Why Are Gold & Silver Prices So High With Special Guest Nina Eichacker

In today's episode, I sit down with Nina Eichacker, an Economics Professor at the University of Rhode Island, to break down something every jeweler has been feeling in their wallet — record high gold and silver prices in 2026. Nina helps us understand why this is happening and what it might mean for small jewelry businesses like ours.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

• The GameStop movie is called Dumb Money
• Nina mentioned the podcast episode "This Is Why People Are So in Love With Gold" via Odd Lots
• I mentioned @metalsmithmelissa's post about why refineries weren't buying silver scrap (worth a read, though many refiners are accepting silver again)
• I mentioned Stuller.com for refining in exchange for store credit
• Nina recommends Marketplace which a great podcast and show covering business and economic news
• Nina recommends Planet Money from NPR

Connect with Nina:

• Subscribe to her Substack: The Accidental Beauty Contest
• Follow Nina on X: @nina_econ

Join our community: Metalsmith Society on Instagram.

My jewelry: Corkie Bolton Jewelry on Instagram.

Support the Podcast: The best way to support the show is by joining our Patreon community. Your support helps keep this podcast going!

Music attribution: Stock Music provided by RomanSenykMusic, from Pond5

Transcript

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Welcome And Why Metals Hurt

Corkie Bolton 0:01

Welcome to Jewelry Making Tips with Metalsmith Society, the podcast for anyone passionate about jewelry making. I'm your host, Corkie Bolton. And on this podcast, I will discuss jewelry making tips, social media, marketing, running a jewelry business, along with insights from special guests in the jewelry industry who share their expertise and stories. Whether you've been making jewelry for a while or just starting your journey, this podcast is your go-to resource. So grab your tools, dust off your workbench, and join me. Today I am very excited to welcome one of my dearest friends, Nina Eichacker. She is an associate professor of economics at University of Rhode Island and just a badass in general. And the reason I wanted to bring Nina onto the podcast today is because I honestly wanted her to explain to me what the hell is going on with all the high metal prices, because I know all of us jewelers are feeling it a lot. But you just, you know, Nina, thank you so much for joining us. You just have a skill for explaining things in a way that are really accessible. So I appreciate you coming on today.

Nina Eichacker 1:21

Well, that is such a kind thing to say. And thank you. It's a it's really a delight to be here.

Corkie Bolton 1:27

Woo! My first uh non-jewelry guest. But you're a creative for sure. I have my moments. So, Nina, real quick before we jump in, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your passion for economics?

Nina’s Economics Origin Story

Nina Eichacker 1:48

Absolutely. So I am I teach economics at the University of Rhode Island. Once upon a time, when I went to graduate school, or sorry, before graduate school, when I was in college, I thought, how can I make the world a better place? And one of the ways to make the world a better place is to understand how money and business and all of that work. And so that has definitely underpinned most of most of my interest in economics. And and I have stuck with economics, which has sometimes felt like writing a mechanical bull, because like I didn't personally find it very easy or intuitive in in college, where you know, what I was looking for was a, you know, like a discipline that would explain why different people were rich and poor, how to, how to undo bad economic changes that we could see had happened in the US and the world at large. And so, you know, despite myself, I went back to graduate school to get a PhD in economics, and that has really motivated me, which is somewhat out of sync with how a lot of people do economics. But but I've found that sort of digging into the nuts and bolts of how the world works, whether it's financial markets, whether it's the development of industry, whatever it is we're talking about, understanding the underpinnings of how those systems work helps us understand the sort of economic fallout downstream. So that's what sort of broadly got me into economics. And then more specifically, I was very surprised in graduate school to find myself drawn to studying finance and money. In 2008, when I was a second-year grad student, the global financial system blew up. And my favorite professor at the time worked heavily in that field. And so, so really, in a way that I couldn't have predicted, I drifted into the study of how financial markets work and how they can go wrong, and that moved into the more abstract study of money itself and how central banks and financial actors make decisions that can make different types of money more or less expensive, and so on. And so, yeah, and so that's sort of how I've gotten to the point now where I find it really interesting to understand why financial traders might gravitate toward different types of commodities with strong material consequences for the world at large, such as the purchase and sale of gold and silver futures and the rest.

Corkie Bolton 4:34

You know, and I I just want to say, I don't think we ever had that connection. It's interesting because I also graduated call well, I graduated college in 2007, but was impacted by that financial, you know, recession, like massive recession and everything that happened in 2008 just because of how it affected the jewelry industry even then, just in terms of like job availability and sales of you know luxury items and trying to enter the work field. And so I think if that hadn't happened, like I'm who knows, I probably wouldn't have had the trajectory I had and even started Metalsmith Society, because maybe there would be like a quirky Bolton boutique somewhere. I don't know. It's fine. I'm I'm I'm happy with how things worked out.

Nina Eichacker 5:18

Yeah, and you know, something I don't know that I've ever talked with, or I have talked with you a little bit about, but I worked at a home goods store. That was my first like job job. And a big part of it, it was all handcrafted stuff from the US, from US artists, and there was a big jewelry counter. And so I remember learning in that place of work about things like, oh, the reason why red glass is always more expensive is because it requires the use of gold. I don't know if that's true.

