jakiro
Author: Sleepy.txt
JPMorgan Chase, the most loyal “gatekeeper” of the old US dollar order, is personally tearing down the high wall it once swore to defend to the death.
According to market rumors, JPMorgan Chase will move its core precious metals trading team to Singapore at the end of November 2025.If geographical migration is only superficial, then its core is an open betrayal of the Western financial power system.
Looking back at the past half century, Wall Street was responsible for constructing a huge credit illusion with the US dollar, and London was responsible forThey are using treasuries buried deep underground to maintain the dignity of pricing.The two are mutually exclusive, and together weave the Western world’s absolute control over precious metals.JPMorgan Chase should be the last and strongest line of defense.
The gray line of grass and snakes lies thousands of miles away.In the official silence of not commenting on the rumors, JPMorgan Chase completed an astonishing asset transfer. About 169 million ounces of silver were quietly classified from the “deliverable” category of the COMEX vault to the “non-deliverable” category.Roughly converted based on public data from the Banking Association, it is roughly equivalent to close to 10% of the global annual supply, which is locked in the books.
In the cruel business game, scale itself is the toughest attitude.This mountain of more than 5,000 tons of silver is, in the eyes of many traders, more like a bargaining chip prepared by JPMorgan Chase in advance to compete for pricing power in the next cycle.
At the same time,Thousands of kilometers away, The Reserve, Singapore’s largest private vault, launched its second phase of construction at the right time, pushing the vault’s total capacity to 15,500 tons.This infrastructure upgrade, planned as early as five years ago, gives Singapore enough confidence to absorb the huge wealth that bursts from the west.
JP Morgan’s left hand is blocking physical liquidity in the West and creating panic; its right hand is building a sheltered reservoir in the East and reaping dividends.
What prompted the giant to defect was the fragility of the London market that could no longer be concealed.At the Bank of England, the delivery cycle for gold has been lengthened from days to weeks, and the rental rate for silver has soared to a record high of 30%.For those who are familiar with this market, this means at least one thing: everyone is rushing for goods, and the physical assets in the vault are beginning to appear stretched.
The shrewdest bookmakers are often the vultures with the most sensitive sense of the smell of death.
In this cold winter, JPMorgan Chase has demonstrated the sense of smell of a top bookmaker.Its departure marks the end of the “paper gold” game that lasted for half a century and turned stones into gold.When the tide recedes, only by holding the heavy physical chips in hand can we get the ticket to the next thirty years.
The End of Alchemy
The root of everything was laid half a century ago.
When President Nixon severed the dollar’s umbilical cord with gold in 1971, he effectively removed the last anchor from the global financial system.From that moment on, gold was downgraded from a rigid currency to a financial asset redefined by Wall Street.
Over the next half-century, bankers in London and New York developed a sophisticated “financial alchemy.”Since gold is no longer currency, it can create countless “contracts” representing gold out of thin air, just like printing money.
This is the vast derivatives empire that the LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) and COMEX (New York Mercantile Exchange) have built.In this empire, leverage is kingship.Every piece of gold sleeping in the vault corresponds to 100 bills of lading circulating in the market.On the silver gambling table, the game is even crazier.
This system of “paper wealth” has been able to operate for half a century, relying entirely on a fragile gentleman’s agreement: the vast majority of investors just want to earn the price difference and never try to take out that heavy piece of metal.
However, the person who designed this game ignored a “grey rhinoceros” that rushed into the room – Silver.
Unlike gold, which is hidden underground as eternal wealth, silver plays the role of a “consumable” in modern industry.It is the blood vessel of photovoltaic panels and the nerve of electric cars.According to data from the Silver Association, the global silver market has been in structural deficit for five consecutive years, with industrial demand accounting for nearly 60% of total demand.
Wall Street can tap out unlimited dollars on a keyboard, but it cannot create an ounce of conductive silver out of thin air.
When the physical inventory is swallowed up by the real economy, the billions of contracts on paper become a tree without roots.In the winter of 2025, this layer of window paper was finally pierced.
The red light came on first,It’s a change in price.In normal futures logic, forward prices are usually higher than spot prices, which is called a “positive market.”But in London and New York, the market experienced extreme “backwardness.”If you want to buy a silver contract six months from now, it’s a good time; but if you want to move the silver bars home now, you not only have to pay a high premium, but also face a long wait of several weeks.
Long queues formed outside the Bank of England’s vaults, registered silver inventories on the COMEX fell below safety red lines, and the ratio of open interest to physical inventories soared to 244% at one point.The market finally understood the terrible reality: physical objects and paper contracts are splitting into two flat universes.The former belongs to those who own factories and treasury, while the latter belongs to speculators who are still sleeping in their old dreams.
