The Global Supply Chain Crisis And The Return To Resource Sovereignty: Col. Douglas Macgregor

A "terrible storm" is approaching the US bond market as the global financial architecture begins a fundamental shift toward hard assets, according to Colonel Douglas Macgregor. With gold inching above $4,600 and silver rebounding into the mid $70s, the guest argues that the economic fallout from the conflict in the Middle East is reaching a critical tipping point. According to Macgregor, the real reason the Strait of Hormuz closed was due to insurance giants like Lloyd’s of London—not direct military force - effectively halting commercial traffic.

In this exclusive interview, Macgregor provides a blunt assessment of what he claims is an urgent US interceptor missile shortage and explains why he believes legacy military infrastructure is obsolete in the face of modern drone warfare. According to the Colonel, a "hidden" supply chain crisis is emerging, including the threat of a global fertilizer shortage and an urgent necessity for "resource sovereignty" in rare earth refining.

Recorded March 31 2026

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00:00 Introduction
00:51 Breaking Peace Signals
01:21 Who Really Closed Hormuz
02:31 China Peace Framework
03:13 Famine and Water Risks
04:53 Missile War Reality Check
07:59 ISR Strike Game Changer
11:08 What Victory Looks Like
17:29 Strategic Minerals and Refineries
29:03 Bond Market and Final Advice

#Gold #Silver #Macroeconomics #Geopolitics #BondMarket #Petrodollar #StraitOfHormuz #KitcoNews #DouglasMacgregor
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The videos are not intended to provide trading advice, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. Kitco News, its anchors, producers, and reporters are not responsible in any way for the performance or actions of any sponsor, advertiser or affiliate of Kitco News. In no event will Kitco and its employees be held liable for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of the content in this video.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Kitco News in Focus with Jeremy Safron.

SPEAKER_02 0:03

Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Safron. Gold is inching above$4,600 again. Silver has rebounded sharply into the mid-70s, but U.S. gasoline has climbed above$4 a gallon. Now the straight of Hormuz remains the central fault line in a conflict rippling across energy, shipping, and the metals market. But we just received some breaking news this hour. Iran's president just announced they are ready to end the war and seeking guarantees, according to the IRNA. Matching comments President Trump just gave to the New York Post stating that the conflict is likely to end soon, even if the U.S. leaves the strait closed. With European allies showing growing reluctance to deepen their support, a diplomatic off-ramp may be forming. Joining us to break this down, this rapidly shifting military and economic reality, of course, is Colonel Douglas McGregor. Colonel, great to have you on. Good to be with you. Kind of matching what the president was saying today, but he's also saying that they would step back even if the strait remained closed. From a strategic standpoint, what does it signal to the rest of the world if Washington takes this sudden diplomatic off-ramp rather than opening the Hormuz again by force?

