Which metal to buy
All of them sold off. I like all three and own all three. Silver has the best upside potential. Platinum has one of the most interesting stories, but it lacks the monetary history that gold and silver carry. It is a high-premium item, and the US Mint has not made a platinum eagle in three, four, five years or longer.
When the music stops, gold gets pegged to a new global system. If I had one trade, it would be gold. If I had two, buy some silver and switch it into gold when the ratio between them corrects. Platinum is my third choice.
Gold and silver together appear 700 or more times in the Bible. Kings, queens, emperors, and pharaohs never bought gold to become wealthy. They held it as immutable wealth to pass to future generations. You do not buy gold to get rich; you hold it because it is wealth. Silver, though, could make you wealthy if it goes where it should go.
The sell-off that hid heavy buying
Earlier this year prices got knee-capped. The Bank for International Settlements called that sell-off structural, not fundamental. The CME Group's COMEX raised margins by 300% into year-end. At the same time, leveraged ETFs had to rebalance under their prospectus rules, which forced massive selling of gold and silver. That combination blew up the price.
As the price fell and the public sold, China bought and central banks bought more than ever before, and lied about it. COMEX deliveries went off the charts. In February, $20 billion worth of gold was delivered. Someone took 26 million ounces of silver in February, a non-delivery month for silver. At $70 an ounce, that is over $2 billion. In total, 39 million ounces of silver left COMEX on trucks in February, almost 3 million pounds worth about $4 billion. Who ran that logistics, who insured it, who took possession, and where it went are open questions.
The questions that matter: as the price was destroyed and the public sold, was the smartest money in the world backing up the truck? Or was the US government making these deliveries through the Exchange Stabilization Fund, then leaving the metal inside COMEX to make it look like nothing changed, just banks playing paper games. Critics say it is only metal moving back and forth. I disagree. It has never happened this way before. Never.
Paper price versus physical demand
Markets keep treating paper prices as reality while physical demand tells a different story. The longer the West manipulates the price of gold and silver, the more deliveries buyers will take. That is why the price has stayed higher for over a year in the East than in the West, and traders keep arbitraging the gap.
Over time, volume moves to the best price. China is going the other way from the West: it is removing its public's ability to speculate in futures and wants people to buy only physical metal. People ask who would trust China. Who trusts the United States anymore? I am a patriot and I love this country, but we look dysfunctional. There are about 35 congressional candidates running on a socialist platform who want to eliminate Congress, eliminate the jails over time, give people in the country illegally sovereign immunity and a pathway to citizenship, and put all corporations under government ownership.
The Western system has operated for years on the theory that no one would stand for delivery. If no one takes delivery, you can sell the same contract over and over again. Now people are standing for delivery, and that breaks the model. What is flowing East is less about metal and more about a new system migrating from paper rehypothecation to same-day settlement. The US may stop being the epicenter for price discovery of the commodities the West has controlled for a long time. Transparency, immediate delivery, same-day settlement, and settlement in another currency give an exchange legitimacy fast. That may be part of why a good portion of the JP Morgan trading desk moved to Singapore.
Same-day settlement moves East
Same-day settlement exchanges are now live across the global south: Singapore, Dubai, and Hong Kong. The difference is that Hong Kong settles same-day in yuan, so you do not have to convert to dollars first. That is the first time an exchange will challenge the Western setting of price, and it can do so in yuan.
Any company or bank foolish enough to naked-short on COMEX can be met with an exchange-for-delivery. This has been running for a year in Shanghai, where prices sit higher. A trader can take 10 million ounces of silver, ship it to Hong Kong, have it trucked to Shanghai, and on a $12-per-ounce spread make $120 million. Those arbitrages are supposed to close in days. This one has stayed open for a year, which signals a market structure under real pressure.
No one is asking who has been standing for delivery, month after month, for billions of dollars for the last 19 months, when nobody used to do it at all.
Gold revaluation, and what it would do
I never said there would be a gold revaluation. I said there could be one. James Rickards points out it would not even need congressional approval. The President tells the Treasury Secretary to revalue gold, tells the Fed, and the Fed issues new gold certificates. Gold is currently valued at $42.22. Every $4,000 increase in the price of gold would give the Treasury General Account $1 trillion, free and clear. Luke Grommen suggests they might let gold rise organically to $7,000 or $8,000, then revalue it market-to-market from $42.22, or maybe more.
Judy Shelton is one of the most brilliant people I have met. She was Trump's nominee for the Fed and wrote the bestseller "Good as Gold." She told me, on video and in no uncertain terms, that while she was on Trump's transition team they discussed this at length, and he told her July 4th, the 250th anniversary, would be the most important day of his presidency. I never claimed a July 4th reset. When asked directly if there would be a reset on July 4th, I said no. Relying on a date is a big mistake, because you will be unhappy 99% of the time.
There is a good chance the President issues gold-backed treasuries. In her book she describes starting with a 50-year bond at a very low coupon, then 5, 10, 20, and 30-year bonds at a zero coupon. Use a company like Tether, drive the price of gold up, sell it to the Treasury to back the back end of the bond, and the price keeps rising. A long-dated instrument becomes easy to pay off as gold climbs. It is the best idea I have heard for getting us out of this system, and a way to reshore manufacturing.
The debt math and Triffin's dilemma
My mentor Richard Russell said 10 to 15 years ago that we are screwed and have two choices: inflate or die. We consume more than we produce, so we spend more than we earn, so the debt never resolves. You either inflate or default. No country has ever come back from 300% debt to GDP. Add unfunded liabilities of $175 trillion in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which are not on the balance sheet, and we are well past 300%.
Being the world reserve currency means, through Triffin's dilemma, that you cannot run a trade surplus. The world needs more dollars than we can supply on our own, and we do not trade enough with every country to give them the dollars they need to buy energy. Take Cambodia, which we barely trade with. They must sell their own currency on the open market to buy dollars to buy oil. So someone decides to send manufacturing to Cambodia and make 10x. That is how manufacturing gets gutted inside the reserve-currency country. This is exactly why China does not want to be the reserve currency; its manufacturing stake is too large. China wants to issue something parallel to the dollar without being the reserve. Vice President Vance has said the same thing more than once. Jared Bernstein, a former Biden White House economic adviser, wrote a report to "dethrone King Dollar," arguing we can no longer be the reserve currency because of Triffin's dilemma.
Why higher gold serves the plan
Rising gold is what devalues the dollar, because gold is the only neutral reserve asset. Measure it against any asset or any currency. Measuring the dollar against the dollar index is flawed, because every currency is devaluing against the dollar, which is Triffin's dilemma at work.
To reindustrialize the country you need a weaker dollar. To pay down the debt you need a weaker dollar. Higher gold lets you reshore manufacturing in a much weaker dollar. In other words, letting gold go to the moon is how you soft-default on reserve status. That is supposition. What is real is same-day settlement exchanges appearing across the East, deliveries running for 19 months, and arbitrage gaps staying open for a year.
Silver could deliver stronger upside; gold is insurance against policy mistakes few investors expect. Systemic change does not arrive overnight. It advances through quiet structural shifts most investors ignore, and those waiting for a single date or instant confirmation will miss the transition. Twenty years out, gold will be far higher than today. I am buying and sitting tight.
