Bitcoin is looking nice. It's going up in reaction. I'm certainly not anti crypto. I'm just myself, from my experience, very pro precious metals. I like something tangible. So not against having Bitcoin. It's just not a full replacement for gold and silver because it's not tangible. It doesn't do other things. But that's great if there's an open door here for an alternative to the dollar and an alternative currency in a different form of savings than what is normally controlled by the financial establishment. So I think that's great. You're listening to Carrie Lutz's financial survival network where you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else. To thrive in today's trying times, you need the financial survival network now more than ever. Go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com and get your free newsletter and gift financial survival network now more than ever. And welcome. You are listening to and watching the financial survival network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. Elections do have consequences, especially in the precious metals market. Day after the election, it's November, November 6th. I can't believe we just lived through what we lived through. But it's behind us. Everything's been fixed. Inflation's finished. The debt is okay. All of our problems are gone. Yeah, right. If you believe that one, well, let's see, I've got a bridge I could sell you in Lower Manhattan. I have an old portfolio of public projects. There's a tunnel down in Miami. That's for sale as well. So you can clean up, put up, just jack up the tolls. That's all. Michael Aries is with us. And now to discuss this, and it's a Mickle Vaney financial group. Michael, great to have you back on. I'm looking at the metals prices and I'm just kind of laughing. I thought this pullback was due before we got to $2,835, not after. But in the meantime, silver is straightened down. And according to Kitco, buck and a half lower. And the gold is taking a real hit today down 77 bucks, but nothing has changed has it? Not really, Carrie. No, like I was going to say too, you're such a comedian too. Oh, yeah, the debt's going to go away. Inflation's been fixed. You should be on a Netflix comedy special, not doing a political and economic podcast. I mean, it just materials great. You're so right. But yeah, I'm all for weddings and bar mitzvahs too. Just just K L at Carrie Lutz.com. And we will give you all the humor you need. These are uncertain trying times. Well, first, you surprised by the election? I don't care about the merits of the candidates. That's irrelevant. Nothing to do with the situation you find yourself in. The country finds itself in. But are you surprised that Trump prevailed? I'm a little surprised that there wasn't more contention and that we knew about it on the night of the election. I'm really surprised that it wasn't drug out and that there weren't voting irregularities and counting that went on for days. I was fully expecting it would be like last time. I'm actually very surprised that it was settled and done last night. So that was interesting to me. And I think the markets had very much priced in one particular expectation. And it was something different than they thought. So we see stocks up and metals down this morning. But in the big picture, in the grand scheme of things, Carrie, it's not that much. Like when we're talking about gold and silver, it's kind of a blip on the radar. You kind of said, "Oh, gold's taking a hit this morning." And it's like, "Yeah, for one day sell off, yes." And then when you zoom out and you look at it moving from $2,000 on up to $2,700, it's like, "Well, yeah, this is nothing. It's still in the same uptrend. It's a normal pullback. We're on the lower end of this range." So great. Yeah, let's let there be a market reaction to election news. Let them digest the news and do what it's going to do. Totally fine. If it's a dip to buy on, then great, add more at these prices because we didn't fix inflation. We didn't get rid of the debt. Trump says he's going to pay off the debt and we're going to sell oil and all this stuff. But $35 trillion, I mean, we'll see. We'll see if we can write in government spending. How about if we, the federal government owns 45% of California. It owns 90% of Nevada. It owns a huge portion of every Western state out there. Utah, I mean, I was looking at the percentage I've known this for years. How about if we just sell off all that real estate that the government doesn't know, doesn't care about and probably could pay off the national debt with a real estate sale? It's like a reverse Louisiana purchase right there. Yeah. Louisiana, what would you call it? Louisiana. Oh, we'll give it back to France. It'll be a Louisiana recollection of their old territory. Repatriation, Louisiana repatriation or just a getting rid of the assets. It's like when companies need to raise cash or they got operations that are inefficient, that they can't make money at, that they want to get redeploy the capital. What do they