Honestly, I don't think Warsh's appointment had much to do with it.
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.
Is it the beginning of a longer-term down? I have no idea.
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.
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!
No one since Volcker has been a real hawk. It hasn't led to hyperinflation, just a continual debasement that has served many purposes.
It would be more surprising if the 30% drop was spread out over a month.
I cashed out :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you want less investment?
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.
Speculation is not the same as investment, and it is still completely non-productive.
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?
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.
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.
Huh? Gold bullion is an input to hundreds of industrial processes. If it weren't, why would gold have any value?
This is not how taxes work at all, my guy. There is a thing called tax elasticity, which is a measure of the proportional change in buying/selling to change in taxation. If you want to have a good-faith discussion about taxes, at least acknowledge that these measures exist instead of pretending that any degree of taxation makes economic activity go "Poof!". It's intellectually dishonest and is not useful conversation.
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.
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...
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.
At least we can afford nice things again
https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/marketmi...
/s
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.
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...
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