Welcome to Palisades Gold Radio. I'm your host Tom Bodrovics. Joining me today is Chris Irons, host of the Quoth

the Raven Podcast and author of QTR's Fringe Finance Substack. Welcome back, Chris, how are you?

Tom, I am so happy to be back. I am thrilled, actually. I'm doing great. How are you? I'm excellent. It's we're kind of chatting a little bit before we started here both ringing the new year fresh fresh slate, you know, hopefully, hopefully you don't necessarily need to change a whole bunch in your life to be able to look forward to the new year. But yeah, it's always great to have you back and to chat because you know you look at a lot of stuff outside, let's say necessarily the particular gold space.

You know, you've looked at China quite a bit,

you have quite a bit of experience

that I don't necessarily get to be exposed to on a daily basis.

So it's good to be able to have a chat with you and also read your blog from time to time because it really helps bring some new ideas, other, let's say risk areas into into my thinking for sure.

So, you know, maybe we can kind of start there.

Why do you think that 2022 was maybe a prelude

for volatility in the markets?

Well, I don't look what I think is that 22 we saw a lot of volatility but not as much as we're going to see in 2023 and by volatility I don't necessarily mean that the market is going to crash all year long

But what I do mean is that I think in 2023 we're going to see the we're going to see

capitulation we're going to see fear and panic in the markets at some point.

I think it's a mathematical certainty just based on the fact that interest rates are now at 4%.

Neil Cashkari said this morning that, you know, he thinks rates should go to 5.4% before the year is over, which is hilarious because just last year he was predicting 1% rates for this year. So he is gone, okay? He's on Jupiter, he's on Mars, but regardless, the point is like some of these other Fed governors, he's talking about a finding the neutral rate at, you know, 5.5%.

And as everybody knows, the economy and the market respond to higher interest rates with a lag.

And so we raised rates as aggressively and quickly over 2022 almost as we ever have at any

point in recent history. Certainly leading up to 2018 when the market crashed during the holidays in 2018, you know, we had been moving in 25 basis point increments for I think two or three years at that point.

What we did in 2022 is we went from zero to 400 basis points, you know, in 12 months.

And all that means is we're going to get probably an even more pronounced response from the markets but because all of that happened in such a shorter period of time,

it's going to take, you know, we're still kind of waiting for the market to respond.

It hasn't had two years.

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