The Entropy Trap!

The author of a blockbuster book about markets talks gold and silver!

A new book about markets and society is causing a stir among financial commentators.  Our old friend Rich Dad Poor Dad’s Robert Kiyosaki says it explains why today’s Rich will become tomorrow’s poor.

The Entropy Trap by Mickey M. Maini

The book is called The Entropy Trap: What Physics Knows That Markets Don’t, Here’s a description from the publisher:

The Entropy Trap explains why some periods in history are not normal cycles, but moments when the system itself begins to change. Financial systems, currencies, political orders, and societies can appear stable for years while stress builds underneath. Then, like an avalanche, the change appears sudden even though the pressure was building for a long time…

The argument is that traditional economics works well in stable periods, but during rare transition periods we need better instruments to measure whether the system is still returning to normal or moving into a new state.

It is easy enough to agree with the author’s description that we as in a period in which trust weakens, debt or promises grow, interventions become larger, and politics becomes unstable.  We have described today’s conditions in similar terms.  So we thought it would be interesting to see what the author, Mickey M. Maini, has to say about gold and silver.

The following excerpts are from an interview Mr. Maini gave to The Institutional Risk Analyst:

The IRA: We have called silver our number one idea for 2026 even while preferring gold as a core holding. How does the framework read the gold-silver pair, especially in the context of some of the more pronounced bubbles in technology and AI?

Maini: Gold is the structural core. It is the major asset with no counterparty. It is no one else’s liability. That is why it returns to the center of the system when trust in paper promises weakens. Central banks have been buying gold at historically elevated levels for several consecutive years. That is not retail behavior. It is sovereign behavior. The framework reads that as confirmation that trust in the existing reserve architecture is leaking.

The IRA: We are in agreement on gold as the basic trust asset. How do you view silver, which was the poor stepchild of gold in a monetary sense going back to the 1890s when first Europe and later the US abandoned silver coinage?  Today silver is a crucial industrial asset for everything in tech but also an increasingly interesting monetary metal.

Maini: Silver is the kinetic version of the same trade. It has monetary properties like gold, but it also has growing industrial demand. Solar. Electrification. Electronics. AI infrastructure. Defense systems. All require silver. It is both a trust asset and a physical input. That makes silver more volatile, but potentially more asymmetric. In inflationary transitions, the gold-silver ratio has historically compressed. The timing is uncertain. The volatility is high. But the conditions for compression are present.  The framework agrees with the broad preference: gold for the core, silver for the higher-beta expression. Gold comes first because the trust function comes first. Silver follows when the monetary trade and the industrial constraint trade converge. Gold is the anchor. Silver is the torque.

Visit with a Republic Monetary Exchange gold and silver professional to learn how to position yourself for the avalanche of change now underway in world’s monetary architecture.