Michael Oliver: Silver Resilient Despite Iran Headwinds

Welcome to this week’s Market Wrap Podcast, I’m Mike Gleason.
Coming up don’t miss another tremendous interview with Michael Oliver of Momentum Structural Analysis. Michael has decades of experience in the financial industry and is especially in tune with the silver market, having called the rally that started back in the fall to a T, and was repeatedly calling for $100+ silver well before it happened, a number we saw back in January.
Find out what Mr. Oliver has to say now given the backdrop of the Iran War, which many have blamed on keeping a lid of silver here in recent months since that big run up and subsequent correction earlier this year. He has some things that may surprise you about what he deems as noise in the market, and exactly how much stock he is putting into the current headwind coming from the Iran War, a situation that many have perhaps overblown when it comes to the short-term effect on the silver price.
This is certainly a man you want to listen to when it comes to the direction of the silver market, so be sure to stick around for Mike Maharrey’s conversation with Michael Oliver, coming up after this week’s market update. And if you enjoy this material, please do us a favor and like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you consume this content.
The inflation dragon is alive and well.
Last November, Donald Trump called himself “<a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115633174669225455" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the affordability president</a>.”  However, it appears that the message is falling flat with your average American.
Based on <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/708905/affordability-dominates-americans-financial-worries.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a recent Gallup poll</a>, affordability tops the list of Americans’ most pressing financial problems. In total, 65 percent of the respondents mentioned rising costs as their biggest economic concern. The survey was conducted between April 1st and April 15th.
Of those surveyed using open-ended questions, 31 percent mentioned persistently high inflation and rising prices as their biggest financial worry. According to Gallup, general inflation worries are among the highest in its more than 20-year trend.
On top of the nearly third of Americans worried about inflation generally, many more pointed to increasing prices in specific categories as their biggest concern.
“Overall, affordability concerns dominate this year’s list, with combined mentions of inflation, energy, housing, and healthcare costs — along with college expenses, transportation costs, and childcare — far exceeding all other types of financial concerns” the report said.
Meanwhile, worries about rapidly increasing energy prices were up 10 percent from last year and at the highest level since 2008.
In a separate Gallup Panel survey, 55 percent of those surveyed said recent price increases have created hardships.
Less than half of Americans view their financial situation as excellent or good. Around 35 percent described it as “fair,” with 19 percent calling their overall financial position “poor.”
And inflation isn’t just a figment of our imagination. It is supported by the data.
We’re all painfully aware of rising fuel prices due to the Iran conflict. The energy index rose 10.9 percent month-to-month in March. That was driven by a 21.2 percent monthly increase in gasoline prices.
But other prices continue to creep higher as well. Annual core inflation, stripping out those fuel prices, nudged up slightly, from 2.5 percent in February to 2.6 percent in March. It’s important to point out that core CPI remains above the Fed’s stated 2 percent target and has been mired in this range for well over a year.
Also, keep in mind that the CPI formula intentionally understates price inflation. The <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2024/01/15/the-cpi-lie-price-inflation-is-even-worse-than-advertised-002930">government revised the CPI formula in the 1990s</a> so that it understated the actual rise in prices. Based on the formula used in the 1970s, CPI is closer to double the official numbers. So, if the BLS used the old formula, we’d be looking at CPI closer to 6 percent. And using an honest formula, it would probably be worse than that.
And there is no relief in sight. The Federal Reserve is creating more inflation as we speak.
Consumer price inflation is just one symptom of monetary inflation (what economists <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2024/01/12/common-definition-of-inflation-you-hear-today-is-wrong-government-propaganda-002925">historically defined as inflation</a>). The Fed has been ratcheting that up for well over a year.
Based on <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Fed’s M2 data</a>, the money supply increased from $21.6 trillion in February of 2025 to nearly $22.7 trillion in February of this year, a 4.9 percent increase.
 In other words, we have an actual inflation rate of nearly 5 percent.
Ultimately, this monetary inflation will work its way through the economy. It will either manifest in rising asset prices or rising consumer prices. Ultimately, it is devaluing your money… by design.
