➡ The gold and silver markets are currently inactive, similar to the 2008 financial crisis, and the reason is unclear. Despite the worst energy crisis ever, according to the International Energy Agency, markets are not reacting. Bank of America predicts a significant increase in silver prices by 2026, potentially reaching up to $309 per ounce. Meanwhile, Hank Paulson, the 2008 bailout guy, warns of a potential treasury market collapse and suggests an emergency plan is needed.
➡ Despite a decrease in silver and gold supplies at the COMEX, there is still a significant amount available. The margin requirements for gold and silver are decreasing, which could attract more traders. Trading activity for silver is at its lowest since 2008, and if it falls below 100,000 contracts, it would be the lowest since the 2008 financial crisis. The head of the International Energy Agency warns of a major energy security threat, which could impact global economic growth and potentially lead to energy rationing.
➡ You can buy gold and silver from Miles Franklin, store it in a safe from Dirty Man Safe with a 10% discount using the code ‘endgame10’, or invest it with Monetary Metals to earn interest. Check the links in the description for more details. See you next week and thanks for watching!

Shoot the glass! Remember when he had to cross all that broken glass without his shoes on? And there’s nothing he could do about it, so he just walked down all the broken glass with his bare feet? Activity in the gold futures market is basically dead. Well it just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Please open his mouth. Hey guys, Raf here from The Endgame Investor, and we’re definitely in very weird times in markets. All over the place, nothing makes any sense.

According to the IEA, the International Energy Agency, I think it’s called, we’re in the worst energy crisis that has ever existed, and markets don’t seem to care one bit. Gold and silver markets are as dead as they were in 2008 during the depths of the financial crisis, and nobody really knows why. We have Hank Paulson, remember that bailout guy from 2008? He’s saying that we have to have an emergency break the glass plan for when the treasury market implodes, and he’s basically predicting the endgame in so many words. And I’m going to respond to people who think that silver is being drained from the COMEX.

My answer is yes it is, and no it isn’t. It all depends on the time frame that you’re looking at. So I wouldn’t take those missives all that seriously, though I do track the COMEX. I track it in a larger context, and not just what has been happening in the last few months. And by the way, Bank of America is predicting triple digit silver for 2026 as high as $309. And no, that’s not a joke, and actually this prediction is kind of old, it’s from February. Still post-silver crash of January 29th, but it’s not very common when a big megabank like this predicts triple digit silver, and explains why.

So we’ll go into that right now. But before we do, get your gold and silver at Miles Franklin. Link in the description below, there’s still time, and you’ll see by the end of this presentation that gold stocks are still extremely cheap, which means that gold has a lot of room to rise, and we’ll see that for many different reasons. And then go and take your gold and put it in a Dirty Man safe. Link in the description below, use the code ENDGAME10 at checkout for 10% off, and don’t tell anyone you have it.

It’s the lowest tech, safest way to store your gold. That’s not really a recommendation. That’s just my opinion. Well, you know, that’s just like your opinion, man. That is as long as nobody knows that it’s there. And if you like this silver report, then check out the Endgame Investor on Substag without your support there. I couldn’t do these videos. And so let’s begin with the slides. Let’s go to the first one here. We’re going to start with gold, and then we’ll get into silver. You can see on my little black trapezoid on the right side here.

Since gold’s bottom at 4,400, we have gone almost back to 5,000. I think about 4,950 or something, and now we’re down to about 4,700 again. But in that time, open interest in the gold market has fallen below 400,000 for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, and it has remained there, which means that activity in the gold futures market is basically dead. Well, it just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Please open his mouth. Why is this happening? That is a big mystery.

But it does mean that when activity fires back up again, there’s going to be a lot of speculators who are going to pile in when the next move starts, when the next gold rally starts, when exactly does that happen? Well, in my personal opinion, it’s whenever this oil crisis that is currently unfolding forces a bank collapse, and then the Fed has to come and print trillions of dollars. That is absolutely going to happen at some point, whether it will be triggered by this current oil crisis, which the IEA calls an oil crisis, the worst that we’ve ever experienced.

Why aren’t markets reacting to this? I don’t know, but eventually they will. It’s the same reason why the people in the big short didn’t understand why housing markets weren’t reacting to the collapsing subprime market and why bonds weren’t reacting to it either. The bonds aren’t going down. They won’t move. It’s possible that we are in a completely fraudulent system. But eventually they did. There are some delays in these things, but they eventually all happen, and it will happen again this time. You can’t block the straightforward moves and expect no fallout. That fallout is yet to come.

The deadest gold futures market since 2008. Just zooming out on this chart here, you can see open interest. I drew a line over here where we are now at about 366,000 contracts. The last time we were below this line was during the 2008 financial crisis. This means that there’s something big happening in the gold market right now as there was something very big happening here at this extreme in 2008. There was also something very big happening here at the beginning of 2020 when gold open interest for some reason reached a maximum of 800,000 contracts.

