Tavi Costa does not think there is a mining company that does the job. A perfect one, he told Stijn Schmitz on Palisades Gold Radio, would own mines that throw off cash, hold development projects that can become the next mines, and spend boldly looking for the next tier-one asset. He cannot find that company. Boards will not pay for the third part. They remember 2011, when the industry bled capital and earned a reputation it is still trying to bury. What they can get past a board is a cleaner balance sheet, less debt, and a dividend.
So he is building the missing company as a portfolio. Cash-flowing producers. Developers the producers will eventually need. A smaller tail of exploration. That is the plan for Azuria Capital, the mining fund he is launching. The macro reason is not a slogan about rocks. It is the Treasury market. Yields have been here before. The debt has not. He does not think Washington can live with that combination, and he thinks gold is already trading the intervention that has not been announced. This piece is his argument. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any metal, any share, or any fund.
The yield is old. The debt is not.
Schmitz asked if the United States is in a fiscal trap, and how close something is to breaking. Costa said he thinks it is close. People who say these yields are normal are making the mortgage mistake. The rate has been this high in some other decade. The price of the house has not. A 10-year yield that was tolerable when the debt was smaller is a different instrument when the stock of debt is, in his figure, almost ten times what it was in the 1940s, the last time the debt problem looked this large.
More than a quarter of the federal debt, he said, has to be rolled in the next twelve months, and it will be rolled at a higher rate. Nobody knows the day that becomes a crisis. He thinks the day is near, and he thinks the scare stories are aimed at the wrong break. He does not believe the Treasury market will one day find no bid at all. The government can print and be the bid. He expects that, through yield-curve control, or something like the old bond-buying programs, or a buyback that is finally large enough to matter. The buybacks he sees now are, in his telling, tens of billions of dollars against a market he put near $37 to $40 trillion, with net debt closer to $30 trillion. That is not support. It is a press release.
He wants Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to show the market what "I am the house" means. Not with a phrase. With capital. Mortgage rates are rising with the long bond, and that is no longer only a Treasury story. A higher cost of capital hits the valuations of companies that, he said, everyone already knows are extreme. The dollar has risen because American yields have risen faster than yields elsewhere. He called that unsustainable. His main thesis is the pair that would undo it. Suppress the yields. Weaken the dollar. Anything that likes that pair looks attractive to him. Gold. Mining. Copper, silver, and other metals. Emerging markets.
A bond backed by a story
The problem is not only American. Fixed income, he said, has been flashing red. American stocks are frothy and have not burst. Inflation has put the whole bond complex in question. Japan was early. British gilts had their own panic. French yields are now in the same conversation. European officials, he said, have started talking about doing whatever it takes in France. He reads that as the same sentence, in a new capital.
Underneath it is a change in what the paper claims to be. Once, he said, a treasury was backed by gold. Then it was backed by military strength. He does not know how to put a price on the second claim, and he does not think a war the country cannot finish makes the claim stronger. Debt on this scale, in his history, produces wars, and it produces populists, because growth is hard and the gap between rich and poor is wide. Latin America, in his telling, is moving away from the left in places. The United States is mixed. He cited a Trump promise, as he described it, of $5,000 to every household if his side wins the midterms, and he said the other side would criticize it and then be tempted to double it. A family that is already buried, promising to spend more, is how he wants the bond market to see Washington. We are still treating it as normal. He says it is not.
He grew up in Brazil. An emerging market, in his definition, is a country that must make policy while watching its own bond auction, because its paper is not the world's collateral. The United States was that collateral. Brazil never was. Those countries also weaken the currency to help exports, then struggle with the inflation that follows. He jokes that the United States is the new emerging market, and he means the texture of life, not a credit rating. Traveling, he has never seen the country so expensive in dollar terms against a modest salary. Rent, a restaurant, the power bill. He uses the price of a McDonald's meal as a rough index. It used to be one of the cheap places in the world. He says it is now one of the expensive ones. The wealth gap, once less stark than in the countries he knew, looks more like them.
