The Silver Market Bull Run — Silver Bullet Mines’ Peter Clausi Reveals What’s Driving the Market

Silver is no longer just creeping higher—it’s surging, and the market is being forced to reckon with a metal that has quietly moved from monetary afterthought to industrial linchpin.

That was the framing that emerged as InvestorNews.com host Tracy Hughes sat down with Peter Clausi, Director and VP of Capital Markets at Silver Bullet Mines Corp. (TSXV: SBMI | OTCQB: SBMCF), as silver prices smashed through levels few analysts were prepared to model, let alone defend. When Hughes reminded Clausi of a conversation at PDAC the year before—when silver was trading at US$26–27 per ounce—his reaction was blunt. “You asked me where I saw silver ending 2025,” Clausi recalled. “I gave you a prediction of between $35 and $40 based on infrastructure issues, demand issues, and optimism. Well, it appears my estimate for 2025 was off, and boy has it skyrocketed. Today, it briefly cleared $115. I think I saw it at $123. Trading back down around $110 an ounce, which is just incredible.”

The obvious question followed: had investors already missed the move. Clausi’s answer was characteristically cautious in form, but emphatic in substance. “I’m not a securities advisor, so do your own due diligence,” he said, before adding, “in my opinion, given the structural issues and the demand side, silver’s just getting started.” What once looked like a long, steady climb now appears compressed. “I had seen a long climb up where it’s making it to the 200 to 250 range over a five-year period. We might get there a lot sooner than that, but silver’s just getting going.”

Unlike gold, whose rally is often explained through macro anxiety and monetary debasement, silver is being pulled by a web of physical constraints. Clausi dismissed the old shorthand that silver merely shadows gold. “For a long time, silver was the poor man’s gold,” he said. “Some people still talk about that wacky thing called the gold-silver ratio, which makes no sense to me.” Gold, he noted, had now cleared US$5,000 an ounce on its own merits, while silver was contending with pressures that had little to do with safe-haven psychology. “Silver is very much an industrial mineral and it’s very much in demand. It’ll be very hard to affect the green revolution without silver.”

That demand is not abstract. Clausi walked through the metal’s ubiquity with the ease of someone who has repeated the argument often, yet still sounds faintly surprised by it. “You can’t have effective solar panels without silver,” he said. “There’s silver in the mirror you shave in, silver in your laptop circuit boards, silver in lights, silver in watches.” Roughly 700 million ounces a year are consumed by industrial applications alone, he noted—“not plates, not teacups, not jewelry”—and for several consecutive years, demand has exceeded mine supply. Recycling contributes only about 10% of annual production. “We’re still in a deficit position,” Clausi said. “And for any fan of capitalism, you know what happens. If demand exceeds supply, price goes up. So, welcome to $100 silver.”

Policy decisions have added friction to an already tight market. Hughes pointed to China’s export restrictions and the U.S. decision to add silver to its critical minerals list. Clausi was skeptical of the latter, even as he acknowledged its market impact. China’s controls, he said, amount to a de facto embargo: only 44 Chinese companies are permitted to export silver, each requiring state approval. “That’s just layers of bureaucracy which will slow the international movement of silver.” As for the U.S. Geological Survey’s move, Clausi was unsparing. “They’re now 60 minerals out of 118 on my periodic table that they’ve deemed critical. And if everything’s critical, nothing is critical.” Silver is abundant in the United States, he argued, and the rationale offered felt circular. Still, he conceded, “those two items are adding to the demand side for silver.”

Against that backdrop, Silver Bullet Mines is attempting to do something increasingly rare in the junior mining sector: convert high prices into near-term cash flow. Hughes asked for an update on shipments of commercial concentrate, and Clausi described a process that was slow but routine. “We’re waiting on the buyer to provide us with its assay results to compare to our assay results,” he said. “It’s just normal course business. There’s nothing new there. There’s no counterparty risk.”

More strategically significant is the company’s direct ship material offtake agreement, which Clausi described as “kind of the holy grail in the mining industry.” By shipping high-grade material without full on-site processing, Silver Bullet can bypass energy-intensive steps. “All we have to do is grind it down to a quarter-inch mesh,” he said. “Crush it, put it in a truck, and ship it. Very little effort goes into it on our part.” The grades, he added, are what make the model work. “Because the two mines that we’re doing that from are so high grade, the buyer is enthusiastic.”

That enthusiasm was reinforced on January 5, 2026, when the company announced the discovery of a new potential high-grade silver-gold zone at its KT Mine in Arizona. Initial sampling from the newly identified zone returned in-house assay results ranging from seven to twenty-seven ounces per ton silver, with gold and lead also present. The company has identified the vein over a strike length exceeding 200 feet and removed a roughly 200-ton bulk sample for processing at its nearby mill. Clausi framed the discovery less as luck than as accumulation of local knowledge. “People say I’m a lucky man,” he said, quoting an old line, “but it’s funny—the harder I work, the luckier we get.” The company is now working to determine whether the zone is a parallel vein, an offshoot, or an entirely new structure. Looking ahead, Clausi was clear about what matters most. “Same thing I’m looking forward to,” he said when asked what shareholders should watch. “Receipt of the first payment. That’s a milestone in a company’s existence.” After that, he expects regularity to replace anticipation: checks arriving every two to three weeks for concentrate, additional payments from direct ship material at KT and the SC Mine, and, later in the year, revenue from the Washington Mine in Idaho as it comes online with a contract miner. “I find all of that exciting,” Clausi said, “because that’s cash creation, not cash consumption.”

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