Matthew Piepenburg of Von Greyerz told Commodity Culture that silver’s recent decline to around $52 has multiple causes, but the dominant one is ongoing price manipulation by large commercial traders on Western exchanges.
He stated that he disagrees 100 percent with those who claim the precious metals markets are not manipulated by the COMEX futures market or other Western venues. “I attribute much of the current paper price of silver to these massive and concentrated short positions by these concentrated but deeply levered banks,” Piepenburg said. He added that the parties doing the rigging have already confessed to it more than once, and that the Bank for International Settlements effectively oversees an open system of price fraud.
Piepenburg identified several additional pressures weighing on silver in 2026. Rising rates from a stressed sovereign bond market create an opportunity cost for a yieldless metal. Leveraged long positions held by hedge funds and CTA trend following algorithms hit simultaneous stop loss signals and dump large volumes at the same time, producing cascading sell offs.
Speculative capital is also being drawn into AI related stocks and bonds, which he described as the greatest misallocation of capital and credit he has ever seen. Institutional dumping of silver has exceeded $1.6 billion. Despite these headwinds, he does not view the stronger dollar as a decisive factor, arguing that the greenback is trading more like another risk asset than a true reserve currency given the absurd debt backdrop.
On China, Piepenburg noted the persistent premiums for silver, gold, platinum, and palladium in Shanghai. He sees this as consistent with Beijing’s longer term strategy to become the world’s largest trading hub for precious metals and the center for fair, physical based pricing rather than paper based discovery.
Once Western banks unwind their concentrated shorts and free price discovery shifts further East, he expects the move in silver to accelerate from incremental to exponential and to push well beyond prior all time highs.
Looking ahead, Piepenburg expects debt sick nations to respond to spiking yields with emergency rate cuts and large scale money creation, a pivot he believes will arrive by 2027. He noted that similar shifts from rising rates to desperate liquidity measures have occurred repeatedly, including from 2018 to 2020 and 2022 to 2024. “Silver wins either way and the endgame ahead of us is currency debasement,” he said.
Temporary noise from manipulation, algorithmic selling, and bond yields does not change the underlying monetary and debt crisis. In his view the large commercial traders know their time is limited, and the next bull cycle in silver is unstoppable.