SPEAKER_03 1:24

Well, I think it's important for people in the United States and Canada to understand that uh the Strait of Hormuz was not closed by Iran. It was Lloyd's of London that closed the strait. As soon as it became clear that the strait was part of the war zone and could be subjected to missile strikes, no one would underwrite shipping from an insurance standpoint. That's the first thing. So that's what really put an end to the uh commercial traffic, which has dropped off about 95%, obviously. Secondly, if the owner of the shipping is not uh working in support of the United States or Israel, and in fact is willing to purchase the oil in Yuan, they are allowed to pass through the straits or the strait. Now that's already happened for a number of tankers going to Japan, Korea, as I understand it, and uh China as well as India. Right now I think India has another nine tankers waiting to move through. So the issue of access to the strait was really about us and Israel since we are fighting this war on behalf of Israel. Uh so that's that's understandable. Now, as far as the uh offer of peace, what I just received myself was a five-point peace framework from uh China via Pakistan. The Chinese foreign minister held talks with the Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in Beijing. These countries have now taken the lead. Uh they've also sent their diplomats to Egypt and Turkey. It looks like the Turks and the Egyptians will be on board for this. And these are the five points that they've raised. Immediate cessation of hostilities, start of peace talks as soon as possible, security of non-military targets, security of shipping lanes, and primacy of the UN charter. Now, as far as the non-military targets and shipping lanes are concerned, everybody needs to understand that in addition to taking 15 million barrels of oil offline, which is essentially what uh the Strait of Hormuz has experienced, we've created an enormous problem for food, fuel, feedstock, and fertilizer. If we don't open this strait, in other words, if there is not a resumption of normal traffic very soon, you're looking at famine in vast parts of the world, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, in the next six to twelve months. So that's very important. The other point is, of course, the desalinization plants. The desalination plants are a lifeline for the people that live in the Gulf region. There are roughly 50 of them, maybe a few more, and uh the Iranians have not struck them. But if we strike Iranian desalination plants along with the oil infrastructure, which is something we said we would do if Iran did not quote unquote meet Israel's terms, which is really what we're fighting for, then uh the Iranians have said they would destroy all of them. And if you just go to Al-Shabael, the port on the Persian Gulf, that Saudi port has a desalination plant. And it provides 90% of the water to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. If that plant is destroyed, you're talking about evacuating the capital of Saudi Arabia because there's no water to drink. Uh so this is a very dangerous situation. It could cause millions to die of thirst. This war needs to end. The world recognizes that, but for some reason, we've been behaving as though it's not our concern. It is our concern.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you've warned about the geographical and tactical nightmare of trying to secure the strike before uh I was reading in some news reports this morning, Defense Secretary Pete Henksinth and Joint Chiefs recently held a brief stating um that the U.S. strikes are damaging Iranian morale, causing widespread desertions, degrading their ability to project power. How do you square that official assessment of progress with your warning that these battlefield metrics may not translate into strategic success?

SPEAKER_03 5:27

Well, first of all, I don't know to what extent the claims that he makes are accurate. Let's be frank. We haven't really told the truth about the level of damage inflicted on us. We know that we have uh effectively approached a point in time, maybe in the next 10 days to two weeks, where we will simply no longer have any missiles capable of shooting down incoming missiles. Also, bear in mind that we can't shoot down hypersonic missiles anyway. So I think our position is in this war of attrition, and it's really a missile war. We're kind of a World War II force sitting offshore trying to bombard this enormous country of 93 million people that stretches for thousands and thousands of square miles the size of Western Europe. A very dumb idea, but we've embarked on it. And we're assuming that uh the targets that we struck have made uh life strategically unendurable for the people that live there. I'm not sure that's the case. I'm always very uh skeptical of these claims of morale breaking. I mean, we've been through this before. You could go all the way back to World War II. We discovered that what we did did not persuade the Germans or the Japanese or anybody else to throw in the towel and give up. There were other factors that were much more important, including the arrival of ground forces. And I think the fact that President Trump has ordered 20,000 ground troops to the region is evidence for the fact that this air and missile campaign has not worked.

SPEAKER_02 6:53

When you say we're running short, uh you were talking about the missile ZRR, are you talking about specific interceptor systems, cruise missiles? Uh and if that and if that's true, I mean, how quickly does that start to constrain policy choices?

SPEAKER_03 7:06

Well, one would think uh profoundly, but thus far I haven't seen any evidence that we're terribly concerned about the damage uh inflicted on the Gulf Emirates. I think we're concerned about Israel because we're rushing whatever missiles we've got left to them. Remember that uh we have avoided a lot of the damage. Even though we were initially attacked, we escaped serious damage, and we've moved, you know, our vessels at sea hundreds of miles away, as far as a thousand miles away in some cases. In fact, the Marines are sitting hundreds of miles away from the Gulf, and one of the challenges right now is to figure out how you would get them into the Gulf. They've got to fly in on V-22s or helicopters. So can you get close enough to do that without being sunk? Obviously, we're very worried about that. We think we're going to infiltrate uh the 82nd and some other elements, Ranger Regiment, into the region. Okay, I hope so, but one of the things that we're up against is persistent surveillance. In other words, anything that happens in that region, anyone who moves, anyone who shows up or leaves, is under constant surveillance from space-based assets, as well as terrestrial assets. We've never faced this before. We always had that advantage. Well, this advantage is conferred on Iran by China and Russia. So now you link that real-time information to strike systems that are deep inside Iran with missiles that have a range anywhere from 500 to 1,500 miles. You could suddenly hit anything that you can find. That puts the use of ground forces very much at risk.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I mean, who who has that surveillance advantage right now? And what does it actually allow them to do that changes this war?

