EXCLUSIVE – E-Podcast Network Interview with Patrick Brunson of U.S. Money Reserve

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– [Voiceover] Welcome to Enterprise Radio, the signature show of EPN, the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, your channel for exclusive interviews with entrepreneurs, small business owners, and some of the world’s top executives who share business strategies and insights that can all help you build your business, leading to your business success.

And now, broadcasting from anywhere between Brazil, South America to Los Angeles, California, it is your host, Eric Dye.

– [Eric Dye] This is Eric Dye, and once again, welcome to Enterprise Radio, a part of EPN, the Entrepreneur Podcast Network.

Today, we’re speaking with Mr. Patrick Brunson. Patrick is the sales manager with U.S. Money Reserve, one of the nation’s largest distributors of precious metals and also known as America’s gold authority.

Mr. Brunson, a pleasure to have you with use today on Enterprise Radio.

– [Patrick Brunson] Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me.

– [Eric Dye] It’s certainly our pleasure.

So tell us, Mr. Brunson, why is gold or precious metals important to one’s portfolio.

– [Patrick Brunson] Okay. So, it’s a bit of a loaded question, but I’ll put it in a nutshell.

So, traditionally, when it comes to precious metals, it is more of a safe haven asset. Most people, if you go to a broker, an advisor, or financial institution to put money into a portfolio with an advisor, they’re going to diversify you in a lot of different types of paper assets, things like stocks, bonds, CDs, IRAs, annuities, 401Ks, mutual funds, you name it. Gold and precious metals is the type of asset that you would use as a form of insurance on all of those other types of assets. So reason being is that gold tends to work inverse of the dollar and other paper assets.

So if you look at, for example, if you look at the 2008 financial crisis that we had 10 years ago, or began 10 years ago, a lot of people lost a lot of money in the stock market and other paper assets, whereas for those who were properly diversified in gold, they came out just fine, neutral or actually made money. So it tends to go up when everything else is dropping. So therefore, it’s considered to be more of an insurance policy on your portfolio.

– [Eric Dye] And a fine explanation. Thanks so much.

Now, how does gold correlate to other assets that people typically own?

– [Patrick Brunson] So, essentially, you can’t put all your money into precious metals. We’ve all heard the term that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. So again, it’s kind of like an inverse reaction. So if you go back, I don’t know, 20, 30 years ago, during, say, the ’80s, the most anybody would recommend that you have in precious metals is maybe 10 percent of your portfolio. But that was also during a time when you could go into a bank and get a CD that was doing 14, 15 percent. A lot of retirees nowadays made a lot of their money off CDs that were performing at those levels. But those days, they’re long gone. You can barely find a CD getting you two percent nowadays. So those, along with bonds that used to pay a lot more as well, treasury bonds, they don’t pay like they used to.

So precious metals has taken over that type of safe haven asset, because if you own a bunch of money in stocks and you call your broker and you tell them you want to get out of stocks, nine times out of ten, they’re going to move all your money over into bonds. And if bonds are not appreciating at the rate that the dollar is dropping, you can lose a lot of purchasing power without even knowing it.

So it’s, again, the best way to describe it is it’s insurance on your portfolio. It tends to zig when everything else zags, if that makes sense.

– [Eric Dye] It certainly does.

How much gold should one own in their portfolio?

– [Patrick Brunson] That’s really up to the individual, obviously.

We as a company here at U.S. Money Reserve, our customers’ protection is our number one priority, making sure they have the right percentage.

Most advisors would recommend having at least 10 percent of your portfolio protected in gold. It’s a tangible asset that is outside of the digital financial system.

And it’s no surprise that things like ransomware … All of our money is just electronic now. It’s not really physical paper cash. They don’t keep your money in a box in the back of a bank in a vault anymore. It’s all just digital numbers in a computer system. So with new digital threats like ransomware, that can affect all of your money if something were to happen to your bank, for example. Now, that’s a long shot, but if something like that were to happen, you still have money protected in a tangible asset outside of the digital financial system.

And so some would recommend at least 10 percent. We don’t recommend exceeding 30 percent of your portfolio in precious metals. However, during times of when we go into recession, we recommend getting as close to that 30 percent as one comfortably can without changing the way that they live financially.

