geopolitical fragmentation that's happening at the moment.

00:14:41.700 And essentially, it's a decline in trust in the neutral settlement via just fiat, pieces of paper system.

00:14:52.580 So gold is not hedging here. It's repricing its role. So gold is being bought for reasons that

00:15:00.820 ignore price. People are not saying, I want to buy gold at this price. They're saying, I want to buy gold.

00:15:06.100 And whatever the price is, I will pay that price in order to get some. And most of the gold buyers,

00:15:11.780 they're sovereign or they're at least quasi-sovereign. And, you know, they're policy-driven,

00:15:18.900 not return-driven. They're not, they're not trying to make a turn on this. And actually,

00:15:23.220 they're relatively price insensitive. Price goes up, fine, I'll have to pay that. And it matters

00:15:28.500 for the gold price because that creates a persistent bid and it weakens the whole traditional

00:15:35.060 valuation anchor thing. And it kind of lifts the long-term floor. So gold's marginal buyer has

00:15:41.860 changed. And as a result, the market has changed. The silver move, however, is kind of inheritance

00:15:48.820 plus amplification. You could look at it like that. Silver inherits gold's monetary signal,

00:15:55.940 but adds three quite strong amplifiers onto that. For a start, it's a much smaller market.

00:16:02.340 It's got a worse supply structure and it's got a large industrial-based demand. So that means that

00:16:09.620 the same flows move silver more and that the physical tightness in the supply shows up faster.

00:16:17.460 And as a result, volatility is going to be, well, it's unavoidable. So silver is not just catching up,

00:16:23.700 it's overexpressing the same signal. You know, silver is gold's megaphone effectively in this case. So

00:16:34.820 why silver looks chaotic while gold looks calm and steady is that gold supply is mostly primary,

00:16:42.900 as in dig it up. And it responds slowly but predictably and it's hoarded by design.

00:16:50.020 That's what you do with gold. Silver supply is mostly a by-product mining other metals

00:16:57.060 and it responds indirectly. And it is consumed continuously. It's in a lot of

00:17:03.140 electrics and stuff like that. Apparently, a Tomahawk cruise missile has about 15 kilograms

00:17:08.580 worth of silver in it. And I mean, that's a lot of silver, isn't it? I mean, I suppose Tomahawk

00:17:13.940 missiles are expensive, but still, you get my point. And you're not getting your silver back,

00:17:18.020 you're not recycling. Well, unless you never use it, then you might recycle it. But, you know,

00:17:24.020 if the one gets used, you're not going there and getting the silver afterwards. So, you know,

00:17:29.220 gold kind of absorbs the stress in the signal, but silver, its job is to kind of reveal that stress

00:17:36.820 through its higher volatility. And I don't think this is just an inflation trade, it's not. Because

00:17:42.180 if it were inflation, then gold would track inflation expectations cleanly and it doesn't.

00:17:48.340 And silver would lag that or decouple from it, and it isn't. And industrial metals would lead,

00:17:55.700 and they're not. And that's not what we're seeing. You know, gold moves independently of

00:18:01.700 short-term inflation data. Like I said, it's got that persistent bid to it. Silver moves with both

00:18:07.780 monetary and industrial pressure. It's responding to both. And correlations are unstable between the two.

00:18:15.780 So it's not just about price rising, it's about the underlying level of confidence of the people

00:18:22.500 in the system have. That's what's going on. And, you know, what actually links gold and silver right now

00:18:29.060 is declining confidence in paper money settlement and the rising importance of actual physical

00:18:37.140 settlement. We come on to talk about, you know, how gold and silver is often traded on exchange markets,

00:18:45.780 COBEX, all that stuff. And what you're seeing, there's a lot of people saying,

00:18:50.500 no, I actually want, I actually want the gold and silver. I don't just want to roll these contracts

00:18:54.740 over. And it's fundamentally a reassessment of a real asset versus promises. All of this is

00:19:00.420 important. All of this I'll explain. Gold expresses all of those through reserve buildup and silver is

00:19:08.100 representing it through stress in the belief of the system. So they're both reacting to the same

00:19:12.980 problem, but, but they're different layers of the same system. So let's, let's start pulling apart

00:19:19.060 some of that. So first of all, um, I think I mentioned that 70% of the metal is coming from

00:19:26.740 something else. Um, so 70% of silver is coming from, uh, copper mines, lead mines, zinc mines,

00:19:34.100 and gold mines. Um, only about 25 to 30% of it comes from primary silver miners. Um, and actually

00:19:43.220 if you think about it, that, that one fact alone explains a lot of silver's behavior,

00:19:48.500 because effectively most of silver is mined accidentally. And I mean, I mean, just to go