Corkie Bolton 5:44

It's just wait, you said what what is it?

Nina Eichacker 5:47

I I my manager said at the time that this was like 2002, I want to say, that like red glass is more expensive than other gold. Like sea glass? No, like blown glass is more expensive. That I can't speak on because gold is used in the process of blowing red glass. And and so, you know, so beginning to understand how the like how all of these things really fit into the fundamentals of all these other products is something that I've found that I've always found interesting, but that I've found increasingly relevant and interesting in the past few years when the sort of global supply chain has really come into global focus. So yeah.

Corkie Bolton 6:33

So let's uh this is a good segue.

Price Shock From 2018 To Now

Corkie Bolton 6:35

Let's hit people with some stats. So we're not gonna go back to the 70s before I was born. You know, we're not gonna do that. We're not even not even gonna go back to when I was in college. That all that's also sad. But I thought it would be interesting to just compare between when I started Metals of the Society in February 2018, where it was so it was February 2018, gold was on average 1300 per troy ounce. Silver was on average about $16 per troy ounce, and platinum was 990 per troy. And I mean, I guess I said I wasn't gonna go back. There was a period of time where like platinum was a little higher than gold, like back in the day, you know. So I but that gold sort of taking the lead had already begun to happen. On this day that we're recording, gold's actually gone down a bit. It's not at its record high. It's currently 4,800. 4,800 per troy ounce. Really expensive. And silver is $77 per troy ounce. So going from 16 to 77, I feel that a lot of listeners of this podcast, a lot of people are feeling a bit even more affected by the silver because I think largely in our community, a lot more people are silversmiths and working in silver. But, you know, of course, I've been working in gold the past few years, and I'm like, yeah, of course this would happen, you know, that the gold would go up super high. So I wanted to start by asking you, what are the main factors that drive up the cost of, you know, gold and silver? And oh, I left out platinum is currently 2,000 per trance. We're we're gonna definitely address gold and silver primarily, but I've also asked Nina here to chat a little bit about platinum because you know she she knows about these things. So yeah, tell us about the main factors that drive up gold and silver costs.

Scarcity Industry Demand Investor Demand

Nina Eichacker 8:43

So I I initially said that there are two factors, but there's actually a third factor that I want to just lead off with. So as jewelers well know, these are all elements. These are not, you can't synthesize gold no matter how much you try. The alchemists have tried, it won't work. Silver is an element, platinum is an element, and so scarcity is a big part of why these metals are precious. You know, the fact that you can't just go into a lab and make some synthetic gold contributes to the fact that it has the sort of historic value that is that it has had for all different kinds of reasons, sort of from time immemorial. So there's that. There's the fact that there's all there are only so many mines that that actually extract these metals. And and I'll come back to that. I'll come back to that in a bit. The second factor of this is that all of these metals are used in the production of other things. So, you know, metal, precious metals are precious. We we believe that they are beautiful, we want to have jewelry that is made out of them, we want to have objects that are made out of them, and that is an important use of these metals, but these also have a lot of industrial applications. So, like gold is used in the creation of panels in spaceships. A lot of these metals are used in or no heat shields, I want to say. So, like if you go to the Air and Space Museum, they will point out different aspects of old space shuttles and they'll say that's made of gold. And it's like, oh, okay, that explains in part why it's crazy expensive to have a space program. Silver is used in all kinds of industrial applications. All of these metals are used in different respects in, or at least some of these metals are used in semiconductors. Many platinum and silver can be used in solar panels. And platinum is used in car manufacturing. I want to say catalytic converters can be produced out of platinum or palladium. But the fact that these are industrial inputs means that, you know, people who are producing cars, people who are producing solar panels, people who are producing semiconductors, all of which we need more of for all of the stuff we like to use, whether that's an iPhone, whether that's a smart, whether that's a smart fridge that can tell you what's in stock or not. All of those things are also using those metals. And so at the industrial level, you know, car companies and computer companies and everyone else that uses these metals is competing in these global markets for these for these metals, which also pushes up prices. The third factor is that these are all considered to be valuable. So silver and gold in particular have this long history as being used as money. And while you know, I don't personally hold gold bars that I, you know, think that at some point I'm gonna default to using as gold, you know, there are people who do buy gold because they believe it's a secure asset. This is a gigantic phenomenon in South Asia in particular, where often women in households will buy caches of gold as a sort of a financial security measure. And investors, you know, it financial investors who are looking to maximize return on portfolios may buy gold or silver, believing that the price is going to rise in the future. But they may also buy it because they are worried about the state of other financial assets that they hold. And so something that has happened in the past, let's say two years in particular is that there's been growing, uh growing fears about the state of the global economy and global fears about the state of the US dollar. So the US dollar is still easily one of the most in-demand global financial assets. But in the past year and a half or so, global holdings of US dollars have fallen, whether as a function of international sanctions starting in 2022 in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But we've also seen this in the past year and a half, in particular, as countries around the world have observed the behavior of US leadership and have expressed fears about, you know, the various economic policies coming out of the White House. And there's been this, you know, small but substantial pivot away from the US dollar. And one of the alternative and and some of the alternative assets that those investors have been purchasing have been gold, have been silver, have been platinum. Yes. I had to raise my hand there.

