➡ The silver futures market is at risk due to a growing mismatch between the amount of physical silver available and the amount promised in contracts. If more traders demand physical silver instead of settling for digital contracts, the system could collapse, causing a significant increase in silver prices. Additionally, there’s a possibility of a new cryptocurrency backed by physical gold or silver, which could disrupt government-issued currencies. However, the success of such a currency depends on its acceptance and the ability to store and transfer the precious metals securely.
➡ The article discusses the potential impact of a sudden demand for physical gold and silver on the financial market. It suggests that if even a small percentage of futures holders demanded physical delivery, it could cause a market freeze and force cash settlements at lower rates. The article also mentions how the government’s revaluation of gold doesn’t change the amount of gold they have or the creditor’s access to it. Lastly, it warns that the system may not survive a shift in behavior towards physical redemption, which could lead to panic buying, rule changes, and a breakdown in trust.
➡ The silver market is facing a serious issue. While there’s a lot of silver in existence, the amount that can be bought is limited and this is causing a strain on the market. The problem is worsened by the fact that silver is being used up faster than it’s being produced, especially in industries like solar power and electronics. If this continues, the gap between the amount of silver available and the amount needed could cause a major disruption in the market.
➡ The silver market is facing a potential crisis due to industrial demand outpacing supply, causing some experts to predict a significant increase in silver prices. This is due to the market’s reliance on paper contracts that may not be honored if physical demand for silver increases. Meanwhile, the government’s economic policies, such as lowering interest rates and not adjusting taxes for inflation, are seen as forms of theft that can negatively impact personal finances. Therefore, investing in precious metals like silver could be a good strategy to counteract these issues and protect one’s wealth.
➡ The article discusses the potential for a significant increase in the price of silver due to a combination of financial panic and supply chain chaos. It suggests that when the illusion of infinite supply is shattered, the price of silver could skyrocket, making it a highly valuable asset. The article also highlights the importance of owning physical silver and gold as a form of protection against a potential decline in the purchasing power of the US dollar. It warns that waiting for a crisis to act could result in missing out on the opportunity to secure these valuable assets.
➡ The article suggests that due to political pressure in the U.S., there might be a significant drop in interest rates. This could signal to investors that the U.S. is not focused on maintaining the value of the dollar, which could cause a dramatic increase in the value of gold. The author warns that the market is built on unfulfillable promises and when trust in these promises collapses, the price of silver could skyrocket. The author advises readers to consider whether they will be left with tangible assets like silver or just broken promises when the market fails.

Futures markets are owned by the futures markets participants. And if we had this type of short squeeze, it wouldn’t physically settle. They would halt transactions. They would arbitrarily establish a price, and they would cash settle. If you actually think that you’re going to catch the owners of the exchange way short, I got a bridge to sell you. But a circumstance that caused that to be a threat, which is to say, if there were cracks in the futures market, you could expect some really interesting fireworks in silver. Rick Rule just sent shockwaves. You’re watching Silver News daily.

It almost sounds like science fiction until you look at the numbers. He’s warning that silver could erupt past $1,000 an ounce. And it won’t be because of hype or speculation. It’ll be because the paper game breaks. Right now, the COMEX futures market is a powder keg and the fuse has already been lit. Behind the scenes, there’s a dangerous mismatch growing between what’s being promised on paper and what actually exists in the vaults. Traders are piling into silver contracts, but the physical silver simply isn’t there to meet demand. And when this cracks open, when people start asking for real metal instead of digital promises, Rick says we’re going to see really interesting fireworks.

But it gets even more serious. Ruul claims the exchanges already know they can’t honor those contracts. They’re ready to halt trading, rewrite the rules, and cash settle before the delivery crisis hits. This isn’t a theory. It’s happened before in other markets. The only question now is when does it hit silver? And when it does, how high could the price go once the illusion collapses and real supply is all that matters? Stick around, because this isn’t just a price forecast, it’s a warning shot. We will definitely see stablecoins or tokenized deposit receipts around gold and silver. I don’t suspect that you will see a fully backed gold or silver token issued by a government simply because it limits their power.

They would have to have the gold or silver to physically back the currency. And that isn’t what they do. They assemble money to spend it. They have no interest in a stable currency because a stable currency reduces their ability to spend at will. What you will see, I think is a crypto product, in fact, a coin that is fully backed, 100% as a deposit receipt. And I suspect that this coin will in size be redeemable. Let’s say as an example, that the coin represented a tenth of a gram. It is likely that one would need to assemble 50 grams or so.

In order to for these fractionated interest, these coins to be able to be redeemed for physical. But I suspect within two years, what you will see is a large deposit of gold and or silver that is lodged at one or more reputable vaulting facilities than the deposit receipts representing real ownership in that metal will be issued to trade online. And that that those coins, at least in quantity, will be able to be redeemed for physical metal. It remains to be seen how host governments will look at that particular fractionated currency. Remember the old law about gold, Good currency drives bad currency out of circulation.

