February 28, 2025 – Gold’s up 12% and silver’s climbed 9.4% in 2025, outpacing faltering stocks for the second year straight. Jim Puplava welcomes Keith Barron, a 42-year mining veteran and CEO of Aurania Resources, to Financial Sense Newshour to decode this rally. With gold nearing $3,000—defying high interest rates and a strong dollar—Barron’s seasoned perspective, forged through decades with top miners and his own exploration successes, shines a light on the forces at play. From central bank hoarding to silver’s untapped potential and the mining industry’s hurdles—including the staggering 28 years it takes to open a mine in the U.S. from discovery to production—listen in to hear what Keith has to say in this fascinating discussion.
Personal blog: Straight Talk On Mining – Insights on mining from economic geologist Dr. Keith Barron.
Company website: Home - Aurania Resources
Key points discussed in today's show:
Precious Metals Performance in 2025: Gold is up 12% and silver 9.4% year-to-date, outperforming struggling stocks for the second consecutive year, despite high interest rates and a strong dollar.
Drivers of Gold Prices: Barron attributes gold’s rise to global inflation fears and central bank accumulation, particularly by BRICS nations, with gold hitting over $4,000 CAD and nearing $3,000 USD.
Central Bank Gold Buying: BRICS countries (e.g., China, Brazil) are stockpiling gold as an alternative to U.S. Treasuries, reflecting doubts about U.S. debt and the dollar’s reserve status.
Trump Administration’s Potential Impact: Barron speculates Treasury Secretary Bessett might revalue U.S. gold reserves (currently at $42/ounce) to $4,000-$5,000, leveraging $775 billion to $1.3 trillion to tackle debt.
Mining Industry Challenges: Political risks (e.g., contract renegotiations in Burkina Faso, Panama), geological risks (“drill it and kill it”), and a 28-year U.S. mine timeline hinder production, alongside physical dangers like venomous snakes.
Miners’ Reserve Struggles: Majors like Newmont and Barrick depleted high-grade ores during a decade-long bear market, now relying on acquisitions (e.g., Equinox-Calibre’s $7.7B merger) rather than organic exploration.
Silver’s Explosive Potential: At a 90:1 gold-silver ratio, Barron predicts silver could surge past $50—potentially $130 at 30:1 if gold hits $4,000—driven by industrial demand, deficits, and middle-class buying (e.g., India, Costco).
Global Gold Movements: Gold and silver are shifting from London to New York, then off Comex, possibly due to tariff fears and BRICS diversification, signaling a West-to-East wealth transfer amid U.S. credit concerns.
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Transcript
Jim Puplava:
Well, we're just at the beginning of the year, but one of the surprising best-performing assets, making it two years in a row, are precious metals. Gold prices are up 12% since the beginning of the year, and silver's up about 9.4%, compared to stocks, which are struggling. Joining me on the program is Keith Barron. He's chairman and CEO of Aurania Resources. Keith, I want to begin by talking about the gold market. We've seen the price of gold go up over the last couple of years despite a major increase in interest rates, like in '22, and a strong dollar. Despite those, gold has been powering ahead over the last couple of years. Typically, you don't see that. What do you think is driving the price right now?
Keith Barron:
Well, typically we haven't seen that in the last couple of decades. But I'm old enough to remember when inflation showed its ugly head, and people ran to gold for security against inflation. I think really that's what's happening now—maybe not in the sense of Americans buying gold, but everybody else doing it. And of course, as you're very much aware, gold is at an all-time high, or very close to an all-time high, in American currency, but in other currencies, it's just absolutely exploded. It's way over 4,000 per ounce in Canadian dollars. It's really quite something that I didn't think I'd see in my lifetime.