Corkie Bolton 14:09

Yeah, that's I I'm processing everything you just said. And so just to clarify, a lot of people were investing in the dollar before. And now they might be more likely to invest in the metals.

Nina Eichacker 14:26

Yeah. So if we're talking globally, that's absolutely the trajectory that we are seeing. So we are seeing people internationally pivot away from the dollar towards gold because they believe gold in particular is this really safe asset. You know, domestic, like people in the US who work at investment banks who are managing portfolios may not have like maybe far less important for the US dollar side of things. But, you know, they're also thinking about secure assets in the midst of uncertainty. If you observe that people around the world are buying gold and silver and you want to maximize return on your portfolio, it makes sense for you to buy gold and silver for your portfolios because you benefit in turn. And the really unfortunate fact of this is that it creates complications. This this has negative spillovers, we might say, for people who use these metals for other purposes. So I teach money in banking, and you know, it early in that money in banking class, we talk about the the metalist approach to money, and the fact that some people in the US still believe that you know we should use gold, like we should, I guess, have de blooms for money or whatever.

Corkie Bolton 15:44

And it comes back. Wait, I just have to ask you, because we're in New England here. Have you ever been to the Pirate Museum in the Cape? No, I have to. We should go. Do they actually have de blooms there? Which feels like a crazy security issue. No one listened to the podcast and do a heist, but they do have like actual gold di blooms there on display. It's pretty cool. No, it sounds amazing.

Nina Eichacker 16:07

But yeah, so and so when you talk about the virtues of paper money versus metal money, one of the arguments in favor of paper money is that you have all these other uses that you need for gold or silver or platinum or whatever. So, you know, so when we think about people who are building solar panels, and we want a lot of solar panels right now, it's far more productive to, you know, to be thinking about silver for those purposes rather than I'm fearful about the dollar, so I'm burying a bunch of silver ingots in my backyard. Like that's the sort of dynamic that that we're thinking about. And so this has negative repercussions for all those industrial producers, and it also has negative implications for people in the jewelry industry who are very vulnerable to the price of these of these metals going up, and they're not, and and they're operating in this very practical space rather than this very abstract I buy a bundle of silver whose price may appreciate, versus I'm buying a set amount because I need to make so many bracelets. Right.

Dollar Doubts Push Metals Higher

Corkie Bolton 17:20

Yeah, and I mean, one thing that I can say from a business standpoint when you're running a jewelry business is you do live and die by your inventory. So even a really successful jeweler who maybe even does have a brick and mortar, if you invest in a million dollars of filling your cases, you know, with literal hogs, the cost of goods sold, of the metals and the and the precious stones, you you don't have inflow of cash, you know, to offset that much inventory. So it was always drilled into me like, yes, you build an inventory, but you know, it was never financially plausible or advisable for me to say, like even back in 2018, like, all right, I'm gonna invest in $10,000 worth of gold, I'll just keep it in my safe, and then I'll slowly work off of it for the next 10 years. But we also had no idea that costs would ever spike this high. So I definitely want to talk about that. Like basically, you know, you you talked about multiple factors. Can we get maybe a little bit more specific about why like record level high gold costs are happening and silver in this moment? I know there's a lot. We'll try to simplify, but yeah.

Nina Eichacker 18:44

So I have some notes here that I'm pulling up. Yeah, I mean the short answer. So the short answer with why now for these prices, I think it it's stemming off of the fact that we've had five extraordinary years like in the making. You know, if we go back to 2020 and the onset of the pandemic, I think that that uh dramatically reshaped many people around the world's relationship with uh investment. And and when I say investment there, what I mean is the the purchase of stocks or bonds or other types of financial products with the goal of generating returns down the line. So there's that. We starting in like 2020, in part because of lockdowns, in part because of you know, general changes in habits because people were worried about getting sick, they found themselves with big pools of savings that they weren't, you know, using to go out to dinner or buy like new work clothes because they didn't leave the house necessarily to go to work. And you had this wide, wide jump, like very broad jump of people into buying those sorts of investment assets. So we had this sort of social shift in consciousness away from oh, buying assets is something that someone with like a stockbroker is going to do and turned into something that anyone could

GameStop Bitcoin And Herd Behavior

Nina Eichacker 20:24

do. So, like buying stock isn't necessarily linked with gold or silver prices, but you know, and if I think about the sort of general zeitgeist of like what's happening with these different types of investment assets, I think that that's an important component of it. Like this sort of social awareness of investment as a thing grew grew a lot in 2020 and 2021.

Corkie Bolton 20:49

And you know, like even I'm even sorry, don't want to mess your flow, but I'm even thinking about like when you could talk about cultural Zycast, like the whole like chicken tendies GameStop, all that stuff. I mean, if you know, like, and if people don't know about that, there's they made a movie out of it too. Dumb money, it's really good. Dumb money, yeah. It's a good movie. I watched it on the plane, but yeah, anyways, it was uh it was someone on were they on YouTube?

Nina Eichacker 21:17

What was it? It wasn't YouTube, it was which was it Discord? Oh it was Reddit.

