DAVID GAROFALO | From Gold Royalty Corp.

· Podcast Episodes
The fundamentals of investing in precious metals in a time of high inflation. David Garofalo Chairman & CEO Gold Royalty

What is sustainable mining? How can precious metals be used in a portfolio to provide protection against inflation. I was joined by David Garofalo to discuss royalties, the mining industry and reducing the impact of digging up those metals.

David Garofalo

  1. Globally recognized Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, and Director of Gold Royalty
  2. Led the largest merger in gold mining history at $32,000,000,000
  3. Named Mining Person of the Year by The Northern Miner in 2012
  4. Canada’s Chief Financial Officer of the Year by Financial Executives International Canada in 2009
Gold Royalty Logo

We spoke about why gold can provide protection against inflation:

Gold can't be printed unlike many fiat currencies. And if you think about it, you could go to any country in the world and talk to almost any anybody on earth and they would under understand the intrinsic value of gold. They would accept it as a means of barter. That's certainly not the case for every fiat currency. There are many currencies simply that you can't use even our Canadian currency. I'm in Canada and there are many countries where they would look at me funny if I try to use that as a means of exchange that, you know, that's certainly not the case with the US dollar, but as the Chinese are demonstrating, they're trying to actively destabilize the US dollar as a reserve currency.

What is David's view of the future demand for precious metals:

Well,I think it's quite robust and, and the big drivers of that I think is the inflationary cycle we find ourselves in now. And there are many parallels to this inflation cycle, to the one we experience in the 1970s. As I said, the US dollar was decoupled from the gold standard in early 1970s to fund a war in Vietnam. Similarly, the fiat currencies globally were decoupled from any backing as a result of the great financial crisis back in 2008. And that's a
resulted, a massive monetary expansion, very, very similar to what we had in the 1970s and perhaps more global in scale than it was in the 1970s. And we have a war in Ukraine now.

Gold Royalty Corp. is a gold-focused royalty company offering creative financing solutions to the metals and mining industry. Its mission is to invest in high-quality, sustainable, and responsible mining operations to build a diversified portfolio of precious metals royalty and streaming interests that generate superior long-term returns for shareholders.

Gold Royalty has a diversified portfolio consists of over 200 royalties located in mining-friendly jurisdictions throughout the Americas.

TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS AFTER THIS BRIEF MESSAGE

Sharesight Award Winning Portfolio Tracker

CLICK ON THE LINK TO SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL OF SHARESIGHT PORTFOLIO TRACKER

Get 4 months free on an annual premium plan when you use Sharesight, the award-winning portfolio tracker. Sign up for a free trial today.

Sharesight automatically tracks price, performance and dividends from 240,000+ global stocks, crypto, ETFs and funds. Add cash accounts and property to get the full picture of your portfolio – all in one place.

Portfolio tracker Sharesight tracks your trades, shows your true performance, and saves you time and money at tax time. Get 4 months free at this link.

Disclosure: The links provided are affiliate links. I will be paid a commission if you use this link to make a purchase. You will also usually receive a discount by using these links/coupon codes. I only recommend products and services that I use and trust myself or where I have interviewed and/or met the founders and have assured myself that they’re offering something of value.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chloe (1s):

Stocks for beginners. Phil Muscatello and Fin Pods are authorized reps of Money Sherpa. The information in this podcast is general in nature and doesn't take into account your personal situation.

David (12s):

And we have a war in Ukraine now. We had a war in Vietnam in the seventies and we had supply chain disruptions we had at energy embargo back in the 1970s. We have an energy embargo today, self-imposed this time. So they're very striking similarities in this inflation cycle to what we experienced in the seventies. But I think this inflation cycle has a potential to be much worse for one significant reason. The debt levels that we have globally at 350% of GDP today are three and a half times what they were in the 1970s at a hundred percent of GDP.

Phil (49s):

Hi and welcome back to Stocks for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. What is sustainable mining? How can precious metals be used in a portfolio to provide protection against inflation to discuss royalties, the mining industry and reducing the impact of digging up those metals is David Garofalo. Hello David.

