COTTONWOOD, Ariz.—Coin Heaven co-owner Gabe Wright saw precious metals demand rise to new heights during the pandemic, but nothing as spectacular as Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse.
“It’s getting real,” Wright said, standing behind the glass showcase filled with various silver and gold bullion, coins, jewelry, and sterling in his busy Cottonwood, Arizona, shop on March 20.
“On a dime, it turned around—big time. It’s unprecedented,” he said. “We’ve seen the demand high, but not like this. Of course, SVB started this phase we’re in.”
And where the buying phase—more like a buying frenzy—ends up is anybody’s guess, Wright said.
Once regarded as a “barbarous relic” by the Wall Street financial sector, gold and silver are now in heavy demand to hedge against inflation and financial risk.
Wright said retail demand for precious metals could soon outstrip supply, and if more banks fail, to expect a full-blown “panic.”
He agreed that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen didn’t help matters by not announcing a government bail-out for SVB after depositors withdrew $42 billion in early March, spurring the bank’s collapse.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insures depositor accounts up to $250,000.
Almost immediately after the run on SVB, people began buying gold and silver on the spot market, putting the squeeze on coin and bullion dealers large and small.
As of March 20, gold was on sale at $1,979 per troy ounce, and silver at $22.51 per ounce.
One troy ounce weighs 31.10 grams or 1.1 regular ounces.
Buy Low, Sell High
In November 2011, an ounce of gold rallied to a multi-year high of more than $2,000 while silver soared to almost $50 an ounce before the bull run on precious metals corrected to new lows.
Wright, whose uncle started Coin Heaven in 1985, said that demand for precious metals was robust during COVID-19.
“But after that bank fell, it created quite a panic, and people wanted to get their funds out of banks and into something real and tangible—gold and silver,” Wright told The Epoch Times.
“It’s something you own. There’s no third party involved. It’s solely yours.”
Galina Suvorova, owner of Galina Fine Jewelers in Cottonwood, said business has been steadily increasing since the fall of SVB, and “there’s more interest in bullion—specifically, bullion and coins.”
“It’s been like this for a couple of years now,” Suvorova said. “Before, it used to be more investors—people doing it for years. Nowadays, we’re getting new people inquiring how to start, what to do with it, what to buy.”
She said the biggest seller at the moment is gold coins, although silver sales are also way up, given their much lower cost, even with higher premiums.
Suvorova said she has yet to encounter supply issues during market dips when silver and gold prices go down.
“During those low dives, it is not the supply that’s suffering; it’s dealers holding back because they have an investment in it and don’t want to lose money,” Suvorova told The Epoch Times.
“Of course, everybody buys more during those times.”
In general, her customers purchase gold and silver to hedge against economic turmoil and as a financial investment, since “there’s money to be made” in precious metals as a historic store of value.
“It’s just what you do with it and how you use it. You can buy investment coins or just for the rally,” Suvorova said.
Many of Suvorova’s new customers are first-time buyers following the collapse of SVB. She expects the buying trend to remain brisk as long as uncertainty reigns in the financial equities and bank sectors.
“Coins and precious metals are a smart investment. We still have fiat currency worldwide, but it’s tied to precious metals prices,” Suvorova said.
“Even if nothing goes crazy, it’s still solid money—cold, heavy money.”
Wright said that substantial risk in the financial markets can only be good for precious metals demand in the long run.
No Top In Sight
“Near term, I do think we’re heading up [in price]. It’s been years in building. An event like banks going down is the catalyst to spark this thing to take off and charge higher,” Wright said.
“When the COVID scare happened three years ago, it kicked off quite a buying frenzy. It sustained for two-and-a-half years or so. Later in 2022, it tapered off.”
In the current market, Wright said he is buying as much silver and gold as he can wholesale to keep pace with demand.
“We cannot satisfy demand based on whoever walks in the door. We have to get more product from our wholesaler,” he said, and people are “nervous. They do not trust the banks—for a good reason.”
“We could get into a pinch where [supply becomes] strained. At that point, we could see premiums go even higher relative to spot [price].”
Wright said dollars, quarters, dimes, and nickels containing 90 percent silver, known as “junk silver,” fetch high premiums after the U.S. Mint stopped producing them in 1964.
“Whatever is floating around—that’s it,” he said.
In these troubled times, Wright recommends setting priorities by stockpiling food and water before buying gold or silver.
“Take care of yourself that way. Then get into metals” to protect your assets, he said.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
So at what point are the 30 to 50 percent premiums on precious metals factoring into buying them, guys? Prices are barely moving on G/S for months even in the middle of huge inflation.
You’re willing to spend 30 to 50% more on a product that is not even moving right now. Nonsensical.
Hand onto your cash then, just don’t cry “Nobody told me”.