Title:   Gold is Down Over 20% From the 2026 High. Is It Over? Rick Rule Says Most Still Don't Get This
Show:    Trading Trends (tastylive; host Ilia Spivak, head of global macro)
Guest:   Rick Rule (founder/CEO, Rule Investment Media)
Date:    2026-JUN-09
URL:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWe_CPbVkds
Length:  ~20 min
Note:    Auto-transcript, timestamps mm:ss. Saved for personal study. A gold-macro + uranium discussion. Auto-transcript
         garbles names ("SPAT/Sprat"=Sprott / SPUT, "chemico"=Cameco, "Kazatamrom"=Kazatomprom, "Vulkar"=Volcker).

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(00:00) Welcome to Trading Trends. I'm Ilia Spivak, head of global macro here at Tasty Live. Joined by who I think is perhaps only our second repeat guest here on the show. Rick Rule is once again with us. He's the founder and CEO of Rule Investment Media. Rick, welcome back. Pleasure to be back with you. Thank you.
(00:22)  Rick, I have saved all kinds of hard questions for you since our last conversation, and I wanted to go right to the dollar and gold, which we explained last time how it has been that since the beginning of this war in Iran, we've had an inflation scare and against that backdrop, interest rates have come up. And so contrary to what people might have thought episodically, the dollar is up because there's been a reach for liquidity and higher rates and gold is down because things have sold it to gain that liquidity and gain exposure
(00:55) to those rates. I want to keep that conversation going. Obviously, this inflation scare is now impacting the broad range of markets. We're seeing it in stocks. We're seeing it in all manner of asset classes and I wanted to see if in your mind this is an input into the larger gold conversation. People have looked at gold as something of a value hedge against fiat currencies being hampered by tremendous levels of debt across most large governments not just the US and not just Europe.
(01:34) And so I wonder if this kind of inflation in your mind in that it inflates the debt away to some extent if that hurts the long-term case or changes the long-term case in any way for gold and precious metals and physical value as a counter to fiat in general. I think a study of history would suggest that fear of the decline or in certain cases the decimation of purchasing power held in fiat instruments has been responsible for most gold moves over the last thousand years.
(02:20)  People attribute all kinds of attributes to gold. What one finds is that other forms of fear — war, political unrest, things like that — have a near-term impact on gold, but they seem to have a negligible long-term impact on gold except sometimes for participants like refugees, the Jewish community, the Vietnamese community, those people had a different use for gold.
(02:50)  It wasn't speculative, it wasn't investment, it was survival. But for most people in less dire circumstance the primary motivation for gold is to shield one's savings from the depreciation in the purchasing power of the currency. It's important to note as a student of fairly recent history — that is to say my lifetime — that reaction to inflation takes place over longer periods of time.
(03:18)  As a very young man I began to notice and become interested in inflation literally in high school in 1968 — I began reading what are now regarded as Austrian economics or hard money books and I would suggest to you that although inflation was a topic on people's minds that the investing public didn't really begin to react to incipient inflation till 1972.
(03:49) In other words, there was a hiatus between the point in time when academics and politicians described inflation and the time that people began to react to it. During that 5-year period, a hamburger at McDonald's went from 20 cents to a buck. By the next year with the Arab oil embargo, the price of gasoline went from 25 cents to a buck.
(04:21)  In 1968, 1969, 1970, despite the fact that we were undergoing inflation, investors' expectations of the future were set by their experience in the immediate past. And the 1950s and 1960s had been very good times. People were extremely optimistic. You're probably too young, but your older listeners will remember things like the Nifty50, high growth stocks that did extraordinarily well.
(04:49)  When your anticipation of the future is set by your experience in the past, and your experience in the past two decades is rosy, you don't react to negative stimulus as well. So, it took probably five years for the population to react to incipient inflation. And I think the same circumstance is happening today.
(05:09)  Exactly the same circumstance. We have lived through what I believe is the most benign economic climate in human history in the period 1982 to 2022. People's expectation of the future is set by their experience in the past, by the dips, believe government inflation numbers like the CPI. If you believe in the CPI and you believe that the destruction of your purchasing power is clipping along at 2 and a half or 2.6%.
(05:42) Then current interest rates seem very adequate. The 10 years yielding 4.4 — you're getting over 100 basis points in real yield if you happen to believe in the CPI. My problem is I don't. I believe that the CPI is better characterized by Mike Maloney as the CP lie.