David (1m 7s):

Hi. Thank you for having me on.

Phil (1m 8s):

Thanks very much for coming on. David Garofalo is the Chief Executive Officer, president and chairman of the board of directors of Gold Royalty. David is a globally recognized chief executive with over 30 years of experience in creating and growing multi-billion dollar sustainable mining businesses. So let's get started. We've haven't covered precious metals for a while on the podcast, so let's just do a little bit of a revision. What are the main precious metals?

David (1m 37s):

Well, we mine or have royalties on mines that have gold and silver principally. We also have a bit of copper as well. I wouldn't consider that a precious metal. It's more of a base metal and one that has a lot of industrial utility, but we have a small amount of exposure to copper as well.

Phil (1m 51s):

And of course there's also platinum and palladium. They're the other main precious metals as well, aren't they?

David (1m 57s):

Yeah, they are, but they're not nearly as commoditized as gold and silver are. It's not as liquid a market, it's, it's a more of a niche market. And again, with palladium there's more of an industrial utilization there. Platinum has more of a jewelry demand angle to it, but I would say gold and silver have many buyers and many sellers. So a proper commodity with a proper liquid market, easy to get price discovery, much more difficult in the platinum palladium side of the business.

Phil (2m 29s):

So the idea of a commodity is this is something that the price of a commodity can go up and down depending on demand and supply with a lot of volatility, can't it?

David (2m 40s):

Yes, it it, that's absolutely the case, particularly in more liquid and deep markets like gold and silver where there are many buyers and sellers and, and price discovery can quite often lead to quite a bit of volatility. And that's what you expect from what effectively is a currency. I would say gold is more of a currency than a true commodity. Doesn't really trade on traditional demand supply fundamentals like say copper or zinc would because gold has been a monetary instrument for four millennia.

Phil (3m 9s):

And silver has some industrial usages as well, doesn't it?

David (3m 12s):

It it does and and important from a decarbonization standpoint. It also has some properties that you know, deal with, you know, cleansing of water, cleaning of water, for example, sanitation. So it does have a lot more industrial utility than than gold does. Gold is more of a monetary instrument, but that being said, silver tends to trade in tandem with gold. There's a relationship, a correlation over the long run. Typically there's a, a relationship in terms of the gold, the silver price ratio in a bull market for precious metals. It tends to narrow to say 40 to one between the gold and silver price in terms of the ratio between them in, in a more bearish market it might widen to 80 to one.

David (3m 54s):

And we've gone through a fairly bearish cycle for precious metals over the last several years. But that's starting to turn around. So silver has the potential to outperform in a rising gold pressure environment as that ratio tends to narrow.

Phil (4m 7s):

There are some traders aren't there that use that ratio between the gold and silver price to find entry and exit points for silver especially, don't they?

David (4m 15s):

Yeah, it's, it's almost a form of arbitrage if you will, where they're trying to guess, you know, the, the narrowing of that range or the timing of the narrowing of that range. And it tends to provide more torque to precious metals up and down. So it's much more volatile for silver than it would be for gold typically because of that play of that ratio and the arbitrage related there too.

Phil (4m 36s):

So you refer to gold as being a store of value and it's one of those cliches we hear in the industry is that gold has been a store of value for thousands of years. So it's the only precious metal that really has a value in and of itself, doesn't it?

David (4m 50s):

Yeah, and that's certainly been the case for many millennia because gold can't be printed unlike many fiat currencies. And if you think about it, you could go to any country in the world and talk to almost any anybody on earth and they would under understand the intrinsic value of gold. They would accept it as a means of barter. That's certainly not the case for every fiat currency. There are many currencies simply that you can't use even our Canadian currency. I'm in Canada and there are many countries where they would look at me funny if I try to use that as a means of exchange that, you know, that's certainly not the case with the US dollar, but as the Chinese are demonstrating, they're trying to actively destabilize the US dollar as a reserve currency.

David (5m 30s):

And what that tells you is really since the beginning of of time, every fee of currency, every created by man has ultimately failed cuz the temptation is just too great to base the value that currency, which is certainly what's happening in the current economic environment.

