Simple economics - and silver is both most conductive out of all the metals and most reflective - there must be high demand for that nowadays - so fair to deduce the price of silver based on that.
As for gold - that is a whole nether topic - but one wonders how much gold is actually in Fort Knox?
Disintermediation, eliminating exchange middlement/manipulators seems to be good, but it means the price of silver is what you can buy silver for at your dealer, or miner, if you are big like that.
When it comes to "removing" the middle-man, let me suggest barter is the best form of trade!
Now when it comes to silver - just package it carefully if you intend to use it in a barter transaction - and god bless you if you do.
I got some silver I might barter for the right price!
But in general my game is going to be to trade high concentrate capsaicin product - well above 2% in an acetic acid solution concentrated and I'll trade that for some silver coin!
Now my background is chemical engineering and I've worked in a plant or two and this is how I concentrate my "product". I take the hottest peppers from the season and wearing gloves I place them in the stainless steel pot with vinegar in it.....and then I boil the mixture - and lo and behold if I boil it enough.....it turns into a highly concentrated paste....and then after that I could tell you what I do - but that info is proprietary!
~
Make me an offer with some silver coin and then maybe I'll be willing to make a trade. This product really is something that adds a little life to soup and other products, and of course if you need to make a spray out of it to put in the eyes of an offender and can do that as well being how high it is concentrated.
~
So it ain't about disintermediation in my book - it is about what you got to offer for barter. So, I got some goods already on the shelf, but the product I got in mind of the end of the '26 season is going to really have merit.....so lets wait till I get that on the shelf - and then just to be purist about it - I'll send it off to a lab to get a full and fair assessment of the capsaicin content. What could be more fair than that?
You describe pepper-mace. I think BIC lighters and boxes of .22 LR may trade well. Who knows? One might value window screen in a world without electricity, right?
There are many possibilities, but we know what the basics we need are.
People don't have much fuel stored, in general, I observe, nor do I.
I'm what you might call a "big fan" of propane. I got a few hundred gallons here where I reside in storage. Just in case. Sort of like an "insurance policy" - just like stacked gold and silver in small amounts make for good insurance John Day MD.
Warm Regards to you - and I'm very fond of Tejas - been all over that state literally. Got kin live there as well.
Propane is the fuel you can store, but it sure is dangerous if it leaks, pools and catches a spark. Gotta be careful.
We've got great mosquitos, too. Used to be malaria-belt and the original white ("indentured servants") slaves died, so they got replaced with black slaves that tolerated malaria better. It was all business...
One thing I like about Yoakum is that it was never a slave econmy, just German and Czech farmers fleeing war in Europe.
That is basically true and I concur - up to a moment. The moment is when (and lets hope this don't happen) the SHIT HITS the FAN - like literally. At that moment, you are better served if you have not been "under the radar" but rather have been expressing views known publicly.
I think it is important to look at the gold and silver mining companies earnings reports for insights into the "real" cost of silver. Many companies reported average sales prices for silver that were actually far above the average comex silver prices for the same period. That tells you what is happening in the real world outside of the financial markets.
""Hecla reported an average realized silver price in Q4 2025 of $69.28 per ounce. The fourth quarter COMEX average was somewhere in the $55-60 range - silver opened October at $47, spent November in the $48-57 band, and only broke decisively higher in late December. A rough average across those three months puts the benchmark around $56.""
Vince Lanci said years ago that the Comex dying would not be a dramatic event as you stated. Probably a paragraph on page 8 in the WSJ announcing the closing of the exchange. The CME can only blame themselves.
Modi went in front of the Knesset just prior to the start of the recent conflagration - he seems to be sort of a traitor to everyday folk - and there are many of them in India no doubt - more than China nowadays.
Modi is a loser in my book - I can't stand the fella after I listened to what he expressed to the Knesset - if you want to puke, just ask and I'll share the video of his speech.
The COMEX sidelining thesis is the structural insight that most silver analysis misses entirely. Once physical buyers start going direct to refiners, the exchange price becomes self-referential, its pricing the speculative activity of traders rather than the supply-demand dynamics of actual metal. The Shanghai premium at 12-13% above LBMA spot is effectively telling you that the benchmark has stopped representing the clearing price. LBMA spot has become a fiction both sides find temporarily useful, sellers discount off it to move volume, buyers reference it to negotiate. But the real price is the one people are actually paying for bars they can hold.
The miner re-rating argument is where this gets investable though. Your point about AISC is the one the equity market hasnt caught up with. A stable floor above $70 changes the entire financial modelling exercise for producers. You go from discounting future cash flows against a price that might not exist next quarter to underwriting against a structural floor that industrial demand keeps reinforcing. thats not a momentum trade, thats a duration trade, and duration trades attract a completely different class of capital than the momentum crowd thats been whipping the miners around for years.
I probably shouldn’t be commenting on this as I don't own any silver, apart from a few old quarters I kept for nostalgic reasons. My two cub toonies are probably worth more than they are by now. Note to Canadians: Check your toonies when you get them in change. If the bear has only one cub, spend them. If two cubs, keep them. Here’s why:
Ha! And you thought silver prices were all over the map:)
OK, so just off the top of my head, no actual numbers provided, it seems to me if we are headed into the kind of global depression some are talking about (The Great Trump Depression, or GTD as it will be known) then the price of things is going to vary wildly - to the upside on things we desperately need, and to the downside on things we don’t need. So the question then is, how much silver is consumed by things we don’t need, or things we can put off buying until they break and need replacing, such as cell phones?