00:19:52.820 through those, I mean, the, the ratio of, and you don't, you don't start a, you don't start a copper

00:19:59.060 mine just to get at the silver because the ratio of, of copper to silver that you're pulling out

00:20:05.460 is something like a thousand to one. Um, that said a copper mine, it can make like 15, 20, 25%

00:20:12.340 of its profit from silver that it's mining accidentally, but it's still a, still a huge

00:20:17.060 ratio between the two. Interestingly, actually lead and zinc, both of those, their ratio of

00:20:22.420 the primary to silver is something like 1500 to one, you get 1500 ounces of, of, of lead or zinc

00:20:31.300 for every silver ounce you pull out. Um, so even though the ratio is much, much lower,

00:20:36.900 actually a higher proportion of their profits come from silver. Um, and with gold mines, actually it's

00:20:43.940 weird with gold mines, right? Because silver can make up as much as 20% of their whole. So sometimes

00:20:49.460 you're only getting four to five ounces of gold for one ounce of silver. So the accidental mining

00:20:56.820 rate of silver in gold is, is by far the highest of the ones I've talked about, but it makes up by

00:21:03.860 far the lowest amount of profit of accidental profit. The reason being is that gold is so valuable

00:21:09.700 that even though you're getting an absolute ton of silver out of it, the, the margin on gold is just

00:21:14.500 so good. Um, that it, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's 5% of your profits, something like that.

00:21:20.420 So, you know, why, why buy product supply breaks in, in most situations where you need more of the

00:21:27.620 silver is because the output decisions are driven by the primary metal and not silver. You know,

00:21:34.580 silver is a, is a, is a credit. It's a nice boost. It's not, it's not the driver and silver price signals

00:21:40.580 are, well, they generally have to be ignored by the, and, and just driven by the demands of the

00:21:46.740 primary. So a copper mine isn't going to ramp up production because silver triples, it might extend

00:21:52.740 a bit, but it's, it's not good. They're not going to fundamentally rework how they work because,

00:21:58.420 because of a silver price. Well, not, not the level that we've seen so far anyway. I guess they could,

00:22:02.420 if it goes, if it goes much higher. One of the things you do need to be careful of though,

00:22:06.660 is that of those say primary silver miners that I talked about, they're only about 25,

00:22:10.820 30% of the market. Um, you do need to be careful because they can pull this stuff out of the

00:22:16.420 ground for about $25 an ounce. And silver is trading at 90. In fact, I, I, let's have a look.

00:22:23.380 Let me just call it up on the phone. What's, what's silver right now? Silver is at $94 as I record this.

00:22:29.060 Um, and like I said, they can pull it out the ground at $25 roughly. So, but, but don't think

00:22:36.500 that that necessarily means, so even though I'm adding a note of caution, don't think that it means

00:22:40.420 that silver at $90 can't, can't last because, because primary silvers do respond to the silver

00:22:48.340 prices and they will respond and they will, um, you know, do various things. And I'll, I'll talk about

00:22:55.460 those, but it does take a long lag time in order to be able to do that. Um, and by long, I mean

00:23:04.100 a series of quarters years, not many years, but, but still years in order to ramp up production

00:23:11.300 meaningfully on this stuff, but they can still, you know, you get what I'm saying. They can still

00:23:15.460 put it out the ground for 25 and actually the capex costs in mining are horrendous as are the energy

00:23:20.900 costs. So they've got to factor that in as well. Copper, lead, zinc, uh, gold mines are probably not

00:23:28.660 going to ramp up that much for silver because it contributes a fairly small part of their,

00:23:35.220 of their overall profits. Although in some cases it can be, it can be like 25%, which is very much

00:23:39.540 worth having. So at $90 silver, you know, margins will improve, but behavior will change very moderately

00:23:47.380 on those things. You know, silver's along for the ride. It's not, it's not driving the vehicle in

00:23:51.300 those, in those sort of other primary metals. Actually the real pressure relief valve is going

00:23:57.140 to be recycling because if you remember, I said about 70% comes from other metals. And then I said,

00:24:01.620 uh, maybe 25% comes from primary silver mines. Well, there's a gap there, isn't there? And the gap

00:24:06.500 is recycling of silver. And this is the bit that will probably grow. This is the bit that will respond.

00:24:12.020 So it will be, you know, scrap jewelry returns. It will be, um, industrial recovery will improve

00:24:18.580 and, you know, uh, marginal materials, um, will become, you know, much more economic, you know,

00:24:25.380 whatever electronic components use a lot of silver, it will become more economic to say, okay, yeah,

00:24:30.100 we're going to, we're going to fish those out and we're going to extract the silver from them.

