Coincidentally, late this morning I went to one of those traveling roadshows where they purchase precious metals, bringing along a childhood coin collection that I wanted to turn into cash.
I started with a single 1 ounce silver medallion and was given a quote for $80. When I had checked the silver price earlier this morning it was above $115.
I questioned the buyer about the spread and he said the spot price was down, and the smelters were backed up so that was their best offer.
I brought out some other silver coins, specifically liberty head and Morgan dollars. He looked at the app on his phone and said “hold on I gave you the wrong price,” and then said “I’ll give you $35 for each of them,” including the pure 1 oz silver medallion.
I said no thank you and left, miffed, thinking he was jerking me around.
I didn’t realize the price of silver was collapsing.
Chances are, he was indeed jerking you around. Nearly every one of these traveling road show style buyers pay very very very very little for coins. They have no reputation to uphold and are the literal definition of “fly by night” - and by the time you realize how little they paid you, they’re gone.
Source: Am full-time professional coin dealer (who is NOT fly by night!) and have to deal with the repercussions of people getting hosed by these roadshows all the time :(
tbh, I never knew the value of coins was tied to the worth of the metal itself
Do these coins get smelted down or something?
A very excellent question and totally reasonable thing not to know (congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000!)
I'm speaking from the perspective of US coins because that's what I specialize in but this generally applies to coins all over the world as well:
Prior to (and including) 1964, US 10c, 25c, 50c, (and when they were made, $1) coins were made of 90% silver. We made A LOT of these, so in terms of outright rarity, most are not rare. Today they're referred to as "junk silver" because in terms of collectibility, they're junk, but the 90% silver content means there's some inherent precious metal value (as of this moment on Jan 30, 2026, they have ~approximately~ 60x their face value in silver content, eg $6, $15, $30, and $60 in silver respectively.)
So that's their basal value that fluctuates with the silver market. But the next layer is actual rarity / collectibility -- if a given coin is desirable enough that it surpasses its metal content, you get a different set of values.
Now to your actual question: Do they get smelted/melted down? The answer is...sometimes. They trade somewhat like financial instruments, based on the assumption that you could melt them down (and there's a cost to doing so), so that's how people value the various silver coins. In reality, there's usually enough demand from people who want to hold physical silver in various forms that they don't actually need to be melted down.
There's obviously a lot more to it, but that's the 5c version ;)
Is that more or less than the spot price? I would have assumed that they trade higher, though maybe the non collectibles trade are only a little bit higher.
My experience, I sometimes buy gold coins to make jewelry. I do that because at least here in Belgium, there's no VAT on coins but there is VAT on the other forms of gold that are more commonly used for that. For professionals it's not a problem because they pass VAT but for an individual it's a 20% difference. Also I'm in Antwerp so it's really easy to just bike to a place that sells gold if I want to.
In my case I buy old French 20 francs coins as they are quite "cheap": 1% above spot price of their gold content (they are 90% gold).
Other more recent coins, like Chinese or Canadian ones, sell at a much higher premium (17%, 20%) so I always wonder a bit who they are for. It's unlikely they can be resold for that much of a premium. At least the shops I use just buy them for their price in gold.
Also a very good question and the answer is also...it depends. The "premium" (delta to spot) on 90% silver (aka "90%") varies with supply and demand. At this very moment with the meteoric rise of base silver, 90% is selling for less than spot. But there have been times when it trades above spot.
The reason is that silver itself is traded on the various international commodity exchanges and those traders are not the same supply & demand sources as the little guy(s) who likes keeping some old silver coins in their garage. So as those supply/demand curves shift, the premium over/under spot price changes as well.
Also I heard that refineries that is companies that take 90% silver or even less in and processes it to something that can be sold on commodity markets that is purer silver are now focusing on well purer silver as that is easier to process. Thus there is less demand on less pure silver. And recycled silver ending with industrial use goes through these companies.
Thanks, that makes sense.
I appreciate you sharing your knowledge! Your layers concept makes sense but I guess I'm just surprised at how large of a layer the market price of precious metals can be—even for "junk silver" coins
Isn't smelting a coin for the metal a crime?
No, not in general anyways. There are specific regulations on smelting pennies and nickels (and it's specifically nickels, not half dimes).
So you can smelt any silver coins minted by the US except for the WW2 silver nickel.
So is speeding. There might be some crazy radiation related super science way to determine if a lump of silver came from a specific collection of coins, but once it's melted down, and the impurities driven out, silver is silver and you can't really tell that it came from coins.
Collectible coins usually get melted as a last resort, if they stay on the shelf forever. The value of the metal is still in the coin though. Think about it: you could buy a very common coin with the same metal, or a slightly rare one. Which costs more? Now take the rare one and put a huge dent in it. Is it worth less than the metal content then?
They're incredibly sleazy scumbags. They buy silver coins at bullion-value or below, which is the lowest grade you can get for a coin, making a small profit on everything they buy and massive profits on the ones that are actually worth something as coins rather than bullion. And it's typically elderly people they rip off, who are thrilled to get the price of a cup of coffee for their 1884S Morgan dollar. Never, ever deal with these predators.
amen!
If you pulled out more product when offered $80, the price was only going to go down from there.
He does have to turn a profit on what he's buying. You want spot price? Oddly enough, in California and maybe other states, a pawn shop will give you spot price.
I’ve also found a few in various states that buy Eagles for spot - of course then they’ll sell them forwards at spot + 15% or something
I’ve gotten them to sell under spot once bc they mispriced their inventory.
Why California? Most pawn shops suck (see Pawn Stars where they offer like 1/3 of the value on most stuff), but you might find a few pawn shops that want to deal with metals and coins. The best thing to do is to shop around a bit when trying to sell anything.
Pawn Stars is semi-scripted entertainment, not necessarily representative of how real pawn shops operate. The actual prices were were negotiated before the episode was recorded.
But of course there will be a large bid / ask spread on collectibles and small quantities of precious metals. Dealers have to make a profit. Anyone who doesn't like the price is free to sell on eBay or at a local coin show or something.
Pawn shops can sell to large online dealers almost instantly in normal times. They can also sell on eBay easier than you can, as an established business. You can do those things too but maybe you don't want to deal with shipping and other hassles. I've heard really atrocious numbers (second hand) from pawn shops. To give you an idea, one guy went to a pawn shop and basically got offered $35 per oz on silver rounds when it was at $65. The coin shop offered him more like $55 if I remember right. This was in December, well before any big buyers stopped taking it or locking in prices. Even at $65 it looked high, because it was a record high, but tell your friend try to buy it immediately after you and it will be significantly over spot!
PS: eBay charges 14% or something. I also know very well that Pawn Stars is scripted, but the business side is true to life.
When the price moves violently up or down, dealers get scared. They need to keep it for an unspecified amount of time to get paid. Maybe the guy was jerking you around, or maybe he was short on cash. $35 for an oz is a terrible price when spot is $90 or something. It hit $120 during this past week and only crashed today, back to the record high from like 2 weeks ago.
> I didn’t realize the price of silver was collapsing.
Wait. It "collapsed" to the price it was on the 9th of january 2026. Which back then was it's all-time high.
FWIW I hold SLV (a BlackRock/iShares ETF on silver, the biggest and most liquid silver ETF in the world) since $26. I noticed the recent craze. So I bought PUTs when it was at $102, protecting me at a strike of $96. These PUTs were pricey but, so far, worth it. But here comes the kicker: I'm financing those PUTs by selling CALLs on SLV (that simple options strategy is called a "collar").
And as I'm a silverbug, I own silver coins too. But these aren't liquid as you noticed.
When you trade paper silver (like the ETF SLV), the price of the market is the price of the market. SLV is not 100% following an ounce of silver's price, but SLV's market price is SLV's market price. It was $105 at close yesterday and $75 at close today and that's just the price of SLV.
I do like that: not getting ripped off by some side-of-the-road hustler.
That dude giving you $80 then giving you $35 is taking a more than 50% cut compared to the nearest low of day. That's quite a rip off.
There's a lot going on here and it's not just the price going up and then going down (see my other comments). Basically, the entirely silver market is dysfunctional at the moment. And it's all about bailing out banks who are getting wiped out by the silver rally.
So when you sell silver at a pawn shop or to a retail dealer, here's what happens in a normal market. You get an instant price, 5-10% off spot hopefully. That dealer then takes that silver and sells it to a refiner in higher volume with a lower margin (to spot). That's their profit. Refiners will convert that silver into bars and sell it to wholesalers and institutional buyers.
But instead what's happening is the refiner needs to hold onto the silver for 7-14 days before it gets smelted and processed. With high volatility, they're not paying out the dealers until it's processed and sold. That's a huge cash flow problem. Instead of instant money, it's money in 2 weeks and you have no idea how much money.
So the retail dealer has to wait and it could be 20% lower or 20% higher in the current market so instead of 5-10% they eitehr have to offer 30%+ less than spot price if they buy it at all. That money tied up has an opportunity cost.
Combine this with a shortage of physical silver to deliver on futures contracts and the refiners aren't really getting the silver they need to satisfy that demand.
So the spot price is fake. Nobody's buying anyway. Low wholesale supply means the prices continue to go up. Banks are haemorrhaging money because they have huge short positions. They have to borrow silver to meet their obligations and the silver lease rate (the price to borrow silver for a money has like 10x'ed) and this is where we are.
Sir banks (at least the sane ones, like JPM) are both long and short on behalf of their clients and simply because they’re dealers and prime brokers all the time and just settle physical, which they also own (because they’re sane).
If the banks had massive short positions, why didn't they report huge losses in Q4?
The banks are not getting wiped out by the silver rally. JP Morgan has not been engaged in shorting the silver markets for years. This is a baseless conspiracy theory, and JPM has also been accused of shorting BTC as well.
The entire narrative is made up and this is really just supply vs demand in terms of silver contracts and shares. I have been actively trading silver since last year and made over $100k and in precious metals (mostly gold) for 30+ years since I first graduated from college so I'm not just an idle spectator.
Thanks for that, that's a really good backgrounder on what's happening.
No, it's a low-effort mix of facts, irrelevancies, misunderstandings, and BS conspiracy theory. Don't believe 90% of the financial information you see on HN.
This was an inevitable correction. Gold and silver had gone parabolic for the past month. Nothing goes straight up. This takes the gold price all the way back to where it was last week.
Honestly, I don't think Warsh's appointment had much to do with it.
Doesn't this reset the silver price to where it was at the start of the month? This is hardly news, people got a bit over-excited in January. The spike is more newsworthy than the fall, and neither are all that interesting.
Silver was around 1/3 of the current price a year ago. Calling this a crash is a bit much. If it hits $20 then it's a crash.
Side note and completely unrelated, but I got my kid a 10 oz .50 caliber silver bullet last year and kicked myself for spending that much on a gag gift (like $300). . . . Should have bought a box of them.
I don't think people are thrilled with Warsh as much as they are relieved it wasn't Hassett or like Kevin O'Leary or something really insane. Warsh has relevant experience and knowledge. He is too close to Trump (and Ron Lauder) but hopefully knows better than to cause havoc.
Crypto markets won in the sense that every single asset class can somehow trade like a memecoin now.
Fun Fact about the Great Depression - RCA is the Poster-child of exuberance and Tesla has had a higher PE for >2 years.
Meme stocks might coincide with meme coins - but I don't know if it's fair to blame crypto for everything.
I think the reality is that - for whatever reason - people are willing to take on MUCH greater risk today for reward than they were prior to the pandemic.
I don't think we can blame crypto for everything. Sure, maybe you could say crypto has been meme-ing since 2017 - 3 years before the pandemic. But we've seen plenty of speculative bubbles like that - if it even was one.
Crypto didn't really start meme-ing with clearly bullshit NFTs and meme coins until the exact same time - 2021 - when Dogecoin et al have meteoric rises coinciding almost exactly with all the meme stocks.
I think this is actually one the best meme indicators: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/doge/btc/
The Japanese Asset bubble was by far the biggest bubble of all time - and it lasted nearly 6 years. The Nifty 50 was a 7 year bubble, nowhere near this big. So, we might be in a bubble - but if we are - it's getting close to being the biggest, longest one ever.
> I think the reality is that… people are willing to take on MUCH greater risk today for reward than they were prior to the pandemic.
I’ll quibble that people have no idea of the risks they’re taking. I read somewhere that amateur stock traders spent something like 4 minutes researching their purchase. Balanced portfolios are just too boring and tedious.
dogecoin has tail emission vs bitcoin which has a finite emission. that is also something to consider. Maybe better to compare market caps? Dunno. Also, over time we have seen the development of more non-doge memecoins.
But shouldn't everybody have equal access to these markets?
The hype around physical silver has been astounding in 2025 and so far in 2026.
I have nothing to back this up, but I believe a group of investors learned from cryptobros just how easy it is to pump and dump with social media and scare tactics, and here we are. Somebody please correct me.
You are correct, but the truth is much uglier and deeper. All of this is scripted and controlled. It was planned for many, many years in advance.
GameStop = Gold. AMC = Silver. Same script, same playbook, same timing and everything, different name.
I might be cynic and consider that other side in media have no marketable skills and other side is there just to get their name out so they can find a few suckers to give them money manage. Or they have something to sell like courses and seminars. Or it is free publicity for them. Pandering to various fields is likely profitable, be it cryptobros, goldbugs, silverstackers, hard money advocates, doomsday preppers, permabears or those believing in astrology I mean technical analysis...
Gold has merely mean-reverted, not "crashed". Some profit-taking since gold got a bit ahead of itself.
If gold continues growing at the same rate as the last 6 months, it will take gold all of a month and a half to get back to where it was.
https://i.imgur.com/bRAy1FB.png
Now, gold might not continue growing, but D.C. hasn't fixed its problems that are causing gold to rise, so I do have a degree of confidence that it will recover quickly.
Everyone is focused on commodities and ignoring basically the entire global market got shook today. Bonds, indices, commodities, and securities all got tanked. Nothing in my portfolio was in the green today, and I generally invest conservatively since it’s my (maybe, hopefully, someday) house down payment at stake.
That said, I agree with you that this feels like a bunch of prominent exits to convert paper profits into actual ones. The underlying problems remain and will become increasingly exacerbated as the year drags on.
I figure I’ll recover losses by this time next year if I just refrain from panic selling.
The market went down less than half a percent today? That’s not a great day but certainly not losses that are even notable
Kids these days have no clue what a real bear market looks like. They were barely in grade school during the 2008 crash.
Same with silver: It jus went back to its 20SMMA
I'm not sure a 6 month window with a squished Y axis to make the graph a perfect 45 degree angle line means much. How it compares to currencies and other assets would be more interesting.
Silver has plenty of industrial uses. Very little has changed in industry to cause demand or supply shifts to match the massive price swings. Thus a lot of this is probably meme investors gambling
> Silver has plenty of industrial uses.
About one third of this demand (photographic film and paper) more or less evaporated in the 2000s. You don't see that on the price chart, so I don't think you can seriously argue that the price is dictated by industrial uses.
Now look at what has happened to demand for silver for photovoltaic cells.
Fun fact about silver, besides its heavy industrial footprint, which you mentioned: the supply is dominated by Mexico. There have been some, uh, erratic words about Mexico from the people in the position to affect trade policy and foreign policy.
China decided to subject silver to export controls similar to rare earth metals. That's one of the big reasons for the silver growth.
But why is silver with export restrictions (Shanghai) trading above silver without said restrictions?
Market manipulation? Why else would paper silver be much cheaper than buying the commodity for real?
The price of paper silver doesn’t match the price of buying the actual commodity, so it’s more likely that it’s being manipulated by “market makers”
This sounds awful, silver down 30%, gold down 11%, but it just brings them back to the 50 day moving average. It doesn't even break the bull trend.
Next week we'll find out if this was a buy on dip opportunity or if it marks a multi-year top in precious metals and the start of a deeper correction and real technical damage.
One day that will happen and the trend will reverse, but it's always more probable that a trend continues.
If you look at the history of related funds, you’ll see that there is volatility when the price gets sufficiently high as people early exit, and that historically it has gone up higher, then once the market is milked dry, it goes way down again for some years.
This has happened multiple times. You may not be able to guarantee it, but I strongly suspect precious metals are a repeating pump-and-dump scheme. It could be money waiting to be made by those that see the pattern, or maybe it won’t happen, who knows?
We knew the correction was coming, but I don't think anyone expected the 30% move in one day.
Anyone with long experience trading commodities would have expected this. This is like the least surprising thing ever.
It is amusing reading the comments on here. Silver dropped 50% in 1980. Silver is the original memecoin. I think people care less though about market events that happened before they were born. It is like the way I know the entire story of silver in 1980 even though I was a little kid but nothing about the Nifty Fifty a decade earlier.
Nothing for me with commodities will ever top -$37 per barrel during Covid with oil. That was a level of market shell shock for me that I just can't imagine being topped.
Probably the opposite. Corrections happen quickly and all at once, somewhat similar to growth.
