Leading Global Commodities Director Calls for Gold to Rise, Silver Fall

The easing of “physical dislocations should see silver sell off soon after reaching $100,” according to David Wilson, Director of Commodities Strategy at BNP Paribas, the second largest bank in all of Europe and the eighth largest bank in the world by total assets.

As January comes to a close, silver has reached and broken numerous all-time highs in the year’s first month and is poised just a few dollars shy of hitting that $100 mark.

Gold Up


Wilson, who rather famously called gold at $5,000 per ounce back in November of 2025 to widespread disbelief, now believes that safe-haven buying in the midst of geo-political upheaval in Greenland and Venezuela and concerns about the independence of the fed could easily necessitate an upward revision to gold’s projected value.

Silver Down


In his interview with Bloomberg News, however, Wilson said he sees a combination of circumstances and policy decisions – as well as a significant rush to cash in profits – driving prices down for silver in the very near term.

Turning to silver, Wilson suggested that even as it continues to set new highs, the physical shortages that drove 2025’s strong rally are resolving, and the gray metal is due for a correction.

“Silver is a much thinner, less liquid market than gold and it started moving in this parabolic fashion mid-December,” he said. “There were a number of catalysts, the announcement of the collateralization of silver by India, that became more aware in Western markets late October, early November. Then we had concerns that China might start restricting silver exporting with the new licensing arrangements. Obviously, there was a concern about U.S. tariffs on critical minerals, and silver was at the head of that list. All those issues were prompting silver to be sucked out of the physical European market, into the U.S. that really, really tightened the physical market and was the catalyst for the upside.”

Then came last week’s announcement from the White House that there weren't going to be critical mineral tariffs yet, prompting a 7% correction in silver prices. Wilson noted that silver prices have since leveraged higher off of gold’s safe haven bid.

“But the physical market is definitely easing, lease rates are dropping back quite substantially, so those kinds of issues look like they're dissipating,” he said. “The other thing you have to think of, is it's a thin market. As soon as some of the speculative flows start looking to take profits, then it's quite likely we could get quite a significant correction.”

That said, Wilson still expects to see $100 per ounce silver in short order. “I think we'll probably get that sooner rather than later,” he said. “That might be the profit-taking level; we could see it drop back from that.”

Perhaps coincidentally, an age-old adage among precious metals investors states that the over/under for silver is 50 to 1. When silver is less than 50x the price of gold, buy. When silver is more than 50x the price of gold, sell. In the middle of January silver hit 51.

There are some investors, however, that say the 50 to 1 number is “the modern ratio” and that the ancient ratio was somewhere between 8 and 12 to 1, patterning the relative scarcity of each commodity. Other investors believe the 50 to 1 ratio is outdated and fails to fully include the expanded industrial/medical/EV/AI uses for silver in the 21st century.

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