Lisa Shalett

So I don't know if we have an idea.

We have a hypothesis, right?

So I know over the last couple of weeks, a lot of folks have talked about gold as maybe a hedge to some of the frothiness in the equity market, et cetera.

But we've really been on this extraordinary run for the past, quite frankly, three years since the bull market began in the fall of 2022 with gold massively outperforming stocks.

Yeah, wow.

And so one of the things that we've begun to think about is not just dollar debasement, but whether or not folks are really worried about fiat currencies more broadly around the world.

And as folks really truly think about whether or not there is a credible, reliable future for stable coins and for crypto, whether some of this ecosystem needs to collateralize itself

with gold away from fiat currencies.

And so one theory we have is that some of these players may be trying to build some reserves in the yellow metal.

Well, it really requires some creativity because a lot, to your point, all of these correlations are breaking down.

And so one of the hypotheses that we have is that we've got this scenario where, yes, we haven't seen inflation in the real economy, but perhaps we're really starting to see inflation in financial assets.

Just too much liquidity from everywhere around the world sloshing around,

looking for places to go.

And in the everything rally, we're seeing folks buy everything from gold to stocks to bonds to currencies.

It does.

And for us, whenever these trends are transparent and trackable, which they really were for the last three or four years, you could say,

I see the order book.

I see the cash flow.

I understand how they're going to fund these CapEx plans.

But literally in the last eight to 10 weeks, the deal making, the pace of the deal making, and the interconnectedness of all of it is starting to suggest to us that we're getting to that part of the cycle where the analysts start making up new terms, this RPO and revenue cycle.