Jim Puplava:
So when we look at this, I want to talk about some other macro factors. One of the biggest drivers of gold prices, of course, has been the accumulation by central banks, especially in the BRIC countries. Just for our listeners, to explain things, the advantage of being the world's reserve currency, like the U.S. dollar, is we have the largest and most liquid financial market in the world. So if somebody like China or Brazil is trading with the U.S. and they have excess dollars because we're buying more goods from them, they recycle those dollars—the other side of the balance sheet—into the U.S. financial markets. The Chinese are big owners of tech stocks; they're big owners of securities; they're big owners of Treasuries. China does not have that as they're trading with other countries. They don't want other countries investing in their financial markets. And if you take some of those BRIC countries like Brazil, they just don't have the depth. So they have been accumulating gold. Let's talk about that because gold, once again, is being used as money in terms of settlement.
Keith Barron:
Well, gold is the ultimate currency and has been for thousands of years. The Chinese have been dumping Treasuries and buying gold—at least that's what we think is happening. The Chinese are buying gold, and a number of other countries have been certainly accumulating gold, not just in the last 12 months, but over the last two, three years. This is really something that's propelled the price. America is a very, very indebted country, and we're hearing this almost on a daily basis from Mr. Trump and the people in his cabinet looking for ways to knock down this deficit. They've been talking about tariffs, they're talking about DOGE and saving money, and all the rest of it. But, you know, if it gets to a situation where America can't sell its Treasuries anymore, then essentially it's game over—you can't borrow any more money. So I think what's going on now, they're trying to be creative and figure out some things that are kind of out-of-the-box thinking, certainly never contemplated by the Biden administration, to potentially knock down this deficit or, in some way, be able to create more leverage for themselves.
Jim Puplava:
So you've been involved in mining, Keith—what, for a little over three decades? You've worked for the world's largest mining companies in addition to establishing a very successful exploration company. I wonder if you would address: mining can be a very dangerous business politically. I want to go there first, where you have, as the price of gold has gone up and precious metals have gone up, some countries renegotiating their contracts with miners to get more royalties from them or, in some cases, just absolutely confiscating. So you have political risk, not to mention in some areas of the world—you know, you've told me some of your snake stories from Australia with what I'm trying to think is the taipan that you were in a trench with; it's probably one of the most deadly snakes in the world. You get bit, you're gone in five minutes—or even some of the snakes that you find in the jungles of South America. So it can be risky from a political standpoint, and not only that, but even the risk of creatures.
Keith Barron:
Yeah, yeah, it's always risky on a number of different fronts. So there's always political risk, which is a very big one. What we've seen over the last year, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Gabon have all reneged on mining contracts and thrown—either throwing the miners out and just confiscated the assets, or they've said, you know, they're basically putting a gun to the mining company's head and saying you’ve got to renegotiate the deal on taxes and the amount that the state gets. In the case of Panama, First Quantum lost its copper mine. You know, this is something that just happens. There were a bunch of people there who whipped up the local community to come out against the mining company and said that they were polluting the area and all the rest of it—none of it; it was all pretty groundless and baseless. But the end result was that the politicians cratered. They are, I believe, in the business now of renegotiating a new contract—I don’t know if that’s true. So there's political risk; there's always geological risk that you start out in a great way and then you drill the thing. You know, there’s a saying in the business: “drill it and kill it,” because most of the time, when you take the diamond drill to your gold deposit or copper deposit, it just simply, through the odds, does not come up to expectations, and you move on to another target. So there's geological risk, and of course, there is a lot of risk from NIMBYs, especially in America right now. It looks like maybe the Trump administration is going to allow some of the projects, like Resolute in Arizona and the Pebble Deposit in Alaska, to let them finally go ahead after essentially decades of opposition from communities, from the Democrats—you name it. It goes on and on and on and on. So, yeah, you know, you’ve got to—there’s lots of sharks in the water, and you have to be able to negotiate this stuff. I think I’ve—well, I’ve actually got more than three decades now in the business; it’s 42 years. And I’ve learned a few things over that time.
