It’s another wild Friday in the precious metals markets, as the silver futures came within a dime of the $60 level.

Here you can see today’s chart, with the $59.895 high at 10:30 am Eastern this morning. Of course that is a new all-time high.

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The gold futures were up on the day earlier, although unlike silver, when gold came tumbling down, the plummet was sharper, and the gold futures are currently flat on the day.

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Over the past two weeks I had seen reports of the following story, although I wasn’t sure how legitimate they were. But now it seems to be confirmed that a change in the rules dictated by the Reserve Bank of India will allow Indian citizens the ability to pledge silver as collateral for credit.

Last month, the RBI announced a new rule that, effective April 1, 2026, will allow people to pledge silver assets to access credit through banks, non-banking financial companies, and housing finance firms under a uniform lending framework.

“This measure could help mobilise India’s vast household silver holdings, broaden access to formal credit, and formally recognise silver as a mainstream collateral asset,” Metals Focus said.

According to some reports, the latest surge in demand in India could be tied to this new rule. While it was officially announced in November, the RBI has been developing the framework since the start of the year. In October, the central bank shared the framework with major lenders for feedback.

Obviously India has been a key player in the silver short squeeze we’ve already seen this year, and this latest news only adds to the demand we can expect to see out of the country going forward.

As I listened to Luke Gromen’s newsletter from last week, towards the end he had an interesting comment about Bitcoin.

Luke talks often about how he had held a large Bitcoin position, although he pared that down when he recently saw indications that a decline might be ahead. And then in last week’s newsletter, he talked about one of the reasons that might account for the recent decline, as some of the quantum computing experts he follows are now raising concerns about a potential Bitcoin vulnerability to quantum computing.

I’ll leave it to you to decide what to make of that, although given my great respect for Luke, it was noteworthy to hear that coming from him. And as always, you can click on either of those tweets to read more from Charles Edwards.

In that same column, Luke also mentioned some interesting comments from Stephen Miran, who was formerly the chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, and wrote a paper back in November about how to restructure the global trading system, before he became a Federal Reserve Board member this past September.

In addition, dealer intermediation of the Treasury market can suffer if banks are forced to hold substantial capital just to support their Treasury and repo trading books, which often are low-return, low-risk, high-volume activities. This otherwise esoteric issue can have meaningful consequences for Treasury market functioning and monetary policy implementation.

Removing these securities from the leverage ratio, as was suggested as an alternative in the proposed rule, would help insulate the Treasury market from stressful episodes when liquidity is in short supply. Due to heightened uncertainty accompanying extreme volatility, policymakers tend to “overdo it” when overreacting to dysfunction. Instead of being forced to react to Treasury market dysfunction after it has occurred, I think excluding those assets now is a small price to pay to deter that potential dysfunction.

Preventing Treasury market dysfunction in the first place may be the best way to limit the Fed’s footprint. Moreover, providing this relief ex post instead of ex ante may lead to the unfortunate perception that the Federal Reserve is bailing out specific entities for poor investment decisions.

That sure is a fair amount of talk about treasury market dysfunction. And I would remind you that we’re seeing the gold and silver prices soar, even before the inevitable round of treasury market dysfunction, that makes what we’ve seen during the past few crises look like a Sunday school picnic.

It sure will be fascinating to see how this all looks after that comes to a head. Because when bond investors inevitably realize that even the nominal coupons they’re receiving aren’t able to come close to accounting for the true rate of inflation, I still don’t see how we don’t eventually witness a mass exodus out of the global debt markets.

But that will come when it comes, and hopefully today it’s enough just to appreciate another exciting week in the gold and silver markets, and then go out and enjoy an amazing weekend.

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