(06:06)  I believe that the deterioration in the purchasing power of the US dollar marked by the basket of goods and services that I consume suggests that the destruction of my purchasing power is proceeding along at an eight or nine or 10% clip. That presents a very different picture. If you're making 4.4 in a currency that's losing value at say 9, you aren't making 4.4, you're losing 4.5.
(06:34) It is when that realization becomes more widespread that gold really performs. Gold is viewed by many people right now after a 50-year hiatus as an investment class or a speculative class. I would argue that a thousand years of human history teaches us that gold is a liquidity class or an insurance class and right now people don't feel the need for insurance.
(07:03) My suspicion is unfortunately that that feeling will change. Well, I think you make a very clear distinction there and it echoes what we talked about last time as well that when we say that the dollar is set to underperform, we're not talking about underperforming against other fiat currencies.
(07:25)  We're talking about underperformance against hard assets and fiat currencies as a grouping underperforming against hard assets. And typically that conversation is presented as oh well governments will try to inflate away this debt but we don't need them to try. We have the inflation here. And so I think the next natural question is well gold is having a bit of a hangover here after an incredible rally last year.
(07:59)  One thing you've talked about recently that hasn't been caught up in this macro narrative is uranium as another vehicle for sort of expressing a view on physical assets and the kind of value storage that that is. Break that down. What's the conversation with uranium? Well, I need to start by saying in most commodities, the easy money has been made.
(08:32)  The easy money occurs when a commodity goes from being hated — it doesn't need to go to being loved. It just needs to go to being unhated. When uranium was at $20 a pound, although it took the industry $40 a pound to make it, so the price had to go up, it was a hated commodity. The move from $20 a pound to $85 a pound means that the easy money in uranium has been made.
(08:56)  It also means however I think looking forward that the sure money is in front of us. Why do I say that? The most obvious reason is that the world needs more power of all kinds. Global power demands, global energy demands are set to double by 2050. And we don't have the capacity to produce that much energy.
(09:23)  Energy will be rationed by price. Nuclear power is extraordinarily reliable base load power. And importantly in today's political discussion, it's base load power that doesn't generate carbon. It isn't the same as burning coal and burning oil. Uranium has in five short years gone from being a pariah to being a politically correct commodity which amuses me greatly frankly.
(09:53)  The thing that's really changed with uranium though Ilia was and is the conflict in the Gulf. It has been 50 years since the world cared about energy security. If you dial all the way back to 1973 and the Arab oil embargo, that form of energy insecurity stimulated the French to build what is now the fourth largest nuclear fleet in the world.
(10:22)  It stimulated the Japanese to build the third largest nuclear fleet in the world. The impetus for that was energy security. Energy security ceased to be a concern for 50 years, but is suddenly a very relevant concern. Uranium is the only fuel on earth that has enough energy density that the Japanese could, if they had sufficient reactor capacity, store enough uranium to power the entire country for 5 years in one uranium storage facility.
(10:57)  You can't store that much oil or that much coal or that much natural gas. You can't build that big a battery. The only material that can give energy-short nations — Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore — energy security is nuclear, the only one. And the big thinkers of the world are beginning to come to understand that.
(11:26)  And I think ordinary citizens are beginning to understand it too. That's very important. We are right now producing less uranium than we consume. And two things are impacting demand. One is that the Japanese are now speeding up in earnest the restart of the plants that were closed as a consequence of Fukushima.
(11:51)  This isn't demand that's going to occur 10 years from now. This is demand that's going to occur 10 months from now. A very different circumstance with regards to pricing. It also is part of a broader trend to nuclear plant construction. Even nations that forswore nuclear — in particular Germany and the United States — are learning that if they are to fund their existing economies never mind data centers that they need reliable inexpensive base load power and their voters would prefer that power to be non-carbon generating. I would
(12:38) suggest that the biggest unsung beneficiary if there are ever beneficiaries of a war would be uranium with regards to the Gulf conflict. People think of oil, they think of gas, they think of nitrogen, nitrogenous fertilizer, sulfur, helium — all things that move through the Straits of Hormuz.
(12:59)  They don't think about the geopolitical attractiveness of a form of energy that gives a country energy security. And there is no other form of energy that gives a country energy security. Well, I think that's a really important insight here. It's sort of the next step in the conversation where you say, okay, well, today it's a story about a bottleneck.