So, if you’re hoping inflation will cool, don’t hold your breath. In fact, you should do everything you can to position yourself to weather more inflationary pressure.
Well, before we get to this week’s interview let’s review the market action in the metals here. And we’re recording this on Thursday evening, so these numbers are based on the Thursday closes.
Gold closed Thursday at $4,664 an ounce, showing a 1.4% decline since last Friday’s close.
Silver was making another run at $90 an ounce after a big rally early in the week, only to see it pull back a good bit on Thursday. The white metal was still up over $3 on the week and came in at $84.26 as of the Thursday afternoon close, registering a 3.9% gain with a day of trading left to go in the week.
Platinum was essentially unchanged when the market closed on Thursday, coming in at $2,069. And finally, palladium was off 2.7% to check in at $1,464 an ounce.
Well now, for more on the metals markets, and specifically silver, let’s get right to our exclusive interview.
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Mike Maharrey: Greetings, I'm Mike Maharrey and I'm joined today by J. Michael Oliver. Michael is the brains behind Momentum Structural Analysis. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you today?
Michael Oliver: I'm good to hear. Good to be here.
Mike Maharrey: Well, it's always a pleasure to have you and you've been on the show before, but I don't want to assume that everybody knows who you are. So, before we really dig into the meat of things, I would like for you to just kind of talk about what is momentum structural analysis and how does it differ from more traditional forms of analysis that we find out there?
Michael Oliver: Well, I started this in 1992, so 30 some years ago. I used to be on the futures brokerage side of the business that started in ‘75 with Hutton in New York. But we provide research that is not based on just looking at price charts like most technicians and looking at overlays of moving averages and things like that. What we do is we take price, we oscillate it versus certain moving averages and create what we call a momentum oscillator. And quite often it'll look sometimes like the price chart and then other times it'll deviate where you might look at the momentum chart and say, "My gosh, that's a topping pattern." And you look at the price chart and say, "Hey, everything looks great." Usually momentum's right. And so that's what we do and we examine all four major asset categories, not just the stock market, not just commodities, gold, silver, but T-bonds as well, foreign exchange, et cetera.
And anyway, that's what we do.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that makes sense to me. So basically, you're kind of capturing the trends that may not be visible just looking at the price itself, right?
Michael Oliver: That's correct. Yeah. Usually when price becomes obvious that it's broken its trend, gone somewhere new direction, it's well off the higher, well off the low, whereas momentum tends to act often before it even turns.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, that makes sense. So with that in mind, how do you analyze something like this crazy environment we're in now where we have this war that's kind of putting an outsized hand print on everything in the markets right now? What are you seeing in terms of precious metals and the impact of the war? And has it changed your overall outlook at all?
Michael Oliver: Not at all. In fact, it's irrelevant is what I would say. Most people, when they talk about monetary metals, for instance, the phrase is often used of global uncertainty helps drive gold. Well, it doesn't. Okay. Go back and look at the start of the Ukraine war. Gold peaked several weeks later. So did commodities, so did oil. Okay. Then the start of this war, oil and silver had already sold off, but they had another wave of selling after that. These factors that come and go are essentially to be ignored. Take, for example, stock market, tariffs. Tariffs wasn't even a term that was used until Trump came in. And so in January, February, March, and part of April last year, 2025, there was a sharp selloff in the stock market based on what? Tariffs, spook people. Okay. Tariffs haven't gone away and yet we V-bottomed out of there and made new highs.
Okay. Now the stock market also sold off recently, so did gold and silver based on the Iran thing. Well, it's going to come and go. And it's irrelevant to the underlying larger fundamentals that I think our conclusion is the stock market is making a major top. The bond market is in deep crisis trouble, US government bond market and monetary metals are about to explode in a way that you have not seen before in the history of the monetary metals. And I think it's going to occur largely in the next three to four months. So anyway, and these have nothing to do with Iran. Okay.
Mike Maharrey: We've seen both silver and gold trading in this range bound fashion over the last couple of months really. I saw a video that you did the other day that you expect silver to once again be back in those triple digit range. So, I'm curious as to what you're seeing, what's the basis. How you see the silver market moving right now?
