➡ The article discusses the current increase in gold prices and the potential economic disaster due to the ongoing conflict between the US and Iran over oil wells. It highlights the impact of this situation on the gold and silver market, which is not yet fully reflected in their prices. The author also mentions the tightness in the silver market and the imbalance in demand. Lastly, the article touches on the rise in US ten-year yields and Brent Crude prices, indicating market concerns over the geopolitical situation.
➡ Scott Besson has taken actions to influence oil prices, but it’s unclear if anything was done for the exchange stabilization fund or gold and silver prices. Tensions with Iran could lead to the destruction of their oil wells and electricity plants, potentially escalating the conflict. Economic impacts are already being felt, with a helium shortage affecting tech supply chains and a diesel shortage impacting Australia’s mining sector. The situation could lead to rising inflation and a weakening labor market, while also affecting the gold and silver market.
➡ Dolly’s project, the Mancho gold mine, is doing well and there will be a meeting with Rick Van Neuenheis and Sean Kunken, who are now part of Contango Silver and Gold, on Wednesday at 4pm Eastern. They will discuss the deal and other developments. Despite the overwhelming historic times, they remain optimistic. Last Friday, they discussed a significant change in the gold market.

The gold price is currently up almost $27 on the day, but at the same time, we’re closer to a true economic catastrophe than we’ve ever been in our entire lives, as Trump says the US will destroy Iran’s oil wells without a deal to immediately reopen the strait, which remains largely closed with some really dangerous ramifications, if that does not change immediately, which we will dig into in today’s show, as well as a look at the latest gold and silver news, so welcome on in. Well hello there my friends, Chris Marcus here with you for Arcadia Economics on Monday, March 30th, which is a rather fascinating day on planet earth and certainly in the financial markets, even if the gold price is only up $21-ish today, let’s call it, already dropped since I recorded the open when it was up $26, and a quick look at silver just for those who want to see, there you have about 70 cents higher above the $70 mark, yet while the prices still are somewhat on the calmer side, by the way it is quite fascinating how gold being up $20 a day is on the calmer side, really any point before the last two or three years that would have been great news for gold investors, yet seems like a bit of a breather, there’s been a bit of volatility today, although as I will explain in today’s video, there is certainly plenty happening behind the scenes that leave it in the position where even if it’s not a big move up or down today, I think we’re certainly heading towards that, and obviously I’m sure it does not come as a surprise that the Iran war and everything that’s happening there is a big part of that, where we see earlier on Monday you had this somewhat contradictory set of headlines where Trump says US will destroy Iran’s oil wells, Karg island, without a deal to immediately reopen the strait, and then simultaneously Trump says US is in serious talks to end the operation in Iran, again at least from a lot of research I’ve done over the weekend about the dynamics of what is playing out right now, which it’s a weird dynamic because on one hand it’s very alarming and distressing when you see that people have already died and it seems as if things with boots on the ground are getting closer to becoming reality, that you could have more people killed and whatever side that may be that people being put in jeopardy through some of these actions, I understand some people feel that even without the actions people are in jeopardy, the whole thing is just tragic, with that said though, certainly some big implications on the gold and silver market that I do not think are being priced in, it seems like almost all of the markets are not yet really pricing in some of the risks that are out there, and while I hope that this bottom headline where they’re in serious talks to end this, sure seems like three different sides dug in pretty staunchly, we won’t go into politics today, I know there’s some people are upset about that and I’m thinking about the right amount of which to blend that in, I don’t think it’s entirely unrelated yet.

