It's the Silver, Stupid

Traditionally, the week between December 24 and January 1 is known in the Western world as ‘Ghost Week’ because the equity, bond, and commodity markets are shut for Christmas and the New Year. Everyone is on holiday. Access by the US Federal Reserve to liquidity is at a minimum.
Therefore, events that happen close to or during this period are not merely by chance. The argument to follow is that these events appear to have been orchestrated as part of a well-conceived and systematic geopolitical game of brinkmanship to secure global dominance and power. Let me explain.

On December 23, 2025 at 1112 hours local time, Venezuela’s three gold mines that produce silver as a byproduct and represent 12 per cent of annual global silver production suddenly went offline and turned ‘dark’. These mines are Las Cristinas, El Callao and Las Claritas. Exactly 93 minutes later, at 1145 hours, President Nicolás Maduro’s government declared a national mining emergency, simultaneously invoking force majeure on exports of silver. This immediately impacted scheduled January 2026 delivery shipments of physical silver bars of 347 MT to Samsung, 234 MT to Apple, and 156 MT to Tesla, respectively. This was a total of 737 MT. These three companies were forced into the spot market at tripled prices to their purchase contracts to compete for supply that no longer existed. This prompted an X post about the worrying situation on silver prices by Elon Musk on December 27, 2025. Musk also visited Trump at the White House.
Only 32 minutes after the initiation of force majeure, at 1317 hours, silver futures on the COMEX in Chicago jumped 7.8 per cent within four minutes. Days earlier, from Friday December 19, 2025, silver call options volume on the COMEX increased 2,847 per cent. The price of silver touched $73.40 on December 23; it rose to $77.15 on Christmas day, and on December 29 peaked at $82.77. Someone with foreknowledge positioned themselves with precision before the blackout. Who was/were these people and how could they anticipate events to the dot?

But the story doesn’t end here. Why was force majeure declared? As of December 2024, Venezuela’s strategic reserve of silver was estimated to be 850 MT. This was enough to honour the supply contracts to Samsung, Apple, and Tesla. However, after Maduro’s abduction on January 3, 2026, it was discovered that only 3 MT of silver remained in El Banco Central de Venezuela or Venezuela’s central bank, based in Caracas. Where did the silver go?

On Christmas Eve, starting between 0247 hours and 0841 hours Venezuelan time, it appears that 11 giant AN-124 cargo aircraft departed Venezuelan airspace carrying what flight manifests described as “mining equipment”. But Venezuela does not manufacture let alone export mining equipment. Was the mining equipment a euphemism for 847 MT of silver that vanished from the Banco Central de Venezuela’s vaults and was flown out of Venezuela on December 24, 2025 on multiple AN-124 aircraft? Evidence suggests that two of these aircraft were under charter to Chinese registered Cosco Shipping Airfreight and disappeared from civilian radar immediately after takeoff. Their transponders were switched off. Flight tracking data shows a total of nine Russian AN-124 aircraft taking off from Caracas, Maracaibo, and Puerto Ordaz flew to Minsk, a transhipment point. Then they flew onwards to Astana, a silver processing hub, and then to Moscow. 

Transhipment through Minsk or Astana serves multiple functions. Destinations in Russia and China cannot be reached without refuelling stops en route. These stops are valuable in other respects as well because they present an opportunity for documentation sanitisation. Cargo manifests can get revised. Shipping records can get amended. Serial numbers on silver bars can be erased and changed. Venezuelan silver arrived in Moscow carrying Belarusian paperwork showing the metal originated from Minsk forwarding facilities.

These flights were preceded by other hectic AN-124 activity in the neighbourhood. Flight data confirmed the presence of AN-124 aircraft at Piarco International Airport in Trinidad (just off the coast of Venezuela) at least nine times between December 13 and 23, 2025. These flights were part of covert Russian activity establishing a financial centre in Trinidad as quid pro quo for its massive economic assistance to the Trinidad government of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, to assist the revival of Trinidad’s floundering economy. Piarco transformed into a logistical staging ground for operations into Venezuela to avoid direct sanctions or radar detection. The 50-mile distance from Trinidad to the Venezuelan coast creates operational flexibility. Aircraft staged at Piarco were making short flights into Venezuela during low-visibility windows, executing loading operations, and returning to Trinidad for international departure.

