Rick Mills, Editor/Publisher, Ahead of the Herd:

On the fourteenth of last November gold was $2,536 an ounce, today it’s $3,334. Silver was $26.38, now its $36.92, platinum was $851.56, today it’s $1,391.00.

Gold, silver and platinum have done extremely well over the last while, can you point to any particular reason for that?

Bob Moriarty, Founder, 321gold:

I think it’s a general exit from the dollar into safer commodities and quite bluntly if you look at the all-time high in the Dow and the S&P you’ve got something similar there so it’s a race to safety that used to be in the T-bills and now it’s in the gold, silver and platinum.

RM: President Trump has said he’s going to personally set the tariff rates: “the logistical challenge of negotiating with so many nations is just too much” so besides the fact that the House of Congress has that power; to set tariffs, it’s a very different policy from his 90 deals in 90 days, it’s a huge backtrack.

BM: Well, if you look at what he’s done, he was elected on a platform of peace and for the first time in recent history he’s bombed the crap out of a country on behalf of a third country that was no threat whatsoever to the United States and I think that was a serious mistake.

And then if you look at the BBB bill that is absolutely going to bankrupt the United States, so all these things he was elected on he’s done a U-turn.

RM: The Fed is kind of between a rock and a hard place, they’re getting a lot of political pressure from Trump to lower interest rates, but they have a job to do and they’re looking at a pair of key reports.

Now we just had the monthly job reports out yesterday and there’s another one about consumer prices due July 15^th; the Fed doesn’t meet until the end of July so they’re going to have time to digest the second report on consumer prices.

The jobs report yesterday I’m just going to read you something from Wolf Richter over on Wolf Street:

“This unemployment rate of 4.1% points is at a solid balanced labor market. The Fed’s median projections of the unemployment rate have been ratcheting higher, at the June meeting to 4.5% for the end of 2025. The actual unemployment rates over the past 12 months of 4.0% to 4.2% have been undershooting the Fed’s projections.”

So not only did you have what many are thinking is a brilliant jobs report, the numbers coming in on the jobs are less than what the Fed predicted for 2025. Now in their June meeting they said they were going to do two rate cuts. I’m saying the Fed has no reason to lower interest rates at this point because of such a solid job report, and then when you look at inflation rates, the overall CPI is at an annual rate at 2.4%.

The forecast was for it to rise 0.2% but it only rose 0.1%. And then if you go to the core inflation, the core CPI, now this one as you know excludes food and energy, it rose by 0.1%, they were expecting 0.3% and the annual rate remained at 2.8%, so they were expecting 3% on the core inflation and they didn’t get it, it stayed at 2.8%, so the Fed has no reason right now to lower rates.

Instead, they’re going to sit back, they’re going to look at the prices for consumers on July 15^th, and I don’t think they’re going to lower, they’ve got no reason to lower yet, what do you think?

BM: Well strangely enough you skipped over something very important so let me ask you a question: Under what provision of the Constitution does the President of the United States have anything to do with tariffs?

RM: That’s Congress, the House has that power.

BM: Thank you, and under what provision of the Constitution does the President of the United States have to do with interest rates?

RM: None, the Federal Reserve, the US Central Bank, is independent, and they have been since inception in 1913.

BM: Donald Trump has confused himself with either Jesus or Mohammed or the Pope, he’s playing a role frankly he’s not qualified for. Now I believe the numbers that are provided by the government are wrong.

If you follow John Williams, the actual inflation rate in the United States is closer to 10 or 11%, so when the government comes out with numbers, and this is true for the Treasury and the Fed, frankly I just don’t believe those numbers. What I see in an anecdotal way is inflation is a lot higher than it appears to be.

RM: We talked about this in the last talk or the one before, when I mentioned people just aren’t cluing in on what’s coming with the tariffs, and even if they’re not hitting the US yet, the pass-through and they’re not yet, the other problem is the devaluation of the dollar.