It would be more surprising if the 30% drop was spread out over a month.
Correct, momentum acceleration is generally a mean reversion signal in futures, and can be effectively combined with momentum signals i.e. you go long when it goes up but when it starts going up a lot you reduce your position.
And these signals are usually very compressed in time because acceleration is actually just an acceleration in the number of decisions being taken, which tends to blow off quite spectacularly.
Something that has changed is the large retail participation, which is making the scale of these moves quite crazy. Will be interesting to see what happens next, as with crypto the scale of the wipe seems so large that it is hard to see how that participation continues.
Healthy for markets but I am guessing this will conflict heavily with the politics.
Big enough dip will cause algorithmic sell off I imagine deepening the dip.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
maybe, but almost everyone will see the hot iron
This is the "dump" part of pump and dump. TikTok influencers have been pushing the gold & silver rally for weeks now, and it was inevitable that people at the top would eventually cash out.
Most of the influencers aren't even in on the investment, they just get paid to pump, and a lot of them don't even get paid, they just do it for the eye balls.
People want to get rich quick.
There's going to be a never ending list of people that will tell them how - just so they can get useless karma points on Social Media, even if they don't make any money, and just convince you to lose your money.
> a never ending list of people that will tell them how
you mean like these trading Bros parachuting onto a yacht and placing a trade and telling me that I could do this too with the correct mindset from their exclusive Telegram group?
:-D
> People want to get rich quick
What about Amish people? Or Buddhists?
Too early to tell. They're both up since 6 months ago. Could be another one of those flash crash events. Buckle up!
They're both up since like 8 days ago. This is one of those classic bullshit "dramatic change if you only look at today!!" stories.
True, but 30% is a pretty dramatic change for one day. If you look at the history of the silver price - go back as far as you like - you won't find many days when it moves 30% in either direction.
Is it the beginning of a longer-term down? I have no idea.
It reminds me of my days looking at biotech stocks. You'd have a small company stake their whole financial future on the outcome of a clinical trial, to know whether their drug works or not. Leading up to the release of the results, the price would veer this way or that based on tidbits cleaned from doctors involved in the trials or whatever, but the stock would mostly be in a superposition of the two universes, one where it succeeds and one where it fails (or more mundanely: the probability weighted average of the price that the stock would be in each one). Then the results would come out and the universes would collapse to the "works" or "doesn't work" one and the stock would jump 30% or crater 50% or whatever.
I haven't been following this gold and silver saga, but it feels like a similar situation where there were two possible Fed appointees who would have vastly different impacts on the price of the metals. Then the announcement comes and the price found the world where that was the nominee and not the other guy.
Considering the array of behaviors exhibited by the president recently, it wouldn’t be entirely unlikely to nominate Alex Jones, eh?
Gold has been going up for years now. I don’t know how much TikTok influencers influence the price. Seems to be mostly central banks and the falling apart of the international order that’s driving a neutral and unsanctionable tradeable asset up.
Gold reverted to the price it was wait for it five days ago. What actually happened was that Trump was forced/pressured to pick Warsh because prices were spiking in anticipation of how Trump's preferred pick would impact global finance.
But anyone who thinks Trump won't get his way and control the Fed to create hyper-inflation is living in a fantasy world that I wish were our actual reality.
We live in a world where Trump launched a criminal investigation against Powell. This is not someone who somehow learned his lesson in the last five days.
The irony is that if Trump understood how markets perceive threats to Fed independence, he'd try to influence rates behind closed doors and not make a public spectacle of his attempt to undermine Fed independence!
Fed independence is damaged but it was never as independent as it should have been.
No one since Volcker has been a real hawk. It hasn't led to hyperinflation, just a continual debasement that has served many purposes.
"Fed independence" has always been kind of a ruse. The theory is Congress would want to print money so they can spend it, so you need someone whose job it is to not do that. But then Congress just borrows the money instead, which forces the Fed to respond to keep interest rates where they want them, with the result that they still end up de facto printing trillions of dollars at the behest of Congress.
To some extent the "independence" is even worse, because the Fed has limited ways it can respond to what Congress does and "long-term cause individual debt to get completely out of hand" is one of their primary effects, which is pretty bad and plausibly worse than inflation having been slightly higher over the same period.
Good points -- what do you think would be effective ways to improve the institutions/incentives?
You essentially need someone with the structural incentive to limit excessive spending to be in a position to actually do that. In the original design that was the US Senate, because Senators were elected by the state legislatures who would then prefer programs to be implemented at the state level unless there was a reason to do them at the federal level. It's not a coincidence that the massive expansion of the federal government happened pretty much immediately after that was changed to make Senators directly elected.
Changing it back would probably work, but it's also a good example of the kind of thing that can work. You find someone whose incentive is to say no unless then answer should definitely actually be yes and you give them the ability to say no.
I have no idea about his credentials or suitability for the job, but Warsh is the son in law of Trump's buddy Ronald Lauder. I get the feeling he's not picking people he doesn't think he can control.
> I get the feeling he's not picking people he doesn't think he can control.
The irony in wanting to control people when you lack self control.
> TikTok influencers
The dump is proximately caused by Trump picking a normal Fed chairman. Nobody on TikTok has anything to do with that, they're just pumping everything because seeling out is their day job.
It's not just Tiktok, and not just the last few weeks. There have been pro-Gold ads in every form of media for the last couple of years, many focusing on uncertainty. The timing is pretty clear.
The 2024 election was a time of great uncertainty, and Trump's first year in power delivered a reality worse than the fears. Trump is still throwing random tariff threats (and actual tariffs) around without rhyme or reason, but he's discovered that threatening to invade (allied) countries can stir things up even more effectively. Choosing a lackey to replace a competent federal reserve chair isn't going to help matters. We're just one quarter of the way through Trump's presidency (assuming he lives and doesn't seek another term), and it seems like the uncertainty is just going to get worse.
However, that uncertainty is, by no means, certain. Domestic resistance and midterm elections could curb Trump's power. International resistance is starting to coalesce. e.g. The EU's threat to use their "trade bazooka" probably contributed to Trump's TACO on Greenland, as did the potential demise of NATO. Responses to Trump's international graspings will likely become more prompt and more muscular, reducing the instability Trump can cause. The system has been shocked, but now its adapting. Many nations are hedging against U.S. centred uncertainty by pivoting to China or other allies. Global markets will likely become more stable as nations learn how to work around Trump's chaos by working around the U.S.. Still, it's very possible that Trump will find new and "creative" ways to make everybody freak out again.
Bottom line, the uncertainty that's been driving gold prices up since 2024 is going to let up at some point. But when? How overvalued will gold be when it does let up?
Fortunately they would have to repeal the 22nd Amendment to allow that dingdong a third term
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
It’s amazing what a little uncertainty, a supine Congress, and an impotent judiciary can do for your prospects of committing high treason.
Traditionally you put a puppet in place to avoid these sorts of pesky rules. Family members are popular.
Trumps tariffs are also entirely unconstitutional. An open and shut case, yet nothing has happened yet...
> No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice
Which makes Trump's repeated claims that he was elected in 2020 doubly stupid.
Does Trump know that? And if he does, does he care?
Good luck with that
It is very hard to pump the metals. The markets for them are just too big. You'd need whole countries buying to make a dent. Miners are another story. Those can be pumped and dumped like any other stock.
On Gold? You know the market is 35 trillion dollars?
Do you have any idea how much you'd need to pump?
A good portion of that has been hoarded since biblical times, and has not been in actual "circulation" ever.
What percentage is "A good portion" ?
Gold mining dates back to ancient civilisations.
Our best estimates suggest that around 216,265 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history.
Interestingly, about two-thirds of this gold has been extracted since 1950.
This massive increase in production has been due to advancements in mining technology and the discovery of new gold deposits.
200 Years of Global Gold Production, by Country - https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/200-years-of-global-go...
Between 1500 and 1650, the Spanish imported 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver from the New World ...
What's your estimate for the tonnage of gold "hoarded since biblical times" ?
>What's your estimate
Good question, I would say your guess is as good as mine, but looks like you have recent statistics !
Thanks for the information, it does look like realistic figures about as accurate as you can get.
I just accept that as much as possible gold has always been hoarded much more strongly than silver amounts having the same values at the time.
Enough to regard silver as a medium of exchange compared to gold as a store of value.
Gold is so tightly hoarded that I expect that there is more than one accumulation established centuries ago, that originally consisted entirely of ancient gold which is comingled with material from the 20th century and maybe newer by now.
It's also possible that before any human value was established for gold in prehistoric times, there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit without need to do very much "mining" at all.