Jim Puplava:
You know, it’s interesting too, and speaking of political, it’s not just the fact that maybe governments want to renegotiate the royalties, but also, as you mentioned, NIMBYism. You’ve got the NGOs and you’ve got the banana greens. So let’s say you do get a deposit—you’re drilling, you’re finding gold, silver, or whatever it is—copper, whatever you’re mining for. Then all of a sudden, you get ready where you want to take it into production, and all of a sudden the NGOs and the banana greens show up and put a stop to it, just like they did in the mine in Panama.
Keith Barron:
Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. So typically in America right now—and as I said, it looks like things may change very rapidly—it’s 28 years to get a mine in operation from the time it’s discovered. How many years? 28 years. And you know, the chances that the finders are still going to be in business is virtually nil. You’re going to get whipsawed by the market; you’re going to have many changes in governments; and, you know, it just really can’t happen. In fact, you don’t even know if you’re going to be still alive to see the fruits of your labor. So, you know, my strategy in my business has always been to find the deposit and then punch it out and use the proceeds from the transaction to move on to the next thing.
Jim Puplava:
So let’s talk about the miners themselves in geology. One of the things in the last decade, gold actually went nowhere. It was in a kind of bear market, went nowhere for almost a decade. So a lot of these mining companies—whether it’s Newmont, Barrick, or some of the larger ones—they high-graded their ore. So they took their richest deposits and mined them because it was more economical with a lower price. Fast forward to where we are today, and a lot of that high grade is gone, and they’re not replacing their reserves. Let’s talk about that. What position does that leave the miners in? It reminds me, Keith, of what’s going on in the oil industry, where you have an Exxon or a Chevron that aren’t replacing their reserves the way they’re replacing their reserves—they’re drilling on Wall Street; they’re buying other companies. Could you see the same thing happening in the mining industry?
Keith Barron:
Well, we actually see exactly that happen. It’s difficult to grow reserves organically. You know, going right back to the 1980s, a lot of the major companies decided to get rid of their geologists, and they basically go to consulting companies if they need somebody. So they offloaded the cost of doing the exploration. The way that they grow is by gobbling up and picking off the junior companies in the industry—smaller companies. So it’s through M&A, through acquisitions mainly, and they use their shares as currency. That’s certainly what happened to my old company, Aurelian Resources—it was taken over by one of the larger gold mining companies. Just this last week, we’ve seen Ross Beaty, who’s a very big name in the mining industry internationally—he runs Equinox Gold—take over Calibre Mining for a transaction of $7.7 billion Canadian. Now that’s going to make them the fourth largest mining company in the world after Newmont, Barrick, and Agnico Eagle. It’s something that the industry didn’t expect, but, you know, this is what they’re doing. They’re going to be a real powerhouse and a force to be reckoned with. But, you know, this doesn’t add to the total sum of ounces out there, right? So there were two companies; they’re combining their reserves and their resources into one company, but they’re not adding to it as if they would if they were out there exploring. Agnico Eagle is one company that’s been very successful in replacing their reserves, and Barrick and Newmont less so. So their profiles have been dropping—have been falling—for quite some time now. You know, what are they going to do? They’re probably going to go out and potentially gobble up Equinox. We’ve seen this kind of stuff before in the industry. But right now, it’s been very difficult for the junior miners to go out there and raise money for exploration, and you need money to drill the holes, to put the boots on the ground, and get the work done so that you can actually make the discoveries. This is where the discoveries come from. But if investors think that they’re going to get much more satisfaction—and a quickie—from buying Bitcoin or Nvidia or something like that, that’s been attracting the money away. Before—not too long ago—it was cannabis. The venture capital that would have gone into junior mining companies has gone into the cannabis business, especially in Canada. But, you know, junior mining—it has the potential to turn you from zero to hero in almost no time. My old company went from $0.30 to $43, and that’s one hell of a return. The stuff in the ground is real gold and silver. The company that’s mining it now is producing about a half a million ounces of gold a year. This isn’t just smoke and mirrors; it’s real stuff—it’s got real value. The fact that the gold price now is so high changes things for a lot of the junior companies because now a gram of gold is worth about $90 U.S., and to mine a ton of rock might cost you $40 or $50. So a gram per ton becomes worthwhile. In the past, a gram per ton would have been considered waste. So this opens up a lot of opportunities for low-grade mines, and there are a lot of them around with very big tonnages. It actually just becomes an earth-moving operation. But you’re absolutely spot-on—for a lot of the major companies, the high grade is long gone, and they’re very lucky. The gold price is saving them; it’s the saving grace because they have extensive areas of low grade, and that’s what’s going to keep them in business.