If your consumers are 70% of your economy and one-third of what they buy is imports, the dollar down 10.3% already this year has a direct effect and you just buy less. That’s another form of inflation.

Something that was in the news recently as well and they’re calling it a “Shadow Fed”.

This is according to a Wall Street Journal report, Trump’s toying with the idea of selecting and announcing a Federal Reserve chair replacement by September, and of course now this is going to be his guy and he’s going to sit there and he’s going to absolutely trash everything that the Reserve is doing right now, holding your interest rates etc., so you’ve got him totally working against the Fed in order to replace Powell with his guy, and the market reacted seriously to that when that idea was floated.

BM: Well, I think Donald Trump is an economic illiterate and I see him doing a lot of things that are very dangerous. I’ll be blunt and I’ve said this many times in the past, the United States is bankrupt and this bill he just managed to force through, which really surprised me because there were a lot of serious people in the Senate and lot of serious people in the House who were dead set against the bill and it still somehow passed, and that’s a 13% increase in the defence budget to over $1 trillion, his increase to the deficit, Donald Trump is literally a bull in a China shop and we’re going to see that very soon.

I see a lot of numbers that scare me, and I think between now and October we’re going to have a massive crash.

RM: The analysts from JP Morgan agree with you, they said that if he does a Shadow Fed, it could re-calibrate rate expectations and trigger reassessment of dollar positioning and they go on to say, “the risk of additional negative shocks would be elevated. We expect US tariff rates to move higher, and the upshot of these developments is that our baseline scenario incorporates the end of a phase of US exceptionalism.”

And then the big deal with Vietnam, Trump announced it but I don’t think Vietnam knew they had a deal, I’m pretty sure they didn’t, they acted a little bit surprised but what happened Trump said “you’ve got your 10% already, we’re going to put another 20% on, so everything coming in from Vietnam is 30%.”

Now if any of that is passed through from China, meaning any of this stuff that they’re finishing or making comes from China, they call those imports China Plus One, that’s going to be taxed at 40% plus the 10%. Meanwhile the Vietnamese economy is wide open for the US to sell anything into it that they want; there’s no tariffs at all.

You’ve got an awful lot of stuff coming from Vietnam into the US, stuff like tech and garments and sneakers and backpacks, school stuff. In the stores the school stuff had to have been ordered a long time ago and now you’re going to see inflation in that.

So how can there be low inflation coming, and nothing to worry about with these deals cause the tariff level letters are starting to go out next week.

The added prices that companies are paying is going to be passed, sooner than later, more on this below, to the consumer, there’s just no way around it.

BM: Of course, but you’re missing the really good point in that announcement from Trump. If goods from the States to Vietnam have no tariff whatsoever, the sales of corvettes in Vietnam are about to go through the roof.

RM: Don’t see the attraction personally but with limitations on China’s REE’s and magnets the auto industry in the US is being severely damaged.

Tariffs at that amount certainly harm’s Vietnam’s economy, everything going into the States is 30% or 50% coming in; signing a deal like that would destroy their economy. There’s no way they can sell anything into the US without Americans being willing to pay a lot more.

BM: If you want to understand what’s going on with the West and the debt-based system, all you do is go back and read Gibbon, ‘The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire’ and you get all the blithering idiots right at the end of empire and quite bluntly we are at end of empire.

I don’t know how anyone in any store, Walmart, Kmart, anybody actually does business in this kind of environment where the tariffs are changing from week to week. He says 90 deals in 90 days and then he comes back at 91 days and says, “Ah I’m just going to set the tariffs.”

Now let’s talk about what the president should do, ok? What has the Department of Justice just come out with that requires presidential action immediately? The Department of Justice came out with a report, it was written up in the New York Times, a very important report talking about the influence of Russia in the 2016 election.

What should that require from the executive branch right now?

RM: If people interfered and stole the election from Trump there should be a lot of people in jail.