This routing bypassed Venezuelan airport documentation while maintaining operational capacity. The AN-124s were not flying in Russian tourists but were deliberately staging ahead of the December 23 operation, with aircraft rotating through Piarco to maintain operational readiness without attracting attention through prolonged presence at Venezuelan airports.

Following these moves, the Chinese government also announced a ban on the free export of silver with effect from January 1, 2026, effectively giving the government control over the flow of 60-70 per cent of the world’s refined silver. Based on recent 2025-26 data, Chinese silver refineries control approximately 60-70 per cent of global refined silver capacity. Under the new rules, only two refineries in China were eligible to qualify as silver exporters. It was too much of a coincidence as China appeared to be cornering the global physical silver market, pushing up prices.

China also began demanding physical deliveries of silver arising from the call options placed by their proxies on the COMEX in Chicago and the LBME in London. Major US banks like JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs as well as European banks like Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Barclays, which were/are short on silver, stood to collectively lose billions of dollars. The Western financial system was tottering.

The presence of sophisticated Russian financial and IT personnel in Trinidad, starting to rapidly construct the infrastructure of what was believed to be an international payments settlement mechanism, was viewed with concern in the US. Further intelligence from Caracas and Beijing revealed that on January 10, 2026, Beijing and Moscow were going to announce the launch of the ‘UNIT’ which was to be the new settlement system for international transactions and would rival the existing SWIFT system run by the US. The UNIT would be backed 40 per cent by gold and 60 per cent by a basket of BRICS currencies. The gold was to be provided by Venezuela which would physically transfer its official gold bullion reserves of 161 MT from the vaults of the Banco Central in Caracas to Shanghai. Venezuela would effectively provide third-party validation of the UNIT.

The UNIT was thus perhaps the most potent economic weapon in the Chinese arsenal as it would rapidly kill the use of the dollar in international transactions and with it the US Treasury. The UNIT would also pay a 5 per cent yield. In order to operationalise this new protocol, a Chinese delegation led by veteran diplomat Qiu Xiaoqi would meet Maduro in Caracas on January 2, 2026. Following which the gold would be flown to Shanghai and the UNIT would be run from two centres, namely Trinidad and China.

But the Chinese were not stopping here. They also upgraded the digital yuan on January 1, 2026 into an interest paying instrument. It would pay 5 per cent per annum.

Therefore, the physical movement of silver and gold from Venezuela to China, the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of silver call options in December 2025, the upgrade of the digital yuan, and the launch of the UNIT were a concerted and collective highly sophisticated attack on the US dollar. Added to this, the Chinese were selling US Treasury bills and their investment in this instrument had fallen from a high of $1.32 trillion in 2015 to $688 billion in 2025. There were no ready buyers for this offloaded debt of $632 billion. The US had to armtwist the UK and Belgium into buying this debt. As of end-2025, the UK held $750 billion of Treasury bills and Belgium held $320 billion. During 2026, the US Treasury has to sell $2 trillion worth of Treasury bills just to keep the lights on.

DURING THE GHOST Week the crisis group in the White House was debating the way forward. But this was not the end of the story. Where was the oil to keep the lights on?

Venezuela had been selling 1,000,000 barrels per day (bpd) of its heavy sulphur crude drilled from its deposits in its Orinoco province. Of this, 800,000 bpd were being sold directly to China’s Guangdong Integrated Petrochemical Project located in Jieyang in Guangdong province.

Interestingly, the entire production of 1 million bpd was being sold outside of the dollar system. These sales were a combination of stablecoin (dollar-like cryptocurrencies transferred from wallet to wallet with no SWIFT choke points along every transaction); digital yuan; debt swaps; and barter.
Meanwhile, because of the sanctions imposed by Trump on Venezuelan oil, the major oil refineries on the US Gulf coast were facing shortages of heavy crude due to reduced Venezuelan supply and Mexican production issues, forcing them to seek alternative, often costlier, supplies from the Middle East or Colombia, tightening markets for grades like Western Canadian Select and Orinoco’s Merey 16 heavy crude. The situation was exacerbated by the need to blend heavy crude with lighter domestic shale oil, creating a supply-demand imbalance that impacted refining costs and product yields, having a cascading effect on transportation costs and food prices in supermarkets. The US needed Venezuelan oil to overcome a structural mismatch rooted in refinery infrastructure and differences in crude characteristics.