And I suspect that that if you actually had a gold and silver backed quasi currency, Even a private currency that was redeemable, that would create interesting times in terms of demand for government issued securities. I’ve been asked really for as long as you and I have been talking to each other, Duncan, probably longer than that, what the chance was of a gold or silver backed currency. And I have to say that the chance of that is nil Simply because it limits the power of governments to spend. People get into government to accrue power and the idea that they would adapt themselves to a currency which reduced their power seems very far fetched to me.

But you will see a private sector initiative. The technology exists today. I’ve invested in three different companies that are working on that technology. My hope is that of course one of the ones that I have invested in will end up being the paramount technology. But we’ll see over time. The silver market isn’t just volatile, it’s controlled. That’s the brutal truth Rick rule lays bare. He calls it a rigged game where the illusion of a free and fair market Hides a much darker reality. At the center of this manipulation is the comex, the world’s largest silver futures exchange.

On the surface, it looks like a marketplace where traders buy and sell contracts representing thousands of ounces of silver. But here’s the Almost no one ever takes delivery. In fact, less than 1% of those contracts are ever settled in physical metal. The rest, they’re rolled over, closed out, or settled in cash. It’s all paper digital promises that never have to meet the cold hard weight of physical silver. This is where Roule’s warning becomes crystal clear. He’s not just saying prices are being suppressed. He’s saying the system is designed to avoid a squeeze at all costs. The rules are written by the very institutions that stand to lose everything if too many people demand actual silver.

If the pressure builds, if investors start calling in those contracts and asking for the real Thing. Comex won’t let it happen. They’ll halt trading, freeze accounts and force settlements in fiat. That’s not speculation, that’s precedent. We’ve seen it happen in other commodity markets and silver with its razor thin inventories is next in line. What Ruul is exposing isn’t just market manipulation, it’s structural fragility. The entire futures market is built on the assumption that most players don’t want silver, they just want exposure to the price. But what happens when that changes? What happens when trust evaporates and everyone rushes for the exits looking for metal that doesn’t exist? Rule says the system isn’t ready and when it finally breaks, the price won’t climb, it’ll explode.

I suspect that they’ll ignore it until it’s too late to squash it. While I consider them to be odious, I don’t consider them to be competent. And my belief is that with robust enough blockchain technology, these transactions are effectively anonymous. The problem with that theory is that the best storage facilities to affect this in are in more competent countries. Probably the best facility in the world to store this would be the Royal Canadian Mint. They have a lot of experience with us at Sprott providing custody right now for $30 billion in redeemable precious metals. There’s no facility in the world that has better ability to store, trace and transfer, accept and transfer physical precious metals.

There’s no facility in the world that has the same ability to do that than the Royal Canadian Mint. If the government of Canada was particularly indisposed to this currency, that would be a problem. The current proponents of this problem of this solution include the London Bullion Market Association. And it might be as a consequence of the London gold establishment’s attractive attraction to this project that the Royal Mint, a vaulting facility in London, could be substituted for the Royal Canadian Mint. I don’t. If a trusted domicile was found, one trusted domicile was found. I suspect that private action would ultimately defeat government sanction.

Lets talk about the numbers because they don’t just confirm Rick Rule’s warning, they amplify it. As of August 2025, the COMEX silver futures market has over 145,000 open contracts. That’s 725 million ounces of silver on paper. But how much physical silver is actually available in comex vaults? Around 150 million ounces. And that’s on a good day. So we’re looking at nearly five times more silver promised than what exists in deliverable form. It’s like a Game of musical chairs with 725 players and only 150 seats. And here’s the everyone’s dancing like nothing’s wrong because less than 1% of those contracts ever demand physical delivery.

But what if that changes? What if more traders, fearing systemic risk or inflation, begin asking for real silver instead of digital contracts? Suddenly, that mismatch isn’t just theoretical. It becomes a critical failure point. The moment just a small percentage, say 5%, of those contracts demand delivery, the vaults are empty, the market freezes. That’s not a glitch. It’s the system operating exactly as designed to avoid collapse through control. This isn’t about conspiracies, it’s about leverage. The futures market has turned silver into a highly speculative asset where billions of ounces are traded daily, yet the actual metal rarely moves.

In a single day, Comex can see trading volumes that are 200 times greater than the available physical supply. That’s not a market, it’s a pressure cooker. And every contract added to that mountain only increases the risk of rupture. When confidence in the system starts to fade, it won’t take a massive run on delivery to cause chaos. Just a spark, just enough people asking, where’s my silver? And when that moment comes, there won’t be enough metal to go around. Only excuses, rule changes, and a price spike the market isn’t prepared for. If the US Government took the gold in Fort Knox, well, first of all, they’d have to do something they refused to do, which is audit and prove to us that A, it physically exists and B, it hasn’t been hypothecated.

But let’s say they revalued all that gold from $42 to $4,000 an ounce just for fun. Okay, how does that eliminate the national debt? I, as a creditor, buy a treasury bond. The government is either able to service that and pay me back, or they’re not. Can you imagine Rick Rule rolling up to the White House with my bond saying, listen, President Trump, there’s something about this arrears. I’d like my gold. I need to remember that President Trump has a legal monopoly on violence, fraud and force. The fact that they revalue collateral that a lender can’t access is of very little interest to anybody.

