THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE TRAPPED in a dollar devaluation, debt expansion, rate suppression whirlwind of a magnitude never been seen before now exacerbated by war. (Greg Mannarino).

Events are moving quickly, geopolitically and economically. So a longer read this week

Last week I told you a repricing event was underway. This week I need to tell you something bigger: the system that prices your metals is breaking apart.

On March 16th, the London Metal Exchange halted all electronic trading. Copper, aluminium, zinc, tin, everything, frozen. The official explanation was a “technical issue.” The timing told a different story. Copper was at all-time highs near $14,000 per metric ton. Oil was above $100. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively blockaded. And somebody, somewhere, was on the wrong side of a very large trade.

If that sounds familiar, it should. In March 2022, the LME halted nickel trading when prices doubled in two days and a Chinese short seller faced billions in losses. They didn’t just halt trading, they cancelled completed trades retroactively. That wasn’t a technical glitch. It was a bailout wearing a server error as a disguise. This is disgraceful behaviour. Where is capitalism, morality and equity?

When exchanges stop functioning because prices move to levels the paper market can’t handle, they’re telling you something important: the paper price is a fiction that only works within a certain range. Step outside that range, and they hit the pause button. Your physical metal doesn’t have a pause button. It’s still gold or silver whether London’s servers are on or not.

The LME halt is just a symptom. The disease is deeper.

The Price Is Splitting

On February 26th, India’s Securities and Exchange Board, SEBI, issued a circular that most Western financial media completely ignored. Effective April 1st, 2026, all Indian gold and silver ETFs must use domestic MCX spot prices. Not London. Not LBMA. India, the world’s largest silver consumer, just told the Western pricing establishment to get lost.

Meanwhile, silver on the Shanghai Gold Exchange is trading at triple-digit prices in U.S. dollar terms. Physical one-ounce coins are reportedly changing hands at $140 to $200 in Asian markets. The COMEX paper price? Around $80. (Less this morning).

The world’s two largest physical buyers, India and China, are paying dramatically more for silver than what COMEX says it’s “worth.” And now India has formally abandoned Western price benchmarks altogether.

We no longer have one silver price. We have three:

• • COMEX/London: The Western paper price ($80)  set by futures contracts, many of which will never take delivery.

• • Shanghai: The Chinese physical price, triple digits and climbing.

• • MCX India: About to become an independent benchmark on April 1st.

The Western price suppression mechanism has always worked the same way: sell paper contracts to drive down the “spot” price, and let physical buyers around the world accept that number. It only works if the physical buyers play along. India and China just said no. They’ll pay what the metal is actually worth, priced in their markets, on their terms.

If you hold physical silver in a vault, as many of you do, the COMEX price is increasingly not your price. It’s the discount. The Eastern price is becoming the real price. And the gap is only going to widen as long as Western exchanges keep hitting the pause button when reality gets uncomfortable.

When sourcing gold or silver physical, the reality rears its head. Either unavailable or available for physical delivery at premiums far above quoted paper prices.

The Currency Illusion

Now let me connect this to something I’ve been watching for months that explains why India and China are building their own pricing systems.

Three inflationary forces are stacking simultaneously:

• • War Inflation. The United States spent $5.6 billion in munitions in the first 48 hours of Iran strikes. Oil went from $60 to over $100. The Strait of Hormuz, through which 21% of the world’s oil passes daily, is effectively closed to dollar-denominated transactions. I’ll come back to “dollar-denominated” in a moment.

• • Tariff Inflation. Before the first missile was fired, tariffs were already adding direct costs to imported goods. These aren’t absorbed by foreign manufacturers. They’re passed directly to you at the register.

• • Monetary Inflation. The “transitory” money printed since 2020 never left the system. It’s still sloshing around, $6 trillion of it and it’s now meeting real supply constraints for the first time. When too much money chases too few goods, you don’t need an economics degree to know what happens.

Any one of these is a problem. Any two together is a crisis. All three at once? That’s what we’ve got.

