What this hour covers
- The number, opened on air the day it landed
- What the Fed actually watches, and why it is not what you were told
- The part buried under the headline
Full transcript
Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome into the Gold Hour. My name is Alan Johnson. And you know, the reason I do this show, first of all, just so you all know this, is to tell you the truth about your money and just plain English. And if you're new here, I just wanna say welcome. I'm glad you found me. And if you've been with me for a long while, for a while, you know how this goes. I'm gonna read the same news to you. What I do is I just spend the week reading the part underneath it. So the news you're hearing, I share that with you, but only the news that's buried underneath it, the part that they don't talk about it.
And I'll tell you right now, this is a big news day. And a lot happened while people were at work. And here's what I've got for you. First of all, about three hours ago, the government released the inflation number, which is the number that the Federal Reserve actually watches. Not the one that you're about on television. It's the one that they actually use. And it actually came in higher than expected. And I'm gonna give you the exact numbers, and I'm gonna tell you what they mean. Second, we're gonna talk about the Treasury Secretary said something this past Monday that almost nobody reported it even correctly. And I'll walk you through it slowly because this one really matters.
And third, my favorite of all is my gold. Subject is about gold. Gold is up more than 15% this month. And one major bank says that it's the best month gold has had since 1999. And I'll tell you what's driving it. And I'll give you the honest version, including what could actually knock it right back down. Fourth, we're gonna talk about the stock market. There's research right now out of Bank of America comparing right now to the year 2000. And there's a column out that came out Monday from a fellow who's been tracking this for decades. And he's laying out nine different measures of value. We're gonna talk about that.
We'll go through both including the argument against them. And then fifth, we're gonna talk about what's coming this Friday because Friday morning, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve gives his first big speech. And I'll tell you what we should be listening for. And then the one you all went waiting for, the contest word, word number eight. And stay with me for that. And then if we have time, we'll go through the mail that I received this week. So let's pour the coffee. You know what to do. Get yourself a drink, water, whatever. And let's get right into it. And let's start off, first of all, with this morning.
At 8.30 Eastern time, the government put out the July reading of something called the PCE. P as in Paul, C as in Charlie, E as in Edward, price index. Now, most of you have heard of the CPI. By the way, PCE stands for Personal Consumption Expenditures. The consumer price index is called the CPI. That's the one they answer on the news. That's the one they talk about on the news. Now, PCE is different. And here's the difference in one sentence. CPI is the one you hear about. PCE is the one the Federal Reserve actually uses. So when you're trying to figure out what the Fed is gonna do, this is the number that really counts.
This is the one that hits home. And here's what we found. Prices rose two-tenths of a percent in July. And what they now say economists have now, it says, they only expected one-tenth. So the point I'm making is it came in double what they were looking for. And they were looking for small numbers, but they actually doubled. And for the full year, prices are now up 3.7%. So their forecast was actually 3.6, which is higher than expected on both. Now, there's a second version of this number called Core PCE. So what happens is Core actually takes out food and energy. In other words, it just strips it out. And Core came in exactly where they thought.
Two-tenths for the month and 3.3% for the year. So the underlying numbers behaved, the headline number just didn't. And the difference between those two is food and gas. So to bring it all in, July inflation ran 3.7% for the year and the forecast was 3.6. So let me put that against the things that give it meaning. The Federal Reserve, they place a target. And that target is what President Trump has been talking about all the time. That target is 2%. So 2% is the promise and it's been the promise now for a long time. Today's number is 3.7. That's nearly double the target. And the Fed's interest rate right now is three and a half to three and three quarters percent.
So think about what that means for a saver. If you're earning, let's say, if you're earning 3.5% and prices are climbing 3.7%, then you're not getting ahead. You're actually losing. You're losing a little ground slowly on the money that's supposedly saving you, be safe. And that's the actual position of a careful person in this country right now. So let me make 3.7% concrete because percentages don't land. Let's say a household spends $5,000 a month and they spend it on housing, food, insurance, gas, medicines, everything. 3.7% of $5,000 is $185. So if the prices keep climbing at the rate they climbed this past year, and I'm not predicting that, I'm just holding that number still so you can actually see it.