The silver price rise is obviously demand driven, but once that is an established trend does that not draw in speculators and further raise the price? So, at what point does that higher price cause companies that make things we don’t need stop making those things which then causes a drop in demand for silver? Also, with the price going up, doesn’t that draw a lot of scrap silver out of the woodwork, or is that an insignificant amount relative to total supply? That’s my highly knowledgeable contribution to the conversation. I’ll shut up now:)
What will a stock market calamity do with the price of PMs? Gold: probably will hold relatively stable (CBs are buying after all). Silver is more volatile: initial heavy drop as you already deduced because of its industrial value. But the monetary part also wants to play, and it's a more achievable goal than gold for most people. So there's more potential demand there.
Silver could be substituted in lots of things by copper if need be (ie: when it's too expensive). However, Cu is also on a roll these days. Still MUCH cheaper though. But for high performance and critical applications? Silver's the unbeaten champion. -- I'm sure some of our more knowledgeable commenters can chime in here 😉 **-- John enters the chat**.
Then there is the FED, most likely what they'd do is print print print. So the place to be then is stocks and PMs. You know, companies with real values or commodities in general.
Then there is now the Ramadan War: which if nothing else is a HUGE sales pitch for "green energy". Mostly meaning solar panels (because wind is not really green, but that's a topic for another day). Which means silver in the high-performant ones. Copper could be used, but the timeline for replacing silver on a meaningful scale is like 4 years. If they started around summer last year, that's still around 3y to go. So still 3y of persistent demand from that angle.
EVs? Well, same story, but here you nearly cannot replace the silver as you need the range in the battery. I don't see much substitution happening there.
anyone who bought in the last half year is probably underwater. Which tends to disillusion people (not me, I've been there for the better part of 10-15 years... And the thesis did not change - much. I guess a broken clock CAN be right sometimes 😉)
Then on to your scrap question: https://no01.substack.com/p/cope-or-hope-for-silver ""Refiners were suspending silver purchases."". The silver's there, just not in the right format to be traded. https://no01.substack.com/p/a-whale-just-learned-a-costly-lesson ""Elemetal and Metalor - two of the biggest refiners in the United States - have paused purchases of scrap gold and implemented a pool system with no price locks. Gold settlement times have been extended to 7-10 business days. Silver? 4-6 weeks.""
Thanks for the detailed reply. One thing I came across while looking at the EV market was this, which seems very bullish for silver (if they can find enough).
On the scrap question, I hadn't considered the pricing mechanism, so thanks for pointing that out. As a rule I should probably go back and read your previous posts before asking questions that may have already been answered, so your patience is much appreciated.
Hmmm... if these solid state batteries take hold, I wonder if battery theft will become a problem the way cat-converter theft is today?
No1 - wife and I are looking to buy an investment property for an STR (airbnb) in Colorado. Really want to get in on some passive income and I can do all the remodeling work. What’s your thougts on leveraging investment properties with equity from a primary residence? Retarded? Worth the risk?
Usual caveat - I'm not a financial advisor, just some guy on the internet with opinions.
"passive income" and "STR" in the same sentence is doing some heavy lifting. Even with a cleaner and a property manager you're running a hospitality business. Dynamic pricing, guest complaints, seasonality, the 11pm plumbing call. Add the remodeling you're planning to do yourself and... that's a second job, not a passive holding.
I'm also half a world away, but in general in the west we have a LOT of regulations. So that's another risk. Check the specific town's ordinance and which way the council is leaning before anything else.
And last: pulling equity from your primary to fund the STR is... well, not very wise. If regs hit or the market softens, you're carrying two mortgages and one of them is the roof over your head. My take: the cash flow should cover debt service in a bad year, not an average one.
Not crazy as a play. Just not passive, and the risk isn't only on the STR.
Money, fiat currency, banks and capitalism (for financial profit operated society) are all the same thing. The only purpose of money is to enable financial profits (which are themselves claims to unearned wealth). Sustained financial profits require perpetual, sustained geometric growth of the money supply to be mathematically possible. This, in turn, requires that fiat currency be legal tender because this is not possible using sound money. This, in turn, requires that, if you began with sound money, you gradually reduce the weight or the purity of the precious metal in each monetary unit of sound money. People don't realise or refuse to realise that reducing the weight or the purity of the precious metal in precious metal coins is a form of fiat currency creation. As is allowing coin clipping or counterfeiting. However, this isn't really enough in the lon term, not by itself. So capitalism then requires that you allow the legalised fraud that is banking to create fictional yet spendable amounts of sound money, which itself is done by allowing both depositors and borrowers to spend the same money separately, at the same time, without drawing down each other's remaining amount of supposedly physically existing sound money purportedly in the bank's vault.
The perpetual geometric growth of the money supply which is required by capitalism's for-financial-profit-operated-society model unavoidably results in perpetual loss of purchasing power unless, at the same time and at comparable rates, the population, size of the industrial base and real productivity all grow as well, along with the money supply. And, most importantly, it requires that the population actually has access to the money needed to actually buy the industrial output. All of these things cannot stably continue being to be the case together, concurrently and continuously, in the long term.
