➡ Rafi from The Endgame Investor discusses the current state of the gold market, noting that despite a ceasefire between Israel, the US, Iran, and Hezbollah, the gold futures market remains unstable. He also mentions the situation in Hormuz, where a deal to open the strait has not been fulfilled, affecting countries reliant on the Straits of Hormuz for oil, such as China, Japan, South Korea, and the EU. Rafi predicts that South Korea or China may run out of oil reserves first, and highlights Japan’s precarious situation, with only about four months of oil left if the Strait remains closed. He concludes by stating that if Japan’s situation worsens, it could have a significant impact on the global monetary system.
➡ South Korea and India, which import a significant portion of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz, face potential crises if they lose their oil reserves, which could lead to a crash in their currencies. Meanwhile, Israel’s currency, the shekel, is strengthening despite the ongoing war, indicating that the country is not in ruins as some believe. The article suggests ignoring news about the war and focusing on market prices, which provide accurate information about the economic situation. It also mentions that the rising prices of gold and silver indicate a weakening dollar, as everything is essentially priced in gold.

And there was a deal to open her moods which has not happened AT ALL! Hey guys, Rafi here from The Endgame Investor and in this week’s Silver Report, I’m not going to talk about silver at all. Why not? Because I don’t want to and the more interesting stuff is happening anyway in the gold market. The gold futures market has not gotten control back of the gold price. Open interest remains extremely depressed, has not recovered despite the supposed ceasefire between Israel and the US and Iran and Hezbollah and whoever else is throwing bombs at each other.

And this ceasefire has not really accomplished much, but conditions in Israel actually where I am are a little bit better. There are fewer sirens, though I didn’t have that many sirens in the first place. I haven’t had any in the last 72 hours. And by the way, if you want to hear any more about my insider reports on what is going on in Israel during the war, check out The Endgame Investor on substack. I write about it in more detail over there. Link in the description below. And if you think from those reports that Armageddon is imminent, then you can go get a dirty man safe at the link in the description below.

Use the code ENDGAME10 for 10% off and support this channel. And if you don’t have any gold and silver yet, you can always go to milesfranklin at the link in the description below and mention The Endgame Investor and then take that gold and put it in a dirty man safe. Use the code ENDGAME10 to check out, etc. Anyway, that’s enough marketing for today. Let’s go to the slides and we will begin with open interest and then we will talk about how much time remains before the oil market implodes or explodes and which countries are going to be at ground zero and how much time do each of them have before they run out of oil reserves and things get really bad.

So let’s check it out. First of all, we see here the interplay between open interest and the gold price. Talked about this last week, but there are some other interesting details here that I didn’t point out before. The blue is the price and the green bars are the open interest. You can see here we are below 360,000 contracts. Still, we went up slightly. It looked two days ago that we were up about 20,375,000 contracts, but those turned out to be preliminary numbers by the COMEX or the CME or whoever runs that thing.

And it turns out that preliminary numbers can be way off the actual numbers. Why? I don’t know why. I don’t know what the mechanics are here, but that’s what it is. So we’re still at very, very low open interest numbers that we haven’t seen since 2012 or 2008, actually 2009. That’s extremely low, which means that liquidity in the gold market is going to be very, very low, which is exactly what we are seeing. But I want to point out these candles over here. You see here that open interest maxed out at about 540,000 contracts over here just before gold topped at $5600 an ounce.

And in this candle where you see the top at $5600, the open interest in gold had already started to fall drastically back down to on that day 460,000. So about 80,000 contracts were liquidated as gold was topping. And then one day later, gold crashed too. What is that? $4700 and then back down to $4400. So we went from about $5500 to $4400, an $1100 move. What is that? About 20%? No, no, it’s less. It’s like 15% is still a lot for two days in the gold price. And open interest had already fallen by a lot by then, which means that whoever was doing that may have had a clue that gold was topping.

And I’m not going to point to any conspiracies here. Some people who can track liquidity flows either by AI or algorithm or whatever, and they can see certain movements being made, which I don’t have the ability to do because I don’t have the data or the expertise to figure those things out. Some computer programs can figure it out and some had, I guess, programmed that or figured out that gold was going to fall in those times because of those numbers. And some firms actually do this and they’re wrong a lot and some firms do it and sometimes they’re right.

It doesn’t mean that they know anything insider or illegal or they’re manipulating anything beyond what the system already manipulates. But this is what we are seeing here. We’re seeing the open interest numbers fall right before gold topped. But now we see here that open interest is still below 360,000 contracts, even though the price has climbed from about $4,100 to now $4,800. So we moved about $700 with open interest falling even further. There are very, very few speculators in this market and as the numbers continue to fall or as they stay around these levels, the liquidity in this market is going to be very, very scarce relatively for gold, which means the gold price will remain volatile.

That includes silver because silver follows gold in volatility normally speaking. But let’s go to the situation in Hormuz. Apparently there was a ceasefire between the US and Iran and there was a deal to open Hormuz which has not happened at all. This is the chart of what the strategic petroleum reserves are for the countries that are most reliant on the Straits of Hormuz. This does not include the United States. I don’t know why the United States is here because they’re not really reliant on the Straits of Hormuz. They only import about five percent of their oil from there.

We do have China, Japan, and South Korea and the EU. These are the sizes of their strategic petroleum reserves and we see here that China has about 80 to 90 days estimated in reserve. Japan has about 175 days. That’s combined government and private reserves. South Korea has about 90 days and EU has about nine days per member state. Who’s going to run out first? Probably South Korea or China. Probably South Korea because they import most of their oil through Hormuz whereas China only imports about half of it. Japan imports the most but they have the biggest reserve.

