What if the LBMA's silver vaults run dry?
An LBMA free-float drain below industrial annual demand spikes silver lease rates and forces EFP blowouts — the squeeze runs through borrow cost and delivery failure, dragging gold and miners with it, not copper. Rhymes with the Oct-2025 squeeze that took silver past $50 and the 2010-11 Hunt-echo backwardation. Forward angle: today's structural deficit is real solar/industrial demand, not a corner, so spot can stay backwarded longer. The lone Freeport copper link in the cascade is a weak proxy — silver/PSLV is the vehicle.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. LBMA free-float silver collapses below industrial annual demand, forcing lease rates to spike and deliveries to fail. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Silver ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.