Corkie Bolton 21:27

Oh, maybe it was just on Reddit, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it's like I it's funny, my husband would laugh at me because he knows about all that stuff, but basically, like, yeah, people were people people were like buying up GameStock and then, you know.

Nina Eichacker 21:42

Yeah, so I was, you know, it was still pandemic times, we hadn't been vaxxed, etc. I was transfixed. I was transfixed by the GameStop thing because it was mind boggling to think about like a wide enough array. Of what you might call retail investors, meaning not Yeah, explain to people a little bit what happened there because I didn't really explain it, but No, that's okay. So there was actually a precursor to the GameStop thing. So in the summer of 2020, the Barstool sports guy, Dave Partnoy, I think, told his followers to buy Hertz stock. So Hertz is a rental car company. Rental car companies were doing poorly in the midst of a pandemic where people didn't want to go on vacation and rent cars. So, you know, so Hertz was in trouble the way many businesses were in 2020. And Dave Parnoy told his followers buy Hertz stock. And a bunch of people bought Hertz stock, and the price of Hertz stock rose, and it created new opportunities for Hertz, the company. So flash forward to early 2021, a big hedge fund company announced plans, not gonna get too into technical or too into the weeds, announced plans to do something in stock markets to quote unquote short the price of GameStop stock. So what that means is you borrow, you borrow shares of stock, and then you do what you can to try to bring, you bet that the price is gonna fall. And when the price falls, you you know basically you return the stock back to the person that you originally bought it from, and you profit from the new price differential. And I always have to look it up for our purposes, like they bet that the price was gonna fall. But it turned out that a wide array of people who had fond memories of GameStop, one didn't want the company to go bankrupt, and two, some very clever, a few, and by a few, probably like 15 to 20, very fancy financial dudes, were promoting the the rush to buy GameStop stock. And they very successfully made the case in Reddit forums and elsewhere to buy GameStop stock. The price of GameStop, GameStop stock rose, and and the price ended up rising so high that the hedge fund had to like abandon its plan and they ended up losing a bunch of money in the process of doing it.

Corkie Bolton 24:54

Didn't it go from like less than a dollar to like 400 or something? I mean, don't worry about it.

Nina Eichacker 24:58

I don't remember the specifics, but it was it was gigantic.

Corkie Bolton 25:01

And well, and the and the guy, the the movie's about this one guy on Reddit that everyone was like looking to, and he was like, keep holding, keep holding. And he also liked chicken tenders and he called them chicken tendies. I mean, we all call them chicken, but you know, it's I can't, it's chicken tendies when I see them now. And whatever I mean, this is a huge digression, but what so check out the movie, but what I like is it does tie to what you're just saying, like absolutely after COVID, this was a whole new world. Totally. And I brought that up not to go off the rails, but like I knew people that were like teenagers and like young adults that were like they were using apps to like essentially day trade GameStop, they were they were buying it when it was lower and it would everyone was, you know, pushing it up.

Nina Eichacker 25:44

And yeah, it's funny, there is a parallel to the gold, but and I promise that this will tie back into gold. But before I get there, I want to also just briefly bring up the you know, the giant cryptocurrency in the middle of the room.

Corkie Bolton 25:59

Oh yeah.

