Recently, precious metals have been on a wild ride, and all kinds of opinions are popping up, like the one in the screenshot below: it claims that the last time we saw a surge in gold and silver prices was during the 2000 dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. Sounds pretty convincing, right? But if you actually pull up the historical price trends for gold and silver, it’s a completely different story: during the 2000-2002 dot-com bubble burst, which also included the 9/11 attacks in 2001—a major event that reshaped global geopolitics—gold and silver prices barely showed any significant fluctuations. Then during the 2008 financial crisis, gold and silver prices actually went down. The last time gold and silver saw a major rally was in 2010-2011 (with the peak in 2011). The backdrop for this was: the 2010 European debt crisis + post-2009 zero interest rates and the first round of large-scale quantitative easing + the silver short squeeze. Grand narratives aren’t just something you casually throw out there—they need solid data and logic to back them up.