Let me summarize like this, without going into the details and the politics of it, it seems like we’re in a situation that not only has a very dangerous economic outcome if this closure continues on and if the conflict continues on, but specifically with the closure and the impacts of what’s happening there, which we’re going to cover before we wrap up here today, so don’t worry, we’ll get to that too, but not only do you have a situation with a very devastating economic outcome that I feel strongly is not currently being priced into gold and silver, and well not here to give you your legal license financial advice, I have been increasing the aggressiveness of my own bet based on some of these things that we’ll dig into, yet you have a real dangerous outcome and also sadly a, what to me seems to be a growing probability of achieving that outcome, so sometimes you have a situation where hey if you’re gonna get fined ten dollars, okay maybe there’s a high probability of it happening, but it’s not a devastating thing, but when you have a high probability of also a high impact, outcome certainly a little bit alarming, and back to the gold and silver pricing, we’ll look at what this has looked like since the war began, which is now almost a month ago, and here you see gold was up if you go a little farther back at 5,400 bucks, got down to under 4,200, back up a little bit off of the lows of last week, similar case on the silver chart where we were up over 96, if you went a little bit back to the Sunday night open four weeks ago, we’ve been down to 61,21, and rallied a bit off of that, meanwhile I will point out that on the silver side the tightness issues that drove the silver price from 30 dollars last year after the reciprocal tariffs, which geez that was April 2nd, so just about on the one year anniversary of that, seems like a long time ago, the thing about that, but that you had those reciprocal tariffs, silver went from over 35 dollars at the time of that announcement to below 30, I think it got under 29, maybe 28, somewhere around there, and then began its ascent that ended up busting the Indian silver supply, which then busted the London silver market in October, left us with price above 121 by the time we reached the peak in late January, and has gone as low as 61 dollars since then, so basically a 50 percent off sale, has rallied since then, yet underneath all of that we continue to see, here’s the Shanghai futures at 79.50, while New York is still just over 70 dollars, so we see that wide in spread, the premium there, which I don’t think is an accident, I continue to say is reflective of the demand imbalance that we’ve had, which perhaps it’ll be interesting, the silver institute numbers coming out in two weeks, and certainly we’ve seen thrifting in the solar market, and the silver institute talked about, and Bloomberg has showed articles about a lot of that thrifting, there were a couple companies looking at using copper instead of silver, so I don’t think it’s going to go away, but some of the demand numbers, especially at the higher price, we will see how that impacts the usage, my guess is that the deficit will be less extreme than it certainly was last year, or the couple of years before that, but in two weeks we will find out more about that, I might make it up to New York for the release of that one, but certainly we will cover that, so hit the subscription button and the notification bell, we’ll keep you posted when it comes out, although despite all of that, I still think there’s an imbalance, and even if you want to, let’s not worry about what I think, or my gut, or my opinion, just, there’s the data, there you go, nine and a half, nine dollars spread, says what it says, and as I mentioned last week, that spread, it’s not like it just has been there for a couple of days or a week, we saw a couple years ago the spread get up to three dollars for a while, but this eight, nine, ten dollar spread really happened, it really flared up the day after Christmas, and has reached even higher levels when silver was up in the under twenty dollar range, I think the spread got, might have been up to eighteen dollars or so, although in fact, not guessing today, we’ll take a look at the data, and here if we look at 2026, you see, according to gold charts or us, yes, over eighteen dollars, under twenty, so we’ll call that eighteen and change, and that was right when silver was, silver futures over 121 in New York, so close to 140 in China, that spread has come back in, yet still maintained, and in case you want to see how that looks, going back three years, you can see there in 2024, we had the three dollar premium for a while, went negative in late 2025, that was probably around the time the market broke in London, sure enough indeed it was, there you see it went negative for a bit, and then has gone quite a bit higher, that’s just the end of 2025, there’s what we saw in 2026, and really that’s your evidence of tightness, and as we’ll see from some of these war headlines, a lot of the metals markets are being directly impacted, although quickly before we get there, I’ll mention that our US tenure up at 434, this was down at 394, right before the war broke out, if we get our one month chart to pull up there, but basically 40 basis points higher, there you can see the increase in the yields over the past month, also for Brent Crude we have 107.5 on investing.com, 113 on CNBC, so the markets also saying they are concerned, we’ve heard Scott Besson talk about actions they’ve taken to impact the price of oil, we have not heard Scott Besson say exactly what has been done on behalf of the exchange stabilization fund, that would be a good time, maybe Tucker Carlson could get him back on and say treasury secretary during the month that the Iran war broke out, you described actions and policies were taken specifically to impact the price of oil, was anything done on behalf of the exchange stabilization fund, and also was anything done on behalf of the gold and silver price, I don’t know for sure that there was, but based on my studies of the history of the gold mark and silver markets, if I had to make an even money bet, I’d take yes versus no, and here you can see as I mentioned before how Trump says the US will destroy Iran’s oil wells if the strait is not reopened immediately, and he said that they will completely obliterate Iran’s electricity-generating plants oil wells in Karg island if the strait isn’t reopened.

Now again, I’m not in Iran, I don’t know their politics particularly, although I did watch several sources over the weekend of people who seem quite credible and knowledgeable, some of whom I’ve seen before, indicating that in Iran people are rushing to sign up to the military to protect against the invasion, so what am I getting at here? I don’t know that it’s likely that they’re going to be hearing that and saying, oh yes, let us rush out and find a deal, and in fact later this week I’m going to find the clip, Luke Roman mentioned this a couple of times, that one of Iran’s leaders basically said a couple weeks ago their plan is to just wreck the western economy by jacking the oil price up, so I think they, aside from what I believe, I think that they believe that they can be successful in that and are willing to die for that, which is again what makes this such a complex situation, not to mention that even if the US and Iran reach the deal, does that mean that Israel and Iran are going to reach a deal which seems like a whole other threshold, so anyway, not going ideally well there, here we see Trump wants to squeeze Iran into peace talks with more troops, but it may backfire, a lot of things indicating that more troops are on the way, if not there already, so anyway.

In terms of economic impacts, we’re starting to see that really filter through already. Helium shortage has started impacting tech supply chains, and we see Reuters mentioned, Titan supply of helium due to Middle East conflict has started affecting some production in the global tech supply chains, leaving companies scrambling to secure alternative supplies, and helium is used in several key stages of chip making, including coolant. Well, God only knows, somebody better call the CME, they might be about to go down without the coolant, leak detection, and precision manufacturing processes as prices have soared since the Middle East crisis began.

I’ve been hearing about how this affects companies like NVIDIA, AI, and here in another article about the helium shortage that’s about to hit the chip industry, and according to Jonathan Small is a huge problem. The gas is irreplaceable for making chips that are in the power of iPhones and NVIDIA’s AI servers. Well, if there are any two companies that are at the heart of technology and AI and large chunk of the US economy, there you have it. Another thing that I was listening to a lot of Luke Grohman this week, I’m not going to turn this into the Luke Grohman show, but I highly respect him and just learn a lot and also want to give credit if something was his idea, but he mentioned how one of the real problems facing the economy is that if the stock market goes down, you’re losing a lot of tax receipts because when you have a rising stock market, majority of those tax receipts coming from capital gains taxes.

So just concerning that you’re already seeing these things pop up. Here we have in Australia, the diesel shortage that worries ricochet that has led to worrying ricocheting across the country’s remote mines. So in the middle of the world, we’re supposed to be securing these strategic critical minerals that we have a shortage of whole thing with the rare earths where we don’t have enough of those. And now you have a diesel shortage affecting Australia that is affecting the mining sector. And this is just a couple of months after David Copley from the Trump administration said they’re planning to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the mining sector over the next couple of years.

And now they can’t get diesel and Phoenix executive John Wellborn mentions when you get down to two days and your fuel supplier rings up and says, sorry, mate, the fuel supply we’re going to give you tomorrow is now two weeks away. You start to have some issues and the alarming crunch in the energy supply has left hundreds of petrol stations around the country without fuel. Also, if you do not have diesel fuel, that creates problems in getting food across the country. We also have seen at times threatened actions affecting desalination, which means that if you have a lot of people living in a desert and they don’t get water, conceivably in humanitarian crisis, if that happens, you hope that doesn’t happen.

