At this point in time, we would venture to guess that most Canadian citizens are aware of the MASSIVE cyber outage that took place due to a bad driver being sent out by the company CrowdStrike.  Most people likely found out many hours after this outage had occurred as it was first being reported in the very early hours of Friday morning (July 19^th, 2024).  Initially, you saw mass panic as the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab had long been warning that the next “pandemic” the world would face would be a massive cyberattack that left all industries crippled, bringing the world to its knees.  Of course, given the fact our Au Bullion newsletter is still being produced and sent out this week, the scale of this outage did not reach catastrophic levels and in most cases industries and the companies within are operating business as usual.

However, to write this cyber outage off as a minor blip in the system would be equivalent to trying to sweep your entire dog under the rug to hide mess rather than sweeping just the small pile of dirt they dragged in.  For context, this outage impacted over 8.5 MILLION devices worldwide and shutdown over 1 MILLION Fortune 500 workstations.  By Sunday, over 7000 flights in the United States alone had been cancelled and with most uncancelled flights being full, reassigning passengers to alternative flights became an impossibility.  Even to this day, airlines are in complete turmoil as in some cases in the United States, travellers are still waiting for a flight home after 5 full days.  In the U.K., health services have been working around the clock as the system shutdown caused their upcoming appointments, as well as patient records to become a tangled mess due to most doctor’s practices running off the same system.  All in all, this outage was reported from the United States to Europe, to China, then down to Australia, only to wrap back around up to Canada.  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the entire world was impacted, with reports of outages reaching EVERY INDUSTRY to some degree.  The scale of this outage was truly massive.

One sector’s outage that went largely uncovered was the global banking system.  There were numerous banks across various countries that reported issues to their online banking systems bringing flashbacks of the Roger’s outage that occurred just a few years ago here in Canada.  Even with the Roger’s outage being contained to just one country, it still put the spotlight directly on an extremely fragile system we have become so reliant on that in the blink of an eye could come down, leaving citizens without access to their bank accounts, debit cards, or credit cards.  Meaning, if citizens were not holding cash, which very few people do these days, or precious metals like silver and/or gold, your wealth had effectively been “turned off” like a light switch.  This is why you have seen many economists shouting from the roof tops how important it is to own physical silver and gold during these times of digital entanglement.  No longer are banking crises contained to a single country, due to the interconnectedness of our system, one country goes down, they all go down.  Which is exactly why central banks have been buying record amounts of gold and silver, this cannot go understated.  Although, us and many others continue to pound the table on this fact, it is for good reason as those with inside knowledge to the system are rapidly preparing for the fragility to shine through, and a global banking reset to take place.  As we have previously covered, this is no wild theory as our global banking system has gone through countless resets of varying scales a plethora of times over the past century alone.

Really think about this, global debt has reached a staggering $350 TRILLION USD.  Global GDP is $100 TRILLION USD.  Both numbers are massive, but even still, debt is 350% higher.  Countries have long been warned that Debt to GDP Ratios over 100% are unsustainable, let alone 350%… This is not a debt that can simply be refinanced at such a scale, this is global bankruptcy staring us right in the face.  Again, why central banks have been stockpiling real tangible wealth in the form of physical silver and gold bullion.

Speaking to that further, it was just announced that India has lowered their import tax on gold bullion from 15% down to just 6%, lowering the tax by over half.  This is already a country that has purchased jaw-dropping amounts of silver in 2024 and is now looking to make their imports of gold that much easier.  India is a country that holds over 24,000 tonnes of gold within citizen households alone, representing over 14% of global gold reserves, surpassing even the World Bank’s reserve totals.  It is evident news cycles are vastly different from East to West as BRICS nations governments and citizens alike continue to stockpile gold and silver at rapid speeds.  While those in the West continue to rely on debt instruments which is why you are seeing credit card debt reach record highs.  Without the ability to tap plastic at the checkout, citizens would have long been drained of their ability to purchase even the most essential items.  This is why owning silver and gold to preserve your wealth over the long-term is becoming one of those essential items.

Look at this simple comparison over nearly 100 years which really emphasizes the power of gold…

1929 Cost

Gold = $20.67 per ounce

House = $6,000 average home cost

1 kg of gold cost $664.56, meaning it cost 9.03 kg of gold to purchase the average 1929 home.

2024 Cost

Gold = $3,335 per ounce

House = $885,100 average home cost

1 kg of gold cost $107,223.59, meaning it cost 8.25 kg of gold to purchase the average 2024 home.

As you can see, owning gold put you further ahead nearly 100 years later as it takes less gold to buy the average home in 2024 than it did in 1929.  Further to that, if you simply held the $6000 in cash it took to purchase that home in 1929 until 2024, it would have been subject to over 1700% inflation.  You would need over $110,000 to have the same purchasing power in 2024, which, as shown above, was achieved by owning gold rather than fiat currency.

For our final topic of this newsletter, we are going to cover something that is currently developing.  This is a story that we do not have all the answers to just yet but will be monitoring over the next week and we will update our readers as more comes out.

What we will be covering is the Overnight Repurchase Agreement (REPO) system in Canada.  What this is in short is a way for banks that need liquidity FAST to receive it from the Bank of Canada, Canada’s central bank.  Essentially, a bank like RBC for example would sell equities to the Bank of Canada for an immediate cash infusion with the intent to purchase back those equities at a later date when the bank is back in good health.  Recently, the Bank of Canada increased the limit from $1 Billion CAD per bank, up to $3 Billion per bank during each session.  Then increased the total amount they would offer at each auction to $8 Billion up from $5 Billion.  This suggested that either one or more banks in Canada were in desperate need of more cash than could be legally provided.  Then the auctions rolled around – on July 15^th and 16^th, no banks took a cash injection.  On the 17^th of July, 2 auctions were needed as more than the capped $8 Billion were required.  A total of $9.24 Billion was injected into Canadian banks.  On the 18^th, another $9.65 Billion was injected.  On the 19^th, a whopping $12.65 Billion was injected.  On the 22^nd, $13.35 Billion again, was injected.  On the 23^rd, an eye-popping $16 Billion was injected into Canadian banks.

Within 5 days, $60.89 Billion in emergency cash injections was needed for Canadian banks to fulfill nightly promises and continue operation.  Some are suggesting this is the beginning of a silent banking crisis occurring with one or a few Canadian banks.  It would surprise no one if these injections continued to grow, but as we said it is something we will monitor closely.  In the meantime, it cannot be stressed enough of the importance of owning physical silver and gold.  The same way we get paid in fiat dollars and hope to save some for a rainy day, we should alter our learning to ensure we are saving what we can in physical silver and gold rather than in a digital account that could one day vanish while we are sleeping due to another global cyber outage which is now no longer unprecedented.