➡ This week’s Silver Report discusses the nature of silver rallies, which are typically fast and intense. It also covers the decrease in bank reserves post-tax day, a common occurrence, and the expectation for these reserves to increase as the Treasury spends its tax day cash pile. The report also mentions the potential for a banking crisis if the government runs out of money and needs to raise the debt ceiling. Lastly, it discusses the performance of platinum and palladium during silver rallies and the current state of the ETF market.
➡ The article discusses the trading volume of gold ETFs, comparing the current situation to the 2008-2011 period. It notes that despite recent spikes, the volume is still lower than in the past, suggesting that retail investors are not as engaged. The article also mentions that the gold market is being influenced by a small number of nervous traders, while larger players remain inactive. The author predicts that gold prices will continue to rise, potentially doubling or tripling in the event of a banking crisis.

There is no such thing as a gradual, light, calm, silver rally, and they all come fast, quick, and brutal. So you got any position before they happen. Well, hello there, my friends. Raf here from The Endgame Investor with this week’s Silver Report, brought to you by Kootenai Silver, symbol K-O-O-Y-F, and U.S. symbol K-T-N in Canada. But we’re going to cover a few things today. The first thing we’re going to cover is bank reserves have fallen post-tax day, which they do every year in late April to early May. I expect this to go back up again as the Treasury sells its, or spends rather, its cash pile that it absorbed from tax day back into the bank reserves.

And then, of course, once the government runs out of money and has to raise the debt ceiling, it’s going to have to raise a lot of money through the issuance of Treasury bills, dollars which do not exist other than in the Reserve Bank pile, and the Fed is going to have to print the difference if they’re going to avoid a banking crisis, which they will only do once the banking crisis is actually triggered. Other than that, I wanted to cover here the nature of silver rallies. We will cover 1979, 1980, also 1973, 1974, and 2010, 2011, all of which were fast blitzkriegs.

There is no such thing as a gradual, light, calm, silver rally, and they all come fast, quick, and brutal. So you got any position before they happen. Also, what was Platinum doing during these silver rallies? What was Palladium doing during these silver rallies? What is happening in ETF land? Not so much, which means that the marginal buyers are still out of the market and they are not chasing gold and silver. And so let’s continue with the slides. But first, this silver report is brought to you by Kootenai Silver, symbol K-O-O-Y-F in the U.S., symbol KTM in Canada.

We’re going to go through the news that I haven’t covered here yet. There will be some news next week. I’m told I don’t know what it is exactly, but I will report it next week, hopefully when it is revealed to me. This news is from January 16, 2025, about three months ago. This reports on its Colombo project with highs of 1,440 grams per ton of silver ore with 3.1% lead and zinc. There’s a lot of lead and zinc in most silver mines. Silver, it’s a great time to be silver. Silver, everything from lead to zinc. And the most complete from A to Zinc.

So we have here a report on three veins. Kootenai is pleased to provide results from the seven new drill holes at the Colombo High Grade Silver Project. The Batcher Board hearing comprises tests from three areas at Colombo. F- Vein, D- Vein, and B- Vein Corridor, which is the extension of the historically mined F- Vein. So many veins. Just hook it to my veins! If we go down to the complete table here, we can see in the silver GPT column in the bowl, 222 over here. If we go down, we see higher numbers, 413, 535, 1,440, 468, 811, 1,050, and 905.

As a reminder, I asked, what was it? Grock last week? What is the average GPT for a silver mine? I think it was somewhere in the 200s to 300s area. So this is a very potentially fruitful piece of property. Lots of silver there. I do own shares of Kootenai. Look it up and check it out if you believe it might be right for you. And with that, this week’s silver report. The first slide here has to do with bank reserves. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I track this pretty regularly. I’m looking for a fall below $3 trillion for about a month or two to trigger the next banking crisis.

We see the traditional move down here in bank reserves as the extra money left over from the 2008 great financial crisis. All of this is the other side of dead debt that the Fed was forced to buy and stuff into the bank system. And the banks can’t do anything with it except for from the repo market, which is now the basis of the entire global economy. And that is about 2.5, 2.6 trillion dollars a night traded dead debt between banks. And that is the grease that keeps the monetary sewers flowing with all the disgusting garbage that’s in it.

So we see here these five ovals that I’ve made. This is the five moves down in bank reserves concurrent with tax day when the Treasury sucks up hundreds of billions of dollars from banks and puts it into its account and then spends it back out again. They have about 600 billion dollars left. Once they spend that all down, that money will be back in bank reserves and then they’ll have to raise the bank debt ceiling. And then once they do, they’re going to have to raise hundreds of billions of dollars from bank reserves, which do not exist.

And the Fed’s going to have to print the difference. This is what we’re waiting for. For the final banking crisis, it’s all pretty mechanical and it’s pretty simple to explain. They need more dollars and not enough exist. The SOFR volume, this is the repo market that is funded by these bank reserves. We see the trend continues higher from 2023. We’re at the low end of the trend line here. You can see it touched over here. I expect this number to keep rising. And once we get to about 2.8, 3 trillion dollars or so, and that coincides with 3 trillion dollars in bank reserves, they’re going to be a repo crisis.

It’s inevitable. Now we’re going to go into the nature of silver rallies. So the first one I’m going to look at is 1979 to 1980. People imagine this as a sustained silver rally throughout the year. That is not the case. The rally actually happened in a period of about four months. There were two months from August to October in 1979, where silver went from about $8.50 or $9 or so to about $18. So let’s say roughly a doubling in two months. And from there, there was the mega rally from December, early December, late November until late January.

