➡ The silver market may split due to a premium that doesn’t seem to be going away, similar to a situation in March 2022 involving a nickel mining company. The closure of the Straits of Hormuz, which is a major route for base metals like aluminum and copper, could cause a similar disruption. This could affect the futures trading of all metals, not just silver. The situation is further complicated by the silver market potentially splitting between New York and London on one hand, and China on the other.
➡ The silver market is dividing into two separate markets, with higher prices in Shanghai compared to New York, indicating a potential system collapse. The Bank of Japan may raise interest rates to stabilize the yen, but this could weaken it further due to its bond dependency. Japan’s lack of action in protecting its oil supply through the Strait of Hormuz could lead to a yen collapse and a shift in the western monetary order. Despite current quietness in the money metals, potential chaos could arise if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for too long.

If this premium doesn’t go away, then basically it’s saying that the silver market has split in two. And that’s usually what happens before a system falls apart in the market’s fracture. Hey, guys, Raph here from The Endgame Investor. And you remember that day in 2022, I believe it was March 7th, called Nickel Armageddon, where some nickel mining company got caught short a whole bunch of nickel because they were expanding operations and hedging their future production. But then there was a nickel spike and they went bankrupt and the LME had to reverse trades and it was this whole big ballad gone and fracas.

Well, something like that looks like it’s going to happen again pretty soon because the straights of Hormuz continue to be blocked. And it’s not just oil that goes through there, it’s a lot of base metals, a lot of the world’s production of important base metals like aluminum and copper go through there too. And once one exchange gets affected or the exchange of one metal gets affected, usually all other metals follow. I’ll show you that in the slides that follow. That nickel Armageddon impacted pretty much all of futures trading and it looks like it will this time as well.

It could be argued that the last nickel Armageddon on the LME and the London metal exchange was precipitated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that war began in February. About a month later, a little bit less than a month later, the futures exchanges blew up. And so while gold and silver appear to be calming down for now, it’s not going to stay that way for much longer because it looks like the straights of Hormuz are going to continue to be closed for the next few weeks at least. There are still missiles going over my head here in Israel, though no big impacts where I am.

And while we’re at it, we’re going to talk about the silver market, apparently splitting into between New York and London on one hand and China, meaning Beijing or Shanghai, on the other hand. This video is brought to you by my sub stack. Check it out in game investor dot sub stack dot com. I wrote about these issues in a more succinct way. And this video does have an actual sponsor and that is silver forty seven symbol AAGAF in the U.S. symbol A.G.A. in Canada, silver forty seven. The point of companies like these and specifically silver forty seven is to turn their inferred resources into measured and indicated.

What does that mean? It means upgrading them from being basically inferred that they exist in these mines to measured and indicated and that takes time and it takes drilling. So you see here that silver forty seven relative to its peers, this is the amount of value per ounce of silver in the ground that they control. Silver forty seven is at forty three cents an ounce. That’s very low. Why is it very low? But because silver forty seven is at the initial stages of proving their silver reserves. Whereas you have peers like Argenta Silver or again to silver.

I don’t know how it’s pronounced. Dolly Varden, Outcrop Silver and Black Rock Silver out all have much higher per ounce valuation. That’s because their ounces are measured and indicated and not just inferred. So the business model or if you are interested in taking a stake in silver forty seven, the point is to move these measured and indicated. Sorry, these inferred ounces up to the measured and indicated category. This has started to happen with one of its mines in Hughes, Nevada, where they move 10 million to measured and indicated. And once these ounces move up to this category, you’ll start to see a revaluation in this stock.

And in general, silver explorers like these, since silver went to 50, went past 50 up to 120 and hasn’t crashed down below 50 as it did in the 1980 top crash way back down. And also in 2011 crash way back down this time, silver seems to be holding its own at around the 75, 80 to 90 dollar range. And it looks like this is a new price for silver. And that is going to attract big players to look at these projects more seriously and perhaps help out in moving the inferred silver to the measured and indicated category with their investments.

Check out silver forty seven AAGIF in the U.S. and AAGA in Canada. Let’s move to the slides. First thing I wanted to share with you guys is something that I have never done before on any of these videos or in any of my writings. Talk about aluminum and what is going on with the aluminum delivery situation. Well, I checked it out at the CME and each aluminum contract covers notionally 25 metric tons. And so you check the inventory at the CME, you get these numbers, 1,339 metric tons are warranted, meaning they are for sale against contracts.

