Jobs, Jobs, and More Jobs

Source: Michael Ballanger 09/08/2026

Michael Ballanger of GGM Advisory Inc. shares his thoughts on the current state of the market and explains why he thinks that, inevitably, gold and silver will lead all commodities.

There is an ancient colloquial idiom that evolved naturally over centuries in Western literature and theater to comment on the fleeting nature of human memory, loyalty, and gratitude. It goes like this: “How quickly they forget!”

As a card-carrying septuagenarian, I am proud to bear natural teeth and hair, and I am able to go to the grocery store without the aid of a walker or a mobile wheelchair. I try to walk whenever I am able, and until an old hockey knee injury started to act up, I was walking for an hour every morning. I view “aging” in the same way I viewed “losing” back when I was climbing the ranks in junior and collegiate hockey. I learned from some very famous teammates how to win and what it takes to instill that ethic into a locker room.

In 1969, I was traded from the London Knights to the Saint Catherines Black Hawks for “two pucks and a tank of gas for the Zamboni” because future Boston Bruins coach Bep Guidolin did not like “finesse” players. Actually, he hated anyone who played the game “by the rules,” so he shipped me down the road to St. Kitts, where I played with former NHL-ers Dave Fortier and Bob Macmillan, but also with future Hall-of-Famer and legitimate all-time greatest player pound-for-pound to ever play the game, and that young man was none other than Marcel Dionne.

Marcel came from a large, French Canadian family and was the “runt” of the litter, standing 5’9″ tall and weighing a remarkable 185 lbs. which meant that he had a very low centre-of-gravity making him very difficult to knock over, stop, check, or intimidate. As a “little guy”, opponents would regularly take runs at him and due largely to his total vision of the ice, he rarely got tagged. One night in Hamilton, Ontario, on local TV station CHCH Ch. 11, a Red Wing tough guy called Jerry Butler decided to drop the gloves with Marcel.

Now, usually, Marcel had either Pierre Guité or Mike Bloom (two registered-weapon goons) on his line as protectors, but this night, for some ungodly reason, Marcel was all alone to defend himself. All I remember was Marcel’s gloves flying into the air and an absolutely savage assault that resembled a Mike Tyson attack on the local gym speedbag. Butler skulked off to the penalty box with a towel over his battered face and ridiculous taunting from the boys on our bench.

What made Marcel a winner was demonstrated one night in a match against the Kitchener Rangers featuring the likes of Montreal Canadiens Hall-of-Famer Larry Robinson and Flyers’ great Bill Barber. Down 3-2 with two minutes to go, Marcel had the puck behind our net and then, looking up at the clock, he dished the puck off to the right defenseman and then bolted straight up the middle. The defenseman lobbed the puck high over the Ranger defense crew, landing it near the red line. Marcel’s blazing speed had him on the biscuit before the defense could even turn around. He went in on goalie Glen Seperich and dropped a shoulder to fake a deke. He flicked his wrists, and the puck laser-beamed into the top corner for the tie.

The sheer determination on Marcel’s face when he left the bench for that final shift said “everything“. It is no surprise that inside the undersized body of this former NHL superstar was the heart of a lion as he went on to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1992, ranking at the time third in career points with 1,771 points in 1,341 games. Amazingly, he still ranks sixth in all-time scoring, some thirty-seven years after his retirement.

As I said, playing alongside teammates like Dionne taught many of us what was required to not only win but also to survive, so I look at aging like we are down 3-2 with two minutes to go. One can fold up the tent and ride out one’s remaining years, or one can spit in the eye of the time clock and forge forward. As a friend once told me, “Motion is lotion”.

Many of us forget that old adage just as we forget that we forget that the cause of most of the inflation in consumer prices occurred in the years following the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 which launched into motion the hijacking of most of the monetary principles of the U.S. “Founding Fathers” who did not hold a single, uniform view on monetary policy, but whose principles were universally shaped by a deep distrust of unbacked paper currency.