To this day, nobody can give me a good explanation as to why it was happening right before the lockdowns and somebody knows something. Was it connected? Nobody knows. But it was a big thing. It was a big deal. And so when there are extremes in open interest, we might not understand why, but it does signal that something big is happening in the market, and it is happening right now. You can’t see it in price, but it’s happening in other areas. Bank of America predicts triple digit silver this year. This is actually from February 28th, and it’s making the rounds now.

I’m not sure why, but from the street, we have Bank of America revamped silver stock price target for 2026 by Hilary Remy. Bank of America just made one of the boldest silver price calls on Wall Street. Michael Widmer, the bank’s head of metals research, projects silver could reach anywhere between $135 and $309 per ounce before the end of 2026. That’s a low call of $135 and a high of $309. This is a real thing. This isn’t gold or silver bugs that have suddenly invaded Bank of America. This is a normie guy, as much as I can tell.

The $135 base case assumes a natural bull market continuation without a squeeze or panic buying. The $309 target is a different animal. It would need a liquidity event, a delivery squeeze, or a surge in physical demand that overwhelms paper markets, all of which could very easily happen this year, and I think will. One of them will, or many, maybe both of them will, or all three of them, however many there are. I don’t know. On that note, we have another panic call. Not quite panic, but he’s saying prepare for panic by Henry Paulson, AKA Hank Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury.

The Secretary of the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis who basically bailed out everything under George W. Bush. So he says, with regard to any breakdown in the $31 trillion market for US government debt, Paulson said that would pose a different case from the financial crisis he dealt with while at the Treasury’s helm two decades ago, and this is from CNBC, by the way. As bad as it was, he says, about the 2008 financial crisis, the government had fiscal firepower to address the credit meltdown. You can come in and clean up the mess, but in the event of a US public debt crisis, when you hit the wall and you’re trying to issue treasuries and the Fed is the only buyer and the prices of the Treasuries are going down and interest rates are up, that’s a dangerous thing.

You know what it is? Hank, it’s called the endgame, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. He says we need an emergency break the glass plan for when this happens. Shoot the glass. I don’t know what that plan could be, because the only thing that could be done is to inflate more, and at this point, inflating more would just destroy the dollar and would bring gold and silver to infinity in dollar terms, and then everything would have to be priced in gold and silver ounces instead, and we’d be at endgame fully, which is what is going to happen, will it necessarily be this year? I certainly hope so.

Now, as for commentators that are saying that some of the things that we’re talking about is that silver is draining from the COMEX. This is technically true, but it’s also not so much true. It depends on context. I’m not criticizing these people. I’m just saying to broaden out the views here and understand what they’re saying. In the context of what’s happening since the 1970s or at least the 1990s, so we see here silver draining from the COMEX. Yes, that’s true in the sense that we were at about 530 million ounces, and now we’re at 316 million ounces, so that’s over 200 million ounces drained out in just a few months.

That’s all true, but when it comes to context and how much are, how high are silver inventories at the COMEX, they’re still pretty damn high, higher than they were at the highs in the 1990s. We’re very near the recent highs of 2021, slightly below them, but if we look at the registered stocks by themselves, we are right near, and this is as far back as the data for strictly registered silver supplies go, we’re near what highs were before 2021, 80 million ounces, 79.28 million ounces. This was around the highs that were seen from 2000 to 2020.

There’s no shortage here. There’s still plenty of silver, plenty of registered silver for sale on the COMEX, and while some of it is leaving, these things go in waves. I won’t be paying much attention to this until we get somewhere around these levels in 2023 or 2016, and that is critically low. There’s still plenty of space away from that. We’ll see if we get there, and I will keep my eye open. Is gold really draining from the COMEX? Well, same story here. This is the total gold supply, both registered and eligible, meaning for sale and not for sale, 29.44 million ounces, total COMEX gold stockpile, so we’re at just below 30 million ounces, and if we go back 2005, I could go back to all the 1974 all the way, but numbers didn’t really change much from 1974 until about 2020, so we see here that we’re still at very high gold supply here on the COMEX, and yes, it has drained out from about 45 million to 30 million in about a year and a half, but that’s happened before, and it happened from 2020 to about 2025, so we still got plenty of room here, and there’s no critical mass or critical situation on the COMEX in gold supplies at all, but there is something happening in the futures market that could pick up some volume and some open interest.

The margin requirements are going down. For the gold contract, we see the current initial margin requirements are 7.7%, and they’re going down to 6.6%. That’s a meaningful move down. Also, for silver, we see they’re at 15.4% and going down today, Friday, to 12.1%, so this will increase leverage on the COMEX trading platform and will draw in more traders as they can afford to spend more money on contracts because margin requirements are lower. We’ll see what that does to the market if it wakes it up a little bit. Silver is still in its lowest activity since 2008, I mean, trading activity on the silver futures market in New York.

We see here that we are at 112,700 contracts because this is the day behind, so 112,000. This is basically a low going back to 2012 and before that, 2008, 2009, and we see here that during these times, there are some extreme things going on in the financial system. In 2011, obviously, we were at the highs in gold. Something big is going on in the silver market, though. It’s still trading very, very quietly right now. It’s just that nobody knows exactly why and what is happening, but whatever it is, it’s big. There is a potential to fall below 100,000 contracts.

