➡ The silver market is facing a crisis as Eastern countries like China are buying up all available silver, causing a shortage. This is happening while the Western financial system is struggling with debt and policy failure. The East is preparing for what comes next by buying real, physical silver, causing a decrease in global silver liquidity. This could lead to a sudden and dramatic increase in silver prices.
➡ The article discusses the instability of the Comex, a major marketplace for trading silver, due to an imbalance between physical silver and paper contracts. This imbalance is causing a crisis as global buyers demand real silver, not paper contracts, and Comex struggles to meet this demand. The article also criticizes Keynesian economics, arguing that it dismisses important economic principles and has led to false assumptions about the economy. Finally, the article predicts a major increase in the value of silver due to ongoing economic issues such as inflation, debt, and currency debasement.
➡ The article discusses the idea of a macroeconomic reset, suggesting that governments, driven by political considerations, may not be the best entities to handle it. It also talks about the increasing gap between the paper and physical silver market, with physical silver becoming more valuable. The article further discusses the potential liquidity issues in the gold market and the historical fate of fiat currencies, suggesting that silver could serve as monetary insurance. Lastly, it mentions a giveaway by Silver News Daily and the importance of understanding economic progress driven by the private sector.
➡ The Bank of England and the LBMA have limited control over gold flow, which is often used as collateral in deals. The silver market is on the verge of a sentiment shift that could cause prices to skyrocket due to a combination of factors including inflation, debt devaluation, supply shortages, and geopolitical tension. The silver supply chain is collapsing due to declining mining output and rising extraction costs, leading to a potential price explosion. Industrial demand for silver is increasing due to its necessity in various technologies, further straining the supply chain.
➡ Silver is becoming increasingly important in today’s economy, especially in the production of solar panels, electric cars, and other technologies. However, as demand rises, the supply is dwindling, potentially leading to a bidding war between nations and corporations. Meanwhile, the value of credit is decreasing, making gold a safer investment. Despite the calm market appearance, experts predict a sudden surge in silver prices due to these factors.
➡ Always talk to an expert before you decide to invest your money. This isn’t a financial advice.

You’re watching Silver News Daily. Subscribe for more. Given that the demand from China and other Eastern nations, East Asian nations, seems to be continuing apace. They’re continuing to get hold of virtually every ton of gold that becomes available. So, yeah, the liquidity situation I don’t see really improving. So far as we are aware, the treasury is not involved with this movement of gold at all. If it was, then this gold wouldn’t be appearing in the COMEX warehouse statistics. And furthermore, I think that anything that the U.S. treasury does will not be divulged. So we really cannot draw any conclusions at all.

All we can do is drum up some conspiracy theories, and that’s not something I’m really prepared to get involved with. The silver market is hurtling toward a moment of reckoning, and hardly anyone is ready for what comes next. Right now, a silent economic war is playing out between the east and west, and silver is the battleground. In the east, countries like China are buying up every ounce of available supply, draining global inventories at a pace the market can’t keep up with. In the west, the. The COMEX exchange continues to pump out paper contracts, trying desperately to hold down the price.

But the cracks are showing and the system is wobbling. If you think this is just another silver correction, think again. We’re talking about a convergence of unstoppable demand and unsustainable manipulation. A powder keg that could explode at any moment. When it does, the price won’t just move, it’ll detonate. Some are calling for $100 silver, others are whispering, $500. But behind closed doors, the most informed voices are warning of something even bigger. Thousand dollars or more. If that sounds impossible, stick around. Because by the time we’re done, you’ll see why this isn’t a wild prediction. It’s a ticking clock.

Well, good question. I mean, they, you know, that they’re bought in the market by presumably US Pension funds and US Insurance companies. They are being bought, let us say, also by offshore insurance companies. I mean, places like the Cayman Islands have a lot of captive insurance businesses, which are American in terms of their underlying liabilities. So they would buy them to match their liabilities. But of course, if you’ve got sellers in the market, if the price is driven by sellers, then the prices are going to fall. In other words, the yields rise. I would say, however, that after the initial scare from the Independence Day on April 2, and particularly since Scott Besant actually took control over the matter and met the Chinese in Switzerland, you know, things have calmed down.

Quite a lot, which I think is good. It really is. I mean, Scott Besant, I think is if you like the control mechanism on some of the more wilder things coming out of the President, which is great, I think that’s very, very good. But it doesn’t actually change the underlying problem. Probably what it does is it changes the timing of things. I mean, for example, we’ve seen gold sell off over the last few weeks, really since it rose up to that 3500 level. And in declining, you know, you could argue that that decline is because the pressure, if you like, on the whole system, the whole financial system, has been relieved somewhat by Scott Besant coming to, you know, a more sensible agreement with the Chinese over tariffs.

Ah, but the dynamics of the situation are still extremely poor. I mean, basically what we have is this is something that so few people actually understand is we’ve got this credit bubble. It’s the largest credit bubble in history. And if you have difficulty trying to understand that, just look at the debt side, because credit equals debt, always two sides of the same balance sheet. And you look at the amount of debt around and the amount of debt which is bad debt, particularly as interest rates tend to rise. Now, I know everybody’s saying it’s going to fall, but that’s another Keynesian bit of rubbish.

You can see that this bubble is ripe to pop. And I think we’ve said this to your audience before, that the situation in many senses is very similar to 1929. You had a credit bubble fueled, if you like, in the late 1920s, the roaring twenties, which then coincided with the introduction of the Smoot Hawley Tariff act of 1930. And you know, we have. While the mainstream fixates on gold, the real story is unfolding quietly in the east, where China, along with other major Asian economies is buying up staggering quantities of silver. These aren’t speculative plays or short term hedges.

This is long term calculated accumulation. For months now, Eastern buyers have been steadily absorbing physical metal from global markets ton after ton, often without regard for price. Why? Because they understand what’s coming. They know the Western financial system is wobbling under the weight of debt, inflation and policy failure and their positioning for what comes after. And unlike the west, which plays with paper contracts and leverages, the east wants real metal, tangible hold in your hand security. That hunger is leaving a gaping hole in global silver liquidity. Inventory reports are already showing drawdowns in London, Zurich and Shanghai.

Supply isn’t just tight, it’s vanishing. The more silver the east locks away, the less is left for Anyone else. And as Western institutions scramble to cover positions or fulfill delivery obligations, they’re discovering something terrifying. There simply isn’t enough metal to go around. This isn’t just bullish, it’s existential. The east is quietly cornering the market, and by the time the west realizes it, the price may have already exploded. Well, I think virtually everybody today has forgotten what say’s law was. It was described incorrectly by Keynes in order that he could dismiss it, which he did in literally the first 20 pages of his general theory, which was the one book really that launched macroeconomics.

What say actually described. I mean, it wasn’t. He didn’t sort of come up with a law, an aphorism, let us say, in one sentence or two sentences. But he wrote a book which is quite a long book. It went around to six editions, I think the final edition in about 1805. And really what he did was he described economics. He described how free markets worked. He described the division of labor, why it is that people specialize. You know, if they got a particular skill, then they maximize their income by deploying it. So, you know, in. So instead of, let’s say, you know, trying to produce everything that you need as an individual, no, what you do is you specialize in something and other people specialize in things.

And you use money to buy the things that you want, having made the money yourself by selling your product. The relentless Eastern demand is triggering a cascading effect across global liquidity. And it’s tightening the noose around Western markets. Every ounce of silver absorbed by China or other East Asian nations isn’t just being consumed. It’s being removed from the global float, often permanently. Unlike speculative holdings that return to market during rallies, much of this silver is locked away in sovereign vaults, strategic reserves, or long term industrial applications. This drain is creating a stealth crisis, one that’s not fully priced in because the true depletion of accessible silver isn’t yet visible to the average investor.

But insiders know what’s happening. The available pool of deliverable silver on major exchanges is shrinking fast. And the ratio of paper to physical silver is growing dangerously wide. When buyers come knocking for physical delivery, there’s less and less to hand over. And that’s exactly how market breaks begin. We’re watching a slow motion liquidity crunch in real time. Dealers are reporting supply delays, premiums are widening, and wholesalers are struggling to secure large allocations. These are all early warning signs of a systemic squeeze. As the east continues to pull silver out of circulation, the west is being left with promises and paper IOUs, the imbalance is accelerating and when liquidity fully dries up, it won’t be a gradual correction, it will be a violent repricing with the metal surging to levels no one’s prepared for.

Basically not be driven by profitability, but by the love of what he’s doing. You know, come on, it’s if you like a different version of a sort of communist approach and that this is the man who invented macroeconomics, which we all follow. I mean, everybody is tied into it, you know, I mean when you get a government statistic, now you and I know that government statistics are, you know, if you like self serving at best and probably downright lies at worst. But this is all part of the macroeconomic thing, you know, relationship between prices and what you should do with money supply and all, you know, all this, it’s all macroeconomic rubbish and it all justifies government intervention.

So I think anyone who is interested in understanding why everything is actually going horribly wrong should really look back and read what Jean Baptiste say actually wrote in his treaty, which as I say was the sixth edition, was published in about 1805, and just ask yourself a question, how have we progressed in terms of our understanding of things from then? And the answer unfortunately is a big fat zero because of all the Keynesian lies. And you’d be amazed. I mean, I’ve had correspondence with very senior journalists, you know, like in the Financial Times and all the rest of it and you know, the, they say, they tell me they deny says law.

