On 29 January, silver printed $121.62 an ounce, a number it had not touched in five thousand years. The men who waited thirty years for triple digit silver watched it sail past a hundred. Then the floor opened. Not on a mine collapse or a war, but on a personnel announcement: the next Fed chair would be a hawk. In one session silver fell thirty eight percent. Every leveraged dollar that rode it up was liquidated on the way down.
That was five months ago. The price flashing crash this week is the aftershock. Silver clawed back into the seventies, rolled over, and now trades near $61, half off its peak. Gold has slid from a January record of $5,589 to about $4,080, dipping below four thousand for the first time in seven months.
Two scarce metals, cut down hard. The buy of the cycle, or the first act of something worse? I pulled forty threads to find out. Start with the yardstick almost nobody uses.