Phil (5m 45s):

And the debasement of the currency is really to do with the money printing that we've seen over the last few years. And actually for a long time governments just tend to keep on spending more money. And that debases or reduces the value of the currency, doesn't it?

David (5m 59s):

Yeah, it destroys purchasing power. If you're printing more of that money, it'll debase the currency, it'll become more common. And if you look at what's happened since the US dollar was decoupled from the gold standard in the early 1970s, the US dollar has lost about 90% of its purchasing power. So that debasement really has eaten away its savings.

Phil (6m 22s):

And is that a function of inflation that debasement?

David (6m 25s):

Well it's a function of money printing, which drives inflation. And the reason that the US dollar was decoupled from the gold standard in early 1970s is Richard Nixon was trying to fund a war in Vietnam. And really what's happened since the great financial crisis is very, very similar to that, there's been a decoupling of fee currency from any intrinsic value, any backing, physical backing whatsoever to deal with a financial contagion which has now reared its ugly head again after many years of excess of monetary expansion, 15 years of monetary expansion since the great financial crisis, not just in the US but on a global coordinated basis across the world. Every central bank has been competing to base their currency to preserve their export markets and really kick the can down the road in terms of dealing with the fundamental issues in our financial system.

Phil (7m 14s):

In that case, what role can gold and other precious metals play in an investor's portfolio?

David (7m 22s):

Well, gold can't be printed. It, it's not the obligation of any government, unlike, you know, when, when you hold a US dollar in your hands it says there's the promise that the US government will deliver a dollar of value in return for that. But you know, that can be debased as the printing presses are ramped up. And that's exactly what's happened. As I said, since the early 1970s, it's been a remarkable debasement of the value of that US dollar. Gold has a very finite quantity on the Earth's surface. If you look at every ounce that's been mined since the beginning of time, it's about the equivalent of a 200,000 metric tons and that would fill one Olympic size swimming pool. So it's a very finite quantity and it can't be printed willy-nilly, it can't be created or mined willy-nilly it.

David (8m 7s):

It requires significant upfront capital investment, social license to operate permits from governments. And that's why we've actually seen a steady decline in production globally. We only add about 2% to supply every year as an industry. And that's declining every year as as productions declined because the industry has not been reinvesting in expiration back in the ground to replace depleting reserves. In fact, reserves in the ground over the last 10 years have gone down 40% cuz of the lack of reinvestment back in expiration because we had gone through a very long bear market for precious metals over the course of the last decade. So the capital just wasn't there to conduct the expiration necessary to replace depleting assets.

Phil (8m 55s):

So investors don't need to just buy physical gold, you don't have to have a safe and put your gold bars into that safe. Do you, what are some of the ways that investors can access the value of gold?

David (9m 6s):

Yeah, you, you're right. Physical is definitely a way to do it and I think everybody should have some physical gold in their portfolio. I certainly do and I do store it in my safety deposit box and I think it's a very, very viable way to invest in gold. But of course what that doesn't provide you is, is much leverage as you might realize, say owning a mining equity, a gold equity. And you know, for example, if gold price went up 10% and presumably the margins at the mine should go up disproportionately higher in a stable cost environment. But unfortunately we're not in a stable cost environment. We're in a very inflationary environment unlike anything we've seen since the 1970s.

David (9m 46s):

And so mining companies are not immune from that cost inflation. So you're not getting that leverage to the gold price that you were hoping to in binding mining equities. That's why I think it's instructive that after 33 years of building an operating mines, I've now run a royalty vehicle. I really believe in the bull case scenario for gold. But I wanted to participate in the gold price rally and get that leverage without exposing myself to inflation at the mine site. And really a royalty company provides that top line exposure while insulating you from the underlying operating costs at a mine.

Phil (10m 20s):

Okay, well let's talk about mining royalties. How, how do they operate? I mean most listeners might think of royalties as in terms of what an artist would receive on their music catalog, for example, or even a a pharmaceutical company. How does it work in the mining industry?