– [Eric Dye] And speaking of gold, where do you see gold going in the future, and what do you base your information on?

– [Patrick Brunson] Well, that’s a bit of a loaded question, too. And I don’t have a crystal ball or anything. I won’t claim that I can predict where this asset will go.

However, we do know for a fact that gold has traditionally been the number one asset to protect our money from inflation. The reason being is when the value of the dollar drops, gold goes up just like your groceries and your gas and your cost of living.

So we also know that during the last administration, the Obama Administration, they printed more money in those eight years, the Federal Reserve did, they printed more money in those eight years than all of the 43 presidents before President Obama combined. So I’ll say that again. They printed more money in those eight years than all of the presidents before Obama combined going back to George Washington.

However, we have not seen one lick of inflation yet in regards to that newly printed money, and there’s a big question as to why. That’s the biggest question. If we’ve printed all this money, which is, I think it was a little over four trillion dollars, why have we not seen that type of inflation, inflationary period? And the best answer that I’ve been able to come up with from experts and economists is that all of that money that was printed, it hasn’t hit the economy yet. It’s all gone to the stock market and other areas to keep it propped up.

So the short answer to your question is I believe gold will increase dramatically in the coming years as soon as we see a lot of that newly printed money start to hit the economy. And quite frankly, there’s many experts suggesting we could see $5,000 an ounce within the next five to ten years. Some experts are calling for $10,000 an ounce in the next 20 years.

But realistically, we see gold increasing based off what happens to the value of the dollar in the coming years and months. So there’s a lot of experts right now calling for recession before the next election. And I think that’s a very good call, because in this country, we usually see a recession every seven to eight years given what’s going on with the situation. Well, if you look back, that means we’re about two years overdue for a recession.

And so I know that the media and the government tries to paint recessions like they’re a bad thing, but they’re actually, they’re good as long as you let them happen naturally, because it allows asset prices to get back down to where they naturally should be so that people can start buying again, and then those assets can start going back up naturally. But the longer we push this recession off, this next one, whenever it should happen, the worse it could be, which means the higher we will see the prices of gold go in the coming months and years.

– [Eric Dye] Certainly some real interesting information there.

Today, we’re joined by Mr. Patrick Brunson, the sales manager with U.S. Money Reserve, one of the nation’s largest distributors of precious metals, and also known as America’s gold authority here on Enterprise Radio, a part of EPN, the Entrepreneur Podcast Network.

Mr. Brunson, how come financial advisors and financial institutions are not telling their clients the same thing?

– [Patrick Brunson] Well, that’s a question that is more of a matter of opinion based off who you deal with. But what I’ve ran into with a lot of our clients when they go and talk to their brokers and their advisors or their financial institutions, whenever they bring up the idea of gold to these types of individuals, they tend to get the cold shoulder. And it makes sense, because once you take 10 percent of your money out of a portfolio that this particular bank is managing for an individual, you have taken 10 percent of your money out of a bank that that bank no longer has. And you know have it in a tangible asset in your physical possession.

So it would make sense for bankers and financial advisors to not recommend it per se, but the good ones, the ones who are not biased if you ask them about it, they’ll tell you if you feel that you want to own to go right ahead. But they’re never just going to come right out and recommend it to you, mainly because they don’t benefit from consumers owning gold, but more importantly, they don’t sell it. They don’t deal with it. So it’s a private, unregulated market, so it’s one of those types of …

It’s like insurance. You as the individual have to decide how much you want to have protected outside of the paper dollar and outside of paper assets. But that’s a decision that the consumer has to make on their own as opposed to letting the advisor or the broker make that decision for the consumer.

– [Eric Dye] Mr. Brunson, why would you say banks are buying up so much gold right now?

– [Patrick Brunson] It is. This is one of the biggest … It’s probably … I would call it the billion dollar question in this industry, because the very banks that are telling us to keep our money in equities and in stocks and mutual funds or whatever the case may be, those very same financial institutions are buying up gold by the metric ton. If you look at some of the central banks all around the world, they’ve been buying up more physical gold than at any other point on record in history.