You know, this is, this is what you’re told when you go to university and study an economics degree, say’s law is rubbish, but it’s not. It actually describes exactly how the economy works. So anyway, that I wrote an article on that and I, I think it might be of interest to people who, well, I think they should actually look quite carefully at why things are really going wrong now and understand the root of that error, which is really Keynes dissing says no. To understand how this crisis will detonate, you have to understand the comex, the beating heart of the paper silver market.

On the surface, Comex looks like a place where buyers and sellers meet to trade silver. In reality, it’s a game of paper promises, where hundreds of claims can be stacked on top of a single physical ounce. This system works. Until it doesn’t. For years, Comex has been the tool used to suppress the price of silver, keeping it artificially low despite soaring demand. Banks and institutional players flood the market with paper contracts, creating the illusion of abundant supply. But it’s smoke and mirrors. When those paper claims are finally called in for physical delivery, the illusion evaporates. And that’s exactly the scenario we’re heading toward.

What makes this moment different is that global buyers, especially from the east, no longer want paper. They’re demanding the real thing. And Comex is struggling to keep up. Registered inventories, the actual silver set aside for delivery, have plunged. At the same time, open interest remains sky high, meaning the number of paper claims is still enormous. This imbalance is unsustainable. The deeper the mismatch grows between physical silver and paper contracts, the closer we move to a forced unwind, one where comex can no longer deliver and trust in the entire pricing mechanism collapses. When that happens, silver won’t just spike, it will escape price discovery will move away from Wall street and into the physical world where supply is tight and demand is limitless.

Yeah, the division of labor, I mean, there will probably come a time when you can’t divide your labor because the credit has gone. You know, credit, which we think is money, is actually gone. And the other thing that he pointed out, actually, which is very, very important, is that there is a time element in everything. If you’re going to go and earn some money, then you have to make something first. In other words, the order of events is you produce something, you sell it, and then you can go and spend the proceeds of whatever you’ve raised from selling your product on the other things in life that you need.

So what this means, and this is very, very important, what this means is that if you get a, what we call today a recession, then you will find that the supplies of goods and services will diminish along with demand. And so consequently, and probably slightly ahead of demand, in fact. So the idea that you have a recession and that, you know, lack of demand will mean that the prices fall is actually completely wrong. There will be changes in the prices of different things. There always are when you get changing circumstances in the economy. But basically what Keynes had to do in order to create room for government to intervene, he had to dismiss say’s law so that he could invent, if you like, a role for government, for government intervention.

Now he published this book, his General Theory, in 1936, and ever since then, his following, if you like, has increased. It increased and increased. And you know, amongst economists, many of them, he had almost a godlike status. But it’s completely wrong, it’s completely false. The suppositions based on it are completely false. And anyone who’s got the tolerance to and the patience to read through the whole of his general theory will find that his conclusions at the end of his general theory are absolutely nuts. He wants to do away with savings entirely. He thinks the government can make available the capital to the individual who you know.

The foundation that once held comics together is crumbling and the evidence is hiding in plain sight. Registered silver inventories have been dropping quarter after quarter order, with withdrawals accelerating as demand intensifies. In past years, comics could rely on a healthy buffer of physical metal to maintain the illusion of solvency. Today, that buffer is dangerously thin. What’s worse, the amount of silver actually available for delivery, known as the registered category, is being cannibalized just to keep up with current obligations. Meanwhile, open interest remains bloated. That means there are still countless paper claims circulating, each one representing a promise that cannot be backed by metal.

If everyone called at once, this isn’t just a logistical issue, it’s a confidence issue. And confidence is the only thing holding this system together. The moment traders begin to doubt COMEX’s ability to deliver, the dam breaks. We’ve already seen the early warning signs. Massive deliveries being demanded by non traditional players, aggressive withdrawals from depositories, and a creeping awareness among investors that the paper market is broken. The bigger story is Comex was designed for a world of excess. But we’re not in that world anymore. The age of abundance is over and the mechanics of suppression are failing.

The deeper the drawdowns go, the closer we come to an event horizon. One final sharp tug where physical demand overwhelms paper promises and the entire market is forced to reprice overnight. I titled it Shooting the Breeze with Egon. Basically, you know, he and I have been, you know, in, in banking, broking, securities, whatever, since the very early 70s. I think in Egan’s, Egon’s case, he’s probably just a year or so older than me and we really, it’s really, I feel like you could cynically say it’s a couple of old men talking. It’s talking, but it’s talking about things which are really relevant today.

And you know, we talk about our experiences in the gold market and what we’ve learned over the years, because it’s always a learning process, the problems that government face, how they’re likely to react. Egon made the case, he made the point which I’ve made before, and I was very, very pleased to hear him say it, and that is that the future very much is likely to be China, Russia, Shanghai Cooperation Organization and brics. I mean, we’re just killing ourselves economically, whereas they’re, you know, they are the phoenix arising from, I don’t know, some sort of ashes, I suppose.