Nina Eichacker 25:59

If we think about the the rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, you know, in recent years, the people who designed Bitcoin were trying to create a financial alternative to the US dollar effectively that would behave like gold. The idea was that Bitcoin, which is not mined out of the earth, but it's like, you know, generated by lots of energy intensive computer programming operations. But the idea was that the way to create Bitcoin's not tangible, right? It is not. It is literally tangible. Okay, thank you. Just okay, yeah. It is code. It is instead of buying shares of a company, instead of buying ingots, you're buying little bits of computer code that is heavily encrypted. Which is a topic for another podcast. But but basically, if you look at the behavior of Bitcoin prices in let's say 2022 to 2024, people's purchasing habits of Bitcoin looked a lot like their historic purchases of gold in previous crises when people are worried about the state of the economy. So, you know, if you go back to 2008, gold prices spiked. And it's because people are worried about the state of the economy. They think I can't trust banks, I can't trust the stock market, I'm gonna buy this tangible thing that has always been valuable, and that thing is usually gold. So there's a there's a wonderful podcast that I love called Oddlots put out by Bloomberg. They had a fabulous podcast interviewing a guy who runs a jewelry shop in the Diamond District in New York talking about gold, and he taught and the jewelry store guy talked about how frankly gold prices should be even higher. The gold prices would be so much higher if people weren't so enchanted by this by this phony Bitcoin thing. So, you know, so if we That guy has a safe full of gold, just saying 100% does. Um he was super interesting. I don't know if he's necessarily a nice guy, but he was super interesting to listen to. Okay, we'll we'll link that in the show notes. I will I will give you the link to that. But he but when when he was talking about this, you know, it was really interesting to listen to because it was like the same type of factors that are motivating Randos to buy gold for precautionary purposes, is behind a lot of people who are buying Bitcoin, believing, oh, this is more secure, oh, this is safer. And once you have that, you know, a critical mass of like true believers buying the metal or buying the cryptocurrency or buying the stock in the case of GameStop or similar, you then get a bunch of people who are like, uh, like I don't think the dollar is going anywhere, but the price of gold is rising. So I'll get some because at some point in the future I can sell and benefit from the price increase. Right. So that's how these that's how these financial booms can can you know can really grow, is effectively you start with the true believers who are into it, who are pushing the price up, which gets people who are not not true believers, but who say, you know, I stand to benefit if I own some of this that I can sell in three weeks when the price is, you know, 20% higher or whatever it is that we're talking about. So, you know, if we think back to more recent years with gold, you know, the the rise of Bitcoin didn't eliminate the global demand for gold. If people have worried about the state of the economy with rising inflation and with rising interest rates, so the Federal Reserve in the US raised interest rates in 2022, it was is when they started doing it. Yes, and that lasted through consistently through 2023, even had some episodes in 2024. And what that did was it made like what we would call capital investment, meaning spending on building industry and all the rest of it more expensive. And in the midst of all of that, in the midst of fears about the state of the economy, whether it's productive capacity by firms, whether it's the state of the price level, you know, whatever is going on, there's this, I don't know, this very sort of ingrained belief that in times of economic insecurity, buy gold. And it doesn't necessarily matter what the insecurity is. If the price level is rising, buy gold. If the price level is falling because you're in the midst of a giant recession, buy gold. Gold is always this fallback. And so, you know, when we think about how other precious metals have have fared in this, I think silver was like, well, I want to buy gold, but gold is too expensive. What if I buy silver instead? Silver is also this very useful commodity that's used in tons of things. And like it's more, it seems more stable than perhaps the stock market in the midst of a world in which an announcement of tariffs may threaten the viability of a range of companies or a range of industries. So metals are once again this real touchstone for investors who are like, you know, we have no idea what's going to happen with business, but we have these commodities that are valuable. We have these commodities that are used in lots of industrial things, and we have these metals that historically have been these sort of financial centers of wealth. Let's go in, let's do it. So going back to the mines thing that I talked about a moment ago, like what we're starting to see is that industrial producers who are like, Jesus, like these prices aren't coming down anytime soon. What if we dig more mines? Like it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of capital, it takes a lot of resources to start a mining operation. Oh, but but in the context of these rising costs, suddenly, suddenly the economic benefit of doing the research to actually increase access to these resources makes sense. It pencils. And so what you're seeing now is that and like gold and silver aren't the only metals where this is the case. Like we're seeing this with earth metals, we're seeing this with lithium, we're seeing this with cobalt, with all of these other elements that are integral to the production of technology that is really inextricable from life right now. And so, you know, it remains to be seen what the sort of endpoint of all of this is. But it stands to reason that if people who are, you know, geologists and people in industry that are, you know, beginning these operations or continuing these operations find new sources of gold or silver or platinum, once those are coming online onto the market, then prices may start to come down.

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Corkie Bolton 34:12

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Stockpiling Metals Comes With Costs

Corkie Bolton 35:45

You know, as you were describing this, I can't help like this is where my mind goes is like if we did a social experiment, like you and I, and like maybe we recruited like four other friends and we went to the mall. Because people are still at the mall. I was just there the other day. Um if we went into the food court and we went into different corners and all of a sudden we all started screaming, yelling, and running in one direction, there is no doubt that some people would run with us. Absolutely. Because we look to like what other people are doing. Yeah. And so it's like, buy gold, buy gold, buy silver, buy silver. And then it's just going like up, up, up, up, up. And I mean, I even remember being in an engraving class before everything got crazy. This was like before 2025. I think I was there in 2024, maybe 2023. And I had a great instructor, Jeff Park, shout outs to him. But I remember there was like conversation in the class about like, oh yeah, like I'm buying as much gold as I can whenever I go, you know, out, you know, into a store and stuff like that. And I found myself pondering, like, and I'm not, this is why you're here as an expert. Like, I'm not educated on this, but part of me felt like, yeah, but if everyone keeps buying, it's just gonna drive the cost up. Yeah. And it, but it's like me, me as an individual being like, well, I'm not gonna do that. Like, then it's like, you know, I lost out because I didn't stockpile gold or whatever. But like that is, I think, the frustrating part about it is it we're very powerless over. I mean, you just talked about some huge factors that are just, it's really, it's outside of our control.

Nina Eichacker 37:22

Yeah. And, you know, something that I was thinking about that you brought up earlier is it's not cost-free to hold a giant stockpile of precious metals. Like, you know, the reason why I would say generally that it's irrational to take all your money out of your 401k, buy a bunch of gold, and then hide it in your house is like someone could come and steal all of that, you know, and that's not an like that's a considerable cost. And so stockpiling precious metals that are vulnerable to theft is costly to people. Yeah. So, you know, that's not necessarily the best answer in, you know, for for how to navigate this. You know, it's like it's like with oil. So when oil prices rise, you know, you you're sort of stuck because like I personally don't have a space to hold, like, I don't know how you would even go about buying like crude oil or I can't.

Corkie Bolton 38:27

That's not on brand for you. No, it's it wouldn't be on brand for you to be like, I'm gonna buy some crude oil.

