---
title: "Silver Keeps Getting Knocked Down at $70. Mario Innecco Thinks That’s the Point."
url: "https://www.readplaza.com/articles/8e55bqFATnS"
type: "article"
publisher: "Commodity Culture"
category: "Market Commentary"
published: "2026-09-10T20:50:00+00:00"
updated: "2026-09-14T02:32:19.055057+00:00"
reading_time_minutes: 11
tags: ["Gold", "Silver"]
---

# Silver Keeps Getting Knocked Down at $70. Mario Innecco Thinks That’s the Point.
I had Mario Innecco back on Commodity Culture last week, and we spent a lot of time on a question that has been bothering silver investors for months: why does the metal seem to get pushed back every time it starts looking like it wants to break through $70?

You can call it technical resistance if you want. You can say it is normal profit-taking after a huge year. You can say the market is simply digesting a move that took silver from the old $50 ceiling to above $120 in a matter of months. All of those things may be partly true. But Mario’s view is that the repeated struggle around $70 and $71 is not random. He thinks that level matters because silver closed last year just above it after gaining close to 150%, and it looks to him as though somebody has a strong interest in keeping the price from settling comfortably above that old high-water mark.

That is a difficult claim to prove from the outside, and I do not think anyone should pretend they can see inside every bullion bank book or every CFTC decision. But the bigger point of the conversation was less about trying to prove a conspiracy and more about understanding how strange the silver market has become. We are not talking about a metal that quietly drifted higher. Silver broke a level it had spent decades failing to conquer, ran violently, got smashed back down, and is now holding in the mid-$60s while physical demand continues to matter more than the paper market wants it to.

Mario’s position is that the frustration is the tradeoff for being early in a market that has not finished repricing.

He reminded me that it took forty-five years for silver to finally break $50. Once it broke, it did not take another forty-five years to reach $120. It took months. That does not mean it goes straight back to $120 tomorrow, and it certainly does not mean every silver chart on X is suddenly right. But it is worth remembering how quickly the mood changed once the old ceiling finally gave way. People who had spent years saying silver could never hold above $50 were suddenly talking about triple digits as if it had always been obvious.

That is usually how these things work. The conviction arrives after the move, not before it.

The number is not the whole storyThere is a tendency in the precious-metals world to obsess over the next round number. Silver needs to break $70. Then it needs $100. Then it needs $120. Then somebody puts out a target for $300 or $1,000 and the whole conversation turns into a fight over who is the biggest bull or who is the biggest idiot.

Mario’s more useful point was that silver should not be viewed as a short-term trade. It is too volatile for that. It has always been volatile. If you are buying because you expect the price to validate you next week, you are probably going to get shaken out at the worst possible moment.

He sees silver as a monetary metal with an industrial role layered on top. You cannot print it. Much of its supply comes as a byproduct of other mining, so even a higher price does not automatically bring a wave of new production to market. At the same time, demand has been running ahead of supply for years. For Mario, that mismatch matters more than whether silver spends another few days below $70.

The thing that has changed most for me is that $65 silver still sounds extreme if you have only been watching the last few months. If you take a step back, it is hard not to see how far the market has already come. A year and a half ago, plenty of people would have called $65 life-changing. Now it is treated like a disappointment because the metal once traded above $120. That says more about investor psychology than it does about the long-term thesis.

Mario thinks we are in a new regime for silver. He does not know what triggers the next leg, and he is not pretending to know which exact day the price takes off. But he thinks the move could be much quicker than people expect once the market gets through this range. His line was that it may not take another forty-five years to see $120 again. It might take four or five days.

That is the kind of statement people will either love or hate, but it captures the point. Silver does not move like a normal market when it gets going. It can sit still for years, frustrate everyone involved, and then reprice so quickly that the people waiting for a perfect entry never get one.

The physical market is where it gets interestingMario also touched on something that does not get enough attention outside the metals crowd: the persistent premium for silver in Shanghai over New York.

The exact reasons are hard to pin down. There are differences in market structure, retail demand, delivery, local supply, and the way physical metal is treated in China compared with the way many Western investors approach it through ETFs and futures. But the fact that a premium has persisted for so long is at least worth watching.

Normally, arbitrage should close a gap like that. Metal should move toward the higher-priced market until the difference narrows. When the premium sticks around, it suggests the physical market is tighter or more highly valued than the paper price would imply.

Mario’s view is that physical buying has been draining metal from the West toward the East. Again, that is not something a retail investor can perfectly map in real time, and I would be careful about turning every premium into proof of an imminent COMEX collapse. But it fits the broader shift we have been watching for years. China and other countries are far more interested in taking delivery and holding physical assets. The West is still more comfortable with paper exposure, derivatives, and ETF claims.

That difference may matter a lot more if confidence in fiat currencies continues to erode.