(13:27)  But a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, there will be some kind of resolution of this bottleneck this way or that. But countries will have learned that they live in a different world. Now I think you made the point last time we spoke that the 40 years that were there through the Volcker disinflation almost right up to COVID is a very different period than what we're entering now and certainly de-globalization and inflation and thinking about the dissolution of US-enforced norms would suggest that
(14:05) countries need to start thinking about things like energy security in these kinds of terms. In expressing a view on uranium — because with gold it's easy, there's any number of ways you can gain exposure from physical to ETFs to futures, same thing for silver — what's the vehicle for exposure to uranium in your mind? There are several. I think for most people the lowest risk exposure to uranium is to buy something called the SPUT physical uranium trust.
(14:41)  Note here conflicts of interest. I'm the larger shareholder of the manager. I'm not an officer. I'm not a director. I'm not an employee. I'm just a beneficiary. The Sprott physical uranium trust is a deposit receipt representing physical ownership of uranium at four facilities worldwide. Uranium is one of those commodities that one is well advised not to try to buy and store at home for fairly obvious reasons.
(15:12)  So the best form of physical ownership is in fact certificated ownership and by far the most liquid of those vehicles is the SPUT physical trust. If someone wants to take a bit of operational risk, I would suggest that the highest quality uranium producer in the world is the Canadian-domiciled Cameco, the symbol CCJ on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange for your Canadian listeners.
(15:42) Highly liquid — really a full cycle uranium shop all the way from producing uranium to enriching uranium to by now in its engineering group building uranium mines and processing facilities for others and generating power. The third that people might want to look at is Kazatomprom which is the largest uranium producer in the world, formerly a large position of mine.
(16:08)  I've sold my stock because of middle management defections. Middle management defections that I didn't understand and I have a hard and fast rule. If there's a risk I don't understand, I sell the stock. There are also a range of uranium speculations, but I'd prefer not to talk to your viewers about those.
(16:31)  They require a lot of work to be a responsible holder. And I found with 50 years of experience that many audiences love the name but aren't prepared to do the work to prepare themselves to own the name. So we're going to leave the speculative ones aside. And that is perfect. How do you feel about an ETF like URA and ETF-type exposure? For a lot of people it's probably appropriate. I'm old school.
(16:58)  The idea that somebody including my former employer Sprott constructs an index that has probably 50% of the stocks in it being stocks I wouldn't otherwise own. The idea that I have to pay somebody a fee to construct a portfolio that I normally wouldn't own for free is problematic to me.
(17:19)  I realize that most of your listeners have lives. They have kids or grandkids. They like to garden. They like to read. They like to do things with their life other than study uranium juniors. And for them, the ETF is probably appropriate if inelegant. And there we have it, folks. Rick, I have, of course, a thousand more questions for you, but we're just going to have to have you back to get to those.
(17:43)  Tell the good folks where they can get more from you. I'll give them incentive. Anybody who cares what I have to say about natural resources and wants to personalize it, including Uranium Juniors, can go to my website, ruleinvestmentmedia.com. There, if you list the natural resource stocks that you own, I will personally review that portfolio and rank it 1 to 10, one being best, 10 being worst, and I'll comment on individual issues if I think my comments have any value.
(18:10) Please, as a sidebar, I know yours is a trading community, no crypto, no tech stocks, natural resource stocks only. The other thing I would suggest to your audience is if you care about natural resources, a conference which I personally believe is the finest natural resource conference on the planet takes place July 6 through 10.
(18:32)  Not surprisingly, it's called the Rule Natural Resources Investment Symposium. If you go to rulesymposium.com, you can learn more. The physical conference is sold out, but you can, if you wish, attend the conference from the comfort and convenience of your own home via livestream.
(19:01) By the way, ours is the only conference I know of, live or otherwise, that has an unconditional money back guarantee. If you attend the conference and think for any reason whatsoever, you being the sole judge that we didn't deliver full value for your money, email me. I'll give you your money back.
(19:26)  We've done it for 30 years now. I'm delighted to say we've had to refund about one-tenth of 1% of the tuitions that we've charged over 30 years. But that guarantee is your guarantee that we're confident our content can make you money. And there you have it. Thank you, Rick. Always a pleasure, Ilia. Thank you.