Most honest financial experts know that the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will eventually end (think BRICS, Saudi’s accepting Juan as payment, etc). The only question is when. A decade or even more seems to be what I read most often. After reading this article I’m suspecting that it can happen practically overnight …. IF silver is priced at its actual value, and not suppressed as it has been for decades now. How long can they keep that silver charade up? Anyway, here is your executive overview (from the article).
The dollar’s reserve currency status doesn’t survive a precious metals price explosion. The exorbitant privilege ends. The ability to print dollars and exchange them for real goods from other countries evaporates.
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Someone asked me to explain why they put so much effort into keeping silver cheap. What will happen if silver gets to its real price? Is the only reason that silver price will then symbolize the real inflation of central bank currencies?
Is that all?
No.
It’s actually so much worse than that.
Let me walk you through what I think is really happening. Because the silver (and gold) suppression scheme isn’t just any longer about hiding inflation.
It’s about preventing the collapse of the entire fiat monetary system.
Exaggeration? Maybe. But bear with me and decide for yourself.
Silver is the most accessible monetary metal for regular folks. You can’t buy a gold coin if you’re living paycheck to paycheck. But you can buy an ounce of silver.
And this is also exactly why it’s the most manipulated asset on the planet.
Four banks control 97.5% of all US precious metals derivatives. JPMorgan Chase. Citibank. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. These aren’t small players dabbling in silver futures. These are the institutions that make up the backbone of the American financial system, and they’ve built a massive short position in silver that generates massive profits.
Until physical delivery is demanded.
Then the whole scheme collapses.
The paper-to-physical ratio sits currently at about 400 to 1 on COMEX. That means that for every single ounce of actual, physical silver that exists in the COMEX vaults, there are 400 paper claims on that silver. I don’t know what you would call this. But one thing this is not: a market. It’s a Ponzi scheme wearing a CFTC-approved suit.
When these buyers insist on real physical delivery rather than cash settlement, these paper positions must be covered with actual metal. And if that metal isn’t available… Well, you don’t need to guess… We’re watching that play out in real-time with China freezing silver exports and London vault depletion.
But let’s dig deeper into why they’re doing this.
Silver’s historical role as money directly threatens central bank monopolies on currency. When silver (and gold of course) rises, it screams one thing: your dollars are being debased.
The World Bank data shows M2 money supply growing at 6.4% annually for the past decade. Silver prices stayed flat during that same period. That gap? That’s the theft silver would expose if it were allowed to trade freely.
Money supply moves up ~6.4% every year. But until last year, silver (and gold) basically moved sideways.
Does that make sense in a real market?
I will whisper you the answer: **Of course it doesn’t.**
The U.S. dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve’s creation in 1913. A dollar in 1913 bought what $35 buys today (officially, via ShadowStats it should be $100-$200 now). Anyone who saved dollars across that period lost basically all of their stored time and energy. The theft occurred gradually – about 3% annually (or 6-10% via ShadowStats). Slow enough to avoid triggering a revolt, but fast enough to transfer trillions in real value from savers to the connected.
Silver rising to its real value would make this theft visible to everyone. Not just to the gold bugs and Austrian economists who already know.
To everyone.
The normies.
The people who still trust their 401(k)s and their savings accounts.
‘They’ can’t have that.
Another piece that most people miss: artificially low silver prices benefit massive industries. Tech manufacturers. Solar panel producers. Electronics companies. Medical device makers.
Silver is in everything. Your phone. Your car. Your solar panels. Your water purification systems. Industrial demand hit 680.5 million ounces in 2024, representing around 60% of total demand. Photovoltaic usage alone consumed 197.6 million ounces in 2024 – that’s up from just 87.6 million in 2018, more than doubling in six years as renewable energy deployment expands globally.
If silver hit its real price – $200-$300 in my opinion – production costs across entire industries would spike.
Governments prefer this “stability.” Never mind that it’s fraudulent stability built on paper manipulation and price suppression. Never mind that it has created six consecutive years of physical supply deficits (2020-2025F).
The system demands cheap silver for industry to function. So cheap silver it shall be… until physical reality catches up with paper fiction.
Decades of suppression have successfully conditioned multiple generations to view silver as “just an industrial commodity” rather than monetary insurance.
This perception management protects the fiat system.
Most people under 60 have no experience whatsoever of gold or silver as money. They’ve been taught that money is paper (or increasingly, digital entries in a database) and that precious metals are relics of a bygone era. Barbarous relics, as Keynes called gold.