Jim Puplava:
Well, let’s talk about some other movers for gold. We talked about how the BRIC countries and the central banks of those BRIC countries have been one of the main buyers of what’s kept the price up over the last two or three years. I want to talk about something that’s coming out of the Trump administration. The Secretary of the Treasury, Bessett, is talking about monetizing U.S. assets. Now, the U.S. supposedly has about 263 million ounces of gold valued at roughly $42 an ounce. If you take where gold is today—around, let’s just round it off, $2,950—that gold is worth close to three-quarters of a trillion dollars. If the price goes higher—I think at 4,000 or 5,000—that could be worth a trillion, a trillion and a half. So there are rumors that the U.S. may, for debt reasons, revalue its gold. Let’s talk about that and what that might mean for the gold market.
Keith Barron:
Well, you know what? It doesn’t make any sense for it to be at $42—it really doesn’t. As I said earlier, Trump is doing a lot of things that’s kind of outside-the-box thinking. I don’t think he can artificially raise the value of gold to really get away from the debts—bail them out—but I think they can lever up with it, and I would not be at all surprised to see—I don’t think it’ll be a mark-to-market thing—I think it’ll be higher if gold rises quickly here. I think it’s going to push through 3,000—it can do that almost any day now. What’s it going to be revalued at? Could it be 4,000? Could it be 5,000? I don’t think it’s going to be 10,000, but whatever it is, it’s going to be very significant. And, you know, let’s not forget about silver. Silver has always been considered to be the poor man’s gold. So people who can’t afford gold, but they believe in hard assets, they’ll buy silver. The silver price has just been kind of bumping along here—$29, $30, $32, $33—not making any serious moves, but I think it’s poised and ready to push through $50. Certainly, if there was a revaluation of the gold reserve, you’re going to see silver—not exactly in lockstep, but it’s certainly not going to be in the thirty-dollar range; it’s going to be much, much higher. As I said, you know, if gold gets too darn expensive for the man in the street to invest in—and it’s pretty close to it now—they’re going to start buying silver, certainly in other countries around the world, not just the U.S., but like in India. India is completely in love with silver, and you could see a tremendous amount of buying from the middle class out of India. You know, the silver market—as you’re very well aware—has been in deficit for a number of years now. There’s not enough silver produced by the mining companies to fill all the orders, so it’s coming out of bolt holes and reserves and whatever to serve the demand. But, you know, this is something that potentially could really explode.
Jim Puplava:
Well, we had Jeff Christian from CPM Group on our program, and he thinks it’s going to take out its old high and possibly even spike as high as $100. As you brought up, you know, we’ve been running—this will be the fifth year that we’re running—roughly about 200-million-ounce deficits. Unlike gold, Keith, 70% of the demand for silver comes from the industrial side—it’s consumed. I mean, you’re not going to recycle an iPhone to get the silver out of it. So I want to talk about something else that we’re seeing happening, and that’s large amounts of gold have been leaving London, heading to New York. The same thing with silver—the supplies have been increasing. What’s driving that, in your opinion? And I guess the other question is, as soon as it gets here, it’s also going off the Comex. So there’s two things happening: it’s being shipped here, and when it gets here, it’s going out the door.
