This is the second shortest they have been. Of course, in the middle of that, we have a Fed-in-a-rate cutting cycle that, apparently, not only do the futures market expect rates to be cut, but even the Fed expects rates to be cut. Well, hello there, my friends. Chris Marcus here with you for Arcadia Economics, and today we are going to be digging into the pricing on gold and silver, some of the recent moves, as well as a few other notes that have come up that I think are worthwhile and sharing just to keep you posted on the things that are happening in the gold and silver world.

So with that said, let us dig right in and take a quick look at the pricing, where we see gold futures still above the $3,050 level, had gotten as high as $3,060. I see this range, 52-week range here, they say $3,092. I’m not sure about that, but anyway, still, I find it rather encouraging that gold crossed the $3,000 level. And so far, we have not really seen a significant sell-off bringing that back in, which is not to say that we will not see that. And I still think there’s a reasonable chance that we see a gold price back below $3,000 an ounce, although very different than what we saw when gold first crossed $2,000 an ounce and fluctuated around that for a span of a couple of years.

And either case, we can see the Fed decision to cut interest rates by $50 rather than just $25. That was back around $2,600 gold now at $3,051, as I mentioned. And as you can also see here, and in the face of tariffs that you continue to hear going over to CNBC or Bloomberg that everything is about uncertainty in the market due to the tariffs. Only problem is, that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon as we’re just about a week away from the reciprocal tariffs. Just saw last night, now they’re talking about anyone who purchases oil from Venezuela is going to get an even higher tariff, which would include China and certainly does not seem like relations with China and trade sense are going so well right now.

But all of that probably not unrelated to $3,051 gold or $34.13 silver. Had a big day yesterday in the silver price, as you can see that move. We were under $33, now well over $34. And feel free to leave a comment below if you think we’ll hit $35 this week. We touched it briefly last week, and I’m recording about 11 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday. So a little time left and you’ll see what the week holds, but obviously silver close to its 2024 high of $3,507. And certainly after the last, depending on when you started investing in silver, if it’s anytime 2013 or since, hopefully that price leaves you feeling happy.

Obviously one thing that has contributed to it a bit is the dollar index, which so far right on track for that same pattern following Trump’s election in 2016. Where we see the surge up and then it rises quickly and then down it falls. That was a sharp move there. Seeing some stabilization since then, although given the things that are happening in the world right now, I would imagine a year or two from now. I would think we would have a lower dollar, perhaps significantly so. And a lot of that is going to be based on the plans of the Trump administration because obviously we’re seeing that what they’re doing is having a big impact.

And I would at least based on what they have done and indicated they’re going to do, it seems like you’re going to have a lot of uncertainty. So remember hearing someone, maybe it was CNBC saying, well, you know, it’s just temporary with the tariffs. Although the tariffs seem to be about as transitory as the inflation was. And again, if you are of the school of thought that you’re going to need a weaker dollar to do the things the Trump administration wants to do without running into a bigger problem than either case. I think we will see this lower with the chance that we Scott dissent has said when he talked about monetizing the assets on the U.S.

side of the balance sheet that he was not referring to gold. He did actually have a quote later on where he talked about the housing related assets that the government now has ownership of. And it’s actually what Tom Luongo said, right? That Tom Luongo on the week after dissent made those comments and I was all excited thinking maybe he was talking about gold. Tom said housing turned out to be right, or at least according to what Scott is publicly revealing. So but the point being that I do think we’re in an era or place in time where the idea of some sort of big shift in a currency sense is very possible.

So I don’t know, two years from now, maybe that has happened. It’s also possible that it has not yet at least as best as I can extrapolate the clues and mix them together a little bit. Seems very possible at this point. So a few other notes here as we dig into gold and silver, the short positions on both gold and silver getting large again. And this we covered in the arcade economics gold and silver daily sub stack, which you can find at gold and silver daily dot sub stack dot com quite appropriately named and you are held if I may say so myself.

And anyway, the note here there, you see on gold, they added about almost 13,000 shorts or, you know, added 11,300 shorts, got rid of some long. So brings their total current short position to 221,000 contracts. So that’s this line here. You can see that in the past couple of months had come in. You’re kind of imagine 220. I think that could be drawn a little further down. So certainly in highly short territory, again, I will give my usual disclaimer. Sorry if you’ve heard or read this so many times before, but there’s a lot of people say that, you know, it’s not that the banks are short this amount because they have offsetting hedges.

How one to one are all of those hedged. I hear a variety of answers. Some claim that they’re all neutral. I’m not sure I believe that maybe the answer is somewhere in between. Although I would say more significantly is that if you look at the times when the banks have gotten extremely long or short in gold or silver and then see whether you find a correlation with the pricing won’t do that today. But anyway, so just want to give full contacts. Silver, they got short again. This one’s interesting because here they’re now at 44,094 contracts short.

And that’s only 5,000 contracts short of the all time record, which was set back in July of 2016. So same disclaimer with what may or may not be hedged, but this is the second shortest. They have been, of course, in the middle of that. We have a Fed that now is increasingly expecting or the market is expecting the Fed to do a lot of interest rate cutting in the months and years ahead. And here you go by June. And now looking at 60 percent chance of a quarter point cut. And you see market is expecting cuts.