So, you know, the world is going to continue, but not with us in terms of progress. So we were discussing all these points and yeah, I mean, you know, we agree on virtually everything, having gone through it over the decades. I mean, we’ve got what, 50 odd years? Over 50, 50 years, 55, 56 years of experience in these markets and you know, we’ve come out of it, both of us learning a hell of a lot. And I think it’s the sort of experience and information which hopefully will help guide people through what are obviously going to be increasingly difficult times.

Every major silver spike in history has one thing in common. Chaos. And right now, the conditions mirror those past breakouts with frightening precision. Look back to 1980, when silver exploded to nearly $50 an ounce. It was a time of runaway inflation, geopolitical unrest and widespread distrust in fiat currencies. The Hunt brothers may have been the face of the movement, but the root cause was systemic dysfunction. Fast forward to 2011. Silver again rocketed from under $10 to just shy of $50. Why? Because Central banks had unleashed unprecedented money printing and investors panicked into hard assets. The pattern is crystal clear.

Whenever the monetary system starts to buckle, silver ignites. Today, we’re staring down the barrel of something even bigger. Global debt is at record highs. Inflation is running hotter than the numbers admit. And governments are losing control of their own currencies. Gold has responded, pushing to all time highs. But silver still stuck, still manipulated, still lagging behind. And that’s exactly why its breakout potential is even more violent. Silver doesn’t move gradually. It coils, it compresses. And when it breaks out, it erupts. Just like in 1980, just like in 2011. But this time there’s a crucial difference. The underlying drivers are no longer temporary crises.

They’re permanent features of the global financial landscape. Inflation isn’t going away. Debt isn’t being paid down. Currency debasement isn’t slowing. These aren’t warning signs of a bubble. They’re the hallmarks of a broken system. And in that kind of environment, silver doesn’t just go up, it redefines its value entirely. It does that says, that’s absolutely right. I mean, this is what I mean by kicking the can down the road. And I think it’s what everybody means by kicking can down the road. And of course, now we’ve got another variation on it. Everybody’s talking about some Sort of reset in, know, in the belief.

These are all macro, you know, guys who, who bought into the macroeconomic meme, you know, they’re saying that there’s got to be a reset. Who’s going to do the reset? Governments? Of course not. Not you and I as, you know, individuals or the collective individuals, meaning the private sector in the economy. We’re not doing the, you know, it’s not assumed we’re, we’re going to be doing the reset. It’s assumed that governments somehow have suddenly got the wisdom that they can do this, which is absolute. I mean, the other point about it is that when governments do intervene because they’ve got no skin in the game and it’s not their function anyway, they’re driven by political considerations.

They always promote the things that get them elected rather than make any sense whatsoever. And so the distortions just build up and build up. And the idea that Schumpeter had of creative destruction, which is really what he saw the cycle, the credit cycle doing, or the business cycle as the Austrians called it, that’s never allowed to happen. So the creative destruction process, because it’s deferred and deferred and deferred just becomes a lot more violent when it happens. And there will come a point where government can no longer control it. Their answer of course will be to debase their currency.

You can see this arriving. It’s the end point for any analysis of our current position. Just before we get going, we just launched the official Silver News Daily Telegram. To kick things off, we’re running a 10 ounce silver giveaway. Yes, real physical silver. Not a voucher, not digital credits, actual bullion. This telegram will be our new home for real time silver discussions, market insights, collection picks and everything. Precious metals. It’s where the community truly comes alive. Here’s how to enter the 10 ounce silver giveaway. Be subscribed to Silver News Daily on YouTube. Turn on the notification bell, comment 10 ounce giveaway on three separate videos.

Be an active member of the telegram group and say hi. Once we hit 500 active Telegram members, we’ll pick one lucky winner to receive 10 ounces of silver shipped directly to you. So get in early, stay active. I mean, I think it’s quite obvious really to anyone who really thinks about it. But I mean in my article, my substack article, I made the analogy with an electricity, an electrician who doesn’t understand Ohm’s law. Ohm’s law is the basis of all electrical understanding and also electronic understanding. Now if you let an electrician loose on your wiring who doesn’t actually understand Gnome’s law, then he’s going to blow you up.

And that’s basically where governments are. I mean, you know that they don’t understand what they’re doing. They’re not qualified to do it. They’re not qualified in the sense that, you know, their motivation is completely separate from that of engendering economic progress, which basically can only happen by allowing private sector actors to progress the economy, driven by their anticipation of what consumers are likely to want tomorrow. It’s the basis of all economic innovation and progress. Governments cannot do it. They can subsidize industries of which there are spinoffs. But then you have to ask yourself, well, what’s the cost? And anyway, are these spin offs something that the private sector would have been able to do on its own? You know, government is not good.