Nina Eichacker 38:32

Just to see what's like I will say Marketplace, all power to them has done, like has actually gone and done this. And so shout out to Marketplace and Planet Money for doing all this too. Like, they're great to listen to. Oh, these are podcasts. All of them are podcasts. Got it, got it. You're absolutely right that the more people subscribe to the panic about these different assets, you know, my personal contributions to the price of anything rising is probably pretty low. But if you have a wide enough array of people behaving in a way rationally or otherwise, it absolutely can make a difference. And this is something that behavioral finance people call herd behavior. The name of my of my Substack, the beauty contest, is like if you think that something is attractive, that doesn't necessarily matter. But if everybody thinks that it's a worthwhile asset to hold, then it makes sense to hold it. Like that that's where this is all going. So, yeah, so like I I think that there are costs and benefits of stocking up at different times, but it's not even necessarily as simple as, you know, buy as much as you can, buy more than you need when the price is lower, because there are other costs that are going to come in to keeping keeping your stash of metal safe and all that.

Corkie Bolton 40:07

Thank you for speaking on that. And I mean, as much as we've like touched upon so many topics here, I really do feel like it's helped me personally have a more clear understanding. I wish that we could answer for the listener, you know, okay, guys, what do we do after we turn the podcast off? Well, it's like, okay, A, check out the other podcast episodes, check out Dina on her socials. I mean, we'll we'll get there. But like, should I A, you know, immediately go buy it gold and silver? B, I'm still not quite sure. And it's like, I know that you can't answer the question. I think the I think the the fear that I've had myself is like, is this going to keep going?

Will Prices Plateau Or Keep Rising

Nina Eichacker 40:54

So forecasts that I have read seem to be pointing to the notion that like, yes, prices are going to keep rising in the near term, but that you may see plateaus in late to 2026, 2027. And there's there's a host of reasons for why this could be the case. One part of it is that supply factor. So as mining companies increase their operations to extract precious minerals, whether they're precious because we think about them as you know, financial opportunities, whether they're useful because solar companies want them, whether they're useful.

Corkie Bolton 41:37

What metals in the sorry to interrupt you, but what metal is in the iPhone?

Nina Eichacker 41:41

You mentioned that. All of them.

Corkie Bolton 41:43

Oh really?

Nina Eichacker 41:43

Yeah. Gold too? Gold, yes. Oh, gold is in semiconductors. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Not as much as silver. So it's more silver that's the issue there, but but there's some gold in them.

Corkie Bolton 41:56

So we should crack it open if you're gonna throw it out anyways and put it in your refining bucket. You you could you couldn't. I'm just being scrappy here.

Nina Eichacker 42:05

Yeah, no, no, so it's a good idea. Take take out your ask your dentist to replace your gold fillings with ceramic. I'm not sure. Don't do any of these things. I'm not a professional.

Corkie Bolton 42:16

I just got it. I just got my tooth replaced. I mean, as one of my dear friends, you know, I've been like missing this tooth. I mean, that's just a side story for a side story here on the podcast. But like my son, Dean, was like, could you please get a gold tooth? It would be so cool. You'd have like street cred, you maybe look like a pirate. And I'm like, I we cannot afford a gold tooth. But okay, that's a digression we we do not need to go down. So so it's pointing towards the potential.

Nina Eichacker 42:45

So there's a potential. So okay, so so the first first thing is like I think that the supply of the resources is like the big, the big one. So as more mining companies increase their operations and more of these commodities come to market, we can we can expect sort of downward pressure on these prices. And I think that that's actually reasonable to predict. Like, you know, the world is massive. We think we are constrained in our access to these resources, but then mining companies discover new deposits of whatever it is we're looking for, and prices gradually start to come back down as stuff comes to market. The second thing is, you know, like there's so much that can change politically and economically. So, you know, I spoiler alert, don't love the economic direction that the country is going in.

Corkie Bolton 43:45

Man, but I mean, we're we we are award winningly being very neutral in our conversation, I would have to say.

Nina Eichacker 43:54

Um so having having laughed it in that diplomatic language.

Policy Votes And Market Volatility

Nina Eichacker 44:00

You know, midterm elections are coming in twenty twenty six. I would say that if you want gold and silver prices to stabilize voting for people that you think are going to do less volatile, uh questionable things economically, politically, is probably a really good idea. Two years later, you know, presidential elections, think hard about it's hugely important. It is think about who you want to be in charge. Think about who you want to be appointing economic officials, whose decisions matter when it comes to these sorts of assets. And think also about you know the the industrial side of things. Like, can we give subsidies to firms that want to produce, you know, solar power, solar panels, etc.? Factors that reduce the costs of those operations that are good for the environment, etc., reduces pressure on these markets and hopefully leads to better outcomes for these for these metals that are so useful and so important for jewelers and other people who are using them.