SPEAKER_03 8:56

Well, it means that you have what I call the ISR strike complex. In other words, the Iranians have perfected what you saw emerge in the Ukraine conflict on the Russian side. The same thing. Okay, we we are sitting at point A, and uh we can see on a satellite 400 miles away the arrival of trucks full of missiles, or the arrival of troops, or the arrival of foodstuffs, or anything else. We can immediately attack it. So within a minute or two of confirming the target, you have a missile on the way, and the missile may take anywhere from five minutes to 15 minutes, depending upon what kind of missile it is. Now, can you shoot it down? Well, you usually fire two or three interceptors to down one missile. We only produce five to seven missiles a day in the United States. These are interceptor missiles. The Chinese, for instance, produce a thousand rocket motors or missile motors every day. So you have a manufacturing base in Iran that was assembled with the help and assistance of China, and you still have resupply from Chinese sources. So, how do you win this attrition war? It's very difficult to do, particularly when you have to move away from the region just to survive. This is the game changer. We're the World War II force. We're organized, equipped, largely as we were during the Second World War, although the technology is much better and much more modern. So one ship is worth 10, uh, 80 years ago or more. But the problem hasn't changed for us, because what we've got now in Iran is a very different kind of force. Where have they put their investments? In missiles and drones and in surveillance. You put those together and you're discovering that is almost an impregnable defense. Now, that doesn't mean that the uh Iranians want to keep this up. I'm sure they would like an end to this, as would anybody with any any brains. The whole world wants an end to it for the reasons I outlined at the beginning. But the question is, what about us? What is President Trump willing to accept? Because everything with President Trump is mortgage divanity. He has to walk out into the spotlight as the victor. If he can't do that, I'm not sure he'll give up.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

Yeah. You know, it's interesting bringing it back to the markets. I mean, Jamie Dimon was on Fox this morning, and he said that the markets will stay concerned here until this is over. I mean, we can see a bit of evidence with these tweets going on right now, the Iranian president. Markets are starting to, you know, climb, I think oil's down to$100 a barrel as we tape this. Um with Jamie Dimon saying this morning that he's, you know, markets will stay concerned until this is over. Uh and that is what matters whether this is completely successful. Uh Colonel, what does success actually look like here?

