Putin Reportedly Offers To Cut Iran Intel-Sharing If US Does Same In Ukraine
Moscow has been accused by top officials in the White House and in Congress of expanding its intelligence-sharing with Iran amid the now three-week-long war involving the US and Israel. Russia has even been accused of handing over targeting information, allegedly assisting in Iranian ballistic missile attacks on US bases and radar sites as well as sensitive assets in the region.
Russia hasn't confirmed that it is doing this, and has issued a meager official denial - but it also hasn't taken serious steps to convince Washington otherwise. The Kremlin is perhaps relishing in the idea of doing to the US in Iran precisely what the US is doing to Russia in Ukraine - making the operation harder, more costly, and setting up for potential quagmire.
On Friday Politico is reporting on a possible quid pro quo offer: "Moscow proposed a quid pro quo to the U.S. under which the Kremlin would stop sharing intelligence information with Iran, such as the precise coordinates of U.S. military assets in the Middle East, if Washington ceased supplying Ukraine with intel about Russia."
"Two people familiar with the U.S.-Russia negotiations said that such a proposal was made by Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev to Trumpadministration envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during their meeting last week in Miami," the report continues.
The sources indicated the US side rejected the offer. Of course, the US has long been very deep into the Ukraine crisis, and significant intel-sharing has stretched back for many years into the Biden administration and even before, in connection with the Donbass conflict of 2014.
Politico underscores, "Nevertheless, the sheer existence of such a proposal has sparked concern among European diplomats, who worry Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. at a critical moment for transatlantic relations."
Assuming the fresh report is accurate, it raises some serious questions regarding US policy at this very sensitive moment of two major raging wars.
The sources here are "two people familiar with the U.S.-Russia negotiations." That could also mean two people familiar with leaking propaganda. https://t.co/Q29DmlQIHT
For starters, much of Trump's base of support has already long been skeptical of Ukraine policy. There is a segment also not happy about the US launching another 'war of choice' in the Middle East, contrary to Trump's pledges on the campaign trail. There are also issues of 'overreach' and overextension in terms of American involvement in no less than two huge global hotspots - one of which Washington is the direct initiator (alongside Israel).
If Trump did actually cease intel-sharing with Kiev, there would be many Republicans which would be quite OK with this. Even J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth have appeared cold on the idea of too much support for Ukraine.
KING: Can you update us on Russian intelligence sharing with Iran?
GABBARD: If it's going on, that answer would be appropriate for a closed session
KING: It's been in the press. Is it occurring?
GABBARD: What I can tell you is that according to the Dept of War, any support… pic.twitter.com/zR5GibrDmT
Whether the alleged offer from Moscow will remain on the table or not is another question. But it seems clear Russia is ready to leverage events in Iran to its advantage related to Ukraine - even at a moment peace talks are clearly on indefinite pause.
US Fast-Tracks Billions In 'Emergency' Arms Sales To Gulf, Bypassing Congress
On the one hand President Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth have declared that America is 'winning' against Iran, having destroyed its navy and air defenses, and having seriously degraded its missiles - but on the other the admin has put in for a more than $200 billion supplemental request to Congress to fund the war.
It seems Congress will likely eventually sign off on this gargantuan figure - for an 'excursion' which should end 'soon' we are told by Trump - given that even the effort to pass so much as a War Powers resolution gets repeatedly stymied.
Still, the US administration is busy bypassing standard congressional review requirements, on Thursday approving a series of emergency arms sales across the Middle East, at a moment US regional allies are being pummeled by Iranian drones and ballistic missiles.
The argument is that Washington's allies are in imminent danger, and given that indeed vital Gulf infrastructure is getting hit quite seriously - new arms have to be rushed over there on an emergency basis.
The largest package was approved for the United Arab Emirates, totaling more than $8 billion. It includes the $4.5 billion sale of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), $2.10 billion for FS-LIDS counter-drone systems, $1.22 billion in Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs), and $644 million in F-16 munitions, including GBU-39 small diameter bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).