David (10m 38s):

Well, the model's very similar. We get a percentage of the gross revenue and the reason we do that is quite often we're providing capital to the explorers, the developers and operators to help them grow their deposits geologically, build them, expand them. And we take a royalty back and return rather than expecting repayment. And that royalty's perpetual, it's adhered to the property for the rest of its life and any expansions in reserves geologically. So we get the benefit of the upside and the goal price and upside and expiration success. So if our operating partners conduct further expiration on the properties and grow their reserves, our royalties extend to those expansions and reserves.

David (11m 19s):

So we get the benefit of the expiration upside without having to contribute to their expiration budgets. So once we buy a royalty, we own it for life. In the case of Gore Royalty, for example, my company, we own 216 royalties across the Americas and they're completely bought and paid for. We never have to put another dime into them. And we get the benefit of the upside in the gold price because again, full benefit because we're not exposed to operating costs is top line exposure. It's a percentage of the gross revenue from the mine. So we're not exposed to the underlying operating capital costs and we get the benefit of the, the expiration that our operating partners conduct. Last year, for example, in our, on our portfolio of 216 royalties, our operating partners invested 200 million dollars in expiration on their properties.

David (12m 6s):

That was about 700,000 meters of diamond drilling. For those that understand how drilling works, that's a lot of drilling. We didn't contribute anything to those expiration budgets, but as they grew the reserves, we benefited in our royalty portfolio from that upside in the reserves.

Phil (12m 22s):

Can we just have a quick look at how a, a mining operation works because they're quite capital intensive obviously, and sometimes they're operating on a wing and a prayer or a, you know, a geological report. What, what does the life cycle of a typical mine look like? Even I know there's no typical mine, but what does it look like? And then I guess what I'm trying to get to here is that capital is required and that mine operation can get that capital in many ways, one of which is via royalties or selling the royalties. Yeah,

David (12m 54s):

Exactly. No, and you're correct to question the lifecycle of a mine though as you correctly point out, many mines are different from each other, but the lifecycle is broadly similar across all of the mines in the world. And it starts with early stage exploration prospecting, looking for properties that have geological potential and there are many means of doing that. Technical means of assessing the potential of a property and then finding geological targets to drill and then that leads to hopefully discovery. In many cases it doesn't. The success ratio is extremely low in the business, it's very, very risky. And typically juniors, many juniors fail and their expiration efforts, I would say the vast, vast majority of them fail cuz it is very difficult to find new mineralization on the ground in spite of very modern techniques to do so.

David (13m 42s):

And then once you actually have discovered something, if you're so lucky to have won the lottery and found that that deposit, then you have to delineate it, geologically drill out the extent of it to really determine the size of the deposit and then you have to engineer an economic case for it. And then you have to engage with the local communities to get a social license to operate. And then you have to cost out the construction of a project, which can be in the many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. The cost to entry in this sector is very, very high. And then you have to build it, commission it, and then operate it cost efficiently. And that can be quite labor intensive and cost intensive as well.

David (14m 25s):

And energy intensive, 60% of our operating costs in the mining business typically are labor and energy. And with the kind of volatility we're experiencing in this sector, you can imagine the risk that presents to the margins at a mine site. And, and I think a, again that goes to my thesis to why you should buy a royalty company rather than an operating company. But typically from discovery to first production, you're looking at 15 to 20 years and that's many, many years of capital and exploration investment and social engagement and government engagement in order to get a license both economically, socially and for that matter from a government to actually build a mine and operate it.

Phil (15m 7s):

I think there's a good lesson in there in that I'm not sure what it's like in Canada, but you know here in Australia and Canada we've got very much mining intensive economies and you're always getting those tips about, you know, you should have a look at this gold mining operation, you know it's gonna be really good. And it just really goes to show how speculative these kind of tips can be and that beginner investors should avoid them.

David (15m 36s):

Precisely and and in fact, you know, many of the junior explorers who do the grassroots exploration only have selective access to to capital quite often, you know, the market's open and closed depending on whether the underlying commodity has momentum. And over the last decade or so, there hasn't been a lot of momentum in the precious metal sector. So by and large the junior explorers who do all the heavy lifting that, you know I talked about the early part of the life cycle being the most risky, they're the ones that do all the heavy lifting take the, the most significant risk and their expiration efforts, but they only have occasional access to capital. And as a result of the lack of consistent access to capital, we've seen as 40% decline in reserves from their peak since 2012 because the juniors are the ones that do the discovery.