It really isn’t. The true battle in the silver market isn’t between bulls and bears. It’s between paper and physical. On one side, you have the comics and other western institutions issuing limitless silver contracts with nothing backing them but confidence. On the other you have industrial users, sovereign buyers and retail investors clamoring for actual metal coins, bars and kilo bricks they can hold in their hands. And the gap between the two is widening at an alarming rate. Take a look at premiums. While the paper price of silver has remained relatively flat, the cost of physical delivery has surged.

Buyers are paying 5, 10, sometimes even 20% above spot just to secure supply. That tells you everything. The paper market may say silver is worth $28, but in the real world, it’s already closer to $35 and rising. This divergence is unsustainable. At some point, the paper price must catch up to the physical reality or be abandoned altogether. We’ve already seen signs of this. Dealers are running dry. Mints can’t keep up with demand. Wholesalers are putting clients on wait lists. These aren’t anomalies. They’re the signals of a physical market under extreme stress. And while the COMEX can print as many contracts as it wants, it can’t print silver.

When the physical shortage becomes undeniable, the paper market will face a reckoning. And when that moment comes, the flood of capital that once trusted paper will rush into the physical space, amplifying scarcity, driving premiums higher and exposing the manipulation that kept silver prices suppressed for decades. This isn’t just a tug of war. It’s a collapse in trust. And when trust breaks, price follows. We don’t actually know the answer to that the liquidity has very much come from leasing central bank, you know, leasing of central bank gold. I mean that was, that was clear. And it was proved by the fact that bullion banks were queuing up to take gold out of the bank of England faults.

I mean, you know, these are banks which have accounts with the bank of England, so it’s possible for them to store some of their gold there, but they would tend not to. Therefore, at least a large amount of the gold that came out of the bank of England was effectively leased gold and it was taken by bullion banks who were benefiting, if you like, from the spread between futures which were trading at a huge interest rate. Premium by interest rate I mean compared with the gold lease rate. I mean it was a simple interest rate arbitrage.

Now that has now stopped. And if you look at the COMEX warehouse gold stocks, they’ve now begun to decline. So that process is over. Furthermore, it was only, what last, no, week before last, I was in London and visiting someone in Throgmorton street behind the bank of England. The doors were firmly shut. There was nothing going in or out. So I think that process is over. But it does raise the question quite rightly that how much liquidity is actually left within the system here. Because we get vault reports from LBMA authorized vaults, as it were, and they have declined a little bit, but not hugely.

But most of the gold there is owned by someone as opposed to being, if you like, the liquidity for the bullion banks to draw upon. So it’s, it’s an interesting, it’s a question we would all like to know the answer to. My guess is there is less liquidity there than the numbers would suggest. Quite a lot less liquidity. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re looking in the hundreds of tons rather than the thousands of tons. And this is very important given that the demand from China and other eastern nations, East Asian nations, seem to be continuing apace.

They’re continuing to get hold of virtually every ton of gold that becomes available. So yeah, the liquidity situation I don’t see really improving. Every fiat currency in history has met the same fate. Debasement, decline and eventually collapse. And today the global monetary system is sprinting toward that same endpoint, dragging silver into a pipe. Perfect storm. Central banks have printed trillions buried economies in unpayable debt and inflated asset bubbles that defy logic. Inflation may be down from its peak, but it’s far from gone. The damage is done. And in this environment, silver becomes more than A metal, it becomes monetary insurance, a life raft in a sea of sinking currencies.

Now let’s talk numbers. If you adjust silver for inflation using honest metrics, not the doctored CPI, but real world purchasing power, its 1980 peak of $50 would be well over $500 today. And that’s before accounting for the massive expansion in money supply since then. Add in growing demand, shrinking supply and an increasingly broken pricing mechanism, and you start to understand why the 1000 plus call isn’t just a fantasy. It’s a rational outcome. Especially when you consider that gold is now trading at multiples of its previous highs, while silver remains stuck in a manipulated range. History tells us what happens next.

When currencies weaken, hard assets soar. Gold may move first, but silver always follows, and it does so with far greater velocity. It’s not just cheaper per ounce, it’s more volatile, more reactive and more leveraged to both monetary and industrial shifts. In a world of failing fiat and expanding distrust, silver doesn’t just catch up, it overcorrects, overshoots, and ultimately reclaims its role as real money. So when you hear 1000 silver, understand that’s not hyperbole, that’s math. Well, the first question about as to whether the LBMA and the bank of England refused to sell send any gold over to the other side of the Atlantic, I don’t think that’s quite the way it works.

Basically, if you have gold or you have leased some gold and the opportunity is there, that is what drives the move over. It’s actually got nothing to do with the lbma so long as the members of the LBMA behave within its rules and regulations. As far as the bank of England is concerned, there is a problem because if you lease gold, then that gold is your property over the duration of the lease. And it could be that if you lease gold, say for let’s say, five years or something like that, which not unusual I would suggest, then you can pass that gold on to other people, rehypothecate it, because why do you have gold? You have gold basically as a bank to use as collateral to collateralized deals.

