Silver Shines, War Rages, LA Burns and the Media Lies

Today, silver trades at nearly $37 per ounce. It’s up sharply in the past month, while shares of silver miners are also rising. Looking back, this new price point is well over double what it was three years ago, in the summer of 2022.

Obviously, something is happening with silver. And if you’ve been stacking metal, and/or buying certain mining shares, you must feel good just now. So today, we’ll discuss silver and, in a broader sense, hard assets along with how to preserve wealth and make some money.

Silver, 10-ounce ingot; mintage from U.S. Strategic Stockpile. eBay screen grab.

First, though, before we dive into silver let’s discuss how America is at war. Indeed, “We’re in the Third World War,” says no less than Steve Bannon, a close adviser to President Trump. “It’s a battlefield that’s everywhere, including in downtown Los Angeles.”

That is, per Bannon, the country is at war and the only real questions are the location of the front lines and the kinetics involved. And with this in mind, understanding the politics of it all will help unlock some of the reasons for silver’s price move, and where things go from here.

Meanwhile, the silver story pertains to other hard assets, as well as to protecting your wealth and making some money.

Where’s the War? Hey, Just Look Around.

When Bannon says that we’re at war, you might (rightly) think of Ukraine, where the U.S. is still engaged in an expensive proxy fight against Russia, despite what President Trump says about his desire to disengage America and pursue an end to hostilities.

Or perhaps, when you think of conflict zones, your focus shifts to the expensive, multi-decade U.S. military presence in the Middle East. There, America is deeply invested in assisting Israel, supporting other friendly nations, and just recently we saw a large-scale bombing campaign against Yemen.

Plus, we have an ongoing, budget-blowout, full-spectrum U.S. competition with China. Currently, the confrontation is non-explosive and consists of flag-showing maneuvers both at sea and in the airspace of the Western Pacific. And of course, there’s the massive, headline-grabbing trade war, bookended by a naval and aerospace arms race in which the U.S. has not made much headway.

Then again, why look abroad for front lines? Because per Bannon, the country is engaged with belligerents here at home, in Los Angeles to be exact and likely in other cities as the summer unfolds. Stand by.

Currently, LA is an active battlefield, a kinetic front where America’s professional Left, along with a large number of what appear to be foreign actors, are engaged. They riot, loot stores, burn cars, toss bricks at cops, wave foreign flags, etc., on the face of it to oppose Trump’s campaign to deport large numbers of people who illegally entered the country.

But why think small? Because clearly, the current LA street war is also an organized resistance movement against the U.S. itself, as an entity. That is… some people on those LA streets want… to… kill… the… country.

Indeed, what we see in California is a modern version of the 1960s-era, subversive movement to rip America apart from the inside; to tear the place down and make way for some sort of Marxist-Anarchist “People’s Revolution.”

Today, many LA perps – certainly, the key organizers – hold much the same kinds of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political beliefs as 60 years ago, when we had opposition groups like the Weather Underground and Black Panthers.

Fast-forward to now, and we have national-scale disruptors like Antifa whose leaders migrate from one trouble spot to another. Plus, LA hosts other homegrown insurgent groups with an open-borders agenda such as what we saw for four years under the Biden administration; i.e., over 12 million walk-ins, almost none of them vetted in any way. That was no mere accident or bureaucratic oversight.

Add to the LA riot-mix other malevolent players who are funded by and aligned with foreign criminal elements like drug cartels, if not taking state-level backing from… Well, let’s just broadly categorize them as countries that don’t much like us.

Look at it this way: The LA riots are an op. They’re well-organized, coordinated and funded with evidently serious cash. And in response, Trump didn’t just mobilize the California National Guard, and order active-duty U.S. Marines to support operations, based on some sort of whim that struck him while out on the golf course.

No, federalizing riot control in a huge city like LA is a national-scale move. It requires cabinet-level input, certainly from Homeland Security, Defense, Justice, and numerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Which means that there’s far more going on in LA – and in other places as summer unfolds – than we are being told.

Peaceful Riots, Right?

Of course, the riots in LA are mostly “peaceful” according to CNN. Yeah, right…

Okay, I’m just kidding about that, but I’m serious too. I actually saw a video clip in which some ditzy CNN talking head described the LA events as peaceful, despite ample video evidence of fires, looting, blocked roads, cars ablaze, cops pelted with stones, explosives and more.

CNN says not to believe what you see. Screenshot X/Twitter.

Obviously, this type of see-no-evil reportage from LA is ridiculous, politically driven media drivel, aka total bullsh!t. And sad to say, it has long emanated from name-brand networks and newspapers, and more recently from an entire ecosystem of blogs and other outlets.

If legacy media will lie about something as obvious as the LA riots, what won’t they lie about? Well, they have no shame which is how we wound up with four years of fairytales about how Joe Biden was in good health.

Of course, many of us – maybe you, dear reader; certainly, most of your editors here at Paradigm Press – didn’t collectively believe that Biden was okay. Clearly, he was non compos mentis. On occasion we wrote about it when the facts fit other investment-themed discussions, such as who was making policy at the White House.

