(Bloomberg) Over the last week or so, we saw GameStop-inspired flash mobs turn their attention to silver, where they attempted to engineer a squeeze. It didn’t really work out.
But silver prices did briefly surge, and for a few days, retail silver coin sites were totally sold out. So why did this happen, and why does silver tend to attract phenomenons like this? This was one topic we spoke about on a recent “Odd Lots” podcast with Jeff Currie, the top commodities strategist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Here are a few lightly edited segments from the discussion.
You go back in history for hundreds of years, silver has always been associated with populist movements. And so the market today is focused on the Hunt brothers cornering of the silver market as the historical analog. We think the appropriate historical analog is actually William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech where essentially he argues that the government and the banks were suppressing inflation and economic potential. It was just similar to the rhetoric that the WallStreetBets group was advocating.
And the key here is, take somebody like Bryan. He was advocating silver coinage as a way of getting around this. And so it has that historical populist element to it. And I think that’s really what’s at play here.
And the way we view the Wall Street Bets group is this is just a continuation of the rise of populism, or it’s just, you know, a crescendo occurring, week after week that’s representing, I think, there’s need for governments to address some of these issues around income inequality and other social needs.
