Under The spotlight Bob Moriarty of 321Gold – Richard Mills

2025.04.08

Bob finds real value in 5 precious metal junior resource companies.

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

Bob it looks like Israel and Turkey are going to butt heads in Syria, the ceasefire in Gaza is over with the biggest Israeli push yet. The US is bombing the Houthis and Trump has also threatened to bomb Iran, Russia is playing games in Ukraine and it looks like the game is delay, delay, delay.

China is doing live-fire exercises in Taiwan’s front and backyard, NATO’s fragmented, with the US possibly pulling out, the EU is barely holding it together and they can’t seem to agree on anything and military force has been threatened to take over Greenland and Panama. The US has also threatened economic destruction of Canada to force it to become the 51^st state.

It seems like trust between friends and allies is breaking down globally. Do you think there’s an offramp here or is the chaos in the geopolitical arena just going to continue?

Bob Moriarty, Founder, 321gold.com:

I think it’s actually going to get worse. There was a top-secret memorandum released a little over a month ago billing the Israeli plans for attacking Iran. The United States has put forces on Diego Garcia that would allow them to attack Iran and Trump has threatened Iran once, totally shut down their nuclear program or face the music; they do not have a nuclear weapons program we know that and he’s demanding they not create defense weapons so I don’t see any way out short of war and literally in the next couple of weeks.

RM: That soon, war with Iran?

BM: Yes.

RM: The Middle East on fire?

BM: Well it’s been on fire since 1948.

RM: It’s been on and off the fire but always simmering on the back burner. Total war with Iran is a different story than Israel fighting it out with the Arabs, if the United States goes head-to-head with Iran everything else is going be a pale ghost in comparison is my thinking.

BM: Well the interesting thing is I think if you followed it, China’s literally laid an almost blockade of Taiwan, I think that China and Russia and Iran know there’s going be a war and they are prepared, and what easily could happen is the United States and Israel can try to attack Iran, and as soon as Iran reacted China would totally blockade Taiwan and the United States would literally have a two-front war overnight.

RM: They would blockade the South China Sea trade route, that’s like $2 trillion a year going through there. We’d lose access to the superchips, 2 nanometer and less, that aren’t built anywhere else other than in Taiwan. The foundries that make them would likely be destroyed, the loss of trade, the loss of the chips would be devastating to the global economy.

BM: Well based on what happened last Wednesday, Donald Trump just threw a hand grenade into a crowded theater and the chaos in the global bond market and stock market is scary. Now I’m listening to two classes of people; some of the smartest people that I follow are saying it’s the dumbest financial move in history. And some other financial people that I respect are saying it’s the smartest financial move. There is no consensus, personally I think it’s going to be a disaster.

RM: Well I’m leaning towards that, I don’t see an offramp. There doesn’t seem to be any backup on either side and when you start getting real stubborn and you won’t let diplomacy work then we’ve got a problem and there’s other problems out there as well.

Let’s switch over to the US debt of almost $40 trillion. There’s $28 trillion of that which needs to be rolled over in the short term. Now Trump wants lower yields on the 10-year and he wants a weaker dollar. That doesn’t really bode well for rolling over a lot of this debt. Kinda takes away some of the safe haven aspect of the US.

We’ve also got the trade war, we might as well call it what it is, the Fed’s looking at rate cuts, traders are betting on at least 4 rate cuts this year, you know the VIX, the fear gauge, has spiked, there’s recession calls ranging anywhere from 45% from Goldman Sachs just this morning to JP Morgan’s 60% chance. I just can’t see how countries that are fighting with the US over trade deficits or are going Buy European only or Buy Canadian only  and are being insulted and disrespected are going to rollover their debt.

Recently China has been offloading its US-dollar foreign reserves, I don’t see Europe stepping up. If countries chose not to roll over their debt then the US is going have to buy its own debt which is highly inflationary.

Now these countries who don’t roll over their debt, depending on what they do with that money, a lot of it could be coming home to roost in the US which is also very inflationary. So I see inflation, especially in food, getting much higher. What are your thoughts on that?