BM: What the report concluded was that Comey and Clapper and Biden and Obama and Clinton conspired to steal the election from Trump, ok, and the whole Russia-gate thing was fraud. Now if that’s true what should the executive do?

RM: Bob I’m at the point right where I don’t believe what the Trump administration has said about Biden, I don’t believe what Biden had said about the first Trump administration, to me it’s all just a great big slough of stinking garbage and none of it’s probably true.

Well, there’s maybe a little kernel of truth in it and then it’s just blown up, gets used as political ammunition. I mean can we actually believe that anything a DOJ run by Pam Bondi will say about Biden? From what she said all along, you can’t believe anything all these people say about anything, that’s the bottom line.

BM: Well, no but here’s the answer. If the Department of Justice concluded that there was a conspiracy to steal the election, be it total fraud on the part of the CIA, the FBI, people should be charged with crimes right now.

Literally to prove your point, if they are charged in the next week or two or months it means that the Department of Justice is actually doing what it should be doing. If they are not charged in the next month or two it means that we’re in this pseudo-DOJ, as fake as the Combs trial and as fake as the Epstein suicide.

RM: It depends on who’s in power what the story is.

BM: Well, I like Bondi’s reaction to the Epstein files: “Oh yeah we’re going to release them, I’ve got them sitting on my desk, we’re going to release them at 2:30 this afternoon.” I’m still waiting, I’ll probably be waiting a year from now. Are you aware there have been two separate independent reports that Epstein’s still alive and they’re still blackmailing people including Trump?

RM: Nothing surprises me anymore, every day something more outrageous happens.

You look back a year ago and you think, “Holy crap I thought that was bad,” but it just keeps getting worse. We’re in a spiral here and it ain’t up.

BM: I think that’s a really good analogy and it’s something I’m going to steal from you. We are absolutely in a spiral; it’s a very negative spiral and between now and October it’s going to be obvious to everyone.

RM: People have got concerns about everything, that’s normal, but especially when it concerns your money and the markets you want to figure out and know possible potentials.

The thing that Ed Yardeni is talking about is a market melt-up.

If you look at the close of the markets yesterday, S&P, Nasdaq records, the Dow within 20 points of its last record in December, the Fed, the jobs, interest rates being held, we’re definitely not facing a market crash right now because our danger is a market melt-up. What are your feelings on that?

BM: Well, we’re clearly in a market melt-up right now, and if you go to CNN and look up the fear and greed index, we’re in extreme greed and it certainly can go higher, but the next big move is not going to be up, the next big move should be down.

We’re in the melt-up right now and there’s absolutely no economic justification behind it. It’s total insanity and it’s going to blow up and it’s going to cost a lot of people a lot of money.

RM: Yes, the S&P is currently trading at 24 times expected 2025 earnings.

Barron’s said late last year: As long as cost inflation – such as moderate increases in wages and salaries, isn’t too burdensome – companies could increase their profit margins a bit in 2025. The cash flow rolling in can support continued buybacks, further increasing per-share earnings.

But Bob this was written before tariffs were implemented and when the dollar was still strong. Today we have tariffs and companies are, for now, eating the extra costs, and we also have a much weaker dollar than when that piece was written.

BM: What’s a good way of putting this? We’re in an exceptionally unstable condition, and we are in the melt-up right now but between now and October things are going to change in a big way.

RM: It’s pretty clear to me that Iran has not been dissuaded from having a nuclear program and that if they did have the 60% uranium enriched, that has not been destroyed, and despite a well-coordinated attack by B-22 stealth bombers and Tomahawk missiles out of submarines, they did not stop and I don’t think they even slowed down Iran’s program.

They’ve got hundreds of miles of tunnels and there’s thousands of centrifuges unaccounted for and they could easily be working on enrichment right now.

The Pentagon came out with a report saying the attack set Iran back a year or two. Tulsi Gabbard said they weren’t even working on a bomb program. The international atomic guys say “yeah, they were,” Iran says they weren’t, President Trump says, “totally destroyed, obliterated, gone, we’re never going to have to worry about them again,” and here we go, the day before yesterday the US slapped a bunch of sanctions on Iran.

