Silver Just Gained a Historic Advantage
Peter Reagan

As gold rebounds past $4,000, the lone bearish forecast quickly collapses under its own logic. Meanwhile, silver gains new strategic importance on Washington’s “critical minerals” list. Here’s why gold and silver are poised to shine even brighter…

The lone bear on gold leaves us with a pretty bullish picture

Yahoo Finance Senior Business Reporter Ines Ferré brings us a strange take from Macquarie Group. That rarest of endangered species, the gold bear. “Bear” is finance jargon for a pessimist, someone who says an asset’s price is likely to fall rather than rise. Generally, bears go into hibernation during price gains, but it seems like the 5% drop from gold’s all time high was enough to wake at least one from its slumber.

The consensus take on gold these days is $5,000 gold by mid-2026 and a run to at least $6,000 through 2028. That is what you see among big banks (BofA, Goldman Sachs, SocGen) and notable analysts.

Bears have been difficult to find, which is why I think it’s worth our time to investigate this position. What can we learn from the pessimist’s take? Do they stand up to scrutiny?

So what does Macquarie give us to work with? Chief economist Ric Deverell says that gold prices have peaked around $4,000 – which is already a very unusual opinion.

So why is $4,000 the peak? Did the dollar suddenly regain purchasing power? Have central banks abandoned their four-year record gold hoarding?

…well, no. Instead, gold price has peaked, Deverell says, because global growth is “beginning to rebound.”

Really?

I’ve been watching for “green shoots” for a while now and here’s what I’m seeing: A global sovereign debt crisis. CEOs bracing for stagflation. I’m truly beginning to believe that GDP growth is an illusion.

So what data, precisely, does Deverell see pointing to a rebound in global growth? Well, he doesn’t say. Meanwhile, the IMF’s latest global financial stability report has the ominous title Shifting Ground beneath the Calm.

Deverell’s weakest argument is that central bank monetary easing is nearing its end. What? Japan and the Euro Zone, sure – 0.5% and 2.15% respectively. But here in the U.S., the Fed has only just begun – rates are at 4% (same in the UK). The Federal Reserve has been very cautious in lowering rates recently, because having the highest rates in 50 years still left us with persistently high inflation. This time, the Fed decided that 3% was close enough to its target 2% before lowering rates again. That’s not a success! Abandoning the fight before winning doesn’t make you the victor!

Deverell seems to be thinking that the Fed intends to leave interest rates at 4%. Well, what's next, then? Another hiking cycle? For two to three years, ever since the latest rate hike and even before, there have been pleas from everyone from CEOs to Congress to cut rates. To avoid a recession, to make mortgage rates cheaper and to lower the federal government’s refinancing costs.

Look – I hate to break it to anyone who wants to see inflation end, but I don’t think the Federal Reserve is going to stop cutting. There’s just too much debt. Historically, nations deal with unmanageable debt loads by weakening their currencies (inflation). Deverell is just plain wrong.

Weirdly, Deverell hedges his position with a caveat: “if geopolitical tensions reescalate or concerns about the size of the U.S. government return, gold may rally further.”

Is it just me, or is this enough to offset everything else in the analysis? Did Deverell just undercut his own bear case for gold?

I’ve seen this over and over through the last two years. Even the grumpiest bear forecasts somehow turn in gold's favor halfway through, as if they can’t help but grudgingly remind readers that, yes, gold is a hedge against the unexpected.

Ultimately, I have to give Deverell credit for even trying to build a case against gold. Kudos to him for pushing back against the echo chamber where virtually everyone from too-big-to-fail banks to everyday American families are bullish on gold. I don’t think he’s right, but then again, it doesn’t matter what I think. The price of gold will settle the argument for us.

Silver is officially a critical mineral

Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Department of Interior is officially adding silver to its critical minerals list. (My colleague Phillip Patrick reported on the draft proposal to add silver to the critical minerals list back in August.)

The U.S. Geological Survey has an extensive report on the entire list of critical minerals here. This is a follow-up to the Section 232 investigation to evaluate American dependence on imported minerals as a security and resilience vulnerability. Now, this update has already caused a bit of panic, as analysts expected some minerals to be included, but not silver.

Concerns over physical supply of precious metals – haven't we heard these somewhere else recently?

Now, a lot of coverage on the “silver is a critical mineral” story make this a tariff issue, as if this only matters because tariffs could be slapped on silver imports. Frankly, I doubt it – but that overlooks the broader scope of this decision.

Last year, Russia’s central bank declared its intention to establish a central bank silver reserve. A silver bullion stockpile, if you will. Back when nations used silver as currency, it wasn’t unusual for central banks to own silver as well as gold reserves (see this 1924 Federal Reserve bulletin for example).