Michael Oliver: Okay. We saw this last year and think about this for a minute. If silver goes crazy like we say it's going to, and it's not really going crazy, it's catching up for errors that it's committed for decades underpricing. If it goes to three to $500 an ounce, that looks like off the page lunatic assumption. But there are many historical examples that's not common, I'll admit. For a market that has been artificially or for some reason underpriced for a long time suddenly wakes up and says, "Oh my gosh, I made a mistake." And it zooms. Example, copper. Okay, copper back 1980s, 1990s, 2000, up through late 2005, copper was in a boring range from 50 cents a pound to a buck 50 back and forth then back and forth, just like silver was up to 50 bucks down, 50 bucks down for 50 years. Okay.
Copper decided in late 2005 to move out of that range. There was no headline event. It was not sympathetic to other base metals. It was just on its own. It broke out and within several quarters it had tripled in price and got up to $4.10 versus the prior range averaged a buck and it did it without headlines, but when it did it, it did it rapidly. The same thing happened to the lead market in 2007. Very exciting markets.
In a matter of several quarters, they left behind decades of prior price lethargy. How come silver has been caught between 50 bucks and five bucks for 50 years, whereas the other monetary metal, gold, every time it had a bull trend would blast out its old prior bull market peak. It wasn't contained or copper wasn't contained or lead wasn't contained. Silver made a mistake. Now there's arguments that, well, it's manipulated. Okay. Maybe that's the reason, maybe that's part of the reason. But the point is it said, "I'm out of here." And often when a market makes a mistake like a overblown stock market on the upside, for example, when they go down, they often go down even more than they might otherwise do to overcompensate for their error. Silver's doing the opposite from below. Not to mention- Yeah, go ahead. No, you go ahead. No, not to mention we have an ongoing bull market in the monetary metals anyway.
So, it's not like Silvers doing something that's out of sync with its overall trend anyway. It's merely going to accelerate its upward trend and it's going to beat gold and get back to values that make sense historically of silver divided into gold. It's extremely cheap right now relative to gold abnormally insanely cheap. It's going to compensate for that and I think it's going to do it in a tantrum.
Mike Maharrey: Do you think really the fundamental issue with silver is that there's just not enough metal and we've got all of this paper silver floating around out there that kind of muddies the waters? But ultimately doesn't it come down to just how much metal is there and how much metal do people want?
Michael Oliver: Well, silver again, people forget it is an industrial metal, a precious industrial metal, but it's also a monetary metal. But let's go look on the industrial side. We know for the last five years or so, the supply has not matched demand at a deficit year by year by year. And even though the price has increased, it is not enticed that much more production primarily because silver production doesn't mainly come from silver miners. It comes from base metal miners. And so their primary incentive for getting silver out of the ground is not silver. It's to get the copper out or whatever other base metal they're going in. So its higher price doesn't necessarily spark increased production. But also, the Chinese, for example, are producing solar panels around the world and the photovoltaic cells are in the solar panels. There's silvers in there. Okay. They constitute about 80 to 90% of global demand for solar power, which is exploding across the world, demand for solar power as a competition to the price of oil, for example.
That means more demand for silver ongoing. It's not going away. And in order to compensate for that, you finally have to, maybe you have to go overboard in price to absolutely wake up all the producers and get them going. Then you have the monetary metal aspect as well. It is for thousands of years been money. Never forget that.
Mike Maharrey: So you've talked about this, the kind of dichotomy between the gold and silver price and we see that in the gold silver ratio. Are you equally bullish on gold as well? Do you see more momentum behind it?
Michael Oliver: Oh yeah. The gold's going up, but it's just not going to match on a percentage basis, especially from this point forward what silver does. Silver is likely to triple or more the gains that we see coming in gold. So for example, I use this all the time as an example and it's just a ho-hum statement, meaning gold's done this before. It's two prior bull markets were both eight fold moves from bare low to bull high, 76 to 1980, 2001 to 2011, different time spans, but both were eight fold gains. Okay. We started from 1,050 in December to … We're only fourfold right now in gold. Okay. If it goes eightfold, it'll be like $8,500 just to match the percent gain it saw twice before in the past 50 years. Okay, let's say gold goes to 8,000. Actually, JP Morgan, I think a couple months ago came out with a fundamental projection of 9,200.