Israel hasn’t said much about it, but the fact is it looks like Iran’s going to pull out of every nuclear deal and agreement.

Whether they were going to build a bomb before or not, they certainly have to be thinking now that they need one just to stop this shit. What just happened was insanity.

BM: Well, it was insanity but you’re chasing a red herring. There is one nuclear-armed state in the Middle East that is a threat to world peace. Who is it?

RM: Israel.

BM: So why are we talking about Iran? If Israel has a right to nukes why wouldn’t Iran have the right?

RM: People think that Israel has a right to bomb Iran, a lot of people believe that Bob, the majority of people have that opinion because of what Iran has done and said over the years.

BM: Everybody has a right to their own opinion, but they do not have a right to their own facts.

RM: I’m saying those in charge aren’t listening, nobody’s listening, nobody seems to want to listen. They think diplomacy has been tried, that’s over. And these are the people pushing the buttons and these are the people marching us down the road of more war.

If this gets out of control, we’re all going to feel the pain of it, it’s not just going to be confined to the Middle East.

BM: Iran appears to have been notified in advance that there was going to be an attack on their bases, and they moved the uranium, ok? Now they’ve got 400 kilograms of uranium, they could produce nuclear weapons from that should they want to, and Iran had said “Ok we’re going to withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.”

That is exceptionally dangerous because now Iran could produce a nuclear weapon, and we wouldn’t know about it. I think the next move is Israel wants to use nukes. That would be a crime against humanity, and that would ignite World War III.

RM: I have a link to an article by the Society of Atomic Scientists, and they say that this 90% enrichment is a complete red herring, that it’s very possible to make a bomb much like what the US used on Nagasaki and Hiroshima – “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”.

You can make either out of 60% enriched uranium, and even much less enrichment, you could make them out of 40% enriched uranium, and this is coming from the guys who should know, it’s simply a matter of how you do it, they’re crude bombs, the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs compared to today’s nuclear weapons were very crude. But they were very effective, they were very dirty and with 400 kg of 60% uranium it is very possible to make seven to nine of those kind of bombs.

I sit here and I go “Ok well where is that uranium?” Right now, you cannot get that uranium, you’re not going to find it, where is it? So the only way this can be settled is through a diplomatic settlement, there is no other way, you’re not going to bomb your way out of this into safety, they’re not going to allow Iran any further movement on their program, they know the uranium exists, they know you can make a bomb out of <60% and this is not going to stop.

The only way to get at this is diplomacy and nobody is interested in diplomacy anymore. Like you said Israel wants to bomb, and the United States seems to just go along with whatever Israel wants.

They didn’t even get upset, they’re in the middle of negotiations and Israel start a bombing campaign and the US says, “Well I told you.” There’s no effort at settling this on a diplomatic front at all anymore.

The US is going to leave Israel to do what ever they want.

BM: Well, that’s not true. There are two countries that have absolutely tried to contribute to a diplomatic solution.

RM: Which ones?

BM: Russia and China. Here’s what’s crazy, we keep talking about Iran and nuclear weapons, there is one country in the Middle East that has been in constant war against all of their neighbors for 80 years, why are we talking about Iran, why don’t we talk about the 12,000-ton elephant in the Jello?

RM: Well, I think it’s all because MSN believes it’s the next excuse Israel needs, like they have over the years, decades. If you look at it there’s been one excuse after another for doing what they’re doing, now they’ve got another excuse. It almost comes down to “Hey look at this, we’ve got a lot of military toys, who are we going to use them on?”

BM: What do you think I did in Vietnam?

RM: You were a fighter pilot, then you were a bomber pilot and then you were a FAC directing the bomber pilots.

BM: Exactly right, I was a forward air controller for 700 missions. I controlled hundreds of airstrikes, hundreds of artillery missions, and dozens of naval gunfire missions. I was an expert at selecting targets and I was an expert at understanding the use of various different weapons.

We had CBUs, we had napalm, we had 500-pound bombs, we have 250-pound bombs, we had 2,000-pound bombs, we had 2.75-inch rockets, we had 5-inch rockets, we had 16-inch guns on the ‘New Jersey’, we had army 105-millimeter batteries that could fire 13 guns in exactly the same spot. I used all of those weapons.

Iran does not need nuclear weapons. Iran has proven they have the ability to kick the shit out of Israel, and they just did. And Israel is hiding how much damage has been done to themselves and they know if they violate the ceasefire that actually Iran never agreed to, it was actually forced on them by the United States and China, Iran is prepared to destroy Israel, and they don’t need nukes to do it.

They took out the entire Mossad, ok, they took out the Weizmann Institute of Science and I think blew up 500 laboratories that cost $500,000 apiece.

The attack on Israel was the most effective attack I’ve ever seen. Remember when the United States supposedly bombed the nuclear sites, and then supposedly a couple of days later Iran attacked the US base in Qatar, do you remember that?

RM: Yes, I do.

BM: Iran notified the United States and Qatar in advance that they were going to hit this base, and the United States had already taken the troops out. Why did they do that?

RM: They didn’t want to get Americans killed because that would be the excuse for greater American involvement.

BM: No, Iran wanted to show the United States and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Israel and the UK and France and Germany, “Watch this. Use every weapon you’ve got and try to stop our missiles.”

So, they fired the missiles at that base and all the missiles got through. A lot of combat is pure psychology and when your enemy shows he can defeat you, no matter what you do, he can even warn you in advance when he’s going to attack you and you cannot stop him, he’s sending you a very crystal-clear message.

RM: Absolutely. I’d like to move on and talk about platinum. The platinum market’s interesting, platinum’s 50% higher in 2025 and holding and the availability in storage hubs like London and Zurich is very tight and it’s going to get tighter.

The World Platinum Investment Council is forecasting a major supply shortfall of nearly 1,000,000 oz this year and it’s mainly due to a 4% drop in global output, particularly from South African mines, and platinum is seeing growth in jewelry especially in China and India.

So, investor interest is rising and the platinum to gold ratio is still historically low.

You’ve been talking about platinum basically since we started these talks and it’s had a nice move. Do you see that continuing?

BM: Here’s the deal. If you go back to 2008 rhodium got up to $10,000 an ounce and between 2008 and 2011 or 2012 rhodium dropped to about $700 or $800 an ounce and I advocated buying rhodium strictly for the reason it was cheap compared to what it had been before. And rhodium went from $700 an ounce to $28,000/oz.

Now 99% of the time, from 1725 when platinum was discovered until now, platinum has had a premium to gold. So, with gold at $3,330 and platinum at $1,400 platinum is insanely cheap, and you know that’s one of the most important issues with me: buy what’s cheap and sell what’s dear. And quite bluntly platinum relative to gold, platinum’s going to go up. The Chinese government is encouraging their citizens to invest in both silver and platinum for no other reason than they’re both cheap.

RM: I only know one platinum project, we talked about it a little while ago, PTX Metals trades as PTX on the TSX Venture. It’s a copper-nickel-PGE-gold story and with all the fundamentals and price rise in platinum right now and palladium, I’m surprised I don’t know about more, it just seems that there’s not a lot of investment vehicles out there to take advantage of this.

BM: Platinum was $900 an oz in April and it’s up 50% since then. The easy way to invest in platinum is to buy an ETF.

RM: Let’s move on here, we’ve talked about gold a lot in our talks, do you think investors are starting to re-rate gold mining companies maybe in the expectation that gold is going to become a larger part of public and private portfolios?

BM: Are you at your computer?

RM: Yes, I am.

BM: Pull up the chart of Orestone Mining (TSX.V:ORS). What was the price two weeks ago?