And so the question is, it always seems like the big banks tend to know what’s going to happen ahead of time, almost as if they control it. I don’t know. But the fact of the matter is, if they’re buying up all this gold, more gold than they ever have at any point in history, do you think they’re buying because they think the price is going to drop in the future and that the value of the dollar is going to soar? I don’t think so.

So in my opinion, my personal opinion, I think that they know without a shadow of a doubt based off what we talked about or what I stated earlier that all the money we’ve printed, I think they know that eventually that money is going to hit the economy and start moving into circulation, and when it does, it could bring down the value of the dollar dramatically.

After … The terms are quantitative easing. After several rounds of quantitative easing, which is just a fancy term for printing money, we’ve seen the value of the dollar over the last decade drop by 33 percent based off the money that was printed during the Obama Administration. Or excuse me, during the Bush Administration. And now, it’s believed that the money that was printed during Obama is going to hit the economy during the Trump Administration.

So I think it’s going to be pretty interesting what takes place in the coming months and years in regards to all of that.

– [Eric Dye] And getting back to our portfolios, how does one go about adding gold into their personal portfolio?

– [Patrick Brunson] So, there’s a lot of different ways that you can acquire gold. One of the number one ways that people do acquire gold is through the physical asset itself. I know that a lot of people buy gold on paper, like gold ETFs, or GLD. But you don’t get the same benefits out of buying what they call paper gold, like gold stock or gold ETFs, you don’t get the same benefits when you acquire physical gold.

So the reason why a lot of consumers gravitate to our company is because our firm, we help you build a precious metals, a physical precious metals portfolio based off the financial needs of that individual. A lot of people are buying gold for a number of different reasons. Some people are buying it just simply to pass off to their loved ones as a private form of wealth, like they have for generations. But for those who want to protect their portfolios from what they feel is coming in the near future, they can come to our firm and they can acquire the right type of gold based off how long they plan on holding it and based off their overall goals to getting it to begin with.

We have very, very experienced account executives here with our firm. There’s a lot of companies you can call, but the majority of them, a lot of them that I have found with speaking to them personally, they deal with one or two different types of gold. We deal with just about every single type of precious metal that you can acquire. And so that allows us to make sure that our clients’ precious metals portfolios are also properly balanced and diversified in different types of metals instead of, as we stated earlier, putting all your eggs into one basket.

Now, the other option is a lot of retirees and consumers are looking to want to move their IRA over into gold. And we actually have an entire department that can help you roll your IRA, or your IRA Roth, over into a self-directed, gold-backed IRA. It’s a beautiful process that we started a couple years back, and it’s a great program that they have. Depending on the situation, there’s no tax ramifications to rolling a regular IRA over into a gold IRA, but we do have some specialists here that manage those directly, which obviously, we can get information out to the consumer directly if that’s something they’re interested in.

But for those who are looking to take advantage of the physical asset and you want to protect a good percentage of your liquid net worth in a private asset, meaning it’s private, you physically hold it, it’s not in the digital financial system out there in the overall big computer system is what some people call it, but it’s an asset that’s physically in your control that you can touch, see, feel, at a moment’s notice, so if someone is looking to get in and diversify, we’ve got a lot of account executives here that can help point them in the right direction. They can also go to our website, which is www.USMoneyReserve.com. And like I said, we have a lot of really good, very educated account executives here with the firm that are helping clients daily to protect their assets.

– [Eric Dye] Mr. Brunson, quite informative, and we can’t thank you enough for spending a moment with us here today on Enterprise Radio.

It is USMoneyReserve.com. Again, thanks so much for spending a moment with us here today on the program.

– [Patrick Brunson] Thank you.

– [Eric Dye] We’ve been speaking with Mr. Patrick Brunson, the sales manager with U.S. Money Reserve, one of the nation’s largest distributors of precious metals and also known as America’s gold authority. And for further details, simply visit USMoneyReserve.com.

And this is Eric Dye, and you’ve been listening to Enterprise Radio, a part of EPN, the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Tune in to our live location as we are streaming live 24/7 around the world at EPodcastNetwork.com/live. You can also find our livestream on iTunes radio and TuneIn Radio, as well as the TuneIn Radio app for your listening convenience.

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