The establishment doesn’t want you to understand that silver was money for thousands of years. America itself started by defining a dollar as a specific weight of silver.
The word “dollar” itself comes from the German “thaler,” a silver coin.
They want you to think in paper terms. To trust the system. To keep your savings in dollars that lose 3% (or 10%) of your purchasing power annually while you’re told inflation is “under control” and “transitory.”
(side note: do you realize now why the stock indexes increase by around 10-12% yearly? They’re just adjusting for inflation, they’re not even growing!)
Silver rising would break that conditioning.
People would remember what real money is.
Thát psychological shift threatens the entire structure of government monetary control.
And that terrifies them.
Now let’s talk about the consequences when – not if, when – this suppression scheme fails.
Because it will fail. Mathematics guarantee it. You can’t have 378 paper claims on every physical ounce forever. Physical reality always wins eventually.
The banks holding these massive short positions have built interconnected webs of paper silver obligations they physically cannot honor at scale.
Remember the 2008 Lehman collapse? Lehman had about a million derivative transactions across 80 jurisdictions. The unwinding took years and nearly destroyed the global financial system.
A silver derivative failure would be worse.
Why? Because silver’s market is smaller and more concentrated in fewer hands. The four banks that control 97.5% of precious metals derivatives are all deeply interconnected. They’re counterparties to each other. When one fails, the contagion spreads.
Bank derivative exposure creates counterparty risk chains that cascade through the financial system. Institution A owes Institution B, which owes Institution C, which owes Institution A. When one link breaks, the whole chain fails.
The regulators know this. Former CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton even publicly acknowledged silver markets were being manipulated but expressed frustration at his inability to stop it. CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam allegedly admitted at an industry conference that regulators “tamped down” silver prices during the 2021 retail squeeze using “all available tools.”
They’re not even trying to stop the manipulation. They’re part of it. Because stopping it would trigger exactly the cascade failure they’re desperately trying to prevent.
A silver price explosion to $100-200-300/oz doesn’t mean silver is suddenly more valuable.
It just means that your dollars became worthless.
That price adjustment exposes the real inflation rate. Not the CPI fiction where they substitute chicken for beef when beef gets expensive. The actual monetary debasement that has been happening for decades.
When silver hit $49 in 1980, adjusted for real inflation (not government-manipulated CPI), that equals over $500 per ounce in today’s -official- purchasing power. At the current $50 price? We’re 97% below the inflation-adjusted high.
That gap represents the scale of monetary debasement that’s been successfully hidden from public view.
When silver reprices to reality, people will see their “safe” dollar savings losing purchasing power visibly, dramatically, and undeniably. The flight to real assets becomes self-reinforcing. People rush to exchange paper for physical. Premiums explode. Dealers run out of inventory. Mints can’t keep up.
We’ve seen the start of this in September and October. That was just a small warm-up.
Ultimately, central banks will lose control.
Historical precedent: after 2008, silver increased 440% over three years. But that was still within the manipulated system, with the suppression mechanisms functioning. An actual breakout beyond manipulation? Where the paper market fails completely and price discovery happens purely in physical markets?
Exponential moves. Parabolic. Violent repricing that happens in weeks or days, not years.
Because silver is so absurdly mispriced, we’ve been consuming silver faster than we’ve been mining it for six consecutive years (2020-2025F).
The supply deficit in 2024 was 148.9 million ounces. In 2023 it was even worse at 200.6 million ounces. The 2025 forecast projects another 117.6 million ounce deficit. Industrial demand keeps growing – solar panels need silver, electric vehicles need silver, 5G infrastructure needs silver, medical applications need silver.
When silver reprices, those supply chains will continue churning. But it shines a bright light on this purposely dark corner of the PM markets. Bright enough for retail to notice.
Manufacturers? They’re left with scrambling for whatever physical metal they can find at whatever price is being offered.
A solar panel will still be feasible at 200 silver as much as it is at 20.
Production won’t even halt. But because retail piled on, there won’t be any silver more available.
These shortages cascade through the whole industry.
You think the chip shortage during COVID was bad? Wait until there’s a silver shortage. Because unlike chips, you can’t just build a new silver fab. Silver comes out of the ground. It takes 7-10 years to bring a new silver mine online even if you throw unlimited money at it.
And at current prices, nobody’s building new silver mines. (side note: only about 30% of silver comes from primary silver mines, so silver mining does not scale very well with its price).
