- What really caused Friday’s epic silver collapse?…
- How the manipulation scheme works…
- Washington has written a tax bill that opens the door for regular Americans to use the same legal tax loopholes the elites have used for decades. Why should elites get all the breaks?
Dear reader,
“Silver Friday.”
That is the fresh label for Friday’s historic 35% hemorrhaging of the silver price — from $120 — to $78.
The mainstream media claims silver’s black day was the consequence of simple market forces.
Silver was overbought, silver was overleveraged… and a shakeout was due.
I do not dispute that silver had outrun its logistics. I do not doubt that silver was overstretched.
I do not doubt that silver was in for a “correction.”
Yet on the scale of a 35% single-day bloodletting — silver’s blackest day since 1980?
Perhaps “market forces” alone are not responsible.
High Gold and Silver Prices Embarrass the Monetary Authorities
Freedom Financial News contributor Jim Rickards has for years trained his binoculars on the precious metals market.
Those binoculars revealed convincing evidence — that is, compelling evidence — that the precious metals market is the scene of wholesale price manipulation.
The large banks, in collusion with governments, conspire to suppress the gold price primarily… but also the silver price.
That is because elevated gold and silver prices are sources of embarrassment. They embarrass governmental monetary authorities and their runt fiat currencies.
Thus when gold or silver mocks them too publicly, the monetary authorities reach for their cudgels… and bludgeon the metals into conformity.
Absolutely, 100% Rigged
Mr. Rickards:
- Is there gold price manipulation going on? Absolutely. There’s no question about it. That’s not just an opinion…
- I’ve spoken to members of Congress. I’ve spoken to people in the intelligence community, in the defense community, very senior people at the IMF. I don’t believe in making strong claims without strong evidence, and the evidence is all there.
- I spoke to a PhD statistician who works for one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. I can’t mention the fund’s name but it’s a household name… He looked at COMEX (the primary market for gold) opening prices and COMEX closing prices for a 10-year period.
- He was dumbfounded.
- He said it was the most blatant case of manipulation he’d ever seen. He said if you went into the aftermarket, bought after the close and sold before the opening every day, you would make risk-free profits.
- He said statistically that’s impossible unless there’s manipulation occurring.
Statistically impossible! Yet there it is.
Conspiracy Fact
More:
- I also spoke to Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz at the New York University Stern School of Business. She is the leading expert on globe price manipulation. She actually testifies in gold manipulation cases that are going on.
- She wrote a report reaching the same conclusions. It’s not just an opinion, it’s not just a deep, dark conspiracy theory. Here’s a PhD statistician and a prominent market expert lawyer, expert witness in litigation qualified by the courts, who independently reached the same conclusion.
Mr. Rickards refers to manipulation of the gold price. Yet the silver price is subject to identical manipulation.
Now we come to “Silver Friday” in particular. What precisely happened?
It Wasn’t Natural
Mr. Matthew Piepenburg is a precious metals expert and author. Like Mr. Rickards, he believes the gold and silver markets are manipulated heavily.
And he finds the sinister forces of manipulation behind Friday’s silver holocaust:
- On Friday, January 30, 2026, the world learned (or rediscovered) just how grotesquely rigged the paper gold and silver markets truly are.
- Despite no change whatsoever in global supply and demand forces, silver went from a $120 near-high on Thursday to a $78 low on Friday, marking this as the largest single-day crash (35%) in the silver market in 44 years.
- It goes without saying that such price moves don’t happen naturally.
Are you certain it was not a natural market event, sir?
The Mother of All Short-Squeezes
Continues Mr. Pieperburg:
- Something far more engineered was in play, a trick which many investors may not immediately recognize, but which anyone familiar with the nefarious insider mechanics of banking, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the COMEX and the London Bullion Market Association can see as plainly as a dentist sees a cavity…
- Folks, let’s be very clear. What happened on “Silver Friday” was neither normal market action nor a convergence of statistically impossible coincidences.
- It was an entirely engineered flushing of the silver price to save a fatally trapped cabal of bankers caught behind the grassy knoll in the mother of all short-squeezes.
Just so. Yet how do the fiends execute the caper?
I do not require a detailed, technical disquisition into the mechanisms involved. Yet please, can you sketch the scene in broad outline for this Simple Samuel?
Silver Was Strangling the Big Banks
- As usual, whenever something so openly rigged… the very first place to look for a smoking gun… is among the banks, most of whom are and were drowning in levered silver short positions by Thursday night’s $120 silver price.
- This meant that with each passing day of rising silver, the banks were getting squeezed to the point of self-destruction.
- This is not fable but fact. Rising silver was literally strangling the big banks. They needed to exit their short squeeze as soon as possible, but preferably at a lower rather than higher silver price.
I see. So the banks were “short” silver. They had wagered on lower silver prices. And every increase in the silver price was to them a liability. High leverage merely amplified their potential losses.
They were therefore hot to give silver a mighty harpooning.
Yet what trick did the silver exchange employ to set the dominoes going over?
The answer, as the theory runs, reduces to heightened “margin requirements.”
How to Trigger a Selloff
Margin requirements refer to the percentage of a trade’s value that investors must fund. It is an ante of sorts.
When margin requirements are increased, investors must increase the funding. This places pressure upon traders to exit their positions.
And on Friday, COMEX (a primary futures and options exchange) elevated margin requirements on silver contracts.
It was but the latest in a series of margin requirement elevations.
Many who were “long” silver were forced to exit their positions on Friday — to the everlasting delight of the “shorts” — the large banks among them.
The dominoes began going over, one after the other, in chained reaction.
One of the Greatest Price Spoofs Ever Witnessed
Mr. Piepenburg:
- Do you think it may… be just another coincidence that the self-regulated COMEX raised its margin requirements yet again on that same Friday to shake out even more of the levered longs, which were otherwise pummeling the short-exposed bankers?..
- By effectively raising the “buy-in” to play poker with the silver exchanges, the new rules (i.e., the “House”) forced most of the silver longs to sell at mass…
- Silver Friday (was) one of the greatest price spoofs ever witnessed in the totally rigged, and now totally desperate paper metals markets.
- As silver hit $120, the levered bankers and the incestuous system they rigged went into open panic and cheat mode…
- By adding more margin hikes on Friday, the insiders forced a sell-off in the paper silver markets…
Now you have the taste of it — or at least I hope you have the taste of it. The business is… complicated.
The Manipulators Are Running Low on Tricks
Yet a question naturally arises: why should you invest in silver, or gold, if they are subject to such rank manipulation?
The answer, argues Mr. Piepenburg, is that the manipulators are running low on tricks:
- What we just witnessed on Silver Friday is pure confirmation that the silver (and gold) paper markets are dying before our watering yet wide-open eyes…
- In short: The world wants physical metals, not paper tricks.
- The CME and COMEX cheaters may be able to brazenly manipulate the paper price of silver, but they have yet to find an alchemist’s ability to create actual silver.
- Moving forward, actual buyers of real silver will move further and further away from the now discredited and increasingly desperate and openly rigged paper markets in the US and UK.
- The physical metals will be in greater demand, and the once-powerful paper exchanges will lose their leverage and influence.
On that day I shall rejoice. That is because I dislike cheaters and I dislike their schemes.
Down with paper silver, I cry! Down with paper gold!
And up with true silver, up with true gold.
Up with truth.
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