If you don't buy one extra thing, you don't add anything. You just pay $185 more every month. Well, 12, think about this, 12 months of that is about $2,200. Your grocery cart just costs more. And the tank and the gas costs more. And the premium went up. And now do that for 10 years. And you don't get a raise because a lot of you that are listening are retired and there is no raise. And that's the part that never ever makes the news. There's no headline that day that somebody's savings quietly stops being enough. And a couple of the other numbers that came out this morning is that the economy grew one and a half percent in the second quarter.
And that was in line with the first estimate. So there was no surprise there. We saw that. Durable goods rose 1.1% in July, while forecast was half a percent. And by the way, durable goods means things that are built to last, like machines, equipment, appliances, aircrafts. And that came in strong. And consumer spending and personal income both came in slightly above what was expected. So put the whole morning together and here's the full picture. Prices, well, prices are running hotter than expected. And the economy is not weak. And normally you'd say that the second part is good news. And by the way, it is, but it has a consequence because when the economy is holding up, the Federal Reserve has no reason to cut the rates.
And when prices are running hot, they then have a reason to raise them. So inflation is above forecast and growth is holding steady. And what that combination argues for is higher rates, not lower. Now, follow me here. One more piece of news and it connects directly to the inflation number, is oil prices fell again this week. Now, that's the third session in a row down. And the reason is worth understanding. The conflict with Iran, it appears to be moving in a different phase. On Monday, the administration laid out an expansion of secondary sanctions. That means penalties are now being aimed at countries and companies that keep doing business with Iran.
So the pressure now is shifting from military action toward economic pressure. And markets have so far taken that as a calming development. So oil came down on that calm. Now, why does this matter to you, sitting at your kitchen table in America? Here's why, because oil isn't just what you put in the tank. Oil is the shipping. It's in the fertilizer. It's in the packaging. It's in the truck that brings us our groceries. So when all oil comes down, it eventually takes some pressure off the prices that we actually pay. And it takes pressure off the Federal Reserve at the same time. And remember, this morning's number came in hot.
And the hot part was the headline number, the one that includes food and energy. Core without food and energy came in right on target. So if the energy stays down, the next reading has a better chance of behaving. So falling oil is the one piece of this week's news that argues against a rate height. And I've watched that as closely as anything else between now and the September meeting. So I'll be watching this closely right along with you. Now, I wanna set up the biggest story of the day. And to do that properly, I have to go back to a number from last week. Last week, the national debt of this country crossed $40 trillion.
It crossed $39 trillion in March, 38 last October, and $1 trillion, which is roughly every five months now. And that debt has to be refinanced constantly. It doesn't just sit there, it doesn't sit still. Bonds come due. New ones get issued so that they can replace the old ones. So the interest rate on government borrowing isn't just an abstract number on a screen. It's the price of a bill that comes around again and again and again. And the United States is now paying somewhere around $1.1 trillion a year just in the interest alone. And that's more than this country. You've heard me say this over and over again, spends on our national defense, which is the entire military, every base, every ship, every paycheck, the interest is bigger.
So interest on the debt now costs more than the United States military. So when the 30 year rate spiked earlier this month to its highest level in about 19 years, that wasn't a technical event. That was the price of the country's largest bill just going up. And that's why the treasury decided to move. Now, was it the right move? Some people disagree. But look at the position that the government is in right now. The government needs lower long-term rates to be able to even afford its debt. And this morning's inflation number argues for higher rates. And those two things cannot be satisfied. So somebody has to lose that argument and the losing side has to get handled somehow.
