Washington Quietly Puts Gold Back on Table , its Secret Plan

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to The Daniela Kamboni Show. Still on the road here, but we're still delivering the latest news today. And in the last few days, Washington delivered clear reminders of why gold and silver still very much matter. First, the Trump administration held a high-profile critical minerals roundtable in Washington, with the president himself announcing billions in new domestic mining and processing projects to secure supply chains and reduce reliance on China. Then Senator Rand Paul finally got eyes on the gold at Fort Knox. After years of pushing for transparency, he went underground this week, confirming that there is roughly 147 million ounces, that they're all there. And he used the moment to drive home what happened to the dollar after we cut the gold link back in 1971. Over 85% of its purchasing power gone. Deficits, money printing, inflation, the so-called affordability crisis. It's just a polite name, we all know that. Meanwhile, gold and silver are responding in real time. Gold ripping higher, back above 4,400 as we're speaking today, and silver surging even harder. So let's get down to what's really happening here. Joining me today is Graham Summers. He is back. Graham, so nice to be back with you today. How have you been? I'm good, Danielle. It's good to see you as well. So isn't me or is Washington just tiptoeing around gold and silver and something bigger is at play? Because that's what it seems like to me, Graham. No, that's a good point. You know, as you mentioned earlier, the Trump administration has made it clear there's a kind of all-hands-on-deck approach to critical minerals. Silver is deemed a critical mineral. The president signed on that in an executive order, and then the United States government service confirmed that. Gold, the USGS did not formally confirm as a critical mineral. But the interesting thing there is that designation was not because gold isn't important. It's simply because the United States isn't strictly dependent on foreign adversaries for production of gold in ways that it is for other items, such as cobalt, lithium, etc. In terms of gold, you picked up on an interesting thread that we've noticed as well, which is that for many years, not to people like us, but for most of the mainstream media and most of mainstream finance, gold was like this verboten third rail. No one talked about it. No one cared about it. If you said something like, well, gold maintains purchasing power, people said, yeah, but stocks are better. It was always stocks or bonds. But in the last few years, that's really changed in a way that we've not seen before. Wall Street's now saying, maybe consider a 60-20-20 portfolio, 60% stocks, 20% bonds, 20% gold. We haven't seen that since at least 30, 40 years. But what's really caught my attention, and you alluded to earlier, is that at the upper echelons, the highest, highest insiders in the Trump administration's treasury secretary, Scott Besson, says they're talking about gold suddenly. I can't remember a time a treasury secretary's talked about gold in my lifetime. Besson gave an interview with Jesse Waters from Fox News, and he's walking through the treasury's office off the West Wing, and he stops by this picture of these certificates that you could convert for gold and silver. He says, we used to be backed by gold and sometimes silver in the past. I thought, my God, why even say that? And then similarly, we now have the secretary then followed up with that saying, he'd been to Fort Knox, or his underlings had, and all the gold's there. Again, very interesting thing to hear from a treasury secretary. That's something normally you'd hear rumblings about from policymakers, but not from the treasury secretary himself. And now Rand Paul going personally to Fort Knox, and it's not like he's not busy. He's got his whole thing going with Fauci and the various investigations he's involved in, so he's certainly a busy man. Why is he taking time out of his schedule to go to Fort Knox? I couldn't tell you exactly what's going on, but it's very clear that something's happening behind the scenes where they're kind of floating what you might consider a trial balloon, or at least suggesting that gold is back in the conversation in ways it hasn't been for decades. Do you think linking the currency, backing the currency with gold again? I mean, when you think about possible versus probable, it's certainly possible. We have to look at everything the Trump administration's doing through the lens of work in what they deem a matter of national security. Things that policymakers have been talking about for decades, but no one in Washington with any real clout acted on, the Trump administration's acting on very aggressively. I was in a critical minerals conference in Northern Virginia a few weeks ago. Can't mention the people that were present, but they were C-suite members from the intelligence community, ambassadors, etc. And they were saying, for years we've been saying there's this issue that we're too reliant on foreign adversaries for critical minerals, but no one would listen. Well, now the Trump administration is not just listening, they're putting capital to work. They've created a kind of de facto $200 billion sovereign wealth fund for the Department of War that's supposed to allocate that $200 billion in the span of three years. Very rapid capital deployment. And what they're doing is it's kind of taking a page out of China's playbook, which the reason China got ahead of us in so many ways was because the Chinese government formally got involved in critical minerals production to try and spearhead an effort to make themselves completely self-sufficient. The Trump administration is now doing something similar. They're allocating capital, they're providing implicit backstops to critical minerals producers, they're cutting red tape, they're doing everything they can to try and accelerate the domestic production of critical minerals, of which