SPEAKER_03 11:46

Well, very quickly in response to Jamie Dimon, I think he's the master of understatement. And President Trump has said a number of things over the last several days were obviously designed to manipulate the market, to calm nerves, to reassure people that this wasn't going to last much longer. But every time he does that, the market tends to rebound, but each time the rebound is weaker. I don't think he has much slack left in that rope. And I do think there's a lot of pressure on him to put an end to this thing. So when you say, what does victory look like? I don't think victory is attainable, not in the terms that have been articulated by President Trump, Secretary Rubio, or Secretary Heggsith, because they're really talking about the destruction of Iran. Let's go back to the beginning. The hope from the very beginning was that you would have some sort of internal unrest in Iran that would work to your advantage. And it was a readiness to attack Iran in the midst of the unrest on the assumption that this would precipitate regime change. Well, that failed. The whole thing was shut down remarkably quickly. And we discovered it really wasn't what it was, what it was billed to be. You know, we've said they killed 30,000 people. That's a complete lie. Only about 3,000 were killed or injured. And these people were activated by the Mossad and the CIA. They were equipped with weapons by the Mossad. They were urged to shoot at policemen. So the the death of 3,000 demonstrators was precipitated by our interference. Now it was shut down. And then after it was shut down, you had Mr. Netanyahu come to the United States and make it clear to President Trump that he has to honor his promises, which means you now have to help us strike Iran. I think President Trump was reluctant, so Israel began the process on its own, and we felt obligated to join the fight. So we've moved into it. Now we've exhausted tremendous reserves, something like 11,000 precision munitions in the first two weeks of the conflict. The expense is outrageous. I mean, some of these munitions cost 1.5 million or more apiece. We are in a position right now where we're trying to resupply and replenish not just uh missile defense, but also precision guided weapons and systems. And this this then is it raises the question, all right, we failed at uh regime change or decapitation, whatever you want to call it. What are we doing now? The answer is we're trying to inflict tremendous pain on the Iranian people, but this is a very large state. This is not one of the weaker Sykes Pico states created in the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East in 1919. This is a real country with a real national identity and thousands of years of history behind it. It's not going to roll over and play dead. So I think they figured that out. So now they're going to try and destroy it and punish it, and you're going to add ground troops. They're going to try and send them into the Gulf to seize something on the assumption that's going to be a game changer, and suddenly the Gulf opens up and everybody starts using it again. That won't happen. And if you put Marines and paratroopers in these isolated islands or on the coastline, they can be just as easily targeted and destroyed by theater ballistic missiles and, of course, uh drones as any other target in the region. So I don't see a good ending. I think at some point, you know, you you've got to do what I think several people have urged President Trump to do privately and pretend, uh, well, we've achieved victory. We've destroyed everything. This is the best we can do in relieving. But that that fails to address an important element here. Who's really in charge? And the answer is Israel and the lobby. They're in charge. They wanted this war. They bought it by buying the politicians in Congress and buying the White House for Trump. This is their war. They want it. And they're not going to be very pleased if suddenly Donald Trump turns around and says, Well, look, I think we've done all we can do. They won't accept that. So there are other forces at work in this process.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Right, right. And you know what? You talked about something interesting there briefly. I want to pivot on how these military tactics are directly impacting the commodities market because I mean you recently noted that we're fighting a 21st century war of missiles and these unmanned systems using an old World War II kind of mindset. I mean, Bloomberg has reported uh what would be the first known combat loss of an E3 century jet after an Iraqian strike on a Saudi base. If that is correct, what does it tell us about the vulnerability of our legacy military infrastructure against this persistent drone warfare?

SPEAKER_03 16:27

Well, we should get the message that the forces we've got right now are not prepared for this new kind of warfare. If we deployed the U.S. Army and Marines to Ukraine to fight the Russians, we would take terrible casualties. They're now reorganized and prepared to fight on a battlefield dominated by persistent surveillance and strike weapons, unmanned and manned. We're not really ready for that. We're not ready for it at sea either. So I hope that we will find a way to end this quickly and go back and review everything. I mean, it's this is similar in some ways to the Russo-Japanese war that took place in 1905. If anybody had paid attention to it in the West, they would have understood this is the prelude to a future war like World War I: trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, quick firing, artillery, and so forth. So I hope we'll do that. But in the meantime, I don't think we have the means at our disposal to induce the kind of response from Iran that the Israelis want and that we have promised to extract from them.

SPEAKER_02 17:32

You know, we're seeing confirmation as well of a drone strike crippling some Russian Baltic oil ports and Iranian strikes damaging major aluminum facilities in the Gulf. Are investors making a mistake by focusing only on crude when, and you brought it up there. I mean, the broader story is diesel, jet fuel, LNG, fertilizer, aluminum metals?

SPEAKER_03 17:53

Well, first of all, I would say that uh at this point, people are going to point to the mining industry that is involved with uh precious metals, coal, and a number of other things, and they're going to say, well, it's going to be more expensive to extract uh these metals using fossil fuels. Well, that may be true in the short run, but the payoff for extracting these metals is absolutely beyond estimation. We are going to be more dependent on these precious metals. Everything from helium, which is not really a metal but a gas, all the way to gold, silver, titanium, you name it, everything than we ever have been in the past. And for those of us that live on the North American continent, this becomes vital to our what I would call resource sovereignty. We can't be dependent on China or any other country in the world to provide us with refined rare earths. We have to build refineries that will refine the rare earths, refine the uranium, and so forth. That's vital and more vital today than it's ever been in the history of our country because it's a matter of self-defense and self-preservation. So I would just tell anybody out there, if you've got money, sure, you want to put it into oil, that's going to pay off for you, oil and gas, but don't walk away from precious metals, because in the long run, they are going to go through the roof.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

Yeah, yeah, well said. I heard your speech over at VRIC too. I mean, it was an interesting take, and you got, I mean, looking where we are right now, looking back, if we would have known what was happening, a lot of that was accurate. Um, you know, talk to me a little bit about these strategic minerals. I mean, is the Defense Department really looking at gold, silver, these types of things to replenish this technology you're talking about?