And that is all the tension that's underneath everything else that I'm going to tell you about today. And it's the situation that the treasury secretary was looking at two weeks ago when he made an announcement. And I think that announcement got reported wrong, almost everywhere. Let me tell you why, because two weeks ago on August the 19th, the treasury department announced a big change. They said that they were going to increase what are called buybacks of long-term government debt. And the market heard that when the market heard this, it actually went straight up, went straight up on it. And what happened to gold?
Gold jumped over 4% in a single day. Bond rates, they came down and the dollar came right down along with it. So every headline you read said the treasury stepped in and you know what, it worked out for them. It actually worked for them by doing that. Now let's talk about Monday the 24th, just the last couple of days ago. Treasury Secretary Scott Beznet held a press conference and it was about Iran's sanctions. That was his major topic. And a reporter asked him out loud about the bond buybacks. And Beznet stated that the regular auction schedule, listen to what I'm saying, I want you all to put this in, because like I said, you don't see what's underneath, you just hear what's on top.
So Beznet stated that the regular auction schedule will continue as normal. And then he added one more thing. Listen to this. He said that they have not bought a single bond yet, not one. So the buyback program that moved the gold price and the bond market has not even purchased anything. It hasn't even started yet. So the first operation, by the way, isn't until September the 10th, which is now two weeks from tomorrow. Now I want to be clear about what I'm saying. And because I'm not saying anybody lied here, nobody lied. The Treasury announced a real plan and they did it on record. They were on record saying this and they actually gave us actual dates.
So now it's now become official on record. Gold now has moved more than 4% in a single day. And then the bond market just moved right along with it. And all of that happened on the announcement before anybody even bought anything. Remember the buying doesn't start till September the 10th. So point I'm making is the markets didn't move on an event. It moved on the expectation of an event that's three weeks out. And that's worth knowing for one reason. If the program doesn't do what people are expecting it to do in September, then that expectation comes back out of the price. Now I'm going to give you the details because you should know what the plan actually is.
And right now the Treasury can buy back up to $2 billion with a B dollars of these bonds per operation. So starting September 9th, that goes to at least $4 billion. $4 billion now, by the way, is a floor. It's not the ceiling, it's just the floor. In other words, they can set it up that way on purpose or they have set it up that way on purpose so that they can go bigger if they really need to. And that arrangement now runs through November the 4th. And the next auction of the 10 year, 20 year and 30 year aren't until mid September. So the whole thing hasn't even been tested yet, not even once. Now here's the part I actually want to teach you because it's the part nobody explains to you.
What is a buyback? It's the government actually going into the market and purchasing back its own bonds. Bonds, it's already issued years ago, they're just going back and purchasing them. And you already know why it is so that they can actually hold these long term rates down. This is why they do it so they can keep these long term rates down. So you're probably wondering, where does the money even come from? And that's an important question because business own people answered it for us this week. The treasury, first of all, the treasury is not the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve can create dollars, the treasury cannot.
So the treasury has to pay for these buybacks with cash that it has or money it actually borrows. And if it borrows, that borrowing has to be short term, or bills instead of bonds. Because if they borrowed long term to buyback, let's say if I got that right, borrowed long term to buyback long term, then they'd be undoing their own work. Makes no sense. The resident himself has a name for this. He calls it a treasury twist, treasury twist. Buy the long dated debt, pay for it, with short term borrowing. I mean, I call that a Ponzi scheme, but anyway, that's what they're calling it, a treasury twist. So let me put it in plain terms.
If you owe money on a 30 year loan and the rate on 30 year money gets expensive, one thing you can do is move that balance onto something shorter, something that costs less right now. Your payment may have got a lot easier for you, but you've not paid off one dollar of it. The balance is exactly where it was from the beginning. What you changed is when it comes to do. And you've made yourself dependent on being able to refinance again sooner at whatever rate exists then. That's the trade, that's the whole trade. So again, a buyback does not reduce the national debt by one dollar. It just changes when the debt comes due.