It becomes an accounting entry. The amount of gold that they have doesn’t change. The creditor’s access to the gold doesn’t change. The only thing that changes is financial ledgerman. If I have a piece of collateral, Donegan, and you can’t access it effectively it isn’t collateral. And that’s the way it is with the government’s gold. Remember? They have the guns. Now, imagine what happens if the bluff gets called. Not by everyone, just by enough traders to shake the system. Let’s say just 5% of futures holders suddenly demand physical delivery. That’s still over 36 million ounces, nearly a quarter of COMEX’s entire deliverable inventory.

The moment that happens, the market locks up. Contracts freeze, exchanges halt trading for the sake of stability. And then comes the trapdoor forced cash settlement. You don’t get your silver, you get a dollar figure decided behind closed doors, often far below what the real price of physical metal would be during a panic. This isn’t paranoia. It’s how the system protects itself. The exchanges are not neutral platforms. They’re built to serve the institutions that operate within them. And if honoring physical delivery threatens those institutions, the rules get rewritten in real time. We saw it in the nickel market in 2022, when the price spiked and the system couldn’t handle the squeeze.

Trading was halted, positions were canceled, and investors were paid out based on an arbitrary price, not the market’s true value. Billions were lost overnight, not because of volatility, but because the exchange rewrote the script. Silver could follow the exact same path. Rule’s point isn’t that everyone will suddenly demand delivery. It’s that the system can’t survive even a small shift in behavior. Just a modest increase in physical redemption requests would set off a chain reaction. Panic buying, hoarding, rule changes, and ultimately a complete breakdown in trust. When that trust evaporates, the paper silver market implodes, and what’s left is the real metal, scarce demanded and skyrocketing in value.

The moment that curtain is pulled back, the price won’t rise incrementally, it will detonate. Of course, you have to look at the interests of the majority of the citizenry. 40% of the citizenry are net recipients of government largesse as opposed to payors. The sum of the policies in our country that are so destructive of the country have to do with artificially low interest rates. And artificially low interest rates benefit spenders at the expense of savers. Spenders are more numerous than savers. I answered that question in the context of the government coming after people’s IRAs. That’s very different.

If you go after somebody’s IRA, which is to say, if you victimize all of Americans, you could expect a very hostile response. If you look at public opinion on X and you go after rich people, which is to say bondholders. That’s not necessarily unpopular with a lot of people. To the extent that the government could make some bleedings about the fact that it’s the billionaires that are the bondholders, I would suspect that the popular hue and cry would be stiff em. 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. And if you think that’s far fetched, so get in early in March 2022, the London Metal Exchange was blindsided by a historic short squeeze that sent nickel prices soaring over 250% in just two days.

But instead of letting the market play out, the exchange did something they canceled trades, halted trading entirely, and retroactively rewrote the rules. Why? Because the institutions holding massive short positions couldn’t cover their losses. Rather than let them fail, the exchange bailed them out by nullifying billions in transactions, effectively choosing who won and who lost. It was a masterclass in market manipulation disguised as emergency intervention. Now apply that to silver. It’s a smaller market, more volatile, and far more vulnerable to physical pressure. If a similar short squeeze starts to unfold, COMEX won’t hesitate to follow the LME’s playbook.

Ruul is warning us they’ll pull the plug before it spirals out of control. Trading halts, margin changes, position limits, anything to suppress the explosion. And when that fails, the fallback is always the cash settlement. No delivery, no market based price discovery. Just a forced exit with a number slapped on your contract that may have nothing to do with the true market value. The lesson is the rules of the game only apply until the game threatens those in charge. And silver, with its massive leverage and fragile inventories, is next in line. The idea that you’ll ride the short squeeze to riches ignores one critical fact.

You won’t be allowed to the price might spike for a moment, but unless you hold physical silver in your hand, the system will make sure you Never see the upside, because when the panic hits, the rulebook gets shredded and all that’s left is chaos. One of the reasons for Trump’s unpopularity is that some of what he is doing today is very inconsistent with the wishes of the people who have traditionally been in power. I don’t think he’s any better than them, or particularly worse, but it amuses me to see the reaction to his executive decrees, his executive orders that didn’t seem to be present when Mr.

Biden or Mr. Obama were doing it. I think that Mr. Trump is probably a more rambunctious violator of the status quo, and he’s not doing it on my behalf, sadly. But I think he’s proof of the fact that a strong willed tyrant can in some circumstances disrupt the existing order. And as I say, I’m not saying he’s any better or any worse. He is different. When people say that nobody can make a difference against a machine, strictly speaking, that’s not true. If you can mobilize enough support, you can make a difference. I remember back earlier in my life to Ronald Reagan.

He had an enormous mandate. In a wonderful book called the Triumph of Politics, David Stockman detailed how the state struck back. Democratic and Republican congressmen alike defanged the Reagan revolution within six months. But what Reagan was able to do was establish an ethos in Washington that caused government from growing as quickly. And that ethos lasted through the first term of the Clinton administration. I’m not suggesting that he succeeded in reducing the size of government. I’m just suggesting to you that he succeeded in establishing an ethos that constrained the growth of the government for 12 years. Years.

And that shows that the deep state is less all powerful than they would have you believe. Most of the time, most of the time they’re 100% in control. But occasionally something happens which at the very least weakens their grip. What Mr. Trump is doing, as I say, don’t get me wrong, I’m no apologist for Trump. I read his book the Art of the Deal. I couldn’t vote on him literally if my life depended on it. But what he is really attempting to do is seize the reins of the state from the incumbents. And I’m not saying he’s going to succeed, but it’s amusing to watch the effort.

But the illusion doesn’t stop at futures. It extends deep into the way silver inventories are reported on paper. There are billions of ounces above ground, and that’s supposed to make you feel safe. But look closer and you’ll See that? Most of this silver isn’t sitting in some warehouse ready to be shipped. It’s locked away in vaults, hoarded in ETFs like SLV, or stashed in private hands that have no intention of selling. Indian households alone are estimated to hold over 600 million ounces. But that metal doesn’t move unless prices explode. In fact, it only surfaces when there’s panic selling during massive rallies.

And even then, it acts more like a pressure valve than a solution. This is the silent danger Rick Rule is pointing to. The market counts these above ground inventories as if they’re part of the active supply. But they’re not. They’re illiquid, inaccessible, and psychologically unavailable unless a crisis forces them loose. And as silver deficits keep piling up, 184 million ounces short in 2024 alone, the real problem isn’t the total volume of silver, it’s the liquidity. What matters isn’t how much silver exists, it’s how much can actually be bought. And in that category, the market is dangerously tight.

When traders look at Comex vaults, they see 150 million ounces, but that’s just a sliver of what’s traded daily. The paper volume can hit 1.5 billion ounces in a single day, 10 times the vault’s capacity and 200 times the deliverable stock. It’s a shell game. The physical reality is out of sync with the paper promises, and that disconnect is widening. Every ounce that exists is counted multiple times through leverage. And the moment confidence in that illusion breaks, when investors stop trusting paper and start demanding metal, the paper price ceases to matter. The only thing that will count is who actually holds the silver.

And when that moment comes, the gap between illusion and reality will snap shut with brutal force. They’re both right. What Jeff Christian will suggest is that there is no deficit because there’s inventory. And strictly speaking, that’s true. There is a deficit. If you look at the amount of silver that’s consumed every year relative to the amount of silver that is produced from silver mines or is a byproduct of other metals or is recycled. And frequently, the silver bulls suggest that this deficit is so overwhelming that the silver price has to move. What those bulls neglect to point out of this, there’s several billion ounces of above ground silver in inventory that doesn’t have to be mined.

Silver, unlike gold, is, is used. It’s important to note that it’s used in, you know, for reflective capabilities. As an example, in solar industry, it’s used in microelectronics, in regular electronics. It’s also increasingly used as a germicide and in water treatment facilities. And a bunch of silver every year, you know, goes out a tailpipe or goes up a smokestack or something like that. It goes to silver, Evan. Yeah, not to mention the silver that’s in munitions and that gets vaporized when they get used. Yeah, sure, More silver every year right now is getting, getting used, that is getting produced.

But there are enormous stockpiles of above ground silver and nobody really knows how much. I remember back to the 80s when Buffett suddenly announced that he owned 15% of the reported above ground stocks of silver. The silver price promptly doubled. All the short squeeze guys, even in the 80s came out from under their britches or wherever they were, and all of a sudden the silver price collapsed. And all the silver bulls were saying, well, this must be manipulation. This must be JP Morgan Chase trying to screw me. What it was was that there was a whole bunch of physical silver owned by the Indian peasantry.

The silver price doubled in US dollar terms and the US The US dollar doubled against the Indian rupiah at the same time. I forget if there was a flood or a drought, one or the other, but there was a bad harvest in India and the Indian peasantries had to make a choice between selling an asset class that was up by 400% or allowing their kids to starve. Pretty easy decision. So in the context of the question that you asked, both parts are right. There is a structural deficit in terms of new mine supply or newly created supply relative to industrial demand.

But there are enormous above ground inventories. The experience of Sprott going Back to, well, 2014, 2015, the silver squeeze is instructive. The narrative around silver was in full swing. And the easiest way for American investors to express their sentiment was the Sprott Physical Silver Trust. We were able, we as Sprott were able to use an at the market financing mechanism. And that snap, it’s already beginning. The signs are subtle, but they’re stacking up fast. In early 2025, speculative long positions in COMEX silver futures surged to their highest levels since late 2023. Traders aren’t just betting on price, they’re positioning for something bigger.

Then came the inventory scare. By June 2024, COMEX vaults had dipped to 140 million ounces of triggering fresh rumors of an imminent delivery crunch. Although the numbers bounced back slightly, the panic didn’t fade. It just went quiet. Behind the scenes, whispers of tighter delivery windows and delayed shipments started spreading August 2025. Reports even hinted that Comex was struggling to meet physical demand on time, though nothing official was confirmed. And that’s how it always begins. Not with announcements, but but with quiet distortions beneath the surface. Rick Rule calls these cracks. They’re the early tremors before the quake.

