Short position held by the banks had been getting to really big levels, set another new second place record, and was within shouting distance of the all-time record, which is 49,609 contracts back in July of 2016, and last week we were incredibly close. We got to… Well, hello there, my friends. Chris Marcus here with you for Arcadia Economics on Wednesday, June 25th, just before 1 p.m. Eastern, and in today’s show we’re going to dig into the latest COT report and talk about whether the banks broke the record for all-time largest short position, as it seemed like they were on track for last week, so we have an update from that, and also Scott Descent, so plenty to dig into, and let us get started here today.

As you can see, the gold future is up 14 bucks on the day, back to 33.48, and obviously you had the big sell-off yesterday. Let’s get our one-week chart here. Price coming back up in the afternoon, and then again today, so a little bit of a rebound in the gold market. Quick look here at silver, where we see silver just back over 36 dollars, had gotten down as low as 35.20, and we can take a look here at the 52-week range, 37.40, the high mark on the year for the futures, so as you might expect, a lot of more to do with what we’ll dig into in a moment regarding the short position, which had been extremely large, whether it ended up being a record or not.

A look at the dollar index, now under the 98 level, quite a roller coaster. This has been over the past year. Here you can see this is under par back in September, a couple days before Jerome Powell said that 25 basis points was not enough, cut to 50, got to over 110 here. Now back under the 98 level, and we can see there’s been quite a sell-off just since Monday. This week alone, here we were up at get over, it looks like we were over 99, and now we’re a dollar and a half lower on the dollar index, so point and a half lower, sorry, that some people don’t like when I use the incorrect terminology, so let me correct myself, and with that said, we can move on to the main highlight of today’s show, because obviously, as you’ve probably seen here or on the sub-stack, been mentioning how that short position held by the banks had been getting to really big levels, set another new second place record, and was within shouting distance of the all-time record, which is 49,609 contracts back in July of 2016, and last week we were incredibly close, we got to what is I think it was 49,099, basically 376 more contracts were added over the past reporting week, brought it to 49,475, 134 contracts short of the record, so in the previous days column we have what last week’s solo actually was, but you can see it did increase, and it’s a couple contracts short, in the end does it matter whether it is actually a new record or 134 contracts short, I would say no, and again I’ll read this part here, which I like to think summarizes the key takeaway, based on the price action over the past week, I’m not necessarily expecting an increase on this Friday’s report, but again the larger takeaway remains that the position is that large, which is similar to what I mentioned last week, still leaves the silver market in a situation where there’s an above average probability of a significant move in one direction another, or another, with there still being a good chance of that move being lower, unless one or more of the banks gets nervous and rushes to cover, and this one was posted on the 23rd, which was Monday, so that was before we saw Tuesday’s sell off, and again I would say when you have those conditions that you know certainly the headline news can impact that, but it doesn’t take much to get the reaction like we saw yesterday, is this a perfect 100% correlation that you should go out and trade options on actively, I would suggest not to do that, but over time will this perhaps skew the odds in your favor, I think that’s fair to say, and anyway we saw that pattern once again there, now in terms of something else that came out yesterday, we did have more commentary from Scott DeSant, who as you know I’m become a, I don’t know if I’m a big fan of, it’s fascinating listening to him talk, and with that said let us play his comments here.

I assume that I will walk out of the building in January of 2029, that what are the three to five things that I would have liked to have done, so stabilize the US finances and put that on a good trajectory that will make sure that we have another great 250 years, bring back. All right, I’m going to pause it there, keep in mind when you’re reading that big beautiful bill and they’re saying well it saves this much or adds this much, that’s relative to the previous projection produced by the last administration that also had zero chance of actually occurring.

None of these forecasts ever had 9% transitory inflation priced in or tariff wars or however we see supply chains look by the end of the summer, so when he’s saying put it on the trajectory to be sustainable for the next 250 years, now he did say by the time he walks out in 2029, so it’s interesting you could say well it depends on what else he has planned, and certainly it does, I would say that what we’ve seen so far does not satisfy that condition, and although in terms of what they might have planned, keep in mind here is this one from back on February 3rd when they were announcing the sovereign wealth fund, and let me play a little bit of that here.