But regrettably, we live in a country and culture where there are few limits to the scale and scope of lies from the mainstream media. They take their daily talking points from a few narrative-spinning shops like the New York Times and a couple of Washington, D.C. policy mills. Then the “news” gets sliced and diced into a storyboard for public consumption. (Eg., Biden was “fit as a fiddle,” until he publicly crashed during his debate with Trump.)

At the same time, most legacy media cannot adjust to the fact that there’s a new, widespread American awareness of their collective duplicity. Yet outfits like CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. keep doubling down on false and failing messages. Perhaps they don’t realize that every time they misrepresent what’s happening out in the world, the already record-low opinion that many Americans hold of them sinks lower. Or maybe they do know this but don’t care.

One way or another, though, and whether legacy media reports it or not, we’ve been living in a long-term cultural war in U.S., and now it’s becoming actively kinetic.

Supply, Demand, and Expensive Wars

“Wars cost much silver,” said Sun Tzu in his ancient treatise, The Art of War. That is, in Sun Tzu’s era silver was the money of China. It was what the authorities had to pay out for horses, chariots, weapons, provisions and salaries for an army. And then, as now, silver was scarce and valuable.

Art of War; Lionel Giles translation. Amazon screen grab.

Sun Tzu’s takeaway was that “There is no instance of any nation ever benefitting from a long war.” And hold that thought…

Because both as traditional money, per Sun Tzu, and presently as an industrial and tech metal, the price move in silver tells us that something big is going on.

Indeed, silver’s price rise is more than just the cost of, say, the U.S. government fighting wars, despite the substantial size of the country’s defense budget. Let’s look at just the basics of silver supply and demand. Begin with the fact that many of the world’s long-established silver districts and mines are on the backside of their productive life.

You need not be a geologist to understand that, in general, prospectors long ago found most of the largest, highest-grade, near-surface silver deposits, meaning the ones that were the lowest cost to develop and mine. And from Argentina to Mexico, to Idaho, to the Yukon, many large-scale old districts and mines have been producing metal for many decades; but they are playing out for a long list of reasons.

Now, the silver search goes further afield, looking for smaller deposits, often with lower grades, and deeper in the earth which means more expensive to exploit, either with surface mining or via mine shafts. The takeaway is that silver supply is tight and getting tighter.

All this, while silver demand is growing. At industrial scale, more and more silver goes into new products, meaning items that didn’t exist in decades past. Consider the ubiquity of electronics (which contain silver, of course) in everything from smart phones to microwave ovens to automobiles. Now add exploding silver demand from solar panel manufacturing.

On top of that, there’s a global-scale level of silver accumulation in various forms of stockpiles. Some of it is industrial buying by companies and nations that are thinking a decade and more ahead to feed their industries.

Other silver buys come from central banks, such as state-level actors in Russia, India, China and more. Evidently, the leadership cadre of these nations foresee silver as a future component of a new monetary system of global trade and finance.

The Declining Dollar

On the U.S. side, a rising price for silver certainly reflects supply-demand factors. But something else is afoot, namely historic and future inflation, and predictable loss of purchasing power of the dollar. And this is related to chronic overspending by Congress, the mountainous growth in national det, and skyrocketing interest now being paid on that debt.

In other words, silver is silver; the atoms don’t change over time. Whether it’s new silver from a mine, or old silver coins or silver from the long-gone U.S. silver stockpile (see photo above), the price of silver reflects the value of a dollar. And that dollar-value has been in decline.

Indeed, from 1792 and the original Coinage Act of the new Republic, to about 1963 when silver was withdrawn from America’s coinage, a U.S. dollar was defined as an ounce of silver. Now with silver at $37 per ounce, it’s no leap of math to say that the dollar has declined in purchasing power by over 97% in the past 62 years. And things will not improve, not with the country’s debt problems coupled with the ongoing wars and near-wars in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and now California.

Of course, this leads to another discussion of the monetary idea behind using gold or silver to back up the nation’s currency. We’re a long way from the classical U.S. gold standard, essentially abolished in 1933 when President Roosevelt seized the country’s private gold holdings. And then, as mentioned, President Johnson in 1963 did away with silver in the coins.

And it gets into the essence of real value, meaning hard assets like precious metals, commodity metals (copper, etc.) and energy fuels like oil, gas and uranium. As investments go, these will hold value in years to come. They’ll adjust upwards in dollar-price as the inherent worth of U.S. currency declines. It’s sad that we must play the game this way, but that’s the way it is.

If you want to learn more about protecting yourself with hard asses, see Strategic Intelligence where we have a long list of suitable investment plays, numerous of which involve silver, gold and other metals, as well as oil, gas and uranium. And in the Rude Awakening, Sean Ring has laid out his personal portfolio of silver mining plays for all to see and follow.

That’s all for now. Best wishes, and good luck to us all.