SPEAKER_03 19:41

I I think what you have going on right now, there's a recognition of the importance of strategic minerals.

SPEAKER_04 19:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:47

But you and I know there are virtually everything we need can be found on the North American continent, from copper to titanium to all of the various rare earths at that corner of the periodic table. The issue is building the supply chain, building the refineries and the distribution. That takes time. I, you know, I talked myself hoarse in Washington, D.C. to members of Congress about the criticality of building refineries. I said we've got to do it. We can't wait around. The sooner we do it, the better off we will be. I think that's beginning to sink in, but we need to allocate billions of dollars to it. So if I were advising the president, I'd say, I don't give a damn about your ego, with all due respect, Mr. President. We need to stop this stupidity immediately. We need to get back to the United States. We need to refocus our investments. We got to get you understand that the Department of Defense is wasting a lot of money on things we don't need. We need to deal with that. That means reductions in the defense budget. But what is left has to be correctly invested. And that brings us to the refinery. Because remember, the byproducts of a lot of these rare earths include uranium. And what do you do with it? What do you do with the waste from the uranium? You've got to put it someplace. Who does that? The Department of Defense. We have places for that in Nevada. And Nevada, of course, is home to some of the best gold producers in the world. All of these things need to be examined carefully, repackaged, and we need to refocus investment on the national level to get where we need to be. Because right now, about 90 to 95% of the rare earths that are refined that we use and need come from outer Mongolia. Good lord. That means some Chinese bureaucrat is deciding what we will or won't get. I don't think we want to live with that.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask you. I mean, because you're saying the real bottleneck is no longer finding the metal, but refining it, processing it, building that supply chain around it. I mean, uh we've heard a lot of rhetoric about this. I mean, we've even had a strategic reserve in place for strategic minerals now. Are They are moving fast enough and has China won that game?

SPEAKER_03 22:03

Well, the game is not over. China has uh stolen a march on us because they started 30 years ago. When Deng Xiaoping began the whole experimental process with capitalism and focused narrowly on some areas where you had some entrepreneurial activity, that was the beginning of something much larger. And the Chinese began thinking very hard about the criticality of their own resource sovereignty. And the reason for that is obvious. We had the largest and most powerful Navy in the world. They have been hostage to other people's navies, particularly the Royal Navy in the past. You go back to the Opian Wars and how the Royal Navy controlled the coast of China, opened up the rivers, and forced the Chinese to accept opium into their societies, which had a terrible deleterious effect. We need to now look at our own vulnerabilities. And that means we have to be sovereign with our own resources. So the Chinese have built this one belt, one road. Why do you do that? Because you don't want to ship across the Pacific. You don't want to have to deal with the United States Navy. So they're building this enormous infrastructure for transportation, primarily rail, also road all across Eurasia. It's going to reach all the way into Africa, all the way to Rochefort in France. And we need to think in those terms. We need to build our own transportation infrastructure as well as the refining, because we need to also be prepared to export as well as import. We've lost the plot on a merchant marine. We should have fast sea lift that moves in and out of ports on both coasts. We need fast trains, high-speed trains. If we'd built it properly, we could outpace the Chinese one belt-one road. We because the one belt-one road goes through numerous nations, which means as it moves, you end up paying more for transportation. You pay for security. You're negotiating agreements. We can move things from the Atlantic to the Pacific, where we speak one language, we have one law, and we don't have to deal with those other intervening problems. But again, getting America to think strategically in those terms at home has been enormously difficult because everything's focused on what people see as profitable interventionism. The American people don't profit from it, but I could take you all over the Washington area, all the way around to all the big neighborhoods, and I could show you magnificent multi-million dollar homes of people who are part of the defense industries, who are part of the congressional complex that has profited from all of these terrible interventions. So it's never been about do we win or lose? It's about how much do we spend and where does the money go? That's wrong. That has to end.