But here’s what nobody in the financial press is telling you and this, in my opinion, is the most important thing I’ll write this year:

The exchange rate is hiding everything

The dollar index sits around 100-104. It looks stable. It looks strong. And if you only look at the DXY, you’d think the dollar is fine. But the dollar index only measures the dollar against other currencies, and every one of those currencies is debasing at the same speed.

Think of it this way: if you and your neighbour both gain fifty pounds at the same rate, neither of you looks fatter standing next to each other. But your clothes don’t fit. The scale doesn’t lie. And the price of groceries doesn’t lie. Measure against a stable asset like gold, and you will see real results as shown in the gold/USD chart below.

The euro is debasing. The yen is debasing. The pound is debasing. The yuan is debasing. The won just hit a 17-year low. When everyone prints, the exchange rates look stable because the ratios stay roughly the same. But measured against what you actually need, food, energy, shelter, metal, every single one of them is falling.

I call this the Currency Illusion. Two drunks leaning on each other, looking stable. The DXY can be flat at 100 while a loaf of bread doubles. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Here’s the proof. My proprietary scanner tracks 172 assets across every sector, with daily, weekly, and monthly signals. Right now, UUP (the dollar ETF) is on a buy signal. At the same time, DBC, GSG, PDBC, GCC, USO, and every major commodity index are also on a buy signal. Both the dollar AND commodities are going up simultaneously.

In a textbook economy, that’s impossible. A strong dollar should push commodity prices down. The fact that both are rising together tells you the dollar isn’t actually getting stronger, it’s just falling slower than other currencies. Commodities are rising in all currencies because all currencies are falling against real things.

That’s not inflation. That’s competitive debasement. And the exchange rate is the curtain they don’t want you to look behind.

The GDP Illusion

This connects to something Gregory Mannarino has been saying that I think deserves a wider audience: strip out government spending from GDP, and the “growth” story evaporates.

Look at these terrifying numbers:

France’s “real” private economy, the part that actually produces things people voluntarily pay for is $1.33 trillion. Smaller than South Korea’s. The rest is government spending counting itself as economic activity.

The United States, at 38% and climbing, is heading toward European levels. Every Tomahawk missile that vaporises $2 million worth of silver and electronics adds to GDP. Every government contractor, every military deployment, every bureaucratic expansion, GDP goes up. But wealth doesn’t. GDP measures activity. War is an activity without progress. Spending borrowed money on things that explode is not growth. It’s the most expensive way to destroy wealth ever invented.

With the war costing $2.8 billion a day and interest on the national debt surpassing the defence budget, the US government’s share of GDP is heading past 40%. At that point, you’re not a free market economy with a government. You’re a government economy with a free market appendage.

Nobody Showed Up

Here’s where it all connects.

Last week, President Trump called seven countries — the UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, and others to send warships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. The answer from every single one of them: no.

Germany rejected the demand outright. France is “resisting.” The UK is “considering options”,  which in diplomatic language means no. Japan and South Korea didn’t even return the call with a commitment. Trump warned it would be “very bad for the future of NATO” if allies didn’t help. In my opinion this will be the reason that the US exits NATO.

Nobody cared.

And here’s why, this is the game theory that matters: Iran didn’t close the Strait of Hormuz. They changed the terms. Oil is still flowing through the strait,  to China, to India, to anyone paying in yuan or rupees or anything that isn’t dollars. Iran’s message was precise: the strait is open to all except the United States and its allies.

So any country that joins the U.S. naval coalition ‘loses’ access to the strait. And any country that stays neutral ‘keeps’ access. Why would Germany send ships to fight for a strait it can use peacefully by simply not joining America’s war?

This is not a military blockade. It’s a currency blockade. And it’s done more damage to the petrodollar in two weeks than China managed in two decades of yuan internationalisation.

Follow the money. Countries are choosing energy access over alliance loyalty. They’re choosing oil over NATO. They’re choosing to price commodities in their own currencies on their own exchanges,  just like India did with silver on February 26th.

The dollar’s power has always rested on two pillars: military protection and energy pricing. When your military is stretched across three conflicts and burning through munitions at $2.8 billion a day, the protection pillar wobbles. When your enemies figure out they can weaponise energy pricing against you, not by closing a strait, but by changing the currency, the energy pillar cracks.