This skepticism arose from their lived experience during the Revolutionary War, when the Continental Congress printed paper money (“Continentals”) that suffered from catastrophic hyperinflation and became completely worthless. To protect the young nation from a similar fate, they anchored the United States’ financial foundation on two core monetary pillars: commodity backing (gold and silver) and strict constitutional limits on printing money.

The quote shown at the opening of this week’s missive was that of former Fed Chairperson Janet Yellen, who served as Secretary of the Treasury from 2021 to 2025 under Democratic President Joe Biden. During her tenure, The U.S. National Debt grew by approximately $8.4 trillion to $8.45 trillion during the four-year presidential term from January 2021 to January 2025.

This represented a 30.5% surge in total outstanding government obligations. To say that Mme. Yellen allowed the U.S. economy to run “hot” during a period when the pandemic of 2020-2021 had shut down traditional supply chains, which is a misnomer.

She would claim that allowing a “high-pressure economy” to flourish would allow “robust aggregate demand and a tight labor market” to reverse the “adverse supply-side effects” brought on by shutting down the entire global economy.

So, when I hear President Trump and Secretary Bessent chiming out about “growing their way out of debt,” what that really means is that they will conjure up the magical means of legalized counterfeiting in order to reflate the money supply without expanding the debt in order to increase the serviceability of that debt.

I have written about this before, but if a farmer has a barn full of corn totaling 1,000 ears of corn and allows 100 customers with $10 each in their pockets to buy that corn, each ear by default cannot be priced higher than $1.00. If, however, the customers are given an extra $20 before entering the barn, despite the corn being worth the same amount, it will command a total of $3.00 per ear. This, in my simplistic description of monetary inflation, is how the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) could experience that unprecedented, historical shock, resulting in a massive 24.4% cumulative increase in consumer prices.

History has proven over and over that governments cannot cure exploding national debt through monetary expansion because the bond market sniffs it out and reacts, taking yields higher, which stifles growth and productivity, with the resultant adverse outcome being runaway inflation. That is the dilemma facing many, if not all, Western governments, and why inevitably gold and silver will lead all commodities, including base metals, energy, and food, to record highs against all fiat currencies. This is “old news” and a very well-trodden narrative, but the recent volatility in the PMs coupled with the desperate acts of the central bank, makes it necessary to repeat it.

Energy Stocks

As this is being written, it is a beautiful Sunday morning in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in the middle of the last real weekend of the summer of 2026. The Wall Street bulls are still drunk from the celebration of capitalism that was the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX:NASDAQ) IPO where the total investment banking underwriting fee pool paid on June 12, 2026, was approximately $500 million.

These “Titans of Wall Street” are once again salivating over the soon-to-arrive Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. Anthropic Insiders hint that the company is aiming for an unprecedented valuation that could target up to $2 trillion, potentially raising up to $100 billion. This would make it one of the largest public listings in history, and with it, a generated fee of approximately $670-700 million. It is no wonder that the bankers are scurrying about like soldier ants at the feeding of the queen.

The rest of the market has been fairly dull, with market breadth on the “weakish” side, with the one exception being the energy stocks.

In the GGMA 2026 Forecast Issue, I told subscribers that the one sector of the market that could be a “great place to hide” was the oil and gas sector, and as can be seen from the chart shown below, the State Street Energy Select SPDR ETF (XLE:US) has been a superstar in 2026, up 46.52% versus the S&P up 13.18% year-to-date.

One of the best performers is a little junior oil & gas producer, Ring Energy Inc. (REI:NYSE), up 72.41% YTD. This strong outperformance was driven by surpassing Q2 earnings expectations, a major operational pivot toward higher-efficiency horizontal drilling, and a strengthened balance sheet that triggered institutional inclusion.

I recently doubled my holding in REI as I believe that oil supplies have been irreparably damaged by the events in the Middle East and will not return to former levels until the next decade has arrived.

