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The recent silver market

OTOH, if the vast majority of your holdings were bought at $20 or less, it's not a big disaster. Think Dollar Cost Averaging. . .

Other than one small purchase as a gift, most of ours was bought far below the current price level. The highest we have paid was a few thousand dollars worth at around $71 in December through a national bullion company at spot with no premium. Very recently I bought some more locally at spot from someone else in the precious metals community. I had bought some foreign gold from him before and got an email offering Morgan silver dollars, US silver eagles, and Canadian silver maple leafs as a group at spot. Since I prefer monetary coins, I would love to have bought just the Morgans, which were about half the value of the deal, but had to take all of it to get the Morgans. When we did the transaction, he told me he needed more money for the car they were going to buy their son than what they anticipated and that he had sent our five emails to local people. All five of us wanted the deal, but I was the first to respond, so we got it. I am still looking out for deals during the dip.

With silver being designated a critical mineral by many governments to stockpile, a mine supply deficit ongoing for five years and accelerating, and increasing industrial demand for silver, the fundamentals still look very good over the long haul.
 
Still no evidence that the gulf states have sold any gold from their centrals banks yet, but if they are selling from their sovereign wealth funds, where they have also been accumulating gold, that would not be as visible. The one central banks that has been selling gold lately is Turkey, whose tourism industry has been hit by the war in its neighbor Iran, with Iran having fired several missiles at Turkey and quite a few travel warnings out on the country. Turkey has had a regular pattern in past financial difficulties of selling gold and then buying it back after the crisis passes. That has happened multiple times.
 
Turkey's central bank sold -58 tons of gold, worth over $8 billion, in just 2 weeks.

Gold reserves dropped -6 tons in the week ending March 13th and another -52 tons in the week ending March 20th, bringing total reserves down to 513 tons, marking the largest drop in 7 years.

Over half of the gold was used to borrow US Dollars via swaps, with the rest sold outright on the open market.

The gold sales also exceeded the ~43 tons of outflows from all global gold-backed ETFs over the same 2-week period, making Turkey the single largest source of gold liquidation worldwide.

This comes as the central bank is burning its FX reserves to defend the lira, which has come under intense pressure from surging energy import costs and rising US Dollar demand since the Iran War began.

As a result, total Turkey FX reserves dropped ~$40 billion, to ~$175 billion, the lowest since Q3 2025.

Rising energy costs are forcing Turkey to dump gold.


 
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