We’re going to go to the next slide here and we see Japan and the Strait of Hormuz. Japan says here this is from HormuzStraightMonitor.com. You can check it out yourself. They import about 80 to 90 percent of all their oil imports through Hormuz and they have about 175 days of imports in reserve. So how long had the Strait been closed since March 1st? It is now April 10th so that’s about 41 days so far. Take that away from 175 and you have, what is it, 134 days? 130? Yeah, 134.

Am I doing the math right? Who cares? 134 days let’s say. So that’s about four months. Is the Strait of Hormuz going to stay closed for that much longer? Maybe. I don’t know. Why would I ran open it? I’m not sure. They pretty much lost everything by now and maybe to save their power plants but I don’t think anyone’s gonna bomb their power plants. I think that was a bluff from the beginning. But anyway, you can see Japan is in serious straights here. Pun intended. Get it? Straights. Japan 10-year bond yield has now hit 2.442.

This is a new high. The high in 2026 is about 2.4 something right here. Now we’re at 2.44 and as you know my thesis is if you’ve been watching these videos or following me on Substack that the higher Japanese interest rates go the weaker the yen gets generally speaking because the yen is the Japanese government bond market. They are the same thing. Now we see here a tweet from Javier Blas who’s the commodity guy at Bloomberg and he says this is now confirmed. Japan will release oil covering about 20 days of consumption from its strategic petroleum reserves in May.

Prime Minister Sanayata Kaichi said. So that’s 20 days release and they’ve already gone through about 41 days. That’s 61 days. So 175 minus 61 is 104. So we have about three three and a half months left of oil for Japan until they completely run out and the country stops. Isn’t that exciting? So Japan here this is the this is the long-term chart of the 10-year bond yield. So you can see here 2.44 as we saw in the previous chart. This is going all the way back to the late 80s and we see here that the high in the January 1999 was 2.695 over here.

Trading economics has a slightly different number. This is CNBC chart. I don’t know which one is true and which one is lying but whatever it is we’re around that that high here and after that we have basically outer space over here which is not good if you’re a Japan guy or anyone who depends on Japan like everybody because they have a huge carry trade which keeps the fiat system alive. So when Japan goes kaput the entire Western monetary system does as well and we are almost there. South Korea and the Strait of Hormuz.

What about South Korea? It imports 70 to 80 percent of its oil through Hormuz and we see here where is the potential for a crisis in Korea. It’s not quite in the 10-year yield that could be though history says that the South Korean won is more of a troublemaker than the 10-year Korean bond whatever they call their bonds. So we see here that the Asian financial crisis in 1998 saw the Korean won crash from about 800 to about 2,000 per dollar and we had another crash in 2008 and it looks like we are at 2008 crash levels over here of about 1,500 and so this could erupt at any time and South Korea could lose its currency if it loses its oil reserves.

They have about 90 days and we’ve done about 41 so maybe about 50 days left here for South Korea to run out of oil. Who knows what happens then? Do they start importing from a different country? I don’t know but it’s not good for them. India and the Strait of Hormuz. So India actually imports 55 to 65 percent of its oil through Hormuz and the potential trouble spot for India if they lose their oils also its currency which we see is at all time lows already at about 93 per dollar and the currency has been weakening since the late 1970s and this could crash at any time especially if they don’t have any oil to run their economy.

If you your economy, your currency dies with it. But which country involved in this war currency is at an all-time high? That’s actually Israel. The U.S. dollar to Israeli new shekel ratio is now down to about 3 or at 3.0367. If we look at an all-time chart here, squeeze this out or not squeeze, it’s the opposite squeeze. Broaden. Broaden this out to 1985 with the founding of the Israeli new shekel and we have we’re pretty much at a major high not all time because we were back here in 1995 before the currency actually stabilized in 2000.

We’re at 3.03. Why is the shekel strengthening? We are at about 30 year high here of 3.03 and what was the low today? It was like oh wow 2.92. We went below three shekels to a dollar. Wow. The shekel has since October 7th, since the big attack in this whole war broke out, the shekel has gone from four shekels per dollar to below three. That’s a 25% increase in the shekel to the dollar and yes this is irrelevant in terms of the endgame because the shekel basically is the dollar because the Bank of Israel owns only dollars but whatever I mean investors seem to want the shekel for some reason.

You guys take shekels? Just got back from a trip to Israel. All I got is a fistful of shekels. I know that a lot of people think that Tel Aviv was destroyed and that the country is in ruins or whatever but if that were true the shekel wouldn’t be so strong versus the dollar. Basically what we all have to do now is ignore the news, ignore people saying about the war and just watch markets. What are the markets actually saying? What are the oil markets actually saying? They’re saying that Hormuz is still closed.

Ships are not passing by. It’s about a 90% blockage still hasn’t changed much since the war started and yes in these times when it is impossible to know what the truth is I do believe you can still follow market prices. Those are actual information about the situation in the economy. As Hayek said the Austrian economist prices are signals and they organize the division of labor. Without prices we would not know what to do when we woke up in the morning and it would be a zombie apocalypse. So in these times I would say ignore the news and keep your eyes on the actual prices of goods and services in the global economy.

They are what people are buying and selling for and they tell the truest information and from what we can tell gold and silver are rising which means the dollar is dying because everything really is priced in gold. Nothing really is priced in the dollar since the dollar is a gold derivative and the rest of it beyond that is all debt that’s going to collapse in an endgame and I hope to see you there on the other side of it. [tr:trw].

See more of Rafi Farber on their Public Channel and the MPN Rafi Farber channel.