If you divide that by 25, you get 53, I think. Yes, you get 53. So you have 53 contracts of physical aluminum are available on the CME vault all around the world. And look at these numbers. You have the current delivery figures for the amount of contracts delivered as of March 12. And I think that is still up to date to today. It’s 111. So 111 warranted contracts have warrants have changed hands. Where there’s only 53 contracts worth of aluminum available. So these warrants, they are changing hands, I guess more than once going back and forth, maybe being double counted or something.

I don’t know exactly how this works, but the amount of deliveries of aluminum versus the amount of aluminum available is extremely tight. However, it’s being counted. I can’t really tell you. I’m not an expert on how the maybe fractional reserve system in the CME actually works. But these numbers look pretty bad. How much aluminum goes through Hormuz, the straights of which are still shut by Iran and their threats due to mostly insurance issues. So primary aluminum production outside of China. The Gulf is responsible for 8% of this. It’s not the biggest portion of the market. China is.

And you have Europe, including Russia. But it’s the second biggest after that. So Gulf producers accounted for 23% of Western output in 2025 for aluminum. So there could be a lumageddon pretty soon. We’ll see exactly how the numbers work out. Watch the aluminum companies and watch for any kind of domino effect on the futures exchanges that begin with aluminum. So if you look back at nickel Armageddon on March 7th, 2022, this is aluminum. This is not nickel. This is aluminum. But look what happened to aluminum during nickel Armageddon in 2022 March 7th. We went up to about four thousand dollars per ton here at the high on March 7th, 2022.

And then once those trades were reversed and justice was served. Of course, you know, if somebody goes bankrupt or if a big company goes bankrupt, you got to reverse the trades because you can’t really hurt those people. That would be bad. But you see here that the aluminum prices are already starting to act as if a nickel Armageddon or an alumageddon is coming. We’re already at about thirty four twenty two a ton. And you can see as we led up to nickel Armageddon, the price of aluminum were also spiking here. So we could be on the situation right now, which means we might be weeks away from some kind of crash in the futures markets beginning with aluminum.

Now, if you look at the real price of aluminum in gold terms, we’re at an all time low, actually, in aluminum prices. And this just demonstrates something. It demonstrates is that the problem isn’t the aluminum supply. The problem is the credit itself that is dying and that requires huge amounts of supply going through in order to keep its purchasing power looking better than it actually is. But in terms of the real price of aluminum, it couldn’t be any cheaper. Copper is already at its all time highs or very, very near them. We’re at five dollars and seventy two cents a pound here.

And we’ve never been this high before. But this also looks kind of, you know, nickel Armageddon. I think this point over here, this spike, which was at the time and all time after copper in March 7th, 2022, there was also a copper spike. It affected copper and aluminum and all other metals as well. But if we have copper already at all time highs and another trade futures trading fiasco in front of us due to the shutdown of the Straits of Hormuz, who knows how high copper could go. But if you look at the same thing that I just showed you in aluminum that the real price of aluminum is at all time lows.

It’s the same with copper. The real price of copper is at all time lows relative to gold. The problem with this system is the fiat money. It is not necessarily the supply of these metals. It’s the problem that it will how it will affect the main credit instrument, which is the U.S. dollar, which, of course, eventually will die. Could this precipitate it? Could Straits of Hormuz being closed precipitate the end of the dollar? Very much so. We’ll see what happens. You got to stay calm and not assume that any single cause is going to be the end game.

But one of these days it will be. We just don’t know what it will be until it happens. The silver market is splitting in two. How is this so? Well, people look at the SGE. I think it’s the Shanghai something. I forgot what it stands for. It’s the Shanghai exchange, Shanghai gold exchange. We have these high premiums in Shanghai of silver, about 15.16% as the last data. And that’s pretty high. It’s not unprecedented. They’ve been there before, but very rarely. And so what people like to say is that the real price of silver is in Shanghai and the fake price of silver is in New York.

Well, that’s not exactly what’s happening because you can still get physical silver for New York prices in the New York market, which is basically the Western market. It’s not a fake price. It’s just a different price. What it really means is that the two silver markets are splitting apart. Because if they were integrated, then people would buy silver in New York, sell it in Shanghai and profit the difference. That premium, they would arbitrage it. That’s what markets do when they are functioning in an integrated way. The fact that these premiums are stubborn and they won’t go away means that for whatever reason, silver traders cannot buy silver in New York and ship it to China.

Maybe it’s regulatory. Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, these markets are splitting apart into two different markets. And here you have the long term. The longest term of the chart goes back on gold charts or us. You can see that we are at 15.16%. We have been here before once during the silver crash of late 2011, after the $50 higher, the $4,000 high back then. But we’ve never really been in this area for a prolonged sustained period of time. But if we do, if this premium doesn’t go away, then basically it’s saying that the silver market has split in two.

And that’s usually what happens before a system falls apart. The markets fracture. That’s what’s happening in silver. Next, it will happen in gold and then the dollar will be dead. But it’s already happening in one of the monetary metals. So this is a warning that whatever is on the way in an end game sense is definitely coming. Bank of Japan faces familiar dilemma as Iran conflicts stirs inflation. So Bank of Japan. The reason I’m reading that headline and that headline I think is from the Wall Street Journal. The markets, the sub headline is markets are pricing a 60% chance of a rate hike at its next meeting in April.

The implication of that title of that headline is that the Bank of Japan is going to try to raise rates to stabilize the yen. But if you look at this medium term chart of the yen versus interest rates, Japanese interest rates in the blue, you have the 10 year interest rates at the higher it goes, the higher the yield. You can see, generally speaking, though, it’s not a perfect correlation here. The higher the yield goes, the weaker the yen goes. The other line, the not blue one. I don’t know what color is, but it doesn’t matter.

That is the yen rate per dollar. So the higher it goes, the weaker the yen is. So you can see the higher yields go, the weaker the yen is. And I’ve made this point over and over again here. The yen is Japanese bonds. So the weaker bonds are the weaker the yen is. And so a rate hike cannot strengthen the yen as it never has in the last six or seven years because the yen is so heavily dependent on the value of the bonds that back it because of all the QE that’s been taking place since Abenomics began in 2013.

The yen and the Japanese government 10 year bond are welded together at the hip. They are Siamese twins. Japan is very heavily dependent on oil that goes through the Straits of Hormuz. If they don’t get it soon, the purchasing power of the yen is going to collapse and they’re going to be forced to raise interest rates because that’s all they know how to do. Little do they know that raising interest rates will only hurt the yen even more because the yen and the Japanese government bond are the same thing. Here’s where the yen is now.

It is testing the final support zone hit in 1990. You can see we have a triple top over here, but triple tops very rarely hold. And we’re going to break through this. And once we break through this, there is basically no support until we get to like 250 or something like that. This was a huge spike up for the yen over here in the early 80s, in the mid 80s, and a spike down for the dollar. But we’re breaking that now. And it’s been a long time coming since 1990. The yen is going to collapse and with it the rest of the western monetary order as we know it.

And what does Japan planning to do about this? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Japan has no plan to dispatch naval vessels to escort this from Reuters, actually, to escort vessels in the Middle East. Prime Minister Sanayatakaiichi said on Monday after US President Donald Trump called on allies to protect tankers traversing through the Strait of Hormuz. We have not made any decisions whatsoever about dispatching escort ships. We are continuing to examine what Japan can do independently and what can be done within the legal framework that Kaiichi told parliament.

These people are very different from what they used to be prior to World War II, prior to getting involved in nuclear war with the United States. They have lost their spine. They have no ability to fight for their own interests anymore. And that’s going to change when the dollar dies. The Japanese are going to come back to themselves and they’re going to be more of a fighting nation. It’s been pretty embarrassing for them since 1945. And I hope they get their will to live back because they’ve also stopped reproducing and they’ve got to get on that too.

All in all, the money metals may be quiet right now. But watch the base metals and watch what’s happening in Hormuz. How much longer can it stay closed before chaos breaks out? My bet is not that much longer at all. This is Rafi, the in-game investor. And if you want to check out my Patreon, I’ll be talking about the war of Gogu Magog in Ezekiel. Is that happening now? And the answer is probably. What does that mean for the world? It’s going to get messy, but in the end, everything will be okay. And why do we think that this is the war of Gogu Magog? Well, because the army at the head of Gogu’s horde is none other than Persia and a guy named Put.

Remember him? Check it out at patreon.com slash endgame investor for as little as $3 a month. And I’ll see you guys soon. [tr:trw].

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