And there's one more piece to this that came out Monday. CNBC reported citing two senior treasury officials where the money might come from. And there's an account at the Federal Reserve - The financial world. - Treasury general account. That's essentially the federal government's checking account. And it's sitting right now near a trillion dollars. And the reporting is that business could draw on that account to fund the buybacks. Now, using it would mean not having to issue new short term debt to pay for this, but it also means spending down the government's cash on hand. And I'd note something that no one has said officially.
How this actually gets funded? And that question is still opening. Still open. Now, here's the number. I want to give you the number for gold. Gold is up more than 15% so far this month. And there are still three trading days left. So this isn't final yet. But if it holds, that's the best month gold has had since September of 1999. 1999, 27 years ago. And that call comes from United Overseas Bank in Singapore, which is one of the largest banks in Southeast Asia. Now, let me give you the full week on this. On Tuesday, gold traded up to $4,697 an ounce. That's the highest it's been since May 14. And it got within a few dollars of $4,700.
This morning, it eased back around $4,620, depending on the actual minute of the time. And it eased back for a specific reason. Traders were pulling back ahead of that inflation number that I opened up with. So over the past week, gold has now added roughly 7%. And it's put together several weekly gains in a row now. And here's what's behind it. There's three things and they're all connected. One, the dollar has softened, it got weakened. The dollar index is down about 8/10 of a percent this month. Gold is priced in dollars worldwide. So when the dollar softens, it takes more dollars to buy that same ounce. So part of what you see on the gold chart isn't gold moving, it's the dollar moving.
Two, and here's the other one. Number two, long-term interest rates came down after the treasury announcement. So gold pays you no interest, it never has. And that's a real drawback, and I'll always say so. So when rates fall, the cost of choosing gold over a bond gets smaller. And here's number three. The reason we spent 15 minutes on this reason is because the physical picture, the 40 trillion in a debt, is the treasury intervening in its own bond market, which is a war going on in the Middle East. So when those all show up together, some money moves toward things that aren't anybody's promise. And I want to give you the outside voice on this in both directions on Monday, listen to this.
Deutsche Bank told its clients to buy gold on the back of the treasury's intervention. Deutsche Bank, by the way, is not a coin dealer. That's one of the largest banks in Europe. And their reasoning was straightforward. They pointed it to Besnett describing himself as having a large set of tools available. And their read was that more intervention is likely coming, and that's the environment that gold does well in. Now the other side, TD Securities put out a note saying the recent strength in gold may be viable, given that the broader back drop. And there's a specific version of that worth understanding. And let me share this with you.
The war in the Middle East pushes energy prices up. And energy prices push inflation up. And inflation pushes the Federal Reserve toward raising rates and higher rates, as you well know, are bad for the gold price. So the Middle East conflict is not a simple positive for gold. It raises the fear and it also raises the odds of a rate hikes. So gold has two factors, this is the point I'm making here, working on it from the same event in opposite directions. And anybody who tells you war is automatically good for gold, they're not telling you the truth and they haven't thought it through. Now let's talk a little bit about silver.
Silver got up to $70 an ounce last week. And that was a two month high. And then it came off and it's been trading now below 68. But for the month, silver is now up about 17%. 17% in a month, that's more than gold and that's typical. Silver moves harder than gold in both directions, up harder and down harder. And there's two reasons. The silver market is much smaller. So the same money moves the price further. And silver also has this industrial job. It goes into, you well know, solar panels, electronics, vehicles, data centers, all of this type of stuff. So silver responds to the money side and the factory side all at the same time.
So if you own silver, expect a rougher ride than gold and because that's just the nature of the metal, it's not a defect. And one more item most people didn't see. Let's talk about China's net gold imports. So China's net gold imports through Hong Kong rose about 11% from June to July, 11% month over month driven by stronger investment demand. And I mention it because that's the quiet part of this market. The headlines are about traders reacting to press conferences. The imports are about metal physically moving and those are two different things. And the second one is slower and more honest. And there's one more buyer in this market I haven't mentioned today that I've mentioned on the show many times, central banks.
Central banks around the world have been buying gold steadily for years now at a pace this world hasn't seen in a long time. And I want you to think about who those buyers are. Those are the institutions that print the money because that's their job. That's literally what they do. And they're taking the money they print and trading it for metal. Now, why would they do that? Well, consider what a central bank holds in its reserves. It holds other countries' currencies, which are mostly dollars. And it holds government bonds, mostly American ones, which means the typical central bank on the earth is holding a large stack of promises from Washington.
And a few years back, they all watched one country's reserve get frozen over a political dispute. Hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in Western institutions just switched off. Now, whether that freeze was right or wrong is a separate argument and there are real points on both sides, but the effect was the same either way. Every finance minister on the planet learned that dollars sit on somebody else's ledger and gold in your own vault does not. I've always said a dollar is a promise, a bond is a promise, gold is the one reserve asset that isn't somebody else's promise. And that's why they're buying. Now, let me add the piece of silver story that never makes headlines.
The Silver Institute, that's the industry's own accounting not an outside critic publishes a survey every year. And their numbers for this year say the world will use more silver than it produces. And that will be the sixth year in a row, six straight years of the world consuming more silver than it pulls out of the ground. And their estimate for this year is a shortfall of about 46 million ounces. And since 2021, they figure the world has drawn roughly 760 million ounces out of existing storage just to cover those gaps. Now, I want to be careful about what this means because most people oversell it. It doesn't mean silver goes up next week.
Silver hit $121 in January of this year and then it fell all the way back into the 60s. The shortfall didn't stop that for a minute because the price on the screen is set by traders and money flows. The shortfall is a physical thing happening in the warehouses. So those two can point opposite direction for a long time and this year they proved it, they did. So what the shortfall does mean in a narrow and more useful is there is less metal sitting on the shelf than there used to be. And each year there's just a little less. Now that's not a forecast folks. That's the actual inventory. All right, let's talk about the stock market because most of you own some.
And there's research that I want to walk you through from Bank of America. Their investment strategist is a man named Michael Hartnett. And he's been at this for a long time. And here's what he found. On the day the S&P 500 closed at a record high, only 20 of the 500 companies in it hit their own record high. Think about this. And of those 20, only seven were not directly tied to artificial intelligence, seven. So the index set a record, 480 of the companies in it did not. And Hartnett's point is that the same pattern showed up at the top of the internet bubble in March of 2000. No, not a similar pattern, the same pattern.
A market where the average is being carried by just a handful of names. Now, let me give you why this matters to a person listening right now. Because most of you don't own individual stocks. Most of you own a fund. Let me explain. An S&P 500 index fund and a 401K from a job you may have retired from. And the whole idea of that fund, the entire selling point is that you're spread out. You're spread out 500 companies, all different industries, if one goes bad, the other carries you. But here's the problem. Another Bank of America strategist, Jared Woodard. I hope I say this name right, ran the numbers on concentration.
The top five companies in the S&P 500 now make up over 26%. Top five, 26% of the whole index. Five companies more than a quarter of it. And what they call new economy stocks, the technology names are now more than half the total value of the index, a record. So if you've got $400,000 in an S&P index fund, about 100,000 of it is in five companies. And more than half of it is writing on one part of the economy. That's not what most people think they bought. And Woodard ran the math on what the concentration means if it breaks and he figures that if those new economy stocks fell 50% and no, that's smaller than what happened in the .com crash.
The S&P 500 as a whole would fall around 40%. 40%. And I want to say that clearly that's a scenario. That's not a forecast. He's not predicting it. He's showing you the math of the concentration. It's what the structure does under stress and nothing more. Now here's the part I insist on including and I want you to notice that I'm including it. Hartnett actually told his clients to actually get more defensive. And when he laid out what he called the post bubble roadmap going back to 1929, he named long-term bonds and defense sectors and the things that badly underperformed in the last stretch of the run up. He did not say gold.