This is an executive order discharges your secretary of the treasury, Scott Pessent and your secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick to begin a process that will hopefully result in the creation of an American sovereign wealth fund. It’s a very exciting event, we’re going to have a sovereign wealth fund which we’ve never had, we have a lot of things that create wealth, and you’ve seen that over the last two weeks, I think we’ve created more wealth, other people have created de-wealth, the people, my predecessors, we’re creating a lot of wealth, Scott maybe you’d like to say something about it, and I’d ask also Howard to say something about it.

Yes sir, this is very exciting, we’re going to stand this thing up within the next 12 months, we’re going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people, we’re going to put the assets to work, and I think it’s going to be very exciting, we’re going to study best practices that’s done around the world, there’ll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people. So there you go, he said later that he was not referring to gold when he said that, I also find it interesting he said over the next 12 months, and this was February 3rd, not a week away from July 3rd, so almost five months later which means the second half of this year should be pretty exciting, so on one hand when he says he you know what he wants to accomplish is to put the U.S.

on a debt trajectory that’s sustainable for the next 250 years, but I don’t think that’s been achieved yet because despite whether big beautiful bills, saves or ads based on the previous projection, we’re still cranking out two trillion and there’s not, hasn’t been addressed let alone some explanation of how that gets repaid, what he has planned here. I would say also we’re not flying completely blind either because A, we have the hand guide from chairman of the economic council advisors, Stephen Moran, that baby is here, let’s get a picture of the cover, this was the guy that he wrote this, which I might add repeatedly referred to the persistently overvalued dollar, he wrote this in November of 2024, a month later Trump nominated him as chairman of economic council of advisors, so I would say that in terms of what is Scott planning, that’s certainly one place I would start and if you want to look on our substack, that was the May 13th one titled conveniently Trump’s council of economic advisors lays out users guide to restructuring the global system and then the other thing is that we also had Luke Roman point out in his column how a fund manager named Michael McNair who I was quite honored to find out actually even watches the show who did had his own commentary on whether he’s seeing compelling evidence of stealthy US FX reserve accumulation using gold detailing how Stephen Moran’s user guide that we just looked at may already be getting implemented or may already be active so there’s clearly more happening than they are saying in these press conferences or I don’t know if there’s a press conference from Besant there is more of a statement but in terms of if he’s going to meet that goal and still has a plan which it seems like he’s planning something in either case I would start by reading this which you can find by googling it or if you want the cliff notes version that would be especially relevant to gold and silver investors well you can go click on our post which does have the link to that paper and either case we will see a lot happening I mean I think it’s becoming more and more clear that there is a problem with the debt and there is a problem with how foreign counterparties are viewing it and for understandable reasons so but of course we will keep you posted and real quick just before we wrap up today I did want to thank first majestic silver who was our kind proud sponsor for the show and fortunately I know they’re going to be down at rick rules investment symposium which is just under two weeks away July 7th through 11th down in Boca Raton Florida that will be there doing some interviews also just enjoying meeting people and we’ll be catching up with Keith Neumire there so we’ll be great to hear his perspective obviously we had him on talking a couple times about the deal last year to choir gato silver that is now part of their portfolio and certainly to have the silver price doing what it’s doing at this time really great timing on how that worked out and you can see we have had activity in the share price of first majestic which certainly has been volatile over the last year although we were down at 4.59 on August 25th and currently trading at 8.17 so obviously big changes in the company after a tough couple of years but congratulations to first majestic on completing that deal and having that silver access at this time and of course you can find out more about them at first majestic.com with that said going to wrap up for today but thanks so much for being here and just in case you missed it yesterday we got an update on what’s actually happening on the retail level of the silver market and whether that wave of selling that we’ve seen over the past two years has finally started to subside and that one is coming your way now you
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