Of course cave men had no formal education but they were sapiens just like us and had plenty of progressive generations over thousands of years to shrewdly recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable. At least some of them anyway :)
And they sure had orders of magnitude more time to pursue economic interests and accumulate wealth before recorded history than there has been since then, no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet !
Edit: Not my downvote! Where did that come from? Corrective upvote now placed.
> I would say your guess is as good as mine
Spoiler: I did a few decades of exploration geophysics, some time working on the production circuit of the SuperPit, and part of a team that sold a global minerals intelligence database to Standard & Poor 16 or so years ago.
(No big deal, I'm just old and happen to have literally mapped uranium / copper / gold / et al. resources and reserves about the globe for clients in the past)
> there might just have been untold megatons within reach as low-hanging fruit
And yet the total amount of known gold in all of history is less than a quarter of a single megaton .. you're suggesting mega tonnes of gold from from before the Roman Rio Tinto mining days have lasted more than two thousand years stacked up as nuggets in many many many caves and structures without being found.
That's an interesting hypothesis.
> Of course cave men had no formal education
Interestingly nor did my father (born 1935) and he's still walking about
> recognize the advantage of not telling anybody about "untold" amounts of anything when it's regarded as valuable.
Can you expand upon the value of megatons of gold to cavemen ?
> no telling what they were keeping off the books when there weren't any books yet !
Oh, you know, gravitometers, ground penetrating radar, seismic surveys, etc. are all means of exploring for things not yet on any ledger.
> Edit: Not my downvote!
I don't fuss much about those, not on my comments, and I see no reason to downvote yours - just ride it out, they mostly even out over time.
All of this is in light humour, your comment caught my eye as I wasn't sure if you were serious, jesting, hadn't thought through the physical implications of a perhaps throw away comment, etc.
Thanks even more for coming back and emphasizing your unique experience !
I think cave men are interesting because almost nothing is known about them.
Except that they were just like us.
If you go back far enough they could be in a cave lined with gold and not care about it at all.
Sooner or later though people coveted it so much they would kill for it. Maybe even Neanderthals too ;)
Meanwhile right there in Colorado there were many kilos of gold sitting at the bottom of a lonely river, still just waiting millennia for people to come along and gather it up. By the time settlers got there and were finished sifting out the gold, a whole city had been built on the spot, and Denver has been there ever since.
I would expect there were a lot more places like that which were never recorded, and by the point that biblical times got here had been tapped out and forgotten for millennia.
Sorry about seismics but my only exposure is from petroleum and I was not one of the geologists so not very involved.
But Trinidad is a major example where you didn't need subsurface imaging to find petroleum since there was so much of it floating on top of the water when foreign explorers arrived at the islands. Some people made plenty of money after its value was recognized from just the amount that was coming out of the ground by itself, before any drilling for the mother lode.
First come, first serve though. If an exorbitant amount can be controlled early it can provide an outsize hoard before anyone else has a comparable chance, and the relative advantage in financial strength so there is no threat to the accumulated wealth.
I would think that once gold was deemed desirable in prehistoric times, it didn't take that many more generations for some to appreciate the advantage of keeping the hoard together so they could retain more "critical mass" and power relative to adversaries.
When there is any adversarial situation, lots of times modern man didn't want anybody to really know the depth and type of their assets for strategic reasons. Other times they may have wanted the opposition to think they have way more resources than they actaully do. I guess plenty of people ever since have been no different, so anything is possible.
This is a prime example of being confidently wrong. As another commenter put it (paraphrased) if you think a few Tiktokers can move the global silver market then you're a deeply unserious person.
There are fundamental issues driving up silver prices in the last 6+ months, capped off by China instituting strict export controls starting January 1, 2026, which has further tightened supply.
This is a short squeeze, just like Gamestop from a few years back. Banks hold huge short positions, the prices keep going up, the exchanges are intentionally trying to bail out by the banks by crashing the market and no retailer is actually buying silver for a bunch of reasons I went into more detail about in other comments on this thread.
I was with you till the last paragraph. Banks having a huge short position is a false conspiracy theory.
Can either one be proved?
You would think, if banks did have a huge short position, they would have announced large losses in Q4 after metals mooned. They did not.
I agree, Gold is a 35 trillion dollar market. There is no pump and dump.
What happened to HN, people are totally fine with fanciful ideas suddenly.
Normies found it?
Is there any good explanation for what is happening with gold prices long-term? If you look at 5-10 year charts it was pretty stable and started to look like NVIDIA stocks since 2023.
This article does a reasonable job of laying out some of the drivers:
https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/marketmi...
> Gold is now up 50 percent since August 2
SP500 with reinvestment for comparison is 72%
NVidia without reinvestment 900%
50% since August 22 2025, not the year 2022. I'm assuming your SP500/Nvidia returns mentioned are from 2022.
I didn't invest and generally avoid anything other than s&p500, ftse 100 and just letting money compound over time (because if I wanted to really gamble I would go Las Vegas) but I wonder how many 'ordinary' people are silently getting burned out there by how much hype there is now online.
I think it will still go up. Banking regulations changed, US dollar dropping. Industrial use going through the roof.
This is a mid term investment. Probably see $70 and a slow build to $200 a once in two years.
You are probably right, but for the wrong reasons =3
The stock market is not a place most amateurs make money. In some cases Vegas would give you better odds. lol =3
Unless you are talking about owning a casino, I can't think of any interpretation of what you are saying that is true. Index funds have a long history of steady growth. Las Vegas businesses make their profits off of the reliable losses of their customers.
What people say they do, and what they actually do... are very different events. =3
I don't like your non-genuine engagement with this conversation. You've made outrageous claims, backed up with no data, and then seemingly pre-emptively linked to a page about trolling by asking for evidence. Well I'll ask you for evidence anyways lol. And I'll also give some that points against your outrageous claims: Retail investment in the stock market is at all time highs [1], and the percentage of investment in passive indices is also at an all time high [2]. It is _possible_ that retail investors are perversely fighting the trends and increasing their investments primarily by engaging in day-trade-esque behavior, but that would surprise me. Especially given that retirement accounts strongly encourage funds. I'd love to see some data pointing definitively either way though.
[1] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/all-topics/financial...
[2] https://www.morningstar.com/funds/8-charts-us-fund-flows-202...
>You've made outrageous claims, backed up with no data
In general, over the long term most amateurs do better investing in real-estate rather than the stock market. This is a well proven fact true for over a century, and making it some sort of personal argument is bizarre behavior.
You can spend 30 seconds looking it up, or continue to shovel your BS. =3
Washington state, as part of their frenzy of tax increases, decided that gold and silver bullion will be subject to the sales tax. Poof! There goes any point in investing in gold and silver. (Collector coins, too.)
What about GLD (SPDR)? I've been investing in a gold derivative for nearly a year and haven't touched a physical object yet.
Bullion has a pretty specific meaning, I doubt shares in gold derivatives could be construed as bullion.
The way you've written it sounds like taxing unmonetized bullion is insane overreach, but is it? They're just treating them the same as any other commodities. I can understand if you're opposed to sales taxes generally, but the only reason to single out bullion for an exception I can see is historic norms.
They're also applying a tax to monetized bullion. That's more more like taxing currency exchanges and it's a bit weird since currency exchanges are normally taxed on appreciation.
We do not charge sales tax when you exchange Dollars for Euros. Bullion advocates argue that exchanging dollars for physical gold is a currency exchange rather than a consumption purchase.
If you were to turn that bullion into an actual product like jewelry, then it would be taxed.
When a firm with tank capacity takes delivery of an oil contract they secured via the CBRE, do they pay sales tax on that? No, because it’s intended for resale.
Unmonetized gold bullion is similarly generally intended for resale. Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion.
Currency exchanges are exactly why I differentiated between monetized and unmonetized bullion. I don't see why going to Costco and buying a bar of gold is fundamentally different than buying the same weight of gold jewelry. That jewelry may very well be intended for resale the same way.
Whereas to me, it's wild that thousands of years of gold bullion trade as a form of currency exchange is supplanted basically overnight and now only "gold but only on paper" would be considered the only form of real gold currency.
"Monetized" gold has only existed for 50 years since gold futures started being offered in 1972. But the real "retail era" of "gold but only on paper" started just ~20 years ago with gold ETF's in 2003 (Australia) and 2004 (USA). So in just 20 years, we're now arguing that the norm from the past 3,000 years of gold trade is completely invalidated.