Corkie Bolton 45:16

And smash the patriarchy. Sorry, now while we're at it. No, I I'm really glad though that you this was incredibly important and poignant that you said all that because it 100% who we vote for does play an impact in this. And yeah, I mean, I think that you know, one of the things that you were covering in the beginning is it is things like wars, tariffs that scare everyone on a global level, that all those insecurities they have brought us to where we're at. I just wish that people were like, instead of buying a gold bar, I'll just buy all the jewelry from Corgible Jewelry and put it in a safe, baby. That's value added, you know, value added. But for real, I think just a few other things that because uh honestly, like it's so fun to talk to you. We could just talk forever about this stuff, and we do when we're together. Um, you know, and I just want to formally apologize for all the times that I interrupted you during our conversation here. But I uh sometimes I need to be like, wait, tell me like I'm a three-year-old. And then also, like, you know, my mind is like, oh yeah, like what's in an iPhone? So thank you for bearing with me

Refining Sweeps And Recycling Value

Corkie Bolton 46:34

there. But I do think one thing that is interesting about what's happened in the jewelry industry is that there was this huge, and it's outside of the jewelry industry as well, like like rush of refining metals to the point that silver, like all these companies were like, we can't take silver anymore. And oh, my friend Melissa, who is you know, jewelry educator, she had a great post about it. I'll link it, where she spoke with someone that's knowledgeable about that. And basically the processing of refining silver just takes a lot more effort, and it becomes more of a like when like massive amounts of people were sending it in, it was like it just slowed down the process. I don't know that those things are really in your wheelhouse here, Nina, but I I do have to say that this is an ideal time for someone in our industry to like send in their dirty sweeps bucket, which is like, do you know what those are, Nina? I don't, but I'm intrigued. So someone else that's listening might not know either. But this is I always say like I never knew about this before Metal Snow Society, but I should shift that a little bit. When I was in college, you know, it was like 2004 and 2007. Let's just say silver was probably like five or six dollars. And even gold, I have this memory, but don't quote me. It was definitely like sub-800 back then. I think that would be fair to say because it was before the recession happened and everything else. So I had a professor at Pratt that whenever he was working in gold, filing gold, anything. Oh, he was so meticulous, David. He would get a file folder, he would put it directly under his bench pen, he would get every fine shaving. It wouldn't get mixed with anything else. And he would store that in a jar and he would melt it down again or whatever he would do with it. I would say that's like best practices for someone that's like really got their life together. Me, I'm a little messier, I'm working on this and that, but I knew that we should be collecting it. Silver, though, I think a lot of people were a little bit breezier about it. If it got in the woodcracks on the floor, it's like, all right, it's silver dust. And the thing I learned in this community is you can save every single tissue that has metal dust. And one of the things I do, like I was working on a gold ring before we hopped on this call. I took the sweat wipe and I just completely wiped my hands down, and then I wiped the floor beneath me, I wiped my clothing down like this, and then we take these items that are more trash, you know, the content of your vacuum in your studio, and you put it into a refining bucket, and then you send it to a refiner, and they will melt it down. All the different metals can be in there. I mean, you could probably put like the innards of your iPhone. I mean, I'm not suggesting anyone do that, but I mean, please don't do that. Please don't do that. We are not in the iPhone. The Metal Smith Society podcast in conjunction with Nina is not suggesting anyone open an iPhone or try to source iPhones for refining.

Nina Eichacker 49:51

Anyways, just officially. But so I think that that's beautiful. Like, I think that's wonderful. And I, and that's sort of the sort of thing that I would hope would arise from this sort of thing. You know, when when the costs of like not to be too not to be too Pollyanish, Paliana-ish about this, but you know, that's what a classic economics class would predict. You know, if the benefit, you know, looking at the sweepings buckets and seeing what silver can be extracted, what gold can be extracted, what everything can be extracted from that and then recycled effectively, like that's what you want to see. That's that's really important. And as the price of those metals rises, suddenly the benefit of doing that sort of more elaborate wipe down, more cautious collection of dust, it it all starts to make monetary sense. And yeah if that is a silver line, and maybe not to be pun trying, not trying to make a pun here, but maybe that's the silver line, is like as the cost of these inputs increase, the benefits of recycling them increase too. Like the fact that someone who's willing to go into the refining business can can now make that make work or make that work.

Corkie Bolton 51:16

I agree, Nina. I mean, we do need to be careful about our, you know, our raw materials. And I think for anyone that's listening that feels discouraged or let down, for one thing, like a troy ounce of silver is quite a bit.

