Stocks, Bitcoin, Gold All Crashing: Is A Bigger Meltdown Coming? | Jeff Christian
Summary
Market Outlook: The guest sees a weakening U.S. economy with rising recession risk, persistent inflation, and potential earnings pressure on equities.
Safe Havens: Investors are shifting to safe havens, notably gold and silver, as well as industrial metals, amid economic and political uncertainty.
Gold & Silver: He expects high volatility with an upward bias; gold’s near-term range is viewed around a $4,300 floor and $5,500 ceiling, with similar upside skew for silver.
Industrial Metals: Copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc, and PGMs show synchronized moves driven by investor flows, inventory rebuilding, and broad macro factors.
Flows & Futures: January saw steady gold ETF buying versus opportunistic silver ETF selling/buying; COMEX roll dynamics (Feb to Apr in gold, Mar to May in silver) support near-term price strength.
Trading Structure: Computer-driven trading amplifies coordinated price action across metals; the guest rejects conspiracy/manipulation narratives as primary drivers.
Policy & Rates: Lower rates are likely for economic reasons, but persistent inflation complicates the Fed path; policy and leadership uncertainty add to volatility.
Top Pick: The guest favors gold as the highest-upside metal through 2026, supported by safe-haven demand and supportive futures/ETF dynamics.
Transcript
We are headed toward a weaker economy. That suggests that the stock market could actually suffer because of earnings weaknesses. People are all looking for safe havens. If you want to be a profitable silver miner, you should be profitable at the bottom of a price cycle, not at the top. Floor is probably around $4,300 right now. >> That's a lot lower than it is now. >> Yes, it is. But my ceiling is probably around. >> Is this the beginning of the end of the bull market that we've seen in the last couple of years up until now? We're going to find out today. It's Thursday, February 5th. The NASDAQ is down 1%. The S&P 500 is down more than 1%. Gold and silver are extending their losses with silver trading now at $75 an ounce. Gold is now back down towards $4,800. Bitcoin is down 10% today in one day. intraday now trading around $66,000. So, what's next for the markets? This comes, of course, in line with a slew of bad economic data out this week, mostly labor data. We're going to find out what's next for the economy. What's next for markets? Jeff Christian is our guest today. He's a managing partner of the CPM Group and he will give us his forecast for the economy in 2026. Are we finally getting a recession? What's happening with gold and silver? Is this the bottom or can we expect another crash from here? and what's happening with the stock markets. He's going to give us his forecast today. This video is sponsored by Koshi. It's a fully regulated platform that lets you trade on real world events from economic data to political outcomes. Sign up and use my code lin link in the description down below or scan the QR code here. New users will get $10 deposited to your account when you trade $10. Traders can put money down on their favorite teams, events, elections, and more in all 50 states, including California and Texas and over 140 countries. And don't forget this weekend, February 8th, this Sunday, is the Super Bowl. Plenty of events to trade this weekend. So stay tuned for that. Jeff, welcome back to the show. Looking forward to getting your forecast today. >> That's a that's a pretty tall order of first versus question. Look, the economy in the United States is weakening and it's mixed picture around the world. You know, in China, you have had record exports this year. Record a enormous decline of exports to the United States. on in the rest of the world, Chinese exports are booming. Uh so but you have a mixed economy. You saw the ADP figures for January in United States. >> Let's just give some context to the audience. So uh today on the 5th of February, initial jobs claims came out 231,000 um versus the expectation which is 212,000. It was up from 209,000 from the previous report. Uh so it looks like just on the surface the uh job uh the labor market's weakening job openings uh came down to 6.5 million uh nowhere near the expectation of 7.1 million. So what do these numbers tell you? >> You have a very weak labor market in the United States and it's been growing increasingly weak over the last several months. We seen some economists are talking about a a jobs recession already existing. We are headed toward a lower a weaker economy. That suggests lower interest rates to the markets. That suggests that the stock market could actually suffer because of earnings weaknesses. U you you have increased economic anxieties. At the same time, you have increased political anxieties. People, institutional investors to to individual investors are all looking for safe havens. Safe havens from the stock market, the bond market, the global economy, political problems. Those safe havens are gold, silver, and also industrial metals, platinum, palladium, copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc. They're all rising as people try to find alternative assets to park their money in because we still have this enormous supply of money with, you know, more than 20% of the financial assets in cash. So you still have this push. All of that put together means continued volatile markets for gold, silver, platinum, platium with a very strong upward bias. Shouldn't lower interest rates be a positive for stock markets? Why isn't the NASDAQ down for the third day in a row? >> Lower stock market would be positive for lower interest rates would be positive for the stock market just on a pure valuation basis. But in so far as the interest rates are declining predicated on expectations of weaker economic activity and reduced earnings in in some corporations and layoffs, there is a general feeling that we are headed toward recessionary or at least very low economic growth uh trends over the course of this year and that's not good for corporations. In addition to which you look at the stock market and you know it's been very selective. A lot of the increases a lot of the strength over the last year year and a half have been in a handful of stocks that are heavily weighted into crypto and AI and a lot of investors are saying you know these things are not necessarily stable industries. Crypto has a lot of issues and a lot of problems and AI increasingly is being seen as far from perfect, if you will. >> How how much of this week's volatility had to do with Kevin Worsh being nominated and he is more hawkish than some of the other candidates. >> I think that that was part of the selloff that we saw January 30th, Friday the 30th, but I I think that it's a relatively small part. You know, for my view, I'm very suspicious of Worsh because he's a he's a a guy. He's not a consensus builder. He's a consensus follower. And he can see that he can get the Fed job chairmanship by being more acceptable to the markets than Hassert or some of the other people that Trump has floated out there. So, you know, I'm more cautious about Walsh. Clearly point uh the appointment or it wasn't the appointment, it was the nomination of Walsh was a positive for the economy and the the markets and therefore negative for precious metals in so far as people thought he might be more hesitant to lower interest rates. But it comes in the context of Department of Justice indictments against the the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve chairman and congressional Republican congressional leaders saying they won't vote for anybody as a Fed appointment until those indictments are removed. So you've got on a monetary basis, you have a big ball of wax that you're dealing with at the same time. And you know, clearly Trump realized that Hasser was totally unacceptable. Uh, and he also realized that he's he's created this monster for himself with his his indictments of POW and the F and and the Federal Reserve Board. So, he's got his own Republican party, uh, Senate and Congressional members of which are increasingly worried about their electability given everything that's going wrong in the United States. um he's got the his own party sort of back backing up and saying, "Hey, we're not going to vote for anybody until you clean up your mess that you've made with the Fed." So, it's a complex set of issues that you can argue about over the dinner table as much as you want, but it all translates into volatility. >> Okay, let's just talk about what the Fed is going to do this year and then we'll lead back into the markets. that this is from cash. It's a prediction market. Will the Fed do a rate cut greater than 25 basis points this year? The markets deciding a 21.8% chance of that happening. Incidentally, I was just looking this up before you were uh before before I put the screen up. Recession this year only a 20% chance according to traders. And actually, if you look at the CME Fed watch tool, there isn't a lot of a um there isn't a great probability of a cut by March or even April. And so my question is Jeff, what kind of economy is the Fed going to inherit? The next Fed chair going to inherit? You already talked about the risk of a ris the rising risk of a recession. What does inflation look like in this environment in this year? What does the unemployment rate look like in this year? >> It looks like the unemployment rate will probably tick up a little bit, but it's all it's at very low levels. You know, we've we've seen the unemployment rate rise over the last 12 months or so, but it's still lower than it was historically for most of the last several decades. So, but we we are seeing increased unemployment, increased layoffs, increased large layoffs by large corporations, reduced hiring by smaller companies, uh smaller lower job growth. That's an issue. At the same time, you're seeing that you're still seeing very persistent inflation. you know, PPI came out and it was 3% on a headline basis and about 3.3 or 3.5 on a core basis. It's much higher than the Fed and other people would like it to see. There are a lot of inflationary pressures. There's a tremendous amount of economic uncertainty because of the reduction in in uh US uh imports and exports. Uh and we could we talk about the the trade balance deficit contracting sharply that's actually a negative for the economy because the trade deficit