The futures market is built on confidence. Confidence that delivery is optional, that the system works, that no one will ever test the boundaries. But every new long position, every dip in inventory, every late delivery stretches that confidence thinner. Eventually, one of those cracks gives way. And when it does it, it won’t be a gradual leak, it’ll be a rupture. The irony is, most of the market is still asleep. They see volatility and assume it’s just another cycle. But what they’re missing is the escalation. Silver prices in 2025 have swung between $26 and $32, not because of fundamentals, but because the margin for error is shrinking.

The paper market can no longer absorb the pressure without trembling. And as Rule warns, the fireworks won’t start with a bang. They’ll start with a flicker, a delay here, a settlement dispute there. And then suddenly the rush begins. Futures traders panicking to convert contracts into metal vault, inventories vanishing overnight. And a buying frenzy that no circuit breaker can stop. The system is already creaking. The only question now is who’s listening? To convert this market activity into cash, which we used to buy silver, and for a while we were raising 40 or $50 million a day, and our charter prohibited us from taking depository receipts.

We had to take silver so we couldn’t hang around and try and buy that silver at the best price from the best taker. We cleaned out the silver that was available to us in Toronto. We cleaned out the silver that was available to us in Ottawa. We then cleaned out Chicago. We then cleaned out New York. Sidebar Gold is expensive and easy to transport. Silver is not expensive and it’s tough to transport. And the people who owed us the silver, the J.P. morgan chases of the world, had to charter these very large airplanes to fly physical silver to us from Switzerland and London.

Now, it wasn’t that the silver was unavailable on a global basis. It’s that the silver was unavailable where it was needed. And that goes to the futures markets. It’s very common. Donegan, we’ve talked about this on your show before. Because the futures markets are so liquid, because they trade such amazing volumes, it is not uncommon to see a single 24 hour period trade more, trade 200 times the physical Silver that’s available for good delivery. Now, invariably these things cash settle, but if you thought about a very small amount of the futures transactions that was held for good delivery, that would absolutely overwhelm the futures market.

Participants in the futures markets or those who look at the futures markets to engineer a short squeeze need to understand that the futures markets are owned by the futures markets participants. And if we had this type of short squeeze, it wouldn’t physically settle. What would happen is that the exchanges would do what they did with tin. They would halt transactions, they would arbitrarily establish a price and they would cash settle. That’s what’ll happen. If you actually think that you’re going to catch the owners of the exchange way short, I got a bridge to sell you, but a circumstance that caused that to be a threat, which is to say, if there were cracks in the futures market, you could expect some really interesting fireworks in silver.

I happen to believe you’re going to see interesting fireworks in silver anyway. I don’t think you need a really dramatic narrative to cause you as a speculator to buy silver. But I like to deal with that dramatic narrative because the facts suggest a different outcome. And as the pressure builds, there’s one factor that could turn this slow motion crack up into an all out detonation. The structural deficit. In 2024 alone, the silver market faced a staggering shortfall of 184 million ounces. That’s not a fluke, it’s a trend. Industrial demand is eating through supply at a pace the miners simply can’t match.

Solar panels, electric vehicles, semiconductors, water purification. Silver is embedded in the arteries of modern technology. And once it’s used, it’s gone. Unlike gold, silver doesn’t just sit in vaults. It gets consumed, melted into panels, soldered onto circuits, lost in landfills. Every year, hundreds of millions of ounces vanish from circulation and we’re not replacing them fast enough. Rick Rule understands the math. He knows that year after year of deficits don’t just drain inventories, they drain confidence. If supply can’t keep up with demand, the pressure has to release somewhere. Either prices explode upward to ration demand, or the system breaks from underneath.

And with mining production down 2% year over year, there’s no cavalry coming. Recycling is stagnant above ground. Stockpiles are already tapped. The illusion of abundance is being eroded by the grind of industrial necessity. This is the hidden fuse behind Rule’s $1,000 prediction. Most people look at price charts or headlines, but the real story is written in ounces. Millions of them disappearing faster than they can be mined. And what’s most alarming, the market isn’t reacting. It’s lulled into complacency by ETF statistics and spreadsheet inventories that look robust until you try to access them. Rule isn’t talking about a price pump.

He’s talking about a structural failure where demand outruns the system’s ability to cope. At that point, silver stops being a commodity and becomes a panic asset, one that everyone wants but no one can find highly unlikely. I remember that as pernicious as government is, they tend to do the easy things. If they lower the interest rate, which increases inflation, inflation is a tax and it’s popular. If they increase taxes on the rich, the people who aren’t rich think this is a very good thing. The government doesn’t need particularly to do politically unpopular things to steal from you.