David (16m 25s):

The mining operating companies are the one that that build and operate. They don't tend to do the grassroots expiration even though they have capital in the balance sheet to do that. They don't do it because the risk profile is so different from running the mine. And when you're a junior company, you embrace that risk, you're swinging for the fences, you know, as it were. And that's why you have such a low batting average as a result. Whereas with mine operating companies, they're quite the opposite. They don't embrace risks, they mitigate risk cuz they take on a lot of capital intensity, they take on a lot of operational risk, safety risk, environmental risk. They're trying to engineer as much risk outta their business as possible. So typically operating companies are terrible explorers and explorers are terrible operators cuz the skillsets entirely different.

Phil (17m 10s):

So what role does gold royalty take in terms of providing capital for miners?

David (17m 16s):

We're, we go right across the risk spectrum and, and typically we'll provide some expiration capital to the early stage explorers, typically when they don't have access to capital as is is currently the case. And so we take on for very low cost, some early stage bets on royalties, on properties and sometimes we'll get mature operators approaching us because they have a very capital intensive opportunity to build the mine or expand the mine that exists or is near production. And we provide capital to them when, when they might not have access to capital from traditional sources, whether it's debt from banks or the equity capital markets might be depressed and it's very difficult for them to raise equity to fund the construction or expansion of their mind.

David (18m 2s):

Sometimes we buy royalties from third parties, you know, for example a prospector might be looking to crystallize the value of a property stake, an expiration claim on, he sold it to an operator, he kept the royalty and then he's decided I'm gonna cash in now. And we pick up a royalty that way as well. And sometimes we originate our own royalties. We have a small team in some of the best jurisdictions, Nevada, Quebec and Ontario, and all they do is stake expiration claims around existing mines. Wait for the neighbors to knock on the door and say, my deposit's trending into your property, can I buy your property? And we say great, you can buy it but we want a royalty back and return really. And that's a very cost effective way to generate royalties cuz it just requires our sweat equity.

David (18m 44s):

And fortunately with 400 years of collective experience within our board of management, we have the expertise to do just that.

Phil (18m 51s):

So you really do that, you just stake out sites around existing mines and just wait and see, wait for someone to knock on the door. That's amazing.

David (18m 58s):

Yeah, exactly. You know, deposits don't know no manmade boundaries, right? Yeah. Geology doesn't understand those, those boundaries, those lines that we draw on a map. And so if we're selective enough about where we state these expiration claims and it's not very costly to do so nor to maintain those claims, we can be very patient. And then when we get those royalties back in return again, it just requires a sweat equity and they don't waste, they don't decay. Even if it's a long-dated opportunity, we can just put it on the shelf, forget about it until somebody builds a mine there and then we start to collect checks when the mine is built and operated.

Phil (19m 35s):

Just tell us a bit more about the history of gold royalty. How long's it been for when you started it and its growth?

David (19m 42s):

Well we started it privately back in 2020, so about two and a half years ago. Initially with a collection of 18 royalties on the development stage assets of our former pairing company, gold Mining Inc. So we were royalties on their 18 development stage gold assets in the Americas, which collectively had about 32 million ounces of gold equivalent resource across our property. So very significant mineral endowment. And having written those 18 royalties, we then IPOed the company in March of 2021, raised 90 million US acquired a currency that we could then use to roll up some of our competitors. And we bought three peer companies over the course of 2021 and grew a royalty portfolio from 18 royalties to over 200 royalties.

David (20m 28s):

As a result of that m and a activity, it created scale quickly and it made us relevant in the the royalty space very quickly, but also gave us a growth profile on the revenue side that's pure leading. We have 60% compounded annual growth in our revenue over the next several years right through to to the end of the decade. And that allowed us to actually introduce a dividend 10 months after our I P O. We paid now about a 1.9% yield. And with that revenue growth that we have and the fact that we have very flat costs, we only have eight full-time equivalent employees and we could run a business 10 times the size with the same number of employees given the simplicity of our business, that means that every incremental dollar of revenue falls right to the bottom line and increases the potential for us to grow our dividend over time.