If the shortage of silver is due to the devouring of industrial behemoths, then the loss of gold is due to a national-level “run.”Central banks, once the staunchest holders of dollars, are now at the front of the queue.
Although gold prices are at historically high levels in 2025,This has caused some central banks to slow down their gold purchases tactically, but strategically, “buying” is still the only action.
Let’s look at this list of buyers.
Poland, after suspending gold purchases for five months, suddenly returned to the market in October, purchasing 16 tons of gold in a single month, forcibly pushing the proportion of gold reserves to 26%.Brazil, which has increased its holdings for two consecutive months, has seen its total reserves climb to 161 tonnes.China, which returned to overweight in November 2024, has been on the buyers list for the 13th consecutive month.
Those countries did not hesitate to exchange precious foreign exchange for heavy amounts of gold nuggets and transport them back to their own countries.In the past, everyone trusted U.S. debt because it was a “risk-free asset”; now, everyone is rushing to buy gold because it has become the only shield against “US dollar credit risk.”
Although mainstream Western economists still argue, claiming that the paper gold system provides efficient liquidity, the current crisis is just a temporary logistics problem.
But paper cannot cover fire, and now paper cannot cover gold.
When the leverage ratio reaches 100:1, and the only “1” begins to be resolutely moved home by central banks, the remaining “99” paper contracts face unprecedented liquidity mismatches.
The current London market is falling into a typical short squeeze dilemma. Industrial giants are busy grabbing silver to protect production, while the central bank is locking up gold as a bottom position for national fortunes.When all counterparties require physical delivery, credit-based pricing models fail.Whoever controls the physical object has the power to define prices.
And JPMorgan Chase, the “magician” who was once the best at playing with paper contracts, obviously saw this future earlier than anyone else.
Rather than being a victim of the old order, it is more willing to be a partner of the new order.This is a repeat offender that has been fined $920 million for market manipulation over the past eight years. Its departure is by no means a discovery of conscience, but a precise bet on the flow of global wealth in the next thirty years.
What it is betting on is the collapse of the “paper contract” market.Even if it doesn’t collapse immediately, that layer of infinitely amplified leverage will sooner or later be cut off round after round.The only thing that is truly safe is the visible and tangible piece of metal in the warehouse.
Mutiny on Wall Street
If the paper gold and silver system is compared to a feasting casino, then in the past ten years, JPMorgan Chase has not only been the bodyguard to maintain order, but also the dealer who is best at cheating.
In September 2020, JPMorgan Chase paid a record $920 million settlement to settle U.S. Department of Justice charges of manipulating precious metals markets.In thousands of pages of investigative documents released by the Justice Department, JPMorgan traders were described as masters of the art of deception.
What they are used to is an extremely cunning hunting method. Traders will instantly place thousands of contracts on one side of the sell order, creating the illusion that the price is about to collapse, inducing panic selling by retail investors and high-frequency robots; then cancel the order at the moment of the collapse, and gobble up the bloody chips at the bottom with their backhand.
According to statistics, Michael Nowak, the former global head of precious metals at JPMorgan Chase, and his team artificially caused instant collapses and surges in gold and silver prices tens of thousands of times in eight years.
At that time, the outside world generally attributed all this to Wall Street’s habitual greed.But five years later, as the 169 million ounce silver inventory puzzle piece is put on the table, a darker thought is beginning to circulate in the market.
In the interpretation of some people, JPMorgan Chase’s “trading” back then can hardly be seen as just to earn a little more high-frequency trading spreads.It was more like a slow and long accumulation of funds. On the one hand, they violently suppressed the market in the paper market, creating the illusion that the price was held down; on the other hand, they quietly collected the chips in their hands on the physical side.
This former guardian of the old order of dollars has now transformed into the most dangerous gravedigger of the old order.
In the past, JPMorgan Chase was the largest short seller of paper silver and the ceiling that suppressed gold and silver prices.But now, as the physical chips have been replaced, they have become the largest bulls overnight.
There is always a lot of market gossip.Rumor has it that the recent surge in silver prices from $30 to $60 was behind none other than JPMorgan itself.Of course, there is no evidence for this statement, but it is enough to illustrate one thing. In the minds of many people, it has changed from a short-selling paper silver trader to the largest long position in real assets.
If all these deductions are true, then we will witness the most exciting and coldest mutiny in business history..
JP Morgan Chase knows better than anyone that the regulatory iron fist in the United States is tightening, and the paper contract game that not only costs money but may even cost lives has come to an end..
This also explains why it has such a soft spot for Singapore.
In the United States, every transaction may be flagged as suspicious by an AI regulatory system; but in Singapore, gold and silver are completely depoliticized in private fortresses that are not owned by any country’s central bank.There is no long-arm jurisdiction here, just extreme protection of private property.
JPMorgan Chase is by no means alone in this breakthrough.