The government can do popular things to steal from you. The idea that the government is going to steal your IRA as an example, I think is highly, highly, highly unlikely. The idea that in an economy that they describe as the best economy in humankind requires an interest rate decrease is a different way of stealing. Of course, their most effective way to steal, Dunnigan, is to index benefits to the cpi, which understates inflation while allowing the continued deterioration of the US dollar while simultaneously not indexing income taxes and capital gains taxes to inflation. This taxation benefit relative to benefits that has to do with the discrepancy between the CP lie and the real rate of inflation is one of the most effective and pernicious forms of theft.

Well, it’s the most effective and pernicious form of theft, save an armed invasion of an adjoining country that I’ve ever seen. And it’s popular. That’s where the battle lines are drawn and the expert community is split right down the middle. On one side you have voices like Jeff Christian of CPM Group who insist the silver market is sound. He points to the estimated 2 billion ounces of above ground silver and argues there’s no real shortage, just investor hype. According to him, the market will balance itself and fears of a squeeze are nothing more than online hysteria.

But on the other side are men like Jim Rickards and Ray Dalio who are raising red flags. They see a very different picture, one where tightening physical supply, escalating industrial demand and rising illiquidity form a perfect storm that’s being ignored by most analysts. Rickards doesn’t pull punches. He says the market is manipulated and that while exchanges might prevent full blown delivery crises, they can’t stop what comes next. Volatility spikes that will shake even seasoned institutions. Dalio, always measured in his analysis, suggests the industrial strain alone could flip sentiment. If demand continues growing and supply remains constrained, futures markets will be forced to acknowledge a reality they’ve been papering over for years.

And Rick Rule, he sits at the center of this storm with a blunt the paper market doesn’t reflect reality, it reflects confidence. And that confidence, he says, is misplaced. The reason this matters isn’t just philosophical, it’s financial. If the contrarians are right, then we’re not looking at volatility. We’re looking at a systemic repricing of silver based on scarcity, not sentiment. When the market stops trusting paper, it has to rediscover price through physical demand. And that’s when the real shift begins. One side will be proven catastrophically wrong, the other vindicated in full. Which side are you on? Because when the smoke clears, there won’t be time to change your answer.

It does depend on your individual situation. If most of your portfolio is in long bonds and you’re a pensioner, if you’re going to get whacked by inflation, you probably need 30 or 35% of your net worth in inflation countermeasures, which is to say gold, silver, platinum and palladium, that kind of thing. If you’re a younger person and you’re a skilled person, where you have inputs and you can increase your wages at the same time as the dollar deteriorates and you have time to come back from mistakes, you can own much less. This is what I will say, Dunnigan.

This doesn’t need any couching. The market share of precious metals and precious metals related securities in the United States is 1/2 of 1%, which is to say 1/2 of 1% of total savings. Investment assets in the United States are comprised of physical precious metals and securities surrogates. The four decade mean is 2%. And I would suspect in this market we’re going to overshoot that mean substantially. I have a very difficult time for most people. Well, first of all, I have a difficult time for anybody that doesn’t save 10% of their income pre tax. There’s a bunch of people who want to live rich, but they don’t want to get rich.

And there’s a contradiction there. And you need to be a capitalist to get rich. You need to have some capital to be a capitalist. You need to save to get that capital. So the first thing is save 10% at least pre tax, no if, ands or buts and save and invest the rest. And I believe that some portion of everybody’s liquidity, but probably 20 to 25% or depending on who you are, 50% of your liquidity should be in gold. If you save in US dollars now, which you must do, by the way, you must maintain liquidity.

If you save in US Dollars, you reduce your purchasing power by savings. You do it because the liquidity gives you the ability to survive and thrive in liquidity. Squeezes. But maintaining your purchasing power takes gold. If someone came to me and said that my portfolio is 20% liquid and half of that is in gold, which is to say 10% of their portfolio is in gold, I would say good work, nice work. Remember that if you use gold like I do, as insurance, a small premium, the premium being the cost of your gold holdings, yields real benefit if the circumstance that you’re afraid of takes place.

If gold does what I think it could do and triple or quadruple over 10 years, a 10% gold holding can shield you from a 50% decline in the value of your securities portfolio. As an example, if your securities portfolio was half of your total portfolio. And while the experts argue, the paper market keeps churning out contracts at a pace that defies logic, every day, nearly 1.5 billion ounces of silver are traded on the COMEX, more than 10 times the annual mine production and 200 times what’s actually deliverable. This isn’t a marketplace, it’s a casino. A hyper leveraged mechanism built on the assumption that no one will ever call the bluff.

But that assumption is starting to look dangerously outdated. Investors are waking up. They’re realizing that the price of silver they see on the screen is a synthetic number determined not by physical supply and demand, but by a paper system that outnumbers reality hundreds of times over. Rick Rule’s warning cuts through all the noise. This paper, silver, these digital IOUs are only valuable as long as people believe they’ll be honored. But what if that belief starts to break? What happens when people stop trading silver like a token and start demanding the metal itself? That’s when the real trouble begins.

