The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more

Good Sunday to you,
This week I’m talking to the goldbugs’ goldbug, Alasdair Macleod.
I’m more of a continued decline, muddle through guy, but Alasdair, as you shall see, is very much in the outright collapse camp and he sees that outright collapse coming soon, as you shall hear - within the next 18 months!
Alasdair has spent decades studying financial markets, monetary history and the role of gold, and his argument is uncompromising: gold is money; pounds, dollars and euros are credit. I could not agree more. Confidence in fiat currencies is approaching breaking point, he says, and any currency that hopes to survive will ultimately have to become a credible substitute for gold through a proper gold standard.We also look at the fragility of the bond markets, starling, Japan, China and what a 21st-century gold standard might actually look like.
My thanks as ever go to The Pure Gold Company for making these interviews possible.
If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.

This is the last of the videos for a while, as we take stock and evaluate. Broadly speaking, most of you seem to like them, so that’s good.
As always you watch the video above, or listen via the Substack app, Apple podcasts, Spotify et al.
And if you want to follow Alasdair and read his immensely popular Substack, you can do that here:
In other news, the latest edition of Charlie Morris’s Atlas Pulse is out now. It’s free, so get your copy here. Gold smells QE, he says. Well worth reading …
And, finally, here is this week’s piece - not on gold, but on copper. It’s telling us something.
Disclaimer:Nothing in this programme is intended as investment advice. It is an expression of opinion only. We do not know your financial circumstances. Do your own research.



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I have been banging the drum for copper for some time, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Gold has the glamour, but many, including veteran investor Rick Rule, now see the greater opportunity in copper.
In summer 2024, I highlighted three copper companies Amerigo Resources (ARG.TO) at around C$1.75 and Arizona Sonoran Copper (ASCU.TO) at C$1.36 and QCCU (QCCU.V) at 12c . Amerigo and Arizona Sonora both hit C$8 on Monday meaning gains of ~350% and ~500%. QCCU, on the other hand, is still at 12c. You can’t win them all.Back in May we noted that things were getting a little hot. The metal had just hit fresh highs; there was a plethora of investment bank supercycle notes and social media was full of predictions about imminent shortages.
The long-term story is intact but don’t chase it, we suggested. Copper tends to be weaker over the summer and some consolidation could give you a better buying opportunity.
We got a good opportunity in June but it did not last long, and here we are three months on with copper at ~$6.50/lb a couple of per cent below where we were in May.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out which way the trend is going in that particular chart.
The summer lull has been more of a pause than anything else.
Meanwhile, beneath the surface, the fundamental copper story is getting stronger.
Copper’s problem is not demand. It is supply.
We covered the demand side extensively in May. AI needs copper. Data centres need it. Power grids need it. Electric vehicles, rearmament, reindustrialistation, India - they all need copper.
This is not the usual China story by the way. If anythign China demand is lacklustre. Its imports of unwrought copper fell 11.5% year-on-year in July and industrial production there has been slowing.
But, as RBC notes, the LME copper market had moved into its steepest backwardation since the 2021 squeeze. In other words, buyers are paying substantially more for copper now than for delivery later. That is a classic physical tightness indicator.
Antofagasta has cut its 2026 production guidance after problems at Los Pelambres. Codelco has abandoned its 1.34 million tonne production target and now expects to produce less than it did last year.
Meanwhile we have BHP’s latest results. Copper now accounts for 54% of its earnings (EBITDA). Its copper mines are extraordinarily profitable (70% EBITDA margin). Yet despite the obvious incentive to produce more, BHP’s copper production actually fell 3% last year.
This is the largest mining company in the world, with some of the best copper assets, engineers and access to capital on the planet. If anyone can turn on the copper taps, so to speak, it should be BHP. Yet it is talking about a “persistent structural deficit” of as much as 10 million tonnes a year next decade. Demand from electrification, digitalisation, data centres and other newer uses, meanwhile, is expected to grow at around 6.5% a year.So it now aims to grow its copper production at ~5% a year, faster than the rest of its business. The requires an extraordinary amount of capital.
In a recent video, Merlin Marr-Johnson, CEO of Fitzroy Minerals (FTZ.V) analyses BHP’s spending plans using Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine, as an example and concludes, “They’re spending $5 billion to stand still. And that is the copper industry in a nutshell.”
Billions of dollars of investment don’t necessarily mean billions of dollars of new production. Mines get older. Grades decline. Pits get deeper. More rock has to be shifted to produce the same amount of metal. Processing plants wear out and have to be replaced. Sometimes you have to spend billions just to stop production falling.
Which brings us to Rick Rule.
Is copper now a better bet than gold?
It could be.
Rule argues that “The biggest copper mining companies in the world need to spend $250 billion to maintain current levels of copper production.” Note - to maintain, not increase. Not every one has $250 billion sitting around waiting to be spent. “The copper development boom that we absolutely have to see in the next 10 years will require vast amounts of capital.”
“There’s nothing that we can do, nothing at all that we can do, to avert a shortage in copper,” he says. As a result, five years from now the copper price will be, “dramatically higher than it is today.”
As you know, copper is an important strategic mineral. Citi recently looked at what might happen if countries start building national inventories. Global refined copper inventories, it estimates, currently sit around at around 3 million tonnes, equivalent to just 1.3 months of global consumption. If governments decided they wanted three months instead, they would need need to find another 4 million tonnes of copper.
Where does it come from?
To be accumulated over two years, Citi calculates, would require the copper price price to rise to over $10/lb to bring enough scrap into the market and destroy enough demand to balance things.
That is not a forecast, by the way, it is a scenario. But governments are increasingly treating critical minerals as a matter of national security. The US has proposed a US$12 billion strategic commodities programme, the EU has allocated billions to critical-mineral security and there have been calls in China for increased copper stockpiling.
So what do we actually buy?