The 1940s are his precedent and his warning that the precedent does not fit. The debt was a problem then. The stock market was not this expensive. After the war, spending was reined in. He asked the obvious question. Can you imagine a politician now standing up and saying the spending stops? His answer was a depression. He would not bet on that speech. He would bet on intervention. If you do not believe the yields will be capped, he said, it will get harder and harder to explain the alternative.
Gold is trading the cap that is not official
Gold pays no yield. It competes with things that do. In the 1980s, yields reached a level where money left gold for bonds, and a decade of the metal ended. Costa thinks this is the opposite case, because the country cannot afford those yields. Gold, he said, is front-running the cap. He would start a repair of the Treasury's collateral by announcing that the United States is buying gold. He owns things tied to gold, and he said he is not only talking his book. The reason he owns them is the lack of discipline. Bringing discipline back, in his view, is hard to imagine without a bid for hard assets.
He does not think we wake up to a reset price. He thinks the move is gradual, with large steps, and he hopes it is slow enough to be a healthier bull market for the industry. He offered two ratios, and they are his arithmetic. The value of gold above ground, he said, is probably under 20 percent of the global equity market. At peaks he associates with the Second World War, the 1970s, and the early 1900s, that share got near 90 percent. In the 1940s, he said, gold backed about half the Treasury market. Today he puts the backing near 3 percent. Official holdings, taken at face value and not as a debate about the vault, are about $1 trillion. On a Treasury market he sized near $40 trillion, half the backing would be about $20 trillion. You can get there by repricing the gold you have, or by buying more, or both. He suspects some buying is already happening, because he thinks the people in the room include gold holders, Bessent among them, and the president. He said he has no data for that suspicion. It should stay a suspicion.
Mining stocks are the other asymmetry. The whole mining equity market, he said, is about 1 percent of global equities. In other eras it was about 10 percent. It can go lower. The room above it, if his history is even roughly right, is multiples. He will take the volatility if he is not over his skis. He wants to pay to see the hand. On the day they recorded, yields were spiking and gold and the miners were down. He called that noise. The economy, he said, cannot survive yields that are simply allowed to run. The rescue of the bond may wait until stocks crack and a recession scare arrives. He does not know the level. He knows he does not want to trade the wiggle.
The 1970s are his correlation, not the last thirty years. Then, yields and gold rose together. Lately, the habit was the opposite. Yields down, gold up. Now yields are up and gold, choppy and off its highs, is still at prices that would have seemed impossible under the recent rule. He reads that as the metal front-running the intervention. A war, in the Middle East or in Ukraine, is fuel, not a separate plot. Overwhelming debt, he said, creates wars. The arguments about who started which one are, to him, a waste. Ten years ago, moving a border or renaming a place was not a live debate. Now it is, from Greenland to Taiwan to India and Pakistan. He does not need each feud to be unique. He needs the direction.
Once gold is in a bull market, he said, other metals tend to follow, even when the story seems unrelated. Copper and gold, over thirty years, look alike to him, with more violence in the industrial metal when the bear market comes. Energy and agriculture join the same tide, because a government that decides it does not have enough gold soon wonders if it has enough oil, gas, or corn. Nine or ten months before this interview, energy was ignored, and he was bullish on it for the cycle, not because he had picked a war. He thinks the turn now is back toward metals, after a choppy consolidation and some sharp drops. A war is not a reason the bond market will relax. Neither is another round of household checks. His line at the end of that stretch was plain. None of us, in his opinion, owns enough hard assets.
Three themes, and a region he went home to
He does not want twenty ideas. He wants two or three, held for five to ten years unless the thesis breaks. Mining is one. Latin America is another, inside a broader emerging-market bet he thinks people still underprice. Energy is the third, and he likes it less at the moment, because everyone is talking about it. He will go back when it is hated again.