At the same time as the rumors were fermenting, Wall Street’s top consensus had quietly been reached.Although there was no physical collective relocation, in terms of strategy, the giants completed an astonishing simultaneous turn. Goldman Sachs aggressively set the gold price target at US$4,900 in 2026, and Bank of America even directly shouted a sky-high price of US$5,000.
In an era dominated by paper gold, such a target price sounds like a fantasy; but if we turn our perspective back to physical objects and look at the pace of central bank gold purchases and changes in inventory in vaults, this number begins to have room for serious discussion.
The smart money on Wall Street is quietly moving their positions, taking less gold short positions and adding more physical positions. They may not sell all the U.S. debt in their hands, but gold, silver and other physical assets are being stuffed into investment portfolios little by little.JP Morgan makes the fastest and most decisive moves because it not only wants to survive, but also wants to win.It does not want to sink with the paper gold empire. It wants to take its algorithms, capital and technology to a place where there is not only gold, but also a future.
The problem is, that place already has its own owner.
When JPMorgan Chase’s private jet lands at Singapore’s Changi Airport, looking north, it will find a larger rival that has already built high walls there.
wandering
While traders in London were still anxious about the depletion of paper gold liquidity, thousands of kilometers away on the banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, a huge physical gold empire had already completed its primitive accumulation.
Its name is Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE).
Financial version dominated by the WestTuri, SGE is a complete anomaly.It rejected the virtual games based on credit contracts like London and New York. From the day it was born, it has adhered to an almost paranoid iron law:physical delivery
These four words are like a steel nail, nailed precisely on the seven inches of the Western paper gold game..
On the COMEX in New York, gold is often just a bunch of ticking numbers, with the vast majority of contracts closing out before expiration.But in Shanghai, the rules are “full transaction” and “centralized clearing.”
Every transaction here must have real gold bars lying in the vault.This not only eliminates the possibility of unlimited leverage, but also makes the threshold for “short gold” extremely high, because you must first borrow real gold before you can sell it.
In 2024, SGE delivered an astonishing report card. The annual gold trading volume reached 62,300 tons, an increase of 49.9% over 2023; the transaction volume soared to 34.65 trillion yuan, an increase of nearly 87%.
When the physical delivery rate of New York’s COMEX is even less than 0.1%, the Shanghai Gold Exchange has become the world’s largest physical gold reservoir, continuously absorbing the world’s stock of gold.
If the inflow of gold is the country’s strategic reserve, then the inflow of silver is the “physiological desire” of China’s industry
Wall Street speculators could use paper contracts to bet on prices, butChinese factory owners don’t want contracts, they have to get real silver to start production.This rigid industrial demand has made China the world’s largest precious metal black hole, continuously devouring the West’s stocks.
This road of “gold from west to east” is busy and secretive.
Take the journey of a gold bar.In the Swiss canton of Ticino, several of the world’s largest gold refineries (such as Valcambi, PAMP) are operating around the clock.They are performing a special “blood exchange” task, melting and purifying 400-ounce standard gold bars shipped from the London vault, and then recasting them into 1-kilogram “Shanghai gold” standard bars with a purity of 99.99%.
This is not only a recasting of the physical form, but also a change in the properties of currency.
Once these gold bars are smelted into 1kg sizes and stamped “Shanghai Gold”, it is almost impossible for them to flow back to the London market.Because to transport it back, it must be re-smelted and re-certified, which is extremely costly.
This means that once gold flows eastward, it is like a river flowing into the sea, and there is no turning back.The waves are flowing, and the river is rolling thousands of miles forever.
On the tarmac of major airports around the world, armored convoys bearing the logo of Brink’s, Loomis or Malca-Amit are the movers of this great migration.They continuously filled these recast gold bars into Shanghai’s treasury, becoming the physical cornerstone of the new order.
Once you master the physical object, you have the right to speak.This is exactly the strategic meaning of Yu Wenjian, the head of SGE, who has repeatedly emphasized the establishment of a “Shanghai Gold” benchmark price.
For a long time, global gold pricing power has been firmly locked in the 3 pm London fixing price, because that is the manifestation of the will of the US dollar.But Shanghai is trying to cut through that logic.
This is a strategic hedging of the highest dimension.When China, Russia, the Middle East and other countries begin to form an invisible alliance to “de-dollarize”, they need a new common language.This language is not RMB or ruble, but gold.
Shanghai is the translation center of this new language.It is telling the world that if the U.S. dollar is no longer trustworthy, then please believe in the real money and silver stored in your own warehouse; if the paper contract may default, then please believe in the Shanghai rules of one-hand payment and one-hand delivery.
For JPMorgan Chase, this is both a huge threat and an opportunity that cannot be ignored.