And so I think from both the LBMA and the bank of England’s point of view, they’re rather limited in terms of what they can do to discourage gold from flowing across the Atlantic. The market would probably do it if you like, insofar as if there is a shortage of gold in London, then the lease rate should rise and that might generate a bit of interest if you like to get gold back and if you look at the last vaulting figures, I think I’m right in saying that the bank of England numbers were down a little bit, but the LBMA numbers were up a little bit.

Now, it’s not the total thing because the LBMA vaults which are recorded are vaults within the M25, which is the circular motorway that goes around London. There are other vaults outside, I guess. And also, of course, we’ve got other vaults and in other parts of the world, particularly places like Switzerland and so on. So, you know, this is just part of the whole situation, as it were. And I think it would be a mistake to read too much into fault moves. If you like changes in faulting levels in London and also in the bank of England, remind me what the second part of the question was.

Markets don’t move on fundamentals alone. They move on psychology. And in the silver market, we’re standing at the edge of a sentiment shift so powerful it could send prices skyrocketing overnight. Right now, most investors are asleep. Silver is cheap, quiet and overlooked. But that’s exactly when markets are the most dangerous, for the unprepared and for the shorts. Because when silver does move, it doesn’t grind higher like a tech stock. It launches. Why? Because the move is never gradual. It’s a reaction, a trigger, a cascade of forced buying, panic, covering and momentum chasing that feeds on itself in a feedback loop of price and emotion.

Think about what happens when silver breaks a key level, $30, then $35. Institutions that have ignored it suddenly have to care. Retail floods in, Fund managers scramble to get exposure. Comics shorts start sweating and the buying pressure increases exponentially. But here’s the catch. There won’t be enough physical silver to meet that surge in demand. And when people realize they can’t get delivery, the scramble only intensifies. This is how herd behavior works. Nobody wants silver at $25. But suddenly at $50, $75, $100, it becomes the hottest asset on the planet. And that’s when the real rally begins.

We’ve seen this movie before. In 2011, silver soared over 400% in just three years. And that was without a full blown global monetary breakdown. Today, all the ingredients are inflation, debt devaluation, supply shortages and geopolitical tension. The spark is coming. And once it ignites, investor psychology will flip like a switch from apathy to euphoria, from dismissal to desperation. And when that moment hits, the chase for silver won’t be rational, it’ll be manic. Well, I mean, it was the May contract. Actually, I think which you know, has seen record to liberies. But I mean the answer, the answer to that is that it’s, it’s actually a separate issue.

If you’ve got, if you’ve got a short position in the futures market you’ll be at you know, what are called the swaps but basically a bullion bank trader, you’re taking the short side. So okay, if you’ve got, if you’ve got to actually deliver something at the end of the day, you know, you might, you know, that’s one problem. But basically you’re trying to close your short position. So what do you do? You bang the market when things go quiet you just bang the market and take the stops out and that’s what’s been going on. It’s as simple as that.

Look at the outstanding interest, the open interest on Comex, it is very, very low. Which tells us that these sort of games if you like are now facing the law of diminishing returns. And I would suggest, I mean it’s fascinating watching the performance today. I mean this is Thursday the, what day are we? Thursday 15th. You know the overnight prices were marked down very, very heavily. Now I would suggest that there is some indigestion if you like in the Shanghai futures market. Shanghai Gold Futures Exchange overnight. We’ve seen this a few times during Shanghai trading hours.

So that indigestion was continuing and it drove down gold and silver quite hard. But then what happens this afternoon, our time, sort of mid morning, your time, suddenly it rallies and as I speak I see gold having been down about 2% is now up 1.4%. I mean it’s a swing of $100 on the upside. Now this sort of thing I guess we don’t know until we see tomorrow but I guess on not much volume is indicative of a squeeze on the swaps. I think they are being very, very badly squeezed. Behind the scenes of the silver market lies a supply chain that’s quietly collapsing under its own weight.

For years mining output has failed to keep up with growing demand. New discoveries are scarce or grades are declining and the cost of extraction is rising fast. Meanwhile, environmental regulations, geopolitical instability and energy price shocks are making silver production more expensive and less predictable. In short, the supply side is running on fumes. And this isn’t just a temporary lull, it’s a structural breakdown. Silver isn’t like copper or aluminum. It’s a byproduct metal often mined alongside lead, zinc or gold. That means when those primary metals fall out of favor or become unprofitable silver output suffers even if silver demand is surging.

Add in resource nationalism, where countries like Mexico and Peru are tightening control over their mines, and you have a recipe for chronic underproduction. Mining companies are warning of delays, project cancellations and shrinking reserves. This isn’t speculative, it’s happening now. And the implications are enormous. Because as industrial and investment demand both spike, the physical market is hitting a wall. There’s no surge of new supply coming to rescue the system, no secret stockpile waiting in the wings. What’s available is all there is, and it’s being swallowed up at record pace. As a result, wholesalers are struggling, dealers are running dry, mints are rationing orders.