RM: Four and a half cents.

BM: And it’s 10.5 cents now. I maintain that one of the most important ways to make a profit is to buy things when they’re cheap and sell them when they’re expensive. Now you and I were both in that placement I think at 2.5 cents. We’ve been talking about this for months, but it’s an opportunity for no other reason than it’s cheap.

Now after we did that interview with Quinton Hennigh (all stocks we mention here, and more, are discussed – Rick) last week there was a lot more interest, the stock went from $0.08 to $0.11 in three days. When you’ve got these stocks that are below $0.10 you can get some exceptional percentage moves.

BM: Yes, I just look at all those ones we bought in the private placements because they were cheap and they’ve all moved 300%, 400%. I see Harvest Gold (TSX.V:HVG) popped up 4 cents just this week after our talk with Quinton, now they’ve announced the financing and it’s down at $0.10 but that was another 2.5-center.

What’s nice is Orestone has some great technical to back our buy-in, so does Harvest Gold and the other ones. I see Trifecta (TSX.V:TG) just started drilling, Sitka (TSX.V:SIG) is going to be drilling. Rackla (TSX.V:RAK) is going to be drilling, so one of the things that I wanted when we started buying these was, they were going to go and drill this year.

Yeah, they were cheap, but I didn’t want to sit on them forever and just wait for the market to give them a lift, I wanted them to put out news, I wanted a drill program this year and it looks like we’re going to be getting that on all of them.

So my question to you is guys with 300-400% right now and they’re looking at a drill program, normally what I would do if my stocks were free trading, and I do have some of each of these companies that are free trading, when I get that kind of a movement I have to evaluate the technical, I have to look at “Ok what are we doing here, what do I want to do with the stock?

Do I want to keep it, do I want to offload some, do I want to offload all of it?” You have to start making decisions now and I think after years of sitting and basically not a lot of money being made people have to start thinking “Ok what do I do?”

Well, my position is I’m just going to sell a little bit of each to get back my original capital, that’s all I’m doing. And I’m holding all the rest and I’m not giving advice and I’m not making recommendations; this is what I’m going to do.

BM: Ok, let me raise some important issues and you hinted at it without delving into it. All these companies we’re talking about, where do they stand on drilling?

RM: All the companies we talked about are going to drill, some have started, and all the others will be drilling soon.

BM: So, if they’re drilling now, what is the next thing that’s going to happen that could move the needle?

RM: Drill results.

BM: Exactly. The beauty is that there was money being raised in April, May, June and July, lots of these companies are drilling right now. In the next month or so we’re going to start seeing drill results flow in and hopefully, I’ll admit it I’m prejudiced like everybody else is, but what I’m really looking forward to is Rackla, because Rackla could be a home run out of the park with one hole.

RM: Well Trifecta had news out, they started drilling, could they not be the same?

BM: Yeah, exact same thing but Rackla’s got 500 meters of surface samples. If they can verify a 500-meter intercept you’ll see the stock go up three, four, five-fold and do what Snowline did a couple of years ago.

But here’s the key. One is if you buy stocks to make a profit you’ve got to sell them when they’re in profit, so your idea of selling part of it to recover what you put into it, that’s a pretty good concept but take into account all these guys that are drilling we’re really looking for a 10 or 20-bagger, we’re not looking for 2 or 3-baggers, and all these companies all have 10-fold potential so that’s something to consider. Now from a seasonality POV what should happen with gold in July?

RM: It’s my Scottish Irish ancestry, a little more Scot than Irish, I think.

We’re in a bit of a weak period but gold should start rising fairly quickly. Seasonality is a big factor here.

BM: Ok very good. From a tactical POV July is the lowest month of the year, by the end of July, first of August that has turned up and from a seasonal POV gold and gold stocks should move up no later than August so you’ve got seasonality on your side, you’ve got buying cheap on your side, you’ve got potential drill results coming in shortly so there’s a lot of good things coming, and if you were wise enough, and you and I were, and you can go back three months ago, of the stocks we were talking about I think every one of them is up.