Thus the currency's purchasing power is diluted by its ever faster growing availability relative to what can be purchased using it. Thus production costs are ever higher even if wages are stagnant. Thus there is ever growing pressure to move production away to areas of the nation where the national fiat currency is scarcer. Thus there is industry flight from the big cities, where the most borrowers borrow the most money every year and where the supply of the national fiat currency grows the fastest.
This is accelerated by developments in shipping and transportation reducing the time and money cost of shipping or hauling freight. This facilitates industrial flight to rural areas of the country.
Then, later on, industry flees abroad to places where the domestic fiat currency is even scarcer and where it is highly prized and valued because it can be used to buy the nation's industrial and technological goods produced by the domestic industry which hasn't all been eviscerated by relocation abroad yet. So the first industries to relocate abroad get the best deal.
And all of this flight abroad to escape the domestic inflation while shipping and hauling the resulting goods and products back home, to sell in the highly inflationary domestic market for much more than can be asked for the same amount of the same quality of goods abroad, is made all the more bad if 3rd party net exporters are convinced, persuaded or forced to demand your national fiat currency as payment for whatever it is that they are net exporters of. Particularly something fundamental to the real economy such as energy and chemical industry precursors, raw materials and inputs.
Other, net exporting countries demanding, as payment for their net exports, your own national fiat currency means that there is even less of a need for goods and products produced by your domestic industry (or your foreign located but domestically owned industry whose products and goods still demand payment in your national fiat currency) to be created or exported in order to create the foreign demand for your national fiat currency which you would need in order to convince foreign manufacturers or producers of goods or products you wish to import to accept your own national fiat currency as payment, rather than actual sound money or the national fiat currency of some other net exporting country.
Which further decouples your nation's ability to consume imports without producing or dispatching exports. Which removes all brakes to domestic deindustrialisation.
Eventually, almost all industry (and other branches of the real economy, the economy of making and of doing tangible physical things in the real world) relocates abroad and the only industries left back home are those which can't as easily be relocated. Such as hotels, restaurants, retail, FIRE etc. And the home country only produces and only exports fiat currency anymore. That is the end stage of capitalism. Capitalism is an inherently and implicitly anti-economic system which can only serve as an economic system with very strong and ever escalating, diversifying and evolving interventionism and state control, restriction, regulation.
The notion of money, itself, is collective mental illness.
At the end of the day, all honest trade and economic activity is barter and always has been. Money is a rationing system and promises of future payment. Money is not wealth. Money is only claims to wealth. The only practical and actually useful utilisation of money is to separate, in time and/or space, the two halves of barter. But the two halves of barter still need to exist for trade to be real and to be honest.
But by separating the two halves of barter (actual honest trade) in time and/or space, it enables dishonesty and stealing from one or the other of the parties to honest trade, which is and can only be barter. Money is just promises of future payment not payment in and of itself.
The only way out and forward is to move beyond money, banks and capitalism altogether.
Big chunks of this I'm with you on - debasement, fractional reserve as legalised fraud, the Cantillon distribution, money as stored time being plundered. I even wrote a piece called "Money is time" back in July '25 that hits a lot of the same beats (https://no01.substack.com/p/money-is-time).
Where we part ways is the diagnosis at the root. I see money as a useful tool that capitalism corrupted, not as the original sin itself.
Honest barter separated in time and space is still trade I'd want to be able to do, and a hard-money unit that actually represents stored labour is the cleanest way I've found to enable that without enabling the fraud you're describing.
So the deindustrialisation chain you lay out - I think that's mostly downstream of fiat plus legal tender, not money as such. Fix the unit, kill legal tender, let markets pick the medium, and a lot of the rot doesn't compound the way it does now.
Probably too optimistic on my part. But that's where I land.
I think you would like to see money and perpetual geometric expansion of the supply thereof so as to enable and facilitate financial profit (I define capitalism as a society or civilisation which operates for financial profit) cleaved somehow, and believe that that would be possible, and I don't think that it is indeed actually possible to cleave money and perpetually geometrically expansion money supplies, inflation and the rest of the chain of consequences which follow. I think money exists precisely to enable money printing to, in turn, enable financial profit and misallocation and redistribution of wealth and living standards from the working class to the financier class and their servants (if only they didn't also destroy the economy and living standards of the plebs and proles as well, in the process). So I don't think you can cleave anything of what we've seen, so far throughout history, from basing your society or civilisation on money.
Moreover, if you have a monetary system, you are conditioning the execution or performance of real economic activity upon there being sufficient money available and also allocated for it, even if the actual real world physical resources for that activity do exist in abundance. And you are also enabling misallocation or waste of resources by way of arbitrarily funding of otherwise suboptimal or deleterious and even stupid activities by the institution(s) which create money inside of your society deciding to finance said activities. And you are also granting control over society to the institution(s) which create its money. Or the bribable people who lead, direct or staff said institutions.
Clearly, you are of the opinion that you can have money without it devolving into fiat currency. I think otherwise. I think money is precisely seigniorage which means precisely the arbitrary or fiat component to its purchasing power. And I also think that "sound money" is just a mind game and confidence trick to get the masses to accept the replacement fiat currency for the one that's at the end of its life cycle, so that the capitalist (ever accelerating printing of fiat currency for a few decades) can begin anew.
Furthermore, I think the core of our disagreement on whether money, perpetual geometric expansion of the money supply, deindustrialisation, depopulation, impoverishment of most of the population through shrinkflation, enshittification, price hikes can be cleaved from each other because you are of the belief that you can have a monetary system based society which either does not operate for financial profit or, alternatively, that you can have generalized financial profitability without ever accelerating money printing to mathematically enable financial profits to exist. Both of which I disagree with but I know and understand that very few people agree with me on the need to move beyond money (and implicitly also banks and capitalism) altogether. I think the point and purpose of money is precisely to enable money printing / fiat currency so as to, in turn, enable financial profits. And that you cannot have a monetary system society without the financial profit requirement. I don't see how that would work or be possible except with a single employer, single manufacturer/producer, single shipper, single seller society where everyone works for something like Weyland Yutani and nothing apart from or outside of Weyland Yutani exists. And everyone in society is just a member of staff and employee of WY. But why even have money at all, then, instead of merely monthly/yearly consumption quotas?
If you try and get around this by being a net exporting nation then you are just outsourcing / offshoring the fulfillment of your money printing or money creation need and, if you accept foreign fiat currencies as payment for your exports, you are trading real, physical, tangible wealth in the present real world for theoretical, hypothetical promises of future payment. Simply because your capitalist society requires financial profit simply to continue operating. As do all capitalist societies.
And we need to remember and realise that you are NOT paid when you receive fiat currency. You are paid when you SPEND your fiat currency. Fiat currency, and money itself (money means seigniorage which means fiat component to its purchasing power), are promises of future payment, not payment in and of itself, and claims to hypothetical wealth, not wealth themselves.
I think we'll need to move beyond money, banks and capitalism, as a species and civilisation, before the middle of this century, if not sooner, or we will not survive as a civilisation and possibly species. But I can see how this opinion is scarcer than hen's teeth and will continue to be so until almost everyone is personally, directly and catastrophically impacted by the collapse so as to become willing to even consider doing things differently.
The real intrigue is that export numbers keep outpacing visible COMEX withdrawals — the silver is coming from somewhere, but the exact sourcing stays opaque (shadow inventory, refiners, rerouting?). Physical demand keeps pulling while paper markets get quietly sidelined.
As another commenter once said: there is NO deficit in silver.
There is one in proper form and shape.
And I tend to agree with him.
However, for all intents and purposes that argument is moot because of how the silver market is behaving. It's acting as if there is a real deficit with the consistent eastern premium and elevated lease rates.
So, I'm trading that. Especially because it persisted as long as now.
I've been buying and sellling certified and uncertified silver coins all along. I could never figure how and when to stack and store pms letting them gather dust as I did years ago. Then I saw a lot of fanatics hoarding and crowing about their love of the metals. Crazy.
The value of silver is a function of demand.
You know #1 - supply and demand.
Simple economics - and silver is both most conductive out of all the metals and most reflective - there must be high demand for that nowadays - so fair to deduce the price of silver based on that.
As for gold - that is a whole nether topic - but one wonders how much gold is actually in Fort Knox?
🦗
"I wonder if they left the gold in Fort Knox cuz they steal a lot."
Did Trump really say that just a few days ago?
You never know these days.
🙄
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fort-knox-gold-audit-update-from-trump-which-one-i-wonder-they-steal-a-lot/ar-AA22Risd
What I reacted to was his quip
"They steal alot"
When the King says that about unspecified underlings, you expect soon trials and executions to follow.
Not necessarily in that order.
Orange man says a lot of things that turn out to have no roots to reality though. Look at the 50th announcement of victory in Iran for latest example
One could say that about any politician actually.
😁
Where did Saddam’s gold go? Where did Libya’s gold go? Fort Knox? IDK.
Disintermediation, eliminating exchange middlement/manipulators seems to be good, but it means the price of silver is what you can buy silver for at your dealer, or miner, if you are big like that.
Different times...
Hell of a good word there John Day, but I don't think it is applicable in this situation. The long word you typed: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disintermediation
When it comes to "removing" the middle-man, let me suggest barter is the best form of trade!
Now when it comes to silver - just package it carefully if you intend to use it in a barter transaction - and god bless you if you do.
I got some silver I might barter for the right price!
But in general my game is going to be to trade high concentrate capsaicin product - well above 2% in an acetic acid solution concentrated and I'll trade that for some silver coin!
Now my background is chemical engineering and I've worked in a plant or two and this is how I concentrate my "product". I take the hottest peppers from the season and wearing gloves I place them in the stainless steel pot with vinegar in it.....and then I boil the mixture - and lo and behold if I boil it enough.....it turns into a highly concentrated paste....and then after that I could tell you what I do - but that info is proprietary!
~
Make me an offer with some silver coin and then maybe I'll be willing to make a trade. This product really is something that adds a little life to soup and other products, and of course if you need to make a spray out of it to put in the eyes of an offender and can do that as well being how high it is concentrated.