00:24:33.540 But bear in mind, even with recycling is that the collection is logistically difficult and electronic

00:24:40.820 silver is, uh, dispersed, slapped all over some printed circuit board or wherever it is. And it's

00:24:47.300 hard to extract it. And so, and also recycling capability is going to plateau quite quickly.

00:24:53.940 And then again, that's going to need to be belt out. So recycling does smooth the spikes a bit,

00:25:01.860 but it is not going to eliminate the deficit unless it remains high and persistent and a lot more

00:25:07.620 logistical capacity of silver recycling really starts to come online. So, you know, what, what

00:25:14.020 actually caps silver price in practice, it's, well, it's mining cost. It's, you know, the geological

00:25:20.580 abundance. Um, yes, it is a precious metal. Yes, it is a rare metal, but it's nowhere near as, as rare as,

00:25:28.180 as gold. Um, that there is, there is silver to be had out there. Um, what it is capped by

00:25:36.660 is, you know, copper demand, um, zinc demand, gold demand, um, timescales, regulations, um, capital

00:25:45.940 discipline of being able to get the capex into the stuff that does this. All of those things are making

00:25:51.060 silver inelastic as in, it doesn't respond quickly to price. So, um, what about the demand realities

00:25:59.140 of these? Because unlike gold, silver is not a store and forget it metal. Um, you know, often

00:26:04.420 once it's used, it's done, it's consumed in, in many industrial applications, it's, you know,

00:26:10.420 it's dissipated, it's, it's completely un, um, economic to recover it, um, or it's permanently

00:26:16.740 embedded in something. And that means that the demand is not just investment sentiment. It's,

00:26:22.900 it's, it's throughput demand, really. You know, silver does disappear, whereas gold

00:26:30.100 mostly doesn't. I mean, I know I lost mine, obviously in that unfortunate boating accident,

00:26:34.260 but largely silver, you know, once you have it, restore it, you don't ever lose it. Um, and, and

00:26:40.180 silver demand, where was silver demand coming from? Well, um, a lot of it is industrial,

00:26:44.180 as I've talked about. So solar panels, they use a lot of it. Um, electronics, um,

00:26:49.780 AI infrastructure. That's a big one at the moment is, is, is going in all into that.

00:26:53.380 Then you've got the investment tier bars, coins, ETFs, who then need a vault somewhere backing it

00:27:00.260 up. Uh, jewelry, obviously that's a big one. That's fairly, you know, price elastic though,

00:27:04.980 that one, you know, industrial demand is the anchor though. Everything else is secondary to the

00:27:09.300 industrial demand and industrial demand, um, is price and elastic in the, in the short term.

00:27:15.540 You know, the silver usage is relatively small compared to what else they're doing

00:27:21.140 and the substitution risk of going to, I don't know, copper or some other high

00:27:26.180 conductivity metal. Um, you do get a performance loss and so it is worth sticking with it. And

00:27:32.420 redesigns do take years, especially reconfiguring the factory and the inputs and all that kind of stuff.

00:27:37.060 So a solar, a solar panel manufacturer, for example, is not going to halt production because

00:27:42.420 silver price doubles. You know, electronics firm is not going to pause making chips, um,

00:27:47.460 because the silver cost is high. They will, they will buy at basically any price in the short term.

00:27:53.140 So industrial buyers are forced buyers is effectively what I'm saying. They're not speculators.

00:27:58.020 Where substitution does and doesn't work. Um, it's, it's possible in jewelry and it's possible in low end,

00:28:05.940 um, conductive uses. Um, and it can be built out in multi-year, um, you know, redesign cycles.

00:28:14.740 Um, where, where substitution is not practical though, is in high reliance electronics. If you

00:28:21.460 want to build something, you really want it to last like, I know satellites, military gear,

00:28:24.820 something like that. You're not, you're not swapping out silver. Solar panels, photovoltaic

00:28:29.700 cells, uh, the paste on, on that. You can't really swap that out without, without big efficiency

00:28:36.820 losses. Um, in fact, if anything, um, you know, you, you, you want a bit of gold, but you're not

00:28:41.700 doing that because that's even more expensive. So, so silver it is, um, defense. Yeah. I've said medical,

00:28:48.900 um, basically high performance stuff. That's, that's all still going to need silver. So demand

00:28:54.980 destruction will happen, but it will be slow. It will be partial and it will be, well, it definitely

00:29:01.140 won't be immediate.

00:29:01.540 If you enjoyed that content and of course you did because you are a smart person. Then why

00:29:07.700 don't you go over to lotuseaters.com where you can watch the whole episode for as little as

00:29:12.740 five pounds a month, which really is not much money at all. And you get loads of really good content.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - January 27, 2026

PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Silver Melt-up

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript