Episode 320: Skyrocketing Gold prices: geopolitical risks and trends

Due to popular requests, we are re-releasing this episode, where Dominic Bowen and Dr. Moshe Lander discuss the recent spike in gold prices, the opportunities, and international risks. 

Find out more about what pushes gold trends, from uncertain geopolitical trends to Trump’s threats on tariffs, and an overall mistrust in governments and institutions worldwide. The conversation also addresses the psychological aspect of the trust in gold as a secure investment coming from humanity’s social and economic history, and central banks’ reserves, although Dominic and Moshe examine the risks of such high trust in limited goods whose value depends on demand and decision-makers. 

Dr. Moshe Lander is a Canadian economist and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Concordia University, where he has taught since 2013, and a sessional instructor at Dalhousie University. Before joining academia full-time, he served as Senior Economist with the Government of Alberta from 2003 to 2007. His fields of expertise include public economics, international trade and finance, economic policy, and the economics of sports, gaming, and gambling. Beyond academia, Dr. Lander is a well-known media commentator who frequently appears across Canadian television, radio, print, and online platforms to discuss economic, business, and policy developments. Renowned for his engaging and accessible style, he has been recognized multiple times as Concordia’s Newsmaker of the Month, most recently in March 2025, for his sharp analysis of issues such as anti-tariff campaigns and the fiscal impact of carbon tax reforms.

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Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.

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Transcript

00:0.00 Quote Moshe Lander: Once everybody’s seen that ‘ hey, free trade is not THE way to do things but ONE way to do things, then who’s to say that the system doesn’t collapse? And how it connects to gold: people are gonna look for something that’s portable, that they can move with them, and money is not that.”

00:0.18s: Elisa Garbil: Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.

00:0.25s: Dominic Bowen: Hi, I'm Dominic Bowen, and I'm host of the International Risk podcast. As central banks from China to Turkey double down on their purchases, and some investors are fleeing volatile equity and bond markets, we have to ask the question: “Is this the new normal, or the early stages of yet another bubble?” To unpack these international risks, the economics, the psychology, and the policy forces behind Gold's Rise, we're joined by Dr. Moshe Lander. He's a senior lecturer in economics at Concordia University. Dr. Moshe, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.

00:57: Moshe Lander: Hello.

00:58 So, where in the world do we find you today?

01:00 Moshe Lander: Actually, today I'm in Montreal, which is in Quebec, Canada. Had you caught me at some other point, I could have been in Calgary, which is at the other end of the country, out in the Rocky Mountains or the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. And so, I'm kind of one of those people who, back in the day in the 1980s, when we would see like professional wrestling on television, you'd always have these like masked Lucha Libre guys that would come out, and they would always be introduced as like from parts unknown. So whenever people say, where are you from? I just say, from “parts unknown”, because I'm so busy moving around Canada that as long as you say Canada, we're good.

01:29: Dominic Bowen: Good. Well, it's a big country and a very beautiful country indeed. And this year we've really seen, I mean, for the last couple of years, actually, I think gold's doubled in price. And the central bank demand for gold has, has increased past 1,000 tonnes last year, which again is another record-breaking amount since records began. So I'm wondering, is this a rational hedge against the currency weaponization we've seen? And not just since the Trump tariffs, but currency weaponization has been increasing more and more of the last few years. And of course, geopolitical fragmentation also feeds in. Or are we watching the formulation of some sort of speculative feedback loop that's driven by people's fears?

02:08. Moshe Lander: I think it could be a little bit of both. But if you look at the longer trend, go back maybe 20 years, i think in Canadian dollars, not American dollar terms, but you know the Canadian dollar return over 20 years is about 1,000%. Gold prices now in Canadian dollar terms are nine times higher than they were 20 years ago. So I think we could probably make the argument that, especially since the turn of the century. We could start with the “dot-com boom” and then the collapse, September 11th, housing market collapse in this part of the world, the COVID, and Trump's first and second term have been just one continuous run of uncertainty. So I think that part of this is the hedge, but part of this is maybe that there's a long-term trend here, which is that gold has always been the safest asset out there. And so maybe it's a little bit of both of what you're seeing.

02:56: Dominic Bowen:  Yeah, it often is the answer to many of my questions. It's a little bit of both. But we know that gold has been that symbol of wealth and power for millennia. And of course, you know we see the pharaoh tombs, and you know so many chalices in old movies. It always seems to be made of gold. This isn't something that's brand new. But when digital currencies and artificial intelligence are just dominating the headlines, why do you think that gold still holds such a powerful place in global finance today?

03:23: Moshe Lander: I think that you actually hit on it. It's that it has that historical importance. It's something that for centuries has been the safest place to park your money in. And so, when you were talking about the movie aspect, I always think of Fort Knox and the ceiling-high ingots of gold, and it's the way that you project your wealth. And so I think because it has multiple uses, it can be used in the healthcare sector. It's used in electronics. It's used in the tech sector. Central banks, for centuries, have been using that as a way to store their wealth. I think that people have learned that as well. And, you know, you can even go into just modern pop culture, right? The idea of the gold grill in your mouth, right, has shown that, hey, I have a status symbol here. So, when you're looking at AI, when you're looking at cryptocurrencies, those things are not tangible. And so, because they're not tangible, sometimes when people hit the panic button, they want something that they can see. And even paper money is something you can see and touch, but it's only valuable because the government says it's valuable. But gold is valuable because it's valuable, and you don't need any government to convince you of it.

04:25: Dominic Bowen:  And I just want to push back on one of the points you made, Moshe, in case any of our listeners are under the age of 18, and that's that gold grills are statuses of wealth and success. They're not. Don't go and do it. I've noticed it in Stockholm, there seems to be an increasing amount of teenage boys with gold and silver grills in their mouths, which... Is concerning me a great deal. But as we said at the start, gold continues to reach record highs. And there are so many potential reasons, the geopolitical tension, central banks, and investor sentiment. You know, what do you see as the main forces driving this, this rising gold?

04:58: Moshe Lander:  Yeah, I really do think that it's geopolitical instability. So, whether we're talking about Israel or Ukraine or just Trump's randomness, you know, all of the tariff talk in the last eight months is something that Canada and the US, at least, have not seen for 60 years. I think that listeners in Europe would be familiar with the idea that Canada, the US, and Mexico have a free trade agreement by whatever name they know it. But we go back even further, the US and Canada had a free trade agreement since the 1980s. And before that, we had the Auto Pact, which was similar to the early days of the European Union. When you go back 70 years, and the six countries were forming a free trade, I think it was around coal, Canada, and the US were forming free trade around cars. And so you know, a lot of the movement over the last 100 years has been towards freer trade. Brexit is the exception. It's not the rule. And when you see a president of the largest economy in the world coming in and saying, “ I want to take everybody back 40 years, 70 years, 100 years, and I'm going to use trade as a weapon”, I don't think there are a lot of people alive who know what that looks like. And so even your shrewd investors are going to say, I'm not fully equipped with how to deal with this. And so gold is the natural hedge then. And so we've seen that and other traditional currencies, the Swiss franc and things like that, where people race to, again, just because of history.

06:17: Dominic Bowen: And you mentioned before about the value of gold. And more and more people, you hear people arguing that digital currency today has value. And you know, you hear digital currency referred to nowadays as the digital gold, but.. I think digital currency has been much more volatile, and whilst there are clearly uses for digital currency and more and more central banks are moving towards it, and there's now stable coins i'm still wondering, I'm not convinced, Moshe. Is the comparison between gold as a standard digital currency a fair one, or do you see that the two are just not like-for-like?

06:48: Moshe Lander: No, they're not like-for-like. I'm very skeptical about digital currencies. You know If you want to talk about what money is for, the first and foremost is that it's a medium of exchange. I can take that thing called money, and I can acquire goods and services with it. So here in Canada, where there are only 40 million of us, and we're right next to the US, the long accusation has been that Canada has “monopoly money”. Our money has color on it. It has pictures and things like that. So when Americans have had just that traditional unicolor money. When they see Canadian money, they say, well, what are you doing, playing a game up there? But the basic point is that Canadian money... is a medium of exchange in Canada, but nowhere else, cryptocurrencies have a problem in that I can't go into the local coffee shop and buy a coffee with crypto or whatever crypto. And so its time has not yet come. Money should be a store of value. It's not a great store of value, but it should be somewhat protective against inflation. I always say to my students that if I take a $10 bill and I put it under my mattress, when I come back in a year, it's still a $10 bill. It hasn't turned into a butterfly or hasn't turned into a $5 bill. Cryptocurrency doesn't offer that store of value because of its volatility, and it is more volatile than gold. Gold itself is volatile. We saw a few years ago that it was crashing through the floor, but over long periods of time, it delivers a much better return. So I think cryptocurrency is slightly different, even though they try to dress it up the same way. We talk about mining for currency in that sector, the way that we would mine for gold, but it's not a ah valid comparison yet.

08:12: Dominic Bowen: So, you left that one open for a really obvious question there with the “yet”, do you think that as we start to reconsider finance and equity markets and different stores of value, that digital currency is moving in that direction, or could move in that direction?

08:26 Moshe Lander: It is. You know, I was doing a radio interview yesterday, and we were talking about when the “dot com” crash happened, and what some of the motivators behind it. And one of the things that I was saying was that if you were alive then, everybody was talking about how the Internet was going to change the world. But at that particular moment, nobody really knew what to use the internet for. You knew you needed a web page, but they were very, very primitive. You knew that the internet was going to help you find things, but there wasn't the supply of information that we have now. And certainly the phones weren't designed in the way that we now have basically, the entirety of human history in our back pocket. But now the internet has changed the world. So, you know, it takes a little bit of time for it to find its natural way. The other comment that I had made was, you know, back in the 80s, my father was one of the first people in my hometown to have a car phone. He had to take his car into the shop for the day, have it anchored into the passenger side floor. And then, you know, that six-foot aerial antenna off the back. Nobody could have predicted that the car phone would turn into what we have now. So I think these two ideas together, when it comes to crypto, are still in that car phone stage, where it's not going to maybe be what we think it's going to be. And we know that it's going to change things, but it hasn't reached that point where it's actually come into play, where it's going to be effective. And so you mentioned central banks. I agree that central banks realize that, hey, its day is coming. And so they're looking to try and lay the groundwork for now. But the other aspect is they might be looking to try to lay the train tracks so that the train goes in the direction they want, rather than just letting it go off in all directions. And a little bit of guidance might help move that along faster as well.

09:59: Dominic Bowen: And you talked about the dot-com crash just before. Investors often call gold a “safe haven”. Is that a term that you like? Do you think that's ah a reasonable term? And if we look over the last couple of decades, ah certainly since Nixon's removal of the gold standard, how does gold compare to other assets like equities, bonds, real estate during times of uncertainty?

10:19: Moshe Lander: So, it's a volatile asset as well. It can move 10 to 15% fairly easily in short timeframes. So if you're looking to merely just jump in, cash out, and move, you’ve got to have a real stomach for it, and you got to be able to time the market extremely well to do it. I'm not an investment advisor, so I wouldn't even be able to tell you that, hey, hold on to it until January, and that's when it's going to top out. But if you're in it for the long haul, it does deliver a great return. The thing is that with gold, it is a physical commodity. And so it requires storage. And if you're going to hold it in large enough numbers to actually make legitimate money, you need to worry about security as well. And so, you know, there's a reason why Fort Knox is Fort Knox. I think that for the investor who's looking to make a killing, the amount of gold that you would need is sizable enough that you're probably better off just looking at companies that are in the mining and extraction of gold rather than the physical asset itself. But hey, if you're just looking to make a few hundred bucks here or there and you have a little bit of time for some fun, hey, it's a great roller coaster ride, but you just got to have the stomach for it. Not everybody does. I certainly don't. And so my limitation is merely just as part of a portfolio rather than ‘this is the place that I'm looking to park my money because I'm scared about what 2026 is going to look like’.

11:32: Dominic Bowen: Yeah, I think being scared about 2026 is a valid concern, but we'll come back to that one in a little bit later. And I'll take the opportunity to remind our listeners that our podcasts are now available on YouTube. So if you prefer to watch our content instead of just listening to it, you can also find us on YouTube. So search for the International Risk Podcast, and you'll find us there. But you can always continue to listen to us on your favourite audio platform like iTunes and Spotify. But you started to mention, Moshe, investments. And I wonder from a portfolio construction point of view, how does gold fit into that? Where should we be looking at it? Is it, as you said, something that you buy a few small coins or gold chips and keep them locked up in your basement? Or is it something that should be just used as a hedge? Or do you see it as a speculative bet? I mean, how should people be interpreting and looking at gold when they look at it as a commodity?

12:20: Moshe Lander: Well, I think if they're going to look at it as a hedge, then that's fairly easy. When you start to see the world melt down around you, you quickly go grab gold. The hard point then is what's the exit strategy? At what point do you feel that the world has become safe enough that you can cash out on gold because you're worried about the subsequent crash that's going to follow behind it? I think the other aspect is that if you're looking to invest, whether it's in the physical commodity or the companies themselves, what's your time horizon? You know, retirees who are looking to buy a couple of Krugerrands, that's not a good investment because your retirement is probably some sort of fixed date where you know when you want out. And if you're hoping that on that particular day or in that particular year, gold is going to reach a certain level that offers you enough peace of mind that you can walk away from your job for life. I don't think that's it. But hey, if you're a kid, you got a little bit of money from mom and dad for the holidays or for your birthday, and you want to take a little bit of a speculation, the good news is that gold, because it delivers that long-term return, it's, if nothing else, going to adjust with inflation. And so as prices rise, the price of gold is going to rise. So in that sense, it's a good return. Normally, I would say stick your money in a government bond if you don't want any risk whatsoever, but I'm not even sure that government bonds these days are 100% safe. At what point is Donald Trump going to say, you know, I want to renegotiate the American debt or I want to forfeit a few payments here and there. What are you going to do about it? And if that Pandora’s box is open, then there's lots of room for other countries to go down that path. The thing with gold, again, is that it's always going to be gold. And what makes it an attractive metal it doesn't tarnish, it doesn't deteriorate, it doesn't break down into parts. And so that purity of gold is something that you can ride through.

13:57: Dominic Bowen: It's a really valid point you raise about the unpredictable nature of Donald Trump. I mean, certainly his second term, he has carried through with most of his promises. Many people have disagreed with the speed, velocity, or the nature of the way he's carried them out. But he's largely carried out what he said he would. But there is still a lot of unpredictability there. And whether he decides to try and restructure US debt, and then how he does that, and the impact on bonds and treasuries, is certainly concerning. These growing vulnerabilities from trade wars that we're seeing, geopolitical tensions, and high government deficits. So you can see how the um IMF came up with that information. And they talk about, in particular, US equities being well above their fundamental values. And I think this does raise the chances of a really sharp sell-off if you're if negative shocks occur, but we just see so many negative shocks occur. We saw in April what I think Trump called the liberation day, and we saw the market drop 20 to 30 percent, but then it rebounded so quickly. So I wonder, when you see these cycles, and we know that when we look at history, and we try and connect it with forced forecasting, and we look at macroeconomic cycles, we can see that booms often end with corrections, both for gold and stocks. But when you look at the world right now, and particularly when we're looking at gold, what do you see as the biggest risks?

15:09: Moshe Lander: Well, right now, I think when we talk about the cyclicality of an economy, other than, say, the 1970s, better part of 100 years, most of those cycles were being driven by the demand side, right? Alan Greenspan talked about “ irrational exuberance”, right? So businesses may lose their minds a little bit, and the valuations get a little too, too hot. Consumers get a little too spendthrift and forget how to save money. And even governments can go on a bit of a spending spree at times. But the last five years have been characterized by mostly supply-side disruptions, right? COVID was the ultimate supply-side disruption, where these long supply chains that we had spent 30 years building since the Japanese arrived with their just-in-time inventory methods were now being called into question. And how many countries were saying, “If we ever face another pandemic, we should be onshoring as much of our supply chain as possible”?. So now, when you have Trump coming along, who's creating essentially a man-made supply chain concern, where he's saying, if you're not building it in the U.S., then I'm going to tear a few, or I want to bring all of these jobs back. Again, the conversation is, “Should we be reducing our reliance on the US economy”? There aren't a lot of people out there who have that experience. The 1970s OPEC oil shocks were really the supply chain disruptor. But if you were around and actively involved, let's say you were in your early twenties, so you were just breaking into the business, you're now in your 70s. So if you're not already retired, you're certainly one foot out the door. I don't know that there are a lot of people around today who have that experience. So, beyond just the supply chain disruption itself is a potential issue, it's the lack of institutional knowledge of how to deal with it. I'm reminded of Ben Bernanke, the former head of the Fed. I believe his PhD dissertation was somehow connected to the mistakes made during the depression, and how it took a bad situation and made it substantially worse. He was the right person at the right time to be in charge of the central bank when economies are melting down around him. And he says, hey, I know how to make a bad situation into a good situation rather than make it something worse. I think that we don't really have those people right now in the key positions of power to try and know how to withstand the global headwinds that are all coming together right now. 