To the west, it can no longer go back because there is only depleted liquidity and tightened regulations; to the east, it must face the behemoth of Shanghai.It cannot directly conquer Shanghai because the rules there do not belong to Wall Street and the city walls there are too thick.
final buffer zone
If Shanghai is the “heart” of the Eastern real assets empire, then Singapore is the “frontline” of this East-West confrontation.It is not only a geographical transit point, but also a carefully selected last line of defense for Western capital in the face of the rise of the East.
Singapore, this city-state, is using an almost crazy investment to build itself into the “Switzerland” of the 21st century.
Located next to the runway of Changi Airport, Le Freeport is the best window to observe Singapore’s ambitions.This free port with independent judicial status is a perfect “black box” in both a physical and legal sense.Here, the flow of gold is stripped of all cumbersome administrative supervision. From the landing of the plane to the storage of gold bars, the entire process is completed in a completely closed, tax-free and extremely private closed loop.
At the same time, another super vault called The Reserve has been prepared since 2024.The 180,000-square-foot fortress is designed to have a total capacity of 15,500 tons.Its selling point is not only the one-meter-thick reinforced concrete wall, but also a privilege granted by the Singapore government – complete exemption from consumption tax (GST) on investment-grade precious metals (IPM).
For market makers like JPMorgan Chase, it’s an irresistible temptation.
But if it were just because of taxes and coffers, JPMorgan would probably choose Dubai or Zurich.It finally settled in Singapore, and there was a deeper geopolitical calculation behind it.
On Wall Street, directly moving the core of business from New York to Shanghai is tantamount to “surrendering to the enemy.” This is tantamount to suicide in the current turbulent international political climate.They urgently need a fulcrum, a haven that can not only reach the huge physical market in the East, but also make them feel politically safe.
Singapore is the perfect choice.
It guards the Strait of Malacca, connects the U.S. dollar liquidity in London, and reaches the physical needs of Shanghai and India.
Singapore is not only a safe haven, but also the largest transit point connecting two divided worlds.JPMorgan Chase is trying to establish a closed trading loop here that never sets: fixing prices in London, hedging in New York, and stocking up in Singapore.
However, JPMorgan’s wishful thinking is not without flaws.In the battle for pricing power in Asia, it cannot avoid one of its strongest rivals – Hong Kong.
Many people mistakenly believe that Hong Kong has fallen behind in this round of competition, but the fact is exactly the opposite.Hong Kong has a core trump card that Singapore cannot replicate: it is the only channel for RMB to go overseas.
Through the “Gold Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect”, the Hong Kong Gold and Silver Exchange (CGSE) is directly connected to the Shanghai Gold Exchange.This means that gold traded in Hong Kong can directly enter the delivery system in mainland China.For those capital who really want to embrace the Chinese market, Hong Kong is not “offshore” but an extension of “onshore”.
JPMorgan Chase chose Singapore, betting on a hybrid model of “dollar + physical”, trying to build a new offshore center on the ruins of the old order.HSBC, Standard Chartered and other established British banks continue to invest heavily in Hong Kong, betting on the future of “RMB + physical goods”.
JPMorgan Chase thought it had found a neutral haven, but in the meat grinder of geopolitics, there is never a true “middle ground.”Singapore’s prosperity is essentially the result of the economic spillover from the East.This seemingly independent luxury yacht has actually been locked in the gravitational field of the Eastern Continent.
When the gravitational pull of Shanghai becomes greater and greater, when the territory of RMB-denominated gold continues to expand, and when China’s industrial machines continue to swallow up physical silver in the market, Singapore may no longer be a neutral safe haven, and JPMorgan Chase will have to make another fateful choice.
cycle restart
There may finally be an official explanation for the JPMorgan rumors, but that no longer matters.In the business world, keen capital always senses the vibration of the earth’s crust immediately.
The epicenter of this shock is not in Singapore, but in the depths of the global monetary system.
For the past fifty years, we have been accustomed to a world of “paper contracts” dominated by U.S. dollar credit.It was an era built on debt, commitment and the illusion of unlimited liquidity.We thought prosperity would last forever as long as the printing presses were turning.
But now, the tide has completely changed.
When central banks of various countries transport gold back to their countries at all costs, and when global manufacturing giants begin to worry about competing for the last piece of industrial silver, what we see is the return of an ancient order.
The world is slowly but surely returning from an illusory credit and currency system to a visible and tangible physical asset system.In this new system, gold is the measure of credit and silver is the measure of productivity.One of them represents the bottom line of safety, and the other represents the limit of industry.
In this long great migration, London and New York are no longer the only destinations, and the East is no longer just a simple manufacturing factory.New rules of the game are being formulated and new centers of power are being formed.
The era when Western bankers defined the value of gold and silver is slowly dying.Gold and silver were silent, but answered all the questions about the times.