SPEAKER_02 24:53

And does that uh you know also help explain why places like Venezuela matter at Gwen, not just politically, but but as a part of a larger scramble for secure resource access closer to home? I mean, Panama, for instance, get trying to get China out. I mean, is that uh working into this thesis?

SPEAKER_03 25:10

Yeah, I think so, except that you know, we we are treating China as this uh unambiguous opponent of everything that we want to do. That's not necessarily true. The Chinese and the Russians, for that matter, all want to do business with us. We obsess over political structures, so we look at Venezuela. We say, well, we don't like Venezuela because it's not sufficiently liberal and democratic. Well, you know, this has gotten a little tiresome, especially since our own democratic structures are not in the best of condition, and a lot of Americans question just how legitimate and credible they are. We've got to get out of this business of intervening in other people's countries on that pretext when in reality what we're trying to do is steal resources. And right now we have the president of the United States who's very proud of the fact that we're stealing petroleum from Venezuela. I don't think that's a good thing at all. I think we should do business with everybody. Now, if we don't like illegal drugs, and we don't like illegal human trafficking, and I certainly am violently opposed to it, defend your borders. Stop it. Are we doing that? The answer is no, not really. We haven't militarized our borders. We haven't brought the Coast Guard back from the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf to the United States, where it belongs. In other words, we've got to get serious about enforcing our own laws here at home. If we do those things, we can do business with everybody. And ultimately, that was always America's great virtue. We did business with everybody.

SPEAKER_02 26:43

Yeah. You know, on that point that you're bringing up, I mean, we are also seeing a rapid kind of shift in how global trade is operating. China just acknowledged its vessels are transiting the strait, and Pakistan is reportingly uh looking to reflag ships to maintain access. Are we watching the accelerated formation of a parallel global shipping and financial kind of architecture, I guess, that bypasses the West or is trying to because of this?

SPEAKER_03 27:08

Of course. You cannot see what's happening today as divorced from this entire BRICS movement. The BRICS movement is an attempt to get out from under our oppressive financial system. We are doing what we're doing in large part because we think we're defending the petrodollar. In reality, we're driving everybody away from it, which is why the Iranians have very cleverly said, buy your oil and yuan and we'll do business with you. They too now want to do away with the petrodollar. The petrodollar has allowed us to enrich ourselves shamelessly beyond the point of reason. But you've got to go all the way back to coming off the gold standard. When we came off the gold standard, we eventually discovered we could print as much currency as we wanted, which meant that we didn't have to tax Americans when it came to going to war. War was this abstract event that didn't really touch anybody's lives. All of this is about to end. I think the de-dollarization is unstoppable. And I'm not advocating it. I was very happy with the status quo in many respects, but we've got to be frank. We've abused people. We've abused countries to the point where we're telling them what crops to grow, what not to build, where to export, where not to export. We've been bullying people to be oppressive and on one side uh uh oppose anyone we don't like for any length of time. All of this sanctioned business has gotten us down this road. All of this needs to go away. But getting us to behave as a normal country, as a normal nation, as a great power that is willing to accept the participation of other great powers, is willing to respect other great powers' legitimate national security interests, that's not easy in Washington. With the American people, it's not difficult at all. They're not interested in this, but they don't have much say in Washington. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

You know, that leads us perfectly into, I guess, the metals market. I mean, we're seeing strong bids today, gold back up above$4,600, silver is rebounding. Are we looking at a classic fear trade, or is this more of what you're talking about, that deeper sovereign shift towards hard assets?