17:17: Dominic Bowen: So, if you were advising policy advisors, if you had a room full of policy advisors from different Western, Middle Eastern, and Eastern governments in front of you, what would your advice to them be? 

17:26: Moshe Lander: Well, the first thing is move towards more free trade, not less. This is not the time to pull up the drawbridge. I was an ardent anti-Brexiteer. I thought that was going to, to shoot the UK in its own foot. But you know, the EU project is incomplete. I think that right now the fear among many policymakers is that they're not being drawn into that more right-wing than we're used to seeing, a much more pro-nationalist, anti-trade, and suspicious of immigration. Look, you don't necessarily have to go all the way back and pull the drawbridge up, but at least put a couple of guards at the drawbridge, then if you're not prepared to go full out into the world. I think that more free trade allows for a little bit of that insulation, to absorb shocks that, if they are coming from outside, you know, there's strength in numbers there. So that would be kind of first and foremost. Beyond that, I think a lot of governments these days are finding that balancing their budgets is an increasing problem. How many French governments have fallen, not just in the last 18 months, but in the last 50 years? We see a French president or prime minister say that we need to address our budgetary issues. Everybody cheers. They vote for the person. Then they go to make changes. And then there are protests in the streets that break the government. And France is not unique there, but they're the ones that have the headlines these days. Governments better figure out how they're going to balance a demographic time bomb that's waiting for them and all of the promises that they made. Scandinavian countries had their crisis, maybe in the 80s and 90s, and had to deal with that. But those were much smaller economies with much smaller populations. But there's maybe a lesson to be learned there that I would say, all right, let's start with this as a case study and start working our way out into larger and larger countries.

19:02: Dominic Bowen: It’s interesting, you mentioned Scandinavia, and at the start of your response, you actually mentioned being a proponent of free trade. I'm currently doing some work for a large energy company in Europe, and I've got to say I am so impressed. I spent a few days with them teaching me how their business works and the markets of how energy is shared. So if wind turbines in Germany are producing extra electricity, it means lower costs. And if Poland's energy prices are spiking, well, then they can offset that by buying German energy. And this occurs not just on a month-by-month basis. This actually occurs every day. Every day at lunchtime, they buy and sell the energy. And then once that's bought and sold, there's still obviously redundant energy that appears the next day. So they can buy it on a 15-minute interval. If there's a country that's connected to another country. They can buy energy, and it means all of Europe gets lower energy prices. It's such a fantastic system. I'm just so very, very impressed. I think the EU should be doing a better job of advising its citizens about this is what has been created. You don't see it. We just turned the light on. But the electricity is maybe coming from Poland. It could be coming from Sweden, Norway, or Germany. um And the connections here are absolutely fantastic. I've been really, really impressed by that connectivity.

20:09: Moshe Lander: I think that you'll find that, you know, in a lot of cases where we've seen famine and like real breakouts of war, it's usually because of the lack of connectivity, right? So when a drought hits one country, usually what they do is they start blocking the exports of food products, figuring, well, this will save us. In fact, it makes it worse. There's nothing wrong with importing food from other countries. I always say that we understand on a very micro level the importance of trade. I mean, unless you're living in the backwoods somewhere where you built your house with your own hands, and you kill your own animals for food and clothing, we're all reliant on somebody for something. And we really never ask questions like, did that coffee shop really need to charge me that much money? We just buy it, and we might grumble, but we go back there day after day and continue to do it. We go to the grocery store to get our food. We go to the clothing stores. And we trade with each other. You know my neighbor says, “Hey, can I borrow a couple of chairs? I'm having some friends over”. “That's fine”. I can go across the street the next day and say, “Hey, can I borrow a cup of sugar? I'm trying to make a cake for my spouse's birthday”. Those are the types of things that we understand that trade is good, and we never question it. But the moment we start putting labels on people, like I say, you know, hey, if I called you North Korea and you called me China, all of a sudden, then we start saying, well, that's different. It's not different. It's our geopolitical mind. It's our psychological mind that interferes with our economic mind. And if we took maybe a little bit more of an approach to whether it's energy or just any other commodity out there, that's the type of thing that acts as an insulator. And it's the same way; if you're married, your spouse is there to some extent to help give you a lift when you're feeling down and to help you stay grounded when you get a little too high. And you're offering the same thing back in return. When you say, I do, what you're really saying is I do to a free trade agreement. among each other. If you approach it like that, I think that's one of those things that it does extend to the macro level. It's just that somehow we look at foreigners more suspiciously and think that there's an ulterior motive. They just want a better.