silver is decidedly one, and gold is sort of being implied as one. I think that this is really an all-hands-on-deck effort that they're going to go as fast as they can trying to cut ties with China in a way that we're not dependent on them anymore. So two important points I just picked up on there. One, why do you think they're hesitant about saying, yeah, gold's a critical mineral as well? Is it because it doesn't have the industrial component of silver? Yeah, so the way the government works, you know, people think that government's a little bit like the private sector. You know, the CEO just says, let's do this, and it's just done. It doesn't work like that. The government has to find specific vehicles through which things are happening, especially in the executive branch. If you don't want to go through Congress, if you don't want to go through the legislative branch, you have to find formal investment vehicles or formal executive vehicles like Doge, for instance. Everybody was up in arms about Doge. That was just a repurposing of something Biden had created, that they just reformatted it and turned it into Doge. So in terms of the critical minerals with gold, it's simply specifically that through the vehicle that they're using, the National Defense Act, which is what they're utilizing to try to cut through red tape, not go through Congress, accelerate, you know, the Department of War's allocation of capital and implicit backstop, they had to use a specific vehicle that requires that in order to qualify as a critical mineral, we're not reliant on foreign adversaries. We're not importing it to a great degree. As you no doubt are aware, the United States has ample gold resources within its borders. We're producing quite a bit. So in that capacity, it doesn't qualify. But what mattered to me was not that it passed mustard in terms of them actually getting it designated. It's that the president himself personally in the executive order designated it, which tells me something's going on in his thinking that gold really matters. The second point, you know, you mentioning the amount of capital they're throwing to critical minerals, to mining in the USA. Graham, it sounds like you're taking this seriously. The question is, is it too little too late? Can we catch up to China? So I have been privy to some meetings that not many people probably who've spoken with you before have been privy to. I can't reveal a whole lot, but one of them involved the Department of War in downtown Manhattan a few months ago. Another one involved the critical minerals meeting I told you about just a few weeks ago. Things are happening in ways that have never happened before. The Department of War previously, if they were going to move forward trying to sort of advance critical minerals production, they'd involve government bureaucrats. They're not doing that. They were in Wall Street trying to hire very high-level private equity and investment banking individuals to come join a new division of the Department of War that's specifically designed to allocate this capital. So what they're doing is they're poaching the top talent they can possibly find to get them involved. The people who are heading up these efforts are very serious heavy hitters in the private equity and investment banking world. These are not, you know, government bureaucrats, people who've been behind the desk of the Department of War. These are people specifically being brought in to try to make deals happen fast. I can tell you one story that they were talking about. The president or the White House reached out to them and said, you've got 72 hours to put together a deal to provide us with zinc. Typically, a private equity deal takes six months to complete. These guys stayed up 100 hours straight and were on lockdown in the Pentagon waiting for the president to sign the deal on a Sunday afternoon. That deal was subsequently announced. It involved a Korean producer of zinc. But these are the kinds of happening. The government's not working like it ever has before. The government's really pursuing an almost private sector approach to doing this. Is it too little too late? We're certainly overly reliant on China for the production, processing, and refining of many critical minerals. But the Trump administration seems to understand that the only way we're going to try to catch up is by aggressively, and I mean in ways you can't imagine, going after this problem. The other thing that came up in the critical minerals conference that struck me was the policymakers present were saying, we're not going to out China China. We're not going to be able to produce on a level they are as cheaply as they are. What they're doing is they're trying to fashion American innovation in ways. A great example is permanent magnets. These are magnets that don't require electromagnetic force. They don't turn on and off. They link up permanently. They are used in a lot of what you would consider exquisite technology in the defense industry, as well as some other AI related uses. The critical minerals necessary to make these things are something that we're now trying to fast track from a mining perspective. But as you noted, that's going to take years. You don't just wave a wand and a mine appears. So what they're doing is they're taking technology that already has some of those critical minerals in it. They're recycling it, taking out the critical minerals, and repurposing it to make these magnetics on the secondary market. So what we're doing is it's not that we're going to out China China. It's that we're going to try and innovate. We're going to try and lock in in ways that the American economy is famous for, and do things in a way that we can find alternate secondary tertiary routes through which to produce this technology. Grant, for the people at home new to the critical minerals discussion, you mentioned how they're vital in AI, obviously for the Department of War. But where would you say they're most used? Why are they critical? Sure. So they're considered critical because they're