Before we go into this chart, I’m just going to go back here for a second. This 100,000 line, you can see I drew a black line just above it to where we are now, but 100,000, that’s below this 2011 low, and the only time we were below 100,000 since 2008, since the financial crisis, was the financial crisis itself. We’ve never gone that low since then, but if we do, here’s how it would happen. We have the May contract delivering on April 29th, I believe. I think that’s a Wednesday. That’s Wednesday of next week, this coming Wednesday, and we see that you have to roll over.

If you don’t want to take or make delivery, you got to roll over from May. The contracts are closing out for May because people don’t want to either take or make delivery of silver and would rather roll over into the next position. So, 4,000 have cleared out yesterday, and only 2,500 have been bought or have been established since yesterday, possibly yesterday. So, a loss of 4,000 and gain of 2,000, that means only half of them, or slightly more than half of these longs and shorts, have moved over to July.

So, if that continues, we could see about half of these 34,000 being wiped out, being closed out for good without rolling over. Half of 34,000 is about 17,000, let’s say 15,000, 14,000, whatever. We’re now at 112,000, so we could see a move below 100,000 contracts, which we have not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. Gold and silver equities are still below. The 2008 crash lows priced in gold. So, this is gold to the XAU ratio. The XAU is the longest or oldest gold and silver stock indexes that I can find here on stockcharts.com.

So, if we go back to 2000, we can see the lower this is, the more expensive gold stocks are in gold terms. How many ounces of gold the average gold stock costs. So, the higher it goes, the cheaper. And the lower it goes, the more expensive. So, you can see here, we are right at a major pivot line. Going back to 2008, this was in gold ounce terms, the 2008 crash lows of the gold and silver equities complex. And we’re going to break them, right? We’ve touched it three times, once in 2016 at the beginning of the gold bull market, once in 2021 after the lockdown insanity of 2020, and once just now at the beginning of 2026 at the highs in late January, we’re going to hit it again, because we’re not that far above it.

We’re at 12.401 now, and this is about 11.5. See here, the bold numbers is 12.401. So, gold stocks haven’t moved down much at all, and they are testing this major pivot point. Once we break it, I think we’re going to go down, head down to this historic area over here from 2000 to 2008, and gold stocks are going to be fundamentally repriced. So, if you still want some gold stocks for your portfolio, there’s still time to get some, because we’re only at the 2008 crash lows in gold’s terms.

Think about that. One last slide here we have from the director or the head of the IEA. It’s called the chief, apparently according to this headline. This is also CNBC. We are facing the biggest energy security threat in history. IEA chief tells CNBC, well, you wouldn’t know that from the way the markets are operating, which is kind of dead. But anyway, that’s what he says. Here he says, describing the strait, meaning the Strait of Hormuz, as one of the world’s most critical oil transit choke points, the IEA, International Energy Agency, has warned that the closure will impact global economic growth, spur inflation, and could lead to energy rationing.

The energy has warned of an imminent jet fuel crunch in Europe, for example, with some countries facing shortages within weeks. Flights are going to get cancelled. Things are going to start happening pretty soon. Europe gets about 75% of its jet fuel from refineries in the Middle East, and this is basically now down to zero. Europe is now trying to get it from the U.S. and Nigeria if we are not able to get it in Europe. Additional imports from the countries now, we will be in difficulties, Burel told CNBC on Thursday.

I really hope, first of all, that the straits opened and refinery exports start from there. But we may well need to take some measures in Europe to reduce air travel as well, meaning we’re starting the rationing process. They don’t think the Strait of Hormuz is going to open up any time soon. Both sides are pretty bellicose in their words, and the U.S. seems intent on continuing its blockade until the refineries of Iran are choked out and they don’t have any capacity left to store any oil and they just shut down.

But whoever is leading Iran, and nobody knows who that is actually, they don’t seem intent on giving in to any of this either, and in any case, the Pentagon has said that it would take about six months to demine the Strait even after an agreement was reached. So we’re looking at about six months until insurance would be able to cover transit again. I’m not sure if any insurance company would want to cover a freighter or an oil tanker that is going through a mined Strait that hasn’t been cleared out yet.

So I think Hormuz is out of commission for the next several months, and we are headed for a very big energy crunch according to the IEA chief. That’s going to happen. It’s going to lead to domino effect somewhere, and gold and silver are going to be involved, whether that means they’re going to go down first in a banking crisis or shoot up immediately. We do not know, and we have to be prepared for any scenario. That means have enough cash in case there’s a crash and have enough gold and silver in case there is not.

And you can get some gold and silver at Miles Franklin. Link in the description below and mention the endgame investor. You can take some of your gold and silver and put it in a dirty man safe. Use the link in the description below and use the code endgame10 at checkout for 10% off. And you can always take some of your gold and silver and store it with monetary metals, with Keith Wiener of monetary metals, and earn a yield on those metals, which I have some as well, and I do enjoy seeing some of my metals earn interest in metals terms.

Use the link in the description below, and I’ll see you guys next week. Thanks for watching!
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See more of Rafi Farber on their Public Channel and the MPN Rafi Farber channel.