22:02: Dominic Bowen: It's fantastic. I love that analogy. I actually heard a couple. They have a relationship podcast, and they talked about how when they come home from work, they ask each other how they're going. But one of the first questions they ask is what number do they assign to each other's feelings? And if one says, oh, look, I'm rocking. I'm feeling like a nine. And the other one, oh, that's good. I'm feeling like a four. And they just know, well, I need to use my number to boost you up. And if they both go, I'm a three today. Oh, gosh, I'm a four. Okay, then you're both in a rough spot. Be gentle with each other tonight. And I thought that was such a fun way. And of course, know some of our listeners might be thinking, well, that's very clinical. Yeah, maybe it is. But it was a great way, I thought, of just balancing each other out or recognizing tonight we can't balance each other out. We just need to be gentle with each other. I think it's a great way if we could take that to our geopolitical level as well. Wouldn't it be a nice system we're working in?

22:43: Moshe Lander: Absolutely.

22:44:  Dominic Bowen: We look at emerging markets, and the share of gold reserves that's been held by emerging market central banks has climbed from, I think it was about 12% in 2010 to about 30% today. There's a lot of talk about de-dollarization and moving power out of the US dollar. Do you think this is de-dollarization by stealth, or do you think it's signaling something else about the changing architecture of global finance and trade?

23:08: Moshe Lander: Well, I'll go back to an earlier answer, and I'll say that maybe it's a bit of both. The US is maybe no longer as trustworthy, and that's in a variety of areas, right? So we've seen that geopolitically, maybe they can't be as trusted. They were the traditional global police officer. And here in Canada, we used to see ourselves as the global peace officers. So you go fight the war and make everybody shake hands, and then we'll come in and ah bring in the blue helmets with the UN and and and hold everybody to account. But I think that it's not just a Trump thing. I think this has been going on, maybe for 30, 40 years now, that successive presidents have decided that they're going to abstain from foreign affairs, or it's not going to be the legacy on which they want their presidency built. And so as the U.S. has disappeared, that vacuum is being created that, well, who's going to be then the global police officer? China has said we're willing to do it, but I think a lot of countries are suspicious of it. And so the idea then is that if you can't really trust the U.S., why do you want to hold their currency then? What exactly makes them the global currency that they have traditionally been since, say, the Second World War, give or take? So holding gold then would be the natural way to insulate against that. But I think part of it, too, is that as economic growth happens, as these emerging markets start to move into more mature markets, they're going to follow the path of their predecessors, which was to hold gold as a way to insulate themselves or to protect themselves. And so if we look at Switzerland or the US, you know, huge traditional holders of gold, emerging markets are going to say, well, if we want a spot at the big table, that's what we need to do as well. And so they're stepping up their game. I think maybe a third aspect is maybe a little bit more of the diversity in gold extraction. You know. Who are the big extractors of gold? Canada, I think, is the fourth largest one in the world. Russia and China are up there. And so 50 years ago, gold would have been much more concentrated in terms of where it was coming out of the ground. And so as more and more countries are getting into the gold game, that gives these emerging countries then, or emerging market countries, more opportunity to get gold and to make those links beyond just gold acquisition, but maybe signaling to other countries that, hey, we're here and maybe there's other things you want to talk about, whether it's security or trade or other forms of economic interactions.

25:13: Dominic Bowen: And I know academics love doing forecasting and predicting the future. But if you were to look forward a decade ahead to 2035, what do you think gold's role will be? And how much do you think of the current market systems that are in place today will still be in place then?

