The Silver Price Crash

Justin Hart at the Rational Ground substack writes: "Silver's 40% Crash Was the Most Predictable Disaster of 2026." It's not that there isn't inflation driving up the price of precious metals, but that the sharp spike was due to something else. An excerpt:

    On Wednesday, silver hit $117 an ounce. By Friday, it was $73.

    That’s not a correction. That’s a 40% single-day crash — the kind of move that wipes out leveraged accounts, liquidates retail portfolios, and sends financial Twitter into full existential meltdown mode. Some late buyers showed up near the close, limiting the official damage to “only” 26%. Cold comfort.

    And then came Monday.

    Stories out of China. A metals dealer they’re calling “The Hat” — fled the country, left behind $144 million in unfinished deals, and triggered a chain reaction of counterparty losses that reached all the way up to state-backed trading firms. Separately, hundreds of customers stormed a bullion platform in Shenzhen — some carrying their children — demanding either their money or their gold. The company couldn’t produce either.

    Silver dropped another 7%. Gold fell below $4,700 — down 14% from last week’s record. And the story is still unfolding.

    Here’s what nobody screaming “dollar debasement” wanted to hear: none of this was about the dollar.

    Not the rally. Not the crash. Not the fundamentals underneath either one.

    Treasury yields have been steady for months. If the dollar were truly being debased — if inflation were genuinely reigniting — you’d see it in the bond market first. You didn’t. What you saw instead was a supply squeeze in silver that went parabolic for the oldest reason in financial markets: price action became the story, and the story became the only reason to buy.

    Silver went from $79 to $117 in thirteen trading sessions. Thirteen. That’s not a market. That’s a meme stock. And as Mike Green put it in a recent interview, that’s effectively what silver became — momentum chasing dressed up in hard-money rhetoric.

    The “dollar is dying” crowd had one data point: precious metals going up. That was it. One market, one interpretation, one narrative — and an army of retail speculators pouring money into something they fundamentally misunderstood.