This is out to December of 2026, a year and a half away. Sure. If we had futures later than that, you’d see a similar pattern. And one of many reasons this is interesting is that Michael Pinto. Many of you may know Michael Pinto used to work with Peter Schiff now has Pinto portfolio. And he had a great note in his newsletter that he sent out last week. And he says to prove what a joke the Federal Reserve is, Powell said in a press conference that the FOMC predicts inflation will return to its 2 percent target level sometime in 2027.

So here’s the question for Mr. Bell. Why is the Fed in a rate cutting cycle when by its own guess CPI will remain above the 2 percent target for six years? And I would say that that only becomes a little more difficult to reconcile when you look at some of the figures from the dot plot that came out that I think the last week. Maybe it was two weeks ago. I think last week, though. But here you see this line, Fed funds rate. Now, this is the projections they just came out with years in December.

So that hasn’t changed. But next year, they’re expecting average 3.4 percent then further lower in 2027. So not only is the Fed expecting the inflation target to come back to 2 percent, but as you mentioned, in a rate cutting cycle that apparently not not only did the futures market expect rates to be cut, but even the Fed expects rates to be cut. So there’s that. And let’s take a look. Here’s a PC inflation. They in December, they thought for 2025, you’re going to be at two and a half percent. Now, they upgraded that to 2.8 percent just three months later.

Yet still, it’s going to come back to 2 percent and 2 percent, even though they’re going to be cutting rates until eternity, apparently. So there’s that here. That was the core. Here’s the regular. They upgraded that, but still coming back down to 2 percent. Unemployment with stock markets rolling over and a whole host of other issues, they just expect it to come down. Even as change in real GDP has been downgraded, you have the Atlanta Fed now calling for negative growth in 2025. So those are their predictions. Take them as you will. And again, we’ll take a look.

Here is the CPI year over year. This is the headline number, which came down from 3 to 2.8 percent over the last month. Although, I mean, if we were here and you said inflation is coming down when you’re down at the bottom of this thing right there, I don’t know if this strikes me as wow. We got under control and it’s in check. But similar picture, as you might imagine, in the core where coming down did have a couple of times where it ticked back up. And I would say if you keep in mind that we have that lag between when the impact of these rate cuts are really felt, we’re probably in that time zone where we would start to feel that now, let alone the cuts that are coming.

So we’ll see if the Fed is right on that. Interesting, because mixed into that, starting to deal with the stock market decline, we’ve had a little bit of a rebound and there is the S&P. Here is the NASDAQ, which you can see a very similar pattern if we can get that one loaded there. Up over 20,000 down to 18,000 now and Dow Jones, same picture there. So again, we do see continued sell off. I don’t think we’ve had a huge impact, I wouldn’t say, in terms of people being concerned about the stock market piling into metals.

Should this continue, I think there’s a chance that we would see that. But one place where we are seeing metals continue to be gobbled up. This was by Mike Maharry of Money Metals, who hopefully will have on the show soon. I do enjoy his writing. And where is that chart again? Yeah, this is the collective holdings of gold in Chinese gold ETFs, of assets under management of Chinese gold ETFs, which I guess is really the same thing. And you can see that that has spiked right this same time period that we have the whole thing with tariffs going on.

So just wanted to point that out and also point out Utah investing $60 million of taxpayer money in gold. So far, here’s how the state plans to use it. Does that mean gold is going to skyrocket to $5,000 an ounce later tonight? I would say probably not. Although when you see gold and silver in Costco, now Utah investing money so far, implying that they may do more, add all those things up. Notice we haven’t heard much about the BRICS and de-dollarization in a long time. If you click on the Arcade Economics YouTube page, go to the Live tab.

We did get an update with Matt Riley, our resident expert on that topic about a month ago. And I would not say that nothing is happening. And sometimes these things happen quietly behind the scenes and over time, which is my own personal feel of where things are progressing. And I am trying to have been trying to get in contact with Pepe Escobar to see if we could get him on the show. So far, I’ve not been able to track him down, but we’ll keep an eye on that one. And anyway, although in terms of guests that I have reached out to, I did check in with Robert Gottlieb of J.P.

Morgan, who did an interview with Michael DiRienzo of the Silver Institute. You can find that on their site. And I’ve asked him. We’ll see if he wants to come on. I haven’t been the biggest fan of J.P. Morgan, his old shop. So, but hopefully. And anyway, in wrapping up, did just want to thank First Majestic Silver, who has been a long time supporter of the show and certainly appreciate that. And it’s also been nice because they’ve been doing pretty well lately in terms of free cash flow, where they had a record for the full year of twenty twenty four, as well as the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four, which obviously was strengthened by their acquisition of Gato Silver.

And the fact that you have increased silver production and gold production at the time when prices are higher certainly has helped. And fortunately, being pretty well received by the market where it has been a challenging year or two for First Majestic, although we see down here in early March about five thirty six and just ticking over seven bucks today in American pricing. So anyway, thank you to First Majestic and the link to their latest earnings and all the developments is in the description field below. And with that said, going to wrap up, but I hope you’re having a great day out there and I will look forward to seeing you again soon.

See more of Arcadia Economics on their Public Channel and the MPN Arcadia Economics channel.