Great job! /s
The petrodollar system requires confidence in the dollar. Other countries need to believe that holding U.S. dollars and U.S. Treasuries is safe and smart.
Silver and gold rising violently exposes the dollar’s weakness for the world to see.
This is already happening. China has been a net seller of Treasuries for nine consecutive months. (And a net buyer of PMs for much longer.) Russia already got kicked out of the dollar system entirely when their reserves were confiscated. Saudi Arabia is accepting non-dollar oil payments. BRICS nations are developing alternatives to SWIFT and discussing gold-backed trade settlement mechanisms.
A silver price explosion accelerates these trends into overdrive.
Why would China hold billions in U.S. Treasuries when they can watch silver going from $50 to $300? Why would any country trust a monetary system that obviously, transparently, undeniably debases its currency?
The answer is they won’t. The dollar’s reserve currency status doesn’t survive a precious metals price explosion. The exorbitant privilege ends. The ability to print dollars and exchange them for real goods from other countries evaporates.
America would have to produce real value to acquire real goods.
Innovative concept, right?! RIGHT?! /s
But PMs breaking free doesn’t happen in isolation. It triggers everything else.
The historical gold-to-silver ratio averaged 15:1 for centuries. During the classical gold standard era, that ratio was maintained by market forces. Today it’s around 80:1 (down from around 100:1). If silver moves to $300, either gold is catastrophically overvalued at current prices or gold needs to move to $24,000+ to maintain even this manipulated ratio.
But gold can’t stay at 4k if silver even goes to $100. The arbitrage is too obvious. The manipulation becomes too visible.
So gold goes higher. Which exposes even more monetary debasement. Which triggers more flight from fiat. Which causes bond yields to spike as investors demand higher compensation for currency risk.
Bond market collapse means interest rates rise. Which means the government’s $37 trillion debt becomes even more unserviceable. Which means more money printing. Which means more currency debasement. Which means higher precious metals prices.
See the problem?
It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Once it starts, it doesn’t stop until the system resets. Until currencies are re-pegged to something real. Until the debt is destroyed through hyperinflation or formal default.
Stock markets sell off as capital flees financial assets for real assets. Real estate corrects as mortgage rates spike and affordability collapses. Commercial real estate is already in trouble – rising rates would devastate it completely.
The dominoes are lined up. PM suppression is the keystone. Remove it, and confidence in the entire fiat monetary architecture collapses in sequence.
China also just stopped silver exports. They told the market: “No more outbound flow.” China accounts for 21% of the silver in SLV. They’ve been one of the largest sources of physical silver to Western markets for years.
They’re not selling anymore. Silver and doré goes in, nothing comes out.
The Shanghai Futures Exchange and Shanghai Gold Exchange both require physical delivery for futures contracts. No cash settlement games. If you’re short, you deliver metal or you default. Last month, China was trading silver at $47-$52 while Western markets were stuck at $46.
That’s backwardation. That’s physical scarcity. That’s the paper market losing control.
London vault inventories are getting depleted. The LBMA doesn’t even update their vault totals regularly anymore – which tells you something. If the numbers were good, they’d be publishing them.
SLV borrow rates hit 19% annualized last month (now around 5%, normal rates? around 0%). That means short sellers are paying 19% just to borrow shares to sell. Why would you pay 19% to short an asset unless you were absolutely desperate to suppress the price?
You wouldn’t. Not unless your entire business model depends on silver staying cheap. Not unless letting silver rise would expose derivatives positions that would bankrupt you.
Backwardation has persisted for nearly a month now. Spot silver trading higher than futures: that’s backwards. Futures should be higher than spot because of storage costs and time value. When spot trades above futures, it means people are paying a premium to get physical metal now rather than waiting for future delivery.
That’s panic for real metal. Not bearish. Desperation.
The manipulation is failing. Physical reality is overwhelming paper manipulation. The banks are bleeding capital to maintain their short positions while the physical market tightens.
They can’t stop. Because stopping means admitting the whole system is fraudulent. Because stopping would mean an exploding price. Because stopping would collapse their whole balance sheet.
But continuing means eventually running out of physical metal to deliver against paper claims.
Mathematics is undefeated. The scheme ends. The only question is timing.
They won’t stop suppressing silver as if they do, they have to admit that the whole system is fraudulent.
If silver is allowed to trade anywhere close to $200/oz, it immediately exposes five decades of monetary debasement. It proves that gold and silver bulls were right all along. It validates Austrian economics over Keynesian. It demonstrates that the Federal Reserve has been systematically destroying the dollar’s purchasing power for more than a century.
