by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
They aren’t even trying to pretend to hide what they are doing. Everyone knows that the meteoric rise in the price of silver in 2025 has put an immense amount of stress on certain financial institutions. Of course nobody is publicly confirming how much damage has been done, but it must be pretty severe if CME Group is taking such extreme measures to force the price of silver down. For the second time in less than a week, CME Group has abruptly raised margin requirements on precious metals futures…
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Gold and silver prices lost ground on Wednesday as investors booked profits after a historic annual rally and exchange operator CME Group hiked the margins on precious metal futures for the second time in the space of a week.
They probably thought that it was best to pull a stunt like this during the holidays while less people are paying attention.
A statement was released by CME Group which said that this latest move to hike margin requirements was done “to ensure adequate collateral coverage”…
CME Group, one of the world’s largest trading floors for commodities, said Tuesday that margins for gold, silver, platinum and palladium would increase again after the close of business Wednesday.
It said in a statement that the decision was made “as per the normal review of market volatility to ensure adequate collateral coverage.”
Give me a break.
We all know why this was done.
What we are witnessing is literally a conspiracy to force the price of silver down.
They knew that when they suddenly increased margin requirements, it would create a squeeze and force precious metals prices lower…
One reason behind recent declines in silver, including the stark fall on Wednesday, is changes to trading rules implemented by exchange operator CME Group, which hosts widely traded silver futures contracts.
Traders operating in CME’s derivatives market must put down cash to support their trades, with the exact amount or margin required varying. Amid volatile trading, the CME raised margin requirements effective Monday for precious metals including silver, and announced that margin requirements would rise again after Wednesday.
If traders cannot put up more cash, their positions are often forcibly closed, or sold, typically at unfavorable prices. This can cause a wave of selling that pushes prices down further, taking some of the shine out of silver—for now.
I am so disgusted by this.
The first margin hike didn’t get the results that they wanted, and so they did it again.
Shame on them.
We are supposed to be at least pretending that we have some semblance of a free market system left.
But even after this desperate attempt to stop the bleeding, the price of silver is still up more than 140 percent in 2025…
Even after sharp declines on Wednesday, silver prices have gained more than 140% this year and remain relatively close to all-time highs above $82 reached on Sunday.
And most analysts are still projecting that the price of silver will continue to rise in 2026 because the fundamentals for silver are exceedingly favorable…
Yet there are also fundamentals behind silver’s remarkable rally this year.
The precious metal, like gold—up almost two-thirds in 2025 to record levels—is considered a store of value and a hedge against the dollar, which weakened this year amid falling U.S. interest rates.
Silver also benefits from industrial demand typical of the current moment, including uses in solar panels, electric vehicles, and data centers powering artificial intelligence.
If the AI boom were to burst, that could change the outlook for silver.
But right now the AI revolution is steaming ahead.
And the U.S. dollar is probably going to continue to get even weaker in 2026.
In 2025, the U.S. dollar index has fallen by nearly 10 percent…
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