~
So it ain't about disintermediation in my book - it is about what you got to offer for barter. So, I got some goods already on the shelf, but the product I got in mind of the end of the '26 season is going to really have merit.....so lets wait till I get that on the shelf - and then just to be purist about it - I'll send it off to a lab to get a full and fair assessment of the capsaicin content. What could be more fair than that?
You describe pepper-mace. I think BIC lighters and boxes of .22 LR may trade well. Who knows? One might value window screen in a world without electricity, right?
There are many possibilities, but we know what the basics we need are.
People don't have much fuel stored, in general, I observe, nor do I.
I'm what you might call a "big fan" of propane. I got a few hundred gallons here where I reside in storage. Just in case. Sort of like an "insurance policy" - just like stacked gold and silver in small amounts make for good insurance John Day MD.
Warm Regards to you - and I'm very fond of Tejas - been all over that state literally. Got kin live there as well.
BK
Propane is the fuel you can store, but it sure is dangerous if it leaks, pools and catches a spark. Gotta be careful.
We've got great mosquitos, too. Used to be malaria-belt and the original white ("indentured servants") slaves died, so they got replaced with black slaves that tolerated malaria better. It was all business...
One thing I like about Yoakum is that it was never a slave econmy, just German and Czech farmers fleeing war in Europe.
A slow build is always more sustainable than a huge spike, and it’s good not to make waves but cruise under the radar lest you attract attention
That is basically true and I concur - up to a moment. The moment is when (and lets hope this don't happen) the SHIT HITS the FAN - like literally. At that moment, you are better served if you have not been "under the radar" but rather have been expressing views known publicly.
Just saying....
I think it is important to look at the gold and silver mining companies earnings reports for insights into the "real" cost of silver. Many companies reported average sales prices for silver that were actually far above the average comex silver prices for the same period. That tells you what is happening in the real world outside of the financial markets.
🎯
Feb 18: https://no01.substack.com/i/188370554/part-3-heclas-q4-25-and-2025-report >> (part 3)
""Hecla reported an average realized silver price in Q4 2025 of $69.28 per ounce. The fourth quarter COMEX average was somewhere in the $55-60 range - silver opened October at $47, spent November in the $48-57 band, and only broke decisively higher in late December. A rough average across those three months puts the benchmark around $56.""
Thank you so much for filling in the blank. Things happen so quickly these days that important information can be forgotten in the stream.
Vince Lanci said years ago that the Comex dying would not be a dramatic event as you stated. Probably a paragraph on page 8 in the WSJ announcing the closing of the exchange. The CME can only blame themselves.
afaik the LME is still around. Those institutions don't die easily...
My main take is that they'll cower back in obscurity and in a decade from now, No1 heard about them any longer.
"Modi started by publicly asking Indians to stop buying gold for a year to preserve foreign exchange reserves."
"The King started by publicly asking Swedes to stop buying coffee to preserve foreign exchange reserves."
Than the king banned coffee imports and coffee drinking entirely.
In the late 1600:s that was.
You can see how well that worked out.
Swedes drink more coffee that any other people in the world now.
Yeah. Everything's fine. Nothing to see here. Please move along.
In the game of Diplomacy - if I was playing - Modi be "odd man out".
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/483/diplomacy
Regards,
BK
Modi went in front of the Knesset just prior to the start of the recent conflagration - he seems to be sort of a traitor to everyday folk - and there are many of them in India no doubt - more than China nowadays.
Modi is a loser in my book - I can't stand the fella after I listened to what he expressed to the Knesset - if you want to puke, just ask and I'll share the video of his speech.
Holy Moly Modi - you are LOST.
The COMEX sidelining thesis is the structural insight that most silver analysis misses entirely. Once physical buyers start going direct to refiners, the exchange price becomes self-referential, its pricing the speculative activity of traders rather than the supply-demand dynamics of actual metal. The Shanghai premium at 12-13% above LBMA spot is effectively telling you that the benchmark has stopped representing the clearing price. LBMA spot has become a fiction both sides find temporarily useful, sellers discount off it to move volume, buyers reference it to negotiate. But the real price is the one people are actually paying for bars they can hold.
The miner re-rating argument is where this gets investable though. Your point about AISC is the one the equity market hasnt caught up with. A stable floor above $70 changes the entire financial modelling exercise for producers. You go from discounting future cash flows against a price that might not exist next quarter to underwriting against a structural floor that industrial demand keeps reinforcing. thats not a momentum trade, thats a duration trade, and duration trades attract a completely different class of capital than the momentum crowd thats been whipping the miners around for years.
I probably shouldn’t be commenting on this as I don't own any silver, apart from a few old quarters I kept for nostalgic reasons. My two cub toonies are probably worth more than they are by now. Note to Canadians: Check your toonies when you get them in change. If the bear has only one cub, spend them. If two cubs, keep them. Here’s why:
https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_nkw=2000+canada+two+cub+toonie
Ha! And you thought silver prices were all over the map:)
OK, so just off the top of my head, no actual numbers provided, it seems to me if we are headed into the kind of global depression some are talking about (The Great Trump Depression, or GTD as it will be known) then the price of things is going to vary wildly - to the upside on things we desperately need, and to the downside on things we don’t need. So the question then is, how much silver is consumed by things we don’t need, or things we can put off buying until they break and need replacing, such as cell phones?
The silver price rise is obviously demand driven, but once that is an established trend does that not draw in speculators and further raise the price? So, at what point does that higher price cause companies that make things we don’t need stop making those things which then causes a drop in demand for silver? Also, with the price going up, doesn’t that draw a lot of scrap silver out of the woodwork, or is that an insignificant amount relative to total supply? That’s my highly knowledgeable contribution to the conversation. I’ll shut up now:)
Lots to unpack here.
What will a stock market calamity do with the price of PMs? Gold: probably will hold relatively stable (CBs are buying after all). Silver is more volatile: initial heavy drop as you already deduced because of its industrial value. But the monetary part also wants to play, and it's a more achievable goal than gold for most people. So there's more potential demand there.
Silver could be substituted in lots of things by copper if need be (ie: when it's too expensive). However, Cu is also on a roll these days. Still MUCH cheaper though. But for high performance and critical applications? Silver's the unbeaten champion. -- I'm sure some of our more knowledgeable commenters can chime in here 😉 **-- John enters the chat**.
Then there is the FED, most likely what they'd do is print print print. So the place to be then is stocks and PMs. You know, companies with real values or commodities in general.
Then there is now the Ramadan War: which if nothing else is a HUGE sales pitch for "green energy". Mostly meaning solar panels (because wind is not really green, but that's a topic for another day). Which means silver in the high-performant ones. Copper could be used, but the timeline for replacing silver on a meaningful scale is like 4 years. If they started around summer last year, that's still around 3y to go. So still 3y of persistent demand from that angle.
EVs? Well, same story, but here you nearly cannot replace the silver as you need the range in the battery. I don't see much substitution happening there.
Late last year, we saw speculators entering the silver trade. But things got out of hand so the PTB had to crush any sentiment. And boy they did... [ https://no01.substack.com/p/this-ones-for-the-history-books & post mortem: https://no01.substack.com/p/the-aftershocks & https://no01.substack.com/p/the-rules-are-made-to-be-gamed ]
anyone who bought in the last half year is probably underwater. Which tends to disillusion people (not me, I've been there for the better part of 10-15 years... And the thesis did not change - much. I guess a broken clock CAN be right sometimes 😉)
Then on to your scrap question: https://no01.substack.com/p/cope-or-hope-for-silver ""Refiners were suspending silver purchases."". The silver's there, just not in the right format to be traded. https://no01.substack.com/p/a-whale-just-learned-a-costly-lesson ""Elemetal and Metalor - two of the biggest refiners in the United States - have paused purchases of scrap gold and implemented a pool system with no price locks. Gold settlement times have been extended to 7-10 business days. Silver? 4-6 weeks.""
Thanks for the detailed reply. One thing I came across while looking at the EV market was this, which seems very bullish for silver (if they can find enough).
https://www.investorideas.com/news/2026/mining/05081-solid-state-battery-breakthrough-silver-demand.asp
On the scrap question, I hadn't considered the pricing mechanism, so thanks for pointing that out. As a rule I should probably go back and read your previous posts before asking questions that may have already been answered, so your patience is much appreciated.
Hmmm... if these solid state batteries take hold, I wonder if battery theft will become a problem the way cat-converter theft is today?
Wonder how much the sulfur price is gonna affect the miners - their costs will go way up too.
https://no01.substack.com/i/194778307/sulfuric-acid-copper-silver-and-what-you-actually-own
This interestingly good PM analysis is why I'm here ! Skimmed it so I could post quickly.
Well, pricing up to 5/13 WAS a bull trap. Big red numbers in my accounts 😧 But I'm used to it.
The AG to ~50 & AU 3,500-4,000 still looks weak, as does AG to 200-300(?!) by summer or perhaps anytime this year.
I continue to stand pat. Looking for an entry into platinum. Historically quite undervalued to AU.
No1's AG chopping in a 70-100 range for the next several months is looking increasingly prescient.
But a classic text on silver's subtitle wasn't "THE RESTLESS METAL" for nothing !
No1 - wife and I are looking to buy an investment property for an STR (airbnb) in Colorado. Really want to get in on some passive income and I can do all the remodeling work. What’s your thougts on leveraging investment properties with equity from a primary residence? Retarded? Worth the risk?
Usual caveat - I'm not a financial advisor, just some guy on the internet with opinions.
"passive income" and "STR" in the same sentence is doing some heavy lifting. Even with a cleaner and a property manager you're running a hospitality business. Dynamic pricing, guest complaints, seasonality, the 11pm plumbing call. Add the remodeling you're planning to do yourself and... that's a second job, not a passive holding.
I'm also half a world away, but in general in the west we have a LOT of regulations. So that's another risk. Check the specific town's ordinance and which way the council is leaning before anything else.
And last: pulling equity from your primary to fund the STR is... well, not very wise. If regs hit or the market softens, you're carrying two mortgages and one of them is the roof over your head. My take: the cash flow should cover debt service in a bad year, not an average one.
Not crazy as a play. Just not passive, and the risk isn't only on the STR.