RM: I looked back at that the other day, and we nailed the junior PM bottom when we started this podcast and started talking about the different stocks.

BM: I invest to make money so I’m happy with the stocks I bought for 2.5 – 4.0 cents and are .10 now.

RM: Part of it we haven’t mentioned is look at the world’s largest gold miner Newmont, 63% from their recent low at the close of ’24, Canada’s Barrick Mining, 40% in US dollar terms from its recent low in December, look at AngloGold Ashanti shares in New York 108% from their low at the start of the year, Gold Fields has seen a gain of 88% in US dollar terms.

Everything you talked about is bang on but we’re going to see, with these guys’ numbers, their earnings and everything are just off the charts and we’re going to see people go “Oh my God what is the precious metal next thing?”

And the next thing is that all that cash flows down into the juniors in M&A and everything else that we could want, we’re looking at a perfect storm for our gold stocks.

BM: Yes.

RM: There’s something else going on, we talk about the food situation, the immigration situation and crops not being harvested, but ‘The Western Producer’ says that in June the US Department of Agriculture released its agricultural trade deficit forecast for the year and it predicts an increase in the US trade deficit $250 billion for agricultural trade, which is up $500 million from its February forecast, and that’s not weird considering what’s going on with tit for tat tariffs and people moving away from shipping into the US from Canada and finding other markets, but the weird thing about this is that typically a large part of these forecasts has an explanatory text, they tell you what’s going on and than why.

Well, producers are complaining that the Trump administration, and this is straight from Trump’s desk, has taken the explanatory text out of these reports.

Reuters did an investigation, and they found the original unredacted report and they attributed the growing agricultural trade deficits to tariffs and sentiments such as ‘Buy Canadian’, ‘Buy European,’ this has reduced the demand for US ag goods.

Trump’s goal was to decrease trade imbalances, but the opposite is occurring and they’re hiding it deliberately.

BM: There’s another thing you should mention, I think we’re going to have a catastrophic situation for agriculture this year. We talked earlier about the issue of farmers not planting, but the other side of the coin is once you’ve planted, and the crops have grown who’s going to pick them?

And Trump’s attack on illegal immigration is stopping the legal labor even the legal labor from wanting to pick fruits and vegetables.  We’ve got so many potential catastrophes all bobbing in the air right now that it’s going to work out poorly. I think no one thought out the impact of how they are attacking the illegal immigration issue.

RM: I don’t think any of these plans were discussed, it was pump out executive orders for everything as quickly as possible. They should have gone to Congress, this should have been discussed, but hey boom this is what we’ll do we’ll worry about the fallout later.

There are reports coming out of California from Ventura County, an area that produces billions of dollars of fruit and vegetables a year and much of it is picked by immigrants in the US illegally.

Nobody’s saying that isn’t true, it is, but that’s just the US agricultural system, its illegal immigrants coming across the border and basically supporting the agricultural industry by planting and picking.

This was an interview on Bloomberg, ‘Immigration raids leave crops unharvested: California farms at risk’.

A grower said 70% of the workers are gone, if 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked, and it can go bad in one day. Most Americans do not want to do this work, most farmers here are barely breaking even, and then you look at Ventura County and the state’s Central Valley and there’s vast agricultural lands north of Las Angeles, one farm supervisor is preparing a field for planting strawberries, usually you’d have 300 workers on the field, he just had 80 that’s all he had.

Another supervisor on a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field but today there was just 17, we’ve talked about this so many times, they’re just not coming across the border, they’re scared.

You’ve got no illegals coming in and most of your legals don’t want to come because they’re scared of getting picked up by ICE.

The reason inflation is not high right now is because food and energy are low, and that’s just a basic fact of the way things are in the US right now. Gas is cheap, food is cheap, and the tariffs haven’t been passed through for one simple reason.