In parallel, Washington approved an $8 billion deal for Kuwait to buy Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor Radars, significantly enhancing the country’s missile detection and tracking capabilities.
Jordan was also included in the emergency approvals, with a $70.5 million package covering aircraft support and munitions to sustain operational readiness.
Notably, a US base all the way over in Jordan, the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, was struck by Iran in the opening days of the war, satellite imagery showed.
This development of all these newly approved 'emergency' arms and weapons shipments begs the question: is this more evidence that Washington is settling in for a 'long war'?
Day 1: it's going to take a couple of days
Day 20: ok we need 200 billion dollars
After all, Trump has given no timeline despite being repeatedly asked, and Israel too is saying the anti-Iran campaign is not even halfway complete. In the end it's certainly not the American people 'winning' here (and they are not going to think so especially at the gas pump either), but the major defense firms.
The movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) features what is today the most famous bank run. It’s film and fiction, yes, but fits with a scenario that has been common for centuries. When the movie came out, the bank runs of 1930–1932 were very much in people’s memory. For older people, they remember the Panic of 1907. Before that, there was the Panic of 1893, the Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1837, and the Panic of 1819.
Panics and banking go together and have for 500 years.
It’s funny that we call them panics, as if people randomly start hurling themselves around in irrational fear. All that’s really going on is that people want their own money and ask for it. Customers grow concerned that the bank—which makes loans on deposits—has overextended and cannot make good on its redemption promises.
It’s a test that the bank passes or not. The bank run is nothing more than a rational check on the soundness of the bank. It’s not “panic” but merely a demand for one’s own property.
The bank run also serves a hugely important market function. The fear of one inspires banks toward prudence. Any attempt to suppress them invariably leads the banking system to become overextended, pushing out leverage beyond a sustainable point. When conditions change, unsound and overextended banks go belly up. This is nothing more than the market at work.
From 1913, with the establishment of the Federal Reserve, the driving ethos of banking and monetary policy has been to reduce bank runs and failures. It was to broadcast a message of confidence in the financial system so that people would no longer panic. It did not quite work, however, as evidenced by the vast bank failures of the early 1930s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt even declared a bank holiday to stop them, which didn’t work, so he turned to gold confiscation and devaluation.
All this is background to a note I just received from my own bank. It’s an update to the terms of service. Here is what it says:
“Added a new Section 8(e) (Digital Wires—Transaction Limits) to clarify that, to protect your account, online wire transaction limits may have daily or rolling 30-day restrictions and that we may establish or modify limits on the amount, frequency, or type of transactions you can initiate using our payment services, or your transaction limits may be temporarily reduced or subject to additional restrictions. Subsections following this one have been renumbered accordingly (Sections 8(f)–8(l)).”
Hardly anyone reads updates to terms of service. I’m probably in the 1 percent of customers who even clicked on the link. What it means should be obvious. My bank can restrict my access to money anytime it wants and by any amount. I might want to take it all in cash or move it to another institution. My bank has told me that this is entirely up to them. By continuing to bank with this famous institution, I have implicitly agreed to this.
To be sure, we should be grateful for banks that protect our accounts. That’s fine. What’s not fine is preventing access to money that is ours. It’s hard to know which is which, and while I would not suggest that banks would naturally lie to us, enterprises are not beyond some limited duplicity when financial survival is at stake.
Should I change banks? It’s probably pointless. Every bank, if it doesn’t have this as part of its terms of service, will adopt it anyway. You could say that this means nothing. Maybe that’s right. Or maybe the bank is just preparing for a rainy day that never comes, and so this update to the terms of service is practically meaningless. One hopes so.
But it did get me thinking: How would a bank run look today?
There will be no George Bailey rushing to the Building and Loan to calm the panicked depositors, explaining how the institution works (e.g., “Your money’s in Joe’s house”). These days, banks are not even very busy with customers. Every time I need to go to one, I walk right up to the window because no one is there. Nearly all money flows and banking services are done electronically.