Money, fiat currency, banks and capitalism (for financial profit operated society) are all the same thing. The only purpose of money is to enable financial profits (which are themselves claims to unearned wealth). Sustained financial profits require perpetual, sustained geometric growth of the money supply to be mathematically possible. This, in turn, requires that fiat currency be legal tender because this is not possible using sound money. This, in turn, requires that, if you began with sound money, you gradually reduce the weight or the purity of the precious metal in each monetary unit of sound money. People don't realise or refuse to realise that reducing the weight or the purity of the precious metal in precious metal coins is a form of fiat currency creation. As is allowing coin clipping or counterfeiting. However, this isn't really enough in the lon term, not by itself. So capitalism then requires that you allow the legalised fraud that is banking to create fictional yet spendable amounts of sound money, which itself is done by allowing both depositors and borrowers to spend the same money separately, at the same time, without drawing down each other's remaining amount of supposedly physically existing sound money purportedly in the bank's vault.
The perpetual geometric growth of the money supply which is required by capitalism's for-financial-profit-operated-society model unavoidably results in perpetual loss of purchasing power unless, at the same time and at comparable rates, the population, size of the industrial base and real productivity all grow as well, along with the money supply. And, most importantly, it requires that the population actually has access to the money needed to actually buy the industrial output. All of these things cannot stably continue being to be the case together, concurrently and continuously, in the long term.
Thus the currency's purchasing power is diluted by its ever faster growing availability relative to what can be purchased using it. Thus production costs are ever higher even if wages are stagnant. Thus there is ever growing pressure to move production away to areas of the nation where the national fiat currency is scarcer. Thus there is industry flight from the big cities, where the most borrowers borrow the most money every year and where the supply of the national fiat currency grows the fastest.
This is accelerated by developments in shipping and transportation reducing the time and money cost of shipping or hauling freight. This facilitates industrial flight to rural areas of the country.
Then, later on, industry flees abroad to places where the domestic fiat currency is even scarcer and where it is highly prized and valued because it can be used to buy the nation's industrial and technological goods produced by the domestic industry which hasn't all been eviscerated by relocation abroad yet. So the first industries to relocate abroad get the best deal.
And all of this flight abroad to escape the domestic inflation while shipping and hauling the resulting goods and products back home, to sell in the highly inflationary domestic market for much more than can be asked for the same amount of the same quality of goods abroad, is made all the more bad if 3rd party net exporters are convinced, persuaded or forced to demand your national fiat currency as payment for whatever it is that they are net exporters of. Particularly something fundamental to the real economy such as energy and chemical industry precursors, raw materials and inputs.
Other, net exporting countries demanding, as payment for their net exports, your own national fiat currency means that there is even less of a need for goods and products produced by your domestic industry (or your foreign located but domestically owned industry whose products and goods still demand payment in your national fiat currency) to be created or exported in order to create the foreign demand for your national fiat currency which you would need in order to convince foreign manufacturers or producers of goods or products you wish to import to accept your own national fiat currency as payment, rather than actual sound money or the national fiat currency of some other net exporting country.
Which further decouples your nation's ability to consume imports without producing or dispatching exports. Which removes all brakes to domestic deindustrialisation.
Eventually, almost all industry (and other branches of the real economy, the economy of making and of doing tangible physical things in the real world) relocates abroad and the only industries left back home are those which can't as easily be relocated. Such as hotels, restaurants, retail, FIRE etc. And the home country only produces and only exports fiat currency anymore. That is the end stage of capitalism. Capitalism is an inherently and implicitly anti-economic system which can only serve as an economic system with very strong and ever escalating, diversifying and evolving interventionism and state control, restriction, regulation.
The notion of money, itself, is collective mental illness.
At the end of the day, all honest trade and economic activity is barter and always has been. Money is a rationing system and promises of future payment. Money is not wealth. Money is only claims to wealth. The only practical and actually useful utilisation of money is to separate, in time and/or space, the two halves of barter. But the two halves of barter still need to exist for trade to be real and to be honest.
But by separating the two halves of barter (actual honest trade) in time and/or space, it enables dishonesty and stealing from one or the other of the parties to honest trade, which is and can only be barter. Money is just promises of future payment not payment in and of itself.
The only way out and forward is to move beyond money, banks and capitalism altogether.
Big chunks of this I'm with you on - debasement, fractional reserve as legalised fraud, the Cantillon distribution, money as stored time being plundered. I even wrote a piece called "Money is time" back in July '25 that hits a lot of the same beats (https://no01.substack.com/p/money-is-time).
Where we part ways is the diagnosis at the root. I see money as a useful tool that capitalism corrupted, not as the original sin itself.
Honest barter separated in time and space is still trade I'd want to be able to do, and a hard-money unit that actually represents stored labour is the cleanest way I've found to enable that without enabling the fraud you're describing.
So the deindustrialisation chain you lay out - I think that's mostly downstream of fiat plus legal tender, not money as such. Fix the unit, kill legal tender, let markets pick the medium, and a lot of the rot doesn't compound the way it does now.
Probably too optimistic on my part. But that's where I land.
I think you would like to see money and perpetual geometric expansion of the supply thereof so as to enable and facilitate financial profit (I define capitalism as a society or civilisation which operates for financial profit) cleaved somehow, and believe that that would be possible, and I don't think that it is indeed actually possible to cleave money and perpetually geometrically expansion money supplies, inflation and the rest of the chain of consequences which follow. I think money exists precisely to enable money printing to, in turn, enable financial profit and misallocation and redistribution of wealth and living standards from the working class to the financier class and their servants (if only they didn't also destroy the economy and living standards of the plebs and proles as well, in the process). So I don't think you can cleave anything of what we've seen, so far throughout history, from basing your society or civilisation on money.
