PM prices rose like a rocket last week, then crashed on Monday. Why? Because the market is being manipulated.
After a strong week-long rally that sent gold, silver and other precious metals prices to all-time highs, prices fell sharply Monday after exchange operator CME Group made a key change to its metals contracts.
11 Comments
Texas Dan · December 30, 2025 at 7:57 am
They’ve done this for years (using fake or borrowed money to buy contracts) in the oil markets. Trading Places may hav even a lousy movie but it showed how people do this stuff. Making people actually have physical assets to trade would be a start.
Leigh · December 30, 2025 at 8:27 am
Phil, at Bustednuckles touched on this yesterday. Apparently an unnamed financial institution overextended themselves in the silver market and triggered a Margin Call by the exchange that they couldn’t cover. Triggering another “too big to fail” bailout apparently.
The only person allowed to fail is the American Taxpayer, while we clean up everyone else’s mess.
https://bustednuckles.net/are-we-seeing-the-trigger-to-a-catastrophic-reset-in-the-banking-system/
Leigh
Whitehall, NY
EN2 SS · December 30, 2025 at 8:58 am
The “market” has been manipulated for decades by the big money bunch. Isn’t that a big part of “choose good stocks and ride out the ups and downs” mantra?
SiG · December 30, 2025 at 9:08 am
Saw a video last week that said this was going to happen – CME was going to raise the amount of cash the banks have to keep on hand to prevent a run on the banks. There have been reports that Chase was “seized by Federal regulators.”
https://voxday.net/2025/12/29/did-chase-just-go-down/
This morning, gold and silver are both up – not higher than last week, but those climbs and crashes are rarely straight lines.
Joe Blow · December 30, 2025 at 1:35 pm
I’ve traded markets for decades. This is nothing new.
Physical commodities are different than trading stonks. Your futures contract is just that, a contract, to purchase XXXX physical units of said commodity at a selected price on a selected date. Most people sell the contract before execution, and it becomes a paper-only transaction, HOWEVER, the contract itself and the system it rides upon, was setup to handle and does run physical delivery of commodities.
SO, when markets get frothy, the people who run the markets, always up the margin rates. This has the effect of protecting the market maker, but also suppresses some of the frothiness. You can call it manipulation if you want, but I don’t see it that way. Guard-rails are sometimes required for orderly markets.
Now, if you’re talking about JPM’s 200m ounce short paper-position in the silver market that was allegedly liquidated for them by CME over the weekend…. Dunno, that’s tin-foil hat shit. Supposedly they sold it off (at a huge loss) and went long 75m ounces.
Divemedic · December 30, 2025 at 5:36 pm
However, those who do this KNOW what effect they are going to have. They trade on that. All you have to do is know what’s coming ahead of time.
It’s how congress gets rich.
TRX · December 30, 2025 at 4:08 pm
…yet the “experienced professionals”, backed by significant software and computing power, fall for it (almost?) every time.
Not just Wall Street, either. Britain and Hong Kong have been pwned too.
Steady Steve · December 31, 2025 at 5:38 pm
CME = Criminal Metals Exchange
Chris · January 1, 2026 at 2:41 pm
Well I started slowly stacking in my 30’s and now at almost 60, I’m holding all I’ve got. I’m debt free for a decade+, and have a job and marriage I enjoy. I’ve got really bare minimum health insurance, but take pretty good care of myself.
We all die eventually. Enjoy what you have. Best of luck to you all in the coming year no matter your endeavors.
Chris(CIII)
Steve the Engineer · January 1, 2026 at 7:42 pm
The Economist (I think) had an article several months ago about JPM getting out of their short position of paper silver, and accumulating a very large amount of physical. No one in the comments so far (I don’t think, I do Evelyn Woodski reading dynamics) mentioned that last summer amid the tariff tantrums, China announced that on January 1, 2026 export controls would be imposed on a lot of rare earths and other commodities INCLUDING Ag. So, now if you want to buy Ag from China you need a license (and exporters need licenses too). Oh, and China productionm accounts for about 70%. So there’s that. I think a bunch of people have been asleep at the switch, not understanding what is really driving the increase in PM spot prices. Combination of CME panic, the days of their paper chase games in PM shorts and longs are quite numbered, the fiat currency Ponzi continues unabated, the A.I. (it’s the latest thing, doncha know) boom with out-of-this-world, fantastical forecasts of need for MOAR power plants, MOAR super duper processing chips and all this stuff requires a lot of raw materials including Ag. So perhaps another way to look at the run up in spot PM prices is a near-perfect storm that the weather forecasters didn’t really report on very much, until recently.
Steve the Engineer · January 1, 2026 at 7:44 pm
https://silvertrade.com/news/precious-metals/silver-news/jp-morgan-sells-entire-200-m-oz-silver-short-position-flips-long-750-m-oz/
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