The sharp rally in gold and silver can be read as a market referendum on the credibility of paper money. Large, persistent government deficits imply that future financing may rely on a mix of higher taxes, financial repression and — most relevant here — central banks keeping borrowing costs contained. When investors suspect that debt sustainability depends on rates staying below inflation, real yields compress and non-yielding stores of value become more attractive. Excessively easy monetary policy reinforces that logic. If the market believes liquidity will be expanded whenever growth or asset prices falter, the perceived “policy put” also implies a long-run bias toward currency dilution. Even if near-term inflation cools, repeated balance-sheet expansion and low real rates can revive fears of monetary debasement and motivate demand for hard assets with limited supply. Gold typically leads as the classic anti-fiat hedge and reserve asset outside the banking system. Silver often amplifies the move because it shares monetary symbolism while also enjoying cyclical industrial demand tied to electrification, solar and manufacturing. In this framing, the rally is less about a single data print and more about regime risk: a belief that policymakers will tolerate higher inflation or looser money rather than impose politically painful austerity. Consequently, both gold and silver are among the hottest trades of the year. Gold, represented in the chart below by the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) , is up almost 60% year to date. Silver, represented by the iShares Silver Trust ETF (SLV) , is up by more than 100%. Both metals have long been thought of as “hard money” because their intrinsic value backed the value of money as commodities. Of course, in the United States, if we ignore less valuable base-metal alloys that have replaced more valuable commodities as the dollar has been debased, another metal used to mint coins is copper. Copper, too, has seen a big rally this year, up more than 56% year to date. However, looking at the relationship between copper and gold, we can see that, relative to gold, copper has underperformed since 1990. The chart below shows the ratio of the price of 1 metric ton of copper to 1 ounce of gold. Although the value of a dollar has declined so much that it is no longer economical to make pennies from copper, the coins would be worth more melted down for industrial use than as money — copper is far less valuable than gold as a simple store of value. Central banks and governments aren’t likely to accumulate copper reserves. However, it is still critical for industrial purposes, for use in electrical wiring, power transmission, pipes, roofing. It is also commonly used in radiators, motors and, importantly, computer chips and servers for its thermal conductivity to prevent overheating. While there’s no functional floor to how low copper’s price can go relative to gold. Gold’s record highs are primarily a function of a lack of faith in governments to restrain their fiscal profligacy. We can look at other things to see whether copper’s value is approximately in line with where it was decades ago. If you decided, for example, to buy a house with real copper pennies in 1990, you would have needed roughly 45 metric tons of them to do it. Today, 35 years later, that is still true — provided those are real copper pennies and not the cheap 97.5% zinc ones that have only a 2.5% copper plating, which the US mint churns out today. If you’re inclined to believe, as I do, that copper will continue to appreciate relative to the dollar, you could simply go long the industrial metal. Still, if one looks at how gold has performed this year, one might observe that the miners have done even better — so a copper mining play might give a bullish copper bet a bit more upside leverage. We, YieldMax, hold 3.5% of one of our actively managed discretionary funds in Southern Copper Corp (SCCO) . Southern Copper, which is a “majority-owned, indirect subsidiary of Grupo Mexico,” operates world-class assets in Peru and Mexico, boasting the industry’s largest copper reserves and a production capacity exceeding 1 million tons annually. The company’s low-cost structure — net cash costs of just $0.61 per pound for the first 9 months of this year — delivers superior EBITDA margins, far surpassing peers like Freeport-McMoRan and Rio Tinto . A buy-write in the name is one way to play it. Another, if one would prefer not to buy it at these recent highs, is to use a call spread risk reversal, where one takes the risk of purchasing the stock at the short put strike while maintaining some upside exposure via a long call spread at nominal cost. If you do use one, such as the example provided below, be sure to use mid-market limit orders. DISCLOSURES: None. 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