25:24: Moshe Lander: I don't know that it's going to change substantially. I think that we're going to see the gold price continue to rise. If you told me, if YOU told me, not if I told you, but that it's going to be, say, $10,000 10 years from now, I don't think that I would blink. It's not that... You know, that's the number I would go with. It's just that the number sounds as good as anything else. I think that we're going to continue to see volatility. And I know that there are a lot of people out there that are saying, we just got to survive 1100 more days, and then Trump is gone. I'm not taking that approach because I think that his legacy will be a lot longer-lasting than just a two-term presidency. Once you decide that you can use trade and tariffs as a weapon, who's to say that a Democrat president in 2028 wouldn't use that as well? Maybe they decide to target Europe and say, you know what? I don't like the position you're taking on labor standards or on the environment, or I don't like the fact that you're not trying to bring in Eastern European countries into the EU. They can pick any issue that is important to them and say, we're going to use tariffs to correct the imbalances that we think are important to us. So, you know, once everybody has seen that, hey, free trade was ONE way to do things not THE way to do things then who's to say that this system doesn't collapse and in canada our big fear these days is that that north american free trade agreement is up for review in 2026 and it's part of the reason why i think that canada and the US haven't been able to settle their their differences over the last eight months. Who's to say that trump's gonna say “you know what I don't like a free trade agreement it's the one topic i've been consistent on for 40 years in the public eye going back to my days as a property developer, I'm just going to rip the whole thing up and walk away”. ah If the UK can leave the EU and if the US can leave a North American free trade agreement, then smaller countries are going to say, “well, if they can do it, I can do it”. And that's where I think then that we're going to have maybe a much longer time period of global uncertainty, and then add to it just the normal sorts of uncertain things that are going on as the population gets larger, climate change, geopolitical instability, the battle for who will be the global leader, whether it's China or the US. In the past, these things have been settled through war or proxy wars, whether it was the USSR against the US or whether it was Europe in the Second and First World Wars. There is this risk that at some point, things are going to come to a head. Imagine if China were to just go and grab Taiwan and say, “What are you going to do about it?” Would somebody be willing to do something about it? Would Trump be willing to do something about it? I just think that there are so many things, long story short, I don't think gold is going down as a long-term trend anytime soon.

27:52: Dominic Bowen: And Moshe, I know you like to travel, and you're a senior lecturer in economics. So when you look around the world, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

28:00 Moshe Lander: You know, there are two things. One, on the outside, I think a lot of people are looking around them, saying, “What's happened to my life?” Why is my standard of living not rising? And they want answers. And usually when people hear I'm an economist, they start saying, “Okay, well, you tell me. Why... don't I have it better than my parents?” Like, I have the answers. I think that what we're finding is that there's a global erosion in trust of institutions, ah whether that's central banks, whether that's health experts, whether it's the government itself. And I'm seeing that when I come across people, they just feel that their world is ah contained within their social media apps. And so those are the people that they trust in that echo chamber where they have like-minded people saying, “yeah, I don't trust these people”. It's not just a left or right thing. I think that this is an issue, then where we've lost that humanity aspect. And that's a problem then. So, in terms of you know how it connects to gold, people are going to look then to something portable, that they can move with them. And money is not that. I think the other part of it is that there's this weird sort of relationship that we have with our governments. I always say that governments are our employees, not our employers, right? If I hired you to work at my Starbucks and I never told you how to run the Starbucks, but I come back five years later and say, wow, what a mess you've made, you're fired. You would look at me and say, hey, aren't you the boss? Shouldn't you have told me how to run the store? We elect governments every four years, five years, six years, depending on where you're from. And we basically tell them to run the Starbucks, but without telling them how to run it. And then when we come back in four or five, six years, and we say, wow, look at the mess you've made, we fire them. Politicians are saying, look, guide us. Tell us what you want. So we have this weird relationship where we don't really tell them what we want. We may tell them what we think they want to hear, or we just ignore the entire process altogether. But the other aspect of it then is that governments are a little bit more free then to you know line their own pocketbooks or to do what's in their best interest. And that's not necessarily what's in society's best interest. So you know that that poses a problem then for people too, where, how can you know then that decisions that governments are taking are really in citizens' best interests? And again, you start turning inward at a micro level. And I find that there's just a lot of fear out there. So communication is really important. Transparency is important. And the government is saying, look, we're taking this decision for this reason and trying to work to stem disinformation and misinformation out there. I think they've maybe abdicated some of that responsibility, and that's making it more difficult not just for financial markets, but for economies to find growth opportunities.

30:23: Dominic Bowen: And so when members of the voting public tell their elected officials, “we want better services, and we want lower taxes”, the classic, which doesn't necessarily add up. And when politicians say, yes, you've been victimized, you've been picked on, it's the other that's made your life more difficult, and I'm going to fix that. And then, of course, we end up with more and more populist governments across Europe, across North America, you know, across many, many countries. We even see it in places like the Philippines, who would have thought that the Marcos would be coming back into power after the debacles of the 80s. But this is what we're seeing. People are desperate for change, or they think they're desperate for change, and they're told that they're justified in feeling that way. What are some of the indicators, some of the economic indicators that people should be looking at to be grounded in what the truth and the reality are?