when we have a trade balance deficit that's money that the that's US dollars that have been sent overseas to pay for goods and services being imported that surplus of money to the rest of the world gets recycled generally into investments in the United States. Fewer lower a smaller deficit trade deficit means less dollars out in the world to be reinvested in the United States by the rest of the world. That's a negative for the US economy. At the same time, you have this anti-US investment trend growing too. So you've got these two factors that are weighing on foreign direct investment in the United States in stocks, in bonds, in corporate bonds, in companies, in land, in real estate. So you've got a lot of headwinds on the economy. That said, you saw relatively strong uh GDP in the last two quarters of of 2025. That doesn't mean that you're not going to see a recession because if you look at past recessions, more often than not, we plunge into a recession after a period of strong economic activity rather than sliding into a recession after a period of low GDP. So the idea that we have 4.36% real GDP on on the last two quarters suggests that interest rates have to stay higher to fight that inflation even in the face of the unemployment. So the Fed the Fed today is kind of stalemated because of the uh the lawsuits and and the impending replacement of power with somebody. Uh but the Fed on a ongoing basis beyond that has got a very tough call to make. Do we fight inflation? Do or do we try to keep the United States out of a recession? Or do we try to do both? And if so, how do we do both? So you've got this tremendous amount of uncertainty in the US economy right now as well as in a lot of other economies. You have the changes in monetary policy in Japan and what that means both for the Japanese economy which I think is probably good in the long term and for the global economy. >> Well, so going back to the uh Fed issue here um what will the Fed cut by more than 25 basis points? What would necess necessitate a 50 basis point cut at one meeting? I don't think it's a pos I don't think it's a probability a 50 uh basis point cut but it would have to be a much sharper decline in employment trends that would happen. I don't see inflation pressures coming off sufficiently to trigger the Fed saying hey we can cut interest rates 50 basis points. It would have to be a significant further det more more rapid deterioration in the employment environment to to to trigger a 50 basis point uh cut in interest rates. >> I need to ask you about gold and silver now Jeff. >> Okay. >> And I don't I don't think before we get into the technical aspects of the charts and uh you know why things are moving the way they are. What was your initial reaction? I mean, just not even your initial reaction because there wasn't even one single event to react to. What generally speaking was your personal sentiment all throughout January as you were seeing silver rapidly escalate towards $100, then breach $100 and stay there and then collapse down 40%. And same thing with gold going up way past before uh beyond $5,400. I mean, forget $5,000. I don't think you and I even spoke um after gold broke $5,000. I'm not I'm not sure. I have to double check. It was close, but not quite. >> I don't think we did. Yeah. >> Yeah. How were you feeling in >> I have a saying. I don't care if it's Armageddon as long as I predicted it. >> Okay. Wow. That's That's You did. Yes. >> We predicted record high gold and silver prices in January and we predicted a sharp fall off at the end of January and that's what happened. So my personal feeling was all right and you know in so far as a lot of our clients paid attention to us record high silver would have been4951 I mean you would have been right then and you were it had it had broken 51 so what happened how did you what was your reaction when it won 2x from there in a matter of weeks >> so not not only did silver let's say let's just take silver as an example not only Did silver do what you expected it to do, which is to break new record highs? It did that by a factor of 2x. >> I showed you some data before we got started recording. If you look at the daily ETF flows for gold and silver in January, in gold, you had this massive consistent increase in ETF purchases. There were only four days out of the 22 trading days in January where ETFs sold were net sellers of gold. They were net buyers in the other 18 days. If you look at silver, they the ETF investors were net sellers in like 17 of the days and net buyers in in 5 days or something like that. So what you were seeing was investors were very consistent buyers of gold and they bought about three million a little bit over $3 million through the ETFs. But in the silver market you had investors in the ETFs buying seeing the price rise taking profits. And if you just look at the last week of January, in the first four days of the year of of the month, investors in ETFs sold well over 10 million ounces of silver ETFs. And then when the price went from $120 at the end of Thursday to $72 at the end of Friday, they bought 5.7 million ounces. Right? So the investors in silver are much more opportunistic and the investors in gold are really concerned on a longerterm sustainable basis. In addition to that, you had the February ComX contract for gold being an active contract. And when you started January, you had a very large open interest in the February contract. And then the last two weeks of January, you saw that rolled from February into April. that had upward pressure on the price of gold. You had about 10 million ounces of February open interest bought back by shorts in the last week of January. 10 million ounces. This is in a market where on a physical basis maybe 40 million ounces of net purchases of physical gold in a year, but in one week you had 10 million ounces of futures bought. there was all kinds of upward pressures on prices and with the in the case of the futures market you knew there was a deadline first delivery date January 30th you know so it you know we were we were surprised at how far silver went to some extent but what you're seeing as I said earlier is you're seeing a full range of investors around the world pouring into precious and industrial metals Now industrial metals are harder to invest in. You you know with with copper you could do comx but you know copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc the ones that have been rising you have to trade LME futures which is kind of a hard thing to do. So that comes down to gold, silver, platinum platium. Platinum platium very small very liquid. Gold very liquid. Silver maybe onetenth of the size in dollar value of gold. So when you see these investment funds which are enormous compared to the gold and silver markets coming into gold and silver it has this wild uh ex uh impact on silver that's much more stronger than in gold. And when you see those investment funds coming out of the markets, it has a much more pronounced bas uh effect on silver prices simply because the silver market is a tenth of the size of the gold market. >> If I were to ask you, let's say, let's just rewind the clock. If I were to have this conversation with you in November and ask you, what would it take for the silver price to rapidly rise to $100 an ounce by the end of January? Not sometime this decade, by January. What assumptions would you have made in November uh to make this kind of forecast and did it play out the way that you would have expected it to play out? >> I would have made a two-step assumption. I would have made an assumption that you would have a tremendous amount of non-traditional precious metals investors, you know, momentum traders and generalist investors pouring into the gold and silver markets. and that that pouring in would be based on two things. One was the fact that the silver price and gold prices had started rising strongly after the Fed's uh late August meeting in in Wyoming where the Fed said, "Hey, we think the labor market's going to be weaker next year than we've been thinking and we may have to cut interest rates more in 2026 than we've been indicating we think is probable." So you had this upward momentum already. My first assumption would have been that we'd see a lot of generalist and momentum investors pouring into the market, which happened. And on top of the pure mo sheer momentum, you'd also have more outrageous political and economic things, things like the administration suing or indicting the Fed >> for stupid right? Excuse my language, but that's just nonsense. Or how about this? >> Invading Venezuela and kidnapping uh the president, accusing him of being part of a a drug cartel. Or going to NATO and saying, "I don't think we need to be part of NATO anymore, and we're thinking about invading Greenland." you know, those kinds of outrageous things that people would never have thought possible for 80 years would have to occur in November and December. And lo and behold, they did. And then I'm not even mentioning Minneapolis. >> So, a series of basically geopolitical and political black swans that nobody thought was going to happen all happened in a matter of weeks consecutively simultaneously. >> They weren't black swans. And people did think they would happen. We were predicting outrageous things. We didn't necessarily get the specific ones done. Ray Gallio has been on the YouTube, you know, regularly saying, "Guys, open your eyes." Two years ago, Amanda Gorman, who was a college kid studying English literature, but g, you know, um, and she's a poet. two years ago in January 2024, she gave a a editorial in the New York Times that said, "You should be afraid. If you're not afraid, you don't know you you're not paying attention to what's going on." There was a lot of warnings and what the specifics were were not clear, but the overall trend was very clear to anybody who had their eyes wide open. So, let's just take a look at the charts and uh examine what happened here. Some would say there was profit taking by the end of January when gold reached $5,600. But then you look at what happened with a lot of the other metals. I'm not going to show different price scales. I'm just going to show how they moved. That's silver. This is copper. This is palladium. >> Mhm. >> Uh let me just get palladium up. Uh I think you know where I'm going with this. Platinum. Jeff, they all move together. >> You're going where I always