And I'm telling you that because it's true and because you deserve to hear the research as it was written. And if I only told you the parts that you agree with me, then you shouldn't trust anything else that I say. And let me tell you, two more voices and then I'm going to move on. Jim Kramer brings the bell, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, Jim Kramer made the same comparison from a different direction. And what he did was he pointed to money circulating between artificial intelligent companies and companies financing their own customer's purchases. And what he did was he compared it to the late '90s when telecom equipment makers helped customers finance big orders, which effectively meant they were creating demand for their own products.
And now for the other side, because there's a serious other side, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are both still positive on this market. Citigroup actually raised its year-end target for the S&P 500 to 8100 citing a significant jump and earnings expectations. So you've got major firms looking at the same market and coming to opposite conclusions. Now, well, that's not unusual, that's just normal, but it's worth saying out loud when everything or everyone around you sounds certain. Now, here's one from Monday that, and this one is current, Mark Holbert writes for MarketWatch. He's been tracking market forecasters now for decades.
And that's actually his specialty by keeping score on who's actually right. And Monday, he published a piece laying out nine different measures of stock market value. And almost nine, all nine are saying the same thing, not that the market is overvalued, that it's extremely overvalued. And I wanna explain why he used nine because his reasoning is really smart. When you point at any single measure, somebody can find a reason it doesn't apply, or say apply this time. And there's always a theory about why this one's broken or why conditions changed. And that gets a lot harder when nine separate measures build on nine different ideas.
All are planning in the same direction. Now, the one with the best track record, and this is the one I want you to remember, it's not a chart of prices, it's not earnings, it's the average American's household stock allocation. How much of the typical family's money is actually in the stock market? And the reason it works is simple. Regular families are late, they come in at the end. When things have been going well for years and then people get comfortable and put more in. When things have been terrible, they pull out and usually right at the bottom. So household allocations right now is the highest at the tops and lowest at the bottoms.
And right now, it's very close to an all time high. So the measure with the best track records as American families have more of their money in stocks than almost ever before. And a lot of you have lived through this twice already and you know what it sounded like at church in 1999 and you know what it sounded like in 2006. And I want to add something about that indicator because it's easy to hear it wrong. This is not a knock on regular people and it isn't about anybody being foolish, it's about timing and the timing is structural. And a family puts more into the market after they've watched it do well for a few years, that's rational, that's how people learn.
And a family pulls money out after they watched it fall because they can't take another year of it. Also rational, also human, which means the average household is always a little behind the turn, though no fault of anyone at all. And that's exactly why this measure works. So when I say household allocation is near a record, I'm not telling you your neighbors are fools, I'm telling you where we are in the cycle of how people feel right now. And here's why I respect this column. Holbert admits the problem with his own argument. He says right in the piece that this indicator has been in overvalued territory for several years and that the market went up anyway for years.
And he doesn't hide that, he just puts it in writing. And then he makes the argument that I want you to think about. He says, if the bulls are right, if these historical measures really have stopped working, then nobody has any idea which way the market goes from here. And we'd be in territory with no map, no map in this territory. And if that's true, then the odds of doing well are no better than chance. And he asked whether that's still investing. And I'll leave that question where he left it. He asked it better than I could even do it. All right, we got 1244. Let's look at the calendar. Friday, this coming Friday, Kevin Walsh is gonna give his first major speech as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
And for some of you that name may be new, so let me catch you up. Jerome Powell is out, Kevin Walsh is in. And the Senate confirmed him, what, 54 to 45? And that's the narrowest confirmation for that job in the history of this country. I wonder why. So he came into the position with the divided Senate behind him. That's the point I'm making here. Friday, he speaks to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And that's the annual gathering where central bankers from around the world come together. I'm sure they do some partying. It's not a policy meeting, nothing gets voted on, but the markets move on whatever gets said. In fact, they're already talking about it.