Anyone who thinks the Russian announcement, the U.S. critical mineral designation and the 200-million-ounces-a-year silver production deficit are unrelated needs a reality check.

You already know how I feel about the price of silver. Since the August critical minerals announcement, the price of silver has exploded 34%. I think it can go much, much higher. Unlike gold and platinum and palladium, silver is the sole precious metal that’s actually consumed by use. The other three can be infinitely recycled; silver cannot.

We’ve often discussed the critical undersupply of silver. Only about 30% of mines that produce silver are primarily silver mines – about 70% of silver is recovered as a byproduct of lead/zinc, copper and gold mines. That dynamic makes miners sluggish to respond to increases in silver’s price.

The same can’t be said for most of the other critical minerals on the official list.

Look, it’s no secret that I’m a huge believer in silver’s growth potential. I sincerely hope that those of you who are regular readers have been listening over the years and are poised to benefit from this global reevaluation of silver’s importance.

If you’re a newer reader, or a silver skeptic, I strongly encourage you to dig a little deeper and learn more. I’m confident your due diligence will lead you to similar conclusions on the truly spectacular growth potential silver offers right now.

Investopedia's November 2025 update on the gold standard is mostly damage control

Investopedia’s gold standard article got an overhaul by writer Nick Lioudis on November 3. Gold investors might already be getting nervous to hear that this is newsworthy, because we all know that mainstream finance is totally in favor of unbacked currency. They couldn’t exist without it.

I'm going to be comparing the Investopedia article of today with the version from February of 2024, also by Nick Lioudis. I picked the date at random, aiming for "something from about a year ago."

So what changed?

Well, first the editors have deemed gold's 5,000-year history as money irrelevant. A massive part of the article that describes early coinage from 700 BC to the Renaissance – gone. They also removed extremely important notes. Historically, it was difficult to oversupply gold relative to goods even when gold production rose.

References to oversupply of money through debasement (in the form of bad coinage, pillage or other hijinks) – also gone from the latest version of the article.

The earlier version, while still mostly disparaging of gold, did admit that a gold standard only really handicapped global economies during times of war. That’s a fancy way of saying that there was no rational way to fund excess wartime spending. Which is why, during both World Wars I and II, everyone went off the gold standard and printed money to pay the troops. Subsequently, since the end of Bretton-Woods, the U.S. has been involved in foreign conflicts twice as often compared to the post-war, Bretton-Woods era.1

How things have changed… The revised article focuses much more on all the wonderful benefits of money-printing. Abandoning the gold standard helps nations! When governments need currency, they can just print it – which makes money not so much a store of value, but rather “a flexible tool for modern economies.”

Wonderful, just wonderful.

While the February 2024 version mostly focused on the inconvenience of a gold standard during war, the new version blames the Great Depression on – that’s right, the gold standard. Because of the gold standard, governments couldn’t easily inflate their way out of an economic crisis.

Not only did governments not cause the problem, they were actively prohibited from solving the problem by gold, that “barbarous relic.”

The most interesting addition to the new article, for my money, is a subtitle asking "What would happen if we returned to the gold standard?"

Credulous readers are scolded:

"A return to the gold standard would limit the Federal Reserve's ability to print money and constrain its ability to enact monetary policy during critical economic events, such as recessions."

They’re overlooking the fact that, during the gold standard era, recessions occurred. Yet, somehow, nations recovered from them without unlimited money-printing. Recessions during the decades of the gold standard, too. The Fed's ability to print money hasn’t made recessions go away.

The hand-waving goes on, but I think we've seen enough. Here’s the major point: In just one year, Investopedia (the Wikipedia of finance) changed their gold standard article from honest and slightly biased against to… Well. To what’s basically a 4,000-word Danger sign.

This is one of countless examples of how history is rewritten by the winners. In this case, the loser (the gold standard) takes the fall for the Great Depression – and the governments and central banks are awarded a trophy for having the courage to take sound money out of their citizens’ hands.

Even the new, revised version of the article can’t help but compliment gold at the very end:

"Gold… remains a significant financial asset for nations and central banks. It provides a hedge against government loans and is an indicator of economic health, making it a strategic component of national reserves. For individual investors, gold can diversify portfolios, often moves inversely to the U.S. dollar."

Despite the article’s obvious bias in favor of unbacked currency, it gets this part right.

 

 

Peter Reagan is a financial market strategist at Birch Gold Group. As the Precious Metal IRA Specialists, Birch Gold helps Americans protect their retirement savings with physical gold and silver.

 

 

 

www.birchgold.com