Silver and gold .29 Dec 2025 11:38
Good Evening Team.
All good news for lnd and from a leading journalist Charles archer.
While I am sort of on holiday, it’s a bit hard to ignore what’s going on in the metals markets. The kind of moves being made are those I’ve been calling for, for years now.
Remember when I took you down the rabbit hole on gold back in February? When COMEX vaults were being stuffed with tons from London, and I speculated — wildly, perhaps — that someone was preparing to bring back the gold standard?
Gold is now above $4,500.
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But today, we’re not talking about gold. We’re talking about silver.
The textbook explanation for silver’s >170% move this year goes something like this: solar panels need silver, China’s restricting exports, supply is tight, therefore price goes up.
Clean.
Simple.
Boring.
Except the actual mechanics of what’s happening are far more interesting — and far more alarming — than supply and demand.
What we’re witnessing is a full-scale fracture between paper silver and physical silver. The same dynamic I outlined with gold in February, except silver has a ticking time bomb attached: industrial users who need the metal and can’t wait.
You see, in a functioning market, arbitrage opportunities disappear within seconds. If gold trades at different prices in London and New York, traders immediately buy cheap, sell expensive, pocket the difference, and prices converge.
This is Market Making 101.
Here’s what’s happening in silver over the past few weeks: Shanghai is trading at $77-91 per ounce, COMEX in New York sits at $71-80 and Dubai is at $91. That’s a $6-20 spread on a commodity with known shipping costs of maybe $1-2 per ounce.
This spread is just sitting there.
The arbitrage should be simple: buy silver on COMEX, ship it to Shanghai, sell at $85, collect your profit minus $2 shipping. Rinse and repeat until the spread closes.
But it’s not closing.
Why? Because when you try to pull physical metal out of COMEX to ship East, you’re discovering something uncomfortable.
There isn’t enough metal to move.
This is the same playbook as gold. Except worse.
COMEX operates on a fractional reserve system. This is not a conspiracy theory — it’s how futures markets work by design.
The number of paper silver contracts outstanding, what’s known as open interest, represents roughly 300 times more silver than physically exists in COMEX vaults.
Normally this doesn’t matter. Most traders close positions before expiration with maybe 1-2% demanding physical delivery.
But what happens when that percentage ticks up?
In December alone, 60% of registered silver was claimed for delivery in the first four days. Four days.
Let me put that in context: COMEX registered silver inventories have been drawn down to multi-year lows. Meanwhile, open inte
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