The Quiet Sanctions Reversal

And if you needed confirmation that the old order is ending, here it is: on Thursday evening of March 12th, timed perfectly for a Friday news dump, the Trump administration quietly lifted sanctions on Russian oil tankers. The license runs through April 11th.

The circle is now complete. The United States bombed Iran. Iran closed the strait to dollar transactions. Oil spiked to $100+. The US needed replacement supply. The only available source at scale? Russia, the country the US spent three years sanctioning.

Russia is now selling oil at over $100 per barrel instead of the $60 price cap Western sanctions were supposed to enforce. Putin didn’t fire a single shot to achieve this. The US defeated its own sanctions with its own war.

The country financing Ukraine’s defence against Russia is now funding Russia’s war machine by buying its oil at premium prices. Meanwhile, Russia, China, India, and most of Asia are building parallel financial infrastructure, their own exchanges, their own pricing benchmarks, their own settlement currencies, specifically designed to operate without the dollar.

The Inflation They’re Not Reporting

The official CPI for February came in at 2.4%. That number was calculated using a methodology the Bureau of Labor Statistics has quietly redesigned multiple times since 1980, each revision conveniently producing a lower number than the last.

Here’s how it works. If steak gets too expensive, the BLS assumes you switch to chicken and counts that as “no inflation.” If your phone costs more but has a better camera, they apply a “hedonic adjustment” that can actually make the price go down in their formula. And shrinkflation, the same box with less product at the same price, isn’t properly captured at all. Breyers didn’t raise the price of ice cream. They just put less in the container. CPI doesn’t see it.

John Williams at ShadowStats has been recalculating the CPI using the older, pre-revision methodologies for over two decades. The numbers tell a very different story:

Same economy. Same grocery store. Different math. Use the method that was good enough for every president from Truman to Reagan, and inflation is running north of 10%. That’s before the oil spike, before the tariffs bite, and before the Hormuz disruption hits the supply chain. The February data was collected before any of this happened. March and April are going to be ugly.

And here’s why this matters for your metals position: interest rates, Social Security adjustments, TIPS bonds, government contracts, they’re all indexed to the official CPI. If real inflation is 10% and the government is paying you 2.4%, you’re losing 7-8% per year in purchasing power. Your savings account, your pension, your bond portfolio, they’re all bleeding out quietly while the government tells you everything is fine.

Gold nor silver need a methodology revision. An ounce is an ounce. The price isn’t “adjusted” for hedonic improvements. It just tells you what your currency is actually worth. And right now, it’s telling you something very different from 2.4%.

What My Scanner Is Telling You

I run a proprietary stock scanner system to assist in keeping abreast of market changes and conditions. Here is some of what it is telling me:

The energy trade is dominant. USO is up 67.9% from its buy signal. MPC up 37.6%. GSG, DBC, PDBC all holding double-digit gains with buy signals confirmed across daily, weekly, and monthly timeframes. Inverse ETFs, the bets against the broader market, are printing: FAZ up 37.7%, SDOW up 14.3%, TZA up 16.2%.

Meanwhile, precious metals miners, ETFs, and royalty companies, 70+ tickers across the entire sector (of course this is my bias), are producing sell signals on the daily and weekly timeframe. Monthly buy signals remain intact. This is a pullback in a secular uptrend, not a reversal.

The productive economy, 78 tickers sitting in “out”, sell signals that have been active for more than three days. That’s the real economy. Defence and energy are the only sectors with consistent buy signals.

The scanner doesn’t have opinions. It follows momentum, volume, and trend. And right now it’s telling the same story as everything else: the real economy is contracting while war, energy, and inflation assets are surging. That’s stagflation, not in theory, not as a forecast, but in the actual price action across 172 assets.

 What It Means For You

I started this letter by telling you the pricing system is breaking apart. Let me end by telling you what that means.