standing. Yeah. >> I What? What? What? Why? It's one thing to say, okay, people are taking profits in silver because they've run up too far. But then you see the entire metals complex acting in the exact same way, moving down the exact same day, troughing the exact same day, and moving up a similar magnitude um in the following days. What is going on? Well, a lot of it has to to do with the fact that, as I said earlier, investors from individual investors and high netw worth individuals up into the largest sovereign wealth funds are all looking for places to park cash or invest cash and precious metals and industrial metals are one of them. You're seeing stronger economic growth than a lot of people expected. a lot of fabricators that actually uh worked down their inventories because they thought that the economy would be lower and and weaker than they had. So there was some fabricators building inventories, especially in base metals because you really can't deal with base metals the way you can with gold and silver. Gold and silver are financial assets and there are these enormous inventories. But, you know, it's something that we have been saying since 1979. It wasn't a silver event, right? You know, if you think that the hunts drove silver prices to $50 and then uh dropped them to $10, you have to say, "Well, why did gold go from$1.90 to $850 to to to 320 and oil go from whatever it was, $4 to to $14 to to $8. You know, everything was moving up and down in coordination. So, part of it reflects dollar weakness. Part of it reflects concerns about the US economy and the global economy, but they were all moving up together and they were all moving down together. >> Well, there's all sorts of coordination. >> Let me just finish. There's another factor that's very important. >> Computer trading. M >> you look at most of the the futures and options markets, including the base metals markets, you've got 90% plus of the trading volume now generated by computer signals to buy and to sell. And all those computers look at the same chart you're looking at, and all of those computers say, "Hey, it's time to buy." Oh, no, it's time to sell. >> The uh uh two follow-up questions. the um the theory that there's a coordinated attack on all these metals uh drawing drawing historical parallels into the picture of the Hunt brothers. I know I know you have different views on the Hunt Brothers. Um the the the the common understanding is that the Hunt brothers cornered the silver market in 1980 and that's what it looks like right now with all the metals and so they cornered it and then they dumped it immediately after. I'm not saying the Hunt brothers were involved in this particular incident. And I'm just saying somebody, you know, some entity is doing the same thing. Any any any evidence we have >> to support this? >> It was nonsense in 1980 and it's nonsense now. >> The Hunts average the Hunts, you know, I saw something the other day on the internet that said that the Hunts had 200 million ounces of silver. The Hunts when they went bust had 67 million ounces of physical silver. Uh, and it was put into a special account at City Bank and City Bank disposed of it. Oh, 1984, 1985. Now, the Hunt's average acquisition price of that $67 million uh ounces was something like $1245. Price went to 50. They weren't buying when it was 30450. You know, they were buying when it was le half of what they bought was less at prices below $12. Very similar to to what's going on now. people want to believe there's some large well 10% of the population want to believe there's some large nasty evil conspiracy going but the other 90% no it's everybody buying and selling around the world at the same time at the same price because they're looking at the same chart >> it's that simple if you go back to 2013 when the gold price went from 1580 to 1380 to 1280 80. There were more than 1,000 individual entities that sold within that 5 or 10 minute period when the price really started to plunge. People blamed Goldman Sachs, but Goldman Sachs actually had a buy recommendation out on gold at the time. You know, actually they had changed uh they had removed their gold recommendation like a week or two before that because they realized all of their clients were short gold. You know, Goldman Sachs in the first quarter of 201 uh 13 had a buy recommendation on gold. The price was like, I don't know, 15, it was 1580. They said it was going to be $2,000 that year. And somebody came into the commodities research room and said, "Hey, here's a chart of the commitment of traders." And institutional investors are net short gold. Our clients are not listening to you thinking that gold's going to 20,000. Our clients are listening to CPM Group saying it's going to sell and we're telling our clients they're wrong. So Goldman at the beginning of April issued a revised gold outlook and said no it's not going to $2,000. Two weeks later the price which was unable to get over 1580 sold off and the wags who don't really know the details of what's going on in the market say well Goldman Sachs must have been selling because two weeks earlier they said it's not going to $2,000. No, there were more than 1,000 entities, individual entities that were selling in that 5m minute period when that fell. And when we pointed that out at the time, someone said, "Oh my god, the Fed has more than 1,000 agents." Now, I think he was joking, but maybe he was that naive. >> Okay, >> it's a broad thing. You don't have to be a genius that when you see the price of silver go from $40 to $120 in two months. You don't have to be a genius to say I think it's a good time to take profit. >> This is a blog that that is circulating. Well, this is one of them. Is JP Morgan manipulating silver again just like before. Silver suffered. This is dated February 1st a couple days ago. Silver suffered it largest intraday collapse since 1980. Yeah, that's right. It plunged more than 32% in a single session in barely two days. roughly $2.5 trillion of market cap evaporated and then very quickly the next paragraph is is JP Morgan involved again. This isn't coming from nowhere. JP Morgan was uh you know it's it's the institution that was fined $920 million by the US Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Exchange. Sorry uh CFTC uh for man manipulating gold and silver between 2008 and 2016. That was mainly for spoofing. Uh okay. Well, are they added again? I don't even I'll just let you How would you answer that question? How what what data would you look at to support or refute this this claim? >> Well, the data that they're looking at is the issues and stops to delivery notices on the COMEX. You know, first off, you have to go back and smack them around and say, "Look, JP Morgan was fined $920 million, I believe it was, and they had >> SEC, Fed, and CFTC regulators placed in their offices for several years monitoring their trading, not just on gold and silver, across assets, including stocks and bonds and currencies and other commodities, because what they said and what they were the JP Morgan was fined for lack of supervision and creating an environment that the courts said uh allowed this criminal activity uh to to to to fester. Five people were indicted for spoofing and spoofing is not a grand manipulation. Spoofing is, you know, something for five minutes or 20 minutes >> trying to jerk the market around, right? Five people were indicted. I think four were found guilty. And the court said, it's interesting because while these people were working in the same office and and spoofing and they knew each other were spoofing, they didn't coordinate among themselves. JP Morgan's fine was for nons supervision. And the feds came in and said, "You've got to create a much better oversight system to monitor and manage these people." Right. So that's the first thing is the Fed the JP Morgan was never found guilty of manipulating and suppressing the markets. They were found guilty of letting other guys jerk around on a spoofing basis. That's the first thing. Second thing is these people look at the delivery notices and they say, "Oh my god, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, these guys have these enormous deliveries and and purchases and and and you know, taking delivery and making delivery. They're swinging the market around and they don't realize those companies are futures commission merchants and they are some of the few remaining large well creditworthy futures commission merchants and they have tens of thousands if not more clients buying and selling futures and options through them and the issues and stops show up as futures commission merchants. So they see these large deliveries or uh withdrawals on the part of JP Morgan and they say, "Oh, well JP Morgan has this enormous position." No. JP Morgan's clients collectively have a large position and it all gets funneled through JP Morgan because they're a futures commission merchant. And people just don't understand that. You know, you've got guys writing like this and they don't understand the market that they're writing about. That's how I would react. >> All right, fair enough. >> That's what I was going to say in my video tomorrow. >> You reacted kind of the same way I expected you to react, but anyway, I wanted to wanted you to explain that anyway. Gold and silver. Let's just finish off on levels then with gold stabilizing around $4,800 and uh actually, what is silver trading at right now? It's at 76. Okay. So, the um the fact that uh gold and silver didn't really uh it rebounded after the 1st of February after that big collapse >> and it's kind of stabilizing around this range. Would you call this a new floor if you were to let let's just look forward now? What is your prediction from now on? >> My floor is probably around $4,300 right now. >> That's a lot lower than it is now. >> Yes, it is. But my ceiling is probably around 5,500. So, you know, the riskreward ratio or the the you know, the the the spread between where we are today and my low and the spread between where we are today and my high. The high the spread on the high side is probably twice what it is on the downside. So, we're saying that the market is skewed to the upside at least for the next month or so. Yeah. This >> you're basing the ceiling off of the fact that the previous top was around 5,500. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah. So, we see and and you know, similar logic applies in silver. So, we're looking at markets that we expect to be very volatile >> but with a skew to the upside. And the skew to the upside has several things to do with it. Part of it is fundamentals. I'll get to that in with silver in a second. And the second thing is that we don't think that the economic and political environment is going to turn rosy in the next four to eight weeks. We think that all of the negative and economically hostile uh f trends that have been going on are going to continue. Now, you know, you can say, well, the Trump administration looks like it was chasened with NATO and chasened with Greenspan and they did the they backed off on Greenland and they back, you know, now they're trying to back off on Iran because they realize that it's really a be kind of a dumb thing to do and they're backing off in Minneapolis. I don't think they they may be backing off on a tactical basis, but you know, strategically the hostility toward US citizens and the rest of the world is still their modus operandi. They're, you know, it's still there. So, we're looking for a very hostile, negative economic and political environment over the next two months. And March is an active COMX delivery month. Now, if you go back two weeks ago, we had 504 million ounces of open interest in the March contract. It's down to about 432. Most of that has been rolled into the a into the May contract. The other 432 million ounces mostly will be rolled into May over the course of February. And that will have an up uh that will apply upward pressure on the silver price especially in the last two weeks of of of February. And the the operation and the price effect will be very similar to what happened in April of 2011 for the May contract. And if you you probably recall, other people don't really recall, silver went from 50 $32 or $36 $36 to $50 over the course of April 2011. And people kept saying, "Oh, this is it. It's going to 100." And we kept saying, "No, because if you look at it, no one's buying silver coins." And ETFs are actually net sellers. But you had about 360 million ounces of May open interest that over the course of April was bought back and rolled into July. And we said we think that the price could get to $50 over the course of April, but on the first trading day, we would expect it to fall and we think it'll get back to $36 over, you know, in short order. Uh we were wrong. It peaked on the first trading uh delivery day for the May contract and it fell to $32 in five days. So, we're looking for a similar pattern with the March contract this year on top of all of the economic and political and stock market and dollar market and currency market factors that are probably causing other investors to say, "Yeah, I don't care what's going on in the futures market. From a longer term perspective, I want to be long gold or and silver." But >> the fact that >> going back to what I said about those ETFs, the gold ETF got investors, they're buying and holding. The silver people are playing the market back and forth. I said before, you know, ETF holders added about 3.4 million ounces or so in July, in January to their holdings. >> Silver ETF holders sold on a net basis for the month 29 million ounces. >> Okay. A few final questions, I'll let you go. Um just using silver as an example because it is more volatile than gold. All right. So the gold and silver prices have not fallen to levels that you would have seen in 2011 or 2012 in 1981. Right? So in the past two cycles where they've peaked uh silver has fallen 90% and then subsequently 70% to its lows in 2012 2013 and then it stay and as you know the metal stayed there for a number of years before 2020. I we're nowhere close to that and people are wondering uh whether or not this time is different or silver and gold are going to do the exact same thing as they've always done in history which is to fall another 70% from its top and then stay low for years. Well, if you look at 1980, that drop from that intraday high of 50 to the intraday low of uh I can't remember how low it got. That was 1982 when that low was hit. Now, you did actually see silver prices go to $10 by April. Uh but that's when the the hunts uh went bust and there was liquidation, >> that big drop. But that low that you pointed out, that's like 1982. That's like July or June of 1982. >> The the the ultimate low there. >> See, it looks very similar to what it's doing now. It's looks very s There's a one day wash out. At the time it was 70%, we hear it was 40%. And then it stabilized and it went up and then, you know, and then slowly over the course of the next year or two started tracing back down. >> Yeah. the the the big plunge was because you had liquidation only of the Hunts futures positions and that was because they failed to meet a margin uh call and that was because Nelson was the only person who was authorized to to transfer the money into the margin account and he was in communicado that night. They did not know where he was because he tended to travel spontaneously and he had gone to France to Paris to try to sell some silverbacked bonds and the investors that he was meeting with there weren't interested. So he checked out of the Bristol hotel and he flew to Saudi Arabia to try to sell these silverback bonds there and his office didn't know where he was. They couldn't call they tried to find him to say you need to wire money into your Bash account overnight to meet margins and he wasn't there. So the next morning Bash had a legal obligation to liquidate those positions. That's the rules. If you don't if your client doesn't meet the margin requirements um it's liquidation only. That's what caused that one day spike. the rebound back up was caused by all kinds of people saying, "Well, it hit $50 last, you know, last quarter. It's gonna go back." But after several months, they realized that we were in what was then the deepest recession in the post-war period. People weren't buying a lot of stuff. And like Kodak, AGA and Fuji changed the formulation to what they call T-grain technology using a 90% less silver per per frame of film and and so they sold off and it went down to that low in the middle of 1982. In the later period that you showed, you know, the low was made in what 2015? You know, the the high was made in 2011. Yeah. Let's wait four years and see if the market looks like that, you know, >> right? Yeah, you're right. Hey, the price fell over the four-year period, but it didn't fall that much >> Monday, you know? It's like you have no concept of time, you know. >> Sure. The fact that I, you know, I talked to Okay, fair enough. uh the uh but just on a more fundamental basis what happened um over the let's just take 2012 to 2016 what happened to the gold and silver markets that that I guess predicated this multi-year decline to its 2014 lows and what would have to happen today for 2030 prices for example in silver to be down another 50% from current levels >> well Looking at the period 19 2011 to 2015, there are several things that happened. First off, you saw mine production, which had been declining for several years, start to rise because at prices above $15 an ounce, $20 an ounce, there was a lot of silver mining capacity that had been shuttered at lower prices and it was reopened and restarted. and you had several new silver mines come on stream that were profitable at prices above $20, right? So, you saw an increase in mine production. You saw a large surge in secondary recovery especially from old uh jewelry and silverware around the world in response to the higher price. You saw solar panels decline. the the use of silver in solar panels actually declined in 2011 and maybe into 2013. So, and you saw other fabricators starting to reduce their silver wherever possible. In some cases, they could substitute away. In some cases, they were able to go from silver wire to uh silverplated copper wire, reducing the silver use in their electronic goods and and things like that. So, you saw a decrease in fabrication demand. You saw an increase in mine production. You saw an increase in secondary recovery from scrap. And then investors started saying, "Hey, you know what? The Fed uh the Treasury's credit rating has been downgraded." And demand for credit for for Treasury bills has actually risen because the yields on them have risen and this thing that we've been worried about for 30 years has occurred and the world didn't collapse. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So you saw investors starts to sell. >> You know, I've talked to a few >> that's what happened over the four-year period, right? >> And that's what's going to it's already starting now. You're seeing reductions in solar panel demand for silver. You're seeing per unit reductions in other industrial uses. You're seeing refineries backed up from one to two weeks turnaround for scrap to four to six weeks of scrap. um you're you know mine production takes a little bit longer to kick in but it will we have about 500 and some odd million ounces of annual mine capacity that's under development scheduled to be come operating over the next 5 years. >> A few silver explorers have told me that uh they're still using $35 an ounce uh silver for their prefeasibility study. What does that tell you about sentiment and confidence? They had too high of a price. >> Really? Okay. But does that signal to you that the industry doesn't believe that this rally is here to stay or are they not are they mutually exclusive? >> $35. The average price in 2011 was $35 an ounce. 34 $35 an ounce, right? That was the peak. You know, the average price a couple years later was $15 an ounce. If you want to be a profitable silver miner, you should be profitable at the bottom of a price cycle, not at the top, you know? So, if you're using $35 an ounce, we may not see $35 an ounce again, but that's not that's not conservative financial planning to say as long as the price stays above the previous record high, >> I'll be profitable. You should say I can be profitable at the previous cyclical low. Well, Jeff, I appreciate your uh I appreciate your analysis. Final question before we go. What is the metal that you think has the most upside potential from current levels until the end of 2026? >> Gold. >> Gold. Great. All right. Thank you. Where can we find your work? >> cpmgroup.com is our website. Uh we'll be coming out with our gold yearbook in March, silver yearbook in May, platinum group yearbook in July. You can pre-order those. You can order last year's. You could probably convince us that if you pre-order this year's ones, we'll give you last year's now so you don't have to wait until they come out. There's precious metals advisory and there's uh you can write to us at info@cpmgroup.com. >> Excellent. We'll put the links down below. So, make sure to follow the CPM group there. Thank you for coming back on the show, Jeff. Appreciate it. We'll see you next time. >> Thank you for having me >> and thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe and follow Jeff and the CPM group in the links down below. 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Stocks, Bitcoin, Gold All Crashing: Is A Bigger Meltdown Coming? | Jeff Christian
