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00:00First off just tell me if you had a different experience in terms of supply and demand over the past week or so as a result of this retail driven interest in silver. Hi good morning. We've certainly seen high demand for silver but probably this is a trend that's been in the markets for you know probably five or six months now with the silver market has been pretty strong. It certainly exacerbated you know over the last three or four days with a IT move and a couple of other things that have happened. But we certainly are seeing strong silver demand mostly at a retail level mostly out of the United States but also out of Europe at the moment. And that's really just a continuation of where we've been for the last six or eight months. Do you have any intentions or what would trigger the kind of rationing restrictions that we've seen the U.S. Mint put in place. We did the US Mint will always put rationing in place. They won't take forward orders where they simply just don't have the capacity to manufacture the product. We tend to do the same thing. We're not on rationing at this stage although we're certainly selling absolutely everything that we can produce. But the point here is that you know the silver market is a very deep market. And as we saw with gold on Comex last year in the sort of you know the early to mid part of last year the. It's a case of. There was plenty of the medal around in this case that's plenty of silver in the world. It's not a case of a shortage of physical silver. It's a case of shortage of silver in a specific or a particular kind of product in a particular location. And the reason for that is it does take time to manufacture silver into products that people want in this case the retail market. So it's largely coins and small bars and then actually getting it to market. And even though fried conditions certainly have eased since the big freight squeeze of early 2020 when we saw a lot of airlines just shutting down and freight routes became very tight we are still able to move freight around the world relatively freely. Yeah I was going to ask how have things changed since the pandemic. Given the freight capacity as well. And now you have the squeeze. The freight capacity has certainly made moving product around a lot more expensive. Some of the airlines are three and four times as expensive now as they were 12 months ago. But that's just the case of markets. Supply and demand in terms of actually moving product around. Over the last sort of six months the situation has eased as the freight markets have normalized to a degree but they're certainly more expensive now than they were before. And there's less capacity now than there was before which also lends to the squeeze being perhaps more pronounced than it otherwise would have been. What are you seeing in terms of flows. We have heard customers selling gold in order to buy silver. Are you seeing that sort of rotation happen and what do you do when that really price has become so or the movement has become so detached from fundamentals. Look we are certainly seeing some of our investors. We run a very large metals depository where people can buy and store both silver and gold and we are seeing some of our investor base liquidating gold positions to buy into the silver position. And that's fairly common when you have situations like this. I've been in precious metals for close to 25 years now so I've been through quite a number of these where you see one asset class liquidated and some flow to another as the market dislocate from the physical. You certainly do see an increase in premiums but you also see the widening of spreads. And certainly over the last three or four days you certainly see the thing. You've seen a significant widening in spreads. Some of our United States based distributors actually have suspended trading until the markets normalize because of the wild swings in the spreads and then also the price volatility. So spreads certainly do go out which does further exacerbate in the minds of right off the retail market the fact that there is this run on so that there is this squeeze and more people will then tend to pile into it. Just putting aside these two the turbulence that we've seen in the last few weeks I'm wondering has the pandemic itself has the start of the pandemic. Have you seen investor behavior demand for different metals changed during that period. I think the pandemic really has focused the world's mind on having precious metals as part of their overall asset allocation. We've certainly seen our depository growth relatively significantly where probably you know we're probably 50 or 60 per cent up on where we were a couple of years ago. And certainly over the last 12 months that growth has been far more pronounced as people tried to diversify their risk. And precious metals does provide that great asset diversify that great enshrined policy against everything else. So saying you know stock markets have been strong. Certainly some of the Trump policies that were very business friendly did tend to drive the US stock markets higher and higher. What few people saw though was that a lot of that drive was through tech stocks rather than the broader market to say.

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Silver Demand Has Been Strong, Perth Mint CEO Says

Richard Hayes, chief executive officer of Australia’s Perth Mint, discusses demand for silver. The precious metal is falling after surging to an eight-year high as it became a target for amateur traders on Reddit Inc. forums. Hayes speaks with Haidi Stroud-Watts and Shery Ahn on "Bloomberg Daybreak' Australia." (Source: Bloomberg)

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