BM: Well strangely enough I’m going to disagree with you slightly. While it’s true that food has been highly inflationary these tariffs are going to skyrocket everything that we buy from China, you know go down to Walmart or Kmart and the prices are going to go up 25-50%.

Since 1944 the US having the world’s reserve currency meant that Americans could buy things cheaper than anywhere in the world and we just declared a trade war on the very people that we want to buy our bonds. I’m reading literally today that China and Japan are unloading Treasuries with both hands, so I think the tariffs are a mistake, I think negotiating with a baseball bat is a mistake, and I think that inflation skyrockets and food’s just a very small part.

RM: You’re saying it’s going be worse than even I forecast.

BM: Strangely enough Americans have gotten used to inflation. If you go back to August 15, 1971 everybody remembers that Nixon took us off the gold standard, but what everybody has forgotten is that was not what his speech was about.

His speech was about wage and price controls because inflation had gotten up to almost 3%, well it’s much higher than that now and it’s going to go a lot higher. I think we’re in a perfect storm that could bring down the world’s economy.

RM: Cast your mind back to the Arab Spring and what caused that was a price spike in food. There was civil unrest, there was a shortage of staples not only in food but right across the board and there was huge inequality.

Right now the US is probably the most unequal earnings-wise, health-wise country in the world, I mean there’s no doubt that inequality is off the charts in the US and with this inflation it’s going to destroy the farmers, the tariffs are hurting the farmers, a lot of food aid in the world was bought from US farmers, we’ve got food programs for schools kids cancelled, kids are going be going hungry.

All that food was bought local from farmers, so we have a farming crisis developing, we have a food crisis developing, we’ve got inequality in all levels of America’s social system. Do you think it’s possible we could have an American Spring in the next year or two? I mean the civil unrest is already starting against DOGE and Musk and the tariffs.

BM: I wrote a book called ‘The Art of Peace’ in 2016 and reading the last two pages of the book is quite interesting because everything that’s happening today is stuff that I forecast nine years ago.

What we’ve got is the world’s first worldwide revolution, you’ve got total chaos in Romania, you’ve got chaos in France, you’ve got chaos in the UK, you’ve got chaos in Venezuela, you’ve got chaos in Brazil, and it all goes back to not having a stable form of money and it’s something that’s been building up for many years.

And you’re correct, there’s going be a food crisis in the United States, but the really scary thing is the farmers are going be destroyed because they’re going to have too many crops that we have no market for.

RM: Well that’s becoming evident here with the tariffs against China. Brazil has a super soy crop this year and Americans their crop’s coming, they’re not going find a buyer for it because China is going be buying Brazil’s crop so they’ve lost that market. Now you’d almost think that would stop a lot of Americans from going hungry, but that’s not the way the system works at all is it?

BM: No, not at all.

RM: So when we look at this, we look at the big macro picture, you’re saying an American Spring is possible but so is a European Spring or a UK Spring?

BM: Yeah it’s worldwide and I literally blame going off the gold standard, I think that you put in so much instability, and there’s so much that has just shocked me since Donald Trump took office. I’m a cynic and I’m old and I am shocked at how corrupt the US government has turned out to be and I was one of the most cynical people, so there’s going to be a worldwide spring of sorts and Ukraine could ignite it, Iran could ignite it, China could ignite it, and of course I’ve see all of these bad things.

I was in the marine corps for six years, spent almost two years in Vietnam and I hate war more than anybody you’re ever going to meet because I’ve seen what it does to people.

Strangely enough the highest tariffs that Donald Trump has put on any country was on Vietnam at 47% and that’s just staggering to me. Do you understand how he calculated the tariffs is so wrong mathematically?

RM: You’re going to tariff the crap out of Vietnam but you don’t have a textile industry in the US, so where are you going to get your textiles from? They were saying yesterday that if they don’t make a deal with Vietnam the cost of textiles in the United States is going up 17%.