So, they're in line with that ho-hum target. I don't know that gold's going to stop there. In fact, I don't think it will because there's certain monetary factors underway that are crisis events and they're not headlines and they should be. But silver, when we plot the relationship between silver and gold on a technical basis, it has broken out last November versus gold from very cheap levels. And I think silver could easily triple or more in relative value to gold and do so very quickly. The same is true with silver miners versus the gold miners. They will likely beat the gold miners.
Mike Maharrey: So, you just piqued my curiosity and monetary policy is kind of one of my pet interests. And so I'm curious what you're seeing that you just mentioned that folks are missing. I'm always curious because we get so caught up in the headlines of the day and I know that there's all kinds of things that go on under the surface that your average guy that's watching CNBC misses. So what do you see going on in the monetary markets that is troubling?
Michael Oliver: Well, the last major stock market decline we had in economic downturn was in 2007, eight and nine, and that was mortgages, mortgage crisis. This time we have government debt crisis. We know we have it in Japan. They've been having a crisis trying to put that fire out and they printed, printed, printed. The US government deficit of the debt problem is increasing, increasing. Excuse me. Jamie Diamond last week said we're facing a debt crisis, government debt crisis. Our timing says he's right. We think the US government bond market, 30-year bonds, are about to slip into new lows in price, new highs and yields regardless of Fed manipulating short end of the market. That is a crisis event that they have to prevent. Only one way to do that. Get the hoses out and print the money. Gold knows this. That's why it's been going up. It knows this crisis is coming and Jamie Dimon is dead on this time, technically speaking.
I know he's not speaking technically. Anyway, that's where we are and that's the major headline that is not out there.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. Our friend Greg Weldon calls it a “debt black hole” and I love that analogy because a black hole impacts everything around it. And we have this and that's why I'm always flummoxed by this absolute certainty that people seem to have that the Federal Reserve is not going to lower interest rates. We've got this inflation. And I've always said that when push comes to sub, they always pick inflation and printing the money as opposed to allowing the stock market to follow economy collapse.
Michael Oliver: If it gets on fire, this is not one of their mandates, see. Unemployment is one okay and that supposedly looks good. We ran studies of unemployment in our weekend report just showing what did unemployment look like back around the dotcom top. Did it warn you that the market was going into a bear trend? Did it warn you in 2007 when the market was topping? No, unemployment looked great. It was very low. It was sideways. No concerns mate. It was not till about six months later when the market had already topped and headed down hard before unemployment showed itself. So, that mandate at the Fed is meaningless. And the other one is, of course, the inflation issue, which is going to bother them because it's not going to stop. This is not just oil. This is the commodity complex turning up because the money flows that are created by central governments are now starting to go into that cheap asset category, underpriced commodities and stocks related there too.
I don't just mean the gold sector. That's leading. But the commodity complex itself by our studies turned up last October, the Bloomberg Commodity Index. It was then at 10650. Right now we're trading 142 and yet there are no headlines other than the oil recently. It's the broad … So anyway, so when the Fed's going to have that problem, they can't shrug it off, but they have to because they got to print anyway. Otherwise, the house burns down.
Mike Maharrey: I don't think a lot of people realize that if you look at the Fed balance sheet, they're actually printing now. It's kind of a dirty little secret that you don't hear talking about a whole lot out there in the mainstream. And I've argued for a long time that quit watching the CPI for your inflation indicator, watch that money supply.
Michael Oliver: Money supply is the inflation.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, exactly!
Michael Oliver: CPI is merely a reflection of it.
Mike Maharrey: Thank you!
