Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,
December means many things: A year coming to an end, a time for reflection, a time for looking ahead. A time for family and friends, and of course, a time for holiday belly-expansion.
However, what many may have missed this December is that it was the month the paper markets in silver had yet another near-death experience.
Hiding in Plain Site
As usual, this critical turning point in metals, as well as its neon-flashing signal of a globally debt-sick financial and currency system, went largely unnoticed.
In financial markets, the daily buzz remained forever focused on the usual suspects, from BTC’s massive falls, MicroStrategy’s losing gambit (-59% YTD) and an over-stretched stock market to crude oil’s annual loss or the never-ending deflation/inflation or strong vs. weak DXY debates.
These are, of course, important debates and topics. Most investors understand them, and thus most investors, bull or bear, have an opinion about them. That is why they fill headlines.
Hiding in Intentional Complexity
But often, in fact nearly always, the real and more nuanced signals, as well as market warnings, are deliberately omitted from the Zeitgeist.
This is not only because such signals are a threat to the so-called “experts” behind these failing and corrupted systems, but because, as such, they are made deliberately too complex for Joe Sixpack to see and hence critique.
I’ve written about such intentional obfuscation through intentional complexity before.
And nowhere is this tactic put to better use than in trying to hide the legalized price-fixing masquerading as “hedging” at that oh-so complex beast otherwise known as the COMEX exchange.
For this reason, I’ve tried (as well as warned) for years to make simple sense out of the otherwise senseless COMEX mechanizations used to manipulate the paper price of gold and silver.
If needed, these “simplifications” of the “complex” can be chronologically revisited here, here and here for a re-fresher course.
Making the Complex Simple
For now, however, let’s continue to derive the simple from the complex.
Toward this end, the core theme is very simple and worth repeating: Sovereign nations guilty of unprecedented debt addiction—and hence the currency debasement needed to monetize that addiction—are absolutely terrified of rising gold and silver prices.
This is because rising precious metals are an open middle finger to governments who have grossly and negligently mismanaged the national currencies by which most citizens measure their wealth.
Precious metals naturally rise when paper money, inflated to reduce debt burdens, unnaturally falls in purchasing power.
And when a currency loses its purchasing power, the natives get restless, and the government, fully to blame for the same, gets both nervous and dishonest.
Making the COMEX Simple
That is why the COMEX, in 1974, added futures contracts to allow massive levels of leverage in the hands of a small cabal of bullion banks to conduct equally massive shorts on the gold and silver price each and every day since. This keeps the prices forced down.
The COMEX, in short, was designed for no other reason than to manipulate gold and silver, for gold and silver, promised by the U.S. Constitution as real money, had been taken away from the people in August of 1971.
The cabal responsible for this crime didn’t want this stolen “real money” to outshine the fake paper money that replaced it.
Since 1971, the fall of fiat money’s purchasing power when measured against gold has been greater than 99%.
That was embarrassing, of course, but it was a slow frog boil which the media and even most citizens ignored for decades.
By December of 2025, however, the narrative of a robust USD had lost its credibility for so many reasons detailed elsewhere, but made most obvious by an astronomical, 2025 gold and silver price appreciation driven by global demand which openly preferred real money over the USD and USTs as the new strategic reserve asset.
Today, global central banks hold more physical gold than USTs.
In short, the world has caught on that precious metals preserve their purchasing power infinitely better than credit-based and openly melting paper dollars.
The Greenback, since it was weaponized in 2022, has simply lost its prior hegemony.
Or stated even more simply: Uncle Sam was losing, and hence the COMEX was desperate to save face and buy time for his discredited dollar by attempting to kneecap the precious metals.
But as we’ve warned all year, the COMEX was running out of the needed gold and silver to continue its legalized charades.