do? You sell the stuff off and you take the cash you can get. It could be whole divisions. It's going to say divestiture could be the Louisiana divestment. You sell the stuff off, but our government- They're not going to do that. They're in La-la land. It's not doing any good. It's not doing anybody any good to have 45% of California in federal hands other than promoting massive forest fires, right? Yeah, exactly. The government's not going to make the right choices, the smart choices at this point. It's too entrenched. You've got Trump in there for his second term, but he's fighting an uphill battle like it was before, even though you've got the Congress and the court on his side. Hopefully, he can get more done this time, but even Republicans were against him last time. Hopefully, he has more traction, more support this time, but you've still got an entrenched government machine that is used to spending other people's money and going into debt to spend more since they already spent all of other people's money. To get rid of that at this point, for the interest payments we have, all the locked-in spending, Medicare, Social Security, there's no way to really rein in this behemoth easily or quickly. It's still a matter of the fact that the Fed has printed too much money and the government has more debt than we can pay back. In other countries, we don't want to buy our Treasuries anymore. Trump gives us some nice optimism here for the next few years, but it's still too big a problem to fix. This reaction in metals is signifying. Digest the news. This wasn't what we expected, but at the same time, it's nothing out of the norm of this trend they're on. There's still too much money printed, and metals still have to go higher to account for that, and that's not going to change. Well, if you were just to sell off $5 trillion worth of federal assets, the market would go nuts, and I bet that would affect precious metals, but I don't see it happening because where are they going to sell all this stuff on eBay? Yeah. Who's going to buy and who do we want owning our land? If we broke off the 45% that the government owns and put it into another state, made it a libertarian state, right? There you go. California. Maybe just anarchy. I think the federal government could do that, right? I mean, I guess you have to have a constitutional thing to approve a new statement, and that start adding stars to the flag is really going to be a pain. Yeah. It's been a while. I don't think they want to do that. We've got a nice grid there to add one more. It's just going to throw it all off, and anyone who's OCD is just going to bother them. It'll be good for the flag manufacturers, though, right? But yeah, and there's some positives to this outcome, too, because if it had been the other way with Harris, I mean, she had brought up ideas like taxing unrealized gains in the market, and it's just like, that's crazy. That is absolute crazy talk to think of taxing unrealized gains before you sell the assets. She probably couldn't have passed that and probably couldn't have got away with it, but that's where her thinking's going. That's the kind of thing she wants to do. So when we have a pro, there's still big problems. There's still problems he maybe can't fix overall like the dead and inflation, but we're certainly not going to have worse problems like we could have had with more taxes, more regulation, potentially more wars. So maybe we have some reprieve, some break for the next few years, but overall, the biggest problems we have that are caused by the central bank haven't been fixed and can't be easily fixed. So yeah, exactly. And yeah, look, it just would have speeded up the downfall of the dollar. But look, I mean, hey, I'm over at 65, I get some social security a little bit to me and my Medicare, but pretty soon nobody's going to take Medicare. And my social security benefits will be inflated out of existence anyway. So what am I supposed to do here, Michael? Yeah. Well, with the metals, there's still an inflation hedge. And if you really zoom out and look at it, a year ago, we're talking about just barely under $2,000 gold. So a year ago, we've got like 1,900-something gold. And now it's still 2,600. It's not even close to giving everything back or crashing or coming back down. And silver too, you know, 45% drop in silver is not atypical for silver. It's a more volatile metal. It can do that in a day. We've seen it several times since it breached 30. But again, a year ago, where were we carry a year ago? It looks like 22, 23. So we're still $10 higher. We're still 40% higher than we were a year ago. And silver is still holding above 30. We've still got this breakout pattern, a pullback, but it's still got a lot of support at 31, 32. And it's still holding that. So it's just like it's just going to take its time working its way out. And everyone that's held silver for a long time, you know, it's volatile. You know, you've got these big up and down moves. But at the same time, ultimately, you see really big percentage performances. And it's doubled since it was in the mid-teens a few years ago. So now it's not like it's trying to give that back completely. And not like there's any reason for it to do so. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Couldn't agree with you more. And yeah, so precious metals is really the only defense you have. Cryptocurrencies. How you feeling about cryptos after the election? Because Trump is the first, you know, positive crypto supporter in the White House. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Bitcoin's looking nice. It's going up in reaction. I'm certainly not anti-crypto. I'm just myself, from my experience, very pro precious metals. I like something tangible. So not against having Bitcoin. It's just not a full replacement for gold and silver, because it's not tangible. It doesn't do other things. But I mean, that's great. If there's, you know, an open door here for an alternative to the dollar and an alternative currency in a different form of savings than what is normally controlled by the financial establishment. So I think that's great. You know, gold does that. Bitcoin does that. They do it in different ways. And you can't really substitute one for the other. You can't send gold across the world in 10 seconds. But also you can't hold Bitcoin in your hand and have it be 100% private and never accessible to a computer. So they both have their advantages, but it's interesting to see what are the alternatives still going up and doing well. Yeah. Well, looking at the price of Bitcoin right now, Bitcoin's up to almost 75,000, 75,000, not a particularly real technical mark, but big round numbers like that are psychological. It breaks 75,000. It could easily go to 100, couldn't it? It could. Yeah. And it's still a new high. I mean, it hit somewhere between 73 and 74 before. You want to touch that the other week. So now it is pushing up to a new all-time high. So and just like gold, gold kept going up, making new all-time highs. It hit like 27, 80 the other day. So it just kept setting new highs. And so now here's a new high after the election. And this big move up. Here's a new high in Bitcoin. So yeah, can this be a breakout? It could still, you know, pull back and consolidate after breaking out to a new high. But yeah, I could see it going higher from here. If it's now, you know, breaking above this big consolidation, really, since what was that since earlier this year, since March, the big consolidation in Bitcoin now breaking above that. So I think that's really positive. All right. Well, hey, we agree there. No questions about it. I mean, it's really kind of fascinating to watch these things go. And who would think that one day, you know, gold is going down, getting slammed based on an election. And Bitcoin is going up based on an election. Yeah. Well, and another thing to keep in mind too, Kerry, is when we think about when Trump was first president in 2016 and had his first term, gold actually went up three of the four years he was in office. It went down the first year and it went up the next three years and then really broke out in 2019, right before COVID and took off and went to 2000 again. So Trump being in office is not necessarily negative for the medals. The first time for the most part, it was positive for the medals. So we'll see how this one goes and see if he does things differently as far as the people he has around him and the type of things he's able to pull off if he wants to close the board or whatever. We'll see how effective he is, but it's still not a negative for the medals because it wasn't the first time. So what do you think the outcome of closing down the border, having Elon Musk in charge of government efficiency, which, yeah, he is always a joke. It's like government or it's an oxymoron, you know. Yeah. But yeah, but if he if he cuts government expenditures, like he cuts costs at a Tesla factory, yeah, we could be in for some interesting times, couldn't we? I mean, that would cause a lot of convulsions, I think, in the market. That's a pretty big deal because you have to think that that's going to be really good in the long term and really painful in the short term. If we have to really go through and revamp government and cut spending and cut costs and cut all the waste and extra jobs that are there, I mean, government has been the biggest job growth aspect in the last year when they keep manipulating the payroll numbers and employment goes down. Government has been the biggest addition, the biggest employer, the biggest addition to that number has been government. So if we're talking about actually making it more efficient, cutting jobs, cutting spending all of this, it's what is needed to get on a better path long term, but it's going to be painful in the short term. So that's a thing. If Trump does what he says he's going to do and keeps his promises, great, but it's really good for the long term and really painful in the short term. So it's not going to be easy to go through that. And the market's not going to like