That said, you're not completely out of line with the views of the USA federal government. Gold has fascinating history of regulation. There was the 1933 total ban on private ownership when U.S. citizens were given until May 1, 1933, to surrender all gold coins and bullion. That lasted until 1974. Or that gold bullion is not subject to FinCEN Form 105 (currency) but rather CBP Form 6059B (goods).
I believe that is a widely misunderstood conception of the origin of money. Gold has generally not been used as currency. The sovereign right to dictate the value of a coin struck in a metal is called "seigniorage", and exists for all of those 3000 years. The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin. The metal in the coin makes it expensive to counterfeit said coin, with punishment by death doing the rest of the disincentive.
There is a reason the coins have the emperor's face on them. They are what he will accept as payment for the taxes he requests, and in assessing taxes according to his power, he dictates their value by fiat.
> The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin.
History has plenty of examples of governments debasing their coinage and resulting drops in those coins values.
> The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin.
That's the fantasy, not the reality.
> The metal in the coin makes it expensive to counterfeit said coin, with punishment by death doing the rest of the disincentive.
What actually happens is the government declares a dollar value for the coin, and then alloys the gold with cheaper metals. This results in inflation. The usual content of counterfeit gold coins is less than the gold in the government issue, which is where the death threat comes in.
Only one counterfeiter ever put more gold in the coin than the government, that was Baraha. The government got mad at him because a Baraha sovereign was worth more than the government issue.
> he dictates their value by fiat
Governments always try that, and it never works. Governments are always alloying the precious metal with cheaper metal, but nobody is fooled, and the result is inflation.
Why do you think the government no longer issues gold coins? why there's no silver in a dime anymore?
Inflation.
>Why do you think the government no longer issues gold coins?
Because it became self evident in the 1800s and first half of the 20th century that a commodity backed currently is not a good idea in any non static economy with a reasonably stable government?
Deflation and constant boom and bust cycles (something like the 2008 crisis would have been pretty mild back in the gold standard days) are somewhat of a drag on economic productivity.
Much of the 3,000 years of history you're referring to saw precious metals used as wealth storage primarily in the form of objects like jewelry, silverware, and candlesticks. All of which have sales taxes.
The question I'm asking is why it's unreasonable that bullion that we've agreed isn't currency isn't being treated differently than these other things?
A fork is a finished consumer product. Even if it's made of silver, you can use it to eat with.
Bullion isn't a finished consumer product, it's the packaging format for the raw material.
Sales tax applies to finished consumer products. The intermediary stages are traditionally exempt, i.e. the person who buys bullion in order to make silver forks doesn't pay sales tax, the person who buys the fork does.
Craft stores still add sales tax to raw material. Costco charges sales taxes to business accounts, unless given a certificate of resale or buying from an exempt category in whatever state. I could go on, but clearly sales taxes apply to more than "just" finished consumer products. They apply pretty broadly to retail sales as a whole.
It's at least a distinction though, unlike the other arguments.
Sales taxes is a much more modern invention not 3000. Gold was money and still is in freer jurisdictions
> Whereas to me, it's wild that thousands of years of gold bullion trade as a form of currency exchange is supplanted basically overnight and now only "gold but only on paper" would be considered the only form of real gold currency.
I mean, it's not a coincidence. For example, the US government has laws against using gold as currency, and they take those laws seriously and enforce them with vigor. They don't want dollars to suffer the competition.
Given the laws, it is necessarily the case, by definition, that gold is not currency.
> the US government has laws against using gold as currency
I don't think that's true, or I can't find any evidence of it. If you want to buy a car and the seller agrees to accept 50 gold coins instead of $100,000 cash, that is perfectly legal. Hell, the US makes currency out of pure gold that are currency at face values of $5-50 (but the gold in the coins is worth 100x more than the face value).
Are you talking about the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 and Executive Order 6102? That banned private ownership of gold and demanded that citizens turn in their gold. But it was lifted in 1974.
> If you want to buy a car and the seller agrees to accept 50 gold coins instead of $100,000 cash, that is perfectly legal.
You're free to barter in general. 50 gold coins, though, would probably be illegal even though 50 marble statues is fine.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/486
Using gold (or any metal) as currency ["current money"] is specifically illegal if the metal is coined.
You'd need to establish that it never crossed the seller's mind that he might later exchange those coins for something else. As an isolated incident, you'll have a fairly strong defense. If there's been another transaction in gold coins in your area recently enough that either of you might have known about it, you won't.
How do goldbacks fit into this? They contain gold (up to 3 grams, a non-trivial amount), they are accepted by a (small) number of businesses, and they are supposed to be reused for further transactions.
If you were prosecuted under 18 USC §486 for manufacturing or spending goldbacks, you'd presumably be relying on the argument that, while they are gold intended for use as current money, they aren't "coins".
> the US government has laws against using gold as currency, and they take those laws seriously and enforce them with vigor
This is nonsense. If you'd like, you can absolutely sell your house for gold bullion. (Or Japanese yen or bails of peanuts.)
> That jewelry may very well be intended for resale the same way.
It isn't.
There is a widespread belief that jewelry is a durable investment, that if you fall on hard times you will be able to sell the jewelry for an amount similar to what you paid for it, or more.
It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.
But it isn't true; if you resell your jewelry you're going to get basically nothing compared to what you paid, unless you like to wear gold chains. The resale value of new jewelry is more like the resale value of a new car.
If there was any significant demand to resell jewelry, everyone would know this. The fact that they don't is sufficient to demonstrate that they have no intention of actually reselling.
> But it isn't true; if you resell your jewelry you're going to get basically nothing compared to what you paid, unless you like to wear gold chains. The resale value of new jewelry is more like the resale value of a new car.
This entirely depends on the type of jewellery and the premium you pay for it over the price of raw materials.
I know for a fact that there's quite a lot of jewelry that trades at a fairly tight spread around the price of weight in gold (10-20% between bid and ask). Losing 20% isn't getting "basically nothing"
Of course, if there's a brand name involved you're not really paying for just the gold content anymore so there the resale value sucks.
You can sell jewelry for the same price as the equivalent weight in whatever purity of precious metals it is and I specified same weight in the parent comment. They won't be the same price originally, but that's not particularly germane to this discussion of whether there should be a sales tax on one vs the other.
And for what it's worth, people buy things for different reasons. It's very common for Indians to explicitly value jewelry as a wealth store (among other reasons), to give one example.
> You can sell jewelry for the same price as the equivalent weight in whatever purity of precious metals it is and I specified same weight in the parent comment.
Yes, of course. Didn't you see my aside?
>> unless you like to wear gold chains
But you can't buy jewelry for the price of the precious metal content. You get charged for the jewels too, and they have very limited resale value.
Some cultures hold a lot of household wealth in that format (predominantly-gold jewellery). South East Asia, North Africa, Middle East...
> It's fair to say that many people have this idea in mind when they buy jewelry, and that it pushes up the price.
Jewelry is the single biggest usage of gold, worldwide. It makes for nearly half of all the gold's reserve and usage. Jewelry alone represent as much gold as all the gold held by central banks and hoarded by individuals (be it bars or coins). There's also some gold use by various industries but that gold is often lost.
So it's fair to say that jewelry does, indeed, push gold's price up.
But maybe I misunderstood your comment.
Indeed, you misunderstood my comment. It says:
(1) Many people believe they can sell jewelry for something approximating the purchase price;
(2) This belief is false;
(3) But the false belief that the money they are spending is recoverable makes those people willing to pay more for jewelry, pushing up the price of jewelry compared to what it would be if people knew they couldn't resell it effectively.
"Generally no one is “consuming” gold bullion."
Huh? Gold bullion is an input to hundreds of industrial processes. If it weren't, why would gold have any value?
That's not consumption as it applies to sales tax rules. In almost every jurisdiction, raw materials and inventory purchased for resale or industrial processing are exempt from sales tax.
Which is why Value added tax is superior system. Though gold is in some jurisdictions treated different when it is considered investment. But for rest it is like any other metal.
Why would gold, something that’s had value for thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, have any value?
Gold doesn't corrode away. If gold was cheap, my roof shingles would be made of gold. You'd also have gold wires instead of copper wires.
Even in ancient times it was consumed to make jewelry and decorations. People used to go to the goldsmiths to sell their gold.
Sorry I clearly should have added a /s.
Wouldn’t that be for the same kinds of reasons things like purple dyes were valuable: rare to find, hard to harvest, hard to transmogrify (insect/sea life guts into clothing dye, gold into chains or other wearables), hard to break, which all culminates into a quick visual indication of wealth.
Now? Gold is a great conductor of electricity (of course silver is better) and some people still like wearing lots of flashy jewelry.
I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable.