BM: Here’s what happened. The Treasury Department actually came up with a list of retaliatory tariffs. If Germany charges a 10% tariff on automobiles imported into Germany from the United States then the United States should charge 10%.

But what Trump’s team did is they calculated the difference between the balance of payments that we took in and the balance of sales that we made but it was only on goods, it was not on services, and when you ignore services you’re only looking at half of that and a place like Vietnam, Vietnam’s a poor country they’re not going to sell Corvettes from the United States in Vietnam, no matter what the tariff is, it’s a poor country, I think the average wage is like $15.00 a month okay, so to put up a 47% tariff on them is simply absurd.

And here’s what happened. Vietnam came back and said okay, we’re going to totally eliminate tariffs on the United States and [Peter] Navarro said yeah but you’ve got non-tariff barriers so you’ve got to take those into account too and that’s absolute rubbish. Vietnam is not a threat to the United States in any way, shape or form and we could destroy their economy and if we destroy their economy and China’s economy and Pakistan’s economy we’re going to end up destroying our own economy, which is beyond stupid.

RM; Well that’s the whole thing, they’ve built a circular firing squad.

BM: Yes.

RM: Taking a step back here you mentioned gold, and maybe having a real currency. Most people don’t understand what happened in 1913 when the bankers’ emissaries, the bankers would be JPMorgan and Rothschild for example, they sent their emissaries to Jekyll Island and they came back with the Aldridge Plan which was sneaked through Congress late at night and passed.

People do not realize that true power doesn’t operate in the sunlight, it doesn’t lead from the front. The real power in this world leads from the shadows from where they pull the strings. Real power isn’t concentrated in politicians, it isn’t the CEOs of big-business multinationals, it isn’t the billionaires, it’s the bankers who control the money and the flow of news, that’s who runs our world and they do not like gold because they’re financially constrained.

I like the gold standard and I think we should have an international currency backed by gold at a 40% rate or something but I just don’t see how we’re going to pull the bankers from the shadows and manage to kill their power.

BM: Well Trump has a plan to monetize the gold, and I have seen some fairly credible, not totally credible but fairly credible numbers of like $40,000 gold. The $37 trillion that the United States owes will never get paid back, okay it is this simple. Elon Musk came out two weeks ago, said Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. We know how every Ponzi scheme ends. It’s not like some succeed, some don’t, they all failed and they failed the same way.

The banking system has been co-opted, you’re absolutely correct, the banking system is the problem. But what’s happened is we now have this incredible dichotomy between oligarchs who really run Washington and the workers, and some things like middle America okay the farming community of the United States, the tariffs will bankrupt the entire farming community I think and that’s serious okay?

What you have, when the dichotomy between the rich and the poor gets to be too large and people can no longer afford food, and we’re close to there now, that’s when you have a revolution so the bankers believe they have all this power, but I was in combat, I know there are limits to power, okay we had 550,000 troops in Vietnam and we lost the war. We spent $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan and we lost the war to a bunch of guys wearing rags on their heads and sandals with light arms.

So the bankers believe they’re winning but in fact the opposite is true. There is a war going on between the debt-based system of the West and the resource-based system of the BRICS and the BRICS are gonna win.

RM: What do you think about the rumors that the reason they’re auditing the gold at Fort Knox is so they can sell it and start a reserve of cryptocurrency?

BM: When Donald Trump came out with a meme coin cryptocurrency the day before he was sworn in as president United States, I believe we saw a top in the cryptocurrencies. Now I don’t believe cryptocurrencies have any value, there are 15,000 Beanie Babies out there.

I have forecast for the last three months that the cryptocurrencies and the stock markets were topping and they were going to crash and they have done exactly that. Cryptocurrencies are frauds, there’s nothing there and people will sit there and tell you oh yeah but so and so made so much money.