Summary
Transcript
We are headed toward a weaker economy. That suggests that the stock market could actually suffer because of earnings weaknesses. People are all looking for safe havens. If you want to be a profitable silver miner, you should be profitable at the bottom of a price cycle, not at the top. Floor is probably around $4,300 right now. >> That's a lot lower than it is now. >> Yes, it is. But my ceiling is probably around. >> Is this the beginning of the end of the bull market that we've seen in the last couple of years up until now? We're going to find out today. It's Thursday, February 5th. The NASDAQ is down 1%. The S&P 500 is down more than 1%. Gold and silver are extending their losses with silver trading now at $75 an ounce. Gold is now back down towards $4,800. Bitcoin is down 10% today in one day. intraday now trading around $66,000. So, what's next for the markets? This comes, of course, in line with a slew of bad economic data out this week, mostly labor data. We're going to find out what's next for the economy. What's next for markets? Jeff Christian is our guest today. He's a managing partner of the CPM Group and he will give us his forecast for the economy in 2026. Are we finally getting a recession? What's happening with gold and silver? Is this the bottom or can we expect another crash from here? and what's happening with the stock markets. He's going to give us his forecast today. This video is sponsored by Koshi. It's a fully regulated platform that lets you trade on real world events from economic data to political outcomes. Sign up and use my code lin link in the description down below or scan the QR code here. New users will get $10 deposited to your account when you trade $10. Traders can put money down on their favorite teams, events, elections, and more in all 50 states, including California and Texas and over 140 countries. And don't forget this weekend, February 8th, this Sunday, is the Super Bowl. Plenty of events to trade this weekend. So stay tuned for that. Jeff, welcome back to the show. Looking forward to getting your forecast today. >> That's a that's a pretty tall order of first versus question. Look, the economy in the United States is weakening and it's mixed picture around the world. You know, in China, you have had record exports this year. Record a enormous decline of exports to the United States. on in the rest of the world, Chinese exports are booming. Uh so but you have a mixed economy. You saw the ADP figures for January in United States. >> Let's just give some context to the audience. So uh today on the 5th of February, initial jobs claims came out 231,000 um versus the expectation which is 212,000. It was up from 209,000 from the previous report. Uh so it looks like just on the surface the uh job uh the labor market's weakening job openings uh came down to 6.5 million uh nowhere near the expectation of 7.1 million. So what do these numbers tell you? >> You have a very weak labor market in the United States and it's been growing increasingly weak over the last several months. We seen some economists are talking about a a jobs recession already existing. We are headed toward a lower a weaker economy. That suggests lower interest rates to the markets. That suggests that the stock market could actually suffer because of earnings weaknesses. U you you have increased economic anxieties. At the same time, you have increased political anxieties. People, institutional investors to to individual investors are all looking for safe havens. Safe havens from the stock market, the bond market, the global economy, political problems. Those safe havens are gold, silver, and also industrial metals, platinum, palladium, copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc. They're all rising as people try to find alternative assets to park their money in because we still have this enormous supply of money with, you know, more than 20% of the financial assets in cash. So you still have this push. All of that put together means continued volatile markets for gold, silver, platinum, platium with a very strong upward bias. Shouldn't lower interest rates be a positive for stock markets? Why isn't the NASDAQ down for the third day in a row? >> Lower stock market would be positive for lower interest rates would be positive for the stock market just on a pure valuation basis. But in so far as the interest rates are declining predicated on expectations of weaker economic activity and reduced earnings in in some corporations and layoffs, there is a general feeling that we are headed toward recessionary or at least very low economic growth uh trends over the course of this year and that's not good for corporations. In addition to which you look at the stock market and you know it's been very selective. A lot of the increases a lot of the strength over the last year year and a half have been in a handful of stocks that are heavily weighted into crypto and AI and a lot of investors are saying you know these things are not necessarily stable industries. Crypto has a lot of issues and a lot of problems and AI increasingly is being seen as far from perfect, if you will. >> How how much of this week's volatility had to do with Kevin Worsh being nominated and he is more hawkish than some of the other candidates. >> I think that that was part of the selloff that we saw January 30th, Friday the 30th, but I I think that it's a relatively small part. You know, for my view, I'm very suspicious of Worsh because he's a he's a a guy. He's not a consensus builder. He's a consensus follower. And he can see that he can get the Fed job chairmanship by being more acceptable to the markets than Hassert or some of the other people that Trump has floated out there. So, you know, I'm more cautious about Walsh. Clearly point uh the appointment or it wasn't the appointment, it was the nomination of Walsh was a positive for the economy and the the markets and therefore negative for precious metals in so far as people thought he might be more hesitant to lower interest rates. But it comes in the context of Department of Justice indictments against the the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve chairman and congressional Republican congressional leaders saying they won't vote for anybody as a Fed appointment until those indictments are removed. So you've got on a monetary basis, you have a big ball of wax that you're dealing with at the same time. And you know, clearly Trump realized that Hasser was totally unacceptable. Uh, and he also realized that he's he's created this monster for himself with his his indictments of POW and the F and and the Federal Reserve Board. So, he's got his own Republican party, uh, Senate and Congressional members of which are increasingly worried about their electability given everything that's going wrong in the United States. um he's got the his own party sort of back backing up and saying, "Hey, we're not going to vote for anybody until you clean up your mess that you've made with the Fed." So, it's a complex set of issues that you can argue about over the dinner table as much as you want, but it all translates into volatility. >> Okay, let's just talk about what the Fed is going to do this year and then we'll lead back into the markets. that this is from cash. It's a prediction market. Will the Fed do a rate cut greater than 25 basis points this year? The markets deciding a 21.8% chance of that happening. Incidentally, I was just looking this up before you were uh before before I put the screen up. Recession this year only a 20% chance according to traders. And actually, if you look at the CME Fed watch tool, there isn't a lot of a um there isn't a great probability of a cut by March or even April. And so my question is Jeff, what kind of economy is the Fed going to inherit? The next Fed chair going to inherit? You already talked about the risk of a ris the rising risk of a recession. What does inflation look like in this environment in this year? What does the unemployment rate look like in this year? >> It looks like the unemployment rate will probably tick up a little bit, but it's all it's at very low levels. You know, we've we've seen the unemployment rate rise over the last 12 months or so, but it's still lower than it was historically for most of the last several decades. So, but we we are seeing increased unemployment, increased layoffs, increased large layoffs by large corporations, reduced hiring by smaller companies, uh smaller lower job growth. That's an issue. At the same time, you're seeing that you're still seeing very persistent inflation. you know, PPI came out and it was 3% on a headline basis and about 3.3 or 3.5 on a core basis. It's much higher than the Fed and other people would like it to see. There are a lot of inflationary pressures. There's a tremendous amount of economic uncertainty because of the reduction in in uh US uh imports and exports. Uh and we could we talk about the the trade balance deficit contracting sharply that's actually a negative for the economy because the trade deficit when we have a trade balance deficit that's money that the that's US dollars that have been sent overseas to pay for goods and services being imported that surplus of money to the rest of the world gets recycled generally into investments in the United States. Fewer lower a smaller deficit trade deficit means less dollars out in the world to be reinvested in the United States by the rest of the world. That's a negative for the US economy. At the same time, you have this anti-US investment trend growing too. So you've got these two factors that are weighing on foreign direct investment in the United States in stocks, in bonds, in corporate bonds, in