I’m grateful for this change. My monthly bill-paying efforts take less than a minute. My childhood memories of my father on bill-paying day still stick with me. He had a small room off the kitchen that was his office. Once a month on Saturday, he would go inside. The kids knew not to disturb him. He had a stack of bills. He would write checks and put them in envelopes with stamps. With each bill paid, he went to his ledger and balanced the checkbook.
As he watched the family accounts drain more and more with each bill, he would grow ever more frustrated and upset. He made a salary of $14,500 and supported two kids, a wife, a home, and two cars, and we took plenty of vacations. In real terms, that’s about $114,000 today, a full household on one income. We made ends meet, but it was often a struggle, one from which he protected the family.
Our entire lives were being held by the bank.
There were never issues of trust.
I doubt that my father ever considered the possibility.
These days, money flows are throttled in every direction even without banking panics.
Venmo limits unverified weekly sending and spending to $300. Verified accounts allow up to $60,000 per week for payments to others. Outgoing bank transfers are limited to $5,000 per transfer and $20,000 per week as long as it is verified. Zelle’s limits vary by the bank: Bank of America permits $3,500 per day up to $20,000 per month. The others are the same or similar.
If you want to move real money, you have to go to ACH (automated clearinghouse) or FedWire (an improvement over old-style wiring) or get a crypto account and use a stablecoin (which moves $1.2 trillion per month, making it dominant). Regardless, it is not easy, and most depositors do not avail themselves of it.
Banks made ACH rather difficult, with pull-down menus of verified recipients. It can be extremely difficult to get serious blocks of money from here to there already. Mostly we don’t need to, so the system has not been really tested. Most people have no idea how much the system of electronic payments and withdrawals is already throttled.
As for cash, it is mostly out of the question. Your bank will give you the stare-down if you ask for $5,000 and make you fill out some law enforcement forms for $10,000. You dare not attempt to carry this kind of cash through an airport. You will be taken aside and asked to provide a full accounting for it. It’s even true for driving: If you are stopped and searched, you risk everything.
To the original question, what would a bank run look like?
It would involve millions of people simultaneously attempting to max out their withdrawals, perhaps to buy gold. It would be the raiding of ATMs until they are empty, which would take about 30 minutes. All the while, the institutions would assure you that they are fully sound and there’s nothing about which to worry.
The same would continue the next day as the banks doled out allotments as necessary and only for verified purposes. You might have a million dollars in the bank, but it would only be numbers flashing on a screen, interesting to look at but impossible to use. There is simply no way to get to it. And forget going to your branch. They would likely put up signs with the explanation that withdrawals are limited to $1,500 or so.
In other words, a serious bank run today would be a quiet and strangely uneventful financial apocalypse in which money movements would be effectively frozen. The Federal Reserve would get to work flooding the entire system with liquidity, unfreezing withdrawals even if they are still throttled. The new money flooding the system to bail out the banks would result in hyperinflation about nine to 12 months later, after which your money would have lost half its value anyway.
What could kick it off? Could be the default of a financial product. Could be the collapse in commercial real estate or a sudden plunge in artificial intelligence asset valuations. Or it could be nothing other than an online rumor that goes viral. This happened often in the 19th century: One person starts the fear, and it spreads like wildfire.
We will not likely ever see a bank run like we did in past times. That’s not a good thing. The system today provides the illusion of liquidity, but take a look beneath the surface. A genuine financial crisis—which we have somehow avoided even during these tumultuous times—would be a civilizational disaster.
This column is not intended to scare you. It might do that anyway.
In 1980, when the Iran-Iraq war disrupted global oil supply, the volume lost was around 4 million barrels per day.
Painful. The world went into recession. Volcker raised rates to 20% to kill inflation. It nearly killed the economy in the process. We called it a crisis and we meant it.
The current Hormuz blockade is running at roughly 20 million barrels per day.
The futures market, in its infinite wisdom, is pricing a quick resolution.