The Latin American shift, he said, was treated as a series of one-offs and was not. El Salvador, then Argentina under Javier Milei. Bolivia surprised him by moving too. People close to him said Brazil would not. He says the shift is underway there as well. A turn to the right in Mexico, he said, should not shock anyone, and it is not in the price. The region is, in his view, the most resource-rich and underpriced ground left, and much of it is barely explored. He bought a house in Brazil two years ago so he would be in front of it. He also described an investment tied to a Bolivian silver mine he called the fourth largest in the world. The name is muffled on the tape. The point he wanted was the region, not the ticker.
He manages the fund the way he manages his own money, and he is blunt about volatility. Hedge funds, he said, used to be about returns. Some were activists. Some were narrow. Then the industry became a contest to look calm, and he thinks that contest killed it. Returns come with swings. He pointed to Sam Zell, the real estate investor, as the career he admires. Zell moved from one industry to the next early, stayed through the noise, and left early too. Costa is comfortable with that. He knows many people are not, and he told them to stay diversified rather than copy him. His edge, as he defines it, is spotting a big trend and then going deep on the best way to own it. Watch it. Stay active. Leave if the thesis dies.
Amazon, except the board will not allow it
This is the idea. Inside mining he wants the company that does not exist. Cash flow. A pipeline of projects that can be built. Bold exploration for the next tier-one asset. He compared it to Amazon in the 1990s and early 2000s. A real business that made money, and a founder who poured that money into the next expansion until the business was hard to compete with. Costa is not claiming he will build Amazon. He is claiming the method. Most mining boards will not use it. After 2011 they will not justify a large exploration budget. They will repair the balance sheet, pay down debt, and pay a dividend, because that is what they can pass. Since the perfect company is missing, he will own the pieces.
Producers he thinks are good businesses for the next few years. Developers that will be in demand when those producers need reserves. Exploration, sized as the tail, aimed at the next tier-one asset. Azuria's mining fund, as he described it on the show, puts the core in something like twelve to fifteen producers and developers, and the rest in exploration. He said the launch was days away. On October 3 he had already posted that the fund was opening, for accredited investors, and that none of the post was advice.
The pitfalls are the industry's own. It takes time that other sectors do not. It has scams, and people who behave badly. The useful fact, he said, is that the business is small enough that operators know one another, and new ones tend to resemble the old ones, good or bad. On the producer side he wants the disruptors who become the next majors, and also the mid-tier miners who are good at a smaller size and do not want an empire. Those, he said, are often careful with capital and slow to dilute. A developer has to be an asset a major will want, or an asset that can raise the money to be built where it sits. Jurisdiction, history, and the team are the questions, and the team is the subjective one. Exploration is the most technical, the most speculative, the most volatile, and the least liquid. It is also where he said most of the industry's billionaires made the money, before they bought cash flow and kept funding the drills anyway. The early financiers matter. So does a capital structure that can survive the trip from a tiny company to a mid-size one. A better team costs more. Sometimes the extra price is worth it. Sizing is the decision, not a rule that cheap is always right.
Valuations, he said, are for the most part very cheap, with differences by metal. Gold and silver shares are cheaper than copper shares, and the margins are better, because the metal prices have moved further. Silver companies, on his look through the sector, hold a huge amount of cash. He put net cash, after debt, at 15 to 20 percent of market value for a lot of them. Free-cash-flow yields of 7 to 10 percent would mean they add something like another tenth of their market value in cash each year, after the spending required to keep the mines running. Set aside the founders' stock, and a buyback of that size is a large share of what actually trades. He does not think the cash is a problem. He thinks it becomes takeovers, once investors start pressing these companies to grow. That pressure has not arrived. He thinks it will, for the same slow reason the bond problem took years to be believed. Grades are falling. Reserves are being mined and not replaced. The deposits that are left, and that fit, will be bid for. The cash goes out as buybacks or as deals.
