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The Silver Crash Was Orchestrated - Andy Schectman

The Deep Dive Jul 15, 2026

Summary

The guest argues January's gold and silver selloff was engineered through COMEX (metals futures) margin hikes, not weak fundamentals.

Record Chinese silver imports and outsized COMEX gold and silver deliveries suggest real demand never matched the price drop.

New physical-settlement exchanges in Hong Kong, Dubai and Singapore aim to set metal prices outside the futures chain.

Suppressed interest rates distort asset prices, and he argues gold rallied straight through the largest rate hikes on record.

Private credit and private equity carry few safeguards and could be hit hard if market-driven rates climb.

Andy Schectman's takeaways

  • Top takeaway His central call as of mid-2026 is that the February gold and silver selloff was engineered rather than caused by fundamentals, citing the BIS finding that the decline was structural and synthetic and pointing to margin hikes landing on top of the predictable year-end ETF rebalance selling.
  • He argues the physical side of the market tells a different story from price: China imported more silver in the first quarter than at any point in its history and $54 billion of gold, while delivery buyers kept standing for delivery month after month and did not care about price.
  • He rejects the view that war and inflation are bearish for gold because the Federal Reserve is not expected to cut rates, noting gold rose through the largest one-year rate increase ever, about 400 basis points from near zero to 4% on the 10-year, and saying dot plots and forward guidance should stop driving price.
  • On private credit and private equity he sees a safeguards gap versus public equities, accredited-investor risk, large sums from insurers, endowments and pensions, and a highly leveraged and arguably overvalued market, and he calls it a significant problem if rates rise, with some industry contacts selling private equity back on pennies on the dollar.
  • He warns that US equity fundamentals are arguably the worst they have ever been with seven to ten stocks holding up record breadth, while the public is at its largest ever common equity allocation with roughly $1.5 to $6 trillion of margin debt, and says he would rather be six years early than 60 seconds late and hold the raft before the Titanic sinks.

Steve Hyland's takeaways

  • Top takeaway He says he has been reading up on private credit and has been told concerns by people somewhat connected to it, citing Grant as the rate observer who was among the first to flag the housing collapse and is now vocal about private credit, while noting nobody knows how much money is really tied up even though commercial real estate is largely backed by it and insurers, endowments and pensions keep signing large cheques.
  • He criticises mainstream reporting on his industry, pointing to a television outlet profiling a dealer that fired its entire staff and then went bankrupt with roughly $70 million to $100 million of liabilities against almost no assets, and saying coverage like that only highlights the negative side of precious metals investing.

Rick Rule's takeaways

  • Top takeaway He cites Rule as the authority that the typical US investor, from retail through the Harvard endowment, still allocates only about half of one percent to gold and gold-related equities, which he uses as evidence that precious metals are under-owned.
  • He also describes a 25-year working friendship with Rule and says he has attended the event since its inception, back when it ran in Vancouver under the Agora name.