That admission destroys the credibility of every central bank, every government economist, every financial media outlet that mocked gold bugs and silver stackers for decades. It proves that the “barbarous relic” crowd was the smart money all along.
The establishment can’t allow that. The psychological damage would be irreparable.
So they suppress. They manipulate. They use every tool available – paper shorts, algorithmic selling, concentrated futures dumping during illiquid trading hours, mainstream media mockery of precious metals investors, academic papers “proving” gold and silver are poor investments.
They’ve built an entire intellectual and financial infrastructure dedicated to maintaining the illusion that paper is money and metal is just a commodity.
But there’s this annoying thing about reality: it doesn’t care about your narrative. Physical silver supply is finite. Industrial demand is growing. Investment demand is accelerating as people lose faith in institutions. And paper claims exceed physical metal by 400 times to 1.
The math just doesn’t work. The scheme is ending not because anyone wants it to end, but because physical constraints are reasserting themselves over paper manipulation.
And when that paper market finally fails – and it will fail – the repricing won’t be gradual. There won’t be a smooth transition from $50 to $75 to $100.
It’ll be bidless.
We’ve seen this already in October: there was this one and a half hour where there was NO SINGLE TRADE in silver. Just bidless.
This is what will increasingly happen at current prices. No physical silver available. At any paper price. Markets locked limit-up for days. Dealers with “No inventory available at any price” signs. Premiums at 50%, 100%, 200% over whatever spot price is being quoted in the dying paper markets.
Then a new price discovery will happen in the physical markets. At levels that expose everything. At levels that make it undeniable what’s been done to the currency. At levels that trigger the cascade.
That’s what they’re really afraid of. Not just inflation visibility. Complete loss of monetary control. The end of dollar hegemony. The collapse of the debt-based fiat system that has allowed governments to spend without limit and banks to create money from nothing.
Silver (and gold) at its real price doesn’t just expose inflation.
It ends the game.
Addendum: Alex came back, and asked:
I dont think the shorting game of silver is profitable for the banks. Why should it be?
It think they benefit from other sides and this would mean they all (banks, government, big companies, elites etc) act in concert to keep alive our enslavimg monetary system
My longer answer:
It can be both. And probably is.
The shorting game doesn’t have to lose money to serve a larger purpose. Banks aren’t charities. If suppressing silver prices required them to consistently take losses, they’d find another way to do it or stop doing it. The beauty of the scheme – if there is one – is that it’s profitable while also serving systemic goals.
Here’s how I think it works:
Direct profitability:
- They’re market makers collecting bid-ask spreads on both sides. So it’s not just naked shorting and praying.
- They have an information advantages over retail traders
- They can move markets with large positions, front-run their own clients, and profit from volatility they create
- COMEX futures allow massive leverage – control $100M in silver with a fraction of that in margin
- They’re playing with depositor money and Fed backstops. Heads they win, tails the system bails them out
JPMorgan paid $920M in fines for precious metals manipulation (2020). That’s not a fine you pay when you’re losing money on the activity. That’s just cost of doing business.
Systemic benefits (see above for a longer take):
- Keeping gold and silver suppressed maintains confidence in the dollar
- If silver hits $100 or $200, it screams “your currency is dying”
- Bond markets would panic. Interest rates would spike
- The entire debt-based system depends on people believing paper has value
This is likely coordinated. Central banks, bullion banks, and governments all benefit from precious metals staying “under control.” I don’t feel the BIS and central bank gold/silver swaps are coincidental.
But the thing is that they need to make sure that the banks can profit (a bit) while serving the larger goal. Look at it this way – if you’re JPMorgan and you know the Fed will provide unlimited dollar swaps, you know COMEX position limits won’t be enforced, and you know you can settle in cash instead of physical when things get tight… why wouldn’t you short silver? You’re playing a rigged game where you can’t really lose.
This system works until physical demand overwhelms paper supply. That’s the breaking point. That’s where we are increasingly moving towards. When someone shows up demanding 100M oz of physical delivery and there’s only 50M oz available. That’s when the whole structure collapses.
So yes, it’s coordinated. Yes, it serves systemic purposes. But it’s also profitable for the banks doing it. They’re not martyrs for the cause. They’re getting paid.
The real question isn’t whether it’s profitable.
The real question is: for how much longer can they keep this up?