When covid hit these companies, multinationals that imported into the States, they jacked their prices up so high that they’ve got an enormous cushion.

I was looking at the profit margins and profit margins today in US corporations bringing stuff into the US are not even close to what they were pre-pandemic; they’re high. They haven’t come back down even close to pre-covid levels.

These companies have such a profit margin right now that they’re not yet passing on the costs because they don’t really know how much to put on because of the chaos, but when the tariffs settle into a fixed amount, they’re not going to continue to eat these costs.

They will now, but when they’re settled in, they’re going to start passing those costs on, you’re going to have a lack of food because there’s no illegals and legals in the country picking it, and you’ve got massive drought already starting in the US. It is hot and dry, you’re getting a heat dome across the Midwest and you’re just not going to have your food, you’re not going to get it shipped, you’re not going to get it picked, it’s going to rot in the fields, and inflation is coming, it’s just not here yet.

BM: Oh yes. You’re exactly correct, however, and let’s not talk about the legality of whether these people are here illegally or not, let’s talk about their contribution to the US economy.

You’re going out and you’re arresting people and you’re throwing them into Alligator Alcatraz in Florida the people who are picking all your crops. Now if you do that, you’re going to jack the price of the crops through the roof and a lot of crops are simply going to rot in the field, which means the farmers are going to go bankrupt.

We have the perfect storm for our economy, and I fully approve of deporting illegal immigrants that the Biden administration brought in by the millions. They were brought in because the Democrats wanted voters, and they had plans for turning them into voters and in many cases, they did turn them into voters.

Those people need to go back to El Salvador, or Cuba, or Venezuela or wherever they come from ok, but at the same time you’ve got a lot of people in California, Nevada, in Arizona that we need to pick the crops, and if we don’t have them, we’re in deep serious trouble.

Trump is doing something that’s good in some ways, but the unintended consequences are a lot worse than anybody realizes.

RM: Absolutely, let’s finish up here with something that caught my eye. Voyager 1 is now 15 billion miles away from earth and still sending back information.

The ship crossed into something called the heliopause, I’m just going to read this from AOL:

“This is the vast boundary where the sun’s influence fades, and the realm of interstellar space begins. At this boundary point the pressure of the solar wind — the stream of charged particles flowing from our sun — meets the pressure of particles drifting through space beyond our solar system. Voyager’s instruments detected a surprising rise in both temperature and particle density at this location a phenomenon scientists now call the “wall of fire.”

Think about the importance of Voyager’s discovery, “it helps to understand what the heliopause really is. It marks the outer limit of our sun’s domain, where its solar wind slows and pushes back against cosmic rays and particles originating from other stars. Think of it as a cosmic shield — a natural barrier protecting planets in our solar system from some of the harshest particles speeding through space.”

Voyager 1’s journey beyond the wall of fire marks the beginning of our interstellar voyage.

BM: Well, the really amazing thing is here’s this satellite that has been out there for decades. It’s been fixed and is still sending back data. That it was sent out almost 50 years ago is even more exciting.

RM: It’s phenomenal. We watched Star Trek and heard so many times “go where no man’s ever gone” but the reality is that we are learning, and one day we’ll be going.

Anything you want to add to wrap this up?

BM: I don’t think so other than the market for gold shares, especially juniors, is going to be quiet in July, and as of the 1st of August will turn up significantly.

RM: We own a lot of companies that we bought cheap, already have nice profits on, and we’re going drilling on all of them, it is going to get exciting.

BM: Super deal.

RM: You have family obligations, I have 75 acres of hay to get rolled, Let’s talk again on the 25^th of July.

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Richard owns shares of Harvest Gold (TSX.V:HVG) and Orestone Mining (TSX.V:ORS).

Silver North (TSX.V:SNAG), HVG, PTX and ORS are paid advertisers on his site aheadoftheherd.com

This article is issued on behalf of SNAG, HVG, PTX and ORS

Bob owns HVG, ORS, SIG, RAK and TG.

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