companies, in land, in real estate. So you've got a lot of headwinds on the economy. That said, you saw relatively strong uh GDP in the last two quarters of of 2025. That doesn't mean that you're not going to see a recession because if you look at past recessions, more often than not, we plunge into a recession after a period of strong economic activity rather than sliding into a recession after a period of low GDP. So the idea that we have 4.36% real GDP on on the last two quarters suggests that interest rates have to stay higher to fight that inflation even in the face of the unemployment. So the Fed the Fed today is kind of stalemated because of the uh the lawsuits and and the impending replacement of power with somebody. Uh but the Fed on a ongoing basis beyond that has got a very tough call to make. Do we fight inflation? Do or do we try to keep the United States out of a recession? Or do we try to do both? And if so, how do we do both? So you've got this tremendous amount of uncertainty in the US economy right now as well as in a lot of other economies. You have the changes in monetary policy in Japan and what that means both for the Japanese economy which I think is probably good in the long term and for the global economy. >> Well, so going back to the uh Fed issue here um what will the Fed cut by more than 25 basis points? What would necess necessitate a 50 basis point cut at one meeting? I don't think it's a pos I don't think it's a probability a 50 uh basis point cut but it would have to be a much sharper decline in employment trends that would happen. I don't see inflation pressures coming off sufficiently to trigger the Fed saying hey we can cut interest rates 50 basis points. It would have to be a significant further det more more rapid deterioration in the employment environment to to to trigger a 50 basis point uh cut in interest rates. >> I need to ask you about gold and silver now Jeff. >> Okay. >> And I don't I don't think before we get into the technical aspects of the charts and uh you know why things are moving the way they are. What was your initial reaction? I mean, just not even your initial reaction because there wasn't even one single event to react to. What generally speaking was your personal sentiment all throughout January as you were seeing silver rapidly escalate towards $100, then breach $100 and stay there and then collapse down 40%. And same thing with gold going up way past before uh beyond $5,400. I mean, forget $5,000. I don't think you and I even spoke um after gold broke $5,000. I'm not I'm not sure. I have to double check. It was close, but not quite. >> I don't think we did. Yeah. >> Yeah. How were you feeling in >> I have a saying. I don't care if it's Armageddon as long as I predicted it. >> Okay. Wow. That's That's You did. Yes. >> We predicted record high gold and silver prices in January and we predicted a sharp fall off at the end of January and that's what happened. So my personal feeling was all right and you know in so far as a lot of our clients paid attention to us record high silver would have been4951 I mean you would have been right then and you were it had it had broken 51 so what happened how did you what was your reaction when it won 2x from there in a matter of weeks >> so not not only did silver let's say let's just take silver as an example not only Did silver do what you expected it to do, which is to break new record highs? It did that by a factor of 2x. >> I showed you some data before we got started recording. If you look at the daily ETF flows for gold and silver in January, in gold, you had this massive consistent increase in ETF purchases. There were only four days out of the 22 trading days in January where ETFs sold were net sellers of gold. They were net buyers in the other 18 days. If you look at silver, they the ETF investors were net sellers in like 17 of the days and net buyers in in 5 days or something like that. So what you were seeing was investors were very consistent buyers of gold and they bought about three million a little bit over $3 million through the ETFs. But in the silver market you had investors in the ETFs buying seeing the price rise taking profits. And if you just look at the last week of January, in the first four days of the year of of the month, investors in ETFs sold well over 10 million ounces of silver ETFs. And then when the price went from $120 at the end of Thursday to $72 at the end of Friday, they bought 5.7 million ounces. Right? So the investors in silver are much more opportunistic and the investors in gold are really concerned on a longerterm sustainable basis. In addition to that, you had the February ComX contract for gold being an active contract. And when you started January, you had a very large open interest in the February contract. And then the last two weeks of January, you saw that rolled from February into April. that had upward pressure on the price of gold. You had about 10 million ounces of February open interest bought back by shorts in the last week of January. 10 million ounces. This is in a market where on a physical basis maybe 40 million ounces of net purchases of physical gold in a year, but in one week you had 10 million ounces of futures bought. there was all kinds of upward pressures on prices and with the in the case of the futures market you knew there was a deadline first delivery date January 30th you know so it you know we were we were surprised at how far silver went to some extent but what you're seeing as I said earlier is you're seeing a full range of investors around the world pouring into precious and industrial metals Now industrial metals are harder to invest in. You you know with with copper you could do comx but you know copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc the ones that have been rising you have to trade LME futures which is kind of a hard thing to do. So that comes down to gold, silver, platinum platium. Platinum platium very small very liquid. Gold very liquid. Silver maybe onetenth of the size in dollar value of gold. So when you see these investment funds which are enormous compared to the gold and silver markets coming into gold and silver it has this wild uh ex uh impact on silver that's much more stronger than in gold. And when you see those investment funds coming out of the markets, it has a much more pronounced bas uh effect on silver prices simply because the silver market is a tenth of the size of the gold market. >> If I were to ask you, let's say, let's just rewind the clock. If I were to have this conversation with you in November and ask you, what would it take for the silver price to rapidly rise to $100 an ounce by the end of January? Not sometime this decade, by January. What assumptions would you have made in November uh to make this kind of forecast and did it play out the way that you would have expected it to play out? >> I would have made a two-step assumption. I would have made an assumption that you would have a tremendous amount of non-traditional precious metals investors, you know, momentum traders and generalist investors pouring into the gold and silver markets. and that that pouring in would be based on two things. One was the fact that the silver price and gold prices had started rising strongly after the Fed's uh late August meeting in in Wyoming where the Fed said, "Hey, we think the labor market's going to be weaker next year than we've been thinking and we may have to cut interest rates more in 2026 than we've been indicating we think is probable." So you had this upward momentum already. My first assumption would have been that we'd see a lot of generalist and momentum investors pouring into the market, which happened. And on top of the pure mo sheer momentum, you'd also have more outrageous political and economic things, things like the administration suing or indicting the Fed >> for stupid right? Excuse my language, but that's just nonsense. Or how about this? >> Invading Venezuela and kidnapping uh the president, accusing him of being part of a a drug cartel. Or going to NATO and saying, "I don't think we need to be part of NATO anymore, and we're thinking about invading Greenland." you know, those kinds of outrageous things that people would never have thought possible for 80 years would have to occur in November and December. And lo and behold, they did. And then I'm not even mentioning Minneapolis. >> So, a series of basically geopolitical and political black swans that nobody thought was going to happen all happened in a matter of weeks consecutively simultaneously. >> They weren't black swans. And people did think they would happen. We were predicting outrageous things. We didn't necessarily get the specific ones done. Ray Gallio has been on the YouTube, you know, regularly saying, "Guys, open your eyes." Two years ago, Amanda Gorman, who was a college kid studying English literature, but g, you know, um, and she's a poet. two years ago in January 2024, she gave a a editorial in the New York Times that said, "You should be afraid. If you're not afraid, you don't know you you're not paying attention to what's going on." There was a lot of warnings and what the specifics were were not clear, but the overall trend was very clear to anybody who had their eyes wide open. So, let's just take a look at the charts and uh examine what happened here. Some would say there was profit taking by the end of January when gold reached $5,600. But then you look at what happened with a lot of the other metals. I'm not going to show different price scales. I'm just going to show how they moved. That's silver. This is copper. This is palladium. >> Mhm. >> Uh let me just get palladium up. Uh I think you know where I'm going with this. Platinum. Jeff, they all move together. >> You're going where I always standing. Yeah. >> I What? What? What? Why? It's one thing to say, okay, people are taking profits in silver because they've run up too far. But then you see the entire metals complex acting in the exact same way, moving down the exact same day, troughing the exact same day, and moving up a similar magnitude um in the following days. What is going on? Well, a lot of it has to to do with the fact that, as I said earlier, investors from individual investors and high netw worth individuals up into the largest sovereign wealth funds are all looking for places to park cash or invest cash and precious metals and industrial metals are one of them. You're seeing