Jan Skoyles and I have been discussing an idea that has shaped much of our recent work, and it is one that grows more relevant as each new crisis unfolds. The modern financial world, for all its complexity, rests on a very simple foundation. Almost every form of wealth today is a promise. Gold and silver are not.
At first this might sound like another familiar defence of precious metals, but it is more than that. The point is not that gold and silver stand apart from the system, but that they express something deeper about it. They are the mirror in which the system sees itself clearly. They are not promises about human activity; they are expressions of it. And that distinction, subtle though it is, defines the difference between what endures and what does not.
The Age of Promises
A share certificate is a promise of future profit. A bond is a promise of repayment. Property prices are promises about credit conditions. Even the money in your account represents a promise of convertibility that depends on the solvency of institutions you will never meet. These promises are the architecture of modern finance, and for decades we have believed they could expand indefinitely.
Yet promises, unlike gold or silver, are elastic. They stretch as confidence grows, until eventually they break. Each financial crisis of the past half-century has been a failure of belief rather than of resources. When investors lose faith in the ability of others to deliver, the system seizes. That is why liquidity, the word most used to describe the health of markets, is in fact a measure of trust. Liquidity dries up when promises no longer convince.
In Gold and Silver: The Great Liquidity Squeeze we explored how this fragility now defines the global economy. Policy, politics, and psychology are so tightly bound that a shift in mood can erase years of accumulated capital. We no longer inhabit a system built on productivity and prudence. We inhabit a system built on confidence.
The Performance of Stability
Central banks have become the principal actors in this theatre of promises. Their power depends on credibility, not capital. Monetary policy is now less an instrument of management than a language of reassurance. The phrase “data dependent” signals not precision but uncertainty disguised as control.
Each new intervention aims to sustain the illusion that order still prevails. Yet every reassurance erodes the meaning of reassurance itself. Markets respond not to earnings or balance sheets, but to tone. Asset prices rise when policymakers sound calm and fall when they sound afraid. This is not finance as allocation of capital; it is finance as performance art.
Gold and silver unsettle this narrative because they cannot be persuaded. They are not policy instruments, and they do not care who holds office or what the next interest rate decision will be. Their value does not depend on the success or failure of the human system, but it does reveal the level of its honesty. When confidence expands, metals appear dormant; when confidence contracts, they awaken.
When the Physical World Interrupts
This year’s surge in silver is an example of that honesty. Many commentators dismissed the move above fifty dollars as speculative fervour. In reality, it was the physical market correcting the digital one. Years of underinvestment, industrial strain, and depletion have collided with an economy that treats scarcity as a theoretical problem. Silver’s price rise was not rebellion but recognition.
Gold tells a similar story. As we argued in The Great Liquidity Squeeze, its volatility is not evidence of weakness but of feedback. Gold reports on the health of promises. When credit expands without collateral, gold acts as the counterweight. It is not a speculative asset. It is an audit.
These movements remind us that physical limits still exist. The financial world can suspend disbelief for long periods, but it cannot abolish constraint. Eventually the tangible reclaims its authority.
Expressions of Human Activity
It is tempting to describe gold and silver as outside the system, but that is not quite right. They are part of human civilisation precisely because they record its behaviour. Gold measures trust in institutions. Silver measures the material intensity of progress. They are not alternatives to human activity but expressions of it — the elemental residues of our choices and our errors.
In that sense, their permanence is not mystical but empirical. They survive because they are not promises. They do not require a counterparty or a clearing house. They do not yield, default, or revise their own terms. Their worth is not conditional.
Central banks understand this, even when they deny it publicly. Their accumulation of gold is not a gesture of nostalgia but of realism. It is an admission that every policy they enact is itself a promise, and that one day those promises will need to be settled in something that cannot be printed.
The Return of Limits
We are entering a period in which limits will once again shape economics. The cost of energy, the fragility of supply chains, and the saturation of debt all mark the boundaries of a system that has lived for too long on its own expectations. Belief is a powerful form of capital, but it is finite.
Gold and silver speak to this turning point. Their rise is not a vote against the future but a recognition that reality has returned to claim its share. They remind investors that wealth built on promises must, eventually, answer to wealth that simply exists.
The financial system may continue to expand its promises for a while longer, but history suggests that promises are only as strong as the conviction behind them. The metals endure because they require no such conviction. They are the expressions of human activity that persist after belief has run its course.
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