Both were two month rallies. So it took basically about four months of rallying for silver to move from about $9 to $50. So you’re not going to be able to trade in out of this. You have to be in it before it happens, and it’s not going to be controllable once it starts. We can see that here is another major silver rally that was very, very short and very extreme. This was in 1974, late 1973 to early 1974, about three months of rallying from about $2.70 to $6.50. These things happen fast, and they cannot be traded.

But the most recent one, you can see that sometimes silver rallies also come in pairs as they did in 1979, 1980. They did here in 2010, 2011. The first leg of the rally was about two and a half months from roughly September to November of 2010, when silver went from about $17.50 to just below $30 or so, almost a doubling, very close to a doubling. And then the rest of the rally occurred from late February 2011 to late April 2011, also about two and a half months of rallying. So instead of four months or about two months of rallying, so instead of four months, it was four and a half months of total rallying.

Very similar situation here, and I expect something similar in silver. This time, the rally is going to be extreme. It’s going to be fast. It’s not going to last more than a few months at most. What was platinum doing during this time? So we can see in the 1970s, sometimes people ask me about platinum. I own one ounce of platinum just because I want to have a little bit of diversity. I just like the metal. It’s fun to hold. It’s very, very dense. It’s much denser than silver, even denser than gold. So you see here that platinum was also rising like crazy during the gold and silver rally.

I can see here in 1978, it was about $150 and it went to about $900 in early 1980, something like that. And we can see here, palladium is even crazier. I drew a trend line here from the mid 1970s. This was the 1970s rally, but it was nothing compared to the 2000 rally and the 2021 rally over here. Well, we could assume or estimate. I don’t know much about the palladium market itself. But if this trend line remains intact and we just scrap this up to just a lockdown insanity and printing three, four trillion dollars in a few weeks, then the upper trend line is somewhere around $1,800 and we’re somewhere around $950.

I forgot exactly maybe a thousand in palladium. If you want a few ounces of palladium, that could be fun. I don’t actually own any. Maybe I’ll get a coin or two. I’m thinking about it. It’s hard to find, though. And premiums, I think, are rather high. So what’s happening in ETF land? I saw an article in Zero Hedge about gold ETFs having a high trading volume, so I looked into the history of that. This is a GLD ETF, by far the most heavily traded gold ETF. There’s also IAU, which I prefer because the fees are a little bit less.

And of course, physical is much better than any ETF, whether it be GLD or IAU. But if you can’t get physical, this is an alternative. They’re not a very good one. But anyway, what’s happening in the ETFs? Yeah, there was a volume spike, but it wasn’t really anything much compared to what volume used to be in the 2008 to 2011 era or even early 2012. That was when people started really waking up to gold and using GLD as a proxy for gold and investing in it. There was a lot of retail traffic in the ETF. And now there isn’t so much.

You can see there was a spike up here. I put the blue line over here. So this was fairly common in that era. This number of wherever it is right now, it says 90 million something. Really nothing totally crazy. This is the March 2022 spike from the Nickel Armageddon fiasco. The London metal exchange started to implode or explode because there was some short problem in the nickel market and it spilled over into other futures markets as well. Overall, yeah, we saw a little bit of a volume spike, but really nothing that crazy, which suggests to me that retails are still ignoring the rally.

Now, if we go further a bit into or zooming into the current volume rally, you can see here the actual number is about 35 million shares traded at the high in gold. That is really nothing. If we move back to the 2008 2011 era where we frequently saw numbers around 150 million. So this is weekly volume down here, about 90 million. So if you zoom in and you can see that if you add the numbers together for the week, it’s about 90 million, but it’s not anywhere near as high as the 200 million and beyond that we saw at the end of the rally in 2011.

So we also see here that even in the futures market, there’s not much going on. Open interest has not moved, despite the incredible moves in gold from about 2900, 2950 to 3000, all the way up to 3500 in mid April, a span of about a week or two, two weeks actually. Still, there’s not much new contracts, not many new contracts being opened, which suggests to me that the players that are moving the markets now that are moving the prices so far high up and down and the huge volatility. Those are by nervous traders and there’s only a few of them on the margins that are moving the price here.

It appears that bullion banks don’t want to sell them contracts without big movements in price, but most of the big actors in the gold space are not really doing much of anything, which is indicative by the fact that open interest is still below 460,000 contracts. I think right now it’s 454,000, this has 458 because it’s the day behind, but still not much going on in the gold market with the big players. This is all marginal traders that are panicking for whatever reason. They think there’s going to be tariffs, they think there’s going to be no tariffs and they’re moving prices very bigfully without thinking much.

But despite that, the trend in gold continues higher and I expect it will continue to continue higher. That’s a little bit repetitive. If you think this was a lot of action in the gold market, just wait until the Treasury runs out of cash and then has to raise hundreds of billion dollars in a few weeks and then runs out of dollars to suck out of the banking system when the Fed has to act. That’s when I expect the really big moves like we saw in 1979-1980 in the silver market and in the gold market. Gold could double or triple in the space of a few weeks and that will signal the endgame.

We are one banking crisis away. Just wait, you’ll see, it’s going to happen. Thanks to the sponsor, Kootenai Silver, symbol K-O-Y-F in the US, symbol K-T-N in Canada for sponsoring this week’s silver report. I’ll see you guys next week. [tr:trw].

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