Never once have I read a quarterly progress report from the CEO of the element “gold” outlining profit strategies for the next year.
> I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable.
Unlike bitcoin there is a price “floor” because of its use in jewelry and industry. Even if no one hoarded it, it would still have some value.
Just because it doesn’t generate a yield doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Fresh drinking water is incredibly valuable and will be more so as its supply dwindles.
> Bullion advocates argue that exchanging dollars for physical gold is a currency exchange rather than a consumption purchase.
One can argue that until they're blue, but it'd still be wrong. Gold is a commodity, and if you're buying it shell-packed at Costco you probably should be paying sales tax on it.
Washington State will do anything to avoid just having an income tax.
They already have a draft income tax proposal, and are eager to pass it.
Buy and keep it elsewhere? Buy futures?
The law covers "monetized bullion" - bars and coins -https://dor.wa.gov/education/industry-guides/jewelry-stores/...
In English-speaking countries, we have a system that prints money and gives it to asset owners. Gold is still an asset, so buying it will still let people participate in that system. Increasing taxes by whatever (I'll assume 10%) is material but it doesn't remove any point, just makes it a bit less attractive. It could easily be a less risky play than investing in US bonds given that they can't pay them back in real terms.
Oregon just south of you has no sales tax
That's a win for society if the money is instead invested into something productive!
But it's a loss if it's forced into risky investments that aren't productive.
People choose to hold non-yield-bearing assets when they believe the returns offered by current investment opportunities are not sufficient to justify the risks.
It is the miracle of modern capital markets that enables almost anyone to quickly and easily invest their savings in productive assets, but of course capital markets aren’t perfect. The availability of “none of the above” options (like gold) that remove savings from the pool of active investment capital is the essential feedback loop that balances risk and return.
Modern capital markets also have non-yield-bearing assets like gold ETFs. The only practical difference is a tiny expense ratio and more liquidity.
I never invested in gold because it is not productive. I don't have any money, either (other than pocket money), because I've invested all of it.
Gold is usually invested in as a hedge against inflation. It's not really the gold that goes up and down in value, it's the dollar that goes down and up.
Gold was worth about as much in nominal(!) terms ~2006 as it was in back in 1980 then doubled in a couple of years. Doesn't seem like a very good hedge but rather a very volatile speculatory asset...
This is an oversimplification IMO. There are higher order effects on the price of gold that makes it not directly related to the value of the dollar.
I'm pointing this out because I have seen a lot of sentiment recently about how the dollar is crashing, just look at the price of gold. Yes, the dollar is decreasing in value faster than usual, but it also isn't crashing in the way that gold is spiking.
This sentiment I think drives speculative gold demand, from standard speculative investing FOMO as well as from emotionally driven inflation fear well beyond what is realistic. The same thing happens to the stock market.
You can call it emotionally driven, but if it’s taken as a fact that the dollar is and will continue to lose value ( and the president is incentivized to pump the price of Bitcoin, whatever level of hell/episode of Mr Robot that is) - then you should expect gold to go up infinitely, relative to a worthless dollar. People aren’t necessarily trading out of fear, just trying to predict the future.
How would you explain the price of gold between 1980 and 2000, then? It's price collapsed, was there no inflation back then?
But the perception of future worthlessness of the dollar cannot actually make the dollar worthless. It doesn't work like that.
In a theoretical scenario where there are many competing substitutable currencies it should work like that, but we are not in that theoretical scenario, are we?
Wouldn’t gold be spiking in proportion to the market’s predicted future value of the dollar, rather than its current value? If the market’s paying attention you’d expect its gold valuation to lead the actual inflation numbers.
It does but that is the first order effect only. You also have people buying gold because number going up means number goes up more. This has a positive feedback loop since the people buying for that reason also makes number go up, which sucks in more people. You also have people bandwagoning hyperinflation type scenarios without a plausible thesis, which results in I think much more hedging in this area than usual. I hadn’t seen hyperinflation as a topic break into the mainstream before. You also have opportunistic savvy speculation that is based on a perception of the perception of the people doing the other ones. And probably more scenarios since there are a lot of interactions possible at higher orders.
So like some of the increase in gold price is due to the decrease in dollar value, certainly, but it isn’t all of it, and at the present time I don’t believe it is near to most of it.
Given that the gold and the dollar are not productive I think one is betting that society is less productive than inflation when one invests in gold and that one will need to pay a ransom over a long weekend when one holds dollars.
Taxing bullion is absurd - it’s not a product but more like currency or a placeholder of money you already have. What other taxes are they passing when you say “frenzy”?
Why is it more like a currency than any other object? It's not negotiable currency or legal tender.
People buy it and sell it. I don't see any difference between bullion, iron ore, frozen concentrated orange juice, and Pokemon cards. You buy a thing, you pay the sales tax.
Well it's more like a currency than any other object because it has been used historically to either a) be the currency, or b) back the currency. Sure that's not true today in the United States, but like, it's obviously different than frozen concentrated orange juice... can we not at least agree on that pretty tame assumption? Or is this just some semantics race to non-meaning?
Iron ore is similar physically, but it's really just a raw input material/ingredient used for heavy industrial manufacturing and production, it's never been intended to be an appreciating asset/hedge against inflation.
I'm unfamiliar with whatever tax is being referred to in this specific comment thread, but I'd be curious how something like $SIVR is handled, considering it's backed by actual silver in vaults. That could lead to some unintended consequences if the investment plans of a lot of money suddenly changes how it's being allocated.
> Iron ore is similar physically, but it's really just a raw input material/ingredient used for heavy industrial manufacturing and production, it's never been intended to be an appreciating asset/hedge against inflation, not any intrinsic property of gold itself.
Gold is not intended to be an asset/hedge against inflation either. Market participants believe that gold has value and that it can hedge against inflation. The belief is what gives life to gold being as a hedge against inflation.
Gold is not an asset, it’s a commodity, an industrial input, and material for jewelry, and for some reason I fail to understand, people buy and hold it because they believe it is an asset that will appreciate in value, but it’s just an elementary metal that is useful for being easy to work with (jewelry) and because it doesn’t oxidize. It does not generate income, you can’t eat it, and in a post-apocalyptic scenario, it’s useless. I suppose the density of gold would allow some very small, very high mass slingshot balls you could defend yourself against people with?
A system is what it does, and gold is popular for jewelry because it’s a useful way to wear money.
Off topic and this might be apocryphal, but I heard on the internet a good reason to keep “money” in the form of gold chains and other jewelry, is that it counts as personal property, so if you’re arrested during a drug bust or trafficking women, your cash and bank accounts may be seized, but whatever you wear to prison gets put in a ziplock bag and returned to you when you leave :)
Gold hasn't been money since 1971.
> What other taxes are they passing when you say “frenzy”?
https://www.ballardspahr.com/insights/alerts-and-articles/20...
It's incomplete, it doesn't list the gold tax.
Wealth tax is the best type of tax, because it incentivizes productive activities against speculation. It should be levied on a continuous basis rather than on transaction basis though, which is just basic numerical analysis.
Not my downvote, but the least devastating tax is only on commerce, and it has to be at insignificant levels to keep from resuting in undue damage.
Taxing wealth, property, wage income, or just plain existence has always sapped productivity like few other things.
It's foolish to try and tax "wealth" when you should instead be taxing the creation of wealth as it's in progress and nothing else. When actual ongoing business operations are going forward is the only time anybody can truly afford to pay any significant tax at all. Even if they are billionaires, and I say this as someone at the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
Ordinary wage income doesn't even make sense to tax whatsoever when you want max productivity, unless income is excessive enough to reach so far above average that greater capitalist profits can be earned on the surplus. Then maybe more than just those gains should be taxed.
Is taxing investment absurd?
This investment is now taxed more than other types of investment. Is sales tax charged when you buy stock? Should it be?
"Tax what you want less of."
Do you want less investment?
Why would you want to encourage investment in gold?
Because we need a low risk system to track whether people are net-contributing or -draining society's resources, otherwise it isn't easy to tell who is creating more wealth so they can be supported. Gold remains the best option after centuries (if not millennia) of experimentation.
> Tax what you want less of.
How do you apply this to housing?
You want investment in housing. You don’t want slumlords ramping up prices for slums. Presumably somewhere has got the balance correct. I haven’t been to that place.
Gold is not an investment. It takes otherwise productive capital out of the economy and produces nothing. It's functionally no different than stuffing your money in a mattress.
It has utility though: unlike the dollars in your mattress, it can't be printed into oblivion by your central bank. It is relatively portable, and people have flocked to it as a store of value especially during periods of socioeconomic instability when assets are going down and gov't spending is going up. It's tradeable for fiat in any country, so it allows you to bring value along if you relocate.