involved in high technology. Everything from your cell phone, to missile systems, to drones. But AI is where the rubber really meets the road. The Trump administration has realized that we're essentially in an arms race with China right now about AI. Why is that? Well, let's just break this down to the simplest terms possible. We now know that if you have power over the internet, you can influence how people think. We've seen enough lawsuits. We've seen enough information. We know that, for instance, Google, with its search capacity, can actually nudge billions of people towards thinking a particular way based on the search results they produce when you do a search algorithm. Multiply that times AI. Multiply that times agentic AI, where you have actual AI agents that are actively formulating tasks. Now imagine a world in which China is the one that's the world leader for that technology. Imagine the influence China would have globally. So the Trump administration figured out it's an existential threat. We have to win the AI war. To that war effort, everything that's necessary for the AI build-out—people think of AI, they think of Mark Zuckerberg, Apple, things like that. AI is fundamentally a natural resource, critical minerals story. All of these data centers that people are up in arms about, all of this technology requires vast, vast quantities of things like copper, cobalt, lithium, uranium, etc. As a result of that, we have this all-hands-on-deck approach from the Trump administration, where they're cutting regulation, they're deploying government capital, they're poaching top-tier talent and trying to formulate a public-private partnership with critical minerals producers, including mining executives. I'm sure you noticed at that roundtable there were people from BHP Billiton and other large cap mining companies. So this is really a kind of once-in-a-lifetime change that's undergoing right now. It's rare that you have a situation where the government says, we are fully backstopping a technological advance simply because, as a matter of national security, we can't afford China winning. That's life-changing results. It's massive. Absolutely. It's massive. Last point, Graham. Metals are moving again, at least while we're speaking right now. Thoughts on this wake-up during the summer? Yeah. That's more you've got to put on your trader hat, less your macro hat. Nothing changed in the macro story for gold. The government's running large-scale deficits. Why? Because we're in a wartime economy where the war is AI. The Federal Reserve is easing again, even though they're saying, are we going to hike? Are we not? Well, you're running $40 billion a month in quantitative easing. That comes to almost half a trillion a year in quantitative easing. That's debasing the currency. We're in a wartime economy. You also have central banks buying 1,000 tons of gold a year. You have retail waking up. You have Wall Street suggesting, let's allocate portions of our capital to precious metals. I'm sure you've noticed central banks own more gold than treasuries now as a percentage of foreign reserves. What does it say that these guys know that if they can print money at will, they're loading up on gold? Nothing changed from a fundamentals perspective. All that happened with gold and silver was two things. One was we had this parabolic rise. Anytime something goes up in a parabolic way, it has to settle. You have to get rid of the froth. You have to put in a nice base before you can start the next leg up. Then the other thing was that when the conflict with Iran began, much of trading volume now is just algorithms. These things are not thinking. They just trade based on correlations. Gold sold off very aggressively because a lot of very wealthy individuals in the Middle East were frantically transferring capital from gold into Bitcoin and crypto because they were worried capital controls were going to stop them from getting their wealth out of the region. When they did that, I'm sure you noticed when the war in Iran first happened, gold initially spiked and then absolutely plunged and Bitcoin caught a bid for the first time in quite a while. The algorithms picked up on that. From then on, anytime a headline about Iran came out, gold sold off, Bitcoin caught a bid. All that was algorithmic trading. From a purely macro perspective, nothing has changed about this story in the last six to seven months. We've been bullish gold and critical minerals for months at Phoenix Capital Research. We thought this breakout was coming sooner, but it looks as though it's finally here. Graham Summers, fantastic roundup. They always say it's the summer doldrums, not this summer. Definitely not this summer. You're absolutely right. We've been saying it for the longest time. Don't listen to what the central banks are saying, but just do what they're doing. That's accumulating gold. That's why I urge everyone to reach out to my colleagues at ITM Trading and take advantage of these prices right now in silver and gold. They will do all the work for you. They'll build a strategy based around your needs, your wants, and how to best protect yourself right now. Graham, you're awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure, Danielle. Where can people read more of your great work, Graham? So you can Google me, Graham Summers, MBA. I have an investment research company, Phoenix Capital Research. I'm also on Substack, G. Summers, MBA. I'm on X, formerly Twitter. I have two books on Amazon that were bestsellers. I'm everywhere. Just look for me. And you obviously have friends in high places, so please keep us up to date of these. I know can't talk a lot about those insider convos, but anytime you have a scoop, please give us a call. Happy to help out anytime I can. People really need to understand this is a very different environment. Thank you. Thank you for supporting my purpose and spreading the word here. Thank you, Graham, and thank you all. We'll have much more great content coming your way, so be sure to stay tuned. We'll see you soon.