By Jo Nova
History books will be written about this week. “This is not good” says Elon Musk.
This week the world woke up to realize that silver is a critical mineral for the high tech, AI, solar panels, and renewables. In four days time, China, which supplies more than half of the processed silver on Earth, effectively blocks their exports of silver.
Meanwhile it turns out JP Morgan, which has been aggressively shorting the silver market for 15 years — was accumulating it all along. The entire COMEX silver market in New York has 30 million ounces of silver that is ‘immediately deliverable’. But JP Morgan is widely reported to control or custody up to ~700–800 million ounces of silver across vaulting, ETFs and proprietary holdings. It is de facto, the US strategic reserve, but controlled by a private bank, not by the Treasury.
The phase change is in progress. I’m not trying to cover all the details, just to let people know that something very big is unfolding.
The largest single use of silver has become “industrial applications”:
Silver, it turns out, is the best electrical and thermal conductor of all the elements. It is essential to the solar panel industry, EV’s, and data centres. And for the last five years the demand from the tech giants and renewable industry has been so great the global silver miners have not been able to keep with demand. The cumulative deficit in silver production since 2020 is 1.1 billion ounces. That’s a lot of silver that has been pulled from physical stores and sent to industrial buyers.
When Elon Musk says “it’s not good” he is thinking of the silver his factories need. Without enough supply, production lines will grind to a halt. Current EV’s use about twice as much silver as a petrol and diesel car (25-50 grams per car.) But the demand is only going to rise. The new Samsung sold state battery is rumored to need hundreds of grams, or even 1 kilogram of silver in every battery. It’s only a prototype, but supposedly charges in nine minutes and has a range of 900km (600 miles). You know they will want silver…
And even if the price of silver rises substantially, it’s still a small part of the whole cost of an EV, therefore the factories are going to pay the new higher prices. Anything is better than shutting down…
It is possible to substitute other metals for silver, but the losses are significant. Copper oxidizes badly, and has higher resistance.
Meanwhile, inconveniently, China announced two months ago that export licenses will be required for silver in 2026 (this is the same treatment they have done with rare earths). So technically, the CCP can say they haven’t banned anything, but the new rules just happen to restrict supply leaving the country from January 1 (Friday). The Export licenses are just “sanctions by paperwork”. Hence many industrial players are just starting to realize their supply lines are suddenly at risk.
There is a big silver shortage, which may bring down some bankers, the ones left holding the short contracts on silver… At the very least, the money printers will have to work hard.
The most calculated trade in inside trading
The Asian Guy in the videos below, is telling (or selling) a story. Strangely, his YouTube channel only started three weeks ago, yet his reports on silver have been so detailed and prescient he has gathered 43,000 subscribers. He appears to be pure AI, and, we should keep in mind that he may even be a product of the JP Morgan marketing team. Who knows? He almost seems to know too much.
Title: JP Morgan Flips LONG + China Ban Starts In 4 Days
WARNING: There are many copies and imitators and ambush spam videos acting as decoys. The original is OG Jon AG. Also on X: OGJohnAG and the backup channel is here. The transcript of this video (now made private) is here.
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The Asian Guy describes himself as a silver bug, and talks the talk of the long suffering silver nerd, and yet, in the end, we have to ask why he is suddenly making these videos and “who benefits” from them. Obviously JP Morgan comes out looking very powerful, (albeit, also rather predatory. They told everyone not to buy silver while they bought it themselves).
The Asian Guy is effectively telling Elon Musk he has been out-gamed by JP Morgan and he will need to knock at their door and wait for them to set the price. Presumably they don’t want him to buy up Mexican silver mines…
In this video (below) made a few days ago, The Asian Guy claims last Friday, one banker must have gone to the US Federal Reserve to beg for $17 billion in Repos (Repurchase agreements) to keep them alive in the disastrous silver shorts gamble. A repo is a loan of last resort. If it’s true, it suggests things are getting very close to the wire for some traders.
It also confirms that the US central powers are willing to inflate their way out of trouble.
The Blob bureaucracy depends on fiat currencies
If the Blob can print money — they can keep giving away other people’s purchasing power in order to buy votes. The game is up though, if the voters realize what is going on and abandon the dollar in favor of something else, like gold or silver.
Because the Blob bankers can always print more money, they have created vast numbers of layers of derivatives, options and hedge contracts. Astonishingly, the ratio of “paper silver” to real silver is estimated to be over 100 to one, or much higher. What’s changing is that people are demanding the physical silver, not just another paper contract. They can’t make solar panels or EVs with paper silver. But once people realize there isn’t enough silver, everything falls apart just like a bank run, and panic sets in.
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PS: My other half, Dr David Evans and I own Goldnerds. We’ve been watching the precious metals market for 30 years, and waiting for the house of cards to come undone (as have many skeptics). Obviously anything I write here is not market advice, just posted for information…