Trump says the war is “basically over”.
His Defence Secretary says it’s “only just the beginning”.
One of them presumably has read the intelligence reports.
Even in the most optimistic scenario - ceasefire tomorrow, everybody shakes hands - the Maersk CEO noted it takes at least ten days after a ceasefire for tanker insurance to clear. Then mine-clearing: Iran has been laying mines in the Strait, and removing them will take weeks to months. Then tankers reposition, loads getting secured, and finally the flow resumes.
The oil futures curve is pricing step five as if it follows step one with a 48-hour lag.
It cannot physically happen on that timeline.
And Iran isn’t just shooting wildly at targets. Yesterday, Fujairah - the world-class bunkering hub sitting outside the Strait, the bypass everyone assumed would soften the blow - has been deliberately targeted. Tehran isn’t just closing Hormuz. It’s also closing the workarounds. One by one. Iran got fed up and decided to take down the imposed sanctions one way or another. And USrael just gave them the ultimate excuse.
If you’ve been reading my silver papers, you know there is a gap. A gap I call “PvP”… No not the gaming term. The Paper vs Physical.
And oh boy. Is it screaming!! Brent futures in New York closed Friday at $104. Elevated but ok-ish. Dubai crude - you know, the real physical oil, real barrels, real buyers - was trading around $127-140. Normally Brent commands a premium over Dubai. Now Dubai is $37 above the paper. And that’s just crude. Bunker fuel in Singapore hit $140 per barrel this week. In Fujairah, $160. High-grade marine fuel, $175. Ships burning fuel right now are paying those prices regardless of what the futures strip says in New York.
Silver at a $12 premium to Shanghai? pffff Silver… Amateur hour compared to oil!
If you’ve read Strait to Brrrrr, none of this is surprising. Paper price is massaged. The New York futures desk is clearly on something the physical buyers aren't.
However this started, this isn’t a military confrontation anymore. I’m even starting to doubt it ever was. The Strait stays closed, oil stays elevated. Oil stays elevated, inflation stays elevated. Inflation stays elevated, the Fed cannot cut. The Fed cannot cut, and $36 trillion in federal debt - already costing $880 billion a year in interest before the war added a billion dollars a day to the tab - gets rolled over at rates that make it progressively less serviceable. The dollar weakens under that strain. A weaker dollar makes the next barrel of imported oil more expensive in dollar terms. Which feeds back into inflation. Which keeps the Fed pinned.
It’s a loop. Iran just needs to keep the strait closed long enough for it to complete a few rotations. The bond market has noticed. Treasury yields are rising in the middle of a geopolitical crisis - not falling. Capital isn’t fleeing to bonds. It’s fleeing to gold. That is a verdict on the US fiscal position.
Trump knows the physical reality, which is why last week he called Putin. The country America has been sanctioning for four years. The one it branded an aggressor, a pariah, an enemy of the liberal world order. He called to ask for help. Then he went further and lifted Russian oil sanctions outright. A Democratic Senator responded with perhaps the best summary of the year: “Looks like we fought Iran and Russia won”.
What else? The IEA approved a record 400 million barrel reserve release. Bessent telegraphed futures market intervention to cap prices. Russian sanctions lifted. Each one a gesture. On my feed someone quoted: “The oil market is massively short of supply. The other options the administration has, other than ending the war, are actually pretty limited”. Woops.
That’s the pin. But actually, the pin in itself doesn’t matter. Really truly doesn’t matter. What does matter greatly however, is WHAT it pricked…
In 1980, US federal debt stood at 26% of GDP. Today it’s 120%. That’s the difference between the same shock hitting a healthy patient and hitting someone already on oxygen. The Volcker treatment that worked then is structurally unavailable now. But don’t worry! These are the same people who called inflation transitory. I'm sure they've got it. This time.
The interest bill on existing debt is already $880 billion a year, more than defence, more than Medicare. Rates at 20% on $37 trillion would cost more than the entire federal budget in interest payments alone. That lever doesn’t exist anymore.
What exists instead is $846 trillion in notional OTC derivatives. Up from $108 trillion in 2000. An eightfold expansion in 25 years, and mid ‘24 → ’25 was the largest growth rate at 16% since 2008.
To put that number in some kind of human context: $846 trillion is roughly eight times the entire global GDP. With 1% of it you could buy every company in the S&P 500 twice over. With 0.01% you could buy Warren Buffett. With a rounding error - 0.0001% - a superyacht, a sports franchise, and a small Caribbean island, and you’d still have 99.9999% left. Nobody has this money, of course. Nobody owns $846 trillion. It’s the notional value of bets stacked on top of bets - leverage and hedges and derivatives daisy-chained to other derivatives. It nets out in normal conditions. In abnormal conditions, “nets out” becomes “finds out”.
Buffett called them ‘weapons of mass financial destruction’ in 2003. The book was $85 trillion then.
The bulk of the current book - around $548 trillion - is interest rate derivatives. All of it priced on a world where oil is $70 and rates are roughly stable. Guess what just happened? Oil exploding (quite literally at times) make counterparties not being able to meet margin calls (guess why gold and silver are trembling so much) and that failure cascades through the chain.
The private credit system was already the weakest link before the war. I covered the gating wave in my previous article so I’m not going to repeat it here, but the language from people who are in the know got pretty alarming. Mohamed El-Erian reached for Bear Stearns 2007 as his reference point. Dimon started talking about cockroaches. Dimon… Talking about cockroaches… The Treasury Secretary himself said he was ‘concerned’ about private credit. When the man responsible for placing a trillion dollars per quarter in new debt publicly expresses concern about the credit system he depends on to function, well… I’ll leave it at that.
Think the gating’s bad? Let me reassure you *evil grin*. One in five companies in the Russell 3000 cannot service their debt from current income. Over half of all investment grade paper is a single downgrade from junk. $5 trillion in corporate debt rolls over in the next four years at current rates, into a war-driven inflationary environment the Fed cannot cut its way out of. The losses are in there. Just not visible yet. When they surface, the institutions holding private credit will face redemption pressure at exactly the moment public markets are offering their best entry points since 2022 /s. Nah, just kidding. They dump whatever they can. Anything, just about anything unrelated with their illiquid portfolio will be hit. You've seen this movie before. Gold fell when Iran struck. Silver fell. Same mechanics, a tad larger. Think ‘08 or ‘00 on steroids.
Now picture what happens when the equity markets start to move. The S&P 500 closed up 1% on Sunday night. The Dow gained 388 points. Meanwhile, fertiliser benchmarks are up 25-44% in seventeen days. Think food. Helium has doubled. Think chips - not the edible ones. Pharmaceutical feedstock pipelines are depleting. The wall between the financial “economy” and the real one is still holding. Walls do that, right until they don’t.
When people need cash fast, they sell what’s liquid. ETFs are the most liquid thing in the world. They sell indiscriminately - tech, gold miners, silver, and just about anything else. You don’t sell what you want to sell. You sell what has a bid. And passive investment? Volume wise, ETFs are like 60% of US equity markets (2024). In 1996 that was only 6%. Which means that when selling starts it’s mechanical. No analysis. No discrimination. Every ETF holder hitting the same exit through the same small door at the same time.
Think of “Liberation Day” as a test run. First-ever simultaneous crash in stocks, bonds, and the dollar - the thing that was supposed to go up when everything else went down.
Tie into that the 401k withdrawals that hit a record high this week. The passive investment machine is leaking from the bottom while demographics drain it from the top.
Feeling comfortable yet? *super evil grin*
Underneath all of this, slower than any war and more permanent than any crisis, is something the financial press doesn’t really mention:
People aren’t having any children.
US fertility hit an all-time low in 2024. The general fertility rate is still falling. IMPLAN puts 1.4 million fewer Americans contributing to housing demand, retail spending, and service consumption in 2025 than trends would have predicted. To put that in numbers: $104 billion in GDP. Not exactly gone, not really disappeared. It just never existed in the first place.