stronger economic growth than a lot of people expected. a lot of fabricators that actually uh worked down their inventories because they thought that the economy would be lower and and weaker than they had. So there was some fabricators building inventories, especially in base metals because you really can't deal with base metals the way you can with gold and silver. Gold and silver are financial assets and there are these enormous inventories. But, you know, it's something that we have been saying since 1979. It wasn't a silver event, right? You know, if you think that the hunts drove silver prices to $50 and then uh dropped them to $10, you have to say, "Well, why did gold go from$1.90 to $850 to to to 320 and oil go from whatever it was, $4 to to $14 to to $8. You know, everything was moving up and down in coordination. So, part of it reflects dollar weakness. Part of it reflects concerns about the US economy and the global economy, but they were all moving up together and they were all moving down together. >> Well, there's all sorts of coordination. >> Let me just finish. There's another factor that's very important. >> Computer trading. M >> you look at most of the the futures and options markets, including the base metals markets, you've got 90% plus of the trading volume now generated by computer signals to buy and to sell. And all those computers look at the same chart you're looking at, and all of those computers say, "Hey, it's time to buy." Oh, no, it's time to sell. >> The uh uh two follow-up questions. the um the theory that there's a coordinated attack on all these metals uh drawing drawing historical parallels into the picture of the Hunt brothers. I know I know you have different views on the Hunt Brothers. Um the the the the common understanding is that the Hunt brothers cornered the silver market in 1980 and that's what it looks like right now with all the metals and so they cornered it and then they dumped it immediately after. I'm not saying the Hunt brothers were involved in this particular incident. And I'm just saying somebody, you know, some entity is doing the same thing. Any any any evidence we have >> to support this? >> It was nonsense in 1980 and it's nonsense now. >> The Hunts average the Hunts, you know, I saw something the other day on the internet that said that the Hunts had 200 million ounces of silver. The Hunts when they went bust had 67 million ounces of physical silver. Uh, and it was put into a special account at City Bank and City Bank disposed of it. Oh, 1984, 1985. Now, the Hunt's average acquisition price of that $67 million uh ounces was something like $1245. Price went to 50. They weren't buying when it was 30450. You know, they were buying when it was le half of what they bought was less at prices below $12. Very similar to to what's going on now. people want to believe there's some large well 10% of the population want to believe there's some large nasty evil conspiracy going but the other 90% no it's everybody buying and selling around the world at the same time at the same price because they're looking at the same chart >> it's that simple if you go back to 2013 when the gold price went from 1580 to 1380 to 1280 80. There were more than 1,000 individual entities that sold within that 5 or 10 minute period when the price really started to plunge. People blamed Goldman Sachs, but Goldman Sachs actually had a buy recommendation out on gold at the time. You know, actually they had changed uh they had removed their gold recommendation like a week or two before that because they realized all of their clients were short gold. You know, Goldman Sachs in the first quarter of 201 uh 13 had a buy recommendation on gold. The price was like, I don't know, 15, it was 1580. They said it was going to be $2,000 that year. And somebody came into the commodities research room and said, "Hey, here's a chart of the commitment of traders." And institutional investors are net short gold. Our clients are not listening to you thinking that gold's going to 20,000. Our clients are listening to CPM Group saying it's going to sell and we're telling our clients they're wrong. So Goldman at the beginning of April issued a revised gold outlook and said no it's not going to $2,000. Two weeks later the price which was unable to get over 1580 sold off and the wags who don't really know the details of what's going on in the market say well Goldman Sachs must have been selling because two weeks earlier they said it's not going to $2,000. No, there were more than 1,000 entities, individual entities that were selling in that 5m minute period when that fell. And when we pointed that out at the time, someone said, "Oh my god, the Fed has more than 1,000 agents." Now, I think he was joking, but maybe he was that naive. >> Okay, >> it's a broad thing. You don't have to be a genius that when you see the price of silver go from $40 to $120 in two months. You don't have to be a genius to say I think it's a good time to take profit. >> This is a blog that that is circulating. Well, this is one of them. Is JP Morgan manipulating silver again just like before. Silver suffered. This is dated February 1st a couple days ago. Silver suffered it largest intraday collapse since 1980. Yeah, that's right. It plunged more than 32% in a single session in barely two days. roughly $2.5 trillion of market cap evaporated and then very quickly the next paragraph is is JP Morgan involved again. This isn't coming from nowhere. JP Morgan was uh you know it's it's the institution that was fined $920 million by the US Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Exchange. Sorry uh CFTC uh for man manipulating gold and silver between 2008 and 2016. That was mainly for spoofing. Uh okay. Well, are they added again? I don't even I'll just let you How would you answer that question? How what what data would you look at to support or refute this this claim? >> Well, the data that they're looking at is the issues and stops to delivery notices on the COMEX. You know, first off, you have to go back and smack them around and say, "Look, JP Morgan was fined $920 million, I believe it was, and they had >> SEC, Fed, and CFTC regulators placed in their offices for several years monitoring their trading, not just on gold and silver, across assets, including stocks and bonds and currencies and other commodities, because what they said and what they were the JP Morgan was fined for lack of supervision and creating an environment that the courts said uh allowed this criminal activity uh to to to to fester. Five people were indicted for spoofing and spoofing is not a grand manipulation. Spoofing is, you know, something for five minutes or 20 minutes >> trying to jerk the market around, right? Five people were indicted. I think four were found guilty. And the court said, it's interesting because while these people were working in the same office and and spoofing and they knew each other were spoofing, they didn't coordinate among themselves. JP Morgan's fine was for nons supervision. And the feds came in and said, "You've got to create a much better oversight system to monitor and manage these people." Right. So that's the first thing is the Fed the JP Morgan was never found guilty of manipulating and suppressing the markets. They were found guilty of letting other guys jerk around on a spoofing basis. That's the first thing. Second thing is these people look at the delivery notices and they say, "Oh my god, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, these guys have these enormous deliveries and and purchases and and and you know, taking delivery and making delivery. They're swinging the market around and they don't realize those companies are futures commission merchants and they are some of the few remaining large well creditworthy futures commission merchants and they have tens of thousands if not more clients buying and selling futures and options through them and the issues and stops show up as futures commission merchants. So they see these large deliveries or uh withdrawals on the part of JP Morgan and they say, "Oh, well JP Morgan has this enormous position." No. JP Morgan's clients collectively have a large position and it all gets funneled through JP Morgan because they're a futures commission merchant. And people just don't understand that. You know, you've got guys writing like this and they don't understand the market that they're writing about. That's how I would react. >> All right, fair enough. >> That's what I was going to say in my video tomorrow. >> You reacted kind of the same way I expected you to react, but anyway, I wanted to wanted you to explain that anyway. Gold and silver. Let's just finish off on levels then with gold stabilizing around $4,800 and uh actually, what is silver trading at right now? It's at 76. Okay. So, the um the fact that uh gold and silver didn't really uh it rebounded after the 1st of February after that big collapse >> and it's kind of stabilizing around this range. Would you call this a new floor if you were to let let's just look forward now? What is your prediction from now on? >> My floor is probably around $4,300 right now. >> That's a lot lower than it is now. >> Yes, it is. But my ceiling is probably around 5,500. So, you know, the riskreward ratio or the the you know, the the the spread between where we are today and my low and the spread between where we are today and my high. The high the spread on the high side is probably twice what it is on the downside. So, we're saying that the market is skewed to the upside at least for the next month or so. Yeah. This >> you're basing the ceiling off of the fact that the previous top was around 5,500. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah. So, we see and and you know, similar logic applies in silver. So, we're looking at markets that we expect to be very volatile >> but with a skew to the upside. And the skew to the upside has several things to do with it. Part of it is fundamentals. I'll get to that in with silver in a second. And the second thing is that we don't think that the economic and political environment is going to turn rosy in the next four to eight weeks. We think that all of the negative and economically hostile uh f trends that have been going on are going to continue. Now, you know, you can say, well, the Trump administration looks like it was chasened with NATO and chasened with Greenspan and they did the they backed off on Greenland and they back, you know, now they're trying to back off on Iran because they realize that it's really a be kind of a dumb thing to do and they're backing off in Minneapolis. I don't think they they may be backing off on a tactical basis, but you know, strategically the hostility toward US citizens and the rest of the world is still their modus operandi. They're, you know, it's still there. So, we're looking for a very hostile, negative economic and political environment over the next two months. And March is an active COMX delivery month. Now, if you go back two weeks ago, we had 504 million ounces of open interest in the March contract. It's down to about 432. Most of that has been rolled into the a into the May contract. The other 432 million ounces mostly will be rolled into May over the course of February. And that will have an up uh that will apply upward pressure on the silver price especially in the last two weeks of of of February. And the the operation and the price effect will be very similar to what happened in April of 2011 for the May contract. And if you you probably recall, other people don't really recall, silver went from 50 $32 or $36 $36 to $50 over the course of April 2011. And people kept saying, "Oh, this is it. It's going to 100." And we kept saying, "No, because if you look at it, no one's buying silver coins." And ETFs are actually net sellers. But you had about 360 million ounces of May open interest that over the course of April was bought back and rolled into July. And we said we think that the price could get to $50 over the course of April, but on the first trading day, we would expect it to fall and we think it'll get back to $36 over, you know, in short order. Uh we were wrong. It peaked on the first trading uh delivery day for the May contract and it fell to $32 in five days. So, we're looking for a similar pattern with the March contract this year on top of all of the economic and political and stock market and dollar market and currency market factors that are probably causing other investors to say, "Yeah, I don't care what's going on in the futures market. From a longer term perspective, I want to be long gold or and silver." But >> the fact that >> going back to what I said about those ETFs, the gold ETF got investors, they're buying and holding. The silver people are playing the market back and forth. I said before, you know, ETF holders added about 3.4 million ounces or so in July, in January to their holdings. >> Silver ETF holders sold on a net basis for the month 29 million ounces. >> Okay. A few final questions, I'll let you go. Um just using silver as an example because it is more volatile than gold. All right. So the gold and silver prices have not fallen to levels that you would have seen in 2011 or 2012 in 1981. Right? So in the past two cycles where they've peaked uh silver has fallen 90% and then subsequently 70% to its lows in 2012 2013 and then it stay and as you know the metal stayed there for a number of years before 2020. I we're nowhere close to that and people are wondering uh whether or not this time is different or silver and gold are going to do the exact same thing as they've always done in history which is to fall another 70% from its top and then stay low for years. Well, if you look at 1980, that drop from that intraday high of 50 to the intraday low of uh I can't remember how low it got. That was 1982 when that low was hit. Now, you did actually see silver prices go to $10 by April. Uh but that's when the the hunts uh went bust and there was liquidation, >> that big drop. But that low that you pointed out, that's like 1982. That's like July or June of 1982. >> The the the ultimate low there. >> See, it looks very similar to what it's doing now. It's looks very s There's a one day wash out. At the time it was 70%, we hear it was 40%. And then it stabilized and it went up and then, you know, and then slowly over the course of the next year or two started tracing back down. >> Yeah. the the the big plunge was because you had liquidation only of the Hunts futures positions and that was because they failed to meet a margin uh call and that was because Nelson was the only person who was authorized to to transfer the money into the margin account and he was in communicado that night. They did not know where he was because he tended to travel spontaneously and he had gone to France to Paris to try to sell some silverbacked bonds and the investors that he was meeting with there weren't interested. So he checked out of the Bristol hotel and he flew to Saudi Arabia to try to sell these silverback bonds there and his office didn't know where he was. They couldn't call they tried to find him to say you need to wire money into your Bash account overnight to meet margins and he wasn't there. So the next morning Bash had a legal obligation to liquidate those positions. That's the rules. If you don't if your client doesn't meet the margin requirements um it's liquidation only. That's what caused that one day spike. the rebound back up was caused by all kinds of people saying, "Well, it hit $50 last, you know, last quarter. It's gonna go back." But after several months, they realized that we were in what was then the deepest recession in the post-war period. People weren't buying a lot of stuff. And like Kodak, AGA and Fuji changed the formulation to what they call T-grain technology using a 90% less silver per per frame of film and and so they sold off and it went down to that low in the middle of 1982. In the later period that you showed, you know, the low was made in what 2015? You know, the the high was made in 2011. Yeah. Let's wait four years and see if the market looks like that, you know, >> right? Yeah, you're right. Hey, the price fell over the four-year period, but it didn't fall that much >> Monday, you know? It's like you have no concept of time, you know. >> Sure. The fact that I, you know, I talked to Okay, fair enough. uh the uh but just on a more fundamental basis what happened um over the let's just take 2012 to 2016 what happened to the gold and silver markets that that I guess predicated this multi-year decline to its 2014 lows and what would have to happen today for 2030 prices for example in silver to be down another 50% from current levels >> well Looking at the period 19 2011 to 2015, there are several things that happened. First off, you saw mine production, which had been declining for several years, start to rise because at prices above $15 an ounce, $20 an ounce, there was a lot of silver mining capacity that had been shuttered at lower prices and it was reopened and restarted. and you had several new silver mines come on stream that were profitable at prices above $20, right? So, you saw an increase in mine production. You saw a large surge in secondary recovery especially from old uh jewelry and silverware around the world in response to the higher price. You saw solar panels decline. the the use of silver in solar panels actually declined in 2011 and maybe into 2013. So, and you saw other fabricators starting to reduce their silver wherever possible. In some cases, they could substitute away. In some cases, they were able to go from silver wire to uh silverplated copper wire, reducing the silver use in their electronic goods and and things like that. So, you saw a decrease in fabrication demand. You saw an increase in mine production. You saw an increase in secondary recovery from scrap. And then investors started saying, "Hey, you know what? The Fed uh the Treasury's credit rating has been downgraded." And demand for credit for for Treasury bills has actually risen because the yields on them have risen and this thing that we've been worried about for 30 years has occurred and the world didn't collapse. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So you saw investors starts to sell. >> You know, I've talked to a few >> that's what happened over the four-year period, right? >> And that's what's going to it's already starting now. You're seeing reductions in solar panel demand for silver. You're seeing per unit reductions in other industrial uses. You're seeing refineries backed up from one to two weeks turnaround for scrap to four to six weeks of scrap. um you're you know mine production takes a little bit longer to kick in but it will we have about 500 and some odd million ounces of annual mine capacity that's under development scheduled to be come operating over the next 5 years. >> A few silver explorers have told me that uh they're still using $35 an ounce uh silver for their prefeasibility study. What does that tell you about sentiment and confidence? They had too high of a price. >> Really? Okay. But does that signal to you that the industry doesn't believe that this rally is here to stay or are they not are they mutually exclusive? >> $35. The average price in 2011 was $35 an ounce. 34 $35 an ounce, right? That was the peak. You know, the average price a couple years later was $15 an ounce. If you want to be a profitable silver miner, you should be profitable at the bottom of a price cycle, not at the top, you know? So, if you're using $35 an ounce, we may not see $35 an ounce again, but that's not that's not conservative financial planning to say as long as the price stays above the previous record high, >> I'll be profitable. You should say I can be profitable at the previous cyclical low. Well, Jeff, I appreciate your uh I appreciate your analysis. Final question before we go. What is the metal that you think has the most upside potential from current levels until the end of 2026? >> Gold. >> Gold. Great. All right. Thank you. Where can we find your work? >> cpmgroup.com is our website. Uh we'll be coming out with our gold yearbook in March, silver yearbook in May, platinum group yearbook in July. You can pre-order those. You can order last year's. You could probably convince us that if you pre-order this year's ones, we'll give you last year's now so you don't have to wait until they come out. There's precious metals advisory and there's uh you can write to us at info@cpmgroup.com. >> Excellent. We'll put the links down below. So, make sure to follow the CPM group there. Thank you for coming back on the show, Jeff. Appreciate it. We'll see you next time. >> Thank you for having me >> and thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe and follow Jeff and the CPM group in the links down below. 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