Mario also believes silver could eventually become more important to the banking system. He has heard discussion around the possibility of silver being treated more seriously as a high-quality reserve asset, similar to the way gold has been treated under Basel rules. That is still speculative, and it is not something investors should assume is around the corner. But the logic behind the conversation is interesting. Gold and silver once sat at the center of banking. A bank with real metal was viewed differently from one built purely on promises. In a world where trust in sovereign debt and fiat currencies is becoming less automatic, it is not crazy to think hard assets regain some of that relevance.

If silver were ever to be held more widely as a reserve asset, its price would almost have to be much higher. At $20 or even $70 an ounce, storing meaningful quantities of silver is cumbersome. At several hundred dollars or more, the equation changes.

Gold may be the government’s escape hatchThe conversation naturally moved to gold, and Mario’s take was similar to what Matthew Piepenburg laid out recently on the channel. The US is not in a position to solve its debt problem through normal growth or fiscal discipline. It can cut spending, raise taxes, default in some form, or devalue the currency. Politics makes the first two difficult. The last option is the path governments usually take.

Mario thinks a statutory revaluation of US gold reserves is a real possibility. The government still carries its gold on the books at roughly $42 an ounce. Marking it to a higher price would create liquidity and strengthen the Treasury’s balance sheet, at least on paper. A revaluation to current market levels would be meaningful. A series of higher revaluations, if gold keeps climbing, would be even more meaningful.

It would not solve a $40 trillion debt problem. Nothing about this is a magic fix. But it would buy time.

And buying time is what governments are usually trying to do.

The reason I find this worth thinking about is that it changes the usual framing of gold. For decades, policymakers wanted gold quiet because a rising gold price was an embarrassment to the dollar. A higher gold price signaled that confidence in the currency was slipping. Now the US has a huge gold reserve sitting on the balance sheet at an archaic price, while the cost of servicing debt keeps rising and the world becomes less eager to finance Washington’s deficits.

At a certain point, a higher gold price stops looking like a problem and starts looking useful.

Mario does not think the US wakes up tomorrow and declares gold worth $20,000. That would be too obvious and too disruptive. He sees a more gradual process as more likely: revalue the official price closer to the market, let gold rise, revalue again later, and allow the dollar to weaken in a managed way rather than through a sudden admission that the system is broken.

That may be good for Washington. It is not necessarily good for the person holding savings in cash and wondering why their cost of living keeps rising.

A different kind of portfolioMario’s approach is conservative where it counts. He would keep the bulk of precious-metals exposure in physical gold and silver held outside the system, with miners treated as the speculative portion. That is worth separating because people often blur the two together.

Mining stocks can offer extraordinary leverage to higher gold and silver prices. The majors are generating serious cash at current metal prices, royalty companies remove a lot of operating risk, and the sector remains tiny compared with the capital parked in broad equity indices. If even a small amount of generalist money rotates into miners after a broader market correction, the move could be dramatic.

But miners are businesses. They have management risk, jurisdiction risk, cost overruns, political risk, and all the usual things that can go wrong with a mine. A good gold thesis does not automatically make every junior explorer a good investment. Mario put it plainly: the exploration end of the market is highly speculative. You might own twenty names and only have one work. That one may change the outcome, but you have to know what you are signing up for.

The physical metal is different. It is not there to generate an exciting quarterly return. It is there because, in Mario’s view, the financial system is becoming more fragile and the currency is becoming less reliable.

He would also look beyond precious metals at the broader natural-resource space. Oil still looks cheap to him relative to the growth in global money supply. Tungsten has become strategically important because China and North Korea control the overwhelming majority of supply. Copper, energy, farmland, and other hard assets all deserve attention in a world where governments are spending more on defense, reshoring, power infrastructure, and industrial capacity.

The common thread is that these are things you need to build, feed, power, and defend a real economy. They are not just symbols on a screen.

The part nobody wants to modelWe also talked about war, and this is where the conversation becomes less comfortable.

Mario is in the UK and has been watching the rhetoric around Russia, defense spending, and the possibility of a broader European conflict. He is not predicting World War III. Nobody can do that responsibly. But he made the point that a major conflict would change the financial landscape quickly.

In 1914, markets froze. The London Stock Exchange shut. New York shut, even before the US entered the war. The financial system was built on promises that suddenly became less trustworthy when people wanted their money back at the same time.

The modern version would not look identical, but it is worth remembering that assets held entirely inside the financial system can become difficult to access during a real crisis. That is the argument for holding some physical metal outside the banking system. It is not about expecting civilization to collapse next Tuesday. It is about recognizing that the systems we take for granted are only as stable as the confidence behind them.

The same logic applies to the broader debt problem. The US, Europe, Japan, and much of the developed world are carrying obligations that assume the current monetary system can be extended indefinitely. Maybe it can. Governments have managed to extend these cycles much longer than most people expected. But the cost of doing so is visible everywhere: higher debt, higher intervention, more currency debasement, and a growing gap between asset owners and everyone else.

That is why Mario remains so focused on physical gold and silver. Not because they are magic. Not because they cannot fall. And not because the people buying them have some secret certainty about the future.

It is because they are still outside somebody else’s liability.

And in a world full of paper promises, that is becoming harder to ignore.