Keith Barron:
Yeah, well, I think, you know, this movement actually started before Trump was even elected. But I think a couple of things are going on here. There’s lots and lots of rumors going around that Trump is going to put tariffs on virtually everything from outside the U.S., and so European gold, if it is, would have a tariff on it. People have been moving gold—especially out of the Bank of England, which is a repository—into the U.S. to avoid those tariffs. I don’t know how much of that is true—some people say it’s all rubbish; other people say it’s the main force driving things. But, you know, I think—well, Trump is a real—he’s kind of a loose cannon; you don’t know what he’s going to do. In the past, we’ve seen Russia get kicked out of SWIFT by sanctions. Trump could bring sanctions down on any country, and then they’re suddenly out of the international currency market. I think this, especially amongst the BRIC countries, has come to a realization. So this is why the BRIC countries have been accumulating over, really, the last two, three years—it’s a tremendous amount of gold moving from the West to the East, more or less. You know, what’s going to happen here is anyone’s guess, but, you know, I think those are major forces that are moving the gold price. But really, it comes down to the creditworthiness of the U.S. government and the fact that the deficit just keeps climbing and climbing and climbing, and Trump, you know, talking about turning Gaza into another-century Las Vegas and rebuilding Ukraine and buying Greenland and all this kind of stuff—this is all very potentially inflationary for the U.S. I think if I was holding U.S. Treasuries and I was a foreign government, I’d be watching the situation very, very closely and potentially diversifying into something else. This is what they’re doing—they’re buying gold as, you know, basically some sort of safety net, so that if suddenly the American currency turns turtle and starts dropping, then they’re going to be in pretty good shape.
Jim Puplava:
I want to talk about something that we’ve seen, and that’s the relationship between silver and gold. It used to be 16. If you look at the last century, it was—you know—something like, or the last decade, it was somewhere around 50 to 1. Now, Keith, it is over 80, almost 90 to 1. What happens when that ratio gets to—let’s say, if it was—let’s say the price of gold goes up; we get into a run on precious metals. What about seeing that ratio decline, which means an upward movement in silver—a lot more explosive?
Keith Barron:
Aha. Well, you know, in America, the 16 to 1 and 15 to 1 goes right back to the time of Alexander Hamilton, who first established the bimetallic system in America and pegged the gold price to a certain number of grains of silver—grains or grams or ounces, however you want to measure it. Before that, it was actually associated with what was coming out of the possessions of Spain and the number of gold coins being coined versus the number of silver. So, you know, it was kind of a ratio—15 to 1, 16 to 1—which was based very much on geology. Those deposits mined back then were very silver-rich. Then, roundabouts 1910, things took a very big change. The change came from a method of beneficiating the ore from copper mines called flotation. So you were able to mine copper mines—like what is owned by Kennecott that’s been going since 1905—where now you were able to recover the copper, which was in fairly low concentrations, like 1% or lower, and the silver would come with it. So silver production today—almost all of it—comes from base metal production. It’s a byproduct, and it’s huge, huge tonnage that is of copper that is being produced—or lead, zinc—that is being produced with silver as a byproduct. The ratio of gold to silver breaks down entirely. So where does that leave—you know—if you’re a proponent of silver and you really love silver, there’s some guys on the internet who say that the silver price, the ratio, is going to go back to 15 to 1. I really do think that that’s nonsense. But to see it where it is right now is nonsense as well. I think that the silver price—I am one person who believes that it’s been manipulated. We’ve seen some banks have their wrists slapped in the past for manipulating the price of silver. I do seriously believe that this is the kind of stuff—shenanigans—that goes on with the paper market versus the physical market. I think that it’s poised and ready—maybe not going to go to 15 to 1, but maybe 30 to 1 or 40 to 1. If it has that kind of movement, anybody who’s holding silver is going to make a lot of money.
Jim Puplava:
Well, I mean, if we just take a hypothetical—because the ratio now is over 90; it’s one of the highest I’ve seen—so if you take—let’s just say in the next year gold hits 4,000, because there’s, let’s say, we revalue it—and if you were talking about 30 to 1, that would put silver over $130 an ounce compared to little $30. I agree because not only are we running supply deficits, but it’s consumed. Silver has become ever more important for industrial use. So if you talk about reshoring factories back here to the U.S., and you talk about even investor demand, the thing that really surprises me, Keith—Costco has become one of the biggest sellers of precious metals in the country. I’ve been watching it; I go to their site just to see what’s going on. As soon as they get silver, it flies off the shelf and it’s gone—I mean, they can’t keep it in stock. So apparently people are accumulating it, and for good reason. Like you said, it’s the poor man’s gold. Not too many people could afford to go out and buy an ounce of gold that—you know—it’s almost 3,000 bucks now.