And the next actual Federal Reserve meeting is about three weeks later. Now, here's what makes Friday different from every Jackson Hole speech you've heard about before. For most of the last 30 years, the Federal Reserve told you what it's going to do before it even did it. And they called it forward guidance. And the idea was that surprises are expensive, so they don't want to warn everybody, so they warn everybody instead of surprising them. Walsh has a different view on it. He doesn't do that. Under the chairman, the Fed has stopped telegraphing its moves ahead of meetings. He said he wants his speech to be about the larger questions, not the quarter point argument.
And he said the Fed is not bound by what the markets have priced in. And he's also set up five internal reviews of how the Federal Reserve operates. One of them is how and how the Fed communicates. So we may be watching the communications policy actually change in real time. And let me give you the room that he's going to be walking into. At the July meeting, the vote was nine to three to leave the rates alone. And three members dissented. And they dissented in favor of raising rates immediately, not cutting, but raising. Beth Hammack, Neil Kasakari, and Lori Logan. Three people in that room wanted the rates higher right then.
And out in the market, traders have been pricing roughly a 38% chance of a rate increase at the September meeting. You can call that better than one in three. And I want you to sit with right now, the conversation in this country is now about whether rates are going to go up, not down. I want you to sit with that because it's a change most people haven't even absorbed. For years, every question was, when do we get cuts? Well, this morning's inflation number doesn't help the case for cuts. So what do you listen for Friday? Not a forecast, he may not give one, the forecasters are wrong constantly anyway. But here's what I listen for, three things.
One, does he address the government's borrowing cost at all? Two, which way is the worry pointed? In other words, prices or jobs that tells you which way he's leaning which he has to pick. And three, watch the day after, not the hour after. The first hour is just the traders reacting to the headlines. The next day is when people have to read it. And I'll cover all of that on Sunday's show. All right, it's time for the word. This is word number eight, and there's one more coming on Sunday's show, and that's the last one. And the drawing is then next week. So if you've been collecting these, you need to know today's and you need Sundays, and then you're done.
The word number eight is trust. T-R-U-S-T, and I picked that word because everything we just spent an hour on. Not because it's a nice word, but because it's the actual subject of today's news. And think about what we covered. The Federal Reserve has a target of 2%. This Monning's number was 3.7. There's a Treasury Department that's always operated on being regular and predictable. That was the deal with lenders. And this month, it made a surprise announcement outside of the normal channel. There's also a new chairman on the Federal Reserve who's decided he's not gonna tell markets what he's planning. And there's a family with money and an index fund believing they own 500 companies.
When a quarter of it sits in five. Every one of those is a trust question, not a math question, but a trust question. And here's what I actually wanted to say about that word. Trust is not the same thing as belief. Belief is what you feel, trust is what we actually act on. And the difference between those two is verification. You can trust a man and still count the change. Those aren't conflict. My father did both his whole life. In fact, the people I've known who trusted best were the ones who checked because they weren't guessing. They knew. And that's the frame of mind I'd want you in for the rest of this year.
Not suspicious, not angry, not looking for conspiracy under everything, just checking. Read your statements. Ask what the fee is and ask what you actually own. And ask what happens to this if the dollar buys less than 10 years than it does today. Those, folks, those aren't hostile questions. Those are questions of somebody who intends to be responsible. And I'll say one more thing about trust. And then I'll move on. The reason trust matters and money is that almost everything you own is somebody's promise. A dollar's a promise. A bond is a promise. A pension is a promise. A CD is a bank's promise. And now most of those promises, they get kept, most of them.