Phil (21m 16s):

Mm, I was gonna ask about the dividend and so o obviously this is a big part of the plan for investors is to provide a dividend for them. Yeah,

David (21m 23s):

It is. You know, at the end of the day our business is a collection of annuities. You know, we have annuities on mines that will pay for we think many, many decades and that means that we have an annuity that we can share with our shareholders through, through a dividend. And so we introduced a dividend program quite quickly, just given again how quickly we were able to scale our business up, given the depth of expertise we have within our business that's given us an advantage given the the seniority of our mining team, our board in terms of accessing opportunities and very quickly executing upon them.

Phil (21m 56s):

I know one of the larger players in this space is a company called Wheaton Precious Metals. Is that correct?

David (22m 2s):

It is.

Phil (22m 3s):

What's the kind of, what's the kind of comparison there between the companies between, well,

David (22m 6s):

You know, the landscape in the royalty space looks somewhat like this. There's three big players in the space of large caps, Franco Nevada, Wheat and precious metals and Royal gold. And they're trading, you know, 20 to 30 billion market cap, two to three times the net asset value of their underlying business. So very, very rich multiples and richly deserve. They're at large companies, mega caps with great portfolios, pay dividends, really blue chip companies. And then there's a collection of smaller cap players like gold royalty that are starting to capture the imagination of the market, but trade as significant discounts to the seniors in the space. What's absent in the sector is a mid-tier company that's big enough to matter to institutional investors, but still small enough to grow because the challenge that the Francos and the Wheatons and the world Golds have at their scale is their inability to grow meaningfully.

David (22m 58s):

They're just too big where, you know, it's hard to imagine them going up five or tenfold even in a rising gold price environment. Whereas the small players that still have scale and have relevance given the quality of the portfolio, that provides them an opportunity to grow manyfold a as the gold price appreciates and we realize some of the value of our vast and underlying portfolio.

Phil (23m 21s):

David, you led the largest merger in gold mining history. Tell us about that.

David (23m 26s):

Yeah, I ran Goldcorp before I took over Gold Royalty, which was one of the biggest producers in the world based here in Vancouver. And we merged it with Newmont back in 2019 to create the world's biggest gold company by market cap and by production. And really that cannibalization in the sector continues to this day. Four short years after that merger new mod has proposed to take over Newcrest another mega merger. It actually would eclipse the size of the merger that we created back in 2019. And it's happening only four short years later because of the downward trajectory and reserves that I was talking about earlier on. It's down 40% as an industry from their peak in 2012.

David (24m 8s):

And because of the lack of investment and exploration in the ground, the industry just has to basically cannibalize itself in order to sustain it, the existing businesses. So that m and a activity will have to continue just out of existential necessity for some of the bigger companies in the sector. But it doesn't really create value cause it doesn't finances in the ground, it just sustains really, really big businesses. And what we're doing actually creates value because we're putting money in the ground to help find new deposits, expand existing ones and build new ones and taking a royalty back and return and enjoying that upside in their expiration success of our operating partners at the upside and gold price while again protecting you from cost inflation.

Phil (24m 50s):

So what's your view of the future for the demand for precious metals?

David (24m 54s):

Well, I think it's quite robust and, and the big drivers of that I think is the inflationary cycle we find ourselves in now. And there are many parallels to this inflation cycle, to the one we experience in the 1970s. As I said, the US dollar was decoupled from the gold standard in early 1970s to fund a war in Vietnam. Similarly, the fiat currencies globally were decoupled from any backing as a result of the great financial crisis back in 2008. And that's a resulted, a massive monetary expansion, very, very similar to what we had in the 1970s and perhaps more global in scale than it was in the 1970s. And we have a war in, in Ukraine now.

