Silver’s moment, Gold’s role, and the Fed’s fork in the road

On a recent episode of the Money Metals podcast, host Mike Maharrey interviews David Morgan, publisher of The Morgan Report and co-author of The Silver Manifesto, after a volatile stretch in precious metals. Morgan is calm about the turbulence and quick to stress discipline as much as data.

The conversation ranges from portfolio construction and the gold–silver ratio to physical market squeezes, refinery flows, and what the Federal Reserve’s latest moves mean for the dollar and bonds. Morgan offers numbers, thresholds, and a framework for thinking about value versus price.

(Interview Starts Around 5:13 Mark) 

Healthy correction or end of the bull?

Morgan calls the recent slide a healthy correction within a strong secular bull market. He notes silver had been up roughly 60%, then suffered an 8% down day; net, that still implies about a 52% gain.

He watches the 50-day moving average as a tell. In silver, he had it at about $45 a week earlier. The market got close, did not hit it, and bounced. He allows it could tap or dip below and recover, but the tone suggests strength and a likely multi-month consolidation before the next up-leg.

How to think about overvaluation

Morgan downplays nominal targets like “ten thousand dollar gold” and instead measures gold as money against real goods. He tracks how many barrels of oil, how much wheat, or how much house an ounce of gold buys, then compares it to historical means.

When those real-world ratios stretch beyond past averages, he calls the metal overvalued; when they lag, it is undervalued. The focus is purchasing power, not just price, especially in an era where the money supply can sprint faster than charts.

Discipline, core positions, and trading around the edges

Volatility cuts both ways, so Morgan recommends building mental discipline. He uses the show-up-at-the-gym model: consistency beats mood swings. For investors, that means buy dips, hold core positions, and avoid emotional whipsaws.

He suggests never trading more than 25 percent of your metals exposure around a core 75 percent long-term position. The goal of precious metals, he says, is not to make you money, but to keep you from losing it across cycles.

From 60/40 to 60/20/20, and where Silver fits

Maharrey raises the Morgan Stanley CIO’s 60/20/20, with 20 percent in gold, as a potential new orthodoxy. Morgan doubts it is a one-off. He sees it as a signal to the brokerage community that strategic gold allocations are now mainstream.

For balancing gold and silver, Morgan uses age-tilted guardrails. At age 60, he would lean 70 percent gold and 30 percent silver; by age 70, 80 to 90 percent gold and 10 to 20 percent silver. He still expects silver to outperform, but he weights gold more as investors age to prioritize stability.

Silver’s monetary case and the Gold–Silver ratio

Despite more than three years near roughly 80 to 1 on the gold–silver ratio, Morgan does not think the relationship is broken. He recalls the spike to about 125 to 1 in March 2020 when silver briefly hit $12.

On a nearer-term, industrially weighted view, he sees about 50 to 1 as a center of gravity over the last 50 years. He flags 70 to 1 as a signal: once the ratio breaks below, silver is reclaiming its monetary role in earnest rather than being treated mainly as an industrial input.

Institutions, sovereigns, and the priced-out Gold phase

Morgan points to sovereign and institutional telltales. He cites Saudi Arabia buying almost a million shares of SLV, India launching silver ETFs, and Russia stocking physical silver. He also sees cultural pivots, like Indian buyers shifting to silver during festival season, as gold prices stretch budgets.

He expects a phase where 4,000 to 5,000 dollar gold prices out parts of the middle class, redirecting flows into silver for more shiny disks per fiat dollar. In his framing, gold is the S&P 500 of monetary assets; silver is the Nasdaq with higher beta when the monetary bid arrives.

Silver is money: History, language, and legal tender

Morgan leans into history and linguistics. He cites Milton Friedman in New Orleans, calling silver the monetary metal of history. In Romance languages, words for silver and money often converge, and in Chinese script, the character for bank traditionally incorporates silver.

He underscores legal-tender status. When Maharrey mentions a 1964 quarter at 90 percent silver, Morgan notes you could still spend silver coinage at face value today, which makes it money at law, even if market value far exceeds face value in daily commerce.

Physical squeeze: LBMA, COMEX, and the logistics of clearing

The show digs into the silver squeeze and price dislocations across Shanghai, the LBMA, and New York. When different hubs post different prices and 1,000-ounce bars must be rerouted to clear shortages, Morgan says the physical market is asserting itself over the paper paradigm.

He cites official tallies of about 29 million ounces shipped to London, which knocked paper prices from roughly $54 to the high 40s before bouncing back. Talk that it might take 150 million ounces to fully clear the LBMA may be high, he says, but the squeeze has not resolved. Lease rates normalized briefly, then tightened again.

Registered stocks and a gas-tank analogy

Morgan runs the math. If 120 million ounces moved from COMEX to meet 150 million in London, registered could fall from around 170 million to near 50 million. He has seen the registered category dip to 30 to 35 million ounces before, tight but survivable, like limping to a gas station on one-sixteenth of a tank.

He also notes Money Metals shipping 1,000-ounce bars to India amid acute needs. And he reports China paying above spot for doré in Peru, confirming directly with a major producer. For Morgan, these are flashing lights that physical availability, not paper, is setting the tempo.

The Fed cuts and ends QT, and what that choice implies

The Federal Reserve cut 25 basis points and announced an end to quantitative tightening on October 30, 2025. Maharrey frames the choice starkly: you can keep air in the bubble with easy money, or you can fight inflation; you cannot do both.

Morgan sees political pressure and an institutional bias against letting markets clear. In a clearing scenario, weaker dollars would demand higher rates, and he sketches 10 percent as a thought experiment that would crush bond prices long before maturity. Instead, he expects more liquidity, more currency, and eventually a confidence problem that history shows is hard to reverse.