Precious metals just saw a violent flash crash.
Markets erupted as $750,000,000,000 was wiped from gold’s notional value in roughly 45 minutes, with silver adding hundreds of billions more in losses. Gold dropped over 2% (nearly $100/oz at peak), while silver plunged as much as 7%, triggering stop-losses and margin calls across leveraged positions.
This move erased paper value calculated against estimated above-ground stocks (gold ~$31–32 trillion total market cap, silver ~$4.3 trillion). The ...