--- title: "The Weekly Finger: El Niño, gold's quiet mission, silver's comeback, and Trump's bond market tantrum" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/296714221.md" description: "The article analyzes investment opportunities driven by a predicted 'super El Niño' impacting agricultural commodities, China's undisclosed gold purchases via OTC markets, and silver's technical breakout. These trends are linked to bond market volatility and political rhetoric regarding US fiscal discipline, suggesting investors should position for currency debasement risk and hard asset appreciation." datetime: "2026-08-23T23:44:08.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/296714221.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/296714221.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/296714221.md) generator: "portal-rs" --- # The Weekly Finger: El Niño, gold's quiet mission, silver's comeback, and Trump's bond market tantrum G'day team, Before we get stuck into it, if you haven't caught Friday's episode of *Theory of Thing*, do yourself a favour and stick it on for the drive in. Heath and I got into bond vigilantes, the GPU backed bond binge coming out of the hyperscalers, and yes, the Swans' finals implosion got its own segment because some wounds need airing in public. Have a listen here: Bond Vigilantes, GPU-Backed Bonds & the Swans Implosion. Right, let's get into the good stuff. ****The Weather Trade Nobody's Pricing In**** I've been banging on to anyone who'll listen (mostly my wife, over dinner, to her visible delight) about a podcast I picked up last week. *Odd Lots* ran a ripper episode with Justin Mankin, a climate scientist out of Dartmouth, on the “super El Niño” that's building for later this year. Not the garden variety El Niño that gets a paragraph in the weather section, but the kind that reshapes droughts, floods and crop yields across whole continents, and could cost the global economy trillions in the process. Link's here if you want the full 56 minutes: A Historic El Niño Is Coming That Could Cost the World Trillions. Here's the bit that should get your attention as an investor rather than just a weather nerd. Agricultural commodities are already sitting at their highest level in a decade, and that's before a proper El Niño has had a chance to wreck a single harvest. *Agricultural Commodities (DBA ETF), weekly candles. Source: Bloomberg, analysis by Tavi Costa.* That's not a coincidence, that's markets front running a supply shock. If Mankin's right about how intense this one's shaping up to be, ag commodities have room to run well past “highest in a decade.” ****Gold's Quiet Return to Form**** While everyone's been fixated on equities grinding higher, gold's crept back to three month highs without much fanfare. The reason why is a story China would probably rather you didn't look at too closely. According to Goldman Sachs estimates, China picked up more than 40 tonnes of gold through the London OTC market in June alone, its second largest monthly purchase since early 2025. That's 167% more than what the People's Bank of China officially declared for the month. May was even more brazen: an estimated 48 tonnes bought OTC against just 10 tonnes reported, a gap of 380%. Add it up and China quietly acquired around 88 tonnes across May and June through the OTC market alone, more than its entire officially reported total for the year to date. Officially China's holding a record 2,366 tonnes. Unofficially, who really knows. When a central bank is buying multiples of what it's willing to admit to, that tells you plenty about how it expects fiat currencies to hold up over the next decade. Worth remembering next time someone tells you gold's a relic. ****And Silver's Off To The Races**** If gold's quietly getting on with business, silver's just kicked the door down. The multi year downtrend that's held since the early blow off top has finally snapped, and it's punching back up through the high sixties. *Silver / USD, daily. Source: TradingView.* Silver's had a shocker of a run since that peak, so this breakout matters. Once a multi-year trendline goes, momentum tends to follow, and the metal's leverage to both the gold thesis and the industrial demand story, think solar and EVs, gives it more torque than gold on the way up. ****Why Now? Ask The Bond Market (And Trump)**** So why is all of this breaking out together, ag commodities, gold, silver? Pull the thread back far enough and you land on the bond market, and on a quote from Trump last week that should have rattled more cages than it did. Asked about further intervention in the bond market after 30-year yields hit their highest levels since 2007, Trump told reporters: *“We have many types of intervention. That's one. The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.”* Full story here: Trump Suggests He Can Use the Military on Bond Markets. Read that again. The sitting President of the United States floated military intervention as a tool for managing bond yields. Whatever you make of the geopolitics, markets read comments like that as confirmation that fiscal discipline isn't arriving any time soon, and that's exactly the environment where hard assets do their best work. Ag commodities, gold, silver, they're all pricing in the same thing: currency debasement risk, and a government more interested in jawboning markets than balancing a budget. ****Silver Plays Worth Watching**** If you buy the thesis, here's where I'd be doing some homework. Barton Gold is top of my list, and not just for the gold. I sat down with MD Alex Scanlon last week and the Tolmer silver discovery, sitting neatly between the Challenger and Tunkillia hubs, is shaping up as a genuine second leg to the story. Barton's just banked a $25.9 million institutional placement, finished a 58,000 metre drill out at Tunkillia, and is eyeing a restart of the fully permitted Central Gawler Mill. Long term the company's targeting 150,000oz of gold and 250,000oz of silver a year. You can watch the full chat here: Barton Gold: Drill Results, Growth & Mill Restart. Broken Hill Mines is worth a mention too. They've consolidated two of Broken Hill's three historic mines, Rasp and Pinnacles, under one roof for the first time, giving real leverage to the silver-lead-zinc system that built the town in the first place. Mithril Silver and Gold is smaller and further out on the risk curve, but the Copalquin project in Mexico has thrown up some eye watering silver hits, and the market's starting to take notice. And have a proper look at Iltani Resources . High grade silver-indium results out of the Orient projects in Queensland have been quietly stacking up. Indium's its own story, worth a column on its own another day. None of this is a recommendation, obviously. Do your own homework, or better yet, talk to someone who can look at your specific situation. And if you're the type of investor who's already looking at placements before they hit the market, or wondering whether you'd qualify to, that's usually a sophisticated investor conversation. If that's you, and nobody's ever properly walked you through what that actually means, flick me a line. Happy to have a chat. **A Good Man Gone** One last thing before I let you go. We lost one of the good ones last week. Regular quarterly podcast guest Vern du Preez of Orbis Investment Management after a long battle. Him, myself and Dan Kelly put together many a quarterly update and his insights were always spot on. Loved a laugh and didn’t mind a gentle ribbing, a true mark of a man. I’ll raise a glass for you mate and won’t soon forget our chats. A few words on him here. I know this column is normally about markets and money, but money means a lot less without good people around to share it with. Look after your people this week. 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