it. If there's less government spending, then yeah, I think I'll like it. Yeah. What about well, like it in certain ways, but the market's not going to like it. So we have to be ready for that. What about eliminating the income tax and going to a consumption tax in tariffs? Yeah, I mean, that's that's in my mind, tough to pull off and tough for us to transition to something like that. I think ultimately it's better, but really tough to get to that point. And then what happens to prices? We're used to cheap prices at Walmart. So if we have a consumption tax and we have tariffs, it's not going to be what everyone's used to where they consume and buy whatever they want. And it's normally very cheap stuff and the dollar goes long way. We've had more inflation last few years. That's kind of going away. But yeah, I mean, you have that kind of change that you're talking about. It's a major social adjustment for people in their standard of living and their spending, which is probably needed. But I don't know, that one might be too painful for anyone to go through and be willing to accept. So yeah, that's a tough one too to see what he's able to pull off and how bad the transition is going to be to get to a better place. That's what's going to be interesting here. And that's why we still need insurance for our money. That's why it's not like everything's been fixed yet. It's just not that simple. Well, at least, at least the business people have to be by nature problem solvers, maybe not in big corporations, but you've got your own business, your problem solvers. So at least maybe the problem will be acknowledged and addressed, just like the concept of making America healthy again, how poor our state of health is as a nation. And it's really, it's really like, to me, one of the major issues that we need to be paying more attention to. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was amazing. He said that in the speech last night that he was going to unleash Bobby Kennedy on the pharmaceutical company like that, Dracula, man, they've got to get their crosses out there and over bullets, man. That's like a rare wolf. It's going to be interesting. It's going to be very interesting this time around, see how this plays out. And if there really is a free for all like that, where he goes after, people like that, or even bad actors from previous times that have accused him falsely impeached him, whatever, is he going to be attacked? That's going to be interesting. Well, you want to make an omelet? You got to break some eggs, right? Yeah, well, we need to, we need to get this country back on the right track. So hopefully, hopefully he's won't do it. What about just the, because we had the Chevron decision, I don't get into talking about legal matters. Basically, the Supreme Court ruled that was a bad decision and no longer are government entities entitled to deference, a presumption that what they're doing is authorized by law and legal. And just on the basis of Chevron, you could cut back probably two thirds of the federal bureaucracy, because you have this thing called regulatory creep. You created your regulatory agency. And before you know it, they're meddling in things that the original drafters of the statute never even knew existed to be interesting. Yeah, very much. It'll be interesting. Yeah, yeah, like, like you were talking about it, Elon gets in there and actually does a, you know, government accountability and waste office and just, you know, starts going going to town on it with the, with the, with the, with the hacksaw, hack and limbs off. Yes. This could be, this could be interesting. It could be very interesting. I'd love to see it. You know, it's like a friend of mine, his uncle was a bit of a whack job, but he got a job working for the post office in an executive position. And he tried to reform it and tried to streamline it and do all this. He lasted six months. I think Elon might, might not last that long. There'll be a revolution because they don't want efficiency. They don't want to stop spending money. They only want to spend more and more. Well, that's a story for another day. Mike, just tell us, where do we find with you? Find you. How do we connect with you on the web? All that good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's McElvaney precious metals. If anyone's interested in gold and silver, and we'll, we'll help do it strategically and, and help you benefit the most from it. You can go to McElvaney.com/Michael or call 970-459-4611. Call or text me and I'm happy to advise. Excellent. And the link is in the show. That's this interview on financialsurvivalnetwork.com. Please sign up for your free newsletter, like over 50,000 of other FSN members have done. And question for Mike, myself, kl@carreluts.com. Always a pleasure, Mike. Thanks for stopping by. Yeah. Thanks, Gary. Enjoy the conversation. So I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Carrie Lutz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com. Financial survival network. Now more than ever.