Pricing Design Tweaks And Trade-Ins

Corkie Bolton 51:32

You know, and I think that's the thing too. It's like if you actually lay out like what your materials are, you know, it's not gonna feel, I think, especially in silver for most pieces, like, oh my God, that just cost me a ring that used to cost me a few bucks is now a hundred dollars. It's it's really not gonna play out with that. Gold, on the other hand, you know, what what what people are asking me about is like, how is this impacting you as a jeweler? And I'm saying basically, to a certain degree, the rising cost of gold is just cutting into my profit as a jeweler and a maker. And I'm sure brick and mortars are feeling that. Yes, everyone should be reflecting on pricing, changing pricing for sure. People are still always, always gonna buy jewelry. Yeah. Like that part, I'm just like, I hope that people don't walk away and be like, I should give up. I've been in that kind of black and white sinking before. And people always buy jewelry. But what I've been suggesting to people is like, look at your designs. What's not selling? Can you take things apart? I had a gold ring that never sold that had like a like a Wellow opal in it that wasn't really like it wasn't like the lightning ridge opals that I use today. I'm probably again saying thanks to Nina that she's nodding her head. She's like, Yeah, okay. But you know, I had set a less valuable opal into a very precious metal. And so I took it and re-melted it, and then I made it into another piece of jewelry. And so I think us reflecting on our physical inventories of jewelry, what could, you know, be taken apart, what could I do better? Designs that maybe incorporate less metal, maybe instead of a solid back plate under a bezel, you know, sawing out a design in the center that reduces the overall metal. So, anyways, though, you know, just to end on that kind of positive note, and I think for me personally, I'm gonna continue to just appropriately purchase metal when it's appropriate. However, one thing I did do multiple times in the past few months, as gold has been really high, is I did scrap like gold, solid gold, not dirty sweeps. And again, this isn't like a this isn't a sponsored plug or anything, but I buy a lot of materials from that company, Stellar, because now that I engrave and do diamond setting and work a lot more in gold, they just have a wider catalog than Rio Grande, another great company that does have a bunch of precious metals as well. But I've just been shopping more with Stellar. Stellar has a trade-in program where basically, if you get an account credit, you're getting a very high percentage back. I can't ever directly quote, but typically you're gonna get something like 92 to 95% back on your gold when you take it as an account credit. And again, it's one of these things where you're just transferring this inventory, financial inventory. So that's been helpful too, because even though the things I've purchased after cost me a lot more, I had the money in my account. So I don't know. Nina, any closing thoughts before I tell people where to find you?

Nina Eichacker 54:41

And you know, I guess the short answer is these things happen. Like if prices rise, prices fall. Commodity markets are fickle, but they don't necessarily stay where they are forever. That's the first thing. The second thing is like policies matter. Use your vote. And third, like there are lots of different factors at work here. So don't feel personally responsible for what is happening. Yeah. If you want to hoard a gold bar, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, go go for it. It's fun, it's it's invigorating to hold a gold bar. Um, I suspect. But also financial markets are gonna do what financial markets are gonna do, and that is to say overreact to some things, underreact to some things, and then eventually get back to some sort of neutral equilibrium. And you know, I think I I try to be optimistic most of the time. And I do think that I do think that the we're in this moment, we're at this sort of precipice where it's like do firms do what they can to produce more of the stuff that we need? And like a lot of the stuff that we need for renewable energy generation is related to precious metals. And so what's good for them, like creating more mines to get the silver, will be good in an ancillary way for jewelers down the line. So let's let's see what happens.

Corkie Bolton 56:19

And just and just a plug for you can get fair trade mined gold. Post-consumer metals are always gonna be the most economically friendly. So, like taking, you know, the meltdown and of maybe old gold, I always mix it with some fresh certified recycled gold, you know, just because you never know when you're melting down gold that is really old again and again, it's kind of good to mix it up. But yeah, you can get certified recycled through, you know, Rio Grande Stellar. Stellar does, I've used it on custom jobs. Whenever someone comes for a wedding or engagement band, I always pitch them like just a little bit higher cost to get it fair trade gold. Because you know, we care about a lot of these things, right? Like all of my stones are are responsibly sourced. And so, like, why wouldn't I think about that with my metal as well, right? Like, I see a lot of jewelers that are like, I only use craft paper to send out my jewelry because I care about the environment. So make sure that you know, you know, about you know what's going on with the metals. Melting things down in your own studio, of course, is really savvy, will save you a lot of money. You know, if you have a rolling mill, you make your own wire. I think one of the things I was gonna mention is like, you know, at the beginning, I kind of got off track is like as jewelers, obviously, we do have additional costs on the top of the metal prices because they there is, you know, fabrication and labor costs that go into creating wires and chains and all those other things as well. But I like that you ended it on a positive note, Nina. And I can't recommend your Substack enough. I'm gonna link it in the show notes. But if you just enjoy learning about what is happening, you know, you have some awesome topics and hearing it, like I really appreciate again, I feel like everyone would concur listening to this conversation. Like, this is such an overwhelming amount of information. I have, I feel like you have a gift on just kind of like breaking it down for us. So the name of that Substack is the Accidental Beauty Contest. And that's what Nina was mentioning early. It's sort of like because everyone else is doing it and it looks so good, that's what you know, the accidental beauty contests means. You can also find Nina on X, formerly Twitter, Nina under-econ e-c-on. Again, I will link that. And we appreciate you. Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun.

Final Takeaways And How To Help

Corkie Bolton 58:45

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I really loved having this conversation with Nina. Gold and silver prices affect every single one of us jewelers, and understanding what's actually driving them is so valuable. Quick note: we recorded this in the beginning of April when gold was around 4,700 per troy ounce. And now that this episode is live in June 2026, it's come down to around 4,000. The landscape is always shifting, which honestly just makes this conversation more relevant. If you got something out of this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and send it to a fellow jeweler who's been asking the same questions. It really does help the podcast grow and reach more makers. The very best way to support this educational work is through my Patreon at patreon.com slash metalsmithsociety. You can also grab merch at metalsmithsociety.com, and if you want to keep learning, go check out the other episodes. As always, keep creating, keep experimenting, and keep learning. Until next time.