Gold & Silver Are the Best Refuges from a “Weird” World (Video)
Ross Beaty is the Chairman of Alterra Power Corp and Pan American Silver. He is an expert in the energy sector and precious metals mining. Beaty spoke with Cambridge House Live about why he owns gold and silver as a protection from the economic and political uncertainties of the next decade. From disruptions in the energy sector, to unstable central bank policies, Beaty sees the potential for the world to get very “weird.” You want to own precious metals when that happens.
Highlights from the interview:
“If global growth slows down, global consumption of metals slows down. You’ve got to be really selective in what metals you do go after. Fortunately, the metals business is a non-renewable business… Plus, it’s getting harder and harder to mine and harder and harder to get social license to build new mines. All of those things serve to keep metals prices higher for longer. Even though the demand might go down, supply will also be constrained. I think prices will still stay pretty high, and we’ll still have pretty good investment returns for most metals…
“Gold and silver, like all metals – it’s a cyclical world we live in. We’re now entering the fifth year of a bear market in all metals. But I look around. Gold has come down from $1800 to $1200 an ounce. It’s still doing pretty well. Don’t forget it was just $250 just ten years ago. It’s still doing pretty well, particularly when the US dollar is so strong. These things give me great feeling of conviction that silver and gold prices are likely to rise, I expect, beyond their all-time high… I think precious metals will outperform all other metals within five to ten years…
“Gold and silver are money. They’re investment metals. Plus, in the case of silver, it has thousands and thousands of industrial uses. It’s the best of both worlds. But really, when you look at how much paper money is being printed, when you look at what governments are doing with the exchange wars that are happening, all the other chaos in the world – gold and silver will be refuges for an awful lot of people when things get weird. And I suspect they absolutely will get weird sometime in the next five to ten years, because they always have…
“Who would have thunk we’d see a 50% drop in the oil price in just two months. Nobody saw that coming. That is so profound and disruptive to financial markets, it’s incredible. Look at what’s going on with exchange rates. Who would have believed the US dollar, the Japanese yen, the Australian dollar would have devalued 20 or 30% in the space of a few months. Not many people… That creates huge changes to international trade… These sorts of things can blow up and have a lot of unintended consequences…
“The disruption that’s going on in alternative energy today is profound. Solar prices are falling off a cliff. In five years, I don’t know what’s going to happen to big utilities… It’s so disruptive. Energy generation, energy transmission, and energy use. There are amazing new technologies to make us stretch our electricity a lot further…
“There’s so many things going on… There’s ecological issues. There’s the climate problems. All of these are disruptive. Quite frankly, I’m not smart enough to know how it’s going to end up, but there’s going to be winners and there’s going to be losers, and a lot of the stuff that is happening is unpredictable. That’s one of the reasons I have gold and silver as a refuge…”
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