Moreover, if you have a monetary system, you are conditioning the execution or performance of real economic activity upon there being sufficient money available and also allocated for it, even if the actual real world physical resources for that activity do exist in abundance. And you are also enabling misallocation or waste of resources by way of arbitrarily funding of otherwise suboptimal or deleterious and even stupid activities by the institution(s) which create money inside of your society deciding to finance said activities. And you are also granting control over society to the institution(s) which create its money. Or the bribable people who lead, direct or staff said institutions.
Clearly, you are of the opinion that you can have money without it devolving into fiat currency. I think otherwise. I think money is precisely seigniorage which means precisely the arbitrary or fiat component to its purchasing power. And I also think that "sound money" is just a mind game and confidence trick to get the masses to accept the replacement fiat currency for the one that's at the end of its life cycle, so that the capitalist (ever accelerating printing of fiat currency for a few decades) can begin anew.
Furthermore, I think the core of our disagreement on whether money, perpetual geometric expansion of the money supply, deindustrialisation, depopulation, impoverishment of most of the population through shrinkflation, enshittification, price hikes can be cleaved from each other because you are of the belief that you can have a monetary system based society which either does not operate for financial profit or, alternatively, that you can have generalized financial profitability without ever accelerating money printing to mathematically enable financial profits to exist. Both of which I disagree with but I know and understand that very few people agree with me on the need to move beyond money (and implicitly also banks and capitalism) altogether. I think the point and purpose of money is precisely to enable money printing / fiat currency so as to, in turn, enable financial profits. And that you cannot have a monetary system society without the financial profit requirement. I don't see how that would work or be possible except with a single employer, single manufacturer/producer, single shipper, single seller society where everyone works for something like Weyland Yutani and nothing apart from or outside of Weyland Yutani exists. And everyone in society is just a member of staff and employee of WY. But why even have money at all, then, instead of merely monthly/yearly consumption quotas?
If you try and get around this by being a net exporting nation then you are just outsourcing / offshoring the fulfillment of your money printing or money creation need and, if you accept foreign fiat currencies as payment for your exports, you are trading real, physical, tangible wealth in the present real world for theoretical, hypothetical promises of future payment. Simply because your capitalist society requires financial profit simply to continue operating. As do all capitalist societies.
And we need to remember and realise that you are NOT paid when you receive fiat currency. You are paid when you SPEND your fiat currency. Fiat currency, and money itself (money means seigniorage which means fiat component to its purchasing power), are promises of future payment, not payment in and of itself, and claims to hypothetical wealth, not wealth themselves.
I think we'll need to move beyond money, banks and capitalism, as a species and civilisation, before the middle of this century, if not sooner, or we will not survive as a civilisation and possibly species. But I can see how this opinion is scarcer than hen's teeth and will continue to be so until almost everyone is personally, directly and catastrophically impacted by the collapse so as to become willing to even consider doing things differently.
The real intrigue is that export numbers keep outpacing visible COMEX withdrawals — the silver is coming from somewhere, but the exact sourcing stays opaque (shadow inventory, refiners, rerouting?). Physical demand keeps pulling while paper markets get quietly sidelined.
CPMGroup says:
"The truth about the silver market surplus and non-existence of a deficit."
Jeffrie Christies has implied that the Silver Institute is a promoter organisation and their data is not to be trusted.
Martin Armstrong said recently that there is a legitimate deficit of silver.
??
Still can't find anyone in Sweden willing to but my scrap silver at "Chinese" prices, still looking of course . . . 🤠
Interesting times . . .
As another commenter once said: there is NO deficit in silver.
There is one in proper form and shape.
And I tend to agree with him.
However, for all intents and purposes that argument is moot because of how the silver market is behaving. It's acting as if there is a real deficit with the consistent eastern premium and elevated lease rates.
So, I'm trading that. Especially because it persisted as long as now.
I'm going to spend some energy and time and try to dig deeper into what is actually going on with silver scrap in Sweden.
Some silver is actually still mined in Sweden, only as a byproduct of other metals I think.
The main historic Sala silver mine has been a museum fo a long time now.
2028 Silver Miner Calls Bitches!!!! It might retire you or buy you a nice vacation
Yup. I have those 😉.
Still relatively cheap for now.
Today (Friday) is going to be interesting too because it's OPEX for GLD & SLV. So the inevitable price suppression is going to happen.
"The trick to beating expectations is 'massaging' them." Under-promise and over-deliver. You must've read my resume. :)
nah, it's more like "underperform and overpromise" 😉
I doubt you'd put that in your resume.
Thanks for the update.
I've been buying and sellling certified and uncertified silver coins all along. I could never figure how and when to stack and store pms letting them gather dust as I did years ago. Then I saw a lot of fanatics hoarding and crowing about their love of the metals. Crazy.
Best way? Don't time it. Just buy a coin every month (or whatever you can put aside).
You won't buy the bottom that way, but you won't buy the top either.
Oh, and don't trade. If history is any indication: silver and gold will hold their values better than any form of paper (or bits) money.