Because the paper market, with all its volume and volatility, can’t deliver what it promises. It’s not built for redemption. It’s built for speculation. And when confidence slips even a little, that speculation turns into fear. Fear becomes flight, and flight crashes the system. This is the dirty secret of silver pricing. The futures market has been suppressing the physical price for years, keeping silver undervalued, under owned and misunderstood. But suppression Has a cost. And the longer it goes on, the more explosive the release becomes. When physical demand finally overtakes the paper flood, when delivery failure becomes even a rumor, the price won’t correct.

Slowly it will snap. And that snap will be felt across the entire financial system. Because silver isn’t just another metal, it’s a barometer of trust. And right now that trust is running on fumes. I don’t think in terms of symbols, so I can’t answer that. Okay. AG being First Majestic versus Mag. Yes. Mag’s a higher quality company on a fundamental basis. I would take Mag. The beauty of First Majestic is that Keith has spent probably $150 million developing 100,000 person constituency around that. And it may be more reactive to the silver price. Keith is a very good friend of mine.

I’m a shareholder of First Majestic. Mag is a higher quality silver company. We have another one. Rick’s thoughts on and current ranking on i80 Gold. I have i80 Gold as a 6, which is not a high ranking. Despite that, I own it. Good range of assets. Good people. Totally pooched balance sheet. They need to fix the balance sheet. Prudent people. So when Rick Rule says silver could hit $1,000, he’s not being hyperbolic. He’s describing a systemic failure that forces the market to find truth the hard way. Think about what happens when a financial instrument that’s been suppressing price for decades finally loses control.

When the illusion of infinite supply is shattered, the price doesn’t rise in steps, it leaps. Just like we saw with nickel, just like we’ve seen with gold during currency crises. But silver is different. It’s both monetary and industrial. When the paper breaks, there’s a double shock. Financial panic meets supply chain chaos. And that’s the kind of moment where price doesn’t matter anymore. Availability does. Most people can’t picture silver at $1,000 because they’re still stuck in today’s narrative. They believe Comex will manage it. They believe ETFs reflect real metal. They believe the rules won’t change. But when delivery fails and cash settlement becomes the new norm, faith in those systems collapses.

Suddenly premiums explode, retail shops go empty, wholesalers freeze orders. And what was once a boring commodity turns into the hottest asset on earth. Rule’s projection isn’t about hype. It’s about pressure. Unrelenting multi decade pressure that’s been building beneath a paper mountain. The second that pressure punches through, the repricing will be savage. Not because of a shortage, but because the market realizes it’s been trading ghosts. And when that realization hits, physical silver becomes priceless until someone decides what the new price should be. And in that moment $1,000 stops being a forecast and starts being a floor. I would do a combination.

I believe the gold price will go up at least the nominal price of gold. But I own it to maintain their purchase the purchasing power. I own my gold because I lived through the decade of the 70s. I own my gold because I think the purchasing power of the US dollar over the next 10 years will decline by 75%. And I believe that the gold price in nominal terms will increase to reflect the decline in the purchasing power of the US dollar. I own the gold stocks because I think they relearned the lesson of financial prudence that they lost in the decade 2000 to 2010.

I think they’re becoming to be better run than industry gives them credit for being. And I own them because as the gold price increases, particularly if the economy stagnates, the gold price will increase faster than the cost to produce gold will and their margins will fatten out. If I’m right remembering the first part of the decade of the 70s, the gold stock index has outperformed physical gold 3 to 1. I’m not suggesting it’s going to do that again but I am suggesting that even the best of the best gold companies, the so called expensive ones, Franco Wheaton, Agnico, Eagle, the golden triumvirate that I call them, I would expect those three companies, as large and as liquid as they are to outperform Gold’s performance by 2 to 1.

So a saver, somebody who owns for protection, buys the gold. An investor, even a prudent investor. And as that moment inches closer, the institutions know exactly what’s at stake. That’s why the smart money is already making its move quietly, methodically and without drawing attention. Rick Rule isn’t just sounding the alarm for retail investors. He’s describing what the insiders are already doing. Look at the behavior of large asset managers, family offices and sovereign funds. They’re not gambling on futures, they’re taking delivery. They’re moving into physical silver, buying mining shares with leverage to spot price and diversifying away from the financial system altogether.

They understand that when the paper market finally cracks, the the first wave of exits will be blocked. The only people who will win are the ones who left before the crowd even saw the fire. This is the part most retail investors miss. They’re watching price action. The big players are watching the plumbing, delivery times, bar availability, inventory movements. These are the Signals that matter. Because in a crisis, the paper price becomes meaningless. What matters is who has title to the medal, who can take possession, and who gets left holding a contract that can’t be fulfilled. Rule’s message is don’t wait for the headlines.

By the time CNBC tells you Silver’s breaking out, it’ll already be too late. This isn’t about panic. It’s about positioning. Those who understand the system’s fragility are positioning themselves on the other side of the trapdoor. They’re not asking whether silver can hit $1,000. They’re preparing for what happens when it does. Because at that point, it’s not about profit, it’s about protection, about being ahead of the freeze. And in a world where liquidity vanishes overnight, the difference between holding a piece of paper and holding a piece of metal could be the difference between survival and regret. If you lose a stock certificate, the penalty for failure is extraordinarily high.