31:09: Moshe Lander: Well, I think that as long as government statistics are produced at arm's length, as long as you're not firing people that produce those statistics because they don't tell the narrative that you want, usually those statistics have been designed in a way that if you look deeply into them, they haven't really changed much for, for decades in terms of how they're calculated. So you get these nice long data sets where you can see trends, and you can also find that the events that maybe you know divert from those paths, you can say, “all right, this worked, this didn't work”. I think that's most important, right? Because data beats all. And the government can say whatever it wants. And I think that's the problem that we're seeing right now with the US administration, is that when the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, “This is how many jobs were created”. And the president says, “That's a lie”. Well, no, it's not a lie. So rather than try to explain what's within the data, you fire the person. You know, that's, again, where that erosion of even trust in numbers comes from then. As always, you know, evidence-based decision-making is much better than going with your gut or going with something you heard or hearsay. So I think it's really important that that data is put out there. But I think also it's important, even though I might be a little bit long-winded in the way I give my answers, you know, somebody needs to explain what that means in common terms. You know, academics who come out and talk academically, that's great for other academics. But if you want to talk to the general population, don't use a lot of jargon and specialized terms. Say what this means for the average person in the street, right? How are you going to deal with ah government deficits and government shutdowns, right? If that... option is presented to them, then maybe it's a little bit more trusting in what comes next. Right. I always say that it takes a lifetime to build up somebody's trust and it takes five minutes to lose it. And I think what happens is if central banks or governments or ah countries lose the confidence of their populace, it's extremely difficult to come back. And that's what creates the vacuum, then for these strong men, mostly, to be able to fill that vacuum and say, well, I'm here to protect you.

33:10: Dominic Bowen: Yeah, I liked your answer. And I really appreciate going back to the data from when I was studying law. I mean, the answer was always “go back to the legislation”. There's case law, there's precedent, there's judgments. But what does the actual law say? You go back to the basics. And I think...  Listening to the head of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, um might be a bit dry, might not be the most interesting video you might find on YouTube today. But I really find listening to him is quite good. Of course, we get everyone analysing the markets and the journalists and politicians commenting on what he said. But going back and listening to what he says, he's got quite a method... He's got quite a methodological approach and quite a systematic way of explaining what he wants to say. And I think he's someone who's quite good to listen to, try to understand his decisions or the decisions of the US  Federal Reserve, at least, and how they perceive the market.

33:54: Moshe Lander: And that's something that's evolved over 30 years, right? The Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of Canada, and the Swedish Bank ah were at the forefront of being a little more open and communicative, with monetary policy decisions that they were making before those three and the evolution that came after them. And trying to understand central bank decision-making was a little bit like Kremlinology, where you had to kind of read between the lines to see what people were saying. So it's good now that the Fed is kind of buying into that. And Jerome Powell, of course, was very worrisome to markets at the time because it was thought that he was just going to be a Trump crony. And the fact that he's been able to push back and say, look, I'm not doing what you want because you want it, I'm doing what is right. That in itself means that when people now hear what he has to say, they trust that, hey, he's not being influenced by outside politicians and that that ah connection then. makes it a little bit easier to limit the damage that, when there's a change in monetary policy, it's not going to create these wild swings in GDP that would have normally come with it. And those wild swings in GDP, of course, have even bigger swings for each individual because GDP, of course, is just the average. So some people are going to experience above-average volatility, or some below-average volatility. And those are the types of things that can help be minimized. So again, stability really comes from communication and transparency. So it's not just through the central bank, but when we see it done well, that's the type of thing we should be emulating. And I think that from a political aspect, you need a politician who's going to tell you the facts rather than what you want to hear.

35:18: Dominic Bowen: I think that's a great lesson for all of our leaders and managers. Moshe, thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast today. 

35:24 Moshe Lander: My pleasure. I'll come back anytime you like.

35:26: Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a great conversation with Dr. Moshe Lander. He's a senior lecturer in economics at Concordia University. And I really appreciated hearing his thoughts on gold. And I really appreciated hearing his thoughts on how gold is perceived and the role gold plays in trade and global economics. Please remember to go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast, where you can watch and listen to our episodes of the International Risk Podcast. This episode was produced and coordinated by Melanie Meimoun. I'm Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We'll speak again in a couple of days.