Michael Oliver: Yeah. And so are commodity prices right. So it's the stock market rising. In fact, if you look at the S&P in the year 2000 at the dotcom top and look where this price is now and then go look at an M2 chart and calculate where it was in 2000 versus now, the S&P has merely matched the growth in the money supply. So it is not really gained in value in real spendable terms. So yeah, money growth is inflation. You're quite right.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. It's interesting though, because when you talk about the stock market, a lot of people seem to think, well, it's going up and people have been saying it's in a bubble for years. I mean, is it inevitable that it's eventually going to deflate…
Michael Oliver: Well, yes, it is because it always does, but the question is when.
And this one happens to be the oldest bull market US history. The most gain on the upside since 2009 of any bull market, S&P's up 10, 11 fold, NASDAQ's up 20 plus fold. And you compare that to 23 to 29 in the Dow or any of the bull markets in history, the dotcom bull market, which is like a tripling quadrupling or the real estate bubble in 2007, which was only like a doubling and a half in the 2000 lows. It's 2002 lows. There's no comparison. We have a bubble and when it breaks, many of the errors that are embedded in it, the decisions that were made wrongly by institutions, by industry, by family planning, based on one factor that was artificially created, the cost of money. The Fed made it cheap over the last 15 years. If you look at a Fed funds chart, 10 of those 15 years, it was zero, free money, Cheech and Chong time.
And even when they up-ticked it, like the 5% or something briefly during that 15-year period, you go back and look 75 years back on the Fed funds chart, even that is in the lower third of the normal interest rate levels that the Fed governs. So, money was free. So you drugged up the stock market, plenty of money flow to go into there. The problem is that whenever a bloated market that has been stimulated by money growth gets excessive, there's finally a point where reality takes over and says, "Hey, I'm going somewhere else." And when that money starts to flow and it's already begun to, you can see it in the gold miners and gold, silver. Somebody's putting money in there, not the average Joe, but some big asset managers are starting to do it. Even the CIO of Morgan Stanley about three months ago, he said, "Hey, 60 / 40 rule out the window. Gold should be a component." So, the issue isn't that they keep printing money and the stock market goes up because usually when they start printing to save the stock market, it never goes there. It goes somewhere else and we know where it goes. Two places used to be bonds and gold would work. Now it's only gold. T-bonds aren't working.
Mike Maharrey: Would you agree that we never really paid the piper for the malfeasance of the 2008 financial crisis?
Michael Oliver: Yep, yep.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, because basically COVID kind of gave them an out to double down. And so now we have 2008 plus pandemic all sitting out there waiting to be
Michael Oliver: Corrected. No, it created errors. Yeah, you're right. They blew the bubble up twice. There's no question and you'll pay the dues for it. And that is what gold knows, but it also knows now it's not just a bloated stock market. We've got a government debt market that can't be pushed down the road again. This time, like Jamie Diamond said, it's a crisis now and we're going to have to deal with it and it ain't going to be pretty. He didn't say that. I say that. But technically we assess the bond market is now about to become the headline. It should have been already, but everybody's chattering about Iran, which will come and go. Everybody's chattering about AI, which by the way, if you look at NVIDIA and go anywhere in about a year. And also we've just had a bubble blow off verticality in the semis recently, which is not a good sign for the stock market because you don't want a structure that's so strong it goes vertical.
Okay. Now in the case of monetary metals, they can do it because likely when they get up there where they're going, let's say within this year, most likely much of it by this summer, certain other facts of reality will change. This is not just another cycle, quote unquote. Too many institutions and assumptions will come into question and doubt because the pain will be terrific here elsewhere. Average guys, layoffs, commodity price inflation, not just oil going up, not based just on the Iran situation. People will be pulling their … And when they lose money in their retirement account, which is the only thing they can smile about right now, all of a sudden it drops 30%. Can you imagine the emotion and doubt that will cause institutions to come into question like fiat money or central banks? It could be tabula rasa out there, but we're going to see that this year in the markets, the beginning of that in terms of the fundamentals.
Mike Maharrey: I'm in agreement with you. I think there's still a lot of people that it's still 2007 in their head and they're … I heard Larry Kudlow not too long ago talking about how there's no problems out there. Everything's fine. Everything looks great.
Michael Oliver: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Mike Maharrey: No problem in the private credit market. Nothing to worry about. And he was saying that in 2007 too about subprime.
