Happy Sunday, GoldBuzzers!

It's been a very eventful couple of weeks since our last edition. We were in France at our son's wonderful wedding, where more than 100 friends and family traveled from all over the world, and endured 38C temperatures (100F), to celebrate the happy couple in style.

Many thanks to all of you who sent emails while I was away and to the hundreds more new GoldBuzzers who have joined us over the past couple of weeks, a very warm welcome.

Now, back to business, because the market clearly didn't take a vacation. I'll say plainly what I was thinking on the long flight home: I believe we're entering a critical and challenging stretch, the kind that tests governments, currencies, and the assumptions most people build their savings on. Gold and silver exist for exactly these times.

That's also why this community matters more than ever. Markets like this are hard to read alone, and between your emails and the people I speak to inside the industry, we see far more together than any of us would on our own. This week proved the point, and today's edition will show you why.

Let’s get into it. ⬇️

Gold punched through $4,600 an ounce on Friday, its highest since mid-May, and silver came within a whisker of $70 before retreating, with both metals finishing the week up more than five percent.

The spark came Wednesday, when the Treasury unexpectedly announced it would at least double its buybacks of 10-to-30 year government debt to contain rising borrowing costs, sending yields and the dollar sharply lower. When the government becomes a major buyer of its own bonds, investors start asking hard questions about fiscal sustainability, and gold is where a lot of that money goes - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already hinted more buybacks could follow.

One thing could cap the rally, though: oil keeps climbing as Washington prepares new sanctions on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz stays largely shut, and expensive oil keeps inflation sticky enough to keep a Fed rate hike on the table. Still, after a summer of sideways drift, this was the week the stagnation broke.

Gold and silver just put in one of their strongest weeks in months, and the trigger was a $2 billion tweak that shouldn't have mattered.

On Wednesday, the US Treasury announced it would at least double the maximum size of its liquidity-support buybacks for longer-dated bonds, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation in the 10-to-20 and 20-to-30 year sectors, effective September 9 through early November. The announcement came a day after the 30-year yield touched 5.34 percent, its highest level in 19 years.

The reaction was out of all proportion to the size. Yields fell hard and the dollar weakened. Gold jumped more than three percent on the day, and by Friday it was trading above $4,600 for the first time since mid-May, with silver back above $69. Both metals closed the week more than five percent higher.

Why a rounding error moved the market

An extra $2 billion per operation is pocket change in a multi-trillion-dollar bond market.

And the Treasury isn't reducing the debt. It's buying older, less liquid paper while issuing new debt to pay for it. Nothing about the $40 trillion pile changed on Wednesday, but the message is significant anyway. With deficits running hot and long rates threatening massive debt-service costs, the move read as an early form of yield-curve management, an admission that there's a level of long-term rates Washington won't tolerate.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reinforced that the next day, saying purchases would likely top the $4 billion ceiling. The initial yield relief didn't even last. By Friday the 30-year was back near 5.3 percent, which tells you the buybacks bought a headline rather than a fix.

Investors drew the obvious conclusion and moved into assets that can't be printed. Ray Dalio put a number on it on Friday, recommending 10 to 15 percent of a portfolio in gold and warning that a debt crisis could arrive within roughly three years if the fiscal path doesn't change.

What Andrew saw from the dealer desk

I had another call with Andrew Sleigh, my senior contact at Sprott Money, on Friday night. For weeks he'd been telling me about clients sitting on the sidelines with serious money, some with a couple of million dollars earmarked for metals, who kept waiting for a better price. He'd been urging them to start buying in weekly tranches. A couple of weeks went by and they hadn’t acted.

Then Wednesday happened. "What has happened this week has told them to stop fooling around and start getting in," he told me. On Friday afternoon alone he handled five separate trades totaling well over a million dollars, with $200,000 and $300,000 orders "coming left, right, and center."

The retail crowd is still quiet, he says, which fits the pattern. The people who chased silver Maples at $171 CAD in the January blow-off got burned and haven't come back. The buyers moving now are the experienced ones, and they're moving before the crowd returns.

Premiums tell the same story. A silver Maple in Canada carries barely $6 CAD over spot versus $11 CAD at the peak, and buyback spreads have started to tighten. Andrew's view is that this window closes the moment retail comes back.

The signals called it a month ago

One month ago, on July 21, the INSIDER Min Risk signal for silver flipped bullish with silver around $58. I'll admit it looked premature to me at the time, but the model detected significant strength under the surface. Since then, Silver has surged more than 17% and the call is looking very prescient.

What the other signals are saying right now is a conversation for INSIDER members, so I'll leave it there. What I can tell you is my own read: nobody serious thinks this is a runaway bull market yet, and Andrew and I agreed a quiet red day or two next week would be healthy. The level I care about is 70 to 75 on silver. If it can regain and hold that range through next week, this rally is worth taking seriously.

That’s all for this Sunday, folks. See you on Tuesday.

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Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com