While the XLE:US looks somewhat overbought, I want to be a buyer of pullbacks in advance of a strong year-end performance as lagging portfolio managers scramble to bring their energy allocations up to market weight.

Metals

The metals have been whipping around like headless chickens, which is due largely and in part to the time of year, as institutional liquidity is sparse, but also because the algobots that run markets these days are responding with hair-trigger impulsiveness to every little nook and nuance that might signal a trend change.

Most of my colleagues that cover precious metals took the Treasury Department’s intervention in the global currency markets as a sign that “Bessent blinked” , meaning that the fear of Japanese dumping of U.S. treasuries prompted the buying of Japanese yen to avoid upward pressure on long-term bond yields.

I was not so sure then, nor was I sure even after the Bessent doubled the buyback of long-date bonds using the Treasury General Account (“TGA”). There is a great deal of jawboning coming from the Treasury Secretary these days, to the extent that he is beginning to sound more and more like one of the past Fed governors, complete with pompoms and cymbals, one inattentive eye scanning Main Street with the other fiercely-focused eye centred 100% on Yield Curve Control (“YCC”).

Since rising yields are the Achilles Heel of the current bull market in stocks, it feels like the old “Fed put” has been replaced by the “Bessent put“. However, we all know that there is no entity on earth that can manipulate either the global currency markets or the global bond market, so by default, the actions by the Treasury Department will wind up just as impotent as the Bank of England just before Soros and Company broke the British pound, forcing a devaluation and reset.

I use the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD:US) as my trading proxy for gold not so much that I think any bank-designed product could ever contain any gold but more because the investment flows that track gold use it because they think that it tracks physical gold, The reality is that physical gold has its own pricing mechanism outside of the U.S. financial markets and the global central banks are starting to recognize this.

Last month, the Dutch central bank (De Nederlandsche Bank, or DNB) officially confirmed that it has moved a massive portion of its gold reserves out of North America. However, rather than bringing all of it home to the Netherlands, the vast majority was relocated to London. In recent years, at least four major central banks have explicitly executed large-scale programs to repatriate or relocate their sovereign gold reserves away from North American vaults (primarily the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of Canada in Ottawa). These moves came as a direct result of the confiscation of Russian dollar reserves after their invasion of Ukraine.

Instead of climbing onto the “Gold has BOTTOMED!!!“ bandwagon, I decided to treat the late-July advance as nothing more than a “bear market rally” for a number of reasons. First, there were no signs of capitulation at the July lows. Secondly, the move off the lows was “event-driven,” and no tradable low was ever earmarked by any event that I can recall. Third, I wanted to see silver leading the way because no bona fide bull market in gold has ever endured without the accompaniment of silver as the leading component. I elected to wait for GLD:US to better the “convergence zone” between the 100-dma and 200-dma for two consecutive sessions, after which I safely conclude that there had indeed been a “change of trend”.

I got exactly that on August 20-21 with a 2-day close above the 200-dma (around $415.00), but also cautioned subscribers to avoid chasing the breakout. I advised them to buy dips closer to the convergence zone rather than chasing GLD:US to nearly $430, which it did only three sessions later. That guidance proved invaluable because after peaking out, it crashed hard, coming all the way back to $396.45, thus negating the 2-day close above resistance.

From where I sit, the jury is out as to whether or not the June-July lows were “THE” low because the one thing that incubates the gold bugs is negative and declining real interest rates, but with the 10-year treasury yielding over 4.7% and rising, and a CPI around 3% and declining, those are not ideal conditions for the incubation of gold bug excitement. In fact, it is an environment in which precious metals tend to weaken. Since the Fed is now not exactly signaling “easing,” we are not going to get any kind of market-moving signal as long as Kevin Warsh is “wearing the badge.”

As a holder of big positions in a number of junior gold stocks, there is nothing that would delight and excite me more than silver breaking out above its 200-dma at $72.07, dragging gold back up through $4,700, and the HUI:US to new highs as well.