The supply chain isn’t just tight, it’s fraying. And when supply collapses in the face of surging demand, price doesn’t rise incrementally, it revalues explosively. This is no longer about margin, it’s about survival. And when the market wakes up to that reality, silver won’t be a commodity, it’ll be a lifeline. Same thing today. We’ve got a massive credit bubble, the largest ever in history, and we have Trump’s tariffs. Now, fortunately, Scott Besant has been taking the worst of that out. But we’re in this sort of dreamland where we think, oh, well, this is the art of the deal.

You sort of say something completely outrageous and then you come back, I think, no, who actually controlled things in Switzerland? It was the Chinese. The Chinese, actually. I mean, okay, they don’t like to see tariffs. I can certainly understand that. But actually, their exports elsewhere are considerably more important to them than exports in America. They have deliberately moved away from. From a reliance on sales of Chinese goods into America. So, yeah, it hurts a bit, but this is why they were quite happy to raise tariffs every time Trump decided it was going to be 140%. I mean, they would raise them as well, which basically meant there was going to be no trade.

Who backed off? The Americans? They had to, because they’re just so ridiculous. And so the Chinese, actually, I think in terms of the art of the deal, it was the Chinese who actually won that one. And I think you might find that they’re going to be further problems, not necessarily just with China, but elsewhere. And of course, the other thing that is done is it’s basically united the ASEAN nations, you know, all the East Asian nations, you know, like Thailand and Vietnam and Cambodia and even Myanmar and so on and so forth, into. Into a trade agreement.

Oh, and also, incidentally, Japan and South Korea into a Trade, trade agreement with China, free trade. They know that they’re far better actually trading with each other than trying to trade with lunatic policies coming out of America. So it’s actually strengthened China’s hand in the geopolitical sense enormously, which I think this wasn’t a policy that was sensibly thought through by the US government. While financial investors debate charts and cycles, industrial demand is quietly rewriting the rules of the silver market. This isn’t speculative buying, it’s necessity. Solar panels, electric vehicles, advanced electronics, medical tech, none of these can function without silver.

And we’re not talking marginal use, we’re talking mission critical, no substitute applications. Silver isn’t just a precious metal anymore. It’s a foundational component of the 21st century economy. And the demand from these sectors is surging with no sign of slowing down. Let’s start with solar. Nearly 20% of all silver consumption now goes to photovoltaic technology. And that figure is climbing fast. As governments worldwide ramp up renewable energy mandates, Solar panel production is exploding. But here’s the silver use per panel isn’t falling fast enough to offset that growth. More panels mean more silver, period. Then there’s evs.

Electric cars use significantly more silver than internal combustion engines. And with the push for decarbonization, the auto industry is racing toward mass electrification. Every wire connector and battery system pulls silver out of the supply chain. And it doesn’t stop there. From 5G towers to RFID chips to next gen medical devices, silver is embedded in the future of nearly every critical technology. Unlike investor demand, which can come and go, industrial demand is relentless. It doesn’t care about price, it just keeps buying. That means every ounce locked into a circuit or solar panel isn’t coming back. It’s gone forever.

And as these industries scale, they’re going to collide head on with shrinking mine supply and a strained physical market. The result? A bidding war not between bulls and bears, but between nations, corporations and manufacturers all fighting over a shrinking pool of metal. In that kind of environment, price doesn’t just rise, it goes vertical. The latter I’d say, because the point about gold, the role of gold, is to give credit its value. And so long as credit is not attached in its value to gold, it is going to start. It’s going to continue to lose its purchasing power.

What we’re doing by holding gold is we’re getting the hell out of credit. It’s really as simple as that. The end game. Well, we’ll see how it plays out. I wouldn’t expect to rush out and start sort of buying vegetables and other things, sourdough dough, loaves, by using gold or silver or whatever. But I might use it to acquire some property when the real value of property is driven down by the crisis that everybody is facing. So there will be different ways you play it. But I would expect the sensible thing to do is that when there is finally some currency stability returns into the situation, whether it’s by the gold standard or whether it’s just it’s gone down so far, someone comes in and actually does something about government spending, government finances, and all the rest of it.

At that point, you may take a different view as to whether you should continue to hold gold or. Or cash it in for a bit of credit. But we’re a long way from there. I mean, at the moment, all it’s about is that credit’s value is going down rather than gold’s value rising. It’s not a clean argument because gold value, if you like, in real terms is rising as well, particularly against major commodities. But that’s a reflection, I think, of everyone trying to get out of credit, or increasingly getting out of credit. Alistair, for people who want to follow your writing on a weekly basis, where should they get connected? Well, I have my own substack, which is alistairmcloud.substack.com or if you Google MacLeod Finance, it’ll probably take you there.