Keith Barron:
Yep, yep—yeah. I see this in the jewelry business; there are a lot of jewelry companies that are going to sterling silver jewelry and abandoning gold altogether. So they’re setting precious stones in silver, and—yeah—no, it’s as you say: the silver that’s going into cell phones and electrical contacts for various things—there’s a lot of uses of silver. That stuff is not coming back into the market; it doesn’t get recycled. It ends up in landfills. So, you know, most of the gold is going to come back, but a large proportion of the silver—if not all of it—that is used for industrial uses is just essentially consumed and gone. So where does that leave us? Well, I do think—what’s it going to do to the cost of a cell phone? If the silver price goes to $140 an ounce, it’ll increase it by a buck or two—it’s pretty inelastic. The same thing with a solar panel—there’s so little silver that’s used in an individual panel that it’s going to be a couple of cents. But if you take the whole production over weeks or months or years of solar panels coming out of China, it’s a very large number indeed. So I’m really bullish on silver—I love silver. I think that potentially it could move even much more than the gold price has recently in terms of percentages. I think anybody who doesn’t pay attention to this is going to be kicking themselves in the not-too-distant future.
Jim Puplava:
You know this, and I want to end on this: one of the things that really strikes me—not only is silver extremely undervalued (we’re bullish as well, and we own quite a bit of it for our accounts, for our clients)—but also the miners themselves, Keith, because, you know, they have rising costs; they’ve seen it in labor, they’ve seen it in fuel costs—things of that nature. But you take a look at the price of gold at $2,950 or silver at $32—these companies are making a ton of money, but nobody pays attention. The public isn’t buying.
Keith Barron:
Yeah, isn’t it quite amazing? I think it will turn around at some point—I don’t know when—but these companies are just throwing off money, a lot of them. You know, 10, 15 years ago, it was almost unheard of for a gold producer to be paying a decent dividend, but now this is starting to happen, and I think this is really what’s going to—we’re going to see in the future—and there will be a movement. You know, if you take—the gold market is so small, and the number of gold miners is really a pittance compared to other companies, say, on the Dow or on the Nasdaq. You know, it’s kind of like trying to force a lot of water through a small fire hose—you’re going to create a lot of pressure—and I think that’s what’s going to happen, and it’s going to drive the prices of the metals, but also very much of the gold companies. They’re all going to have very strong balance sheets. I think you’ll continue to see acquisitions going on here, but, you know, you will see exploration being jump-started and new discoveries being made. But we’re behind the curve on this—you know, there’s nothing really that’s been made in terms of worldwide exploration—big discoveries—for 15, 20 years now. So there’s a lot of catch-up to be done.
Jim Puplava:
All right, well, listen, Keith—as we close, why don’t you tell our listeners: you have the company—your exploration company you’re running—but you also have a website where you talk about issues related to mining. Could you give out both?
Keith Barron:
Sure. I occasionally write on this, though I don’t have a lot of time. It’s called Straight Talk on Mining—all one word. There’s lots and lots of commentaries on there—gosh, going right back to 2001. It’s kind of a guide to understanding press releases and drill results and all that kind of good stuff. The company that pays the bills for me and puts the bread on the table is Aurania Resources, and that’s spelled A-U-R-A-N-I-A. We’re listed on the TSXV in Canada under ARU. You can get a hold of me at keith[at]aurania[dot]com if you’ve got any questions about the gold market, the silver market, or anything—just fire away.
Jim Puplava:
All right, my friend. Well, listen, you take care and come back and talk again.
Keith Barron:
I will do. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Jim.
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