Dr. Nomi Prins just stepped off stage at the Rule Symposium – where over 80 speakers and thousands of investors gather each year to talk resources and commodities – in front of a ballroom that had to double in size from last year to fit the crowd.

We caught up with her right after.

The economist and former Wall Street executive – she spent years as a managing director at Goldman Sachs and a senior managing director at Bear Stearns – didn’t waste time getting to what’s changed most since last year.

It starts with the Iran war.

When key transportation routes locked up, oil prices spiked. Everyone felt that part – at the pump, at the grocery store, in every conversation about what the Fed might do next.

But Prins says that’s only the visible layer.

Similar lockouts, she explains, have been happening across global commodity supply chains for a while now – just without the dramatic, single-event coverage that oil got.

And when the panic selling hit gold and silver right as the war began, Prins says it created something specific – a distortion she believes represents a real opportunity.

She also isn’t convinced the Fed’s inflation number means what people think it means.

Core PPI strips out food and energy before it ever reaches a headline. Prins doesn’t think that’s realistic – and she has a pointed way of explaining why.

The conversation also covers:

• Why she believes fiat money and real assets are increasingly disconnected
• What she’s watching in the physical silver market right now
• Whether the Fed might change how it measures inflation
• Why she questions the Fed’s ability to control inflation at all

Prins is the author of several books on Wall Street and central banking, including Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World and Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever. Before becoming an author and speaker, she worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, a senior managing director at Bear Stearns in London, and a strategist at Lehman Brothers. She is the Founder of Prinsights Global, a macro-economic, geopolitical, and natural resource focused research firm.