by Niko Moretti
Silver hits $95 per ounce December 30
Then a Day Later pops 30% more to the upside
The Country that unveiled the World’s Largest Silver Bar is now selling Silver at $127.45 per ounce … and rising
COMEX silver pricing has crossed the line from distortion into open fraud, and the physical market is now shouting the verdict: the shortage is here, right now. A benchmark that still prints silver in the low‑$70s while real metal is changing hands at $90, $100, $130 and beyond is not “discovering” a price; it is fabricating one.
Theater of the Absurd: COMEX
COMEX still quotes silver in the low‑$70s, while buyers in Japan are paying around $130, Dubai $127 , Kuwait $106, Korea near $97 and Walmart near $90 just to get real bars delivered. That is not a healthy arbitrage band; that is a smoking gun that the so‑called global reference price has been severed from reality. The screen is one world, the vault is another, and only one of them can melt.
Beijing Throws the Switch
“China’s new silver export controls, effective January 1, 2026, weaponize its role as dominant refiner and second‑largest miner into an explicit chokehold on global flows.
When one country sits astride more than three‑quarters of the refining chokepoints and then starts gating exports, every ton that used to bleed out to plug Western deficits becomes a political decision, not a market response. That is not a “risk factor” in a prospectus; that is the architecture of a hard shortage.” – Jon Forrest Little
Empty Shelves, Full Alarm
The dealer shelves are screaming what the COMEX tape is hiding. Big online houses have been stripped of serious silver bars—10 oz, kilo, 100 oz, 1,000 oz—by panicked buying, and now smaller players like Monument Metals are posting “sold out” across the same categories. This is the classic pattern of systemic scarcity: Tier‑1 inventory disappears, then Tier‑2 is gutted, and suddenly the only thing still abundant is the digital fantasy on a futures terminal.
When Walmart Knows COMEX Is Lying
Even Walmart is inadvertently testifying against COMEX. When a big‑box retailer is tagging 1 oz APMEX bars around $87 while the official “world price” sits in the low‑$70s, the lie is no longer subtle. The physical market—Japan at $130, Kuwait at $106, Korea at $97, U.S. retail near $87—is converging in one loud band, and COMEX is standing alone in another, lower, utterly discredited one.
Obituary for a “Benchmark”
Call it what it is: fiction posing as finance. A price signal that cannot source metal is not a benchmark; it is a weapon used to gaslight producers, miners, and savers while the last available ounces are quietly vacuumed out of the system. The divergence between COMEX paper and real‑world metal is not an oddity to be arb’ed away; it is the obituary of COMEX’s relevance and the flashing red siren that the global silver shortage has finally broken into the open
Buy the Miners, it is still early
Silver’s historic 2025 surge has left most primary and junior miners badly trailing the metal itself, with sector ETFs like SIL capturing only a fraction of bullion’s triple‑digit gains so far. That disconnect is already being flagged as a coiled spring, with multiple analysts arguing that the next wave of capital will flow into undervalued silver equities as investors seek leverage to any continuation of this move. For everyone who feels they “missed the boat” on physical, the coming chapter is expected to be a violent catch‑up in mining shares, driven not just by retail traders but also by institutional money reallocating into the silver space
Aya Gold & Silver, Andean Precious Metals and Kuya Silver are three producing silver miners positioned to benefit from a world of structural silver deficits and increasingly fragile supply chains.
Aya Gold & Silver (OTC: AYASF) is ramping output at its high‑grade Zgounder mine in Morocco while advancing the large Boumadine project, giving it both current cash flow and transformational growth.
Andean Precious Metals (OTC: ANPMF) operates the San Bartolomé plant, the only commercial silver oxide processor in Bolivia, with a long track record of multi‑million‑ounce annual production.
Kuya Silver (OTC: KUYAF) has successfully restarted the Bethania mine in Peru and is steadily increasing throughput and concentrate sales, providing emerging but real production leverage to higher prices.
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