Silver just did something it hasn't done in decades: it reminded everyone that precious metals can still throw a party. On December 26, silver futures hit $75 per ounce, capping a rally that's been equal parts industrial demand, monetary anxiety, and full-blown retail mania in China. If you're keeping score at home, that's roughly 155% year-to-date and about 30% for December alone, making it the metal's best monthly showing since December 1979.

Yes, 1979. That's the year the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market, which ended about as well as you'd expect. But this time around, the story is different. Instead of two billionaire brothers trying to monopolize a commodity, we've got a massive physical shortage in China colliding with genuine industrial demand and a global monetary system that's starting to look a little wobbly.

China's Silver Shortage Gets Weird

Here's where things get interesting. "China is facing a literal shortage of physical silver," according to The Kobeissi Letter, and that's not hyperbole. The world's largest silver-consuming nation is basically out of the stuff, and retail investors are scrambling over each other to get exposure.

The iShares Silver Trust (SLV), which tracks COMEX silver prices, has surged roughly 30% month-to-date. But the real action is happening in China's only pure-play silver fund, the UBS SDIC Silver Futures Fund LOF. This fund has gone completely parabolic, trading at premiums exceeding 60% above the value of its underlying silver contracts on the Shanghai Futures Exchange.

Let me repeat that: people were paying 60% more than the fund's actual holdings just to own a piece of silver exposure. The fund is up 187% this year, compared to roughly 145% gains in Shanghai-traded silver futures. That's the kind of premium you see when supply can't keep up with demand and everyone's afraid of missing out.

Bloomberg reported Friday that social media platform Xiaohongshu (also known as Rednote) became ground zero for silver arbitrage tutorials, drawing waves of retail traders into the fund. The product hit its 10% daily limit for three consecutive days before UBS SDIC finally stepped in with sharp subscription restrictions and risk warnings about potential heavy losses if the bull market reverses.

Even after some pullbacks, the fund's premium remains far above early December levels. The fund manager is essentially begging people to slow down, but the buying frenzy continues.

Is Silver Already Too Expensive?

So here's the obvious question: if silver just hit $75, are we already too late? Not according to Robert Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad Poor Dad author who's never been shy about his precious metals enthusiasm.

"If you think silver is at an all time high then you're too late," Kiyosaki wrote on X. He added, "I continue to acquire silver at $70 an ounce," and suggested that $200 silver by 2026 is entirely plausible. He's framing this rally as part of a much larger structural shift rather than some short-term speculative peak.

Is that realistic? Maybe. Ramnivas Mundada, director of Economic Research at GlobalData, thinks the fundamentals support a lot more upside. "This rally marks the beginning of a structural shift away from a U.S.-centric framework toward a more multipolar order," Mundada wrote, pointing to geopolitical instability, a slowing U.S. economy, trade frictions, and accelerating de-dollarization as key drivers.

On the demand side, Mundada highlights strong industrial consumption, particularly from solar panels and electric vehicles. Those aren't speculative trades; they're real-world uses that create structural deficits. He suggests silver could test $85 to $100 per ounce as those deficits widen.

The upside case is straightforward: wealth preservation, portfolio diversification, and a hedge against systemic risk in an increasingly fragmented global financial system. The downside? Sharp, sentiment-driven corrections that could wipe out recent gains, plus rising input costs across technology supply chains that depend on silver.

What Happens Next

Whether silver pauses here, corrects hard, or keeps climbing into the new year is anyone's guess. But what's clear is that the metal has reasserted itself at the center of global markets in a way we haven't seen in decades. This isn't just retail speculation or monetary hedging. It's a potent mix of industrial demand, monetary uncertainty, and genuine physical shortages, especially in China.

Silver's best annual performance since the late 1970s isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening as the world edges into a more multipolar financial era where dollar dominance isn't guaranteed, industrial transitions accelerate, and retail investors in the world's second-largest economy are buying physical metals like it's going out of style.

For now, silver is having its moment. Whether that moment lasts or crashes spectacularly will tell us a lot about where global markets and the monetary system are really headed.