We’re going be posting a piece in the next day or two and it’s a very credible piece talking about there’s actually 500 people who operate behind the scenes and totally manipulate bitcoin. Now you have heard stories about how gold is manipulated, and you have heard stories about how silver is manipulated, I don’t believe either one of those, but I guarantee the cryptocurrencies are manipulated, and when Donald Trump came out with the meme coin and the New York Times did a story and said 86% of the people who invested in the Donald Trump meme coin lost money, I think crypto is gonna go the way of the electronic Beanie Baby.

RM: I thought the same people who absolutely trash fiat currency seem to just want replace it with crypto and I’d just to love to go unplug their computer and see where they are with all of that.

We’ve talked about a lot of problems and I think we agree on a lot of it and what we also agree on is that we’ve been through this before, we saw it in ‘07-08, most recently we saw it in 2020, we don’t see a lot of these severe market crashes thank God but we do have some recent experience to draw upon.

What happens when the market crashes is basically the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, meaning precious metal stocks, gold and silver, get thrown out as well. but it seems like within a week, within days if you look at the charts you see the crash, and silver and gold goes with it and then you see the rebound happening very quickly and the crash is a buying opportunity in a lot of stocks. This morning we’ve got five to talk about.

We’re going to start in alphabetical order and the first one would be Banyan Gold (TSXV:BYN).

In 2020 you said Banyan was the most interesting gold company in the world. I know they’re up in the Tombstone Gold Belt, why don’t you tell us about Banyan.

BM: OK well Banyan is actually run by a very close friend of mine named Tara Christie and I just love Tara Christie. I think Tara Christie is wonderful, an absolute leader in the mining industry, she is a tribute to being a woman and to be a miner, unfortunately she was married to the guy that was running Victoria Gold and Victoria Gold had a technical failure, the TSX forced them into bankruptcy even though they’ve got quite a viable project, but you can buy gold from Banyan at 11 bucks an ounce and it will go into production at $3,000 gold, it’s a license to steal. I’ve got so much respect for Tara and literally it was the story of the baby got thrown out with the bathwater, but it creates opportunity and the opportunity is there for anybody who wants to take it.

RM: Yeah it’s trading at $0.20, it has a fully funded 30,000-meter drill program ongoing right now, so I mean that’s a lot of news coming and there’s going to be some hits in there, there’s no doubt about that.

Now our second stock is Harvest Gold (TSXV:HVG). Quinton Hennigh of Crescat Capital said they were very happy that Harvest had acquired a district-scale land package in the Urban Barry greenstone belt, Quinton called it “an underexplored green belt, with one of the most notable new gold camps in Quebec.” Pretty strong words.

BM: Yeah but Quinton’s got it totally confused.

RM: Do tell.

BM: He was talking about all the tactical aspects of a company having three major projects in the Abitibi gold belt of this totally under-explored area, and what he didn’t say was the most important thing. At three cents a share you can buy the entire company for under $2,000,000, now I’ve written a couple of financial books and I talk about if you want to make money in resources you want to buy when things are cheap and sell when they’re expensive. If you start a company in Vancouver or Toronto and you’ve got a three-line phone and a secretary your company should be worth 3 or $4 million so for Harvest Gold to be selling under $2,000,000 Canadian that’s simply absurd.

RM: It’s not even valued properly as a shell.

BM: Yeah exactly.

RM: The next one is Sitka Gold (TSXV:SIG). You’ve called Sitka another Snowline Gold.

BM: Nah it’s not.

RM: Pardon me?

BM: It’s not a Snowline. It’s a lot better than Snowline.

RM: Snowline’s pretty good.

BM: I hear what it’s worth is crazy and you know in all good faith Quinton Hennigh happens to be my best friend, okay and he and I talk on a regular basis and I participate in most of the deals that Crescat gets.

Quinton Hennigh was talking to me about Sitka when Sitka was, 7, 8, 9 cents a share. I loaded up with both hands, here’s the good news and it’s my opinion okay that’s not based on any numbers because Snowline has a great resource right now, Sitka is drilling deep, they’re going to be releasing a hole probably in the next two weeks that I think showed 150 examples of VG (visible gold) in the core.