I'm not telling you otherwise. But every one of them depends on somebody else doing what they said. And there's one thing on this earth that isn't a promise from anybody. It's a piece of metal that has to be dug out of the ground and can't be created by a keystroke. That's the entire argument. And it's not more complicated than that. Word number eight is trust. And then I'll give you one more on Sunday. I don't think I have time to do these metal pieces. Let me see if I can pull one here. This is a good one. Actually, I don't think I'm going to have time. So I'm going to go on. So first of all, let me just tell you, heritage goal partners.
I decided to do this. And this is for you out there that just found this show today. I spent over 40 years in the financial business. And 28 of them are in precious metals. And for a long stretch of that, I actually worked inside of the bigger companies as consultant, so on. And I'll tell you plainly why I left. In a big shop, there's a sales floor. There's a manager over the floor. There's a manager over the managers. There's a marketing budget. There's an office lease. On and on and on, I could go. And all of that gets paid before you do. In other words, it gets paid out of the price on your points. So I decided I'd go out on my own.
And I started heritage goal partners. Heritage is me. That's the entire company, one person. So when you call, if you call, you get me, not a receptionist, not some rep who started three weeks ago and is reading off of a screen, you get me. And because there's no floor and no managers and no marketing partner, apartment, I'm sorry, I can charge or I do charge some of the lowest prices in the industry. And I still keep my lights on. That's not a slogan. That's just the math of one person, me doing the work. So here's what I'd like you to do. If you've got a 401K sitting at an old employer or an IRA somewhere and you've been wondering whether part of it, what part of it belongs to the real market, give me a call and I'll personally walk you through the entire process of starting a gold IRA, the whole thing, what it costs, how long it takes, what the actual rules are and what can go wrong.
And if at the end of the conversation you decide it isn't for you, no problem, that's a fine outcome. And I've told people, believe me, I've told people they can't do this. I've told them and I'll do it again this week probably. There's also a kit that I put together. It's free, it's called the gold IRA. And I wrote it and I explained it honestly. And every fee is printed in plain numbers, every rule in plain English, including the parts that don't flatter gold. So if a company won't show you how its fees are before you call, then you already know what kind of company that is. My number you can reach me at is 833-577-4653, that's 833-577 gold, one phone call, one person, you got me.
Well, that's the hour. Inflation came in at 3.7 this morning against a 2% target. A bond market that moved markets around the world hasn't bought a bond yet. Gold is having its best month since 1999. A record high in the stock market that 480 companies weren't part of. And a new Fed chairman who's gonna speak out this Friday who has decided not to tell us what he's even thinking about. And word number eight, again, is trust. One more on Sunday that I'll be reading out. The drawing's gonna be next Wednesday. It's 40 ounces of silver, that's two rolls of silver. You know, I wanna say something that's on my mind as I've been talking and this has been playing on the other side of my subconscious mind.
Is a good friend of mine, Ron, who has been on this platform for a long, long time with Clyde Lewis. I don't even know if he's alive as I'm speaking right now because he's unresponsive. And everybody thought Clyde was gonna go before Ron. Oh, Ron, cancer metastasized. It got in his stomach cancer and then it just went throughout his body. There's publishing now on the Ground Zero website. You can go and pay your dedications to him as well. I just wanna say, you know, to his family and everyone out there, you know, God bless you all. Ron's just going to a better place now. And he even said it. He was speaking to someone that, the producer of the show that I'm, I talked to him on a regular basis and he even told him just the last few days ago that he's ready, he's ready to meet his maker and that he's made his peace and he knows where he's going.
And you should too. God is great. Let me just tell you. There's a mighty God out there. I want you all to just say a prayer for Ron and his family. That's why I wanted to mention this and take care of yourselves. Take care of your family. God bless you. God bless your family and God bless America. And I will be right back here on Sunday to give out the last word and then we'll draw the name on Wednesday. And one lucky winner is gonna win 40 ounces of American Eagle's silver 0.999. And look, silver went up to over $100 an ounce. Can it do it again? That's your answer. I'll see you this Sunday. Take care. God bless you.