Gold miners, he said, have healthy balance sheets and good margins, and less cash than the silver names. Copper names look less attractive on yield, and should not be forgotten, because the shortage of the metal itself can reprice the margin. His mix, for now, is a piece of each, sized to the moment, with silver the most interesting on the balance sheet. Producers in the fund will lean gold, with some silver. Developers and early producers will lean silver and some copper. Exploration he does not sort by metal. Gold, silver, copper, nickel, manganese, zinc. He cares whether the ground can be worth more than he paid, and preferably a multiple of it.
Do not buy the label
He closed the method with a warning that fits the same rule. New money is arriving in mining through the phrase critical metals. Many of the things he owns are critical, in the policy sense. The buyers he worries about are not asking whether the business is any good. They are buying the label. He thinks a lot of those shares are expensive, carried by volume and not by the numbers, and he thinks that ends badly. His order of questions is the reverse of the slogan. Is this a good business? Only then, do I want the metal? The metal is the second question. It is not the first.
That is the same discipline as the three-layer portfolio. A producer with cash is a business. A developer a major will need is a business in waiting. An explorer is a business only if the rocks and the people can survive the wait. A ticker that says the right mineral, and cannot answer the first question, is the 2011 problem in a new costume. The boards who refuse to explore are afraid of that costume. Costa's answer is not to pretend the fear is foolish. It is to keep the exploration small, known, and attached to cash flow that does not depend on the next hole.
The idea, once
Costa thinks the Treasury market is the tell. Yields at these levels, on a debt stock he says is unlike any prior episode at the same yield, will not be allowed to clear on their own. More than a quarter of the debt rolls within a year. The buybacks he sees are too small. The dollar's strength is a side effect he expects to reverse when the yields are suppressed. Gold is holding up in a tape that, under the rules of the last few decades, should have hurt it. He reads that as the metal trading a cap, a weaker dollar, and a slow repair of collateral, not as a one-day reset. Wars and household checks make the bond math worse. Hard assets, metals first among them right now, are where he wants to be, in size he can sit with.
The industry will not sell him the vehicle in one share. Boards will pay dividends before they will fund the next discovery. Azuria is his attempt to own the three jobs anyway. Producers, especially where the cash is real. Developers the producers will have to buy when grades run down. Exploration as the tail, metal-agnostic, and never as a costume called critical. Silver, on his figures, is where the net cash and the free cash flow are largest. Gold miners are healthy and less cash-rich. Copper is the metal story with the thinner yield. None of that is a promise that the intervention comes this quarter, or that a 46-metre hole is a mine. It is a way to stay in the trade without asking a board to forget 2011.
The company he wants does not exist. The portfolio is the substitute. The bond market is the reason he thinks the substitute gets paid.
A note on sources and limits
This account follows the October 8, 2026 episode of Palisades Gold Radio, hosted by Stijn Schmitz, with Otavio "Tavi" Costa, founder and chief executive of Azuria Capital LLC. The debt multiples, the share of debt rolling in twelve months, the buyback size, the $37 to $40 trillion market, the gold-to-equity and gold-to-Treasury ratios, the $1 trillion of official gold, the $20 trillion backing figure, the 1 percent mining weight, the silver net-cash and free-cash-flow ranges, and the $5,000 household figure are his statements on that program. They are not a new official release, and the buyback comment is his scale, not a line item from a financing calendar.
His suspicion that the Treasury is already buying gold is, by his own words, a suspicion without data. The McDonald's comparison, the France "whatever it takes" line, and the political map of Latin America are his readings. Sam Zell died in 2023. Costa invoked the career, not a recent obituary. The Bolivian silver investment is his. The mine's name is not clear on the recording.
Azuria Capital is the firm named on his October 3, 2026 post and on the program page. He said the mining fund would focus on roughly twelve to fifteen producers and developers, plus exploration. The post said it was for accredited investors and was not advice. Nothing in this piece is an offer to buy that fund, or any security, or any metal.
A three-layer portfolio can still lose money. Yields can stay high longer than a thesis. Exploration can go to zero. Readers should read the filings and speak with a licensed adviser before any decision.