But here was another one. This was from Sunday night. Iran attack on Bahrain aluminum smelter threatens to add pressure on global supplies. And you can see back here from the arcade economics, gold and silver daily. This was back on March 4th, where we mentioned aluminum had already hit its high since 2022 as Alba declared a force majeure. And then on Sunday, Iranian attack on Bahrain aluminum smelter threatens to add to the pressure. So certainly this is impacting the mining and metal supply chain. Also seeing those rising yields, which is a problem for the debt markets.

It just is concerning that things are going from bad to dangerous quickly. If this doesn’t get resolved, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting resolved, although China suppliers are warning of higher prices for Americans due to the Strait of Hormuz closure, which means that on top of it, you’re going to have inflation rising at the same time that the US labor market has already slowed down. Last month’s report was a disaster. It’ll be interesting to see the numbers that come out this month. Again, and I get it. Are they reflective of what’s really going on out there? Not usually, but either case, it’ll be fascinating to see what the numbers show for the past month, which was certainly a turbulent one, because what is Trump going to say about the lower interest rates now that you already had an inflation rising before this war broke out, now oil’s over $100.

So inflation is going to be going up at the same time where the labor market weakening and Trump and also not just Trump, but here we have former chairman of Trump’s council of economic advisors, Stephen Myron, who is now part of the Fed and still backs cuts as interest rates could be about a point lower this year. That wouldn’t be down to the 1% or lower that Trump had suggested earlier this year, although would still be lower than the 225 basis point cuts that the markets had priced in until everything happened over the past month.

Now those cuts have been pushed back in terms of the Fed futures curve, but Governor Myron still wants rates about a point lower. We’ll see at some point if we get Kevin Warsh in to become the new chairman of the Fed. But jeez, if Myron turned out to be right and you had interest rates even a point lower, which I wouldn’t rule out, great we’re going. There’s a good chance also you’re at the heart of it. Everything that’s happening in Iran, you’re rapidly increasing the probabilities of quantitative easing far sooner than later.

So you might get your interest rate cuts, might get that and perhaps it’s not surprising that in the midst of all that Hong Kong is wooing central banks to become the gold trading hub as we continue to see gold infrastructure and gold trading move to the east with Hong Kong and also Singapore really trying to dominate as much of that as possible at the same time where we see a big divergence in the silver premiums and either case quite a bit happening out there. And those are the things impacting the gold and silver market right now, which I think are definitely going to be impacting Dolly Varden Silver, which now has officially become Contango Silver and Gold as they have closed their deal with Contango or who held the cash flowing Mancho gold mine and has advanced their high grade exploration projects in Alaska now combined with Dolly Varden’s high grade Kitzold Valley silver gold project in British Columbia’s golden triangle.

And you have a bigger company now that has a portfolio of high grade precious metals assets, more than $100 million in combined cash. And again, as we mentioned here, as they are advancing some of those projects that Dolly has been working on, they have the cash flowing Mancho gold mine. And fortunately we’ll have Rick Van Neuenheis of formerly Contango ORE and Sean Kunken, who is the CEO formerly of Dolly Varden, but now the combined Contango Silver and Gold joining us on Wednesday, 4pm Eastern. Certainly if you have questions about the deal, great time to log on and join us.

We’ll go through the developments. Who knows what will happen by then, but also dig into what is happening with this deal. So anyway, hope you’re having a great day out there. We’re living through historic times, maybe a little bit overwhelming here there, but historic nonetheless. And just in case you missed it, on Friday we dug into one of the key correlations that has existed pretty much throughout this war in the gold market that just broke. And to find out more about what that is, well, just click on the video coming your way now.

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