Good Sunday to you,
I am being impersonated again, so if you receive messages from someone that looks like it could be me, it isn’t. Please block and report. (Also feel free to message me so I can report them too.) Many thanks …
We have another Money, Markets and More for you today with Joshua Saul, founder and CEO of The Pure Gold Company, who tells us what gold and silver investors are actually doing after one of the most extraordinary runs in precious metals in recent years.Joshua is in the unusual position of speaking directly to investors as they buy and sell, which gives him a good view of what is actually happening at the coalface. The frenzy we saw at the beginning of the year has subsided, but something interesting is happening underneath: the first-time buyers have largely disappeared, but value-driven investors have been buying into the correction. Is this the end of the gold bull market, or simply a pause before the next leg higher?
You can watch the video above, or listen via the Substack app, Apple podcasts, Spotify et al.🥇 This video was made in association with The Pure Gold Company.
If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.

In other news, the paperback of the Secret History of Gold - Money, Myth, Politics and Power has just come out in the UK, so order yours now. 4.7* on Amazon. :)
And, in case you missed it, here is this week’s piece:
Disclaimer
Nothing in this programme is intended as investment advice. It is an expression of opinion only. We do not know your financial circumstances. Do your own research.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Apologies for the double email this Sunday, but we have another Money Markets and More, in which I sit down with precious metals analyst and forecaster Ross Norman to discuss the precious, China and why he believes the forces driving the precious metals bull market are structural.
You can either watch the video above, or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify et al.
Ross has spent decades analysing the precious metals markets and has repeatedly won the LBMA’s annual gold forecasting competition. Few people know the mechanics of the physical gold market better, which makes his perspective on what China and the world’s central banks are doing particularly interesting.We also discuss whether gold could reach $7,000–$10,000 by the end of the decade, why Ross would favour silver with £100,000 to invest today, and his prediction that gold could once again become something people actually use as money.
Follow Ross and Metals Daily
This video was brought to you by The Pure Gold Company:
If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.

📖 The Secret History of Gold: Money, Myth, Politics and Power.
Nothing in this programme is intended as investment advice. It is an expression of opinion only. Do your own research.
And if you missed today’s thought piece, here it is:



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Last week I walked some of Britain’s oldest path, the Ridgeway, which runs across south central England. It’s literally a ridge, and would once have been a vitally important path when the valleys on either side might have been impenetrable marsh or forest.
I walked 56 miles in 4 days, starting in Avebury and ending in Goring.
Lots of amazing views of Britain’s brown and pleasant land. Red kites galore. And, early on Day 1, I even saw a brown hare, something I hadn’t seen for many decades. At one point it sprinted (should say galloped?) through a field alongside and past me, quite the sight, but I was so busy admiring it I didn’t get the video.
Lots of barrows and burial grounds. Lovely peaceful places. I was particularly taken with Wayland's Smithy
The path was pretty deserted - I only passed somebody every hour or so. Sometimes I went several hours without seeing anyone, excluding cyclists of which there were a few, especially towards Goring.So lots of time to think, and one of the things I thought about at great length was what to do with my largest position, something I’ll have more on soon. Gold stocks look, by the way, as though the summer consolidation is over, and are starting to pick up. Here’s to another bonanza 12 months …. But back to the matter in hand. Each evening I would walk down off the Ridgeway to one of the villages in the valley, then climb back up the hill the following morning. Lots of lovely churches and thatched cottages to be seen.
One of the many landmarks on the trip is the famous Uffington White Horse, carved into the downs some 3000 years ago in the late Bronze Age. With the underlying chalk, it is bright and white, and locals have maintained it all these years. It almost looks modern: minimalist and abstract with clean, stylized lines conveying sweeping movement.
But as I walked the mile or two up the hill that sunny morning, several things struck me. First, that the White Horse isn’t actually very visible from the valley below.
If its creators wanted people in the valley to see it, surely they would have carved it into the side of the hill. But they didn’t. They carved it right on the lip.
nor is visible from the Ridgeway just above. In fact, it’s not that visible from land at all and better seen from the air above.
That immediately made me think of the Nazca Lines in Peru (see vid below), those ancient figures carved into a plateau which too best appreciated from the air.
But that doesn’t quite work either. If the Uffington figure was intended to be viewed from above, why not put it on the plateau? (You can’t even see it from the Ridgeway itself) Why put it on the lip?
3,000 years ago, much of the valley below would have been wooded or marshy, as I say, making the figure even harder to see from below. So who was supposed to see it? And from where?
The final mystery of my day was this: is it actually a horse? Look at the head. Does that look like a horse to you?
It has whiskers. Horses don’t have whiskers. Cats do though. Yours confused, DominicPS Here is the white horse pictured from the air. You do not get this view from the land … and there’s no way that’s meant to be a horse. I’m sure Jason Arday has the answers,

In case you missed it, here is this week’s piece, the second part of my special report into the tidal wave of takeovers sweeping the UK at the moment as we sell ourselves off. One of these, WPP, moved 35% in two days.
In other news, here is my talk on gold from CPAC the other day. Nothing you don’t already know, but I was pleased with the talk.
And, finally, mining financier Simon Catt had me on his podcast, while I was walking the Ridgeway. Here it is on Spotify
And on Apple podcastsFinally, finally, here’s a little two minute doc on the Nazca Lines which I narrated many moons ago - of some relevance to today’s piece. It’s not a bad place to spend a couple of minutes.
Until next time,
Dominic
If you live in a third world country such as the UK, I urge you to own gold or silver. The pound will be further devalued, as will the euro and dollar. The bullion dealer I use and recommend is The Pure Gold Company. They deliver to the UK, the US, Canada and Europe. More here.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe