© Sott.net
Truth be told, however, the US has always been like this. The difference, under Trump, is one of degree, tempo, and the (reduced) extent of destructive 'collateral damage'. Dispensing with carefully-crafted narratives facilitated by CIA 'regime change operatives', Trump is far more inclined to tell it like it is: in a world changing from unipolar to multipolar, he's afraid the US will not only surrender its dominant position to its peer competitors, China especially, but become dominated by them. Hence the urgency for maximum access to, and leverage over, key resources like energy and minerals.
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Show Notes
Reader Comments
@bezel bub:
that which is born, dies.
only that which was never born, never dies.
humans, and in particular, 'global leader types', are beset with the idea that they (we? ??) can create a civilization, an artificial system of order--an empire, if you will--that will never die.
this is an impossibility.
each of us, whoever we are, have only one challenge, one responsibility.
and that is to live the best that we can, while we can.
your friend,
ned
From the "ai": Desired outcome is important - is it not? And "idioms" have merit! Sometimes I think the "ai" thinks we are STUPID - but tis true - from Gen Z on they just need "instructions" for every little step - they think the "ai" is their slave - oh how wrong and entitled so many of them are - truly - the best way to learn is not from "ai" for eff sake. I mean seriously. Thanks for letting me know what "normal" is - Jeesh! Who the hell needs ai for baking a cake! Safety Notes and Pro Tips my ASS Got - overdone for sure!
Maybe you should of kept the unicorn on the table?
who knows - but really - if you don't get comments then suggest you are losing your audience.
Just saying.
Myself - I've recently been very interested in the price of silver.
I posted an article at my Substack place on that - and I'm seeking comments with merit. [Link]
Lets talk about silver - shall we?
Quote: " The contrasting model of behaviour change focuses on the more automatic processes of judgment and influence – what Robert Cialdini calls “click, whirr” processes of mind. This shifts the focus of attention away from facts and information, and towards altering the context within which people act. We might call this the “context” model of behaviour change. The context model recognises that that people are sometimes seemingly irrational and inconsistent in their choices, often because they are influenced by surrounding factors. Therefore, it focuses more on “changing behaviour without changing minds.” This route has received rather less attention from researchers and policymakers." Excellent analysis of how manipulation works, "altering the context within which people act" .
According to the interview, the USA used energy weapons against the security detail. According to the guard, hundreds of the security were killed and none of the Americans. It begins right after the intro of the video.
Here is one of the originial doctors opposed to the covid-19 vax giving a review of what has happened to women, who took the vax, their fertility and miscarriages. [Link]
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The Argentum VerdictPaper Silver Crashed 31% in Seven Hours. Physical Silver Premiums Exploded to 54%. The Great Divorce Has Begun.by Shanaka Anslem Perera Feb 01, 2026 [Link]
"The consensus positioning in silver is predicated on a supply response that cannot occur.
On January 30, 2026, silver futures crashed thirty-one point four percent in a single session, the largest one-day decline since the Hunt Brothers’ collapse in 1980. The institutional interpretation crystallized within hours: speculative excess had been purged, the bubble had burst, and the metal would return to equilibrium somewhere below fifty dollars where sober analysts had always said it belonged. Bloomberg ran the headline “Silver Bubble Bursts.” The Financial Times called it “a long-overdue correction.” Goldman Sachs reiterated their conviction sell recommendation. The smart money, according to this narrative, had seen it coming.
The smart money missed the only data point that mattered.
While paper silver was crashing in New York and London, physical silver in Shanghai was trading at premiums exceeding fifty percent over the COMEX price at the crash low. In Dubai, wholesale premiums reached eighteen percent. In Mumbai, dealers were quoting twenty-five percent above the screen price. At the exact moment when paper silver printed seventy-eight dollars and twelve cents, the lowest tick of the crash, physical silver in Asia was changing hands at prices equivalent to one hundred twenty to one hundred thirty dollars per ounce in wholesale markets where actual metal was delivered. The financial press reported the paper crash. They did not report that physical premiums widened by thirteen to fifty-four percent during the very session that was supposed to prove silver was overvalued.
This is the opposite of what should happen when an asset is genuinely overvalued. When a bubble bursts, holders rush to exit, and physical markets trade at discounts to paper as metal floods the market seeking bids. The widening of physical premiums during a paper crash is the signature of something else entirely. It is the signature of a market that has fractured into two separate pricing regimes that no longer communicate with each other. The paper market and the physical market have divorced, and the implications of that divorce will define precious metals investing for the next decade.
Inside this analysis: the complete mechanism that consensus does not model, the specific timeline for the next stress test, the positioning vulnerability that trillion-dollar allocators are blind to, the trade specification with entry, target, stop, and sizing, and the framework that will compound for the rest of your career. The January crash did not end the silver bull market. It confirmed the thesis that makes the bull market inevitable. What follows is the institutional playbook for what comes next.
I. The Great Divorce: When Paper and Physical Stopped Speaking The morning of January 30, 2026 began like any other in the precious metals complex. Silver futures had closed the previous session at one hundred twenty-one dollars and sixty cents per troy ounce, a record high that had drawn comparisons to the Hunt Brothers’ attempted corner of 1980. The rally had been relentless since October 2025, powered by a combination of industrial demand, investment flows, and the dawning recognition among sophisticated allocators that the metal faced structural supply constraints that price could not resolve. The appointment of Kevin Warsh as Federal Reserve Chair, announced the previous afternoon, provided what the market needed: a catalyst for the leveraged positions to unwind.
By the close, silver had fallen to seventy-eight dollars and fifty-three cents, a decline of thirty-one point four percent that wiped out three months of gains in seven hours. The financial press declared the move a healthy correction. The word “bubble” appeared in headlines across every major financial publication. The consensus narrative crystallized with remarkable speed: speculative excess had built through 2025, leverage had accumulated to unsustainable levels, and the Warsh announcement had provided the pin that popped the balloon. The smart money, according to this narrative, had been vindicated..."
Copyright 2026 Shanaka Anslem Perera. All Rights Reserved.
At the worst tick of the New York crash, when COMEX silver printed seventy-eight dollars and twelve cents per ounce, the Shanghai Gold Exchange was quoting silver at the equivalent of one hundred twenty to one hundred twenty-five dollars. The premium of Shanghai over COMEX, which had averaged five to seven percent during the 2025 rally, exploded to over fifty percent during the crash low. In Dubai, wholesale dealers reported premiums of fifteen to eighteen percent over spot. In Mumbai, where physical demand had been strong throughout the rally, premiums reached twenty to twenty-five percent. The January 25 data from the Shanghai Gold Exchange showed silver trading at one hundred twenty-seven dollars and eleven cents when COMEX was printing one hundred fifteen dollars and five cents, a premium of ten and a half percent that persisted through the crash and widened dramatically as paper collapsed.
This is not how markets behave when an asset is overvalued. When a commodity is in bubble territory and the bubble bursts, physical holders rush to sell into whatever bid remains, and physical prices fall faster than paper because the holders of actual metal are more motivated to exit than the holders of financial claims. Physical markets trade at discounts during genuine corrections because metal floods the market seeking liquidity. The signature of a true bubble bursting is physical weakness relative to paper, not physical strength.
The January 2026 crash showed the opposite signature. Physical premiums did not compress during the crash. They exploded. The metal that was supposedly overvalued became more expensive relative to paper at the exact moment when the thesis of overvaluation was supposedly being confirmed. The arbitrage that should have closed the gap, buying cheap paper and delivering expensive physical, did not function because the metal required for that arbitrage does not exist in sufficient quantity.
The gap between paper and physical is not a temporary dislocation that clever traders will arbitrage away. It is a structural feature of a market where the supply of metal cannot respond to the price of metal, where the clearing system operates on claims that exceed physical availability by ratios exceeding two hundred fifty to one, and where the margin mechanics of the paper market create automatic deleveraging that the physical market does not experience.
The January crash did not restore equilibrium. It confirmed that equilibrium no longer exists.
II. The Byproduct Trap: Why $122 Silver Cannot Create More Silver
The consensus model for silver assumes that price increases will trigger supply increases. This is how commodity markets are supposed to work. Higher prices incentivize marginal producers, stimulate exploration, accelerate recycling, and eventually restore balance between supply and demand. The model has worked for centuries across dozens of commodities from copper to wheat to crude oil. Orthodox commodity analysis assumes supply elasticity as a background condition, rarely examined because it has always held.
It does not work for silver.
Seventy to eighty percent of global silver production is not silver mining. It is a byproduct of copper, lead, zinc, and gold extraction. The largest silver-producing operations in the world are optimizing for base metals, not precious metals. Silver is incidental revenue from the same ore body, a geological accident of mineralization rather than a deliberate target of extraction. When the price of silver triples, the production decision of a copper miner does not change, because silver represents a small fraction of the economics that justify the mine. The miner cannot increase silver production without increasing copper production, and copper production is governed by copper demand, copper prices, and copper project economics. The supply of silver is structurally decoupled from the price of silver.
This is not a temporary condition that investment will resolve. The geological reality is that silver deposits rarely occur in concentrations sufficient to justify standalone mining. The metal disperses through the earth’s crust in association with other minerals, and the economics of extraction require those other minerals to bear the burden of capital expenditure and operating cost. Primary silver mines exist, but they represent less than thirty percent of global production and face their own constraints that prevent them from filling the gap.
Fresnillo PLC is the world’s largest primary silver producer, meaning it operates mines where silver is the primary product rather than a byproduct. If any company should respond to record silver prices by increasing production, it is Fresnillo. On January 28, 2026, two days before the crash, Fresnillo released its guidance for 2026. The company reduced its expected silver production from a range of forty-five to fifty-one million ounces to a range of forty-two to forty-six and a half million ounces. At one hundred twenty-two dollars per ounce, the highest sustained price in history, the largest primary silver miner in the world was cutting production, not increasing it.
The explanation was geological. Ore grades at Juanicipio, one of Fresnillo’s flagship operations, had collapsed from four hundred twenty-three grams per tonne in fiscal 2025 to an expected two hundred ten to two hundred thirty grams per tonne in 2026. The company was transitioning to narrower veins with lower metal content, a decision driven by the physical depletion of the high-grade zones that had been mined in previous years. The easy silver has been extracted. What remains is deeper, lower grade, and more expensive to process, regardless of what the silver price does.
The average silver ore grade across the industry has declined from fifteen troy ounces per tonne in 2010 to approximately nine troy ounces per tonne today. This forty percent degradation in ore quality means that miners must process sixty percent more rock to extract the same amount of metal, consuming more energy, more water, more labor, and more capital per ounce produced. New mine development requires seven to ten years from discovery to first production, and there are no major discoveries in the pipeline that will change the supply picture within the investment horizon that matters for current positioning decisions.
The models that institutional allocators use assume supply elasticity that does not exist. They assume a feedback loop from price to production that the geology of silver mining has severed. They forecast a return to equilibrium that cannot occur because the mechanism required for equilibrium has been disabled at the level of physical reality.
The cumulative deficit from 2021 through 2025 is documented at approximately seven hundred ninety-six to eight hundred twenty million ounces. This is not a cyclical shortfall that will self-correct. It is a structural depletion of above-ground stocks that has been running for five consecutive years, drawing down the inventories that previously provided the buffer between supply and demand. The deficit represents roughly one full year of global mine production. The market has been consuming its seed corn, and the January crash did nothing to replenish it.
Even with thirty percent thrifting in TOPCon solar cells, the forty percent year-over-year expansion in global photovoltaic installations creates a net demand increase that consensus models fail to net out. Industrial demand is not declining. It is accelerating faster than efficiency gains can offset.
Standard commodity models treat inventory as a buffer stock that dampens price volatility. When prices rise too fast, inventory releases, and prices moderate. When prices fall too far, inventory absorbs, and prices stabilize. This model requires inventory to exist in sufficient quantity to perform the buffering function. When cumulative deficits have consumed the inventory, the buffer no longer functions. Price discovery migrates from the margin of inventory release to the margin of demand destruction. The question is no longer what price brings supply and demand into balance through normal market adjustment. The question is what price forces industrial users to reduce consumption involuntarily, and the answer to that question is substantially higher than current prices...."
Shanghai Premium Over COMEX: Currently thirteen to fifteen percent. Watch for compression below five percent as failure signal or expansion above twenty percent as stress intensification.
COMEX Registered Inventory: Currently one hundred eight point seven million ounces. Watch for decline below one hundred million ounces as stress signal or rise above one hundred fifty million ounces as failure signal.
Silver Lease Rates One-Month: Currently elevated above normal. Watch for sustained normalization below one percent as failure signal or spike above fifty percent as stress signal.
March 2026 Open Interest Versus Registered: Currently fourteen to one ratio. Watch for delivery notices exceeding seven percent of open interest as stress confirmation.
Fresnillo and Peer Production Guidance: Currently declining. Watch for upward revision as supply response signal.
There is this element that adds volatility. Brave AI: "China’s 2026 Silver Export Policies took effect on January 1, 2026, marking a major shift in global commodity dynamics . The country replaced its previous quota system with a strict licensing framework for silver exports, managed by the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM)."
Hope you have made preparations.
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Game on!
BK
🦬
I read some bullshit that Israel fabricated the movements in silver and that Israel controls the us of a - and if that is so - I say EFF Israel. Eff em to hell.
But if so, if Bondi is bonded - and Trump is a puppet - Vance just another puppet in line - then so be it -
Tis WAR!
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Let the best ideas prevail.
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Personally - I'd just assume an attack upon Iran occurs - and then lets bring this to resolution - one way or the other. Tis my humble view if Iran has made preparations with assistance from those who give a shit about the future, the Tel Aviv is toast - and for good measure - sink the Lincoln is my council.
Meanwhile - Odessa beckons.
Tis WAR I type again.