Bullion dealers were already extremely tight on supply for the past 6months to a year (covid halting many mines made it even tighter). Dealers are now selling 1oz silver from $28-32 per oz. The PAPER metal market has been used to suppress the metals since the 1970's and has become outrageous in the past few years (learned from the London Gold Pool failure when physical metal was secretively leaked into the market to add unknown supply). Of the tiny fraction of people that have metal exposure, the majority of them are in paper funds that are thought to have PHYSICAL backing. The physical metal has been loaned out to hundreds (if not 1000s) of owners. There is not nearly as much real metal as the market prices in, it is almost entirely fraudulent paper contracts used to manipulate the prices to maintain the fiat illusion.
Although the metals have been a target of suppression for extremely long (especially once the Federal Reserve was created), I am referring to the creation on the COMEX futures market in 1974. This allowed for the banksters to flood the market with PAPER gold contracts.
The London Gold Pool collapsed in 1968 after the Bank of England was no longer willing to secretively sell PHYSICAL gold into the system to suppress pricing and maintain the narrative of a strong British pound. Gordon Brown had been running the gold suppression scheme and the failure is nicknamed "Brown's Bottom". The Bank of England had to quit selling metal into the market or risk running low/out of physical. The pressure had to be relieved in the gold market and prices spiked upwards as a result. It just so happens that Gordon Brown bought his home from Robert Maxwell, who some allege to have been spying on him.