I told subscribers last Thursday that “I am hoping that the lows are in, but as we all know too painfully, ‘hope’ is not an investment or trading strategy…”.

Advice like that has saved me a lot of money over the five decades that I have been practicing “slash & burn” trading in the precious metals markets.

Fitzroy

With Labor Day marking the end of the seasonally weak period for the junior, I have been one very interesting one, being Fitzroy Minerals Inc. (FTZ:TSX.V; FTZFF:OTCQX).

Before I don the tank top and short-shorts, screaming rah-rah chants through a mechanized megaphone whilst atop a large soap box positioned strategically on the City Hall steps, let it be known that I could not for the life of me understand why the share price has been under pressure despite the terrific year they have enjoyed expanding their Buen Retiro Copper Oxide Deposit in Chile.

Frustrated with a stock price that simply failed to reflect the underlying value as a nascent near-term producer, I had a chat with CEO Merlin Marr-Johnson and asked him the question: “Why, pray tell, with all these great drill hole results from Buen Retiro, is your stock trading like a two-bit junior explorco?”

His answer, while stated far differently with infinitely more geological aplomb, was this:

“That’s because we ARE a “two-bit junior explorco”, at least in the eyes of the market.”

Aghast, I spent the next twenty minutes listening to a very exciting list of milestones that ended with “We haven’t shown the market any numbers yet.”

In the next nine months, the company will endeavor to deliver a number of significant milestones that will vault it from “two-bit junior explorco” to “nascent producer” with the delivery of the following:

• Metallurgical Results: Q3 2026
• Minerals Resource Estimate/Preliminary Economic Assessment: Q4 2026
• Final Metallurgy: Q1 2027
• Pre-Feasibility Study: Q2 2027

So, by next summer, the market will see just how profitably and just how big Buen Retiro has become. Once they show the world how $6.50 copper can impact the company on a free-cash-flow basis, it will be priced accordingly, which, in my assessment, is US$400-500 million versus the current US$120 million or a 3X to 4X lift from current levels.

Meanwhile, drilling at their highly-prospective Caballos Copper-Gold-Molybdenum discovery will commence within the next thirty days, and if early “deep IP” targets turn out to be economically-viable copper porphyries, then the valuation needle gets thrown violently northward, making Q4 2026 extremely exciting for my top pick and #1 holding.

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Important Disclosures:

1. As of the date of this article, officers, contractors, shareholders, and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Fitzroy Minerals Inc.
2. Michael Ballanger: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own securities of: Fitzroy Minerals, GLD, and Ring Energy Inc. My company has a financial relationship with: None. My company has purchased stocks mentioned in this article for my management clients: None. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector.
3. Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports, Street Smart, or their officers. The author is wholly responsible for the accuracy of the statements. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Any disclosures from the author can be found below. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy.
4. This article does not constitute investment advice and is not a solicitation for any investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her personal financial adviser and perform their own comprehensive investment research. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports’ terms of use and full legal disclaimer. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company.

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Michael Ballanger Disclosures

This letter makes no guarantee or warranty on the accuracy or completeness of the data provided. Nothing contained herein is intended or shall be deemed to be investment advice, implied or otherwise. This letter represents my views and replicates trades that I am making but nothing more than that. Always consult your registered advisor to assist you with your investments. I accept no liability for any loss arising from the use of the data contained on this letter. Options and junior mining stocks contain a high level of risk that may result in the loss of part or all invested capital and therefore are suitable for experienced and professional investors and traders only. One should be familiar with the risks involved in junior mining and options trading and we recommend consulting a financial adviser if you feel you do not understand the risks involved.

( Companies Mentioned: FTZ:TSX.V; FTZFF:OTCQX, REI:NYSE, )

Source: https://www.streetwisereports.com/article/2026/09/08/jobs-jobs-and-more-jobs.html