Michael Oliver: Oh, he was good. Yeah. No, we've studied the relative performance between the financial sector and the S&P. Most people aren't focused on the financial sector, but we are. And late last October, a couple quarters ago, we said, uh-oh, watch Bank of America … Not bank marker. It should be Visa and MasterCard. And sure enough, you punch up those charts and you'll see, hey, they're not doing what the stock market's doing. They're not collapsing, but they're steadily going down. Something's going on there. And then when you look at the broader financial sector, XLF is a good ETF to look at. It includes banks, large banks, insurance companies, broker dealers. It is in a collapse mode versus the S&P. When you plot the difference between XLF and S&P, it's making multi-decade lows as we speak relative valuation to the S&P. It started to do this back in 2007 before the top occurred.
The same thing happened. Suddenly the financials got anemic. S&P made a new high in October of 2007. Financials didn't. Spread was collapsing. We're getting the same thing right now. So everybody's looking at the wrong headlines is what the point be.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah. I think that's very common in this day and age too, especially with the advent of social media where every headline is splashed across the entire world. It's crazy. All right. I've got one more question for you, just kind of a fun one before I get you out of here. Do you have a favorite gold or silver coin around or even a bar that do you really like?
Michael Oliver: No.
Mike Maharrey: No?
Michael Oliver: No, no. I have no preference on that. I just say that, and this is my own personal investment position as well. I have to declare that at the end of our reports, what I own, et cetera. What I own in my portfolio is highly concentrated in silver bullion ETFs and silver miners. I do own some GDX. I own some commodity assets as well, but primarily silver and silver miners. Now, once I see this move occur that I think is going to occur in a wet bar of soap manner being squeezed, okay, between now when we come up out of here, and by the way, we see enough technical evidence right now to say even before price of gold and silver, take out this range high, we see enough action within that range that momentum tells us this rally is going to take hold, this particular rally we're seeing now, it's going to get us up out of here.
But once on the other side of that, once we get that explosive effect where they price themselves probably beyond where they might otherwise be, what do I do? Do I take profits and put it in quote cash? But what's cash? A piece of paper that's being depreciated so rapidly that when you look at an M2 chart, you think, "God, we're in the Weimar Republic." Or, "I'm going to move it over to gold bullion and take my silver profits and move most of it over into gold bullion and not regard it as an investment. I'm putting it in cash."
Mike Maharrey: You're saving in real money.
Michael Oliver: Real money. Yeah.
Mike Maharrey: Absolutely. That's a great answer. All right. So where can folks go to find you and avail themselves of your immense knowledge and wisdom?
Michael Oliver: Olivermsa.com. OliverMSA for momentum structural analysis dot-com. Take your time. We have a part on the site where we explain our methodology in a laborious but explanatory way and request some sample copies of our reports.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. It's fantastic. It is a different approach and I really appreciate that. And I think you're digging into a lot of things that are a lot deeper than maybe gets spotted in other places. So I really appreciate you. I appreciate you taking a little time out of your day to hang out with me. I know you're a busy man, so I'm going to let you go.
Michael Oliver: Thank you, Michael.
Mike Maharrey: Thank you. Well, I'd definitely love to have you back again at some point and thanks a lot.
Michael Oliver: Thank you. Bye, Michael.
Mike Maharrey: Bye.
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Another great conversation there with Michael Oliver and we will look to have him back on throughout the year. Remember this man was all over the big rally in silver back in the fall and earlier this year that saw it finally eclipse $50 for the first time ever and then run up to over $100. It’ll certainly be worth getting his insights as we see things progress, so we’ll be sure to check in with him from time to time.
Well, that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. And to check out any of our audio programs, including our second podcast, the Money Metals Midweek Memo, just visit <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/podcasts" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MoneyMetals.com/podcasts</a> or find them wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And as a big help to us we would ask you to please like, subscribe, download and rate our podcasts. Doing so helps us extend the reach of this material.
Until next time, this has been Mike Gleason with <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Money Metals Exchange</a>, thanks for listening and have a wonderful weekend everybody.

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