Clearly, China and Russia had launched a highly sophisticated proxy attack on the US and this necessitated an equally wide-ranging response. The US already had its forces in place in the Caribbean as part of <Operation Southern Spear>. It also had an ongoing dialogue with Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to stage a shadow coup after immobilising Venezuela’s Russian and Chinese air defences by an extremely intricate cyberattack. China was the primary adversary and multiple messages had to be sent to it. The first message was one of humiliation. After  Qiu Xiaoqi had met Maduro on January 2, 2026 and while the former was still in Caracas, on the night of January 2-3, the US Delta Force under the aegis of  <Operation Absolute Resolve>, abducted Maduro and his wife who already had criminal charges of drug trafficking and other crimes filed against them in US courts. The couple were flown to imprisonment in the US.

The Delta Force teams also physically seized the 161 MT of Venezuelan gold bound for Shanghai under the chaperoning of Qiu Xiaoqi and also flew it to the US. Thus, 161 MT of Venezuelan gold meant for China was kinetically forfeited and it entered the custodial ledger of the US. By abducting Maduro and taking sovereign Venezuelan gold, the US effectively killed the concept of sovereign immunity. This gold was dispatched to the COMEX vaults in Chicago where it would presumably be placed in unallocated accounts, thereafter melted and recast into new hallmarked bars and turned into market liquidity. The title of the forfeited gold was thus swapped.

But the work of the Delta teams was not over. The 82nd Airborne Division had seized control of the province of Orinoco. The Delta teams assisted and secured expert technologists to take control of oil generation. The daily transfer of 800,000 bpd to Guangdong at deep discounts was halted. This critical structural supply shortfall created was likely to impact China as, if and when resumed, it would no longer be provided for in barter or stablecoin or digital yuan but only in cash dollars. This would have cascading effects on industry in south-eastern China as annually Guangdong produces 20 million MT of processed crude; 1.2 million MT of ethylene; 2.6 million MT of paraxylene. Further, this drop in daily crude supply would restrain China from any early adventure in Taiwan.
However, the real loss from Orinoco was from the possibly permanent disruption in supply of tantalum and thorium. Post-Covid, Chinese companies had clandestinely shipped over 5 million MT of these two minerals to China.

China has developed and successfully tested the world’s first operational thorium-fuelled molten salt reactor (MSR), the 2 MW TMSR-LF1, achieving a significant milestone in nuclear energy by demonstrating the conversion of thorium into usable fuel, paving the way for potentially safer, cleaner, and more abundant nuclear power, with plans for larger commercial reactors. This experimental reactor, located in Gansu province, achieved criticality in late 2023 and full power operation with thorium fuel in 2024. Tantalum is vital for China, used extensively in electronics (capacitors), aerospace (jet engines), medical implants, and high-speed tools due to its corrosion resistance and high melting point, with China being a major producer and refiner but heavily reliant on imports of raw materials.
By losing its physical presence on the ground in Venezuela, China also lost access for its navy to the Atlantic Ocean; it lost its strategically vital foothold in the Caribbean, and also potential leverage over the Panama Canal and over the US ports of Houston, Galveston, and the Mississippi River Delta. China also lost access to Venezuelan crude, thorium, and tantalum apart from Venezuelan gold, and the impact of its economic warfare against the US was considerably diminished. Russian and Chinese weapons systems took a beating and lost potential export markets. Russian S300 and S400 ABMs lost their shine as did their SU30s. Chinese JY-27 radar also suffered a loss in credibility. All these weapons failed in war.

China will lie low and hit back when it is ready. Hit back it will. In the interim, the US has re-established its singular global supremacy for now.