It’s a vicious circle: housing is too expensive, so young people delay children. Fewer children means less future housing demand. Which should eventually reduce prices, except the lag is 20-30 years, and in the meantime housing stays expensive, so the people who couldn’t afford a house still can’t, still don’t have children, and the loop tightens at its own pace regardless of what the Fed does or what happens somewhere in the narrow waterways in exotic places.
Added: the boomers are saying bye sayonara.
The generation that inflated every asset class for 40 years through automatic 401k contributions is, somewhere around now, flipping from net buyers to net sellers. Of course it’s impossible to say like “March, 17: boomers start to cash out their 401ks”… Nope, the tide just turns. The same passive machine that provided an inexorable, automatic bid for equities and bonds and real estate - every payday, every year, for four decades - begins to redeem. Quietly. Continuously. For the next twenty-some years. Every asset they inflated on the way up faces a headwind on the way out. Not a crash. A long, grinding, demographically-inevitable ratchet.
Another angle I want to cover is the petrodollar. I covered this already in “The Bretton Whoops”. But the short version is: oil was priced in dollars, dollars were recycled into Treasuries, and the US military keeps the Gulf safe. It required two things - a reliable dollar and a credible security guarantee. The dollar’s reliability cracked in 2022 when Washington froze Russia’s reserves. The security guarantee cracked when the US started a war they cannot finish.
The dollar’s share of global FX reserves has since fallen to around 45%, the lowest since the 1990s. Gold’s share has quadrupled in twelve years. Gulf states are reportedly discussing pulling investment commitments from the US.
And now Iran has done something structurally interesting. It didn’t just close the Strait - it converted it into a tollgate. The toll isn’t money - yet. It’s alignment. Ten countries have been offered safe passage: China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and others. The US isn’t on the list. This isn’t a military tactic. It’s economical.
Lots of people have the wrong framing. They think “petrodollar is dead, long live the yuandollar”. Right? Wrong frame entirely. China doesn’t want a reserve status. Couldn’t stomach it if it tried. Because a reserve currency means running a permanent trade deficits to pump your currency into the global system - America has been doing this for 50 years and the reward is a rust belt, a $37 trillion debt tab, and a bond market that needs foreigners to keep showing up or the whole thing seizes. China watched that happen and said: 不用了，谢谢. And opening the capital account enough to make yuan genuinely reserve-worthy would mean letting money flow freely across the border - ending the CCP’s ability to direct credit and control the financial system on Beijing’s terms. They’d sooner eat the wallpaper.
What the yuan-for-oil arrangement being implemented actually is, is an industrial policy dressed as currency diplomacy. You sell your oil into the permitted lane. You receive yuan. Now you’re sitting on yuan in a system with capital controls - you can’t just convert it and park it wherever you like. Your options are: buy Chinese goods, buy Chinese infrastructure contracts, invest in Chinese assets. That flow cycles straight back into Chinese factories and Chinese employment. China doesn’t have to stimulate its domestic consumption anymore. It exports the demand problem onto its trading partners and invoices it as a geopolitical arrangement. Three hundred million jobs - and unlike the US - no helicopter money required.
Those dollars that used to flow into Treasuries don’t just suddenly rush home. They just stop showing up at the next auction. Treasury needs to place roughly a trillion dollars every hundred days. Fewer buyers means higher yields. Higher yields mean the Fed is cornered. A cornered Fed means the printer runs. Same mechanism as demographics, same mechanism as the derivatives book, same direction.
My long-running conviction - and I’ve been saying this long enough that it stopped sounding contrarian and started sounding obvious - is that the world ends up back on a gold standard. Not the romanticised version where you rattle coins in your pocket. Though honestly, with modern payment rails, a gold-backed account is functionally identical to a dollar account. You’d never touch the metal. You’d just change the ticker from USD to XAU and carry on. The technology exists right now. The obstacle isn’t infrastructure. It’s that the people running the current system would rather light themselves on fire.