Its price reflects that utility and like any modern asset, a lot of speculation. You can speculate on whether it's more or less useful given current events -- nothing wrong with speculating that it is only going to be increasingly useful.
You're right that it has utility, but being fungible doesnt imply that it is automatically an investment.
Speculation is not the same as investment, and it is still completely non-productive.
Agree it doesn't generate wealth. It's explicitly a store of wealth.
Investment is a weird term because most people would consider keeping cash or cash equivalents (gold) to be investments, even if they don't generate wealth. Cash is also an opinion, in terms of the market.
An investment creates a return
Roger, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.
What is it that you're arguing for then? That there be some entity that gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of all of our excess money? Who gets to decide what's excess? Who gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of the money?
How is this any different than buying a house? Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.
The person you bought it from can do something else with that money, sure, but that's also true of the other person in your transaction to buy gold.
Maybe you'll say a house has more utility than bars of gold, but all of this at the end of the day, seems to come down to your specific views and judgements of what it means for capital to be used productively. So to circle back to the beginning, what is it you're advocating for here? That because you don't see gold as a low risk hedge against inflation as being "productive" it should face more taxes to incentivize it not happening?
> Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.
I mostly agree with you, but I don't think the house comparison is good. Houses require lots of maintenance, and to hold their value (comparable to other houses) they often need remodeling every decade or so. If instead of houses we just said "land" then I think the comparison would hold up more.
No, im not arguing that it should be illegal. Im just saying, as Warren Buffet before me did, that its not an investment.
It relies on the greater fool theory to produce excess returns. It is bad for the economy when money idles in non productive speculative assets.
The money didn't disappear, it just changed hands.
You are forgetting the opportunity cost. The gold does not generate wealth it just stores value, like a mattress stuffed with bills. It has become a dead, stagnant, and unproductive thing and by doing that it has removed value from the overall economy that was previously there.
How? The money that was used to buy it is now in the hands of somebody else that can invest it. Nothing was lost. It just changed hands.
There are two sides to every transaction.
In this case 1/2 of the trade is a dead end. In another hypothetical transaction we might see that the money was instead used to pay for services, and that profit was then spent on food, and then it was spent on fertilizer, and then it was spent on chemicals, and then it was spent on mining, and then it was spent on energy, and then it was invested in.... You get the idea. You can follow a single dollar around the world for years. The money is exchanged, and then exchanged again and again generating profits and adding value to the economy with every exchange.
With the purchase of gold that half of the transaction is instead just... dead. The money is no longer in the economy, it's locked in some dudes junk drawer or a safe instead. Worse, it's not being used to generate excess returns like all of the items above are.
Gold is just... useless. Except of course as a store of value, but even then it's only good if you think the dollars value will decrease and don't care that it's not great for the world around you to extract money from the economy and render it effectively dead.
So before, person A has the dead thing, and after, person B has the dead thing. The result for the economy is exactly the same as if the transaction didn't occur, except the people have switched places.
You either maintain the house for others use and extract rent or live in it. This is productive.
If you are hoarding an unused house we should heavily tax that to make it unreasonable to do so.
In physical metals that don’t generate income or induce further economic activity, I don’t believe so. What good does a hunk of gold sitting in a safe do for the economy?
>What good does a hunk of gold sitting in a safe do for the economy?
Not a whole lot once legal tender certificates can no longer be redeemed for the same amount of metal year after year.
[flagged]
Can you please make your substantive points without snark, flamebait, swipes, or personal attack? Regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, you can make your substantive points without these things. We're trying for something else here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I can certainly do that, and I can see how my comment came across as unnecessarily harsh. I just want to be clear that my issue was with the reasoning, not the position, and not the individual.
Thanks! and yes, it's often the case that those different levels get tangled up in the reader's mind, even if the commenter was clear in their own mind. Basically, intent doesn't communicate itself - it has to be disambiguated.
Following the guidelines is the best solution of course :)
It still up an awful lot from the start of 2025. From about 30 up to 115 and down to 85.
Yep, I expect a bunch of people to buy at this price, hoping it's the bottom, but it still has plenty of room to fall.
Energy and Materials were among the most notionally net sold US sectors this week, GS Prime Book: US Long/Short Ratio (MV) driven by both short and long sales. Collectively, this week's $ net selling across the two sectors was the *largest since April '25* and ranks in the 96th percentile vs. the past five years.
While not unexpected, the numbers still say that if you bought silver before Trump (which given history of metals countering uncertainty and the promised causes of uncertainty was a smart move), you're making a solid > doubling even now. For me, though, who gets too anxious when trying to attempt such things and ends up ruining it, it'll just go on the list of regrets like when I thought to but didn't invest in zoom once we started using it in 2020.
If memory serves, 1980 was the time of the silver corner by a couple of brothers.
The Bunkers. My father told me the story many times as a child and he warned me sternly never to buy Silver. There's always more Silver he said. People will be dredging it out of old cupboards.
The Hunt brothers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
Rise your hand if you have been holding a leveraged positions which is now vaporised :-D
This isn't a simple correction. I've been following this for a couple of months and there's a lot going on. I suspect this isn't over. It's noteworthy that the year 1980 because that was when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market. It's often used as an example of the market correcting itself. It's actually a better example of how the exchanges broke the Hunt brothers to bail out the banks.
The key event that caused the collapse is sometimes called Silver Thursday [1]. The exchange changed the liquidity rules, forcing a margin call the Hunt brothers couldn't make, forcing a selloff. This was arguably to bail out banks with large short positions in silver.
Well, pretty much the exact same thing happened this week when COMEX massively increased the margin requirements [2]. It's worth noting that the market is in a state called "backwardation" where the spot prices are higher than future prices. Refiners aren't buying silver, even at the inflated spot price, because of price risk. But also, the COMEX spot price is increasingly being viewed as "fake" because foreign exchanges are paying significantly more for physical silver thna the paper COMEX price [3].
Basically, this whole thing looks like another GameStop ie a short squeeze. There's not enouugh physical silver to meet contract demands. There's like 300oz of futures silver contracts per 1oz of physical silver.
If you followed the original GameStop short squeeze, the price tumbled there too but didn't solve the short squeeze. You even have exchanges closing people's options positions (eg RobinHood) despite them being in the money.
Banks still need to cover their significant short positions and it really looks like the exchanges are trying to crash the silver market to do it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/cme-raise...
[3]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4861917-why-silver-prices-i...
Do me a favor and look at how many CME Notices were issued raising margin requirements for precious metals in the past year. Hint: They do this all the time to account for market volatility and the contract value. If a contract increases by 10% margin is not static. CME raised margin requirements several times in the last month to little market effect.
Silver crashed because China halted trading on the only public silver and gold ETFs Friday. There are videos of HK police arresting guys freaking out because they couldn't cash out beforehand: Apparently the fund had been operating as some kind of pyramid scheme and was not solvent at those prices.
Also on Friday, China urged investors to "invest responsibly" or some such (source: FT) and froze a bunch of suspicious accounts. I believe those accounts were behind the pump and dump social media ("AI Asian Guy" videos on Youtube, investment subreddit spam) with the help of plenty of useful idiots.
There's a ton of good coverage of the precious metals run up in FT this past week.
So I found a chart showing silver prices vs margin requirements on Linkedin of all places [1]. Yes, margin requirements change and the exchange tries to protect the market in times of high volatility but increasing the margin requirements significantly means everybody has to put up more collateral even if you're significantly in the black.
That's my point: they're intentionally trying to crash the market. The analsysi that they're defending the banks from a short squeeze seems to fit the available data [2].
As for China, the government is ensuring their local industries have sufficient silver supply, which is particularly important for solar.
The US government has a lot of power to do similar to this but refuse to use it because it would hurt profits. I'm thinking specifically of the Defense Production Act, which could've been used to lower oil and gas prices in 2020-2022. Instead we passed on the costs to consumers, let oil companies export to the world and let them make record profits.
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryanlemand_this-chart-is-wort...
[2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/everything-investors-know-his...
This is the answer; Diamond hands baby
so how long do you think will this play out? asking as a concerned silver and gold holder lol
I think that a real bubble requires margin. It's not just that people are buying because the price is going up, it's that people are buying with borrowed money because the price is going up.
That ends badly. It ends badly for the lenders. So when it starts to look like that's what's happening, a perfectly reasonable response is to change the margin requirements. When the circumstances are normal, use the normal margin requirements. But when the circumstances are abnormal, of course they should adjust.
