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Rick Rule: Why Gold Is Still ‘Stupidly’ Under Owned, Oil Shortages, Silver & Palisades Goldcorp

Palisades Gold Radio Jul 11, 2026

Summary

Gold is 'stupidly' under-owned: precious metals hold 0.5% of US savings assets versus a 2% four-decade mean, implying fourfold demand.

Rule frames gold as a purchasing-power hedge — up 8% compounded over 26 years while the dollar sheds 75% over the next decade.

Oil's coming shortage is structural, not geopolitical: roughly $2.5 trillion of deferred sustaining capital that no armistice can close.

A debasement era lifts mine construction inputs about 10% a year, so future cash flow projections need far heavier cost inflation.

Silver producers mining at $35 an ounce compete against copper byproduct credits near $0.50, which squeezes out the most marginal operations.

Key points on Agnico Eagle Mines

  • Rule says he is a large shareholder of Agnico Eagle and that the roughly 24,000 people in the Rule Classroom community he serves are very large shareholders as well.
  • He says he sat down with Agnico Eagle CEO Omar Al-Juny at last year's symposium and then reviewed the portfolio with him by phone, project by project within what the law allows, and built his own models of input cost increases.
  • On the Malartic expansion, from about 600,000 ounces a year to one million ounces a year, he notes the $2.5 billion capital build: the part being spent now is on budget, while the same scope three years out would come in at about 1.3 times today's budget.
  • His conclusion from that work is deliberately modest: his Agnico Eagle forecast five years out will be wrong, and only being closer than consensus models built by people who do not model is the point, since directionally correct is what matters.
  • He flags that mine-construction inputs are rising about 10 percent compounded, so gold investors discounting Agnico Eagle's future cash flows should escalate costs by at least that rate rather than hold them flat.

Rick Rule's takeaways

  • Top takeaway His central call as of July 2026 is that gold is still badly under-owned: precious metals are about 0.5 percent of US savings assets against a 2 percent four-decade mean, which he says implies a fourfold demand increase on reversion, while the dollar could lose 75 percent of its remaining purchasing power over the next decade.
  • He frames the position on the downside case rather than the upside, saying he would only sell gold if the US balanced its federal budget, made political accommodation to pay down $40 trillion of debt and the $120 trillion net present value of unfunded entitlements, and produced a positive real rate, which with 8 to 10 percent purchasing-power erosion would mean the 10-year Treasury yielding about 10 percent; he puts the probability of that within ten years at functionally nil.
  • On oil he argues the coming shortage is structural rather than temporary, built on about $1 billion a day of under-invested sustaining capital, roughly $1.5 trillion cumulatively and heading toward $2.5 trillion, which cannot be cured by an armistice the way the recent Gulf conflict spike from $55 to $115 was; he expects the deficit to bite around 2029 or 2030 and puts peak oil demand about 40 years out rather than the four years the industry is priced for.
  • He says he sold his physical silver after the early-January limit-up run because a hyperbolic sector chart is always a sell, and redeployed the proceeds into physical gold as savings, 25 percent into oil stocks and 50 percent into silver stocks, reasoning that silver equities were priced as if silver were $42 while it traded near $85.
  • He notes two supply-side limits on the bullish resource case he still endorses: mine-construction inputs rising about 10 percent compounded, which forces higher future capital and sustaining costs, and a US shale tier-1 drilling runway he puts at about 2.5 years at $60 oil, extendable by roughly 15 years only if extraction technology improves by about 5 percentage points, which he says is not incentivised below $90 oil.

Stijn Schmitz's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Schmitz frames the interview as a hunt for the current opportunity set, and after Rule declines to name a commodity he presses him on contrarian areas, on whether the 1970s oil-price episode is a valid parallel today, on whether silver miners are still valued near $40 silver, and on refiners.
  • Speaking for a show he calls sponsored by Palisades Gold Corp, his parent company, he promotes the vehicle and its Nevada gold ground during the segment and then puts Rule on the record asking directly for his view of its value proposition.

Doug Casey's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Rule cites a Doug Casey characterization of a precious-metals bull market as trying to siphon Hoover Dam through a garden hose, to explain why a fourfold demand reversion would swamp the available supply of assets and leave tertiary junior explorers as the last and most violently repriced tier.