While Sitka has in fact shot up from where I was buying and still got a $180 million market cap and Snowline’s got a $1.1 billion market cap, so Sitka is more accessible, they’re fully funded for a 30,000-meter drill program, they already have one hole that’s going to come out shortly that could double the price of the shares overnight.

RM: Well they’ve got a base, they’ve got 1.3 million oz indicated and 1.5 million oz inferred. Investors, there’s guys on the chat boards said it’s too deep but they obviously don’t know anything about mining, if they did they’d know that block caving is the perfect method to mine that.

So let’s move onto another one that I like and that’s Silver47 (TSXV:AGA). Silver47’s got a 60-kilometer trend of VMS/SEDEX, pretty much got the district all claimed up. The thing that I love about this property is that it has got so much exploration potential I mean I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much VMS indications right on surface and it’s literally everywhere. I love Silver47’s chances to grow their 168,000,000 ounces of silver-equivalent in an inferred underground [resource].

BM: Well you just raised another issue and strangely enough that’s another project that Quinton Hennigh and I were involved in and it was owned by an Australian company, and the guy that was running the company didn’t like to listen to advice.

When covid hit, he didn’t do anything about lining up the drill crew so in 2020 they did nothing in Alaska. I think it’s like 100 kilometers south of Fairbanks I mean it’s certainly accessible.

They spent all their money in Australia and then the Australian government came out and changed the requirements for putting up reclamation deposits on projects. It literally put the Australian company out of business, so Quinton and I went to the current management of Silver47. Silver47 had a big silver project in Canada but the government changed the rules there because evidently the locals wanted to take control of the project so Silver47’s fabulous silver project that the government was sitting on and wouldn’t let them do anything pretty much died.

So Silver47 realized they needed something. Now I was writing about the deposit in Alaska five or six or seven years ago, there is a resource it’s about a $5 billion resource of metal in the ground and Silver47 is cashed up, they just finished a private placement and they’re absurdly cheap. When people realize how good Silver47 is, it’s going to be one of the top silver stocks in the United States.

RM: I agree 100%, I interviewed Gary Thompson the CEO two weeks ago and the interview’s posted on my site. I think it’s one of the nicest silver plays I’ve seen in a very long time. 

Now let’s get back to the Tombstone Gold Belt, one of the first up there to make it big was Victoria Gold and then we talked a bit about the next one with Snowline and then Banyan and Sitka, but there’s a new kid on the block called Trifecta Gold (TSXV:TG). Tell us about that one.

BM: Well interestingly enough here are the biggest of the junior companies up there: it’s Rackla [Metals], it’s Snowline, it’s Sitka, it’s Banyan, it’s Trifecta, it’s the Eagle deposit and again going back to what I recommend to people is you buy stocks when they’re cheap, you sell them when they’re expensive. Rackla with no resource has a $20 million market cap and Trifecta with no resource has a $6.5 million market cap, so I mean if Trifecta didn’t do anything and the price of gold didn’t change and Trump didn’t blow up the world’s economy Trifecta could still triple.

RM: You gotta buy ‘em when they’re cheap even when there’s blood in the streets and hold on and show a little patience and let the company go to work and make your money, I mean sometimes it is that simple isn’t it?

BM: No, it’s always that simple.  

RM: We have do this more often Bob, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you today and I’m glad we did this.

BM: Me too because I’ve posted your work for years and we’ve never chatted but there are some really interesting but scary things happening right now and the one thing we know is the mainstream media lies about everything, so it’s incumbent on any serious citizen or any serious investor to pay attention to the alternative media, because the alternative media only lies half the time and the mainstream media lies all the time.

RM: I agree, we’re going to talk again real soon Bob, thank you.

BM: Good, thank you.

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com

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Richard owns shares of Harvest Gold. Harvest Gold and Silver47 are paid advertisers on his site aheadoftheherd.com This article is issued on behalf of HVG, TG, SIG, BYN & AGA.

Bob Moriarty owns shares of Sitka, Trifecta, Harvest and Silver47.