$SLV is still up 125% in the past 6 months after this "collapse" which is absolutely bananas.
*Paper silver. The gap widens
What goes up quickly comes down quickly?
At least we can afford nice things again
Temporarily
Sure, but compare the price of silver to a year ago...
Earlier today, it occurred to me that the "spot" price could go to zero if the physical metal isn't available for delivery. I missed the dip down into the 70s.
It'll recover that 30%+ within a week or two.
Wouldn't even say this is interesting
It's looks like a flash crash. Somewhat rare, and from an algorithm perspective it's interesting.
This looks like an IQ test, but for who?
For those on wrong side of options contracts expiring? I would guess that this is paper silver being manipulated.
Indeed. There’s a large delta between paper silver and Shanghai physical silver prices right now.
China only has one silver fund (SLV equivalent), and it stopped creating new shares. So the existing shares trade at a large premium to the value of the underlying metal. Is that the "Shanghai physical" price you're talking about?
Trump announces Warsh and this happens. Can't be a coincidence.
Incidentally Warsh's father in law is billionaire Ronald Lauder who is trying to get Trump to capture Greenland. Sounds like father-in-law got him the role.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...
Warsh played a substantive role in addressing the financial crisis in 2008 and has a lot of relationships and respect across financial markets.
How independent will he be? Who knows. But folks believe he is at least knowledgeable and competent. Which is not widely believed of all the president’s appointees.
"The last full, comprehensive audit of Fort Knox's gold reserves was in 1953". This was one of Trump's broken promises.
Unless you have physical metal you are just gambling on a videogame playing against the dev studio.
IMO this is temporary. Why?
1. Geopolitics. Globalization is dying. See 3.
2. Debt. Countries refuse to tax or do austerity. The only thing left is to destroy their currency by printing away their debt.
3. Preparation for a new global war which requires massive spending.
4. Basel III which made gold tier one. Unallocated gold does not qualify as a tier 1 asset
Thanks for Nr. 4 - wasnt aware of!
The headline is incorrect. It's Silver ETFs that tumbled, not silver.
The event I'm betting on is Silver shortage and the removal of ETFs from chart price calculations. Though this price drop may be a delay... Or maybe lower prices could hasten demand, leading to that scenario.
Precious metals is a weird market I guess as price rises can drive demand just as well as price drops.
How do people feel about gold? To me it is purely speculative vs. index funds. If I were rich mabe have a bit of gold for the bunker next to the long life tinned gourmet meals. Better than fiat but not as good as company investments.
I think gold will keep going up over the next few years, because many central banks are converting from dollar reserves to gold. That means very large demand which is mostly price-insensitive.
I am super confused about the markets stance on gold, silver and the dollar.
Did the market consider Powell the cause of a weak dollar and not Trump? I thought Powell was what was standing between the dollar and complete recklessness.
A friend had taken out a second mortgage to buy a ton of silver at the highs, they are not doing good. His wife doesn’t know.
I think it was in the news when a family did that to buy Bitcoin many, many years ago.
Not telling the spouse is pretty bad though.
Top is in if true.
Exactly.
As someone who has been actively trading silver for the past year, the real reason that silver plummeted is because:
1) the market was looking for an excuse and the new Fed chain nominee was as good a reason as anything.
2) The margin requirements on metal futures changed THIS MONTH. Instead of having daily limits, they changed the margin requirements for futures contracts in real-time throughout this move. Futures brokerages calculate margin requirements every second, so what happened was as silver dropped today, the margin requirements got more strict and then people were being liquidated out of their positions immediately. This caused the markets to crash the way we did all day.
Previously, what you would see are circuit breakers kick in and the contracts would stop trading for a certain amount of time. You never used to see down 30% days ever, because circuit breakers would limit is. You would see limit down days, and the contracts would stop trading for the rest of the day and then reopen the next day. In the 70s and 80s I think there was a time when some contracts would open at limit down for 15+ days in a row and wouldn't trade for the entire day and people were financially ruined because they couldn't get out of a position for weeks on end.
So finding an excuse to sell on top of forced liquidation is what you saw today. It's a classic volcano top and I think silver is going to drift lower for the rest of the year.
yeah but its up 125% in 6 months, so this doesn't hurt anyone except the crazies that saw the price already high a week ago and bought
I don't see how world risk changed overnight. To me, that means these market bubbles are financialization Ponzi schemes unmoored from fundamentals.
At least there's still money in the speculative Pokemon card market!
/s
I knew that Silver prices were going all time high but I had still assumed that Silver (and to that extent Gold) were stable.
Looks like atleast for Silver, that gets completely thrown out of the window now for some time.
I also thought Gold was a safe haven but I checked and it seems that it lost (10%?)-ish as well.
I have some complex thoughts and reasonings but I really liked Gold as an idea but looks like it is vulnerable to volatility at times too.
I used to think that maybe banks can have gold itself and gold usually does or ~ equal to inflation itself rise and I mean theoretically net I think even this year it does definitely beat Inflation (I mean it grew double I guess in 1 year) but for banking concerns especially supposing someone got money this time and let's hypothetically assume they get into this gold bank, then its still volatile & they could've lost 10% and then tried to withdraw money and more short squeeze so the idea has a major flaw after this incident.
I wonder how swiss franc is doing. I looked at it and it looks like its doing fine (1% down but I do feel like that's really okay) given how Swiss franc (seeing another cnbc article or yahoo finance ig) grew what 13-14%
Although the problem with people holding swiss franc is that when I searched swiss franc I found this article (from CNBC itself) which actually shows how a strong swiss franc might be/is bad for swiss economy
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/swiss-franc-us-dollar-price-...
I do wonder, then what's the ideal solution of "safety"
I am scratching a lot of options now & I am either thinking US inflation protected assets or World Equity are the only two stable/(really valuable) because the whole essense of value behind gold/silver was its stability which especially for silver feels broken but gold isn't that far behind either.
Although atleast in my original context of banking, I later came to know about the concept of narrow banking and how there was a bank which actually wanted to invest in TIPS itself but that was blocked off by the feds for many reason.
I do feel like TIPS might protect inflation protection but they don't really protect the erosion of wealth because I feel like (I am not sure I can be wrong I usually am) but the pricing of houses and other assets are rising higher than inflation rises & inflation itself can vary depending (so housing rent inflation might be higher) & depending on your lifestyle. Maybe TIPS really wouldn't be able to help you to say.. save to get house or really have you give the ability for money to do what it actually does. To me the idea of inflation includes buying houses too so if say someone with some salary was able to buy a house 20 years ago then imo when I consider inflation protection or investing or anything in general, I expect that my wealth could be able to buy me things ~generally at a good amount & that's the point of good investing to get good returns at understandable/ your own risk profile.
I guess now I am personally more inclined towards world index funds in general I guess as a form of real stability where value gains are still backed by real gains (Something which I feel is core philosophy of the bogle philosphy & the reason why people should invest in first place)
I may have gotten a bit off topic here but coming on the point again here about Silver.
Would this be considered as (expected?) or is it a black swan event especially considering the 30% fall off.
From the headline, it feels like a black swan event (especially when they compare it to 1980's) but I am curious to know what others think too. I do feel like these black swan events really shift how we think tho & we can have it in our better judgement for future ig imo.
> I do wonder, then what's the ideal solution of "safety"
This universe doesn’t guarantee safety, but you can mitigate risk via a diversified portfolio.
> This universe doesn’t guarantee safety, but you can mitigate risk via a diversified portfolio.
I guess you are right but I don't think its the universe itself but rather the people's speculation which can technically be considered universe.
Personally, I really love diversified portfolio as well.
"Safe haven" and "lost 10% in one day (that it gained the previous week)" are not contradictory. "Safe haven" is "will retain value even if the dollar becomes worthless".
yes I can agree but I also assumed that it wouldn't be volatile and (could be?) used in place of a currency.
Well technically speaking gold rose so much in terms of $ for so long so technically if we were on gold standard, the value of $ would've lost too (and become volatile too)
So I get that part I guess but still I do feel like swiss francs are a more safe haven while not being volatile but looks like switzerland really doesn't want its currency to de-inflate.
It's an interesting thing for sure to find out I guess. I mean long term, gold is definitely hedge against inflation but so do other investment options for the most part.
Fair to assume trillions of the physical metal weren't simultaneously dumped onto the market in the past day; this is entirely ETF driven therefore it's also safe to assume there is manipulation taking place to drive the price down.
What I don't understand is why, when there appear to be signs of a supply shortage, market forces appear to want to drive the price down and cause any remaining inventory to flow towards China where there is a $30~/oz arbitrage to be made.