And my objective, basically, is to try and help people understand these enormously important issues and to work out how to protect themselves from, if you like, what is actually happening. And I just feel that’s terribly important for people to know. I just hope that the knowledge is, if you like, it’s not really necessary. But as we go on, we can see that it is becoming more and more necessary to understand what is going on. And this is why, you know, occasionally I will write an article about something which is pure economics, like the relevance of say’s Law and the irrelevance of what everybody believes.

By that I mean macroeconomics, which was invented by John Maynard Keynes. Right now, everything looks calm on the surface, but that stillness is a lie. We’re in the eye of the storm, and the real chaos hasn’t even begun. The mainstream media is silent, pretending silver is irrelevant. Institutions are quiet, hoarding, physical. Behind closed doors, volatility is low and price action seems subdued. But beneath that calm exterior, pressure is building to an unsustainable degree. Inventories are drying up, premiums are widening, industrial users are whispering about shortages. And silver veterans are watching all of this with a Familiar chill because they’ve seen what comes next.

It’s the setup, the silence before the scream. This is the point in every past bull run where the market gave you one last chance to prepare before it snapped. The fundamentals are flashing red. The COMEX is cracking. Eastern demand is draining the west, and yet the price hasn’t moved yet. That’s exactly how smart money likes it. Because once the breakout starts, the window slams shut and those waiting for confirmation will find themselves locked out, chasing silver at triple today’s price and wondering how they missed the signs. The false calm is the trap. It lulls investors into complacency just before the detonation.

And when it hits, it won’t be a gradual ascent, it’ll be a vertical spike. Every suppressed ounce, every delayed delivery, every ignored warning will come rushing back in one explosive moment of price discovery. And those who were positioned early, they won’t just be ahead of the curve, they’ll be riding the shockwave. Well, I think what the bond markets are telling us is that rates are going higher. I mean, and the reason it goes higher is you’ve got to look at it from the foreigner’s point of view. A foreigner, let’s say, buying U.S. treasury debt, he’ll be looking at, you know, the, the, the, the supply.

Not only has he got a fine, you know, is he being re, you know, asked to refinance some of the debt that he holds as it’s coming up to maturity, but also he looks at that 2 trillion-ish deficit, it he looks at the prospects for America, he might take the view that it’s going to be more than 2 trillion. Does he want to get involved with a yield of 4.5% on a 10 year, you know, that’s the way he’s looking at it. And not only that, but he’s probably overweight in dollars anyway. I mean, when you look at the US Treasury’s tick numbers, which call the Treasury International Capital Statistics, foreigners own something like $40 trillion of currency in debt.

40 trillion. That compares with a nominal GDP of less than 30 trillion. They are horribly, horribly overweight in dollars. And if the global economy is slowing, whether it’s China’s economy slowing, which some people would say is the case, but trade certainly is being jumped on by these tariffs. Do you really need all these dollars? The answer is probably not. So we have a situation, I think, where you have sellers of dollars from abroad for a variety of reasons, which raises the question, at what level are they likely to become investors again? And that’s Very, very difficult to see, because with America in effect, in a debt trap, and the definition of a debt trap is that it doesn’t have the revenue income in order to sustain the level of debt it has.

Under those circumstances, you find that interest rates and bond yields start rising. And as they start rising, the situation just gets worse. And it gets worse to the point where someone actually has to do something about it. And I’ve said this so many times, we had exactly the situation in, I think it was late 1975, early 1976, when we had to issue, I mean, in the throes of a recession, the government had to issue three gilts. In other words, our UK government bonds with yields of 15%, 15.25% and 15.5% Now, I see no reason why US dollar yields won’t rise towards that level.

And this is Scott Besant’s big headache. How is he going to keep this thing under control? Difficult. Silver is no longer just a cheap metal or a forgotten commodity. It’s become the linchpin of a global financial and industrial standoff. On one side, the east is draining the world of physical silver, locking it away for strategic advantage. On the other, the west clings to a crumbling paper system that no longer reflects reality. Comics inventories are vanishing. Supply chains are fracturing. Industrial buyers are getting desperate. And through it all, silver’s price has remained eerily stagnant. But not for long.

Because when these forces finally collide, and they will, it won’t be a slow burn, it’ll be an ignition. Silver will break free from decades of suppression fueled by a perfect storm of monetary chaos, supply shortages, and demand surges that no system is equipped to handle. And when it does, the price won’t stop at $50 or $100 or even $500, it could blow past $1,000, shocking everyone who wasn’t paying attention. This isn’t a theory. It’s the logical end of an unsustainable system. So don’t wait for the headlines. Don’t wait for Wall street to tell you silver matters.

The writing is already the wall. And if you found this discussion helpful, make sure to subscribe for more real insights the mainstream won’t give you. But remember, this is not financial advice. Always speak to a professional before making any investment decision. SA.
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