A certain Wall Street giant suddenly airlifted its entire New York precious metals team to Singapore—something about this just doesn’t add up.

On October 27, the team received the notice; by October 30, they had already landed in the Lion City. Three days? That’s as fast as fleeing for your life. Economist Bill Still revealed in a video at the time: there was no public announcement, the entire operation was completed quietly. And then? The CME Exchange “coincidentally” experienced a power outage.

The official explanation was that a cooling system failure caused the server outage. But anyone in the industry could spot the flaw immediately: data centers have multiple cooling backups, and the adjacent server rooms were completely unaffected. It was obviously a deliberate power cut.

The truth came to light on December 5. That day, the number of silver December delivery contracts exploded—7,330 in total. What did several top Wall Street institutions do during those hours of the outage? They negotiated behind closed doors with the long-position clients and ultimately agreed to a $65 million cash settlement deal.

The terms were straightforward: could you delay taking delivery until March? As compensation, they added $1.775 per ounce. Silver’s suspended price at the time was $54.53, while the settlement price was directly set at $56.30. In this way, the shorts were able to close 6,186 contracts at a high price.

After receiving the money, the longs postponed their orders as agreed. As a result, we saw: the spot-futures premium disappeared instantly, open interest for March contracts surged, and futures prices were pushed up by $1. The data doesn’t lie.

But the more ruthless move came afterward. To ensure smooth negotiations, the giant urgently changed the status of 13.4 million ounces of silver to “pending,” locking up the physical metal and refusing to deliver. Normally, longs would wait 10–30 days to take delivery, but now the wait was even longer. So they had to weigh their options: take the cash settlement, just wait a few more weeks; insist on delivery, with no idea how long it might take. Most chose to compromise.

The entire timeline was just too precise: the team moved, the exchange lost power, the longs were called in for negotiations. This was no spur-of-the-moment plan—it was orchestrated for at least a week.

Why move the team overseas? Because this kind of private bribery and price manipulation would be tightly scrutinized in the US. Back in 2020, the same institution was fined $920 million for similar operations. This time, the team relocation and negotiations all took place outside the US, successfully dodging domestic regulators—a textbook case of forced liquidation.

But the underlying problem remains unresolved. December’s squeeze was merely postponed to March, and the physical silver shortage is still there. They must do as much as possible with short positions on the edge of regulatory limits before March and before certain policies kick in. If a squeeze really erupts in March, and rumored silver tariffs are added, the losses could exceed $10 billion.

So the core purpose of this relocation is clear: buy time and ease the pressure of the physical silver squeeze. As for what will happen in three months? No one knows.