David (25m 35s):

We had a war in Vietnam in the seventies and we had supply chain disruptions, we had an energy embargo back in the 1970s. We have an energy embargo today, self-imposed this time,

Phil (25m 46s):

Self-imposed

David (25m 47s):

Russian products. So they're very striking similarities in this inflation cycle to what we experienced in the seventies. But I think this inflation cycle has a potential to be much worse for one significant reason. The debt levels that we have globally at 350% of GDP today are three and a half times what they were in the 1970s at a hundred percent of G D P. So as you can imagine, when Paul Volker assumed the reigns of the central bank in the US in the late 1970s, he had a lot more latitude to raise interest rates to tame inflation. And in fact, that's exactly what he did, bringing interest rates to 20% against inflation of 14%.

David (26m 28s):

And by the early 1990s, he had sled the dragon and he brought inflation down to 2%, which we enjoyed for, for 20 years until the great financial crisis introduced new excesses into the system. And today, central banks can't hope to raise interest rates sufficiently to tame inflation because it would bankrupt governments in the US alone. Debt services doubled to a trillion dollars a year in the last 18 months. If interest rates went up another 200 basis points, it would double again. So today we're standing at one out of every $7 raised in taxes is going to debt service. That's remarkable and shocking. And you can imagine there's very limited latitude nor appetite for the central banks to really raise interest rates to tame inflation with these debt levels.

David (27m 15s):

There's no fiscally responsible way for them to repay the debt. So they're going to have to inflate it away. They're gonna have to debase the currency and by extension debase the debt denominated in those currencies in order to make the debt go away and shrink it as a percentage of the economy.

Phil (27m 30s):

Many investors these days value sustainability in the companies they invest in. What are you seeing and what are you doing about the sustainability of the mining industry, which obviously uses a lot of resources to get these minerals out of the ground?

David (27m 45s):

No, no, absolutely. And and one of the things I did when I was running Goldcorp a producer, we built the first all electric underground zero emission mine in the world in Ontario called Borden. And ironically, I've ended up with a royalty on Borden within the gold royalty portfolio just through by happenstance. So I'm delighted that we have such a, such a high standard E S G related mine in some of the, one of the best jurisdictions in the world. But look, the, the industry has done a lot in terms of reducing carbon intensity, but also needs to do a lot of work on reducing water intensity as well. And I think they're making great strides in that regard. The technologies are improving every day and and being scaled every day from a royalty company's perspective.

David (28m 30s):

There's a limit to what we can do, obviously when we own a royalty, we're a bystander, we collect check. We can't influence the day-to-day E S G practices. But I, I can tell you that there are many opportunities that we've simply passed on during our due diligence process because of a lack of high quality E S G practices, whether it's safety, social engagement, environmental governance, where we didn't feel comfortable with the reputational risk that the operator brought in. In fact, out of the 250 opportunities we've looked at since our I P O two years ago, we've only executed an eighth and we've passed on about a dozen or so opportunities for E S G reasons.

David (29m 11s):

So we have very stringent criteria during the due diligence process that hopefully avoids any reputational damage by getting associated with an operating partner that doesn't have the credibility to conduct proper E S G practices.

Phil (29m 26s):

So how can listeners find out more about gold royalty and how can they access it as an investment?

David (29m 31s):

Sure. We're on goldroyalty.com, so very easy to remember. And we're GROY on the N Y C American and again, we pay a 1.9% yield. We're quite liquid stock on the NYC and we have the highest growth rate in the Americas from some of the best assets in the Americas. We have a royalty on Canada's biggest producing gold mine, Canada's second biggest producing gold mine and the biggest producing gold mine in the United States as well.

Phil (29m 59s):

David Garofalo, thank you very much for joining me today.

David (30m 2s):

Delighted to be here, Phil. Thank you.

Chloe (30m 5s):

Thanks for listening to Stocks for Beginners. If you enjoy listening, please take a moment to rate a review in your podcast player or tell a friend who might want to learn more about investing for their future.

Stocks for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn’t financial advice, and you shouldn’t buy or sell any investments based on what you’ve heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the speaker only not Stocks for Beginners. This podcast doesn’t replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances or current situation.