If you hold physical gold and silver, whether in our vault in Panama or anywhere else, you hold the one asset that doesn’t need an exchange to function, doesn’t need a government to guarantee it, and doesn’t need a server to stay online. The LME can halt trading. COMEX can raise margins. India can leave the LBMA. China can set its own price. None of that changes the weight of the bar in your hand.

The shrinkflation the government isn’t counting tells you what they don’t want CPI to show. The same box of cereal, less product, higher price. Ground beef at your local Walmart: $7.29 for what used to be two pounds, now it’s one and a quarter. K-Cup pods: twelve per box became ten, same price. Breyers ice cream: 1.66 litres shrank to 1.41. Same shelf, same packaging, less inside, same price. The government says inflation is 3%. Your grocery receipt says otherwise.

The GDP they’re reporting counts missiles as growth. The exchange rate they’re showing you measures one sinking currency against another. The “spot price” they quote you is set by paper contracts in a market that shuts down when the price moves too far.

In my opinion, we still have a long runway on this metals move. The monthly buy signals remain intact. The structural supply deficits in silver are widening. The two largest physical buyers in the world are now building independent pricing systems that reflect what the metal is actually worth, not what a leveraged paper market says it should be.

The question isn’t whether to hold. The question is what the world looks like when the Western paper price and the Eastern physical price finally converge. I believe that convergence is coming. And when it does, the people holding real metal in real vaults are going to find out what repricing actually looks like.

Hold. And forward this to someone who needs to read it.

PLATINUM

SELL: On the Daily chart (03 March 2026), the rate of change still falling.

URANIUM

SELL (03 March 2026) URA.

BITCOIN AND GOLD

Bitcoin outperforms Gold  (12 February 2026).  14.77 one ounce gold coins buys one bitcoin, this was over 41 ounces almost a year ago.

ETHUSD: BUY: (18 February 2026)  Looks like it is working.

BTCUSD: BUY: 03 March 2026.  NASDAQ (Cyan). Note the divergence from the NASDAQ.

GOLD AND SILVER STOCKS

05 March 2026 Gold outperforms gold stocks. Looking a little overbought.

Silver outperforms silver stocks (05 March 2026). Was overbought, no transfer yet.

GOLD AND SILVER

Silver to Gold Ratio

Gold outperforming Silver. (03 March 2026)  Silver is coming out of the ground at about 8:1 and the Gold: Silver ratio is 63.13:1.

GOLD TO USD

USD outperforms Gold, (30 January 2026). Rolling over again.

A LOOK AT THE GOLD AND SILVER CHARTS

Gold’s low of the week was $4530.00 and the high was $5,044.00 now trading at around $4,537.00.

• • Gold Monthly:  is a HOLD. We bought it for $1,800.00 in October 2023.  Looking overbought, but it can hold that situation for a while. No sell signal yet. Indicators turning down. Looking precarious. If price continues to fall we will have a monthly sell.

• • Gold Weekly:  (SELL 19 March 2026)  

• • Gold Daily: (SELL 17 March 2026). 

The low for Silver this week was $65.92 and the high $82.52, trading around $65.65 at present. 

• • Silver Monthly: Hold. (Buy:  $24.00 March 2024). Looking overbought. No sell signal yet. Indicators turning down. Watching carefully.

• • Silver Weekly: (SELL: 09 February 2026). If I were holding physical, I would not be releasing it at these prices. As a trade, I would follow the signal. No new buy on the indicators yet.

• • Silver Daily: SELL (04 March 2026). 

Our partner has stock of both gold, silver and Goldbacks in our vaults available in Panama. Please contact us for more information.

A video by Mike Adams on the Goldbacks. 

Well worth a look!

On the Stockcharts.com charts, the blue vertical lines are our proprietary system buy signals and the red vertical lines are system sell signals – for information purposes only

An interview with Josh, owner of Scottsdale Mint:

If you are interested in an overview of Fort Kobbe, you may want to have a look at this video: Mike Brown, Director, Fort Kobbe, International Vaults, A DotCom Magazine Exclusive Interview

This is my interpretation of the market and is not to be taken as financial advice. Before making any buy or sell decisions, I recommend that you consult with your professional financial advisor.