SPEAKER_03 29:24

Well, I I don't know if it was you. I listened to Grundlager, whom I respect a great deal, and he talked about the bond market, the vulnerabilities there. I also listened to Luke Groman, I think he's a very fine analyst. I listened to Alistair McLeod because he's one of the first to really point out the problems that we've got with gold and the emergence of a very likely gold-backed currency in the BRICS Nations. We are headed into a terrible storm. I don't know how else to put it. And I think that too is just over the horizon. And what we're doing in the Middle East is probably going to accelerate that storm. I don't know how we're going to manage it. I don't know if we suddenly wake up and discover that we're no longer using dollars in the United States. We're using some other new currency that replaces it. We're on a very, very dangerous road. Let me be blunt. So that's why I said that what Jamie Diamond has warned about is accurate. He's just understating it. It's closer and more dangerous than he suggests.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

I mean, for investors kind of trying to separate signal from noise, which we try to every day. I mean, what is that one thing they should watch most closely right now? Is it shipping volume through the hormones? Is it insurance rights? Is it diesel? Is it jet fuel? Or is it signs of this diplomatic off-ramp?

SPEAKER_03 30:44

Well, jet fuel right now, Singapore jet fuel is up to$231 a barrel.

SPEAKER_04 30:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:50

That should be ominous. What's that going to do to international travel? Uh look, I think you have to look at multiple indicators. Single factor analysis is always dangerous. But I think you've heard the right people talk about the f right things. What about the bond market? What's going to happen there? It's up, its average is what, 3.8%, but the 30-year bond and I think the 10-year are uh up over 4%. And the 30-year is closing in on something higher. I don't have the figures in front of me, but I would look very carefully at what goes on in the bond market. We went through a crisis when Liz Truss was prime minister with the guilt market in London. And people actually thought that the British economy was simply going to collapse, and with it the British state. It was a very near-run disaster. I think we have to look for something like that in the United States and Western Europe. But at the same time, going back to what I said originally, and this is going to sound simplistic, but I think this is true. Whatever you do, invest in anything that comes out of the ground. Food, if you grow it, it's going to be a lifesaver. The world is not going to have enough food. We know that now. The fertilizer market is in serious trouble. The Russians can't compensate for it. And I don't think anybody but perhaps the Chinese have stockpiles of fertilizer. One of the lessons that we should learn from the Strait of Hormuz and shutting off all of this oil is that you've got to stockpile fertilizer, not just oil, also fertilizer. And again, we're back to rare earths. You've got to stockpile it, that's fine. But where's the refinery? Where's the supply chain? Who's going to own that? How do we do it? I'm not suggesting it should be nationalized. I don't suggest that at all. But we have to help firms and corporations out there see clearly into the future now. But to do that, we have to come to strategic reality as a nation. We aren't there. People are still in this bubble of uh fantasy that we are what we were militarily in 1991. We aren't. We're not even close.

SPEAKER_02 33:03

Before I let you go, I mean, you know, just on a personal note, I mean, you're in Washington, you know the congressmans, you've been talking to them, you've been lobbying for this type of stuff. Uh, do you find that where we are right now, are they listening more closely, realizing that this should have been done earlier, or are we just not there yet?

SPEAKER_03 33:22

We're not there yet. The few people who listen, there are a few, I won't name them, but they're there, are not enough. And uh, I don't think we're going to move in a fundamentally new direction until the bottom falls out of the market. I think it's coming. Yeah, all right. Final message to invest. Mark Faber says so. And I'm a big Mark Faber fan, and he's been pointing to this too as well.

SPEAKER_02 33:50

Yeah, Mark is great. Uh and Alistair McLeod, actually, I'm taking notes. We've got to reach out to Aleister, have him back on the show soon. All right, I want to appreciate uh thanks for coming on. I mean, your final message to investors kind of watch the bond market, stay anchored in real assets, especially metals and things in the ground. You got it. Yeah. All right. Colonel Douglas McGregor, thanks for joining us here on Kitco News today. I appreciate it. Lots happening. Hopefully, um we get into some offering up here. Thank you. Hey, thank you. Bye-bye. All right. And to our viewers, we want to hear your thoughts on the conversation. Leave a comment below. Make sure to hit the like button. Subscribe to the channel so you never miss an update for the latest market coverage and spot prices. Head over to Kitco.com. I'm Jeremy Saffron. Thanks for watching.

SPEAKER_01 34:33

Kitco News in Focus with Jeremy Saffron.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

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