I recently opined that January 26^th, 2026, was going to be recognized as the day a liquidity tremor rippled across the U.S. financial markets.

Everything trembled at once, at ~ 10:00 a.m. ET.The dollar spiked, so did the yen, gold and silver fell, so did stocks, oil got smoked, and bonds barely reacted at all.These are the signs that ‘something snapped’ beneath the surface.

I have no idea who or what, because it was rather quickly papered over, but the signs were unmistakable.

And now, we have what appears to be another set of liquidity troubles here on February 5^th. Equities are getting sold, oil and gas are getting clobbered, the metals are being sold hard, and Bitcoin is getting clobbered, too. But bonds are barely reacting, which would ordinarily be climbing in price if this were a typical market sell-off. But they are not.

This image is from February 5th, 2026, around noon.

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So where is all that money going?It’s going to money heaven.At least to the extent that people and firms have borrowed to invest or speculate.When those strategies get nervous, they close out their positions, selling whatever they’ve got, buying interest dries up relative to selling pressure, and things go down in price.

That’s the sort of pattern you see when “liquidity dries up.”

If we look at the one-month returns for equities, we can easily see that there’s a rotation away from technology generally and AI very specifically, and finance to classic defensive stocks…and quite pointedly oil companies too.That’s an interesting thing to note since oil itself hasn’t moved up appreciably over the past year and is well below where it was a full year ago.

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This is the sort of Great Rotation you see marking the tops of long bull runs.Big investors and institutions creep away from the sexy, high-flying momentum stocks and instead buy consumer defensive, utilities, REITs, and healthcare stocks.

Meanwhile, significant silver product shortages exist in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US.But that hasn’t stopped the banksters from slamming paper silver hard, with their usual retinue of sordid tricks.

Those mainly consist of dumping massive volumes of paper contracts across a very tiny window of time late at night.

Last night was no exception, and, of course, there was no halt as ‘required’ by CME rule 589:

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“Let it rip!” they said at the CME, as long as it’s to the downside.I have every confidence that a similar move to the upside would have had halts applied religiously.

So tune in to hear more, and find out why having a risk-managed portfolio is a good way to manage the volatility that seems to be headed our way.

Video Length: 01:19:10

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