 Jim, I want to get your thoughts on Germany repatriating its gold. The news came out that, you know, it got its gold back from Paris, from New York. Now, mainstream media was quick to point out, hey, this happened three years ahead of schedule. So while some applauded it, it raised some red flags for you. Why? Well, this is a very complicated story. But as you know, in 2013, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Central Bank of Germany notified the Federal Reserve, also the Bank of England and the Bank of France, that they wanted their gold back. Not all of the gold. Germany still has gold in New York, and they still have some gold in London. A little over a thousand times. Right. They did get all the gold back from Paris. So they left some of the gold, but they wanted it back. And the Fed said, well, it's going to take, you know, seven years to get you all the gold back. And everyone said, well, uh-huh, this proves the Fed doesn't have gold. Which is nonsense. They do have the gold. It could be leased. The physical gold is there. It could be leased out. And you might have had to wait until the leases run off before you could ship it back. That's a separate issue. But here's the point. Germany doesn't want all the gold back. They did this for political reasons. And this is why it was done, finished early. 2013 was an election year for Merkel. 2017 is an election year for Merkel. There's a very small, they have a parliamentary system. There's a very small minority party. It's kind of a nationalist Trump-style party. And they're banging the drum about getting the gold back. So they put in the original notice to appease that party. Merkel wins the 2013 election. They finished the deliveries in 2017. You know, the election is September 24. It sounded coincidence that they finished the delivery one month ahead of the election because this boosts her standing with this little party. So there's a political motivation behind that. So A, and the other reason they don't want all the gold is because there's no gold leasing market in Frankfurt. Nobody wants to do deals under German law. There's no well-developed leasing market in Frankfurt. So they didn't want all the gold in the first place because they wanted some floating supply in New York and London to run leasing operations, to run the gold manipulation. Number one. Number two, the timing is explained by the political dynamics inside Germany. So there's a lot of backstories here. So if Frankfurt cannot lease the gold out, if it's just sitting in the vault, isn't this price positive for gold? Absolutely. Because to run the manipulation scheme, it's sort of a hundred to one paper to physical, but you need some physical. Think of it as an inverted pyramid. You've got all this paper gold, Comex Futures, and unallocated, you know, London Bullion Market Association, Forward Contracts, and ETFs and all this paper gold on a little bit of physical, but you do need some physical. When you take, that's the floating supply. When you take a little bit of that physical out and take it out of the floating supply where it's not available to support financial transactions, the pyramid gets more unstable and the likelihood of a price spike goes up. We're also seeing this, this was in Switzerland recently, and I met with some of the private vaults and they said gold is moving from the banks, or UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and others, to private vaults like Loomis and Brinks and others. But the difference there, people say, well, what's the big deal? You take, you know, a bar of gold, you move it from this vault to this vault, what's the difference? The answer is this, when you take it out, this reduces the floating supply. And when it goes into Brinks, it's not available for leases. So this is why they dragged it out over the course of these years? Because many people said, you know, it's not, it wasn't that much gold. Why couldn't it be moved faster? Well, physically, it could have been moved in a matter of days. Logistically, there was no impediment to that, but legally, and this is really the issue, as I said, they didn't want to disrupt the gold leasing market. If the New York gold is leased out, you've got to wait until the leases run out before you can ship it. OK, so while all this is happening and this news is breaking, Steve Mnuchin pays a visit to Fort Knox saying, look, all the gold is there, $200 billion worth of it. Was it business as usual? Now, this is only the third time in history that Treasury Secretary visits Fort Knox. Was it standard for you or weird? When I saw this, this was totally weird. I was shocked. I was shocked for a number of reasons, Dana. Number one, first of all, it is rare. Only the third time that Treasury Secretary has ever visited Fort Knox since 1937. So that's been a long time. Secondly, he took Senator McConnell with him and some aid, so it was kind of an official visit. And there hasn't been an official visit to Fort Knox since 1973. Now, obviously, there's army troops and others guarding it. There are people there all the time. But for an official Washington visit, it's been since 1973. It was at 44 years or whatever. So this is extremely rare, number one. The other thing that's unusual about it, what I call the monetary leads, so Treasury Secretaries, Finance Ministers, Central Bankers, they don't want to pay any attention to gold. Remember when, a few years ago, when Bernanke did a lecture at Georgetown, maybe George Washington University, and one of the students said, Mr. Chairman, what about gold? He goes, oh, it's just a tradition. He got away from that question as fast as he could. The reason is, the minute you pay attention to gold as a monetary asset, you're enhancing the value of gold as a monetary asset. You're putting a floor under the price. They don't want people to think about gold. They don't want to pay any attention to it. So that was unusual. Then the question is, why did he do it? And he tweeted it out, put a photo with the gold bar. I mean, I've been involved. I'm a serious investor and analyst of gold, but it's kind of fun to hold those bars. So what do you think is behind it then? Well, one of the things, look, one version was he wanted to see the eclipse and it was an excuse to fly the government jet to Kentucky because it was in the totality of the eclipse. But there's something else going on, which is we're coming up against a debt ceiling and a budget train wreck. The US budget ends on September 30th, but that's a Saturday this year. So really September 29th is kind of D day for the budget. The Treasury is running out of cash. You're literally running out of cash. So you've got to do two, and these are separate issues. People kind of mush them together, but they're separate. You've got to raise the debt ceiling so the Treasury can borrow more money. And you've got to approve at least a continuing resolution, or else you're going to shut down the government. Imagine if you don't do either, you shut down the government. Oh, by the way, the Treasury can't pay its bills. But the Treasury has a trick up its sleeve. It's been done before, which is the following. The gold on the books of the Treasury is officially valued at $42.22 per ounce. Everyone knows that's not the price, but that was the price back in 1973 when they first did this. You could market to market just the way a hedge fund does. So the Treasury could take the gold and say, okay, we're not going to market to $1,300 or any number you want. And that difference between $42 an ounce and $1,300 an ounce, all the Treasury has to do is send a certificate. This is under the Gold Act of 1934. All they have to do is send a certificate to the Fed, and the Fed has to give them the money in the Treasury's bank account. So the Treasury could pull $350 billion out of thin air just by remarking the gold. If that were to happen, what would that do to the price of gold? Well, at a minimum, it would say, well, wait a second, the Treasury is treating gold like money. Maybe I'd better think about what it means to be money. The minute you do that, you get to $10,000 gold because that would be what the price of gold would have to be to support the existing money supply, basically M1. 40% backing of M1 today with the amount of gold, the price would be $10,000 an ounce. It's not Mr. Gold, it's eighth grade math. But it would be paying way too much respect to gold. I'm not saying this is going to happen. I'm saying it could happen. It's one of the tricks they have up their sleeve. They could pull $350 billion out of thin air without raising the debt, without increasing the debt at all just by marking the gold to market. So maybe a minute you wanted to go and make sure the gold was there first. Gem record, so much weirdness, a little time. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.