Remember that I own or ran a brokerage firm for 35 years and there were a lot of quote prudent folks who took delivery lost their certs. So if you were somebody like Rick Rule with a highly organized wife and a good information retrieval system and a superb executive assistant like Cali Farnham and you have an adjacent safe deposit box in a bank and you have a personal safe and you keep track of all this stuff and if you’re an investor, not a trader, then take delivery. I often buy stocks with the view to holding them 10 or 15 years.

If you take delivery and sell and you can’t make physical delivery of that share within three days or if the share for one reason or another doesn’t pass muster with the clearing firm, you’re suddenly short. You can get bought in, lose money and still have the damn cert. So I understand the risks inherent in the financial system. I understand too because I’ve been exposed to it. The frailty of individual investors habits with regards to certificate storage and safekeeping. For most people the correct line of defense would be to read the statement of financial condition of your brokerage firm and that brokerage firm’s clearing firm and or the bank custodian and do business with solvent institutions.

Most people, as opposed to reading the financial condition of their fiduciaries, would prefer to read a book. So it’s important to answer that question in the context of who the individual. So here’s the final warning from Rick Rule and it’s one the market cannot afford to ignore. When the collapse comes, Comex won’t sound an alarm. They won’t send you a notice. And there will be no countdown, no flashing red lights. It’ll be silent. One day you’ll try to roll a contract or request delivery, and the response will be trading halted, settlement, and cash only. And just like that, the game ends.

The entire illusion, the one built on leverage, liquidity and the false comfort of plenty of supply, evaporates. What’s left is a mad dash for physical silver and a price surge so violent it redefines what a breakout looks like. Rule isn’t saying this for shock value. He’s laying out a roadmap of what happens when a paper market that’s 200 times larger than its physical base finally hits the wall. And the wall is coming. The deficits are real, the industrial drain is accelerating. The above ground inventories are increasingly illiquid. And the exchange mechanisms designed to prevent chaos, they’re also designed to protect institutions, not you.

When delivery fails, when redemption is denied, and when trust disintegrates, that’s when the silver price explodes. Not from speculation, but from a desperate, disorderly flight into anything real. And in that moment, those still clinging to futures, ETFS or digital IOUs will be left behind. This is your window. The trap is visible, the signs are clear, and the time to act is now. Don’t wait for validation. By then, the door will be locked and the real silver will be gone. Yeah, absolutely. I remember. I remember well the bull market of the 1970s. Those were my formative years as an investor.

In that decade, 1970 to 1980, the purchasing power of the US dollar, according to the then Office of Management and budget, declined by 75% in 10 years and the gold price ran 30 fold. A truly memorable bull market. In the middle of that bull market, many people Forget that in 1975 there was finally popular outcry against inflation and Congress and the Fed decided that they were going to break the back of inflation and increase the interest rate. They did that, and the gold price fell from $200 an ounce to $100 an ounce. And the then Philadelphia gold and silver stock index fell by 65%.

And it did it in 10 months. It was a precipitous decline. If you were a young man with a quarter of his net worth in gold and gold stocks. Guy named Rick Rule. Just. Just any particular guy? Yeah, it was a character building experience. And Donegal, I was already a character. You know, it’s important to know though, at the end of that period in 1975, because it wasn’t just the gold market. That got impacted. The stock market sold off. The bond market got obliterated. Housing starts basically stopped. Consumer durables that are financeable like automobiles fell apart.

So Congress lost their nerve in a hell of a hurry. And when they took the interest rate down at the end of 1975, savers and investors in the United States and around the world understood that US Society capitulated in terms of keeping the dollar strong. And people who got shaken out by that 50% decline in the gold price missed out on a move from $100 an ounce to $850 an ounce in five and a half ensuing years. I’m interested in this question because I think the political pressure in the United States right now is around another concerted interest rate drop.

And that interest rate drop, given the strength in our economy, particularly relative to other economies, will signal to investors and savers around the world that US Society and the US Government is uninterested in protecting the integrity of the US Dollar. And I think gold’s response to a real interest rate decline or a couple of 25 basis point rate cuts could be dramatic. Truly dramatic. Maybe not as dramatic as 1975 was, but truly dramatic. So here’s the truth. Rick Rule wants you to understand this isn’t about hype. It’s about a market built on promises that can’t be kept.

The comex won’t warn you before it changes the rules. It won’t hand you physical silver when the contracts break. And when that moment of reckoning arrives, when futures collapse, trust evaporates and everyone scrambles for what little metal remains, the price won’t inch higher, it’ll skyrocket. That’s how you get $1,000 silver. Not from speculation, but from systemic failure. You’ve seen the cracks. You’ve seen the math, and now you’ve heard the warning. So if you’re watching this, ask when the music stops, will you be holding silver or just a promise? Because the paper game ends the moment confidence does.

If you found this breakdown valuable, make sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don’t miss what’s coming next. And remember, this is not financial advice. Always speak to a qualified professional before making any investment decisions. Sam.
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