What happens first, before any grand declaration, is narrower: gold becomes the settlement layer between sovereigns who no longer trust each other’s paper. The US is apparently net-settling its trade deficit with China in gold - if that data holds up. In three of the last four months it seems that gold is flowing East. No Bretton Woods conference. No announcement. Just two countries quietly deciding that when the paper gets complicated, the metal clears the table. That’s how monetary systems actually change - not by proclamation but by practice, one bilateral settlement at a time, until enough of them are doing it that someone calls a conference to ratify what’s already happened. The Bretton Woods conference didn’t create the dollar system. It formalised what the war had already decided.
The next conference is coming. It just hasn’t been scheduled yet.
Silver. Because I can’t write a piece about systemic fragility without it, and because this week’s data is worth your attention even if the price chart isn’t.
The paper price looks terrible. Miners are trading like silver is heading back to $40. Silver Santa - one of the accounts I follow on Twitter (yeah, I’m old) - moved 40% to cash, describing “a strong pre-COVID feeling”. The technical picture is ugly.
But the crucial part: the physical reality didn’t get that memo.
The COMEX “run rate to zero” ticked down to 89 days as of Friday, from 93 days on Thursday. Four days burned in one. The SGE briefly stopped publishing silver inventory data mid-week, then quietly resumed. Shanghai is still paying a 13-17% premium over London. The same paper/physical divergence playing out in oil is running in silver at a slower pace with a much longer fuse.
But what does a draining vault have to do with your savings account?
More than most people think. The COMEX sets the global silver price. But if the COMEX increasingly doesn’t have the physical metal - and the run rate suggests it won’t for long - then the price it sets is a fiction. An unallocated silver account at your bank is a claim on that fiction. An ETF share is a claim on that fiction. When the fiction and the physical reality eventually converge, it won’t be because the paper comes up to meet the physical. It’ll be because the paper can no longer pretend.
Same mechanism as Dubai crude. Same mechanism as the derivatives book. Just a slower fuse.
When $68 trillion in US equity markets eventually moves - and it will - and the indiscriminate ETF selling hits everything, and the margin calls cascade through a derivatives book built on assumptions that no longer hold, and zombie companies start defaulting, and the boomer redemptions add their steady mechanical pressure, and 401k hardship withdrawals accelerate - the question of where capital goes becomes very concrete. Bonds? Already struggling to absorb a trillion per quarter. Cash? In which currency? Real estate? In a demographically challenged market with rising yields?
Gold has a structural bid from central banks who drew their conclusions in 2022 and have been buying ever since. Silver has vaults on an 89-day countdown and a paper price that hasn’t caught up yet.
I’m buying the dips. Have been. Will continue.
(A small aside: I’m considering opening a dedicated Substack to document my trades in real time - with a ten-minute lag - for those who want to follow the positions, not just the analysis. The analysis stays here, free.)
None of this is hidden.
None of it requires a security clearance or even a Bloomberg terminal. It’s all there, in the vault data, the yield curves, the fertility statistics, the derivatives book, the bunker fuel prices. The information exists. The pattern is legible.
The question was never whether this would happen.
The question was always who would be holding paper when it did.
Each crisis gets a fresh name but the same printer... TALF, TARP, BTFP, BTFD, YOLO, CTRLP.
Ready For War? New B-21 Raider Activity Spotted Over Mojave Desert
There has been increased activity of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, suggesting the Department of War is on an accelerated path to bring the next-generation bomber platform into service, with the USAF targeting an operational date in 2027.
Earlier this month, plane spotters appeared to capture the highly secretive B-21 refueling behind a KC-135R tanker over the Mojave Desert.
Nice! You spotted the new baby B-2, the B-21 Raider!
There was no confirmation that the latest sighting was from earlier this month or on Tuesday, but it is certainly notable given everything unfolding in the Middle East (read here).
